December 12th, 2021 • 3h 20m
Shownotes
Every new episode of No Agenda is accompanied by a comprehensive list of shownotes curated by Adam while preparing for the show. Clips played by the hosts during the show can also be found here.
VAERS
VAIDS
Boosters Affect Overall Immunity
Repeated vaccinations with the same antigen at short intervals ("booster shots") destabilise the immune system so that autoimmune processes occur. Among other things, antibodies against one's own DNA can be formed, as this work showed:
Could certain COVID-19 vaccines leave people more vulnerable to the AIDS virus? | Science | AAAS
Certain COVID-19 vaccine candidates could increase susceptibility to HIV, warns a group of researchers who in 2007 learned that an experimental HIV vaccine had raised in some people the risk for infection with the AIDS virus. These concerns have percolated in the background of the race for a vaccine to stem the coronavirus pandemic, but now the researchers have gone public with a "cautionary tale," in part because trials of those candidates may soon begin in locales that have pronounced HIV epidemics, such as South Africa.
Some approved and experimental vaccines have as a backbone a variety of adenoviruses, which can cause the common cold but are often harmless. The ill-fated HIV vaccine trial used an engineered strain known as adenovirus 5 (Ad5) to shuttle into the body the gene for the surface protein of the AIDS virus. In four candidate COVID-19 vaccines now in clinical trials in several countries, including the United States, Ad5 similarly serves as the "vector" to carry in the surface protein gene of SARS-CoV-2, the viral cause of the pandemic; two of these have advanced to large-scale, phase III efficacy studies in Russia and Pakistan.
BLM LGBBTQQIAAPK+ Noodle Boy
Smollet take away citizenship
Mandates and Boosters
Semiconductor Worker Petition
ITM Adam and John,
The entire semiconductor industry is starting to mandate vaccines and employees really need exposure to help fight back. Tim Pool told us to “just start our own semiconductor company”.
We know the No Agenda show and producers actually understand how big the semiconductor industry is, and that there is a chip, and labor shortage already.
The dept. of labor says 1 semiconductor job supports 4.8 other jobs in the US economy. Many of us are highly specialized employees with families to feed and we can’t just “start our own company”. Please share our petition https://change.org/savesemiconductors before the idiots in charge FUBAR the entire industry.
I would like to request Jobs Karma , Clips: "get the vaccine" followed by "nooo" and a de-douching for those who made this contribution possible.
Thank you,
Sir Andrew of the Wet Drains.
Visiting Family? - Everyone Needs a Test Now
Here's what I'm doing with my family Emily:
EVERYONE takes a home test. Everyone.
Can anyone even keep track of how many shots each vaccine now needs as well as
how long ago the last one was administered?
These facts are easily proven out of Fauci's own mouth.
We need a digital packet for people that they can use, with pre-written emails
etc.
Cyber Pandemic
Planet Lockdown — The Financial Control System
In 1998, trillions of dollars started to get sucked out of the U.S. government by the central banks. Our retirement funds have been looted and will within just a few years be nonexistent
Historically, U.S. intelligence agencies have primarily worked on behalf of the central bankers
Central bankers are now putting into place a system that will allow them to extract tax without representation
The central bankers, most of whom are technocrats, have created a breakaway society, a parallel society, in which they are above all law and control everything
To combat their control system, we must first be able to see it for what it is, and realize how it’s being used by us, to our own detriment
Big Tech Regulation and Section 230
Climate Change
BBB
CPI November 2021: Inflation surged 6.8% in November, more than expected, to fastest since 1982
Energy prices have risen 33.3% since November 2020, including a 3.5% surge in November. Gasoline alone is up 58.1%.
Food prices have jumped 6.1% over the year, while used car and truck prices, a major contributor to the inflation burst, are up 31.4%, following a 2.5% increase last month.
January 2022 CPI weight update : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Starting in January 2022, weights for the Consumer Price Index will be calculated based on consumer expenditure data from 2019-2020. The BLS considered interventions, but decided to maintain normal procedures.
OTG
Consumer Data Platform [continued]
I just wanted to wanted to give a little info following up on ~1:15:32 of recent episode 1405 on the conversation that began with CDP from one of the
advertising-big-four producers which turned onto the topic of mobile ID. I can't share any proof of the extent I was involved (nor would my paystubs really prove
anything) but I wanted to give some more info on the subject:
Idemia--the very uncool old dudes behind "TSA PreCheck"--have been incredibly interested in Mobile ID for a very, very long time. They've had numerous product
launches around the world, including in the States (here's a press release from last month re: Mississippi and their reference to implementation in Arizona,
Oklahoma, and Delaware: https://www.idemia.com/press-release/idemia-identity-and-security-north-america-launches-mobile-id-technology-mississippi-2021-11-18 ).
The exciting+depressing part: I personally witnessed that AS SOON as COVID-19 hit the mainstream news, Idemia executives, their marketing team, AND MEMBERS OF TSA
LEADERSHIP (!) were all getting giddy in the same email threads with each other about incorporating their Mobile ID product with a health pass.
Aaaaaaand here's a press release from April 2021 about their test launch of their Health Travel Pass in the Netherlands:
-"Media Analytics"
Cameras in the classroom BOTG
(2) About Cameras in the classroom
I have been surveilled by students and schools alike. The result is that on different occasions, I have called: (a) racist; (b) problem (I was accused of being mean to students – based on the tone of my voice – NOT the language that I used); and (c) anti-science.
In North Carolina, a two-party consent state, kids recorded me and posted it on social media. The administrators said that I (ADOS) was raising the idea of racism, hence making me the racist. It turns out that millennials TUNE out when OTHER students are asking questions in class. And as soon as they do not hear the teacher talking, millennials will REPEAT the EXACT same question. That really got me annoyed.
So after such happed in my class, I had asked certain children – who just happened to identify as white – if they had ignored the dialogue between me and a black student – simply because the white student felt that such questions and replies were irrelevant. Then I said, I hope the lack of attention and concern was NOT due to racism.
(All that was recorded on a cell phone)
Those comments got me fired. The admin (Karens) told me that I was instilling racism in students by RAISING the idea that some students might be racist.
In Mexico, my school in Durango (over 1000 km south of El Paso) installed cameras, after a teacher, in Mexico City (900 km away from Durango), raped a handicapped student!!!
I had a girl (age 14) who failed two (8 week) marking periods, and she failed the make-up exam (which was open book, AND I let her cheat – by talking to others). She still could not solve 5 of 10 geometry and algebra questions.
So, a day or two later, she asked if she could “do some extra work” to raise her grades. While SITTING, I told her emphatically, NO. She ran out of the class - crying, and called her parents. The principal reviewed the video and audio and said that I had done nothing wrong, but the parents said that they did not like my tone of voice. The parents never asked for the recordings, and the principal never presented them in my defense. I was fired.
Here in China, I was teaching Grade 8 biology. I had an American boy who insisted that CO2 is killing the planet. After we read the textbook chapter about plants and he saw that plants need carbon dioxide to LIVE, I suggested that he review the SCIENCE about AGW, climate change, climate crisis. The boy recorded me – and his father said that I am “anti-science.” I was THREATENED with termination for failing to “believe in global warming.”
This boy also recorded me when I shared the SCIENCE on virology, and exogenous contagion.
I am the SCIENCE teacher!!! I do the research on viruses, masks, vaccines, etc. If I were not the only PhD in this school, in a city that cannot find English-speaking science and math teachers, I would have been fired.
In my experience, cameras in the class are only used ONE way – to punish.
Best
Prof JJ
2022
The supreme court’s abortion ruling is even more unsettling than it may seem | Moira Donegan | The Guardian
Kicked it down the road closer to the elections
In a ruling on Friday, the court held that a lawsuit by Texas abortion providers could go forward – but only on narrow grounds. Only those state officials responsible for licensing medical providers may be sued, the court ordered – no one else involved in the state’s practical maintenance of SB8 is liable. The ruling said, for instance, that the providers could not sue court clerks, those bureaucrats tasked with actually docketing the lawsuits that would enforce SB8.
For providers, it seems that the best possible outcome for the suit now is that they may be able to secure an injunction preventing medical providers from being delicensed. These perplexing limits placed by the court on which parties can be sued to challenge SB8 ensures that though the suit against the law will be at least partly allowed to go forward, it will be largely toothless.
War on Food
A2 Milk BOTG
I used to own and operate a large bespoke ice cream company in the Western
US (Honeymoon Ice Cream) so I've bought thousands and thousands of gallons
of milk!
My ears perked up hearing the discussion of A2 milk at the top of last
Thursday's show. How exciting! Let me tell you, most drinking milk produced
in the United States until the mid-1960s came from Jersey cows (the brown
cows...think Elsie, the brown cow). The milk from Jersey cows is rich,
creamy, and does not contain an offending protein (A1) that causes bloating
and discomfort.
But milk producers had a problem, especially as they tried to increase milk
consumption (remember the milk moustache campaign?). The smaller Jersey cows
don't produce enough milk naturally. Production was switched over to
Holstein cows (the black and white cows) that have udders the size of Pam
Anderson if she ever nursed twins. Get the idea. Big and milfy. The problem
is Holstein cows naturally produce a slightly different type of milk with a
protein called A1 and that caused many people to experience bloating and an
upset stomach when drinking liquid milk. May people assume they have a
low-grade form of lactose intolerance to milk when in fact they are reacting
to the A1 protein.
Well, in the wisdom of modern science, the solution wasn't to go back to
natural, non-A1 Jersey milk BUT to genetically modify some Holstein cows to
produce a milk without the offending A1 protein. And that product has been
marketed and sold by "big milk" as A2 milk for a little more than a decade.
Friends, if you want a great tasting milk that isn't fucked by science but
produced by nature, drink God-given, Jersey milk. You're experience with
milk will never be the same again!
I love you all, that's why I'm writing,
ITM,
Sir David of Ross
Modified = Breeding
Farmer Clare on A Milk
Hey Adam, Farmer Clare here, I wanted to give you some insights to A2 milk
as that is what I produce here in New Zealand.
A2 milk comes from cows that produce the A2 beta casein protein types, cows
can be either A1A1, A1A2 or A2A2. This occurs through natural breeding, no
DNA modification. Only if they are both A2A2 can they produce the
particular protein. We can find out what the cows produce through milk,
blood samples or DNA testing. My herd is DNA profiled and so that is how I
know. Interestingly enough the science is not settled on A2 milk but
consumers swear by the milk having less of an impact on your gut, so it is
good for young and old.
https://nutritionstudies.org/what-exactly-is-a2-milk-everything-you-need-to-
know-about-a2-cows-milk/
At the moment we are getting a 20c/kg/MS bonus on our milk that we produce,
we are lucky to have a contract which we signed in May 2019, a year later
and no one can get contracts anywhere. A lot of farmers have bought and
sold cows in order to make their herd A2 only and now have no ability to
capitalise on it. How long the bonus lasts is anyones guess, most
breeding in NZ is now done to target the A2A2 protein. We supply Synlait,
this milk company has a majority shareholder that is Bright Dairy (foods)
Chinese state investment, and the a2 milk company.
Interestingly for the A2 milk company things have gone belly up since COVID
took off, the main source of purchasing was through Diagou channels, foreign
(mainly Chinese) people were coming over on holiday, to study etc and
sending tons of A2 milk powder back to family/friends in China, thereby
eliminating the need for import paperwork etc. As soon as borders closed
that sales channel stopped as well and hit a brick wall. I heard recently
that things are progressing to enable A2 milk/powder to go through the ports
to China, but its a long process.
Go Podcasting!
Comedy tag Spotify royalties
STORIES
World population set to decline for the first time in centuries says study
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 16:02
Home / World / World population set to decline for the first time in centuries says study December 9, 2021
2 min read
According to a new study published in the Lancet journal, the world population will decline for the first time in the next century.
The world's population is currently estimated to be at 7.8 billion people. According to the estimate, the global population would peak at around 9.7 billion in 2064. Then it will fall to 8.79 billion in 2100.
Due to low birth rates and aging populations, up to 23 countries, including Japan, Thailand, Italy, Spain, Portugal, South Korea, and others, might see their populations fall by more than 50%.
China is the world's most populated country. But it will see its population drop from 1.4 billion in 2017 to 732 million in 2100.
The study noted the global trend of population decline. But it also predicted that some sections of the world would witness an increase in population.
This encompasses North Africa, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. It is likely to triple in population from 1.03 billion in 2017 to 3.07 billion in 2100 over the century.
According to the study, the population of India, the world's second-most populous country, will be approximately 1.09 billion in 2100.
World population decline driven by fertility decline Lead study author and Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), Stein Emil Vollset, told IFLScience, ''The last time that global population declined was in the mid 14th century, due to the Black Plague. If our forecast is correct, it will be the first time population decline is driven by fertility decline, as opposed to events such as a pandemic or famine.''
According to the report, girls' education and better access to contraception will reduce fertility and population growth.
These factors influence the fertility rate, which is the most important determinant of the population. The fertility rate is the average number of children a woman has over her lifetime. The worldwide total fertility rate is likely to steadily drop, from 2.37 in 2017 to 1.66 in 2100. It is significantly below the minimum rate (2.1 live births per woman) necessary to maintain population levels, he added.
WestJet Flight Diverted After Pilot Suffers Medical Emergency Requiring Defibrillator '' COVID Shot Effects? - DC Clothesline
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 16:00
On Monday afternoon a WestJet flight was diverted back to Calgary after the pilots suffered a medical emergency, in which a defibrillator was rush out onto the scene.
Army Doctor Testifies: ''In 1 Morning I Had To Ground 3 Out Of 3 Pilots Due To 'Vaccine' Injuries'' '' Then I Was Cut Off From Patients (Video)The CONvid: Of Pilots Dying In Flight, Crashing Planes & Unvaxxed FEMA Nurse Replacements (Video)Multiple Sources Confirm ''Vaxxed'' Pilot Died In The Air '' Airline Covering It Up Along With Numerous Other Health Issues For Pilots & Flight Attendants (Video)American Pilot Calls On Americans To Fight For Freedom Against Illegal Vaxx Mandates (Video)MSN reports:
WestJet flight 1590 landed safely at Calgary International Airport at 1:12 p.m. Monday, just less than about an hour after taking off, according to public flight logs. The Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane was flying over southeastern Alberta when it turned back toward Calgary.
In an email statement, WestJet spokesperson Madison Kruger said EMS met the flight upon arrival and the pilot was removed from duty. Another pilot onboard took control of the plane.
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''All WestJet flights have two pilots, to ensure that should any illness occur in the flight deck, there is an additional pilot onboard to ensure the continued safe operation of the aircraft and the safety of our guests and our crew,'' Kruger said.
EMS said they responded to the airport terminal around 1:25 p.m. but that paramedics had no patient contact and left the scene without request for EMS assistance.
Edmontonian John White was a passenger on the flight, sitting four rows from the front of the plane. He first realized something was awry on the flight after noticing concern among flight attendants, one of whom brought a first-aid kit and a defibrillator into the cockpit.
The Montreal Gazette added:
''Then they made the call for if there is a doctor, nurse or EMT on the plane and as luck would have it, one doctor came forward and two nurses,'' White said. He said a pilot on board in the passenger area also made his way to the cockpit.White said the pilot was brought out of the cockpit and set down as medical volunteers treated him. The pilot appeared to collapse shortly afterwards. TRENDING: 20-Year-Old Muslim Migrant Rapes 10-Year-Old Austrian Boy: ''I Haven't Had Sex In Months- I Just Couldn't Help Myself''
''They were able to get him talking again after they got him on the floor, but they were working on him pretty feverishly,'' White said.
WestJet declined to provide details on the illness or the current condition of the pilot, citing privacy concerns.The airline said 70 passengers were on the flight, with some accommodated with travel Monday. The airline added additional Calgary-to-Atlanta and Atlanta-to-Calgary flights for Tuesday after the incident. A scramble and some lengthy queues ensued after the cancelled flight, White said.White praised the pilot and medical professionals on board for their handling of the incident and safe carriage of the flight back to Calgary.''When I saw the extra pilot go into place, I felt a lot better, and then my concern turned to the well-being of the pilot. . . They weren't messing around or wasting any time,'' he said. ''And I will commend the flight attendant. They were really impressive and they kept us abreast of what was happening. It was impressive to see them jump into action like that.''
Army Doctor & Aerospace Medicine Specialist LTC. Theresa Long Calls On Pentagon To Ground ALL Pilots That Have Taken COVID ShotsPilot Encounters IN-FLIGHT Terminal Stroke As Experimental COVID Shots Continue To Be Unlawfully Mandated (Video)Informed Consent, 5 Dead Jet Blue Pilots & Liquifying The Dead With Kate ShemiraniBritish Airways Confirms 4 Vaxxed Pilots Dead '' Claims No Link To Experimental Injections '' Anyone Buying It?Of course, the Mockingbird media isn't questioning their handlers and financiers' COVID shots, are they? Nope, because they are getting 30-40% of their revenue from them. I would be willing to wager that this pilot is suffering from effects of the shot. Why do I say this? Listen to WestJet's own statement from its website.
The WestJet Group is committed to ensuring the health and safety of both our guests and employees. Today's announcement from the federal government marks an important milestone towards becoming a fully vaccinated industry and the safe restart of the travel and tourism sector.
We are proud that more than 98 per cent of our workforce have self-declared their full-vaccination intent prior to the implementation of our airline's mandatory vaccination policy. As previously announced, effective October 30, 2021, WestJet and Swoop will become fully vaccinated airlines.
As we proceed towards implementation of the federal mandatory vaccination policy for travellers and federally regulated employees, we continue to advocate for the recalibration of travel guidance and policies that were implemented prior to the widespread availability of vaccines. It's critically important that these policies also evolve to reflect our transition to a fully-vaccinated company and fully-vaccinated Canadian airline industry.
Vaccination is our best way out of this pandemic and we want to ensure the travel journey does not become more difficult for Canadians. The digital solutions outlined today, including a pan-Canadian vaccine passport, must be made available as soon as possible for Canadians when showing proof of vaccination for travel.
WestJet is complicit in the illness this pilot is suffering, and who knows if the pilot will live or die due to the shot. I think it is pretty clear that he's probably had the shot or two or three and this is taking its toll on him just as it has others who have taken it, whether they are pilots or not.
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Article posted with permission from Sons of Liberty Media
AdBlue: What Is It and How Does it Work?
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 15:53
Understanding the role of AdBlueLowering the amount of emissions produced by vehicles has, and still is, a big focus of countries around the world. In fact, you may have already seen that the UK government is banning the sale of new petrol and diesel-powered cars in 2030.
In the meantime, governments have been enforcing new regulations that mean car manufacturers are having to reduce the harmful gases produced by their models.
These regulations have led to the creation of something called AdBlue, a liquid that is now prominent in all new diesel-powered vehicles. However, if you are not familiar with modern diesel cars and you are planning on buying one, then AdBlue could be a bit off-putting.
Thankfully, the role of AdBlue in your car is easy to understand, as we explain below.
What is AdBlue and what does it do?
AdBlue is a biodegradable, completely harmless solution designed to help diesel vehicles meet the latest Euro exhaust emissions regulations.
AdBlue is made from 32.5 percent urea and 67.5 percent deionised water. You may have seen rumours that it contains pig's urine, but that is factually incorrect.
How does AdBlue work?Typically, modern diesels utilise a treatment system called Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR).
The SCR blends the AdBlue with the engine's exhaust gases, which creates a chemical reaction, to convert nitrogen oxides (NOx) into nitrogen, water and carbon dioxide (CO2).
As a result, the gases emitted are less harmful to the environment and our health.
Does my car have an SCR system?The SCR system is typically found on diesel powered vehicles that have been designed to meet Euro 6 regulations.
Euro 6 was introduced in 2014, so any diesel vehicle built after that should, in theory, utilise AdBlue. Typically, the more recent the diesel-powered car, the more likely it is to use an SCR system.If you are in any doubt, then consult with your vehicle's handbook.
What happens when you run out of AdBlue?
SCR equipped cars typically reduce engine performance, with some not starting at all if AdBlue levels are completely depleted.
Do not worry about it though, because a low-level warning light will appear on your vehicle's dashboard long before you run out.
Where do I find AdBlue? A wide variety of fuelling stations will have AdBlue in abundance, whether it is as a standalone pump, or as large containers that you can take home.
It is not uncommon to find AdBlue being sold in major supermarkets, too. Although you can visit your nearest Stratstone retailer, who will have plenty of AdBlue readily available.
How much is AdBlue?As you can imagine, prices for AdBlue vary greatly across locations and sellers.
Based on a few searches around local and national sellers, the average price has ranged between £1.00 and £1.50 per litre, with some retailers offering discounts on bulk purchases.
How often does AdBlue need topping up?
Consumption of AdBlue is completely dependent on the vehicle, your driving style, and the journey.
However, it could be anywhere from 3,000 to 12,000 miles between refills. It is not uncommon to have to refill your tank at least once between scheduled dealer services.
How do I refill the AdBlue tank?Similar to refilling your diesel tank, there will be an AdBlue filler cap somewhere on your car.
The location of the filler nozzle varies from car-to-car, so we would recommend checking your vehicle's handbook.
Contact Stratstone for helpIf you have any doubts regarding AdBlue and its use in your car, please do not hesitate to contact your nearest Stratstone retailer, who will have knowledgeable team members on standby ready to assist you with any queries.
Alternatively, they will be more than happy to get you booked in for a top-up should the low-level warning light appear on your vehicle's dashboard.
The supreme court's abortion ruling is even more unsettling than it may seem | Moira Donegan | The Guardian
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 15:35
D on't be fooled by the supreme court's nominal hedging on its endorsement of SB8, the Texas abortion ban that deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who assists in an abortion after six weeks' gestation. In a ruling on Friday, the court held that a lawsuit by Texas abortion providers could go forward '' but only on narrow grounds. Only those state officials responsible for licensing medical providers may be sued, the court ordered '' no one else involved in the state's practical maintenance of SB8 is liable. The ruling said, for instance, that the providers could not sue court clerks, those bureaucrats tasked with actually docketing the lawsuits that would enforce SB8.
For providers, it seems that the best possible outcome for the suit now is that they may be able to secure an injunction preventing medical providers from being delicensed. These perplexing limits placed by the court on which parties can be sued to challenge SB8 ensures that though the suit against the law will be at least partly allowed to go forward, it will be largely toothless.
In the meantime, SB8 will remain law. Women in Texas are effectively banned from securing a legal abortion in the state, even though the still-standing Roe v Wade decision says that they have a right to one. It's likely that SB8 will remain in effect at least for the duration of Roe's lifetime '' meaning that Texas women will not be able to obtain legal abortions after six weeks for the foreseeable future. Many of the initial media responses to the court's opinion emphasized that since the suit was allowed to go forward, on technical grounds, the ruling was a narrow win for the abortion providers. But in reality Friday was a massive win for the rightwing Texas government, and for anti-choice forces nationwide.
That SB8 has been allowed to take effect '' now for the second time '' by the supreme court reflects the justices' eagerness to gut abortion rights. The fact of the matter is that the court is already set to overturn Roe and allow states to ban abortion outright. That much was clear to anyone who listened to last week's oral arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health, a case surrounding the constitutionality of a 15-week ban in Mississippi, which devolved into grim misogynist spectacle as the Republican appointees held court on the supposed ease of giving infants up for adoption and their own robust comfort with overturning long-settled precedent.
That ruling is scheduled to come down in late May or early June. When it does, a slim majority of states are expected to ban abortion, either immediately or very soon thereafter. That means that soon SB8 '' and the copycat bills that it has inspired in states like Florida and Arkansas '' won't be necessary for the anti-choice lobby to achieve their aims. Instead of concocting an elaborate enforcement process in which rogue anti-woman vigilantes enforce their abortion bans, the states will be able to enforce their bans themselves.
SB8, then, and the supreme court's embrace of it, can be understood not only as a harbinger of the justices' deep contempt for the abortion right, but also of their childish impatience to exert this contempt upon American women. They can't even wait six months. They want to ban abortion right now. In pursuit of this goal, the supreme court has proven itself willing to undermine its own capacity to oversee state laws, to enforce federal supremacy, and to protect constitutional rights.
The anti-choice substance of the court's decision in SB8 was not surprising; its embrace of Texas's tactics perhaps was. Aside from its direct attempt to undermine women's rights, SB8 also took aim at judicial authority. By banning abortion long before viability, the law flouted the supreme court's precedents in Roe and Planned Parenthood v Casey. But that much a slew of vehemently anti-choice justices would probably forgive: all six of the Republican appointees clearly believe that Roe was wrongly decided, and at least five of them (all but Roberts, who seems more trepidatious) appear eager to overturn it. But in its novel enforcement mechanism, SB8 sought specifically to evade judicial review '' not just to give the court an opportunity to overturn its own precedent, but to make it so that within Texas borders supreme court precedent didn't matter.
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor compared SB8 to the views of John C Calhoun '' a nineteenth-century pro-slavery campaigner who argued that states have the right to nullify federal laws that they do not like. America fought its civil war in no small part over this question. By first allowing the SB8 to go into effect, in September, and then by gutting the lawsuit against it this Friday, the supreme court has, shockingly, endorsed a scheme to undermine its own power, and granted a state the ability to evade federal precedent. Nullification, it seems, is back in style.
For years, court watchers have wondered whether the justices' institutionalist instincts would overcome their misogynist ones: if the Court had to choose between maintaining its own power and legitimacy, and overturning Roe, which would it choose? Now, it seems, we have our answer.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
FDA Approves Eye Drops That Replace Reading Glasses
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 15:28
Eye drops that could potentially replace reading glasses for millions of people were approved by the Food and Drug Administration in October, and hit the market this week.
The drops, called pilocarpine and marketed as Vuity by pharma outfit Allergan, could come to the aid of some 128 million Americans who are farsighted. According to the company, one drop in each eye can sharpen closeup vision for six to 10 hours, CBS News reports.
The drops work by using the eye's existing ability to reduce its pupil size.
''Reducing the pupil size expands the depth of field or the depth of focus, and that allows you to focus at different ranges naturally,'' George Waring, principal investigator of a clinical trial for the drug involving 750 participants, told CBS.
The drops aren't the cheapest, but aren't prohibitively expensive, either, at $80 for a 30-day supply.
It isn't a miracle drug, however. Reported side effects include headaches and red eyes. The company is also warning not to use the drops while driving at night.
The drops are also mostly effective for middle-aged people. Those above the age of 65 won't see as much of an effect, according to CBS.
The value proposition is a matter of convenience '-- wearing reading glasses can be a pain for millions of people, so ditching them is intriguing.
''It's definitely a life changer,'' trial participant Toni Wright told CBS. ''I would not need my readers as much, especially on the computer, where I would always need to have them on.''
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CPI November 2021: Inflation surged 6.8% in November, more than expected, to fastest since 1982
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 15:07
Inflation accelerated at its fastest pace since 1982 in November, the Labor Department said Friday, putting pressure on the economic recovery and raising the stakes for the Federal Reserve.
The consumer price index, which measures the cost of a wide-ranging basket of goods and services, rose 0.8% for the month, good for a 6.8% pace on a year over year basis and the fastest rate since June 1982.
Excluding food and energy prices, so-called core CPI was up 0.5% for the month and 4.9% from a year ago, which itself was the sharpest pickup since mid-1991.
The Dow Jones estimate was for a 6.7% annual gain for headline CPI and 4.9% for core.
Price increases came from familiar culprits.
Energy prices have risen 33.3% since November 2020, including a 3.5% surge in November. Gasoline alone is up 58.1%.
Food prices have jumped 6.1% over the year, while used car and truck prices, a major contributor to the inflation burst, are up 31.4%, following a 2.5% increase last month.
The Labor Department said the increases for the food and energy components were the fastest 12-month gains in at least 13 years.
Shelter costs, which comprise about one-third of the CPI, increased 3.8% on the year, the highest since 2007 as the housing crisis accelerated.
Markets reacted positively to the report, with stock indexes on Wall Street rising, while government bond yields moved lower. Some economists thought Friday's report could indicate even sharper inflation of greater than 7% for the headline number.
Fed officials have attributed the inflation jump to factors associated with the pandemic. Strong consumer demand for goods and supply chain bottlenecks have been major factors, though the price increases have been stronger and more persistent than policymakers had anticipated.
"There's no question no matter how you look at it, even if you take out the extremes caused by the pandemic, it's still very high inflation," said Randy Frederick, managing director of trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab. "This is still supply chain disruption, semiconductor-related inflation."
Central bank officials have indicated that will begin slowing the help they're providing in an effort to tamp down inflation. Investors widely expect the Fed to double the tapering of its asset purchases to $30 billion a month, likely starting in January. That would enable the Fed to start raising interest rates as soon as next spring.
Inflationary pressures have been hitting workers hard.
Though gross pay has increased 4.8% over the past year, real average hourly earnings accounting for inflation declined another 0.4% for November and are down 1.9% for the 12-month period, the Labor Department said in a separate release.
While much of the pandemic-era inflation has come from soaring demand for products such as vehicles and other long-lasting goods, services inflation also has been on the rise. Excluding energy, services costs rose 0.4% in November and are up 3.4% for the 12 months, the quickest annual pace April 2007.
Apparel costs also were notably higher for the month, rising 1.3% for the month and 5% for the year, ahead of the holiday shopping season.
Some economists, however, think inflation is near its peak, particularly with energy prices declining in recent weeks. While West Texas Intermediate oil is up more than 52% in 2021, the price has come down about 14% from its most recent peak in November.
With unemployment claims running at their lowest pace since 1969 and gross domestic product expected to show strong gains to end 2021 after a lackluster third quarter, inflation remains the biggest problem for the recovery.
President Joe Biden has been paying a political price for surging prices: A recent CNBC survey showed his approval rating stuck at just 41%, due in large part to 56% of respondents who disapprove of his economic record, compared to just 37% who approve.
Petition · Semiconductor Industry Workers Against Mandated COVID Vaccine · Change.org
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 14:35
Semiconductor industry workers, those who keep our nation at the forefront of technological innovation and support all of our high-tech infrastructure, have become the latest target of government overreach. Many companies in the industry have begun to do the bidding of OSHA, an unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy tasked by the Biden Administration with enforcing a vaccine mandate. Coercion of employees to disclose private medical information (vaccine status) with the aim of forcing vaccinations on them under threat of job loss, has begun.
In just a few short months, semiconductor industry workers and professionals have gone from ''essential frontline workers'' to being threatened with the loss of their livelihoods if they don't disclose their private medical information and/or submit to vaccination. This isn't about politics, vaccine efficacy, or workplace safety concerns; it's about taking a stand to preserve freedom for everyone, and for future generations.
On top of frightening implications for fundamental human rights and liberty, this blatant attack on employee dignity, trust, privacy, and autonomy has caused morale to plummet around the industry. Already facing difficulty in finding qualified workers to replace an aging workforce, and with supply chain shortages looming, semiconductor manufacturing is vulnerable. When workers are forced to leave the semiconductor industry over vaccine mandates, the support system for our technology dependent society will leave with them. To preserve high-tech manufacturing and technological infrastructure while taking a stand for medical choice, bodily autonomy, privacy, and the foundational principles of human freedom, please consider signing and sharing this petition as far and wide as you can.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."- George Santayana"The essence of Government is power; and power lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse."- James Madison"Government is never more dangerous than when our desire to have it help us blinds us to its great power to harm us."- Ronald Regan"There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice"-Montesquieu"This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector."- Plato"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." H.L. Mencken"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." Henry Truman
EXPLAINER: Was tornado outbreak related to climate change?
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 14:15
WASHINGTON -- The calendar said December but the warm moist air screamed of springtime. Add an eastbound storm front guided by a La Nina weather pattern into that mismatch and it spawned tornadoes that killed dozens over five U.S. states.
Tornadoes in December are unusual, but not unheard of. But the ferocity and path length of Friday night's tornadoes likely put them in a category of their own, meteorologists say. One of the twisters - if it is confirmed to have been just one - likely broke a nearly 100-year-old record for how long a tornado stayed on the ground in a path of destruction, experts said.
'Å'One word: remarkable; unbelievable would be another,'¯½ said Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini. 'Å'It was really a late spring type of setup in in the middle of December.'¯½
Warm weather was a crucial ingredient in this tornado outbreak, but whether climate change is a factor is not quite as clear, meteorologists say.
Scientists say figuring out how climate change is affecting the frequency of tornadoes is complicated and their understanding is still evolving. But they do say the atmospheric conditions that give rise to such outbreaks are intensifying in the winter as the planet warms. And tornado alley is shifting farther east away from the Kansas-Oklahoma area and into states where Friday's killers hit.
Here's a look at what's known about Friday's tornado outbreak and the role of climate change in such weather events.
WHAT CAUSES A TORNADO?
Tornadoes are whirling, vertical air columns that form from thunderstorms and stretch to the ground. They travel with ferocious speed and lay waste to everything in their path.
Thunderstorms occur when denser, drier cold air is pushed over warmer, humid air, conditions scientists call atmospheric instability. As that happens, an updraft is created when the warm air rises. When winds vary in speed or direction at different altitudes - a condition known as wind shear - the updraft will start to spin.
These changes in winds produce the spin necessary for a tornado. For especially strong tornadoes, changes are needed in both the wind's speed and direction.
'Å'When considerable variation in wind is found over the lowest few thousand feet of the atmosphere, tornado-producing 'Ë'supercell thunderstorms' are possible,'¯½ said Paul Markowski, professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University. 'Å'That's what we had yesterday.'¯½
There's usually a lot of wind shear in the winter because of the big difference in temperature and air pressure between the equator and the Arctic, Gensini said.
But usually, there's not a lot of instability in the winter that's needed for tornadoes because the air isn't as warm and humid, Gensini said. This time there was.
WHAT CONDITIONS LED TO STORMS OF THIS SCALE?
A few factors, which meteorologists will continue to study.
Spring-like temperatures across much of the Midwest and South in December helped bring the warm, moist air that helped form thunderstorms. Some of this is due to La Nina, which generally brings warmer than normal winter temperatures to the Southern U.S. But scientists also expect atypical, warm weather in the winter to become more common as the planet warms.
'Å'The worst-case scenario happened. Warm air in the cold season, middle of the night,'¯½ said John Gordon, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Louisville, Kentucky.
Once the storm formed, exceptionally strong wind shear appears to have prevented the tornadoes from dissipating, experts say. Tornadoes are thought to die off when thunderstorm updrafts lose energy.
Tornadoes typically lose energy in a matter of minutes, but in this case it was hours, Gensini said. That's partly the reason for the exceptionally long path of Friday's storm, going more than 200 miles (322 kilometers) or so, he said. The record was 219 miles (352 kilometers) and was set by a tornado that struck four states in 1925. Gensini thinks this one will surpass it once meteorologists finish analyzing it.
'Å'In order to get a really long path length, you have to have a really fast moving storm. This storm was moving well over 50 miles (80 kilometers) per hour for a majority of its life,'¯½ Gensini said. That's not the speed of the winds, but of the overall storm movement.
'Å'You're talking about highway-speed storm motions,'¯½ Gensini said.
HOW RELATED IS CLIMATE CHANGE TO TORNADO OUTBREAKS?
It's complicated. Scientists are still trying to sort out the many conflicting factors about whether human-caused climate change is making tornadoes more common - or even more intense. About 1,200 twisters hit the U.S. each year - though that figure can vary - according to the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory. No other country sees as many.
Attributing a specific storm like Friday's to the effects of climate change remains very challenging. Less than 10% of severe thunderstorms produce tornadoes, which makes drawing conclusions about climate change and the processes leading up to them tricky, said Harold Brooks, a tornado scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.
Scientists have observed changes taking place to the basic ingredients of a thunderstorm, however, as the planet warms. Gensini says in the aggregate, extreme storms are 'Å'becoming more common because we have a lot warmer air masses in the cool season that can support these types of severe weather outbreaks.'¯½
The U.S. is likely to see more tornadoes occur in the winter, Brooks said, as national temperatures rise above the long-term average. Fewer events will take place in the summer, he said.
Furtado of the University of Oklahoma said tornado alley, a term used to describe where many twisters hit the U.S., has shifted eastward into the Mississippi River Valley. That shift is because of increases in temperature, moisture and shear.
'Å'Bottom line: The people in the Mississippi River Valley and Ohio River Valley are becoming increasingly vulnerable to more tornadic activity with time,'¯½ he said.
___
Follow Suman Naishadham on Twitter @sumannaishadham and Seth Borenstein at @borenbears
___
The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP's environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/environment
Michael Nesmith, the Monkee for all seasons, dies at 78 - ABC News
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 13:54
Michael Nesmith, the wool-hatted, guitar-strumming member of the 1960s, made-for-television rock band The Monkees, has died at 78
By JOHN ROGERS and BRIAN MELLEY Associated Press
December 10, 2021, 7:18 PM
' 7 min read
FILE - Mike Nesmith, of The Monkees, performs in Rosemont, Ill., on Nov. 5, 2021. Nesmith, the guitar-strumming member of the 1960s, made-for-television rock band The Monkees, died at home Friday of natural causes, his family said in a statement. He was 78. (Photo by Rob Grabowski/Invision/AP, File)
LOS ANGELES -- Michael Nesmith, the singer-songwriter, author, actor-director and entrepreneur who will likely be best remembered as the wool-hatted, guitar-strumming member of the made-for-television rock band The Monkees, has died at 78.
Nesmith, who had undergone quadruple bypass surgery in 2018, died at home Friday of natural causes, his family said in a statement.
Nesmith was a struggling singer-songwriter in September 1966 when ''The Monkees'' television debut turned him and fellow band members Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork and David Jones into overnight rock stars.
After the group broke up in 1970, Nesmith moved on to a long and creative career, not only as a musician but as a writer, producer and director of films, author of several books, head of a media arts company and creator of a music video format that led to the creation of MTV.
Nesmith was running ''hoot nights'' at the popular West Hollywood nightclub The Troubadour when he saw a trade publication ad seeking ''four insane boys'' to play rock musicians in a band modeled after the Beatles.
The show featured the comical misadventures of a quartet that tooled around Los Angeles in a tricked-out Pontiac GTO called the MonkeeMobile and, when they weren't chasing girls, pursued music stardom.
Each episode rolled out two or three new Monkees songs, six of which became Top 10 Billboard hits during the show's two-year run. Three others, ''I'm a Believer,'' '"Daydream Believer'' and ''Last Train to Clarksville,'' reached No. 1.
Jones, with his British accent and boyish good looks, was the group's cute lead singer. Dolenz became the wacky drummer, although he had to learn to play the drums as the show went along. Tork, a folk-rock musician, portrayed the comically clueless bass player. Nesmith, with his twangy Texas accent and the wool hat he'd worn to his audition, became the serious but naive lead guitarist.
A prankster by nature, he'd arrived at the audition carrying a guitar and bag of dirty laundry he said he planned to wash immediately afterward. With a harmonica around his neck, he stormed into a casting office, banging the door loudly. After pausing to gaze at a painting as if it were a mirror, he sat down and immediately put his feet up on a desk.
He got the job.
But he rebelled almost immediately when producers told him they were going to call his character ''Wool Hat.'' He demanded they use his real name, as they did with the other actors.
It would be the first of many confrontations Nesmith would have with producers during a tumultuous two-year run in which ''The Monkees'' won the 1967 Emmy for best comedy series.
Nesmith and Tork, the group's two most accomplished musicians, railed against the program's refusal to allow them to play their own instruments at recording sessions. But when Nesmith revealed that fact to reporters, music critics quickly turned on ''The Monkees,'' dismissing the show as a fraud and the band as the ''Prefab Four,'' a mocking reference to the Beatles' nickname, Fab Four.
Nesmith, meanwhile, had written several songs he hoped to debut on the show, but almost all were dismissed by music producer Don Kirshner, as sounding too country.
Among them was ''Different Drum,'' which Linda Ronstadt recorded in 1967 for her first hit single, validating to Nesmith his opinion that Kirshner, hailed by the pop music industry as ''The Man With The Golden Ear,'' didn't know what he was talking about.
Things came to a head when all four Monkees demanded they take control of the music. They were warned they would be sued for breach of contract.
At that, Nesmith rose from his seat and smashed his fist through a wall, telling Kirshner it could have been his face.
For years Nesmith would refuse to confirm or deny the incident, even as the other three gleefully recounted it to reporters. In his 2017 memoir, ''Infinite Tuesday,'' he did acknowledge it, saying he'd lost his temper when he felt his integrity was being questioned.
''It was an absurd moment in so many ways,'' he wrote.
It did give the Monkees control over their music, however, beginning with the group's third album, ''Headquarters.''
After the show concluded in 1968 the band embarked on a lengthy concert tour where members sang many of their own songs and played their own instruments before crowds of adoring fans. Jimi Hendrix was sometimes their opening act.
Following the band's breakup Nesmith rarely rejoined the others for reunion tours, leading many to believe he disliked the band and the show, something he steadfastly denied.
''I really enjoyed being in the show. I really enjoyed working with Davy and Micky and Peter,'' he told Australian Musician magazine in 2019.
It was, he would often say, that he was simply too busy doing other things.
Over the years he recorded more than a dozen albums and toured with the First National Band, the country-rock-folk group he assembled.
He wrote scores of songs, including ''Some of Shelly's Blues,'' ''Papa Gene's Blues,'' You Just May Be the One'' and ''The Girl That I knew Somewhere'' that he performed with the Monkees. Others, performed with the First National Band, included ''Joanne,'' ''Propinquity (I've Just Begun to Care)'' and ''Different Drum.''
For the Monkees' 30th anniversary he induced the others to reunite to record a new album, ''Justus,'' for which all four composed the songs and played the instruments. He also rejoined the others for a brief tour and wrote and directed their 1997 TV reunion film, ''Hey, Hey, It's the Monkees.''
Nesmith also wrote and produced the 1982 science-fiction film ''Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann'' and earned executive producer credits on ''Repo Man,'' ''Tape Heads'' and other films.
His 1981 comedy-music video ''Elephant Parts'' won a Grammy and led to ''PopClips,'' a series of music videos broadcast on the Nickelodeon cable network that in turn led to the creation of MTV.
Nesmith even published two well received novels, 1998's ''The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora'' and 2009's ''The America Gene.''
In 1999 he prevailed in a bitter courtroom battle with the Public Broadcasting System over royalties from a home-video deal his media company, Pacific Arts, had struck with PBS. A federal jury awarded him $48 million, concluding the popular purveyor of children's shows and documentaries had defrauded him.
Nesmith, showing he hadn't lost his Monkees sense of humor, said afterward: ''It's like catching your grandmother stealing your stereo. You're glad to get your stereo back, but you're sad to find out that Grandma's a thief.''
Both sides agreed on an undisclosed settlement and Nesmith founded another company, Videoranch.
After Jones died in 2012 he began to rejoin the Monkees more frequently, their concerts now earning glowing reviews from critics. He attributed that to most of the group's original critics having died or retired.
Following Tork's death in 2019, Nesmith and Dolenz took on the name The Monkees Mike & Micky.
Robert Michael Nesmith was born Dec. 30, 1942, in Houston, Texas, the only child of Warren and Bette Nesmith.
His parents divorced when he was 4 and his mother often worked two jobs, as a secretary and painter, to support her son and herself. It was that latter job that inspired her to whip up a typewriter correction fluid called Liquid Paper in her kitchen blender. By the mid-1970s it had made her a fortune, which she eventually left to her son and to nonprofit foundations she endowed to promote women in business and the arts.
Her son, who was married and divorced three times, is survived by four children, Christian, Jason, Jessica and Jonathan.
'--'--'--
Former Associated Press writer John Rogers was the main writer on the story.
5 Experiments and Syndromes to Account for Mass Covid Trance Behavior
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 13:51
People are walking round in a COVID trance or a COVID hypnosis as I covered in a previous article How the Masses Were Hypnotized Into the COVID Cult. The orchestrators of the COVID scamdemic understand human psychology very well and have been able to cleverly hack or exploit psychological weaknesses in the masses to engender compliance and obedience. In that article I discussed Desmet's ideas of mass formation and how those who deeply buy into the official narrative are part of a cult '' the COVID Cult.
In this article, I will emphasize 5 experiments or syndromes which also shed light on how people come to conform, adapt to absurdity and obey authority, even if it goes against their personal moral code and principles. We must be aware of these tendencies within ourselves as we strive to remain sovereign and free individuals.
COVID Trance Like Behavior: The Asch Conformity ExperimentsPeer pressure is not just something with which only kids or teenagers have to deal. The desire to belong is a deep-seated human drive. The Asch Conformity Experiments, conducted in 1951, were a set of experiments used to determine the degree to which people would adjust their behavior based on the need to fit in and not stand out. Solomon Asch told the participants it was an experiment about visual perception.
He first had them answer a simple question alone where they were comparing the length of 3 different lines on the right to the one on the left, and answering which line on the right was closest in length to the one on the left. 99% of people answered correctly.
Then, he put the participant in a room with others, where some of the others were actually confederates with the experimenter. The confederates would at times deliberately give the wrong answer. This had the effect of swaying the participant to give the wrong answer, denying their own eyes or senses in order to conform with the group. Asch found people would go along with the group 37% of the time, but for different reasons: some because they thought they must be wrong (when so many others or ''the group'' has a different answer), and others because they wanted to avoid the discomfort of standing out. Asch also discovered that when he gave the participant a partner (i.e. another participant who was participating at the same time), then conformity dropped from 37% to 5%.
You can watch an except of the experiment here. The following is a revealing excerpt:
Sometimes we go along with the group because what they say convinces us they are right. This is called informational conformity. Sometimes we conform because we are apprehensive that the group will disapprove if we are deviant. This is called normative conformity '... The partnership variation shows that much of the power of the group came not merely from its numbers, but from the unanimity of its oppostion. When that unanimity is punctured, the group's power is greatly reduced.''
COVID Trance Like Behavior: The Milgram ExperimentsThe Milgram Experiment, conducted in 1961 and repeated many times, shows that ordinary people can be tricked into following orders and committing horrible acts if they believe the commands are coming from a legitimate authority. The results show that generally 50-65% of people would obey authority even if it conflicted with their morals and conscience.
The experiment was set up by telling volunteers they would be helping with research to see how well people learnt via punishment. They needed to read questions to someone in another room, and if that person answered incorrectly, they were to administer an electric shock, each time at an increasing voltage. As the experiment went on, they could hear the yells of pain after they inflicted the punishment, and they were led to believe they were causing it (although they were not; the person in the other room was a confederate of the experiment).
Although some of the volunteers clearly felt uncomfortable and objected, the experimenter in charge, who wore a white coat and introduced himself as a scientist, would merely say things like ''the experiment requires that you continue'' '' and many did continue all the way to the highest voltage of shock.
You can watch an except of the experiment here. The following is narrated by Stanley Milgram himself:
''The results, as I observed them in the laboratory, are disturbing. They raise the possiblity that human nature cannot be counted on to insulate men from brutality and inhumane treatment at the direction of malevolent authorities. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act, and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority. If in this study, an anonymous experimenter could succesfully command adults to subdue a 50 year old man, and force on him painful electric shocks against his protests, one can only wonder what government, with its vastly greater authority and prestige, can command of its subjects.''
COVID Trance Like Behavior: Stanford Prison ExperimentThe Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted in 1971 and has a website dedicated to it here. Student volunteers were told they would be adopting the roles of prison guard and prisoner, participating in an experiment to study the psychological effects of prison life. The experimenters set up a simulated prison and carefully noted the effects of it on the behavior of all those within its walls.
Shockingly and very quickly, those playing the role of prison guard fell into sadism, and those playing the role of prisoner fell into depression. These were volunteer strangers who had no previous affiliation or connection with each other. The experiment was stopped after 6 days for ethical reasons and concern about mental, emotional and physical health of the participants:
''Blindfolded and in a state of mild shock over their surprise arrest by the city police, our prisoners were put into a car and driven to the ''Stanford County Jail'' for further processing. The prisoners were then brought into our jail one at a time and greeted by the warden, who conveyed the seriousness of their offense and their new status as prisoners. Each prisoner was systematically searched and stripped naked. He was then deloused with a spray '... The guards were given no specific training on how to be guards. Instead they were free, within limits, to do whatever they thought was necessary to maintain law and order in the prison and to command the respect of the prisoners '... On the fifth night, some visiting parents asked me to contact a lawyer in order to get their son out of prison. They said a Catholic priest had called to tell them they should get a lawyer or public defender if they wanted to bail their son out! I called the lawyer as requested, and he came the next day to interview the prisoners with a standard set of legal questions, even though he, too, knew it was just an experiment.
At this point it became clear that we had to end the study. We had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation '' a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically. Even the ''good'' guards felt helpless to intervene '... I ended the study prematurely for two reasons. First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was ''off.'' Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners.
Second, Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw our prisoners being marched on a toilet run, bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other's shoulders. Filled with outrage, she said, ''It's terrible what you are doing to these boys!'' Out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its morality.''
COVID Trance Like Behavior: Stockholm SyndromeThese next 2 are syndromes, not experiments. The term Stockholm syndrome was first used by the media in 1973 when 4 hostages were taken during a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden. The hostages defended their captors after being released and would not agree to testify against them in court. They had developed a connection with and an affinity for their captors.
Stockholm syndrome is thus defined as a condition in which hostages develop a psychological bond with their captors during captivity. Wikipedia quotes this research from the book Stockholm Syndrome by C. S. Sundaram, which lists 4 key components that characterize Stockholm syndrome:
A hostage's development of positive feelings towards the captorNo previous relationship between hostage and captorA refusal by hostages to cooperate with police forces and other government authoritiesA hostage's belief in the humanity of the captor, ceasing to perceive them as a threat, when the victim holds the same values as the aggressor.Even before the advent of the COVID scamdemic, I believe the world was suffering from societal Stockholm syndrome, i.e. a society-wide disorder of citizens liking and defending their political leaders who were actively exploiting them.
COVID Trance Like Behavior: Munchausen Syndrome by ProxyMunchausen syndrome was first described in 1951, relating to a group of patients who invented stories about their supposed illnesses, and convinced doctors to perform unnecessary surgical procedures on them. The theory is that these people were unconsciously doing this because they craved attention or care. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a variation, but contains a key difference.
It is a specific form of child abuse first described in 1977 which describes situations in which the parents or the caregivers, almost always the mother, invent illness stories about their children and attempt to substantiate the stories by fabricating physical symptoms and signs. Usually, families or caregivers bring the child to the hospital with symptoms that cannot be explained easily via physiologic ways, and these symptoms occur only when the child is with the parents.
The Underlying PatternsNow that you know about these 5 experiments and syndromes, can you see how they fit into the COVID plandemic and at least partially explain all the COVID trance behavior? Think about all the conformity that has happened, as people in many places still continue obediently wearing their masks, getting their fake-vaccine and chastising those who don't follow all the ridiculous, illegal and illogical COVID rules. Think about all those who were influenced into getting the clot shot to conform with the expectations of their spouse, partner, family or friends.
Think about all the blind obedience and lack of critical thinking that has happened, as white coated misleaders like Dr. Anthony Fraud-ci instructed the masses to ''follow the science'' and that if you disbelieved him, you would be going against science itself. Think about all the heavy-handed and sadistic brutality dished out by sociopathic cops, especially in places like Australia, to those who dared to peacefully protest, walk around without a mask or simply walk outside their home for a few hours. Think about how those cops (who were so inclined) relished the chance to become prison guards while the rest of the citizenry was relegated to prisoner status. Think about all the support and praise leaders, whether political or scientific, have received over the last 20+ months, while they have been actively engaged in violating fundamental and inherent human rights, such as the right to work, to trade, to travel and to breathe air in an unrestricted manner, not to mention the rights of medical freedom and bodily autonomy.
Finally, think about the psychopathic nature of the state, which has invented a virus, a pandemic and an emergency in order to turn the citizenry into patients that must be ''cared'' for, even when the majority never wanted that care and even when that ''care'' is actually grave harm.
Final ThoughtsIn so many ways, Operation Coronavirus is a psychological operation. It is the grand psy-op. It works by leveraging fear to induce conformity, docility, obedience and a blind trust in authority. It works, as Huxley and Orwell both said in different ways, by attempting to make you love your servitude and love your captor-abuser. It works by attempting to make you doubt your own sanity and capacity to assess your own state of health.
Although it is vital to expose the numerous medical and scientific fallacies of the official COVID narrative (and there are many), as I and others have been diligently doing since the start, it is, I would suggest, even more critical to understand the powerful psychological manipulation that has taken place. We must do this in order to break free of the COVID trance propaganda and reclaim our sovereignty.
About the AuthorMakia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news site The Freedom Articles, author of the book Cancer: The Lies, the Truth and the Solutions and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com. Makia is on Steemit and Odysee/LBRY.
Sources:https://thefreedomarticles.com/mass-hypnosis-psychosis-initiation-ritual-covid-cult/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYIh4MkcfJAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOUEC5YXV8Uhttps://www.prisonexp.org/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndromehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5688899/Image via Pixabay. Article cross-posted from Waking Times.
New Conservative Network Seeks Crowdfunding HelpThey say we have to go big or go home. We're trying to go big and bring the patriotic truth the the nation, but we need help.Readers may or may not realize that over the past year, we've been bringing more conservative news and opinion outlets under our wing. Don't take our expansion as a sign of riches; all of the ''acquisitions'' have been through sweat and promises of greater things to come for all involved. As a result, we've been able to bring together several independent media sites under a unified vision of preventing America from succumbing to the progressive, ''woke,'' Neo-Marxist ideologies that are spreading like wildfire across America.
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Could certain COVID-19 vaccines leave people more vulnerable to the AIDS virus? | Science | AAAS
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 13:38
Science's COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.
Certain COVID-19 vaccine candidates could increase susceptibility to HIV, warns a group of researchers who in 2007 learned that an experimental HIV vaccine had raised in some people the risk for infection with the AIDS virus. These concerns have percolated in the background of the race for a vaccine to stem the coronavirus pandemic, but now the researchers have gone public with a "cautionary tale," in part because trials of those candidates may soon begin in locales that have pronounced HIV epidemics, such as South Africa.
Some approved and experimental vaccines have as a backbone a variety of adenoviruses, which can cause the common cold but are often harmless. The ill-fated HIV vaccine trial used an engineered strain known as adenovirus 5 (Ad5) to shuttle into the body the gene for the surface protein of the AIDS virus. In four candidate COVID-19 vaccines now in clinical trials in several countries, including the United States, Ad5 similarly serves as the "vector" to carry in the surface protein gene of SARS-CoV-2, the viral cause of the pandemic; two of these have advanced to large-scale, phase III efficacy studies in Russia and Pakistan.
In today's issue of The Lancet, four veteran researchers raise a warning flag about those COVID-19 vaccine candidates by recounting their experience running a placebo-controlled AIDS vaccine trial dubbed STEP. An interim analysis of STEP found that uncircumcised men who had been naturally infected with Ad5 before receiving the vaccine became especially vulnerable to the AIDS virus. The vaccine, made by Merck, had been the leading hope for what was then a 20-year search for a shot that could thwart HIV. But after the STEP results appeared, the field went into a tailspin. "It took a decade to recover," says one of the co-authors of the Lancet correspondence, Lawrence Corey of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Corey, who now co-leads the COVID-19 prevention network in the United States that is testing vaccines at the behest of the National Institutes of Health, says he and his co-authors went public because Ad5-based COVID-19 vaccines may soon be tested in populations with high HIV prevalence and thus a greater risk of accidental infection during a clinical trial. "If I were in a sub-Saharan African country and making a decision as to what I would want for my country for a general population use of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, I don't see why I would pick an Ad5 vector [vaccine] when there are many other alternative choices," Corey says.
The backfire in STEP'--which evaluated the efficacy of the Merck vaccine in people at high risk of HIV infection in the Americas and Australia'--also appeared in a second study, dubbed Phambili, of the same vaccine. It was taking place simultaneously in South Africa and was stopped early because of the STEP data.
Precisely how Merck's Ad5 vaccine increased the risk of HIV transmission in STEP and Phambili remains murky. The Lancet editorial spells out several possibilities, including dampening of HIV immunity, enhancing replication of the AIDS virus, or setting up more target cells for it.
In addition to the Ad5 COVID-19 vaccine candidates, several other leading vaccines, including ones made by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca/the University of Oxford, use different adenoviruses as vectors. There's no evidence that any of those adenoviruses increases the risks of an HIV infection.
I don't see why I would pick an Ad5 vector [vaccine] when there are many other alternative choices.
Lawrence Corey, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research CenterOf the Ad5-based COVID-19 vaccine candidates, from China-based CanSino Biologics, has developed the furthest. In a Lancet report in May, researchers from the company recognized the "controversial" possibility of their vector increasing the risk of HIV infection and said they would watch for it in the candidate's trials. CanSino's COVID-19 vaccine is being tested in efficacy trials in Russia and Pakistan that together hope to enroll more than 40,000 people, and the company is discussing starting studies in Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico.
China has already approved a CanSino vaccine against Ebola that uses the Ad5 vector. Yu Xuefeng, CanSino's CEO, tells Science the risk of increased HIV susceptibility may be limited to Ad5 vaccines that produce an AIDS virus protein. "There's no clear answer yet," Yu says. "We certainly haven't seen anything with the Ebola vaccine." The company's Ebola vaccine was tested in a population in Sierra Leone that, he notes, had a relatively high HIV prevalence, making it more likely to have detected the problem if it existed.
Russia's Gamaleya Research Institute has a COVID-19 vaccine candidate that uses a combination of Ad5 and Ad26 vectors; it's now in an efficacy trial in that country.
Last week, ImmunityBio received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin human trials of its COVID-19 vaccine, which uses Ad5 as a vector. The first trial will take place in Newport Beach, California, but Patrick Soon-Shiong, the company's CEO, says he also hopes to test it in South Africa, where he grew up and went to medical school.
He calls the STEP study results "very, very fuzzy" and stresses that ImmunityBio's Ad5 has four deleted genes that reduce the immune responses it triggers. "It's 90% muted," he says.
ImmunityBio is discussing the risks with scientists and regulators in South Africa of a trial there to test its modified Ad5 COVID-19 vaccine. The informed consent process for that proposed study would tell participants about potential risks given the previous STEP and Phambili results.
Soon-Shiong emphasizes that his company's experimental COVID-19 vaccine, unlike every other candidate that uses an adenovirus vector, presents two different SARS-CoV-2 genes and might therefore offer more protection from infection or disease. Why only test this in wealthy enclaves of Southern California, he asks? "Why not South Africa? Why not for the underserved people of the world?"
Pediatrician Glenda Gray, who heads the South African Medical Research Council and was the protocol chair of Phambili, has taken part in several discussions with the ImmunoBio team. "When [Soon-Shiong] contacted South Africa, we were obviously quite concerned," Gray says. "All of us who were in Phambili and quite traumatized by what happened asked whether there was an appetite to do something in South Africa."
But after several months of deliberations, the South Africans concluded that regulators should consider a small trial of the vaccine there in people at low risk of HIV infection, Gray says. "We decided not to throw the baby out with the bath water just yet," she adds. "If it does go ahead in South Africa, there has to be huge consultation with communities, and we have to make doubly sure that the participants understand what happened in the past."
Gray says South Africa appreciates ImmunoBio's offer to allow the country to manufacture the product. "We're in the middle of a COVID-19 epidemic in South Africa, and we don't know if we'll ever get access to the current suite of vaccines" produced elsewhere, she says.
The decision to move forward, she insists, has to be left to South African scientists, regulators, and ethics committees. "It's incredibly patronizing for people to determine what science is good or bad for other countries," she says. "Everyone knows about Phambili and STEP, and the scientists understand that there's an important need to be cautious."
Gray, who has co-authored papers about HIV vaccines with Corey and the other three authors of the Lancet correspondence, says there are no easy answers. "What if this vaccine is the most effective vaccine?" she asks. "If this works out to be an important vaccine, we'll have some experience with it."
Prime Minister confirms move to Plan B in England - GOV.UK
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 13:33
The Prime Minister has today [Wednesday 8 December] confirmed that England will move to Plan B following the rapid spread of the Omicron variant in the UK.
Urgent work has been ongoing to understand the impact of the new variant with regards to vaccines, treatments and transmissibility. Early indications showed a large number of concerning spike protein mutations as well as mutations in other parts of the viral genome.
On Saturday 27 November, the government acted quickly to slow the spread of Omicron while more data was collected and assessed.
The most recent data suggests that Omicron has a very high growth rate and is spreading rapidly. S-gene drop out cases have grown from 0.15% of cases during the week of 21st November, to 3.3% of cases since 5 December in England. There are currently 568 cases confirmed across the UK and early analysis from the UK Health Security Agency suggesting the doubling time could be as little as 2.5 to 3 days.
As seen in previous waves, a swift rise in cases can lead to a rapid rise in hospitalisations, which will quickly lead to pressure on the NHS. The data in South Africa is showing a rapid increase in hospitalisations.
As a result of this concerning data the Prime Minister has acted quickly and with caution, confirming Plan B measures will come into force while more data on vaccine efficacy and disease severity is assessed. Plan B was set out in September and will help to slow the spread of the variant and reduce the chances of the NHS coming under unsustainable pressure, while buying time to deliver more boosters.
While it is likely there is some level of reduced vaccine effectiveness against Omicron, it is still too early to determine the extent of this.
The government will continue to look closely at all the emerging data but vaccines remain our best line of defence and it is now more vital than ever that those who are unvaccinated come forward, and those eligible for their boosters book when called.
Today the NHS confirmed a huge expansion of the booster programme, with the National Booking Service now open to all those aged over 40 to book their jabs. The dose interval has also been shortened from six months to three months, with those eligible now able to book a month in advance '' two months after their second dose.
The vaccine programme will be supported by the continued development of world-leading treatments. Today the Prime Minister confirmed a new national study that will see 10,000 UK patients at risk of serious illness from COVID-19 given the treatment molnupiravir to treat their symptoms at home.
Testing will also be a vital tool in controlling the spread given the likely increased transmissibility of Omicron. As there is now demonstrated community transmission of Omicron, we intend to introduce daily contact tests for contacts of confirmed positive cases instead of the ten-day self-isolation period.
Everyone should test using a lateral flow device, particularly before entering a high-risk setting involving people you wouldn't normally come into contact with, or when visiting a vulnerable person. Lateral flow devices remain free of charge and can be collected from local pharmacies.
From Friday 10 December, face coverings will become compulsory in most public indoor venues, such as cinemas, theatres and places of worship. There will be exemptions in venues where it is not practical to wear one, such as when you are eating, drinking or exercising. For that reason, face masks will not be required in hospitality settings.
From Monday 13 December, those who can will be advised to work from home.
From Wednesday 15 December, and subject to parliamentary approval, the NHS Covid Pass on the NHS App will become mandatory for entry into nightclubs and settings where large crowds gather '' including unseated indoor events with 500 or more attendees, unseated outdoor events with 4,000 or more attendees and any event with 10,000 or more attendees.
People will be able to demonstrate proof of two vaccine doses via the app. Having considered the evidence since the emergence of Omicron, proof of a negative lateral flow test will also be accepted.
Introducing Covid-status certification from next Wednesday will give businesses a week's notice, as promised in the government's proposals for introducing mandatory certification published in September.
A full list of guidance on these changes will be available on gov.uk in the coming days. Face covering regulations will be laid in parliament tomorrow, with the remaining regulations laid on Monday 13 December.
Parliament will debate the measures next week, with a vote expected to take place on Tuesday 14 December.
The government will keep the data under constant review. The regulations set to expire six weeks after implementation, with a review after three weeks.
Taken together, the government is hopeful these measures will reduce transmission and slow the spread of the Omicron variant, and will continue to urge those eligible to get their boosters when called.
Biden set to make 1st late-night TV appearance as president | AP News
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:49
WASHINGTON (AP) '-- President Joe Biden is getting ready for his first late-night TV appearance since taking office.
Biden is set to appear Friday on NBC's ''The Tonight Show'' with comedian Jimmy Fallon. Biden will appear virtually; the White House didn't say where he will be when he tapes the segment.
Biden has made two previous appearances on the show. He bantered with Fallon in April 2020, a week before he became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, and in September 2016, toward the end of his eight years as vice president.
Biden is suffering from a steep drop in the polls and has been under pressure to engage more with the media.
He has been trying to improve his standing with the public by traveling around the country to promote a $1 trillion infrastructure law, money that will be used to repair roads and bridges and lay down high-speed internet across the country.
The president also has been trying to rally public support for a separate social welfare and climate bill that has stalled in the Senate.
January 2022 CPI weight update : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:37
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Planet Lockdown '-- The Financial Control System
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:31
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
In 1998, trillions of dollars started to get sucked out of the U.S. government by the central banks. Our retirement funds have been looted and will within just a few years be nonexistentHistorically, U.S. intelligence agencies have primarily worked on behalf of the central bankersCentral bankers are now putting into place a system that will allow them to extract tax without representationThe central bankers, most of whom are technocrats, have created a breakaway society, a parallel society, in which they are above all law and control everythingTo combat their control system, we must first be able to see it for what it is, and realize how it's being used by us, to our own detrimentThe ''Planet Lockdown Part 2'' interview above features finance guru Catherine Austin Fitts, founder of the Solari Report. (To get a taste of what you'll find in the Solaris Report, you can download this previous 2020 issue.) You many think you previously saw this but most likely it was Part 1.
Fitts has spent decades exposing corruption and fraud, both within the banking industry and government, and corruption and fraud are driving forces in the COVID pandemic as well. She got her start on Wall Street, where she had a successful career for over a decade.
In 1989, she became the assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development under the Bush administration. After 18 months, she resigned, but while there, she discovered how technology could make the financing of neighborhoods more productive.
''Government money was destroying neighborhoods, not helping them,'' she says, but private entrepreneurs could take this new technology and finance privately. To that end, Fitts started an investment bank and broker dealer named Hamilton Securities Group.
A couple of years later, they were hired by the federal housing administration to be the lead financial adviser, which gave Fitts access to ''incredibly rich databases about how the real estate, land and a lot of the mortgage financing and home building works in America's 3,100 counties.'' Fitts continues:
''Then I entered a period where I litigated with the federal government for 11 years. The Department of Justice seized all the databases and all the software tools, and I litigated with the federal government. That's [what] forced me to really dive into how the control systems were working.
When I was in Wall Street, I saw how the financial control systems worked, but since so much is rigged through the central bank and through government, it gave me a chance to really see how government worked on the covert side, and how that related to Wall Street and Washington.''
Our Retirement Funds Have Been LootedIn 1998, trillions of dollars started to get sucked out of the U.S. government, Fitts says. In essence, it was ''a coup d'etat by financial means.'' She realized then the extent to which our government was siphoning '-- stealing '-- the money. ''They were stealing everybody's retirement,'' Fitts says.
''Everybody's going to retire in 20 or 30 years, but they were going to steal the money up front. So, by the time we got to where we are now, the money would be gone and they could turn to everybody and say, 'Well, we can't really afford your retirement.'''
On Wall Street, you have markets and monetary policy run by the central banks, and then you have the electorate, which influences fiscal policy and the government. So, it's a dual pillar system. Markets are managed centrally. So, central banks, which control monetary policy, can simply print money, and the military then makes sure the money is taken up, which keeps everything liquid. Fitts explains:
''The economic equation is: Can you make more money from printing than you have to spend on the military and making the system go? I'll give you an example. In the 1980s, we had a period of tremendous monetary expansion. In the last year of the decade, in '89, there was a huge fight in the Doolan partnership [Furey, Doolan & Abell LLP] about how much money should be paid to the traders for bonuses.
I had a wonderful partner who did a study, showing that '... if instead of having traders in the seats, we'd had chimpanzees, we would've made more money. It was very interesting because you'd go out to the Hamptons on the weekends and you'd '... hear everybody talking about making fantastic amounts of money because they were brilliant and geniuses and smart and clever.
But it wasn't [because of their smarts]. It was just simply the monetary policy floating the boats '... A lot of the money comes from economic warfare. So, [when] you pump up the dollar, you're moving money out of the U.S. government. As we're coming through this big change of globalization, you loan massive amounts of dollars.
And then all of a sudden you pull all the loans. You throw them into a dead-end trap. You pull the money and then they get a crash. Now your dollar is high. So, you go and buy up everything on the cheap.
The governance structure that existed before the financial coup was basically: You have the central banks running monetary policy, and then you have the sovereign government running fiscal policy. The citizens pay taxes to the sovereign government, and they elect representatives who have something say about how that fiscal money gets [divided] up.
Then you have private central bankers and private interests who control monetary policy and are relatively independent of the fiscal. What we've seen [is that] '... the less the government has information sovereignty and financial sovereignty, the more dependent it is on the central bankers.
So, as the government have levered up with debt and lost their informational and financial sovereignty '-- part of this is what's happened with digital technology '-- the central bankers have gotten more and more powerful.
Since fiscal [year] 1998, we've had what I call the financial coup d'etat. So, in the United States, up to $100 trillion have been moved out. Dr. Skidmore and I did a study, and as of 2015, the number was $21 trillion '...
At that exact time, we had $20 trillion of debt. So, there was more money disappearing than there was debt. [So, they were taking that] money out. That's the financial coup. Now that the money is out, you can collapse the government.''
Why Central Bankers Are Intentionally Collapsing GovernmentImportantly, Fitts stresses that government doesn't have the power to make illegal transactions. The central banks '-- which are privately owned '-- must be involved in order for that to occur. The private banks ''are doing it for them,'' Fitts explains.
''So, we've now reached the point where the central banks are moving in and basically taking control of fiscal policy as well,'' she says. ''And this is why there's such a big debate about election fraud.
Essentially the computer systems are controls for the elections, and essentially, the citizens or taxpayers have lost any say. If you look at polls over the last 10 years, the citizens want the country to go to the right, and Congress votes to go to the left. That's because increasingly these people are controlled and dependent on what the central bankers want.
There's a great interview that Chuck Schumer, the senator from New York did at the beginning of the Trump administration, where he basically said that if Trump thinks he's going to contradict or defy the CIA, he's dreaming; they have 50 ways from Sunday to get you. And traditionally, if you look at the U.S. intelligence agencies, they basically worked for the central bankers.
So, what's happening is we're watching a reengineering of this fiscal line. You're basically looking at the central bankers moving to put into place a system that will allow them to extract tax without representation. That's the trick, financially. How do you force the citizens to pay taxes with no representation?
Of course, they're using the pandemic to roll in the system that will make it possible for them to achieve that. Naomi Wolf has done a very good job of describing this, and she said, 'Vaccine passports are the end of human liberty in the west.'
She's right, because ultimately, what it's going to evolve into is a financial transaction system where, if you don't behave, the central banks can take money right out of your account. They can stop you from transacting.''
An example Fitts gives is, say the central bankers (read totalitarian rulers of the whole world) don't want you to be able to travel. They want you to stay put where you are. They can easily accomplish this, in this planned system, by programming your electric car such that it cannot operate past that five-mile boundary line.
They will also have full control over the function of money in this system, meaning they can decide what you are allowed to spend your money on. They could decide they don't want you to have fresh food, so you can only use the central bank digital currency for processed food.
We've Been Lured to Create Our Own PrisonThe central bankers are nothing if not clever when it comes to prototyping. They don't do anything without first running many tests to see what will work best. But they don't just hire top experts. No, instead, they persuade the top developers that they can make a ton of money by developing these prototypes. They make it fun and innovative, allowing skilled people to come up with the ideas.
Once a successful prototype has been identified, they then build their own version of that. In the case of cryptocurrencies, their version is a central bank digital currency under centralized control. Another part of the complete system is the smart grid, which was prototyped, developed and rolled out in recent years. The smart grid is, of course, a requirement for the surveillance apparatus that is at the heart of it all.
While all of these things, cryptocurrencies, the smart grid, artificial intelligence technologies and the like, are marketed as a way to make us all freer, the intended result is a global prison system where no one is free. The good news here is that they must get the general population to build their own prisons. The answer then, is that once you see how it's done, you can just stop. Stop building the prison walls. Stop building and contributing to the surveillance grid.
This could mean quitting your job if you work for a company that is involved in developing and building technologies intended for this control grid. But even if you don't actually perform work that helps build it, you are still participating in the control grid structure by using surveillance tools like Facebook and Google.
By allowing smart meters to be installed in your home, by buying and using AI-based technologies and ''smart'' technologies, by allowing GPS tracking on your phone and so on. If you don't want to contribute to building this global prison, you have to actually take action and change how and who you do business with.
''If you look at a lot of the financial fraud over the last 20 years in the United States, the leader of that financial fraud in many cases was JP Morgan Chase. Yet statistics show that 50% of Americans bank or have credit cards or other relationships with JP Morgan Chase.
In 1998, when I first realized what was happening with the mortgage fraud and JP Morgan Chase was at the heart of it, I was writing a check on a JP Morgan Chase banking account. And I said, 'Why am I banking [with JP Morgan]? Why am I allowing my funds to be used as deposits to engineer financial fraud? I've got to come clean.'
Forget about protesting. If tomorrow, everybody woke up and said, 'You know, I'm not going to bank with the New York fed member banks,' the change would be dramatic, because if you look at where we're banking and who we're working for and who we're associating with, we're helping them do this.
Remember this is an all-digital system. One aspect of this is currency, but the other is a one-way mirror where you have 24/7 surveillance and data. So not only can I watch you 24/7 and collect data from your body, from your mind, from your activities, but then I can stop you from moving around spatially, or I can turn off your ability to transact.''
The Control System and Transaction System Are OneAs noted by Fitts, the system being built is both a control system and a transaction system. The transaction system, however, is not based on what we consider a real currency. It's actually the end of currencies, because in this system, you can never take the currency out of the bank and put it in your pocket. You can only conduct transactions that are validated and approved through and by the central bank.
Remember, the 24/7 surveillance system ''can literally get the human race to be connected to the cloud, to the AI, the software and the robots,'' Fitts says. ''We're talking about connecting the human race to a cloud where they teach the AI, the software and the robots, how to do their jobs.'' In short, we are actively engineering a future where we, humans, have been largely eliminated from the workplace.
Those who remain will be integrated with robotics. ''In other words, whether I have a human do that job, or whether I have a robot do that job, I can manage them in the same system if I can have them all hooked up to the cloud and communicating with each other.''
Basically, what we're looking at is transhumanism, and we're quite literally dehumanizing ourselves. This system will also do away with markets, because what we think of as markets will be micromanaged and optimized through artificial intelligence and software.
What Do You Want?Knowing this, the options become rather simple. As noted by Fitts, we can have a human civilization, or we can have an inhuman civilization. We can have a financial system where private monopoly controls the printing of money, or we can have a decentralized system.
I agree with Fitts, who states that the world she wants to live in is where the financial printing press has been decentralized, and where we are committed to human civilization '-- not a transhumanist one run by technocrats. As crazy as this transhuman technocratic future may sound to the everyday person, it's clear the technocrats believe their system can work.
''I think they believe it can work because of the one-way mirror,'' Fitts says. ''[Let's say] you have a one-way year where you have 100% access to the data, 24/7, of all the people on this side of the mirror.
Remember, once you engineer all this secret money in taxation without representation, they [the people] can't see behind the mirror. The thing that punches a hole in the mirror is transparency about government money, and no taxation without representation.''
Creating a Breakaway CivilizationThis is why the central bank takeover of the sovereign governments is so important, because this takeover allows them to create a system in which the two sides of the mirror are two entirely separate civilizations. Those behind the mirror '-- you and I '-- cannot see what the technocrats are doing on the other side, while they can see every last thing we do and say. ''You're literally talking about a parallel universe,'' Fitts says.
Those behind the mirror, the technocratic rulers, do not obey any law that applies to those of us on the other side of the mirror. They are not subject to the law. They have complete immunity from prosecution.
''They can engage in systematic violation of what you and I think of as the law, with impunity,'' Fitts says. ''And if you look at how much money has been moved out in the financial coup, they can literally become a parallel civilization.''
They're Trying to Sell You on Being a SerfThe vaccine passport is clearly the tool of choice for the authoritarian globalists' plan to deprive you and your family of your freedom and personal liberties. This financial coup is 20 years in the making. They voted on the ''direct reset'' plan (aka The Great Reset), they wrote the plan, and have been implementing that plan, year by year, step by step.
We're now in the end game, Fitts says, where they need to consolidate everything. Now, with their vote for The Great Reset, the central bankers made the decision to put 500 million people out of work over the next year alone.
''That's the equivalent of dropping several nuclear bombs around the world. That's financial warfare, and they made it intentionally,'' Fitts says. ''They made it knowingly. It was a plan. And what is very important to understand, when you think about this pandemic, is people are not dying from magic viruses.
People are dying from tyranny, they're dying from a great poisoning. That's part of that tyranny, but our problem, and the thing we need to be afraid of, is tyranny. Because the tyranny needs, and is about to get much, much worse.
It's the passports and that system of central bank digital control that will give them the ability to do that. The world economic forum calls it The Great Reset, which is kind of the marketing '... The World Economic Forum guys make it interesting and fashionable [to say] 'In 2030, you own nothing, and you're happy.'
Now, what I hear is 'It's 2030, the direct reset has stolen all your money, taken all your assets, and they've got your mind-controlled.' The Great Reset is to sell people on a vision of a world where the average person has a much smaller command on resources and assets, and is subject to complete central control.
Part of what you're dealing with is that human beings crave coherence. And so, if you can put them in a state of incoherence, they will literally do anything they can to get back to coherence. It's a torture mechanism. If you study torture, it's a typical torture tactic '...
That's why you see all these people saying, 'If you just accept the passports, you'll be free. Or if you get the vaccination, you'll be free. They have spent a fortune since World War II on figuring out how to use digital technology, telecommunications and media to implement mind control much more economically and much more broadly. And one of the things I think they're very enthusiastic about how well it has worked.''
Watch the Financial TransactionsWhen will it stop working? When enough of us can see what they're doing. For example, it's important to realize that, during this pandemic, people have been bought out of the labor market with federal assistance that pays them more than they were making while working.
This strategy has severely impeded small businesses from getting the labor they need to keep going, and according to Fitts, this is all part of the plan to bankrupt all small businesses.
Of course, the next step will be to require the COVID jab for anyone who wants to collect unemployment or other financial assistance, as the vaccine passport is combined and integrated with the new all-digital central bank transaction system. Step by step, everyone is being herded into the new control system. But remember, we can stop it, because we're doing it to ourselves.
The problem is, ending tyranny almost always requires some kind of sacrifice. End tyranny is rarely a comfortable or profitable venture. That said, there are countless ways to fight back.
Prayer War Room and Other SuggestionsFitts tells the story of a woman fighting corruption in her hometown. She was scared because taking it to the next level would require her to go public, and she was a very private person. Fitts suggested she watch the film ''War Room,'' a Christian movie about prayer. ''Start a war room and just fight them through prayer,'' Fitts told her. Apparently, it worked wonders.
''So, there are many different ways to fight, and you could fight in a way that's comfortable. Some people organize, some people are bringing lawsuits. Some people are lobbying. Some people are moving and going to another jurisdiction. Some people are pulling their money out of JP Morgan Chase.
There are many different ways to do it. If you're working for a big bank or big corporation, start working on building the skills and the resources and the wherewithal you need to start something yourself. Start learning. It's called DIY '-- do it yourself.
Start looking at your financial picture and figuring out '... how you can collapse your income statement and your balance sheet to something which is much more resilient, locally, and doing it yourself.
We don't need to get mortgaged up and get dependent on the system. The third thing is, for God's sakes, go out and get yourself a great bank. Particularly if you're in the United States, there are lots of great banks and great bankers '... who also don't want the central bankers controlling everything.
I know a lot of community bank presidents who don't want to be controlled by the New York Fed '... So, the first thing you need to do is swing your money out of '-- if you're invested in the New York fed member banks, or in the big corporations that are running government this way '-- swing your money out of those stocks and start investing in building a local food system.
Who's your farmer, who's your rancher? Where are you going to get high-quality fresh food? There is tremendous opportunity to build out the local, fresh food systems. If you take the time and have patience, there are very good investments to be had there.
Tastes like FREEDOM. Order Founders Blend Organic Coffee from Freedom First Coffee. Use "NOQ" as the promo code for 10% off!
[Next, know] who's your sheriff. The entire enforcement within a county area is controlled by the sheriff [in the U.S.], and in most counties, the sheriff is elected. Not all but most. The feds cannot come in and do an enforcement action unless the sheriff allows it to occur.
[Why should you] care about who your state legislators are? Because the state legislators have the power to say no to the federal government, particularly if you're not willing to escrow your taxes and get into this taxation without representation.
So, go through your financial statement and your balance sheet and get the bad guys out of your money and start supporting the local guys who are willing to support the rule of law '...
I had a former client who called me and said, 'I just sold a house, and I want to know, should I put the money into real estate or precious metals?' And I said, what's the point of having assets? If you don't have an army to protect them, meaning if you don't have litigators, state legislators and sheriffs who are willing to go protect your assets, your assets are worthless; you'll lose them.
So, she took the money and gave it to a group of litigators who were litigating some of what's going on right now. Anytime you can make an investment that permanently reduces your expenses, you're better off to do it yourself. So instead of paying your water bill, build a well. In other words, get your money out of financing the guys who are doing this to you, and get your money into financing yourself, your friends or people you know.
Trust me, if tyranny controls everything, and tyranny can operate above the law, then nothing's going to work. This is a war. And if we don't stand up and fight it, now, there will be no way to wiggle around this. There's no way to outplay it. There's no place to run. There's no place to go. So, you've got to stand and fight back '...
We have a choice. Everybody has a choice. So, stop building the prison, stop helping these guys and start creating friction. We don't have to go along. And we're the ones who are building the prison. So, you have to bring transparency to what's going on, and then you have to take action.
We're not all going to make it out of this process alive. It's war. That's what happens in a war, but human liberty is worth fighting for. We're living in a world where there are two visions, and the top 1% have a vision of us as a natural resource, [while] we have a vision of us as individuals with sovereign rights that come to us by divine authority.''
As noted by Fitts, these are two extraordinarily different visions. One option is a society where all people have the ability to exercise our potential. In the other, only a few get to exercise their potential, while the rest have no opportunity at all. We're in the end game. It's all or nothing at this point. There's no middle ground.
In the end, Fitts and I both believe the plan will fail, but ONLY if we all do our part to prevent it. What's more, we also need to prepare for what comes after their plan fails. This too could be just as challenging. Fitts notes in conclusion:
''I tell people, while the Titanic is sinking, grab some planks and deck chairs and start building your ark, because these guys are going to make a huge mess. This is a mess. And if you look at what they're trying to do, it's very hard, it's very complicated. I think it's going to fail.''
''The Truth About COVID-19'' exposes the hidden agenda behind the pandemic, showing the countermeasures have nothing to do with public health and everything to do with ushering in a new social and economic system based on totalitarian, technocracy-led control. So, it's not misinformation they fear. It's the truth they want to prevent from spreading. Pick up a copy of this best-selling book today before it's too late.
Big Pharma's Five Major Minions that Everyone, Vaxxed or Unvaxxed, Must OpposeThis is not an ''anti-vaxxer'' article, per se. It's a call for everyone to wake up to the nefarious motives behind vaccine mandates, booster shots, and condemnation of freedom.The worst kept secret in world history SHOULD be that the unquenchable push for universal vaccinations against Covid-19 has little if anything to do with healthcare and everything to do with Big Pharma's influence over the narrative. Unfortunately, that secret has stayed firmly hidden from the vast majority of people because of the five major minions working on behalf of Big Pharma.
What's even worse is the fact that Big Pharma's greed is merely a smokescreen to hide an even darker secret. We'll tackle that later. First, let's look at the public-facing ringleaders behind the vaccine push, namely Big Pharma. But before we get into their five major minions, it's important to understand one thing. This is NOT just an article that speaks to the unvaccinated. Even those who believe in the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines must be made aware of agenda that's at play.
Let's start with some facts. The unvaccinated do NOT spread Covid-19 more rampantly than the vaccinated. Even Anthony Fauci acknowledged the viral load present in vaccinated people is just as high as in the unvaccinated. This fact alone should demolish the vaccine mandates as it demonstrates they have absolutely no effect on the spread of the disease. But wait! There's definitely more.
This unhinged push to vaccinate everyone defies science. Those with natural immunity may actually have their stronger defenses against Covid-19 hampered by the introduction of the injections which fool the body into creating less-effective antibodies. Moreover, the push to vaccinate young people is completely bonkers. The recovery rate for those under the age of 20 is astronomical. Children neither contract, spread, nor succumb to Covid-19 in a statistically meaningful way. What they DO succumb to more often than Covid-19 are the adverse reactions to the vaccines, particularly boys.
All of this is known and accepted by the medical community, yet most Americans are still following the vaccinate-everybody script. It requires pure cognitive dissonance and an overabundant need for confirmation bias to make doctors and scientists willingly go along with the program. Yet, here we are and that should tell you something.
Before I get to the five major minions of of Big Pharma, I must make the plea for help. Between cancel culture, lockdowns, and diminishing ad revenue, we need financial assistance in order to continue to spread the truth. We ask all who have the means, please donate through our GivingFuel page or via PayPal. Your generosity is what keeps these sites running and allows us to expand our reach so the truth can get to the masses. We've had great success in growing but we know we can do more with your assistance.
Who does Big Pharma control? It starts with the obvious people, the ones who most Americans believe are actually behind this push. Our governments at all levels as well as governments around the world are not working with Big Pharma. They are working for Big Pharma. Some are proactive as direct recipients of cash. Others may oppose Big Pharma in spirit but would never speak out because they know anyone who does has no future in DC.
This may come as a shock to some, but it's Big Pharma that drives the narrative and sets the agenda for the ''experts'' at the CDC, FDA, WHO, NIH, NIAID, and even non-medical government organizations.
Most believe it's the other way around. They think that Big Pharma is beholden to the FDA for approval, but that's not exactly the case. They need approval for a majority of their projects, but when it comes to the important ones such as the Covid injections, Big Pharma is calling the shots. They have the right people in the right places to push their machinations forward.
That's not to say that everyone at the FDA is in on it. Big Pharma only needs a handful of friendlies planted in leadership in order to have their big wishes met. We have seen people quitting the FDA in recent weeks for this very reason. The same can be said about the other three- and five-letter agencies. Too many people in leadership have been bribed, bullied, or blackmailed into becoming occasional shills for the various Big Pharma corporations. Some have even been directly planted by Big Pharma. That's the politics of healthcare and science that drives such things as Covid-19 ''vaccines.''
Read the rest of this story, but please be sure to donate first if you can.
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Toyota halts more production in Japan as parts run out | Reuters
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:15
An employee of Toyota Motor Corp. works on the assembly line of Mirai fuel cell vehicle (FCV) at the company's Motomachi plant in Toyota, Aichi prefecture, Japan May 17, 2018. Picture taken May 17, 2018. REUTERS/Issei Kato/File Photo
TOKYO, Dec 10 (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Co (7203.T) on Friday expanded production stoppages at some factoriesin Japan because of a shortage of components shipped from parts plants in Southeast Asia.
The latest halts will cut car output by 9,000 vehicles when added to curbs announced on Thursday, affecting production of Lexus models and its four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser, Toyota said in a press release.
Although limited, the cuts come as Toyota tries to make up for production lost to earlier supply-chain disruptions in Malaysia and Vietnam that forced it to trim vehicle output even as demand for cars in markets such as China rebounded as coronavirus lockdowns ended.
The world's biggest car producer by volume said it is sticking to an annual production target set in September to build 9 million vehicles by the end of March.
"We would like to maintain 9 million units, but we will keep a close eye on the situation," a Toyota spokesperson said.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to reuters.com Reporting by Tim Kelly, Sakura Murakami and Maki Shiraki; editing by Himani Sarkar and Jason Neely
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
New Zealand's plan to end smoking: A lifetime ban for youth - ABC News
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:12
New Zealand's government believes it has come up with a unique plan to end tobacco smoking '-- a lifetime ban for those aged 14 or younger
By
NICK PERRY Associated Press
December 9, 2021, 3:24 AM ET
' 4 min read
WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- New Zealand's government believes it has come up with a unique plan to end tobacco smoking '-- a lifetime ban for those aged 14 or younger.
Under a new law the government announced Thursday and plans to pass next year, the minimum age to buy cigarettes would keep rising year after year.
That means, in theory at least, 65 years after the law takes effect, shoppers could still buy cigarettes '-- but only if they could prove they were at least 80 years old.
In practice, officials hope smoking will fade away decades before then. Indeed, the plan sets a goal of having fewer than 5% of New Zealanders smoking by 2025.
Other parts of the plan include allowing only the sale of tobacco products with very low nicotine levels and slashing the number of stores that can sell them. The changes would be brought in over time to help retailers adjust.
Because the current minimum age to buy cigarettes in New Zealand is 18, the lifetime smoking ban for youth wouldn't have an impact for a few years.
In an interview with The Associated Press, New Zealand's Associate Health Minister Dr. Ayesha Verrall, who is spearheading the plan, said her work at a public hospital in Wellington involved telling several smokers they had developed cancer.
''You meet, every day, someone facing the misery caused by tobacco,'' Verrall said. ''The most horrible ways people die. Being short of breath, caused by tobacco."
Smoking rates have steadily fallen in New Zealand for years, with only about 11% of adults now smoking and 9% smoking every day. The daily rate among Indigenous Maori remains much higher at 22%. Under the government's plan, a taskforce would be created to help reduce smoking among Maori.
Big tax increases have already been imposed on cigarettes in recent years and some question why they aren't hiked even higher.
''We don't think tax increases will have any further impact," Verrall said. "It's really hard to quit and we feel if we did that, we'd be punishing those people who are addicted to cigarettes even more.''
And she said the tax measures tend to place a higher burden on lower-income people, who are more likely to smoke.
The new law wouldn't impact vaping. Verrall said that tobacco smoking is far more harmful and remains a leading cause of preventable deaths in New Zealand, killing up to 5,000 people each year.
''We think vaping's a really appropriate quit tool,'' she said.
The sale of vaping products is already restricted to those aged 18 and over in New Zealand and vaping is banned in schools. Verrall said there was some evidence of a rise in youth vaping, a trend she is following ''really closely.''
New Zealand's approach to ban the next generation from tobacco smoking hasn't been tried elsewhere, she said.
But she said studies have shown youth sales decrease when minimum ages are raised. In the U.S., the federal minimum age to buy tobacco products was raised from 18 to 21 two years ago.
While public health experts have generally welcomed the New Zealand plan, not everybody is happy.
Sunny Kaushal said some stores could be put out of business. Kaushal chairs the Dairy and Business Owners Group, which represents nearly 5,000 corner stores '-- often called dairies in New Zealand '-- and gas stations.
''We all want a smoke-free New Zealand,'' he said. ''But this is going to hugely impact small businesses. It should not be done so it is destroying dairies, lives and families in the process. It's not the way.''
Kaushal said the tax increases on tobacco had already created a black market that was being exploited by gangs, and the problem would only get worse. He said smoking was already in its twilight in New Zealand and would die away of its own accord.
''This is being driven by academics,'' he said, adding that stakeholders hadn't been consulted.
But Verrall said she didn't believe the government was overreaching because statistics showed the vast majority of smokers wanted to quit anyway, and the new policies would only help them achieve their goal.
She said the pandemic had helped people gain a new appreciation for the benefits of public health measures and rallying communities, and that perhaps that energy could be harnessed not only to tackle smoking but also diseases like diabetes.
Verrall said she had never smoked herself but her late grandmother did, and it likely compromised her health.
''It's a really cruel product,'' Verrall said.
Twitter bans popular account highlighting Nancy Pelosi stock trades, @NancyTracker
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:11
Twitter has booted @NancyTracker, a popular account that documented Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's stock trades and drew attention to the millions of dollars she and her husband have generated through trading.
The account had over 200,000 followers when it was banned. Some of its most popular tweets highlighted that Pelosi's role as a government official gives her access to ''insider information'' and noted that Pelosi's returns have significantly outpaced both the market and some of the world's best investors.
@NancyTracker was created by The Free Press Report which also created the largest Ghislaine Maxwell trial tracker account, @TrackerTrial.
Twitter suspended both accounts earlier today and claimed that The Free Press Foundation had broken its rules against ''platform manipulation and spam.'' It also referenced rules that prohibit artificially amplifying or suppressing information.
However, The Free Press Foundation pushed back against Twitter by saying that all of the @TrackerTrial's engagement was ''organic'' and that ''there was not outside amplification.''
In October, less than two months before the accounts were suspended, @NancyTracker said it had received ''a cease and desist order from a lawyer representing someone high up in the [Political] office.''
''I will not name names. And I will also not cease or desist,'' @NancyTracker added at the time.
The Free Press Report is urging fans of the @NancyTracker account to follow it on free speech social network Gab and has already built an audience of tens of thousands of followers on the platform.
Filmmaker Daniel Bostic described the censorship of the @NancyTracker account as a ''full on authoritarian crackdown just days after Dorsey leaves.''
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down on November 29 and was replaced by Parag Agrawal. Since being appointed CEO, Agrawal has faced scrutiny for his past comments that Twitter's role is ''not to be bound by the First Amendment'' and that he wished Twitter had censored some content sooner.
Investor and Bitcoin commentator Anthony Pompliano also suggested that the censorship was linked to Agrawal by highlighting that the accounts had been suspended and tweeting: ''New Twitter CEO seems to be having a busy week.''
The censorship of these popular accounts is the latest in a wave of Twitter censorship that has occurred since Agrawal took the reigns. A link to the American Heart Association website was recently flagged as ''unsafe'' and numerous accounts have been suspended after Twitter announced new rules that ban the sharing of photos or videos of people without their permission.
HUGE CYBERATTACK ON INTERNATIONAL MARKETS SIMULATED BY INTERNATIONAL CRIME SYNDICATE THAT GOES BY MANY NAMES '' SILVIEW.media
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:06
I feel this is not getting the deserved attention and I will rectify the situation.Because, traditionally, drills precede a false flag, which is organized by the same people who did the drill.
The official press release of the event, basically, published yesterday by Reuters and sent out to every mainstream news outlet out there:By Steven Scheer
<<Israel financial-cyber officials take part in a simulation of a major cyber attack on the global financial system with 9 other countries, the World Bank and IMF at the Finance Ministry in Jerusalem.
JERUSALEM, Dec 9 (Reuters) '' Israel on Thursday led a 10-country simulation of a major cyberattack on the global financial system in an attempt to increase cooperation that could help to minimise any potential damage to financial markets and banks.
The simulated ''war game'', as Israel's Finance Ministry called it and planned over the past year, evolved over 10 days, with sensitive data emerging on the Dark Web. The simulation also used fake news reports that in the scenario caused chaos in global markets and a run on banks.
The simulation '-- likely caused by what officials called ''sophisticated'' players '-- featured several types of attacks that impacted global foreign exchange and bond markets, liquidity, integrity of data and transactions between importers and exporters.
''These events are creating havoc in the financial markets,'' said a narrator of a film shown to the participants as part of the simulation and seen by Reuters.
Israeli government officials said that such threats are possible in the wake of the many high-profile cyberattacks on large companies, and that the only way to contain any damage is through global cooperation since current cyber security is not always strong enough.
''Attackers are 10 steps ahead of the defender,'' Micha Weis, financial cyber manager at Israel's Finance Ministry, told Reuters.
Participants in the initiative, called ''Collective Strength'', included treasury officials from Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Thailand, as well as representatives from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Bank of International Settlements.
The narrator of the film in the simulation said governments were under pressure to clarify the impact of the attack, which was paralysing the global financial system.
''The banks are appealing for emergency liquidity assistance in a multitude of currencies to put a halt to the chaos as counterparties withdraw their funds and limit access to liquidity, leaving the banks in disarray and ruin,'' the narrator said.
The participants discussed multilateral policies to respond to the crisis, including a coordinated bank holiday, debt repayment grace periods, SWAP/REPO agreements and coordinated delinking from major currencies.
Rahav Shalom-Revivo, head of Israel's financial cyber engagements, said international collaboration between finance ministries and international organizations ''is key for the resilience of the financial eco-system.''
The simulation was originally scheduled to take place at the Dubai World Expo but it was moved to Jerusalem due to the Omicron variant of COVID-19, with officials participating over video conference.>>
Now please tell me which countries spearheaded restrictions and the Great Reset the most. Australia and Canada belong to the British Crown and need to be assimilated with UK.
And this is the view from Israel, as per Times of Israel:10-day drill led by Finance Ministry aims to boost international cooperation against hacker threat to global financial systemsBy TOI STAFF9 December 2021, 11:02 pm An illustrative image of computer popup box screen warning of a system being hacked; hackers, cybersecurity attack. (solarseven; iStock by Getty Images)
Israel led a 10-country, 10-day-long simulation of a major cyberattack on the world's financial system by ''sophisticated'' players, with the goal of minimizing the damage to banks and financial markets, the Finance Ministry said on Thursday.
The Finance Ministry led the scenario with help from the Foreign Ministry, and said the ''war game'' was the first of its kind.
The exercise simulated several scenarios, including sensitive data surfacing on the dark web alongside fake news, leading to global financial chaos.
Participants included representatives from the US, UK, United Arab Emirates, Germany, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Thailand, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The Finance Ministry's chief economist, Shira Greenberg, headed the Israeli team. The exercise was ''further evidence of Israel's global leadership'' in the field of financial cyber defense, she said.Get The Times of Israel's Daily Editionby email and never miss our top storiesNewsletter email addressGET ITBy signing up, you agree to the terms
''The unique and groundbreaking exercise held today showed the importance of coordinated global action by governments together with central banks in the face of financial cyber threats,'' Greenberg said.
The simulation ''featured several types of attacks that impacted global foreign exchange and bond markets, liquidity, integrity of data and transactions between importers and exporters,'' Reuters reported.
Israeli officials said international cooperation was the only way to counter the threat of major cyberattacks.
''Attackers are 10 steps ahead of the defender,'' said Micha Weis, financial cyber manager at the Finance Ministry.
In October, the National Cyber Directorate issued a general warning to Israeli businesses to be aware of potential cyberattacks, as the country faced an uptick in hacking attempts.Prime Minister Naftali Bennett speaks at the annual Cyber Week, at Tel Aviv University, on July 21, 2021. (Miriam Alster/FLASH90)
The warning came after an Israeli hospital faced a major ransomware cyberattack that crippled systems, and from which it could take several months to recover.
On Wednesday, Israel's National Insurance Institute said that its website had been hacked, causing it to go offline for several hours.
In July, cybersecurity firm Check Point reported that Israeli institutions are targeted by about twice as many cyberattacks as is average in other countries around the world, particularly the country's health sector, which experiences an average of 1,443 attacks a week.
The most targeted sectors around the world, including in Israel, are education and research, followed by government and security organizations, and then health institutions, Check Point said.
The report found that, on average, one in every 60 Israeli organizations or firms is targeted every week with ransomware attacks, an increase of 30 percent over the rate in 2020.Hospital staff at Hillel Yaffe Medical Center log patient details with pen and paper, following a ransomware cyberattack, October 13, 2021. (Hillel Yaffe Medical Center)
Last month, the Black Shadow hacking group released what it said was the full database of personal user information from the Atraf website, an Israeli LGBTQ dating service and nightlife index.
The group also uploaded personal medical information for patients of Israel's Machon Mor medical institute, including medical records of some 290,000 patients.
The two attacks amounted to one of Israel's largest-ever privacy breaches.
Black Shadow is a group of Iran-linked hackers who use cyberattacks for criminal ends, according to Hebrew media reports.
Very interesting report from ToI, as opposed to Reuters, isn't it? Now let's zoom out a little, for more contextBETWEEN HYSTERICALS ABOUT RUSSIAN HACKERS, WEF MEMBERS GATHER UNDER RUSSIAN HELMS TO WORK ON THE CYBER GREAT RESET
World Economic Forum's Centre for Cybersecurity Platform
The Centre for Cybersecurity is leading the global response to address systemic cybersecurity challenges and improve digital trust.
>>As technological advances and global interconnectivity accelerate exponentially in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, unprecedented systemic security risks and threats are undermining trust and growth.
The World Economic Forum's Centre for Cybersecurity is an independent and impartial global platform committed to fostering international dialogues and collaboration between the global cybersecurity community both in the public and private sectors. We bridge the gap between cybersecurity experts and decision makers at the highest levels to reinforce the importance of cybersecurity as a key strategic priority.
Our Community has identified the following three key priorities:
Building Cyber Resilience '' enhance cyber resilience by developing and scaling forward-looking solutions and promoting effective practices across digital ecosystems.
Strengthening Global Cooperation '' increase global cooperation between public and private stakeholders by fostering a collective response to cybercrime, and jointly addressing key security challenges.
Understanding Future Networks and Technology '' identify future cybersecurity challenges and opportunities related to Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies and envision solutions which help build trust.
Founding Partners
Accenture, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Salesforce, Saudi Aramco, Sberbank
Governments, International Organizations, Academia and Civil Society
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Europol, FIDO Alliance, Global Cyber Alliance (GCA), International Telecommunications Union (ITU), INTERPOL, Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD), Oman Information Technology Authority (ITA), Organization of American States (OAS), Republic of Korea National Information Resources Service (NIRS), Saudi Arabia National Cybersecurity Authority, Swiss Reporting and Analysis Centre for Information Assurance (MELANI), University of Oxford, UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)
Among the speakers we also find the CyberPeace Institute, a Geneva-based company that describes itself as ''citizens who seek peace and justice in cyberspace,'' funded by Microsoft, Facebook, Mastercard, and the Hewlett Foundation.
I'm still feeling I'm looking at pictures from the same wedding party. Can we find more? Aplenty, but let's zoom out even more:Remember IMF / Worls Bank are official partners of the World Economic Forum. I didn't mention them in the headline below, but they are a key factor there too:
VACCINES AS GATEWAY TO DIGITAL ID, A CONCEPT LAUNCHED IN 2016, AT DAVOS, BY GATES AND PHARMAFIA
And before that..
[EXCLUSIVE] FINAL EVIDENCE COVID-19 IS A 'SIMEX' '' PLANNED SIMULATION EXERCISE BY WHO AND WORLD BANK
And right before that:
FINANCIAL VACCINES: ''OBSCENE'' PANDEMIC INSURANCE BONDS ISSUED SINCE 2017 BY WORLD BANK AND WHO, WITH NO INTENT TO PAY OR HELP
Also:
On June 28, 2017, The World Bank (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) launched specialized bonds aimed at providing financial support to the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF), a facility created by the World Bank to channel surge funding to developing countries facing the risk of a pandemic.
''This marks the first time that World Bank bonds are being used to finance efforts against infectious diseases, and the first time that pandemic risk in low-income countries is being transferred to the financial markets.''
The World Bank '' June 28, 2017Read more on pandemic bonds.
FOR MY FINAL BULLETPOINT: WHICH COUNTRY DO YOU THINK IT HAS BEST CYBERATTACK CAPABILITIES, IN TERMS OF KNOW-HOW AND TECHNOLOGY?Israeli Military trains and 'privatizes' some of the world's best hackersWhere I'm getting at:We've isolated the virus here, in its many variants.
It's the same small core of culprits running both the defense and the attack, with the same old tactics. They've already coopted or allied everyone that could pose a threat, except Iran. Similarly to how Epstein's customers sit on both benches in Ghislaine Maxwell's trial.
I mean, who attacks ''the global financial system'', aliens?I know some people who have been attacking it for centuries now. They're largely the same ones doing this 'defense' exercise. Noticed all militaries are ran by ''defense'' ministries? There's no Land and Resources Grabbing Ministry or industry.
If you prefer sports analogies better, think all the teams involved in this pandemic / Great Reset were football teams, and this reveals once again the board of the International Football Association that organizes the World Cup. They don't care that much who wins as long as the show meets the profitability targets and doesn't threaten their control positions.
They make money off the 'rivalry' and the show, not teams.
And we're watching the semi-finals.
Ah, by the way, most of them also worked together on the WW2 Cup.COVID, HITLER, BLM, THE GREAT RESET '' MANY BRANDS, ONE CARTEL. AUSCHWITZ PERFECTED AND GLOBALIZED
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EXCLUSIVE IMF, 10 countries simulate cyberattack on global financial system | Reuters
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:05
Israel financial-cyber officials take part in a simulation of a major cyber attack on the global financial system with 9 other countries, the World Bank and IMF at the Finance Ministry in Jerusalem December 9, 2021 REUTERS/ Ammar Awad
Register now for FREE unlimited access to reuters.comJERUSALEM, Dec 9 (Reuters) - Israel on Thursday led a 10-country simulation of a major cyberattack on the global financial system in an attempt to increase cooperation that could help to minimise any potential damage to financial markets and banks.
The simulated "war game", as Israel's Finance Ministry called it and planned over the past year, evolved over 10 days, with sensitive data emerging on the Dark Web. The simulation also used fake news reports that in the scenario caused chaos in global markets and a run on banks.
The simulation -- likely caused by what officials called "sophisticated" players -- featured several types of attacks that impacted global foreign exchange and bond markets, liquidity, integrity of data and transactions between importers and exporters.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to reuters.com"These events are creating havoc in the financial markets," said a narrator of a film shown to the participants as part of the simulation and seen by Reuters.
Israeli government officials said that such threats are possible in the wake of the many high-profile cyberattacks on large companies, and that the only way to contain any damage is through global cooperation since current cyber security is not always strong enough.
"Attackers are 10 steps ahead of the defender," Micha Weis, financial cyber manager at Israel's Finance Ministry, told Reuters.
Participants in the initiative, called "Collective Strength", included treasury officials from Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Thailand, as well as representatives from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Bank of International Settlements.
The narrator of the film in the simulation said governments were under pressure to clarify the impact of the attack, which was paralysing the global financial system.
"The banks are appealing for emergency liquidity assistance in a multitude of currencies to put a halt to the chaos as counterparties withdraw their funds and limit access to liquidity, leaving the banks in disarray and ruin," the narrator said.
The participants discussed multilateral policies to respond to the crisis, including a coordinated bank holiday, debt repayment grace periods, SWAP/REPO agreements and coordinated delinking from major currencies.
Rahav Shalom-Revivo, head of Israel's financial cyber engagements, said international collaboration between finance ministries and international organizations "is key for the resilience of the financial eco-system."
The simulation was originally scheduled to take place at the Dubai World Expo but it was moved to Jerusalem due to the Omicron variant of COVID-19, with officials participating over video conference.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to reuters.com Reporting by Steven Scheer; Editing by Jane Merriman and Lisa Shumaker
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Boris Johnson blasts BBC over partygate saying it neglected focus on Covid-19 booster jab rollout | Daily Mail Online
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:01
Boris Johnson has condemned the BBC as 'shamefully frivolous, vengeful and partisan' over its coverage of the No 10 'Partygate' row.
The embattled Prime Minister turned his fury on the Corporation in the belief it has neglected its 'primary duty' of publicising the need for booster jabs to combat the new Omicron variant of Covid.
Mr Johnson '' who is facing a Commons revolt, a crunch by-election and rumours of a vote of no confidence in his leadership '' angrily told friends that the BBC's exhaustive coverage of the party scandal has 'wasted' too much 'public time and attention' when it should be concentrating on urging the public to get their jabs now that 'Omicron is starting to rip'.
Ministers have been rattled by data which shows people who had two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine several months ago have almost no protection against the Omicron strain, but are encouraged that a booster jab takes the protection above 70 per cent.
The analysis by the UK Health Security Agency has triggered intense debate within the Government about how the booster campaign can be accelerated in time to avoid fresh Covid restrictions.
An embattled Boris Johnson turned his fury on the Corporation in the belief it has neglected its 'primary duty' of publicising the need for booster jabs to combat the new Omicron variant of Covid
Mr Johnson angrily told friends that the BBC's exhaustive coverage of the party scandal has 'wasted' too much 'public time and attention' when it should be concentrating on urging the public to get their jabs now that 'Omicron is starting to rip'. Pictured: The details behind the 'partygate' coverage which has dogged No10
Ministers have been rattled by data which shows people who had two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine several months ago have almost no protection against the Omicron strain, but are encouraged that a booster jab takes the protection above 70 per cent
From tomorrow, 7.5 million people aged between 30 and 39 will be eligible to book a booster, taking the number who have been added to the online booking system over the past week to ten million.
In a separate move, Ministers are expected to scrap the controversial 'traffic light' system for travellers coming into the UK, meaning those arriving from 'red list' countries will no longer have to quarantine in hotels for ten days.
The move '' which is expected to be introduced in time to spare anyone from having to spend Christmas in a hotel room '' comes in response to the speed at which the Omicron variant is spreading and the expectation that there will soon be limited differences in infection rates between countries.
The 'Partygate' row was reignited last week when footage was leaked to ITV News of a mock press conference showing Downing Street staff joking about a 'cheese and wine' event on December 18 last year, despite days of denials that any party had taken place at a time when indoor gatherings were banned.
Mr Johnson was forced into a grovelling apology to the Commons while Allegra Stratton, the spokeswoman caught on the video, tearfully resigned.
In other developments:
Scientists at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said the UK was facing a substantial wave of Omicron infections in January, with an estimated 25,000 to 75,000 dying from the variant by April '' although they noted there was uncertainty around the modelling; New cases of Omicron rose by 50 per cent yesterday '' from 448 to 663 '' taking the total to 1,898, with the variant now predicted to be the dominant form of the virus in England by the end of the year The latest figures showed 54,073 positive tests over the previous 24-hour period, up 12.6 per cent on the same day last week '' while hospital admissions rose almost four per cent to 839 and deaths were up 1.1 per cent week- on-week to 132; Former Cabinet Minister David Davis uses an article in The Mail on Sunday today to oppose the Plan B proposals which he describes as a 'knee-jerk reaction' that 'may do enormous economic harm for little gain'; Downing Street is resisting a 'grinch' push by Michael Gove to introduce tougher measures such as 'pub passports'; Furious holidaymakers accused a major Government-approved Covid test provider of failing to send them fit-to- fly certificates in time for their departures; A study found that working from home is having a detrimental impact on family life as parents struggle to balance childcare with their job commitments; Data showed Christmas shoppers are opting to buy locally rather than in city centres amid growing concerns over the Omicron variant; Durham Cathedral will require worshippers attending Christmas services to show proof they are vaccinated, have tested negative within the previous 48 hours or have recovered from the virus; Post-mortem tests revealed two boys from the same school died within days of one another after they caught Covid. Mohammed Habib, 14, and Harry Towers, 15, both students at St John Fisher Catholic College in Newcastle-under-Lyme died in October. Some 663 new cases of the strain were detected across the UK, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said, up from the 448 recorded yesterday. It takes the country's total to 1,898, although experts suggest the true number is much higher
As Mr Johnson fumes about the BBC, Cabinet Secretary Simon Case has launched an investigation into the alleged Downing Street party as well as another reported gathering on November 27 and an event at the Department for Education on December 10.
Mr Case '' who will examine the purpose of the events, who attended and whether rules were followed '' is expected to report back within days.
The story led BBC bulletins and dominated Radio 4's Today Programme, with much of the coverage led by the outgoing Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg. In an online article yesterday, she wrote: 'This weekend it is worth asking if 'Planet Boris' might actually, finally implode?'
Ms Kuenssberg incensed No 10 last month by quoting a Downing Street source as saying that there was 'a lot of concern inside the building about the PM'.
Her report triggered a blame game within Whitehall and strong denials that the so-called 'chatty pig' responsible for the briefing worked for Chancellor Rishi Sunak.
Mr Johnson is facing a rebellion by more than 50 Conservative MPs on Tuesday when the Commons votes on new Plan B Covid restrictions, including vaccine passports.
Amid a tidal wave of sleaze allegations, Tory chiefs fear they could lose the North Shropshire by-election two days later, despite defending a majority of almost 23,000.
Meanwhile, a growing number of Tory rebels '' some linked to former Prime Minister Theresa May '' are discussing sending letters to Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, calling for a leadership contest.
And an opinion poll for Opinium last night gave Labour a lead of nine points, their biggest the company has reported since March 2014. The poll puts Labour on 41 per cent and the Tories on 32 with Mr Johnson's approval rating at an all-time low of minus 35.
The national booking system will open tomorrow to everyone aged 30 to 39, allowing them to arrange a top-up jab three months on from their second dose. The booking can be made two months after their second dose.
Dr Emily Lawson, head of the NHS Covid-19 vaccination programme, said: 'With the emergence of the new variant and the rising case numbers, there has never been a more important time to get boosted. So when it's your turn, book in'.
The latest figures show more than 409,000 boosters were administered on Friday, meaning almost two-fifths of the population aged over 12 has now had the additional jab.
A BBC spokesman declined to comment last night.
RFK Jr's Heroic Resistance to the CIA's Continuing Covid Coup D'(C)tat |
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 11:57
EDWARD CURTIN With his extraordinary new book, The Real Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, RFK Jr. has made it very clear that he will not allow Orwell's 1984 totalitarian boot to stamp on his face.His is a very rare moral courage, and he is asking us to join him, before it is too late and we enter into a new dark age, in recognizing and resisting the evil forces intent on stamping out democracy around the world.
He is not pulling his punches with language as he accuses the political-intelligence-media-money-medical-corporate-pharmaceutical conspirators of executing ''the controlled demolition of American constitutional democracy.''
For a brilliant and highly accomplished lawyer and excellent writer and speaker, the choice of those words ''controlled demolition'' is clearly intentional.
For anyone who doubts that the Covid-19 crisis is an intelligence-run operation controlled by spooks working with medical technocrats like Anthony Fauci, billionaires such as Bill Gates, the military, media, Big Pharma, the World Economic Forum, etc., a close reading of this book '' with its 2,194 references '' will disabuse one of that illusion.
The CIA has long been deeply involved with vaccines, viruses, drugs, weaponizing cancer, biological weapons, and of course massive mind-control operations '' deadly propaganda in plain English '' for use in controlling US Americans and foreigners alike. (ER: And MKUltra, in reference to mind-control operations, which many believe is still going on, providing us with shooters, 'terrorists' or thugs on demand.)As Kennedy writes in an ironically understated way, ''The pervasive CIA involvement in the global vaccine putsch should give us pause.'' Yes, a long pause. He continues [my emphasis]:
There is nothing in the CIA's history, in its charter, in its composition, or in its institutional culture that betrays an interest in promoting either public health or democracy. The CIA's historical preoccupations have been power and control. The CIA has been involved in at least seventy-two attempted and successful coup d'(C)tat between 1947 and 1989, involving about a third of the world's governments. Many of these were functioning democracies. The CIA does not do public health. It does not do democracy. The CIA does coups d'(C)tat.
Just as it does Kennedy assassinations.
Character assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is what the CIA and its media mouthpieces have been doing for years. This has become more and more necessary as they have realized the great growing danger he poses to their agenda.
Calling him an anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist, and names far worse, is part of a concerted smear campaign to turn the public away from his message, which is multi-faceted and supported by deep research and impeccable logic.
Like his father and uncle, he has become an irrepressibly eloquent opponent of the demonic forces intent on destroying the democratic dream.
With The Real Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, he has pinned his indictment of those forces to the world's wall for all to read.Just as this new book will not be reviewed by the corporate mainstream media, not even negatively for fear of promoting it by doing so, so too the last book he wrote, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, was completely ignored by such media.
As I wrote three years ago in the only review of that book:
When a book as fascinating, truthful, beautifully written, and politically significant as American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, written by a very well-known author by the name of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and published by a prominent publisher (HarperCollins), is boycotted by mainstream book reviewers, you know it is an important book and has touched a nerve that the corporate mainstream media wish to anesthetize by eschewal.
American Values is part memoir, part family history, part astute political analysis, and part-confessional, and is in turns delightful, sad, funny, fierce, and frightening in its implications.
What implications?
It is the heart of that book that had the obedient reviewers avoiding it like the plague, a plague introduced by a little mockingbird, as in Operation Mockingbird. No member of the Kennedy family since JFK or RFK had dared to say what RFK, Jr. did in that book.
He indicted the CIA in a carefully crafted and fully factual way for a vast array of crimes. He spelled out the long war between the Kennedys and the CIA that resulted in the deaths of his father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle President John Kennedy.He threw a gauntlet down in the midst of telling an entertaining and touching family saga, which included a critique of his own youthful transgressions.
But the nation's spooks smelled danger in the tale and they are now more acutely aware that they must censor him because his message is finding an expanding audience of people sick of government lies and very hungry for the truth.
More and more people are willing to follow this brave man into the darkness of our history and the ongoing coups d'(C)tat underway at home and abroad. They smell a demonic author behind the Covid-19 propaganda.While Dr Anthony Fauci understandably stands at the center of this new book, and deservedly so for his evil machinations over so many decades, it is important to recognize that he is an obedient, albeit very powerful, underling in a systemic structure of evil, who has greatly materially profited from the sale of his soul.
Yet while this is true, to read Kennedy's chapters on Fauci's commanding role in the HIV/Aids fraud, the AZT shakedown, illegal experiments on children that killed at least 85, etc., is enough to make your blood boil and to realize that such actions must spring from a source far deeper than the thirst for lucre.
Something fiendish and sinister is at work with all this with the suffering and death it has caused, and in the ways it has foreshadowed the COVID-19 propaganda and the complicity of the mass media in fronting for Fauci and his allies, then and now.
Kennedy exhaustively details Fauci's work as a drug dealer for Big Pharma, even while his job at NIAID is to protect and improve the people's health, which has deteriorated dramatically over his tenure. (It is important to mention parenthetically but not at all incidentally that the CIA ''manages'' the so-called war on drugs in a similar manner.)
Thus we have a war of drugs and a ''war on drugs'' working in tandem in a perfect scheme to drug as many people as possible. Here are a few details:
Fauci has an annual $6 billion budget, most of which goes toward the research and development of new drugs. He is the highest paid federal employee, more than the President, with an annual salary of $417, 608. He controls 57 percent of global biomedical medical funding directly and indirectly via the NIH, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust, and therefore controls the scientists looking for research money. He has for decades overseen the regulatory capture of government health agencies by Big Pharma. The CDC, a paramilitary organization, spends $4.9 billion of its $12 billion budget buying and distributing vaccines, the vaccines that Fauci has been pushing. It also owns 57 vaccine patents. Fauci and other officials receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help to develop and push through the approval process. He has for many years promoted false pandemics to promote novel vaccines, drugs, and pharmaceutical company profits. Forty-five percent of the FDA's budget comes from the pharmaceutical industry through what are euphemistically called ''user fees.'' Fauci has a ''strange fascination with,'' and has invested in ''gain of function'' experiments to engineer superbugs, which is part of a long CIA history of weaponizing viruses, etc. RFK Jr's detailed exposure of Fauci's role reminds me of reading Moby Dick and meditating on Melville's description of Ahab '' one has to enter a different mental space to begin to comprehend such evil, and even then one is struck dumb by its extent and the media's complicity in covering it up for so long.
When I use the word evil, I am not using that word loosely, but very precisely, for the actions of Fauci and his ilk are evil, although the human being Anthony Fauci is still capable of contrition and redemption. Anything is possible if not probable, but I am not holding my breath.
Just as the actual people who shot JFK, RFK, MLK Jr, et al. were obedient servants of the system that produced them '' listen to Bob Dylan's Only A Pawn in Their Game '' Fauci is a product of a structural system of evil.
This is not to excuse him but to place his actions in an historical and structural context.
Obviously, he is not a poor southern unschooled white man used by the KKK as in Dylan's song, but a sophisticated and Jesuit-educated New Yorker brought to political consciousness within a system that amply rewards obedience to the authorities. He is a graduate of the same Jesuit high school I attended, the elite Regis High School in NYC (and then the Jesuit College of the Holy Cross), and is considered by many of my classmates to be a national hero bordering on a saint.
Such schooling made me well aware of how the system gobbles up its youth with promises of wealth and prestige if they yoke their intellectual acumen to allegiance to the rules of the game and become what Hannah Arendt termed ''schreibtischt¤ter'' '' desk killers, or what the great American poet Kenneth Rexroth called hyenas with polished faces in the offices of billion dollar corporations devoted to ''service.''
That such socialization is presented as being ''a man for others'' within the Jesuit tradition of mind-control, doubles its effectiveness as a confidence game. That is why so many decent young people succumb to this siren call. It then, however, demands the quelling of an uneasy conscience.
Jean Paul Sartre called this bad faith (mauvaise foi) a form of mental trickery in which one tries to ''lie'' to oneself '' an impossibility since the liar and the one lied to are the same person '' which means the deceiver must really know the truth that he is trying to conceal from the deceived.
This form of split consciousness allows those who serve a rapacious system to attempt to deceive themselves and others that they are serving a just cause. Such attempts demand an actor's skill and the quelling of one's inner voice.
But there are very many actors among us, as Nietzsche said, not genuine ones, but bad actors. Fauci, Gates, et al. are bad actors in a propaganda film, at least for those who know how propaganda is produced and bad acting exposed. Robert Kennedy is such an astute critic.
My purpose here is not to go into detail about Fauci and Gates's connections to the U.S. intelligence and defense industries, for this is a meditation, not a review. But those connections are massive. Read the concluding chapter 12 in The Real Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.
Check his sources, 298 for this chapter alone. This is not speculation or theory, but fact. Do your homework. Study. Kennedy says:
After twenty years [since the insider anthrax attacks following September 11, 2001: see Graeme MacQueen's, The 2001 Anthrax Deception (isbn.nu)] of modeling exercises, the CIA '' working with medical technologists like Anthony Fauci and billionaire internet tycoons '' had pulled off the ultimate coup d'(C)tat: some 250 years after America's historic revolt against entrenched oligarchy and authoritarian rule, the American experiment with self-government was over. The oligarchy was restored, and these gentlemen and their spymasters had equipped the rising technocracy with new tools of control unimaginable to King George or any other tyrant.
Yet the fight is far from over, and those with the tools and the mechanistic, material mindsets must contend with a rising tide of opposition to their plans for a ''Great Reset'' and a transhuman world.
We may be in the final battle of this war, but the human spirit is stronger than those who wish to stamp out human freedom. Robert Kennedy, Jr. is leading the fight for the soul of the world, and it is both a political and spiritual one.
It does not take great intelligence to realize that when countries throughout the world act in a synchronized way in locking down their populations and repeat the same message on cue that such events are centrally coordinated.The entire COVID-19 propaganda campaign, culminating with its push to enforce multiple vaccines that are not vaccines and are based on fraudulent PCR tests, has been long in preparation and the intelligence agencies' fingerprints are all over its planning.
War game scenarios, weaponized vaccines, the CIA, the NIH, Gates, Fauci, the NIAID, DARPA, Wired magazine, the financial elites and their power centers such as the World Economic Forum, etc. '' they are all involved in a conspiracy to impose a rigid global tyranny over regular people for the benefit of the world's super-rich.Since Fauci's coordinated lockdowns early in 2020, there has been a 3.8 trillion dollar shift in wealth upwards to the super-rich, creating 500 new billionaires, while pulverizing the middle class, destroying small businesses, enriching Fauci and his Pharmaceutical and robber baron corporate partners, and causing vast suffering and death all around the world.
None of this is accidental. Kennedy documents it all. He writes:
Dark Winter, Atlantic Storm, and Global Mercury were only three of over a dozen Germ Games staged by military, medical, and intelligence planners leading up to COVID-19. Each of these Kafkaesque exercises became uncanny predictors of a dystopian age that pandemic planners dubbed the ''New Normal.''
The consistent feature is an affinity among their simulator designers for militarizing medicine and introducing centralized autocratic governance.
Each rehearsal ends with the same grim punchline: the global pandemic is an excuse to justify the imposition of tyranny and coerced vaccination.
The repetition of these exercises suggests that they serve as a kind of rehearsal or training drill for an underlying agenda to coordinate the global dismantlement of democratic governance'...
'...Virtually all of the scenario planning for pandemics employ technical assumptions and strategies familiar to anyone who has read the CIA's notorious psychological warfare manuals for shattering indigenous societies, obliterating traditional economics and social bonds, for using imposed isolation and the demolition of traditional economies to crush resistance, to foster chaos, demoralization, dependence and fear, and for imposing centralized and autocratic governance.
US and foreign intelligence agencies have dominated the COVID-19 military project from the start. The CIA and Fauci are central to the official ''conspiracy theory'' '' accurately called fact '' including ''Operation Warp Speed'' under Trump.
Trump simply carried on the work of his predecessors, including Obama, but acted as if he was opposed to it. It has always been a bi-partisan program because the CIA runs both parties.
When he was in prison in Germany after returning in 1939 from Union Theological Seminary in NYC to oppose Hitler, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the following from his prison cell before he was executed:
Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved '-- indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
By stupid he did not mean that such people lacked intellectual ability, for they were often very smart, but that they had fallen under the spell of public power and lost all independence of mind.
Thus he adds,
''He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.''
Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. is still trying to reach these people. His is an heroic task. No wonder Kennedy is named for St. Francis to whom he is devoted; St. Francis taught him and us that courage and sacrifice are what God asks of us all.
One of his father's favorite quotes defines the son as well; it is from Edith Hamilton, the author of The Greek Way, who wrote:
Men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life'...To the heroic, desperate odds fling a challenge.
Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. has stepped up to the challenge. He is brave and brilliant. We are blessed to have his witness.
************
SourceEdward Curtin is an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.
Published to The Liberty Beacon from EuropeReloaded.com https://www.thelibertybeacon.com/rfk-jrs-heroic-resistance-to-the-cias-continuing-covid-coup-detat/
'Fleming Rolling in Grave': Netizens Livid After Bond Producer Says Next 007 Could Be Non-Binary
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 11:49
https://sputniknews.com/20211212/fleming-rolling-in-grave-netizens-livid-after-bond-producer-says-next-007-could-be-non-binary-1091458178.html
'Fleming Rolling in Grave': Netizens Livid After Bond Producer Says Next 007 Could Be Non-Binary
'Fleming Rolling in Grave': Netizens Livid After Bond Producer Says Next 007 Could Be Non-Binary
The news comes amid speculation about the next installment of the famous spy saga and discussions about representation in the film industry. Some reports even suggested that the UK's next top spy could be a woman.
2021-12-12T11:14+0000
2021-12-12T11:14+0000
2021-12-12T11:15+0000
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The next James Bond could be a non-binary figure, the saga's producer Barbara Broccoli has said. The 61-year-old, who has worked on 13 Bond films, including "Octopussy", "License to Kill", "Tomorrow Never Dies", and the latest one, "No Time to Die", made the statement while speaking on the podcast Girls on Film.Host Anna Smith quizzed Broccoli about the next film in the franchise and whether producers plan to introduce any changes to 007's identity and character.At the same time, she disproved rumours that Britain's most famous spy could be a woman.A non-binary person is defined as someone who doesn't identify as being female or male and uses pronouns like "they" or "them".The news has caused a torrent of angry comments on social media.Even people who are not fans of the saga voiced their discontent.Many users said they won't watch the next film if 007 is made a non-binary person.Others predicted the end of the franchise itself if producers go forward with the changes.Some netizens emphasised that the film's producers should stick to Ian Fleming's portrayal of James Bond.Many users wondered what the plot of the next movie would be like if 007 becomes non-binary.Still others directed their anger at Barbara Broccoli.Commenting on the proposed changes, one Hollywood producer, who spoke to the Daily Mail said that 007 "has to adapt to the times, but a non-binary [Bond] might be hard for fans to accept".
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11:14 GMT 12.12.2021 (Updated: 11:15 GMT 12.12.2021 )The news comes amid speculation about the next installment of the famous spy saga and discussions about representation in the film industry. Some reports even suggested that the UK's next top spy could be a woman.
The next James Bond could be a non-binary figure, the saga's producer Barbara Broccoli has said. The 61-year-old, who has worked on 13 Bond films, including "Octopussy", "License to Kill", "Tomorrow Never Dies", and
the latest one, "No Time to Die", made the statement while speaking on the podcast
Girls on Film.
Host Anna Smith quizzed Broccoli about the next film in the franchise and whether producers plan to introduce any changes to 007's identity and character.
"Non-binary, perhaps, maybe one day?", Smith asked.
"Who knows? I mean, I think it's open. We just have to find the right actor", the film producer replied.
At the same time, she disproved rumours that
Britain's most famous spy could be a woman.
"I don't think that we should be making films where women are playing men. I think we should be making more films about women. I think Bond will be a man", Barbara Broccoli said.
A non-binary person is defined as someone who doesn't identify as being female or male and uses pronouns like "they" or "them".
The news has caused a torrent of angry comments on social media.
Beyond words to describe sickness.
'-- Wilhemina Bothwell (@ettieeden) December 12, 2021Ffs just leave something alone... stop ruining things!!!
'-- Jamie Henderson (@cca_nrfc) December 12, 2021Even people who are not fans of the saga voiced their discontent.
I've never watched any of the James Bond movies so I'm not biased in this conversation. But wouldn't it be best to come up with a franchise of their own with the main character being Non-Binary? Or even a new woman spy? Be original, and leave the classics as they are!
'-- Freddie ð¯ (@Freddie_23_23) December 12, 2021Many users said they won't watch the next film if 007 is made a non-binary person.
Quoting article..."...the character could identify as non-binary... "
Okay
And I'll identify as someone not watching James Bond movies anymore.
'-- Chris CPX (@ChristopherCPX) December 12, 2021Others predicted the end of the franchise itself if producers go forward with the changes.
Some netizens emphasised that the film's producers should stick to Ian Fleming's portrayal of James Bond.
This is insane. Create a new franchise with the lead character a woman/person of colour/gay/non-binary. Leave James Bond alone. It's a successful franchise as it is. Bond was created by Flemings as a straight white man who's handsome & charming with women https://t.co/Rv5bVRzjgd
'-- Ù
Ø´ Ù
ÙÙ
(@Gihan81) December 12, 2021Then call it something else. This is not how Fleming intended it to be.
'-- nico wurzer (@nicow86452535) December 12, 2021Many users wondered what the plot of the next movie would be like if 007 becomes non-binary.
The evil misogynistic, homophobic villain is attempting to convert world in binary mode and implement regressive family values in schools and colleges...Non-binary James Bond, pronoun they/them saves the day with the help of woke mob on Twitter and cancels the vilian
'-- AlanBravo (@SlayerLiberandu) December 12, 2021An excellent idea. But there is still too much wrong with Bond. Why does they have to kill the baddies? Surely it would be better to see Bond around the table negotiating peace treaties with baddies rather than despatching them. I'd also like to see Bond wearing unisex clothing
'-- The Super History Buff (@super_buff) December 12, 2021And they definitely should be vegan.
'-- Melindi Scott (@melindiscott) December 12, 2021Still others directed their anger at Barbara Broccoli.
And how do the producers identify themselves? Fluid C***s?
'-- Sandro Martinsð¬ð§ð¬ð¬ð§ð· (@sanmarts) December 12, 2021Just before Cubby Broccoli passed away he told his family ''Don't let them screw it up.'' I guess his daughter, Barbara Broccoli, didn't listen and is going to neuter #JamesBond and make him a eunuch. https://t.co/ElqXBIdesp
'-- David Long (@david_d1421) December 12, 2021Commenting on the proposed changes, one Hollywood producer, who spoke to the Daily Mail said that 007 "has to adapt to the times, but a non-binary [Bond] might be hard for fans to accept".
The supreme court's abortion ruling is even more unsettling than it may seem | US politics | The Guardian
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 05:07
Show caption 'Many of the initial media responses to the court's opinion characterized the ruling as a narrow win for abortion providers. But in reality it was a massive win for the rightwing Texas government, and for anti-choice forces nationwide.' Photograph: Daniel Slim/AFP/Getty Images
OpinionIn allowing Texas's outrageous abortion ban to stay in place, the court signaled that it is willing to sacrifice its own legitimacy and power in order to destroy Roe
Don't be fooled by the supreme court's nominal hedging on its endorsement of SB8, the Texas abortion ban that deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who assists in an abortion after six weeks' gestation. In a ruling on Friday, the court held that a lawsuit by Texas abortion providers could go forward '' but only on narrow grounds. Only those state officials responsible for licensing medical providers may be sued, the court ordered '' no one else involved in the state's practical maintenance of SB8 is liable. The ruling said, for instance, that the providers could not sue court clerks, those bureaucrats tasked with actually docketing the lawsuits that would enforce SB8.
For providers, it seems that the best possible outcome for the suit now is that they may be able to secure an injunction preventing medical providers from being delicensed. These perplexing limits placed by the court on which parties can be sued to challenge SB8 ensures that though the suit against the law will be at least partly allowed to go forward, it will be largely toothless.
In the meantime, SB8 will remain law. Women in Texas are effectively banned from securing a legal abortion in the state, even though the still-standing Roe v Wade decision says that they have a right to one. It's likely that SB8 will remain in effect at least for the duration of Roe's lifetime '' meaning that Texas women will not be able to obtain legal abortions after six weeks for the foreseeable future. Many of the initial media responses to the court's opinion emphasized that since the suit was allowed to go forward, on technical grounds, the ruling was a narrow win for the abortion providers. But in reality Friday was a massive win for the rightwing Texas government, and for anti-choice forces nationwide.
That SB8 has been allowed to take effect '' now for the second time '' by the supreme court reflects the justices' eagerness to gut abortion rights. The fact of the matter is that the court is already set to overturn Roe and allow states to ban abortion outright. That much was clear to anyone who listened to last week's oral arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health, a case surrounding the constitutionality of a 15-week ban in Mississippi, which devolved into grim misogynist spectacle as the Republican appointees held court on the supposed ease of giving infants up for adoption and their own robust comfort with overturning long-settled precedent.
That ruling is scheduled to come down in late May or early June. When it does, a slim majority of states are expected to ban abortion, either immediately or very soon thereafter. That means that soon SB8 '' and the copycat bills that it has inspired in states like Florida and Arkansas '' won't be necessary for the anti-choice lobby to achieve their aims. Instead of concocting an elaborate enforcement process in which rogue anti-woman vigilantes enforce their abortion bans, the states will be able to enforce their bans themselves.
SB8, then, and the supreme court's embrace of it, can be understood not only as a harbinger of the justices' deep contempt for the abortion right, but also of their childish impatience to exert this contempt upon American women. They can't even wait six months. They want to ban abortion right now. In pursuit of this goal, the supreme court has proven itself willing to undermine its own capacity to oversee state laws, to enforce federal supremacy, and to protect constitutional rights.
The anti-choice substance of the court's decision in SB8 was not surprising; its embrace of Texas's tactics perhaps was. Aside from its direct attempt to undermine women's rights, SB8 also took aim at judicial authority. By banning abortion long before viability, the law flouted the supreme court's precedents in Roe and Planned Parenthood v Casey. But that much a slew of vehemently anti-choice justices would probably forgive: all six of the Republican appointees clearly believe that Roe was wrongly decided, and at least five of them (all but Roberts, who seems more trepidatious) appear eager to overturn it. But in its novel enforcement mechanism, SB8 sought specifically to evade judicial review '' not just to give the court an opportunity to overturn its own precedent, but to make it so that within Texas borders supreme court precedent didn't matter.
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor compared SB8 to the views of John C Calhoun '' a nineteenth-century pro-slavery campaigner who argued that states have the right to nullify federal laws that they do not like. America fought its civil war in no small part over this question. By first allowing the SB8 to go into effect, in September, and then by gutting the lawsuit against it this Friday, the supreme court has, shockingly, endorsed a scheme to undermine its own power, and granted a state the ability to evade federal precedent. Nullification, it seems, is back in style.
For years, court watchers have wondered whether the justices' institutionalist instincts would overcome their misogynist ones: if the Court had to choose between maintaining its own power and legitimacy, and overturning Roe, which would it choose? Now, it seems, we have our answer.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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Bitcoin surge was a windfall for white supremacists, research finds
Sat, 11 Dec 2021 21:32
Some prominent white nationalists invested early in bitcoin and have gotten rich off its sharp rise in value in recent years, researchers say.
Fringe movements have acquired an estimated tens of millions of dollars in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, according to a study released Thursday by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
While bitcoin today is used more as an investment asset than a functioning currency, its early adopters promoted the fact that it was a way to conduct financial transactions without any involvement from banks.
For some neo-Nazis, that dovetailed with antisemitic conspiracy theories about the financial system, said Megan Squire, the center's senior fellow for data analytics and a co-author of the report.
''There's a pretty strong libertarian streak that runs through the far right,'' she said. ''Crypto looked to them like an interesting toy and a way of being in charge of their money and not having to use central banking. Then when you layer the antisemitism, on top of that, as in 'the banks are controlled by the Jews,' it makes a lot of sense why these early adopters, these libertarian-styled guys, would get involved in Bitcoin so early.''
The cryptocurrency world has grown swiftly in recent years, moving far beyond bitcoin to include a wide variety of alternative digital currencies and blockchain-based systems. Blockchain is a concept in which computer networks work together to create distributed systems that can be used to keep track of everything from digital currencies to ownership of digital art.
That growth has coincided with the rapid appreciation of bitcoin. A single bitcoin is now worth about $47,000. Two years ago, the price was closer to $7,000.
Squire and the report's other co-author, Michael Edison Hayden, a senior investigative reporter with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said they had identified more than 600 cryptocurrency addresses used by white supremacists and far-right extremists including many high-profile personalities who have reaped major windfalls by soliciting donations in bitcoin.
A number of payment systems, like credit card companies and apps like PayPal and Stripe, have banned individual white supremacists, making cryptocurrencies more appealing for fringe fundraising.
''Any video streamer that you look at, any of the blogs that you go to, any of their Telegram channels, they all have Bitcoin addresses or some kind of crypto address where they take donations,'' Squire said.
''They all rely on Bitcoin at this point. That was not the case four years ago,'' she said.
But while some cryptocurrencies are designed to be anonymous, most, including bitcoin, make every transaction public. The same method that Squire and Hayden used to compile the report makes many white supremacists' cryptocurrency transactions visible to anyone who wants to look at an account's activity.
''The list of 600 addresses we analyzed is just a big list that I made of who owns what, and the way that we get those is just watching these guys tell each other where to send the money,'' Squire said. ''It's just literally just looking this stuff up on this public ledger.''
Kevin Collier is a reporter covering cybersecurity, privacy and technology policy for NBC News.
Brandy Zadrozny is a senior reporter for NBC News. She covers misinformation, extremism and the internet.
OnlyFans subscribers could have their mortgage applications rejected, says advisor
Sat, 11 Dec 2021 18:05
(C) AFP via Getty Images GettyImages-1235723147.jpg A mortgage advisor has revealed that subscribers of OnlyFans could find their mortgage applications rejected.
The platform has increasingly gained popularity since its launch in 2016, but a mortgage expert has shared that he's seen many prospective homeowners have their applications rejected due to their subscription to the site.
Glen Russell, director of Russell Financial Solutions LTD, told the Sun: ''I have seen rising numbers of OnlyFans customers turned down for mortgages due to the consistency of transactions on statements.''
But it's not due to the nature of the payments that have banks being cautious, but it's more due to the number of recurring transactions.
He continued: ''If there was one payment on your bank statement then it could be justified as a one-off monthly payment.
''But some OnlyFans users end up spending on the site far more than just once a month, and that's when the mortgage lender could see it's a regular outgoing payment and they could see that as a liability.
''It is not the case with all mortgage customers, but I have noticed there is an increasing trend.''
While Russell says that being a regular subscriber to more than a couple of OnlyFans accounts isn't a cause for concern, he advises people to be honest with their mortgage lender as they will be able to see exactly where your money is going.
He continued: ''When you're questioned about any transactions on your account, honesty and transparency is the key for a successful application'...even if that does feel a bit awkward.''
Michael Isherwood, a mortgage and protection advisor at Progress PFS has also shared similar sentiments on TikTok. In a video on the platform, he said a client was rejected for a mortgage due to the number of OnlyFans transactions on their bank statements.
He said: ''I've just got off the phone to an underwriter. I've joked about this before, but it's never got this far. The underwriter has declined the case because of a significant number of transactions on the client's bank statement to OnlyFans.
''The lender has decided '' because of the volume '' that they're factoring it into their affordability calculation, treating it the same way they would gambling. They said it was an addiction. Please try and avoid sending money to OnlyFans on your bank statement.''
When applying for a mortgage, providers ask for various methods of proof of identity and that you have the ability to pay them back. This is usually in the form of bank or building society statements going back several months.
For many first-time buyers, the mortgage application process can be overwhelming, but Isherwood advises speaking to a qualified mortgage advisor for guidance.
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Sat, 11 Dec 2021 17:29
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'The internet's on fire' as techs race to fix software flaw | CTV News
Sat, 11 Dec 2021 17:08
BOSTON -- A critical vulnerability in a widely used software tool -- one quickly exploited in the online game Minecraft -- is rapidly emerging as a major threat to organizations around the world.
"The internet's on fire right now," said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike. "People are scrambling to patch," he said, "and all kinds of people scrambling to exploit it." He said Friday morning that in the 12 hours since the bug's existence was disclosed that it had been "fully weaponized," meaning malefactors had developed and distributed tools to exploit it.
The flaw may be the worst computer vulnerability discovered in years. It was uncovered in a utility that's ubiquitous in cloud servers and enterprise software used across industry and government. Unless it is fixed, it grants criminals, spies and programming novices alike easy access to internal networks where they can loot valuable data, plant malware, erase crucial information and much more.
"I'd be hard-pressed to think of a company that's not at risk," said Joe Sullivan, chief security officer for Cloudflare, whose online infrastructure protects websites from malicious actors. Untold millions of servers have it installed, and experts said the fallout would not be known for several days.
Amit Yoran, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Tenable, called it "the single biggest, most critical vulnerability of the last decade" -- and possibly the biggest in the history of modern computing.
The vulnerability, dubbed `Log4Shell,' was rated 10 on a scale of one to 10 the Apache Software Foundation, which oversees development of the software. Anyone with the exploit can obtain full access to an unpatched computer that uses the software,
Experts said the extreme ease with which the vulnerability lets an attacker access a web server -- no password required -- is what makes it so dangerous.
New Zealand's computer emergency response team was among the first to report that the flaw was being "actively exploited in the wild" just hours after it was publicly reported Thursday and a patch released.
The vulnerability, located in open-source Apache software used to run websites and other web services, was reported to the foundation on Nov. 24 by the Chinese tech giant Alibaba, it said. It took two weeks to develop and release a fix.
But patching systems around the world could be a complicated task. While most organizations and cloud providers such as Amazon should be able to update their web servers easily, the same Apache software is also often embedded in third-party programs, which often can only be updated by their owners.
Yoran, of Tenable, said organizations need to presume they've been compromised and act quickly.
The first obvious signs of the flaw's exploitation appeared in Minecraft, an online game hugely popular with kids and owned by Microsoft. Meyers and security expert Marcus Hutchins said Minecraft users were already using it to execute programs on the computers of other users by pasting a short message in a chat box.
Microsoft said it had issued a software update for Minecraft users. "Customers who apply the fix are protected," it said.
Researchers reported finding evidence the vulnerability could be exploited in servers run by companies such as Apple, Amazon, Twitter and Cloudflare.
Cloudflare's Sullivan said there we no indication his company's servers had been compromised. Apple, Amazon and Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Harvard Study Explodes Myths About 'Vaccines' Stopping the Spread '' But It's Even Worse Than That - Becker News
Fri, 10 Dec 2021 15:30
A Harvard study of 68 nations and 2,947 counties in the United States published in the European Journal of Epidemiology is shattering the argument that the mRNA therapeutic drugs being marketed as ''vaccines'' do anything significantly to stop the spread of Covid-19.
It's even worse than that. As Becker News suggested in September, there is a positive correlation between a nation's vaccination levels and the ''case'' rates being reported. The scientific findings are a crushing blow to the argument that the vaccines have a ''public health'' purpose and that vaccine mandates are justified.
The Harvard researcher who co-authored the study, S. V. Subramanian of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, teamed up with Canadian researcher Akhil Kumar to perform the research.
Their ''bombshell'' findings? Read them and weep:
At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days (Fig. 1). In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people .
Eureka. That is what Becker News had pointed out in September:
As the Covid pandemic continues to defy predictions about when it will finally be 'over,' there is a curious phenomenon taking place across the United States and around the globe: Covid-19 case rates increasing alongside vaccination rates .
The textbook examples of this disturbing trend are the nations of Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Israel is now experiencing its fourth wave, which is being accompanied by another round of 'booster shots.' Israel has 61.5% of all adults ''fully vaccinated'' (although the use of 'booster shots' throws the term into question.)
Israel was also one of the most suggestive cases for the above-cited Harvard study.
Notably, Israel with over 60% of their population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days. The lack of a meaningful asso ciation between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exempli¬ed, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated.
Where was the Omicron variant first detected? Botswana, followed by South Africa. Interesting.
The study also makes an interesting point about counties with extremely high vaccination rates: '' Of the top 5 counties that have the highest percentage of population fully vaccinated (99.9''84.3%), the US Cent ers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identi¬es 4 of them as 'High' Transmission counties.''
Thus, if you believe that getting nearly the entire local population ''vaccinated'' will do anything to stop the lockdowns and mandates, this data should make you think again. The agenda is political, and therefore, the solution will have to be political.
I am obviously not the only researcher to pick up on this data phenomenon. Justin Hart at the Substack Rational Ground has also mentioned it multiple times. Indeed, he had picked up on the unusual data patterns in July.
Looks at this! I put together cases and vaccination data from the CDC. (Cases are per 100K left Y-axis | vaccinations are increasing % right Y-axis)
Cases drop by 75% or more for every age group BEFORE any group hits 20% vaccination. Something else is going on entirely here. 1/ pic.twitter.com/oI4iKiGlww
'-- Justin Hart (@justin_hart) July 26, 2021
The above-cited Harvard study provides a snapshot of the data points that illustrate the ''marginally'' positive association:
This looks more than ''marginal'' to me. At the U.S. county level, there appears to be no discernible relationship between vaccination levels and case rates.
There you have it: There is no real-world evidence that ''vaccines'' stop the spread of Covid-19.
However, this isn't stopping Pfizer's CEO from making the unsubstantiated claim to sell the ''booster'' shots.
''Although two doses of the vaccine may still offer protection against severe disease caused by the Omicron strain, it's clear from these preliminary data that protection is improved with a third dose of our vaccine,'' Pfizer's CEO Albert Bourla said. ''Ensuring as many people as possible are fully vaccinated with the first two dose series and a booster remains the best course of action to prevent the spread of COVID-19.''
This is an absolute lie. It should be no surprise that a Big Pharma CEO would deceive the public about his product. But the U.S. government and the corporate press turning a blind eye to the false claim should have Americans outraged.
As a legal team recently explained in a lawsuit against the FDA, the ''vaccines'' have absolutely failed in preventing the spread of Covid-19. Thus, there is no legal, moral, or public health justification to mandate ''vaccines.''
The Harvard study's paper was accepted in the European Journal of Epidemiology and can be read below:
Increases in COVID'19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the U'... by Kyle Becker on Scribd
OPINION: This article contains commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Part 1: CIA's Extraordinary Role Influencing Liberal Media Outlets Daily Kos, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone ' Children's Health Defense
Fri, 10 Dec 2021 14:42
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As a longtime investigative journalist and author, I have spent a good portion of my career researching corruption within U.S. intelligence agencies. I was nevertheless surprised to learn about the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) central role in crafting the militarized governmental response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. documents in the final chapters of his new runaway best-seller, ''The Real Anthony Fauci.''
I've known Kennedy for more than two decades. I have interviewed him and collaborated with him on environmental articles and several books, including ''Climate In Crisis.'' I have great respect for his legal work and the accomplishments of his ongoing Waterkeeper Alliance. And I appreciate his dedication to alerting the public about alternative narratives related to the pandemic.
I am fully vaccinated and a believer in the efficacy of the vaccines. However, as a bedrock liberal with a deep reverence for the First Amendment and time-honored right to freedom of speech, I became alarmed that social media sites, including Instagram and YouTube, have banned Kennedy from pointing out flaws in the dominant narratives surrounding the COVID crisis.
In my view, Kennedy has been falsely vilified as an anti-vaccination disinformation ''conspiracy theorist.'' Blanket censorship by mainstream media seems to prohibit him from responding to such attacks.
And it disturbs me that once-idealistic liberal media outlets have devolved into apologists for the pharmaceutical industry (including its captured public health technocrats), as well as their stifling of any dissent. Why the vitriol against Kennedy, I wondered, from leading liberal news websites such as Daily Kos, The Daily Beast, and more recently, Rolling Stone?
A The Daily Beast headline appearing one year before the pandemic set the tone (Feb. 8, 2019): ''Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. spouts his insane anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory in measles hot zone.''
Seeming to borrow a page from the CIA's propaganda manuals, the liberal blogs have employed the signature trope of portraying opposition to official theology as the dangerous product of right-wing extremism.
After Kennedy gave a speech in Berlin in August 2020, The Daily Beast falsely claimed the event organizers were a ''Weird Pro-QAnon German Group Behind RFK Jr.'s Latest Anti-Vaxx Stunt.''
In lockstep, Daily Kos headlined a story by one of its regular contributors, DowneastDem, ''Anti-Vaxxer RFK JR. joins neo-Nazis in massive Berlin 'Anti-Corona' Protest.'' Kennedy fought back by filing a defamation lawsuit against Daily Kos and its pseudonymous author. In fact, the Berlin ''Peace and Justice Rally'' had been attended by a million peaceful Europeans of every ethnicity protesting what they saw as the global imposition of totalitarian controls and seeking restoration of democracy, tolerance (the stage banner was a giant mural of Mahatma Gandhi and the MC was a Black Ghanaian), constitutional guarantees and civil rights '-- the opposite of Nazism.
The enmity against Kennedy has only escalated as his prominence in the resistance has grown.
''His quackery has likely killed people,'' Daily Kos went so far as to assert. Another posting read: ''He's a twisted, sick individual who has made a mockery of his family's legacy. His own family has distanced itself, calling him 'dangerous,' as if he has the plague, because he likely does. Maybe even more than one plague. He is, indeed, against all vaccinations.''
Anyone who has followed Kennedy's nuanced, measured and well-informed views on the science might recognize such sophomoric characterizations as ''disinformation propaganda.''
Yet the liberal metamorphosis appears so complete that Public Citizen, an advocacy group that once served as a scourge to Big Pharma, is using its tax-deductible legal assets to defend Daily Kos pro bono against Kennedy's lawsuit. Daily Kos' support of censoring debate about the government's COVID countermeasures belies Public Citizen's rationale that its passion for defending the First Amendment prompted its decision to defend Daily Kos.
So how did the Pharma cartel capture the liberal media? The abduction has been multifaceted.
In his new book, Kennedy shows how Pharma's deployment of $9.6 billion in annual advertising expenditures allows it to dictate content in electronic and print outlets, transforming the traditionally liberal networks ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN into marketing and propaganda vehicles.
With $319 million in strategic donations, Bill Gates simultaneously gained control of so-called ''independent'' media outlets like NPR, public television, The Guardian and dozens of other ''advertising-free'' liberal news outlets that can now be used to promote a bio-security agenda generally and Gates' vaccines in particular. This has been well-documented in publications ranging from the Los Angeles Times in 2007 to The Nation in 2020-21.
My investigation suggests that Pharma and Gates have a powerful clandestine partner that has made the medical-industrial complex's media hegemony airtight through their apparent penetration of leading liberal online news sites. It is also well-documented, though often forgotten, that since its inception more than 70 years ago, the CIA has orchestrated news and editorial coverage in America's most influential liberal national news organs '-- Washington Post, New York Times and TIME.
These outlets continue to hew faithfully to CIA theology on globalism, biosecurity, coerced vaccinations, Russiagate, a militarized foreign policy, censorship, lockdowns, vaccine passports, digitized currencies and other issues. My investigation for The Defender indicates that Kennedy's most vitriolic critics among the liberal online journals may themselves have also fallen under the sway of the intelligence apparatus.
In ''The Real Anthony Fauci,'' Kennedy exposes Pharma's alarming entanglements with the CIA, bioweapons developers, medical technocrats and the Silicon Valley robber barons. My own research has revealed that military and intelligence agencies enjoy disturbing links to the leading editors of Daily Kos, The Daily Beast and Rolling Stone that may explain why these journals have lately devolved into ideological commissars for the pharmaceutical cartel's official orthodoxies, champions of the biosecurity paradigm and censors against critics of the biosecurity state.
'Here's a little secret I don't think I've ever written about'
Markos Moulitsas Zº±iga, the founder and public face of Daily Kos for two decades, was born in Chicago in 1971 to a Greek father and a Salvadoran mother. At the age of four, Markos' father moved with his family to El Salvador during the brutal CIA-sponsored civil war.
The country's feudal and homicidal oligarchy '-- with U.S. government assistance '-- was ferociously suppressing a civil rights movement by its oppressed peasantry.
The CIA's Salvadoran project was the inaugural conflict in the agency's notorious ''War on the Poor'' across Central America. CIA-controlled death squads and U.S.-trained Salvadoran military battalions devastated some 90,000 peasants, intellectuals, Catholic priests and nuns, students and labor leaders to fortify the positions of feudal oligarchs allied with U.S. multinationals. U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, a contemporary critic of the CIA's murderous role in Salvador, dismissed the Salvadoran government's self-serving claims that it was battling Communists.
''Only a tiny, tiny fraction of the murdered poor were Communists,'' Dodd told Kennedy. ''Virtually all of the casualties were unarmed civilians '-- mostly peasants seeking escape from a barbaric feudal serfdom.'' Dodd continued, ''It wasn't a civil war '-- it was a massacre.'' Dodd is currently the director of the Dodd Center for Human Rights at the University of Connecticut.
Moulitsas' father evidently took the side of the oligarchs and the Agency. The younger Markos later reflected on his experience:
''I actually grew up in a war zone. I witnessed communist guerillas execute students accused of being government collaborators. I was 8 years old, and I remember stepping over a dead body, warm blood flowing from a fresh wound. Dodging bullets while at market. I lived in the midst of hate, the likes of which most of you will never understand. There's no way I could ever describe the ways this experience colors my worldview.''
When rebel fighters appropriated the Moulitsas home for their headquarters, Markos says, his parents received an envelope containing his photograph and that of his younger brother boarding a bus. That thinly veiled threat prompted his family's return to the Chicago suburbs.
Moulitsas enlisted in the U.S. Army at 17, spending his service as an artillery scout for a missile unit in a small German town and dodging deployment to the Gulf War ''by a hair.'' He later reflected that ''I would not be the person I am today without my military service.''
During a confessional moment at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club in 2006, Moulitsas acknowledged that at some point following his discharge, he enlisted in the CIA, entering the agency's rigorous training program, hoping to become an undercover spy: ''So, I applied to the CIA and I went all the way to the end, I mean it was to the point where I was going to sign papers to become [part of] Clandestine Services.'' This and other remarks by Moulitsas were captured on audiotape, a transcript of which now appears online.
Like many journalists who began their careers working for the CIA, Moulitsas claims to have left the agency before turning to journalism. (Anderson Cooper makes the same claim.) It's nearly always impossible to ascertain the truth, but Moulitsas' story has some internal inconsistencies.
Moulitsas contends that he abandoned his CIA dreams because the job would have required him to live, at least briefly, in Washington, D.C., a locale he says he detested. (Nota bene: The CIA does, of course, send most of its undercover operatives to locales outside Washington, D.C.)
He said:
''And it was at that point [in 2001] that the Howard Dean campaign took off and I had to make a decision whether I was gonna kinda join the Howard Dean campaign'... or was I going to become a spy. (Laughter in the audience.)''
At some point prior to the Dean campaign, Moulitsas suddenly metamorphosed from right-wing conservative Republican to straight-ticket Democrat.
He said:
''It was going to be a tough decision at first, but then the CIA insisted that, if I joined that, they'd want me to do the first duty assignment in Washington, D.C., and I hate Washington, D.C.''
There is an obvious flaw in Moulitsas' story: Had Dean won, Moulitsas would of course have ended up back in his despised Washington, D.C.
Before Dean's political nosedive early in 2004, Moulitsas moved west to Silicon Valley at a time when the CIA was storming the Internet. There, as project manager in a web development start-up, he met and married Elisa Batista, a reporter for Wired.
As Kennedy shows in his book, Wired served as an external newsletter for the U.S. intelligence community, which had taken a strong interest in infiltrating Silicon Valley since before the Internet's inception. U.S. military and intelligence agencies first launched the Internet by building the ARPANET grid in 1969. The CIA established a vast investment fund called In-Q-Tel, which it used to fuel the eruption of Silicon Valley's tech industry by funding a vast array of tech startups with intelligence potential.
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In May 2002, Markos Moulitsas had founded his blog, calling it ''Daily Kos'' after his military nickname. Within two years, Moulitsas attracted a large readership and made blogging his full-time occupation. A gifted organizer, Moulitsas ensconced himself deep into the Democratic Party power structure. He promised to deploy armies of cyber warriors to hijack the Democratic Party away from its bedrock constituents '-- Big Labor, trial lawyers, and civil rights leaders '-- ''[the] ineffective, incompetent, and antiquated Democratic Party establishment'' '-- and transform it into the party of Big Data/Big Tech.
Moulitsas said:
''We cannot wait any longer for the Democratic Party to reform itself and lead us into a new era of electoral success'... [T]he netroots, the grassroots, the progressive base of America '-- must act now to take back our party and our country'... Technology has opened up the previously closed realm of activist politics to riffraff like us.''
Crashing the gate
Using his blog to mount fundraising drives for Democratic candidates around the country, Moulitsas gave high-ranking politicians ''diary space,'' established a Yearly Kos convention for bloggers, and became an acerbic and polarizing voice of a new tech-based version of left-wing liberalism.
By mid-2018, Daily Kos had mushroomed into the largest liberal community blog in the country, with some 8 million unique viewers per month and 2.3 million registered users. The ''liberal'' mass media lionized its founder in dozens of fawning profiles which he cultivated.
For years, Moulitsas managed to conceal a key biographical fact despite myriad articles and detailed hagiographies praising his recreation of liberalism.
Moulitsas only publicly acknowledged his brush with the CIA during an unguarded moment when the circumstance summoned him to defend the agency against the harsh assessments of a moderator during his June 2, 2006, Commonwealth Club appearance.
The CIA's role in some 73 known coups d'(C)tat against mainly democratic governments between 1947 and 2000 '-- one-third of the world's governments '-- had earned the agency condemnation from liberals for decades.
In his opening question to Moulitsas, the Commonwealth Club moderator wondered why liberal media outlets were suddenly going sweet on the CIA:
''[N]ot long ago, liberals loathed the Central Intelligence Agency as the enemy of democratic governments and they installed dictators around the world, and these days you read the papers, and people on the Left are rallying to the defense of the CIA and are indignant when the CIA is politicized. How did this come about, that suddenly liberals are championing the CIA?''
At first, Moulitsas stammered in response:
''I don't know.'' The questioner persisted: ''Do you find it strange or ironic, this sudden love for the CIA?''
Under this pressure, Moulitsas blurted out the truth:
''Here's a little secret I don't think I've ever written about.''
Moulitsas described his tenure at the agency as a brief flirtation interrupted only by his sudden passion for Howard Dean.
Moulitsas coughed as he launched into his enthusiastic defense of the agency with, unsurprisingly, falsehoods:
''I think a lot of the people that did have problems with the CIA, I mean it was a very vocal minority. I think most people really didn't think about it all that much, right? It wasn't really on their radar screens, in the way that now it is, because now we are in this huge [Iraq] war, and it was the CIA that was warning the [Bush] Administration against invading because there were no weapons of mass destruction.''
This, of course, was classic disinformation. In fact, the CIA in 2003 was, as usual, aggressively pushing for war. The agency played a direct and reprehensible role in fabricating intelligence to grease the skids for President Bush's Iraq invasion. During the run-up to the attack, CIA Director George Tenet famously assured President Bush that Saddam had a secret arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. He said, ''Don't worry, it's a slam dunk.''
George W. Bush later said his worst mistake during his White House years was swallowing the CIA's guarantees. He said:
''The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein.''
Apparently assuming the illiteracy of his Commonwealth Club audience, Moulitsas went on to describe the CIA as ''a very liberal institution.'' He said:
''And in a lot of ways, it really does attract people who'... want to make the world a better place'... Of course, they've got their Dirty Ops and this and that, but as an institution itself the CIA is really interested in a stable world '... And stable worlds aren't created by destabilizing regimes and creating wars.
''Their [sic] done so by other means. Assassination [of] labor leaders '... I'm kidding! I don't think it's a very partisan thing to want a stable world. And even if you're protecting American interests, I mean that can get ugly at times, but generally speaking I think their heart's in the right place. As an organization, their heart is in the right place. I've never had any problem with the CIA. I'd have no problem working for them.''
Operation Mockingbird
In 1948, the year after its founding, the CIA created a top-secret program '-- Operation Mockingbird '-- to wield influence over the American media. From its inception, this clandestine project was yet another of the CIA's outlaw enterprises.
The 1948 Smith-Mundt Act had illegalized the use of CIA funding to broadcast propaganda to Americans. When a congressional investigation in the mid-1970s first revealed Operation Mockingbird's existence, shocked Americans learned that the agency's key CIA collaborators included Washington Post owner Philip Graham; CBS owner William Paley; Time-Life publisher Henry Luce; top editors at the New York Times, and Joseph Alsop, whose influential column appeared in more than 300 newspapers.
CIA Director Allen Dulles oversaw Mockingbird's illegal network until RFK Jr.'s uncle, President John Kennedy, fired him at the end of 1961. By then, Mockingbird was employing ''some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees'... engaged in propaganda efforts.''
The agency commissioned its journalists to write articles promoting the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the national security state, and rewarded them with classified information to spice up their ''scoops.''
The CIA also established formal journalism training for its spies, embedding them in key journals and nurturing their careers. The agency promoted propaganda narratives, including portraying murdered Salvadoran farmers as Communists under Soviet control, and discouraged newspapers from delving into CIA atrocities such as the agency's mass murders of tens of thousands of Vietnamese peasants, Buddhist leaders and intellectuals (Operation Phoenix); its orchestration of the butchering of a million Indonesian civilians; its political assassination, torture training and regime-change projects across Latin America (Operation Condor), Africa, and Asia; its crack dealing and drug smuggling operations; and its role in the overthrow of the Democratic governments in Chile, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq and elsewhere.
CIA-affiliated journalists were instrumental in suppressing questions about the CIA's role in the Kennedy assassination '-- even as the agency's former chief, Allen Dulles (who remarked with satisfaction of JFK's murder: ''That little Kennedy '... He thought he was a god''), crafted and defended the official ''lone shooter'' narrative from his chair running the Warren Commission.
In November 1963, Life Magazine's Executive Editor C.D. Jackson '-- a longtime CIA asset '-- purchased the original Zapruder film, published select frames upholding the lone-gunman theory, then locked the original in a vault to preserve it from public view.
Jackson also negotiated exclusive rights to Marina Oswald's story and enlisted a CIA ghostwriter to fortify the official Warren Commission orthodoxy.
The CIA coined the term ''conspiracy theory'' to discredit those who questioned the Warren Report. A Jan. 4, 1967, CIA document released under the Freedom of Information Act describes the agency's strategizing how to combat critics of the Warren Report.
The report said:
''To employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (II) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories.''
It's noteworthy that this was the same propaganda playbook that media outlets '-- including The Daily Beast, Daily Kos and Rolling Stone '-- applied during the COVID-19 crisis to marginalize, gaslight, discredit and vilify dissenters.
When the first expos(C) of the CIA's dark deeds (The Invisible Government) appeared in 1964, the agency secretly obtained the galleys and formed a special group to arrange negative reviews. When the left-wing Ramparts Magazine planned to break a story of the CIA's clandestine and illegal funding of the National Student Association, the agency organized a campaign that the orchestrator later said ''had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing'... We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried out.''
Despite the CIA's best efforts to deny and stonewall a Senate investigation into its many illegal media activities, the Church Committee warned in 1976:
''In examining the CIA's past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with U.S. journalists and media organizations.''
In response to public and congressional outrage, then-CIA Director George Bush issued new guidelines regarding the cozy relationship.
The guidelines said:
''Effective immediately, CIA will not enter into any paid or contractual relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news agency, U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.''
Mockingbird redux
Despite President Bush's assurances, Operation Mockingbird never really closed up shop. The CIA continued to expand its media tentacles around the globe and across the decades.
A year and a half after Bush's proclamation, Carl Bernstein, who partnered with Bob Woodward to expose the Watergate scandal, revealed in Rolling Stone that over a 25-year period more than 400 American journalists had carried out assignments for the CIA. Bernstein expressed his skepticism toward the agency's avowal that it had ended its crusade to corrupt reporters and control the media.
The CIA continued to act to punish media criticism of its activities and even to swallow an entire network that refused to buckle under. As far back as 1954, several cronies of Allen Dulles, including lawyer and Wall Street speculator William Casey, created Capital Cities Communications, which over the next quarter-century became a global media conglomerate. Casey remained on the company's board until 1981, when he became '-- wait for it '-- director of the CIA.
Several years into Casey's CIA tenure, an ABC News report implicated the CIA in an assassination attempt against an American citizen. Casey retaliated by asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to revoke all of ABC's TV and radio licenses.
The CIA next asked the FCC to levy Fairness Doctrine penalties against the disobedient network.
The New York Times described the CIA's attacks against ABC: ''This amounts to a government plot to commit intimidation.''
The Times, which in that epoch was still a champion of freedom of speech, warned that:
''William Casey, the CIA director, seems to think he and his agency were libeled, but to sue for libel he'd have to prove reckless disregard of the truth and open his files on the case. Unwilling or unable to do that, he's using the FCC as a shortcut to punishment. ['...] This is a chilling assault on a network and the Constitution. It needs to be thrown out fast.''
A month later, in March 1985, Casey's Capital Cities (in which he secretly retained considerable stock) appears to have found another solution to the ABC News problem '-- The company paid $3.4 billion to take over ABC, a company four times its size. Board members came to include billionaire investor Warren Buffet and Robert P. Bauman, chair of the SmithKline Beecham pharmaceutical company.
In his 2019 best-selling book, Presstitutes: Embedded in the Pay of the CIA, Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor for Germany's mass daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), reveals how the CIA and the German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) continued to use pervasive infiltration of the global media to spread propaganda to shape public opinion.
Ulfkotte recounted that the BND and CIA recruited him while he was in university and placed him at FAZ. An idealistic young man, he was thrilled to work for his country's intelligence agency. He later said, ''However, looking back, I was corrupt, I was manipulative and dealt in disinformation.''
CIA and BND handlers instructed Ulfkotte what stories to write '-- supplying him with information that he accepted without fact-checking. On one occasion in 2005, to cover up rampant industrial espionage against German companies, then-CIA Director James Woolsey ordered Ulfkotte to write articles saying the U.S. did not carry out industrial espionage.
Ulfkotte quotes a CIA agent who told the Washington Post, ''You can get a journalist for less than a good whore, for a few hundred dollars.''
While on assignment in the Middle East, Ulfkotte regularly reported to the local CIA and BND outposts. While working abroad as a foreign correspondent, he discovered that ''every foreign reporter for the American and British press was also active for their intelligence services.''
He describes how the CIA houses its captured journalists in sinecures at U.S. and German think tanks that have close ties to the CIA and NATO, where they manufacture pro-U.S. opinion and push for war with Russia. The State Department, Ulfkotte says, provides grant money to think tanks that house journalists/spies and that promote CIA propaganda.
Like Kennedy's new book, Ulfkotte's ''Presstitutes'' was a bestseller in Germany (for a full 18 months) when it was first published in 2013, despite a wall-to-wall boycott by mainstream media.
Today, leading liberal press organs routinely print unvetted CIA disinformation as verified news stories.
In April 2021, Glenn Greenwald revealed that the blockbuster New York Times story ''Bountygate'' was actually a CIA-generated propaganda fiction. The Times reported that the Russian government tried to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. The Times reporters got this tall tale from the CIA and neither verified or fact-checked it. The Times reporters did not disclose that the CIA had provided the unverified story.
Only later '-- after the top U.S. military official in Afghanistan said there was no evidence to support the allegations '-- did one of the New York Times reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story admit that he was publishing a clandestine disinformation press release from the CIA.
Greenwald tweeted, ''So media outlets '-- again '-- repeated CIA stories with no questioning: congrats to all.''
One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story (originally attributed to unnamed ''intelligence officials'') say today that it was a CIA claim. So media outlets '' again '' repeated CIA stories with no questioning: congrats to all.https://t.co/4GbUXBCOpI
'-- Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 15, 2021
Following the exposure of CIA's role in fabricating the Bountygate whopper, The Daily Beast belatedly condemned the deception, even though it had previously uncritically published many articles promoting the CIA ''Bountygate'' narrative.
Now it tried to distance itself from the scam. Ben Norton tweeted on April 15, 2021:
D'oh! US spy agencies basically admitted they lied about Russia supposedly paying militants in Afghanistan to kill American occupation forces.
Of course the entire Western media spread this lie for weeks, but don't expect them to issue any corrections https://t.co/itOniutu0D
'-- Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 15, 2021
In an April 2021 article, ''The CIA Used to Infiltrate the Media. Now the CIA Is the Media,'' Caitlin Johnstone writes:
''So the mass media aggressively promoted a CIA narrative that none of them ever saw proof of, because there was no proof, because it was an entirely unfounded claim from the very beginning. They quite literally ran a CIA press release and disguised it as a news story.''
Johnstone says that the CIA's Bountygate story was part of a larger propaganda effort to arouse Americans against Trump's proposed troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Germany, and to incite anti-Russia propaganda. The agency's disinformation campaign, according to Johnstone, succeeded in winning the CIA an exemption from Biden's Afghanistan ''withdrawal.''
The New York Times' role as a promoter of CIA propaganda is an old story: Following the 2001 Operation Iraqi Freedom, both the New York Times and Washington Post were forced to apologize for their fabricated weapons of mass destruction stories that drove the U.S. invasion.
As it turns out, the much-respected journalists who penned these articles were acting as glorified stenographers for the CIA.
Johnstone said:
''Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and people are too propagandized to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like the New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo, which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits. The sole owner of the Washington Post [Jeff Bezos] is a CIA contractor [Amazon Web Services signed a $600 million cloud computing agreement with the CIA in 2013] and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on U.S. intelligence agencies per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known CIA assets like NBC's Ken Dilanian, as are CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.''
Johnstone continued:
''This isn't Operation Mockingbird. It's so much worse. Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something to the media. What we are seeing now is the CIA openly acting as the media. Any separation between the CIA and the news media, indeed even any pretense of separation, has been dropped.''
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Children's Health Defense.
What SEC football just taught us about COVID-19 | TheHill
Fri, 10 Dec 2021 14:24
Southeastern Conference (SEC) college football ushered in the return of maskless, full'capacity crowds. It was the ultimate stress test of COVID-19.
As crowds returned to packed stadiums, there was much angst that they would be super spreader events. On Sept. 7, MSNBC's Joy Reid asked Dr. Anthony Fauci Anthony FauciGoogle giving ,600 bonuses to employees worldwide: report What SEC football just taught us about COVID-19 The Hill's Morning Report - Presented by Uber - Senate gets busy, except for Build Back Better MORE , ''As soon as I saw it [pictures of packed stadiums], I thought COVID-19 is about to have a feast. What did you think?'' Fauci replied: ''I thought the same thing. I think it's really unfortunate.''
SEC football games are primarily located in states with relatively few state'imposed COVID-19 restrictions (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas), and nine of the states have vaccination rates consistently lower than the national average. But while vaccination is our primary weapon to combat COVID-19 infection, natural immunity from prior infection also contributes to population immunity.
The average SEC stadium holds over 80,000 fans, and four of the stadiums have capacities exceeding 100,000. Stadium policies are set by each individual school, not the conference, and Louisiana State University (LSU) was the only SEC school to impose stadium entry COVID-19 protocols (proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test), although LSU lifted that restriction on Oct.16 when they hosted 96,000 fans.
SEC games are not just stadium gatherings. Tailgating, parties, and travel '-- both public and private '-- present opportunities for community transmission. But it didn't happen. Population immunity levels in the context of mostly open'air events are demonstrating that viral shedding in this setting is minimal and is not resulting in outbreaks.
To further study this observation, we examined the weekly new COVID-19 case rate in the home counties of the 14 SEC universities. The first home football games were the weekend of Sept. 4, when 10 teams hosted their season opener. A total of 98 home games were played over the three'month season.
We found that the average infe ction rate for the week ending Aug. 8 (before most students returned to campus) was 0.35 percent. The average COVID-19 infection rate peaked at 0.49 percent for the week before football games began, and then steadily decreased to 0.08 percent for the week ending Oct. 31, after which it remained low. The average weekly infection rate for the five weeks before SEC football began was 0.44 percent, while the average weekly infection rate during the SEC football season was 0.18 percent. No evidence suggests that SEC football activities have led to COVID-19 outbreaks in the communities hosting the games. This is great news for players, fans and anyone who enjoys outdoor gatherings!
Our findings are consistent with a recent JAMA study that found no instances of in-game COVID-19 transmission among college football players during last year's 2020 football season. The hypothesis that SEC stadium gatherings would result in increased COVID-19 transmission is not supported by the data. Vaccination and natural immunity downgrade COVID-19 to an endemic mild virus. Let's respect the evidence, enjoy outside gatherings and have the freedom to live our lives!
Elizabeth Plummer, Ph.D., CPA is a professor at Texas Christian University's (TCU) Neeley School of Business and the TCU-University of North Texas Health Science Center School of Medicine. Marty Makary M.D., M.P.H. is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Carey Business School. He is the author of "The Price We Pay." Twitter: @MartyMakary. Ge Bai, Ph.D., CPA is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School and Bloomberg School of Public Health. Twitter: @GeBaiDC.
REPORT: Biden Admin Plans On Advising Ukraine To Hand Over Territory To Russia | The Daily Caller
Fri, 10 Dec 2021 14:22
President Joe Biden's administration reportedly plans to push the Ukrainian government to appease Russian President Vladimir Putin by ceding territory, The Associated Press reported Thursday.
Biden held a virtual meeting Tuesday with Putin, during which Biden threatened an ''economic'' response should Russia invade Ukraine. Russian troops have been amassing on Ukraine's border for weeks, a nation that has long sought to join NATO but is unlikely to gain membership within the next decade, officials told AP. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: 'Speak Loudly And Carry A Small Stick': Republicans Blast Biden's Response To Putin's Escalation In Ukraine)
U.S. officials reportedly plan to urge Ukraine to grant autonomy to eastern regions that are still controlled by separatists who participated in the 2014 Russia-backed revolt against the Ukrainian government. The eastern Donbas region has held a vague ''special status'' since the 2014 uprising, a status Ukrainian parliament voted to extend for another year on Dec. 3.
President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet during a summit on June 16 in Geneva, Switzerland. (Peter Klaunzer/Pool/Keystone via Getty Images)
Biden has previously confirmed that deploying U.S. troops to help Ukraine fend off an invasion is not on the table, focusing instead on economic sanctions.
''We have a moral obligation and a legal obligation to our NATO allies if they were to attack under Article 5, it's a sacred obligation,'' Biden said. ''That obligation does not extend to NATO '' I mean to Ukraine. But it would depend upon what rest of the NATO countries were willing to do as well. But the idea that the United States is going to unilaterally use force to confront Russia invading Ukraine is not on, in the cards right now. What will happen is there will be severe consequences.''
The president's critics have argued his stance on Ukraine is projecting a message of weakness to the world, and particularly to China. Reporters also pressed the White House on the message Biden's Ukraine response may send to China at Tuesday's press briefing. China has long mirrored Russia's aggression toward Ukraine with its own threats to retake Taiwan by force.
''Some observers have described a nightmare scenario where President Putin invades Ukraine and also simultaneously President Xi uses force to reunify Taiwan with China. Is the U.S. prepared to deal with such a scenario?'' a reporter asked national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
''The United States is going to take every action that we can take, from the point of view of both deterrence and diplomacy, to make sure that the Taiwan scenario you just described never happens, and to try to avert the invasion into Ukraine,'' Sullivan said. ''That is the object of our policy right now. Those are the steps we're taking.''
Russian troops continue to amass along the Ukrainian border, and U.S. intelligence officials believe that Moscow is prepping for a full-scale offensive against Ukraine as early as the next few weeks, according to The Washington Post.
Jussie Smollett being found guilty of hoax will hurt LGBTQ folks reporting hate crimes
Fri, 10 Dec 2021 14:21
The Jussie Smollett saga may now be technically over after a Chicago jury found the actor guilty Thursday of five of the six counts he faced, but its impact will be '-- and has already been '-- felt for years to come. It doesn't matter if the actor, who starred on ''Empire,'' really was beaten up by people yelling ''This is MAGA country!'' and is wrongly being punished or if he did stage an elaborate hoax, as the jury decided he did by finding him guilty of five counts of disorderly conduct.
The indisputable victims of hate crimes will now carry an even heavier burden of suspicion.
Instead, the seemingly never-ending questions over the almost three years regarding the truthfulness of his account means the indisputable victims of hate crimes will now carry an even heavier burden of suspicion.
The only winners found as the dust settles are the members of the right who have declared themselves America's real victims of hate and discrimination '-- people who have strategically made the Smollett case their go-to example for how the left operates and how it wrongly makes villains out of Donald Trump supporters.
Meaning Smollett's guilty verdict is their new crowning jewel as our culture wars rage on.
When the actor said in January 2019 that two men wearing masks subjected him to a racist and homophobic attack near his home in Chicago, an overwhelming outcry followed. The actor initially garnered sympathy across the political spectrum, which, during our current era, is uncommon.
Trump denounced the attack as ''horrible,'' activists took to the streets to march and Smollett's story was used to introduce new anti-lynching legislation on the floor of the U.S. Senate. For many, the reported attack on Smollett was par for the course in an America that was already seeing a rise of violent hate crimes from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Chicago amid Trump's presidency. Thus, Smollett's story of being attacked was seen as a call to action.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted that ''the racist, homophobic attack on @JussieSmollet is an affront to our humanity,'' and then-Sen. Kamala Harris labeled it a ''modern-day lynching'' before the passage of her historic legislation expanding federal penalties for hate crimes. The case was seen by many as evidence that no one was safe under Trumpism '-- not even celebrities.
But just as quickly as the story broke, it took a turn and then another as evidence produced by the Chicago police swayed supporters to abandon Smollett (who was charged with filing a false police report, then had those charges dropped, then was charged anew) just as fast as they had rushed to support him.
As the tide turned against Smollett, the right was excited that it had a smoking gun illustrating how "fake" the media is and how Democrats only cared about issues that would hurt the then-president.
Donald Trump Jr. launched an all-out social media campaign by taking over the hashtag #JusticeForJussie and perverting it.
When Smollett was first charged, Donald Trump Jr. launched an all-out social media campaign by taking over the hashtag #JusticeForJussie and perverting it by trolling seemingly every high-profile person who had defended Smollett: from Harris to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts. Even now, #JusticeForJussie is used as a weapon against the left.
Trump followed his son's lead and called Smollett's case a ''disgrace to our nation'' and an ''embarrassment.'' During his impeachment inquiry, Trump used the allegations against Smollett to describe how unfairly he had been and was being treated.
"Then you have the case of this wise guy Jussie Smollett, who beat up ... himself," Trump said in late 2019 to a group of police chiefs in Chicago, Deadline reported then. "And he said MAGA country did it. MAGA country. That's a hate crime."
"It is a scam. A real big scam. Just like the impeachment of your president is a scam," he said.
Given Trump's unchecked racism and his White House being hostile LGBTQ people, it's obvious why the Trump family loved the case against Smollett: a "fake" hate crime reported by a high-profile Black, gay celebrity was the perfect shield in a country where identity is everything. Just like how in the beginning, the story Smollett told was the perfect weapon to attack Trump.
This case has been one I have found myself entrapped in for years. When Smollett reported being attacked, I was serving as editor-in-chief of The Advocate, the world's oldest and longest-running magazine for LGBTQ people. Smollett's team had called me a few weeks before the alleged attack to pitch me on a cover for late 2020 in advance of a storyline on ''Empire'' where he'd marry an HIV-positive character.
The planned storyline was too far away for me to plan coverage, but we had created a channel of communication between us to keep the conversation going. So when news broke the morning of Jan. 29, 2019, that Smollett had been attacked in Chicago, a town in which I had spent years reporting on violence and police for The Guardian, we as a magazine were well situated and well sourced to make the alleged attack our biggest story.
We couldn't help but cover the story of a Black, gay celebrity who said he'd been attacked by Trump supporters. This wasn't just because it was a story involving a famous member of the community we covered, but also because for many of us who had been reporting on anti-LGBTQ crimes for years, we believed his case might help shine a light on the fact that LGBTQ folks '-- especially trans people '-- were dying at historic rates in the streets. Smollett claimed to have been attacked in those same streets.
Since journalists began accurately reporting trans homicides in the early 2010s, we have consistently seen a rise in anti-LGBTQ violence, with 2021 being the deadliest year on record, specifically for trans people. Black people in this country, regardless of their sexuality, also find themselves over-represented in FBI data documenting hate crimes in the U.S. each year.
With this guilty verdict, it's really those people who lost '-- not just Smollett '-- with the winners being people who are now more emboldened in demanding even more from victims before receiving justice. Sure, Smollett may have lied '-- or at least was found guilty of it. But statistically most people who report these cases do not lie and are rarely ever believed.
What is so important for us to do in this moment, as we look to what's next, is to ensure work is done to stop the epidemic of hate facing folks who look like Smollett. Trump supporters are not being subjected to hate crimes for supporting Trump on any level '-- full stop.
Trump is an expert in gaslighting America, and if we continue to allow the Smollett case, no matter where one stands on it, to detract attention from everyday people impacted by hate in this country, it would be the greatest gaslight moment of all '-- and a signal of more to come.
Israel heads 'hack simulation' on global financial markets '-- RT World News
Fri, 10 Dec 2021 11:39
Israel has taken point on a 10-country exercise which simulated a crippling cyber-attack on financial markets around the world, attempting to create a realistic scenario of the panic and chaos that would ensue, Reuters reported.
Dubbed 'Collective Strength' and carried out on Thursday, the international cyber drill was conducted alongside the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates, among other countries, as well as major financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, according to the outlet.
Treasury officials from the participating nations were shown a film to outline the simulated events, in which a narrator states that sensitive data was stolen and shared on the Dark Web, ''creating havoc in the financial markets'' over a period of 10 days.
Read more
The exercise '' reportedly dubbed a ''war game'' by the Israeli Finance Ministry '' ran through a number of different kinds of attacks, including breaches that affected foreign exchange and bond markets, liquidity and the security of data shared between exporters and importers around the world. It also examined the impact of misleading news reports on the would-be crisis, as well as what steps governments would be expected to take.
''The banks are appealing for emergency liquidity assistance in a multitude of currencies to put a halt to the chaos as counterparties withdraw their funds and limit access to liquidity, leaving the banks in disarray and ruin,'' the narrator continued.
Israeli officials pointed to smaller-scale breaches on companies in the past, saying that such attacks are possible on a wider scale, and that only global collaboration could hope to avert the worst outcomes in the event of a major hack.
''Attackers are 10 steps ahead of the defender,'' Micha Weis, financial cyber manager at Israel's Finance Ministry, told Reuters, while another ministry official added that cooperation between governments and international bodies ''is key for the resilience of the financial eco-system.''
The cyber drill was originally scheduled for the Dubai World Expo in the UAE earlier this year, but was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and forced to find a new venue in Jerusalem.
READ MORE: Apple reveals which diplomats were hacked by Pegasus
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VIDEO - The Ivermectin Story; Feed This to Your Horse Faced Horse-Paste Democrat Friends - Granite Grok
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 13:50
If someone stood up tomorrow and said, ''x'' cures COVID, I have a high degree of confidence that the Left's Machine would denounce it, pay for studies to justify their position, and shout down anyone who tried to suggest otherwise.
It is the scientism strain of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and we know it's real.
When aspirin showed signs of improving health outcomes related to COVID, they bad-mouthed that. Asprin. Someone even suggested dropping it as a daily treatment for men at risk for cardiac arrest.
Ironically, their cure (mRNA Vax) has a short history with a risk of cardiac complications (to name but one), unlike Ivermectin, over which many Dems are still outraged. The sort of rage that prompts them to repeat, repost and defend moronic claims by even dumber talking heads and so-called experts.
Just go on social media, anywhere the stench of leftism is permitted to pollute the virtual air, and type I-V-E-R-M-E-C-T-I-N.
Stupid will flourish in abundance, complete with the nasty that rides side-car in every liberal trash-mouths excuse for an opinion.
We're here to help.
This video is called the Ivermectin story. It talks about how natural and effective this drug is and how great it is for treating animals and people '' safely for over 30 years. A medical advance so highly acclaimed, it won a Nobel Prize.
MEANWHILE, the COVID Vaccines are not even 12 months old officially, and their record is the worst of any vaccine since before Ivermectin was discovered. A record stained with blood and now the lives of children.
Save this link or keep it handy. The next time some lefty badmouths Ivermectin, share it.
The video includes an introduction and a Q and A after. The actual story starts at 1:06 and ends at 12:05.
Steve is a long-time New Hampshire resident, blogger, taxpayer advocate, and a member of the Board of directors of The 603 Alliance. He is the Editor at Large and a co-owner of GraniteGrok.com; a former board member of the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire; and a past contributor to the Franklin Center for Public Policy.
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VIDEO - BioNTech CEO replies to claims he refused vaccination '-- RT World News
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:35
The head and co-founder of a company that produces one of the most widely used Covid jabs, Ugur Sahin, has commented on an interview in which he revealed that he and his family had not been vaccinated.
A video of Sahin, the German immunology and oncology professor who helped develop the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, telling a reporter he was not immunized against the coronavirus recently went viral on social media. In an interview with the German DW TV channel, conducted in English, the reporter queries whether the CEO will ''allow personal questions,'' before asking, ''I have heard that you yourself have not taken the vaccine yet. Why not?'' Sahin responds that he is ''legally not allowed to take the vaccine at the moment,'' due to there being a priority list. ''It is more important for us that our co-workers and partners get vaccinated,'' he says, adding, ''What is also important, we were even not allowed to participate in clinical trials.''
Read more
In an apparent response to the video, Sahin posted a rebuttal on the professional networking site LinkedIn this week. His friends had been urging him to share a photograph of himself being inoculated against the deadly virus, he wrote, but he had thus far ''refused to do so,'' explaining that he had been of the view that his communications should not be about himself, but ''should contribute to scientific transparency and provide data, facts, and insights.''
However, he said, since the aforementioned interview, he and his wife had each received two doses and a booster of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The LinkedIn post was accompanied by a photo of Sahin being jabbed against Covid-19 ''in early 2021,'' he said, to address the ''false rumors'' circulating on social media that he had refused to be vaccinated.
Urging others to follow suit, and citing the experience of a friend ''fighting for his life'' against severe Covid, Sahin added that his company was currently developing another vaccine ''to address the Omicron variant, irrespective of whether it will be needed or not.''
The video of the interview, which is still doing the rounds on Twitter, has garnered so much attention that the BioNTech press office has also been obliged to comment on it. The statements its then-unvaccinated CEO made in it were accurate at the time, it said, but were now ''completely outdated,'' a spokesperson told Reuters. The interview was recorded a year ago, when only older people and those in high-risk groups in Germany were legally eligible to receive a Covid-19 shot.
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Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:09
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VIDEO - New FDA-approved eye drops could replace reading glasses for millions: "It's definitely a life changer" - CBS News
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:09
A newly approved eye drop hitting the market on Thursday could change the lives of millions of Americans with age-related blurred near vision, a condition affecting mostly people 40 and older.
Vuity, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in October, would potentially replace reading glasses for some of the 128 million Americans who have trouble seeing close-up. The new medicine takes effect in about 15 minutes, with one drop on each eye providing sharper vision for six to 10 hours, according to the company.
Toni Wright, one of the 750 participants in a clinical trial to test the drug, said she liked what she saw.
"It's definitely a life changer," Wright told CBS News national correspondent Jericka Duncan.
Before the trial, the only way Wright could see things clearly was by keeping reading glasses everywhere '-- in her office, bathroom, kitchen and car.
"I was in denial because to me that was a sign of growing older, you know, needing to wear glasses," she said.
It was in 2019 that her doctor told her about a new eye drop with the potential to correct her vision problems, temporarily. The 54-year-old online retail consultant, who works from her farm in western Pennsylvania, instantly noticed a difference.
"I would not need my readers as much, especially on the computer, where I would always need to have them on," she said.
Vuity is the first FDA-approved eye drop to treat age-related blurry near vision, also known as presbyopia . The prescription drug utilizes the eye's natural ability to reduce its pupil size, said Dr. George Waring, the principal investigator for the trial.
"Reducing the pupil size expands the depth of field or the depth of focus, and that allows you to focus at different ranges naturally," he said.
A 30-day supply of the drug will cost about $80 and works best in people 40 to 55 years old, a Vuity spokesperson said. Side effects detected in the three-month trial included headaches and red eyes, the company said.
"This is something that we anticipate will be well tolerated long term, but this will be evaluated and studied in a formal capacity," Waring said.
Vuity is by no means a cure-all, and the maker does caution against using the drops when driving at night or performing activities in low-light conditions. The drops are for mild to intermediate cases and are less effective after age 65, as eyes age. Users may also have temporary difficulty in adjusting focus between objects near and far.
As of now, the drug is not covered by insurance. Doctors who spoke with CBS News said it's unlikely that insurance will ever cover it because it's not "medically necessary," as glasses are still a less expensive alternative.
For Wright and millions just like her, the new drug is an easy backup solution '-- with a clear advantage.
"Just a convenience to have that option of putting the drops in and being able to go," she said.
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VIDEO - 'We Can't Guarantee Your Safety': Head Of LAPD's Police Officers' Union Warns Tourists Away '' CBS Los Angeles
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:08
HOLLYWOOD (CBSLA) '' With many people feeling Southern California is experiencing a violent crime wave, even prompting the head of the Los Angeles Police Department's union to warn tourists away, LAPD Chief Michel Moore tried to assure people that crime is not out of control in the city.
''My message to anyone thinking about coming to Los Angeles, especially during the holiday season, is don't,'' Jamie McBride, the head of the LA Police Protective League, the union representing LAPD officers, said in a television interview.
READ MORE: Bryce Young, Mater Dei Alumni, Wins Heisman TrophyThe message from McBride comes as what many residents and business owners view as a wave of crime slamming the city and surrounding areas.
''We can't guarantee your safety. It is really, really out of control. I said it to people before, it's like that movie 'Purge,' you know, instead of 24 hours to commit your crime, these people have 365 days days to commit whatever they want,'' McBride said.
His warning seems to resonate with some residents.
''It's pretty scary walking at night,'' said Sarah Veenstra, who moved to LA from Wisconsin about six months ago. She said she didn't realize crime and safety would be such an issue.
''I genuinely thought it would be a safe area. It turned out not be as safe as I thought. I'm definitely, like, carrying something on me every time I leave the house when it's dark out,'' she said.
Los Angeles police investigate an armed robbery outside a downtown L.A. hotel on Dec. 7, 2021. (CBSLA)
Rampant crime continues. Some of the latest victims were hit at the downtown Intercontinental Hotel, where armed robbers stole an estimated $100,000 in jewelry early Tuesday morning.
That robbery comes on the tail of smash-and-grab, follow home and home invasion robberies, but Chief Moore on Tuesday tried to reassure the public.
RELATED: Armed Robbers Hit Palisades Home During Holiday Party
''It's not out of control. It's not a spiral that we've lost control over. It is important that we not have a sense of acquiescing or just lackadaisical approach to this. We're calling out the severity of it,'' the police chief said.
Moore also noted that robberies are up nearly 5% compared to last year, but the rate is about 13% lower than 2019, before the pandemic.
READ MORE: Authorities Arrest Brea Man, Nick Papin, For Vandalism(credit: CBS)
Recently, 14 people were arrested for smash-and-grabs, but most of them have already been released.
''Eleven were released on zero bail and we need the criminal justice system to look at those offenses and recognize how to keep the most dangerous individuals off the street,'' Moore said.
During the pandemic, zero-bail policies were put in place for some crimes, like burglary. Chief Moore said he and LA County District Attorney George Gasc"n are in close communication.
''Gasc"n and I spoke as recently as Friday,'' Moore said, ''and he assured me he will hold criminal offenders, violent criminal offenders, accountable.''
While acknowledging the reality of what's been going on, Chief Moore said the city is relatively safe and he is welcoming tourists.
''I believe tourists coming to Los Angeles are safe. Certainly, as safe here as any other portion of the country.''
RELATED: Family Mourn Teenager Shot And Killed Near Boyle Heights Recreation Center
Some tourists, though, have seen the headlines are aren't taking any chances.
''We just take Ubers everywhere and don't walk from place to place. So, that's about it,'' a tourist told CBSLA.
People out in Hollywood, who live here or are visiting, said they are just keeping an extra watch on their surroundings.
MORE NEWS: Man Wounded In Highland Park Shooting On SaturdayIn a Tuesday press release, DA George Gasc"n said a press conference will be held Wednesday to outline the accomplishments made in the past year.
VIDEO - 'I owe them my life': Man who suffered heart attack thanks first responders who saved him
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:00
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - A windward Oahu man who collapsed this past summer got the chance Thursday to thank the first responders who saved his life.
In August, Jordan Ford been working around his house and had just finished taking a shower when he suddenly collapsed. The 31-year-old was suffering from a heart attack and had become unresponsive.
Ford's wife immediately called 911 for help and the Honolulu Fire Department rushed to his home in Maunawili.
Firefighters quickly stepped into action, providing CPR and using a defibrillator to administer shocks before paramedics arrived.
When EMS was on the scene, paramedics took over care and transported Ford to Adventist Health Castle. He has since recovered from the incident.
''I owe all of them my life, everyone behind me,'' Ford said. ''It means a lot that they were so quick and I have no recollection of any of it, but clearly they're dedicated and I just want to thank them.''
During the heartfelt reunion, Ford expressed his gratitude and presented lei to the first responders who helped him that day.
Firefighters said Ford is living proof that CPR saves lives and they encourage the public to learn the skill.
Copyright 2021 Hawaii News Now. All rights reserved.
VIDEO - OMICRON ðºð¸ð...ðº on Twitter: "He literally called the people getting vaccines ''the sheep'' https://t.co/GrE01zv8Zo" / Twitter
Sun, 12 Dec 2021 04:10
OMICRON ðºð¸ð...ðº : He literally called the people getting vaccines ''the sheep'' https://t.co/GrE01zv8Zo
Sun Dec 12 01:44:52 +0000 2021
VIDEO - Operation Whistle Pig: Inside the secret CBP unit with no rules that investigates Americans [Video]
Sat, 11 Dec 2021 21:28
It was almost 10 p.m. on a Thursday night, and Ali Watkins was walking around the capital following instructions texted by a stranger. One message instructed her to walk through an abandoned parking lot near Washington, D.C.'s Dupont Circle, and then wait at a laundromat. Then came a final cryptic instruction: She was to enter an unmarked door on Connecticut Avenue leading to a hidden bar.
The Sheppard, an upscale speakeasy, was so dimly lit it was sometimes hard to see the menu, let alone a stranger at the bar. But amid the red velvet upholstery, Watkins, then a reporter at Politico, almost immediately spotted the man she was supposed to meet: He was wearing a corduroy blazer and jeans and had a distinctive gap between his teeth.
''I won't tell you my name, but I work for the U.S. government,'' he said, according to her account later provided to government investigators.
It was June 1, 2017, and Watkins was a rising star in the world of national security journalism, breaking big stories about the investigation into President Trump's alleged ties to Russia. She had hopped from the Huffington Post to BuzzFeed and then Politico, when a man writing under the pseudonym Jack Bentley had reached out, wanting to meet with her. She agreed, as journalists often do, thinking he might be a potential source.
Ali Watkins during a PBS interview about her reporting on Russian espionage, June 1, 2017. (PBS/YouTube)
Once at the bar, however, she found that the man seemed more interested in gathering information about her than in providing her with information. And he appeared to know a lot about her, including details of her travels and her relationship with James Wolfe, an older man who worked on Capitol Hill.
The meeting, which lasted almost four hours, would change both of their lives. Late the following year, Wolfe, the onetime boyfriend of Watkins, was sentenced to two months in prison for lying to the FBI about his relationship with reporters. And Watkins, by then at the New York Times, faced ethical questions about her relationship with Wolfe, even though she denied he had been a source for her stories while they were involved.
The true mystery of the saga was the role of the man at the bar. He was portrayed in subsequent articles as something of a rogue actor who had taken it upon himself to conduct a Trump-era leak investigation, and he subsequently faced an internal investigation at the Department of Homeland Security, where he worked.
Yet documents obtained by Yahoo News, including an inspector general report on the investigation that spans more than 500 pages '-- and includes transcripts of interviews that investigators conducted with those involved, emails and other records '-- reveal a far more disturbing story than the targeting of a single journalist. The man, whose real name is Jeffrey Rambo, worked at a secretive Customs and Border Protection division. The division, which still operates today, had few rules and routinely used the country's most sensitive databases to obtain the travel records and financial and personal information of journalists, government officials, congressional members and their staff, NGO workers and others.
As many as 20 journalists were investigated as part of the division's work, which eventually led to referrals for criminal prosecution against Rambo, his boss and a co-worker. None were charged, however.
Rambo, who believes he was unfairly vilified for seeking out Watkins, said in a wide-ranging exclusive interview with Yahoo News that he acted legally and appropriately. He agreed to speak amid what he describes as escalating threats against him in San Diego, where he now lives, and after Yahoo News obtained a copy of the inspector general investigation into Rambo and his colleagues.
''''I'm being accused of blackmailing a journalist and trying to sign her up as an FBI informant, which is what's being plastered all around San Diego at the moment because of misinformation reported by the news media,'' he said in the interview.
The story Rambo tells is even stranger than the one already in the public view, which is strange enough. His meeting with Watkins, he says, was the result of a Trump-era White House assignment to Customs and Border Protection to combat forced labor. Rambo, the lead on the project, was authorized to reach out to anyone who he thought might be useful, including journalists and other people inside and outside the government.
As part of that process, he and others he worked with vetted those potential contacts, pulling email addresses, phone numbers and photos from passport applications and checking that information through numerous sensitive government databases, including the terrorism watchlist.
Jeffrey Rambo in his San Diego coffee shop, Storymakers Coffee Roasters. (Sandy Huffaker for Yahoo News)
''There is no specific guidance on how to vet someone,'' Rambo later told investigators. ''In terms of policy and procedure, to be 100 percent frank there, there's no policy and procedure on vetting.''
Those swept up in the division's vetting included journalists from national news organizations, ranging from the Associated Press to the New York Times. Even Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post, was flagged in those searches.
''When a name comes across your desk you run it through every system you have access to, that's just status quo, that's what everyone does,'' Rambo told investigators.
But the idea of government officials trawling through government databases, looking at the private lives '-- and even romantic relationships '-- of U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime, is precisely what civil liberties experts have warned about for years.
''For two decades, we've seen how the collect-it-all, share-it-all philosophy underlying post-9/11 law enforcement floods agencies with sensitive personal information on millions of Americans,'' Hugh Handeyside, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties National Security Project, told Yahoo News. ''When agencies give their employees access to this ocean of information, especially without training or rigorous oversight, the potential for abuse goes through the roof.''
Rambo, however, doesn't see his story as one of abuse. He was doing precisely what his higher-ups authorized him to do.
''I'm called a rogue Border Patrol agent, I'm called a right-hand man of the Trump administration, I accessed data improperly, I violated her constitutional rights '-- all of these things are untrue,'' Rambo told Yahoo News. ''All these things are standard practices that '-- let me rephrase that. All of the things that led up to my interest in Ali Watkins were standard practice of what we do and what we did and probably what's still done to this day.''
CBP's National Targeting Center was created in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to help identify potential threats crossing the borders of the United States, whether people, drugs or weapons. When Rambo was detailed to the center in 2017, he was assigned to the newly launched Counter Network Division, a unit designed as a bridge between law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community that prided itself on taking ''out of the box'' approaches.
Freed from the constraints of bureaucracy, those inside were supposed to think creatively about how to solve problems. According to testimony in the inspector general report, Rambo's supervisor, Dan White, fostered a freewheeling atmosphere at the division, calling his team ''WOLF,'' short for ''way out in left field.'' White even had a water bottle with a WOLF sticker. He himself would later tell investigators: ''We are pushing the limits and so there is no norm, there is no guidelines, we are the ones making the guidelines.''
The division's assignments were high-level and came directly from the CBP commissioner, the secretary of Homeland Security or the White House, which in May 2017 asked the division to look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the U.S. believed companies were using cobalt mined by forced labor to produce consumer goods in China. Rambo, one of few Border Patrol agents assigned to the division, where he worked alongside representatives from across law enforcement and intelligence agencies, was asked to lead the project. ''My orders were to tackle a problem set that we were given from the White House,'' he told Yahoo News.
Rambo, according to documents included in the inspector general report, was told to gather the evidence needed to hit companies with sanctions under the rarely used Tariff Act of 1930. He proposed using information from experts in academia, NGOs, humanitarian groups, officials at other government agencies and journalists specializing in forced labor reporting. The plan was greenlighted by his boss, he later told investigators, with one caveat. "Make sure you vet whoever you contact,'' Rambo said White told him.
In late May 2017, Rambo and one of his co-workers began reaching out to people, including Martha Mendoza, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter who covered forced labor. On May 31, Rambo, using his government email, wrote to Mendoza explaining that CBP was trying to identify companies that were importing goods possibly linked to forced labor. ''We are hoping to connect with subject matter experts outside of the traditional government circles as your 'rules of engagement' are a bit different than ours,'' he wrote Mendoza, ''and can perhaps help in pointing us in the right direction to U.S. companies that meet such criteria or are suspected of such.''
Associated Press journalist Martha Mendoza. (Khairil Yusof/Flickr)
Another reporter who caught his eye was Ali Watkins. On June 1, he spotted a Politico story by Watkins on how Russia's spy games were heating up inside the United States. Her story, which came at the height of Trump administration concerns over leaks relating to the FBI's Russia investigation, cited a half-dozen anonymous current and former intelligence officials. ''Ali Watkins was, for lack of a better word, the hot-topic reporter at the time,'' Rambo told Yahoo News.
Rambo, who was later pressed repeatedly about why he chose to reach out to Watkins, a reporter who had never written about forced labor, said he was looking for prominent journalists with access and buzz. He told investigators he wanted to identify national security journalists who could not just tell CBP about forced labor but also publish stories that would allow him to ''overstate'' U.S. enforcement capabilities. Rambo believed these stories inflating U.S. capabilities would prompt shippers to alter their routes, proving they were involved in illegal activities.
''I thought, 'OK, I'll use Ali Watkins,''' he said.
A former senior DHS official told Yahoo News that forced labor was indeed a concern of CBP.
''Forced labor was a priority of the administration. It's a priority of the Senate Finance Committee that oversees U.S. Customs and Border Protection," the former official added. "It remains a bipartisan priority both for the anticompetitive aspects and trade perspective, but more importantly for the humanitarian aspects."
(''Committee staff are not aware of the Counter Network Division working on forced labor,'' Keith Chu, a spokesman for Sen. Ron Wyden, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told Yahoo News. The staff were also not aware that Rambo's leak investigation was done under the auspices of working on the forced labor issue, he added.)
Asked about Rambo's plan, however, the official expressed surprise that such a thing would be pursued at CBP.
''I can tell you at minimum that is an overexuberant interpretation. CBP does not conduct psychological ops or misinformation campaigns. CBP is not a member of the intelligence community. CBP does not have the authorities to do those kinds of things,'' the former senior official said.
Rambo believed he did have the authority, and he had certainly had his boss's approval to contact Watkins. After reading her story, he did something that most journalists probably don't expect government officials to do: He ran Watkins through an assortment of databases. Those included, among others, CBP's Automated Targeting System, a tool that compares travelers against law enforcement and intelligence data; TECS, which tracks people entering and exiting the country; the Treasury Department's FinCEN, used for identifying financial crimes; and the State Department consular database, which included details of her passport application.
''When you say vet someone, you vet them. There's no parameters on what that means,'' Rambo said.
''Vet the reporters you use,'' Rambo said his boss told him, '''vet them through our systems.' I vet them no different than I vet a terrorist.''
On his screen was Watkins's international travel, color-coded blue in a format similar to an Excel spreadsheet. He saw a flight from Andrews Air Force Base to Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, sandwiched between two trips with the same person, a man more than 30 years her senior named James Wolfe. Together they traveled to Cancºn, London and Spain, according to the inspector general report.
Recounting his search of Watkins's travel, Rambo began to reenact what he saw as his ''aha moment.''
''I know what suspicious travel looks like,'' he said, recalling the moment he thought he had stumbled on something big: the mystery male companion.
''Who is James Wolfe?'' he recalled asking himself, mimicking typing when describing his efforts to identify Watkins's traveling companion.
James Wolfe, former director of security for the Senate Intelligence Committee, leaves the federal courthouse in Washington on June 13, 2018. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)
Then he queried Watkins's family members, thinking he might be related to her. Wolfe, he found, was not a family member but a senior staff member on Capitol Hill.
''Why is Ali Watkins flying with the head of security for the Senate Intelligence Committee?'' Rambo recalled wondering, excited by his find.
But he already had a theory, one that would later be denied by Watkins. Wolfe, he surmised, was giving her information and access in exchange for a personal relationship with her.
''It's reasonable for me to believe in exchange for personal trips she was given access to Guantnamo,'' he recounted, unaware that the Pentagon regularly offers journalists the opportunity to travel to the U.S. naval base there to report on legal proceedings related to 9/11 detainees.
Rambo then went to his boss. ''I say, 'This person is great in terms of access, but based on my vetting she may be receiving classified info,''' he recalled to Yahoo News.
White later told investigators that the division would regularly conduct checks on journalists to determine their personal connections, to establish if they were someone CBP could trust.
''Figure it out,'' White told Rambo. ''If you can use her, use her. If not, don't.''
That afternoon, Rambo reached out to Watkins using the address jackbentleyesq@gmail.com, which he later described as an ''off network'' account sanctioned by the Counter Network Division. ''It wasn't just some random alias I created just then to meet her,'' he said during an interview in San Diego, where lives with his two dogs, father-and-son beagles named Jack and Bentley.
He would later defend using the Gmail account and a fake name, he said, because he didn't want to provide information on where he worked unless he deemed her trustworthy. He and his boss even discussed signing her up as a confidential human source '-- a highly unusual proposal for a journalist '-- so she would be locked into a confidentiality agreement, though the idea was never pursued.
Rambo and Watkins agreed to meet in Dupont Circle that evening.
As Rambo prepped for his meeting, he reached out to an old FBI counterterrorism contact, now at the bureau's headquarters. ''Can you give me a call,'' Rambo wrote in an email. ''If possible ASAP. I need to run something by you that I *believe* might be in your swim lane.''
At the bar, Rambo sipped WhistlePig old fashioneds and fired off questions to Watkins. Could he trust her? Had she ever burned a source? The questions began to unnerve Watkins, particularly when they revealed that Rambo appeared to know private details about her life, like where she had lived in New Jersey for a short period, and where she traveled. And yet they stayed in the bar for nearly two hours talking.
Around midnight, as the bar was closing, Rambo paid with a credit card, and they began walking together up the street toward Kramerbooks & Afterwords, a popular bookstore and caf(C) near Dupont Circle. Inside, Watkins said, Rambo was holding up books and magazines while talking, as if to conceal his identity.
At around 1 a.m. the two left Kramerbooks together and walked down the street.
Standing in front of a closed Starbucks, Rambo continued to press Watkins about her sources. Had she ever had an inappropriate relationship with a source? Had she ever done anything to compromise her journalistic integrity?
Watkins said no, but eventually told Rambo what he already suspected: She was involved with Wolfe, but she denied he was leaking to her. ''I've never received information from that person,'' she said, according to her account later.
''Do you know he is married?'' Rambo asked, turning the cellphone in his hand around so Watkins could see.
''This is his wife,'' Rambo said, apparently not realizing he was showing her a photo of Wolfe's first wife (the two had divorced and Wolfe had remarried).
Rambo continued to ask about her relationship, and what would happen to her career if it was made public.
''Are you trying to blackmail me?'' Watkins asked him. Rambo denied he was.
The two continued talking outside the Starbucks, with Rambo pressing her on Wolfe and her confidential sources. Watkins by then felt ''spooked,'' she later told investigators.
Rambo never revealed to Watkins where he was employed or his real name, but she later told investigators he insinuated he was working in the Washington metro area with the FBI.
''Here's a tip,'' he told her not long before they parted ways around 2 a.m. ''Don't travel together.''
The morning after the meeting, both Watkins and Rambo each set out to investigate the other.
Rambo emailed his FBI contact again. ''Confirmed improper relationship between a member of the SSCI and the press,'' he wrote, using an abbreviation for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. ''Additional details in person if possible.''
''[Subject of investigation] is the SSCI Director of Security,'' he added in another email an hour later.
That same day, Watkins returned to the Sheppard to get Rambo's credit card slip, which had his real name. A quick Google search led to a story about a Border Patrol agent starting a brewery. She called CBP, gave his name and asked to be connected. After a brief silence, then a click, a phone rang. No one picked up. Still, she later told investigators, she took this as ''quasi-confirmation'' that Jack Bentley was Jeffrey Rambo. (Even several years later, Rambo is still furious at the bar for giving Watkins his credit card receipt. ''Who owns that place? They gave her my personal information,'' he fumed.)
Rambo didn't know that she had identified his real name when, a few days after their meeting, he discussed with his boss, White, how to proceed. According to emails included in the inspector general report, Rambo was ready to hand everything over to the FBI, but his boss stopped him. White wanted to run Watkins through more DHS databases to find out if she had any sources inside the department, expanding the investigation. Rambo's probe into Watkins and Wolfe also now had a name, taken from the whiskey he drank at the bar where he met Watkins: Operation Whistle Pig.
Rambo said Operation Whistle Pig was focused only on whether Wolfe was providing classified information to Watkins, or anyone else, but it appeared that a large number of journalists were caught up in the probe. ''After 'Operation Whistle Pig' was approved, Rambo identified 15 to 20 national security reporters and conducted CBP records checks of those reporters,'' according to a FBI counterintelligence memo included in the inspector general report.
Rambo in the Barrio Logan neighborhood of San Diego. (Sandy Huffaker for Yahoo News)
While the Justice Department has policies on seeking information from journalists or news organizations, the rules apply to records that require a subpoena or warrant, such as phone records, not information that the government already possesses. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department responded to questions about this.
White then introduced Rambo and another member of the team to Charlie Ratliff, a program analyst in the Counter Network Division. Ratliff worked on DOMEX, a program that collects information from the contents of a person's electronic device when they cross a U.S. border. The controversial program sweeps up everything from phone contacts and emails to the contents from encrypted messaging apps and social media.
''We know you do high profile,'' White told Ratliff, introducing him to Rambo.
Rambo explained to Ratliff that Watkins and Wolfe were having an ''affair'' and that Wolfe may have been leaking classified information to Watkins. Rambo gave Ratliff what are known as ''selectors,'' such as telephone numbers, email addresses and Social Security numbers. Ratliff, in turn, ran those selectors through a number of databases, including the Terrorist Screening Database, a watchlist that has more than 1 million names and has been widely criticized for errors and lack of review.
Watkins didn't have any direct connections in that database, also known as TSDB, but one of her contacts did: Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post. ''Oh'....and the Huffington Post owner was/is a direct contact to a TSDB on 3 phones and 1 email. LoL,'' Ratliff wrote in one email to White.
''It's impossible for Arianna to comment, as she is completely unclear what her connection to the watchlist is,'' a spokesperson for Huffington told Yahoo News.
Handeyside, the ACLU attorney, called the database ''a due process disaster.''
''The standard for placement on the watchlist is so low, and the safeguards against errors and misplaced suspicion are so deficient, that it's no wonder the watchlist has ballooned to well over a million people,'' he said. ''Having a connection to someone on the watchlist is not remotely suspicious of itself.''
Arianna Huffington at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in 2020. (David Crotty/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
But it wasn't just journalists being investigated, or ''vetted,'' in the parlance of the Counter Network Division. Ratliff, whose email signature was ''In God We Trust. For Everyone Else We Vet,'' created a PDF file later that month that included ''several Congressional referrals,'' according to the inspector general report. That PDF was then sent to CBP's Analytical Management Systems Control Office, which is described in congressional testimony as dedicated to finding anomalies among the agency's employees ''to mitigate any potential threat to the CBP mission.''
According to White's later testimony, Ratliff regularly investigated congressional staffers' travel captured by CBP to run against the Terrorist Screening Database. ''White stated that when Congressional 'Staffers' schedule flights, the numbers they use get captured and analyzed by CBP,'' the inspector general report says. White told the investigators that Ratliff ''does this all the time,'' looking at ''inappropriate contacts between people.'' At one point in an email, Ratliff also references sending a PDF package listing several congressional members linked to people on the Terrorism Screening Database. It is unclear, based on the inspector general report, which members were identified.
Rambo then contacted analysts with Deloitte, a government contractor that had employees working directly for CBP's Counter Network Division, who specialized in investigating people using social media and other open sources of information. ''I sent them the link to that [Russia] article as context as to who Ali Watkins was and basically told them to move on with that to uncover what they could,'' Rambo told investigators. He identified Watkins as a ''primary target'' of Operation Whistle Pig and Wolfe as an ''associated target.''
Deloitte did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
The Deloitte team soon sent back a bulletin pinpointing Watkins's exact location on dates when they knew she was with Wolfe, like their trip to Spain. They also noted other geotagged Facebook check-ins during the time under scrutiny, including domestic travel to three states. The bulletin included information on her mother and brother and links to their profiles. Attached to the email were photos taken from Watkins's Facebook profile showing her in Spain.
''Gracias,'' Rambo replied.
There were conflicting accounts about how many other journalists, beyond Watkins, who were scrutinized by the Counter Network Division. White told investigators that in preparation for speaking with the Associated Press's Mendoza, she was run through multiple databases, and ''CBP discovered that one of the phone numbers on Mendoza's phone was connected with a terrorist.''
In a statement to Yahoo, after being told of the investigation into one of its reporters, an AP spokesperson, Lauren Easton, blasted CBP.
''The Associated Press demands an immediate explanation from U.S. Customs and Border Protection as to why journalists including AP investigative reporter Martha Mendoza were run through databases used to track terrorists and identified as potential confidential informant recruits,'' Easton told Yahoo News in a statement. ''We are deeply concerned about this apparent abuse of power. This appears to be an example of journalists being targeted for simply doing their jobs, which is a violation of the First Amendment.''
According to a memo that Troy Miller, then the head of the National Targeting Center, provided to investigators, the division reached out to reporters at the Huffington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Associated Press. ''These entities were analyzed further to determine nexus to the information being provided to CBP in order to validate any future information that would be provided on alleged forced labor practices,'' wrote Miller, who went on to become the acting CBP commissioner.
According to records included in the inspector general report, such vetting was standard practice at the division.
''I would just remove journalists from that question, to begin with,'' Rambo later said when asked about the vetting process for journalists. ''Just through day-to-day practice of how we operate, when you're told to vet somebody, that you vet them through all of those systems.''
A former New York Times reporter confirmed to Yahoo News that they met with Dan White and others at CBP to discuss trade-based money laundering, among other issues. ''They also pitched me on the labor abuse work that CBP was doing,'' the former Times reporter said.
''"We are deeply troubled to learn how U.S. Customs and Border Protection ran this investigation into a journalist's sources,'' Danielle Rhoades Ha, a New York Times spokesperson, wrote to Yahoo News. ''As the Attorney General has said clearly, the government needs to stop using leak investigations as an excuse to interfere with journalism. It is time for Customs and Border Protection to make public a full record of what happened in this investigation so this sort of improper conduct is not repeated."
The Justice Department and the White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including about the appropriateness of investigating journalists. A spokesperson for DHS referred requests for comment to CBP.
''CBP vetting and investigatory operations, including those conducted by the Counter Network Division, are strictly governed by well-established protocols and best practices,'' a spokesperson for the agency said in a written statement to Yahoo News. ''The Counter Network Division within U.S. Customs and Border Protection's (CBP) National Targeting Center (NTC) shares information with key partners, analyze threats, and enhances the U.S. government's operational ability to combat illicit networks, including those associated with terrorists and transnational criminal organizations.''
''CBP does not investigate individuals without a legitimate and legal basis to do so,'' the spokesperson added. ''These investigations support CBP's mission to protect our communities.''
Whatever Rambo's original purpose for vetting Watkins, his focus in the days after meeting her was on furthering a leak investigation, and he appeared to view himself as a central player. ''[M]y main concern is that encounters such as these are a large part of the leaks occurring and building it out could paint a better picture with regards to that if the dots can all be connected,'' he wrote to the FBI on June 5.
And it was jusn't just Watkins who interested him. When Reality Winner was arrested for leaking classified information about Russia to the Intercept that month, Rambo emailed the Deloitte contractors working with him a link to a news story about her arrest. ''First of many,'' one of the Deloitte contractors replied.
Rambo responded with just a photo of Omar Little, an iconic character from the long-running television series ''The Wire'' (Little is a criminal who operates according to a strict moral code). Underneath the image were the words ''Omar Comin Yo,'' a reference to his catchphrase meant to evoke fear and impending death. ''As in Ali Watkins or James Wolfe is next in terms of being arrested for leaking information,'' Wolfe told investigators when asked what he meant with the reply.
Over the summer, Rambo stayed on the leak investigation, even requesting another cellphone for his work with the FBI. In mid-July, he met with two FBI agents at an Au Bon Pain next to the Hoover building in downtown Washington, D.C., to relay what he knew about Watkins and Wolfe. He also sent them copies of their travel records plucked from CBP's system. ''Let me know if you need anything else specifically and I'll get it to you ASAP,'' Rambo told the FBI agents, according to an email he sent following the meeting.
''This is all great info. Thanks so much for your help,'' one of the agents replied. ''I'll look over all of this and get a plan moving forward.''
On July 13, Rambo wrote the Deloitte team with good news. ''Just as a heads up, 'Whistle Pig' was accepted as a full-blown case,'' he wrote. ''Just got confirmation yesterday so wanted to update you guys so you knew what became of it.''
While Rambo thought the case was moving forward, one of agents told him a month later they weren't pursuing the investigation. In October, however, Rambo, who was now working for CBP in California, got a call. ''The FBI just launched a media leak investigation unit, and suddenly they had all the interest in the world,'' he recalled to Yahoo News.
He was also asked to sign a Classified National Security Disclosure Agreement preventing him from discussing his conversation with the FBI about Watkins and Wolfe, according to the inspector general report.
Finally, nearly a year later after his last conversation with FBI agents, Rambo's work seemed to pay off: James Wolfe was indicted, not for leaking classified information but for lying to FBI agents about his relationship with reporters, including his travel with Watkins. (Wolfe did not respond to a request for comment.)
Wolfe leaves the federal courthouse in Washington on June 13, 2018. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)
What should have seemed like good news for Rambo suddenly made him a lightning rod. On June 12, 2018, just a week after Wolfe was indicted, the Washington Post published an article about Rambo's meeting with Watkins, identifying him by his real name. Rambo, who never realized she had learned his name, was blindsided.
Rambo, the article reported, had told Watkins that ''the administration was eager to investigate journalists and learn the identity of their confidential sources to stanch leaks of classified information.''
Rather than a law enforcement officer working hand-in-hand with the FBI on an investigation, Rambo suddenly found himself painted as a rogue agent conducting his own leak investigation. ''Rambo's search of travel records could be a crime if he didn't have a legitimate reason to examine that information,'' the Post said it had been told by unnamed officials.
''Rambo was not part of the FBI's investigation of Wolfe,'' the Post reported, citing an anonymous law enforcement official.
The FBI nondisclosure agreement left Rambo hamstrung: He couldn't correct the record or break his silence. ''Knowing what I know now, I never would have signed it,'' he said, adding that his lawyer has since told him it probably isn't binding.
The FBI declined to comment on any aspect of this story.
White would initially claim to investigators that he wasn't aware of Rambo's meeting with Watkins. But he wrote an email to Ratliff the day after the article was published saying, ''Thanks, now I just have to go back and recreate Rambo's date night,'' an apparent reference to the meeting at the Sheppard.
That same day, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General launched an investigation into Rambo, who was put on administrative leave. The probe, conducted jointly with CBP's Office of Professional Responsibility, focused on whether Rambo improperly accessed government databases to get information on Watkins and Wolfe without a need to know, and if he'd used that information to question Watkins about possible leaks of classified information outside the scope of his official duties.
Over the next two years, investigators interviewed Rambo, his supervisors, his co-workers and even Watkins. They also reviewed thousands of emails and records related to Rambo's investigation into Watkins and Wolfe and his interactions with the FBI.
Rambo in the Barrio Logan neighborhood of San Diego. (Sandy Huffaker for Yahoo News)
The inspector general's report found grounds for potential criminal charges against Rambo, including improperly accessing records, making false statements and conspiracy. White, who appeared to have lied about several aspects of his role in the Watkins probe, was referred to prosecutors for possible charges of conspiracy and making false statements, the latter being the same charge that sent Wolfe to prison. Ratliff, who helped Rambo with the searches, also faced potential charges.
White did not respond to a detailed request for comment. Yahoo News made multiple attempts to reach Ratliff, who it appears no longer works at CBP.
On Oct. 22, 2020, the Office of Inspector General presented the criminal referrals to Mark Lytle, the head of financial crimes at United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. In January, Lytle replied that it was declining to prosecute, based on several factors, including legal precedent on law enforcement use of databases and ''the lack of CBP policies and procedures concerning Rambo's duties.''
A spokesperson for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to comment. Lytle, who has since left the office, did not respond to requests for comment.
That doesn't surprise Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor and constitutional law expert who has reviewed surveillance programs. When the government wants to investigate someone for doing something illegal or inappropriate, it has free rein so long as it doesn't violate any specific law. ''If there is no law or policy that specifically regulates it, then there's nothing that prohibits it,'' he said.
But Handeyside, the ACLU attorney, says these very lack of procedures are the heart of the problem: ''We're in a very dangerous place if having no rules means officers can't break any rules.''
Beyond the legal precedent, there was another reason prosecutors didn't want to charge Rambo. ''Chief Lytle also stated that it would not be very good jury appeal as Rambo's actions revealed potential criminal violations by Wolfe, Rambo reported the information to the FBI, and Wolfe was later indicted,'' the inspector general report states.
In response to questions about the results of its investigation, a spokesperson for the Office of Inspector General replied: ''To maintain independence in appearance and fact, DHS OIG does not participate in DHS operational or programmatic decisions.''
Chu, the Wyden spokesperson, said the senator was only aware of the inspector general's investigation from news reports. ''The [Department of Homeland Security inspector general] was asked repeatedly for the results of its investigation, but never provided it,'' he said.
Watkins, who still works as a reporter at the New York Times, expressed outrage over the new revelations about the investigation into her and Wolfe's relationship. ''I'm deeply troubled at the lengths CBP and DHS personnel apparently went to try and identify journalistic sources and dig into my personal life,'' she told Yahoo News. ''It was chilling then, and it remains chilling now.''
While acknowledging that her prior relationship with Wolfe was problematic for her reporting, she said that was no excuse for the government's conduct. ''My mistakes '-- none of which should have concerned Jeffrey Rambo or the CBP '-- have been more than clearly established in various records, including my employer's,'' she added. ''Those mistakes were mine, not my family's, and that their privacy was violated in this process is egregious.''
The same month that prosecutors told the inspector general they would not be pursuing charges, Rambo was taken off administrative leave and cleared to return to work as a Border Patrol agent. It wasn't public vindication, but at least he had his job back.
Earlier this year, Jeffrey Rambo opened a small coffee shop in the Barrio Logan section of San Diego, home to a tight-knit Latino community. He says its name, Storymakers Coffee Roasters, is a tribute to the coffee producers the shop features. He's also back in the field working as a Border Patrol agent, but he runs the coffee shop in his free time. He describes coffee roasting as his passion.
One of the keepsakes he has from his time in the Washington area is a large glass globe with cobalt blue oceans and clear land, an award from CBP for his work that came with a cash bonus. The globe is a reminder that, before the press coverage, he was lauded for his work at the National Targeting Center, including on the Watkins/Wolfe case. The plaque on the globe reads: ''Jeffrey Rambo '-- In Honor and Recognition of Your Dedication to the National Targeting Center Counter Network Division in 2017.'' At his going-away party, his boss even cited his work on the leak investigation, Rambo told investigators.
He still has his job at CBP, but not the accolades. And it hasn't been easy going at his coffee shop either. In late September, he arrived one morning and found a photo of himself plastered to a telephone pole outside, identifying him as a Border Patrol agent. It called him a racist who tried to blackmail a journalist. Some posters had a QR code that linked to a list of articles about Rambo. The posters were also plastered around the neighborhood, which he blames on the press coverage of his role in the Wolfe investigation.
A poster identifying Rambo as a CBP agent on a telephone pole in Barrio Logan; a portion of a poster that has been ripped down. (Jana Winter/Yahoo News)
More than four years after he met with Watkins, Rambo agreed to sit down with a Yahoo News journalist at a cocktail bar in San Diego to tell his story. He agreed to speak, he said, because of the threats to him and his shop. He also wants people to know he's been cleared by CBP '-- something the agency has authorized him to disclose '-- and is hoping to offset the bad news stories.
He's angry at lots of people. At the press for vilifying him, and CBP for not publicly defending him, and the FBI for its ''poor handling'' of the case. ''They never would have had a case pertaining to Ali Watkins or James Wolfe or any other people that may or may not be involved in this matter if that information wasn't provided to them by me,'' he says.
The news stories follow him everywhere. Recently, he had a date planned with a woman, but she canceled after reading articles about him. In the meantime, Dan White, Rambo's onetime boss, is back at the Counter Network Division, supervising the same team as before. When the inspector general requested any new policies or procedures the division had for contacts with journalists and people outside government, it received no reply.
Rambo is convinced the whole story will clear him.
Sitting with a Yahoo News reporter at the bar, not far from his coffee shop, Rambo was sipping his WhistlePig old fashioned, talking about the most recent threats, when two women sitting across the bar recognized him from the fliers around Barrio Logan, the ones that called him a ''fed'' and ''a rat,'' and said he tried to blackmail a journalist and make her an FBI informant.
"How did you not see this would be a problem?" said one of the women, referring to his opening a coffee shop in Barrio Logan.
As with everyone else, Rambo was convinced that if he told them his side of the story, he could win them over.
''Ask me anything,'' he said, buying their next round of drinks.
For two hours, until the bar closed, Rambo spoke to the women about his job and his presence in Barrio Logan.
''Jeffrey Rambo the coffee shop owner is different than Jeffrey Rambo, Border Patrol agent,'' he told them. ''That's just my day job.''
Rambo in his coffee shop on Nov. 21. (Sandy Huffaker for Yahoo News)
Yet a few hours later, after the bar closed, Jeffrey Rambo, whether a border agent or coffee shop owner, was tearing down posters of himself around his neighborhood in San Diego. He wanted CBP and the police to come take fingerprints, to identify who put up the posters (they declined). ''CBP said this is a private matter, but that's bullshit,'' he said. ''In this neighborhood, being identified as law enforcement is dangerous.''
The man who investigated a journalist and her sources now feels wronged by the media, which investigated him, and frustrated that he can't marshal the resources of the government to investigate his critics.
Rambo knows that speaking to a journalist about his case will likely get him fired from his government job, but CBP's refusal to defend him has led him, as he put it, ''to take matters into my own hands.''
''What none of these articles identify me as, is a law enforcement officer who was cleared of wrongdoing, who actually had a true purpose to be doing what I was doing,'' he said, ''and CBP refuses to acknowledge that, refuses to admit that, refuses to make that wrong right.''
VIDEO - (15) GB News on Twitter: "'The ritual humiliation of children [in Germany] who are asked to go to the front of the class and state their vaccination status daily, those who are vaccinated are applauded.' Journalist Alex Story reports on coronaviru
Sat, 11 Dec 2021 17:59
GB News : 'The ritual humiliation of children [in Germany] who are asked to go to the front of the class and state their vacc'... https://t.co/OaTT1I9kzM
Fri Dec 10 12:04:59 +0000 2021
VIDEO - How AdBlue diesel exhaust fluid shortage will affect truck drivers | news.com.au '-- Australia's leading news site
Sat, 11 Dec 2021 17:58
Most people didn't even know this essential product even existed - but now there's a shortage it will have a huge impact on Aussies.
Behind the scenes of our everyday lives there are numerous complex systems that make it all possible. From the water infrastructure that delivers clean drinking water to our taps, to the global supply chains that provide a steady flow of goods for our consumption, these systems are generally taken for granted and rarely warrant more than a passing thought.
That is until the pandemic.
Since the pandemic first struck at the centre of the world's manufacturing heartland in January last year, the fragility of some of these systems has been exposed as it becomes clear that they can't simply be switched off and back on again without issues arising.
The one that we have generally become familiar with in recent months is the supply chain issues that have resulted in long waits for some goods, rising prices and in some cases empty retailer shelves.
Trouble for truckies to tradies
In recent months another issue has arisen that is arguably even more concerning and could bring Australia effectively to a halt if not adequately addressed in a timely fashion, a shortage of diesel exhaust fluid (DEF) also known as AdBlue.
AdBlue is injected into the exhaust systems of a large proportion of modern diesel vehicles, including roughly 50 per cent of the nation's truck fleet in order to reduce emissions.
While it's possible to adapt vehicles to run without AdBlue, it is highly illegal to do so and would result in heavy fines from authorities.
From the modern diesel powered trucks that deliver food to our supermarkets to Australia's best-selling car, the Ford Ranger (which only comes with a diesel engine), all could come to a halt if their AdBlue tanks run dry if alternative supplies can't be sourced before Australia's supply is exhausted.
Why is there a shortage?
Around the world there is currently a major shortage of urea, which is a key material in manufacturing AdBlue and is also a major component in some types of fertiliser.
With global fertiliser prices currently sitting at near record highs after more than tripling since the start of 2020, some fertiliser exporting nations are placing curbs on exports in order to ensure domestic supply and to keep prices more affordable for their farmers.
The world's two largest urea exporters who account for almost one-quarter of all global exports, Russia and China have both limited or placed temporary bans on urea exports.
Prior to the ban on exports China supplied Australia with roughly 80 per cent of its urea needs, which has now left Australia in an extremely vulnerable position and in need of a swift resolution in finding another supplier.
South Korea was recently left in a similar position due to previously sourcing over 97 per cent of its urea needs from China.
Given the extremely high stakes of running out of urea, the South Korean government has been working feverishly to find alternative supplies to ensure that their road transport network remains at full strength.
On Tuesday, the South Korean government announced that it had secured an alternative supply from Indonesia after signing an agreement to purchase 120,000 tons of urea per year, including a batch of 10,000 tons to be shipped in the coming weeks.
Australia's tank is running low
National Road Transport Association (NatRoad) CEO Warren Clark recently told news.com.au that Australia's stock of AdBlue would run out by ''about February next year'', but warned that it could happen earlier.
''To be really clear, the lack of AdBlue, without breaking the law, is going to have a large impact on everyday Australians, everyday consumers and everyday business owners,''
''We've got a freight supply chain under extreme pressure coming out of Covid, and about 50 per cent [of Australia's truck fleet] runs on AdBlue, so it's a massive issue, it's half the fleet, so what happens then?'' Clark said.
Given the enormity of the potential impact of an AdBlue shortage on supply chains and the availability of goods to consumers, Clark said the government needed to address the crisis immediately.
''This is a supply chain issue the Government needs to look at, because they're the only ones who can fix this,'' Clark said.
While some of Australia's own exports could potentially be redirected toward domestic use, Australia's exports are only a tiny fraction of broader domestic demand.
Solutions and a more long term problem
With just months remaining until the nation's supply of AdBlue could run dry, the federal government may need to follow South Korea's lead, to step in and seek a swift trade agreement to ensure a continued supply.
An agreement with Indonesia could potentially resolve the issue relatively swiftly, if they are in possession of sufficient supply given our proximity geographically.
But the potential shortage of AdBlue is a symptom of a much larger and potentially far more protracted problem, the high cost of fertiliser.
As key export nations increasingly look to guarantee their own farmers have a sufficient supply of affordable fertiliser to ensure domestic food prices remain as affordable as possible, this is having a profound knock on effect for fertiliser prices globally.
While there will hopefully be some measure of relief from falling gas prices (a key component in nitrogen based fertilisers) after the conclusion of the Northern Hemisphere winter, the high cost of fertiliser may persist as a long term issue.
High stakes, little time
As warnings from experts continue to grow louder and we approach the end of the year, it's clear we have encountered yet another kink in one of our civilisation's complex systems that the vast majority of us have taken for granted.
Whether it will be resolved before there are disruptions to the nation's transport network remains to be seen, but one imagines that avoiding this would be a top priority.
Currently the government has stated that it is monitoring the issue and that it is aware of the concerns about the supply of AdBlue.
Tarric Brooker is a freelance journalist and social commentator | @AvidCommentator
VIDEO - Until We Meet Again. Brian Williams Signs Off - YouTube
VIDEO - Water treatment plant in Greenville Co. working towards testing for omicron variant
Sat, 11 Dec 2021 15:21
GREENVILLE CO. (WSPA)- A water treatment plant in Greenville Co. is working to find a way to test the omicron variant.
ReWa collects wastewater from residents in the county and sends off samples to test for COVID variants. They say they use the results to determine where the community stands with the virus.
ReWa has been collecting samples to test for COVID for the past year and a half. Now, they want to be able to detect the new omicron variant.
''Our partner lab, Bio Bot, is currently working with their research and development platform to determine if they can isolate this genetic sequence, to tell us if omicron, what percentage of the contribution to the virus concentration there is,'' said Cameron Colby, Water Quality and Sustainability Leader at ReWa.
Colby said they don't currently have the capability to this testing. She said some major setbacks are the lab getting funds and making sure their waste samples don't decompose.
''Identifying a sequence of RNA that is not going to decompose, or is stable in wastewater, that can also tell us which type of SARS-COV-2 variant we have, is a very challenging endeavor,'' said Colby.
Colby said even without being able to detect omicron, their data shows the extent of COVID-19 in the community.
''We just went through our third peak, attributable to the delta variant. We're seeing a pretty consistent, albeit slow, downward trend in our weekly average of data,'' she said.
She doesn't believe they have seen the omicron effect in Greenville.
''Any big departure has traditionally been indicative of a new variant strain that's come into play. We have not yet seen an uptick departure from our trend, in fact, we are seeing a downward trend in our concentrations,'' said Colby.
Colby said they will continue to look at the data and work toward their goal of detecting omicron.
She said the trends are still showing transmission and infection within the community, but it's lower than it's been recent months. She said they're also comparing their results with Clemson and pushing to have data publicly available on their website.
VIDEO - Brian Williams warns of darkness spreading during final broadcast as NBC anchor [Video]
Sat, 11 Dec 2021 15:16
After 28 years as an anchor with NBC networks, Brian Williams called it quits on Thursday during his MSNBC show The 11th Hour. While his final episode was filled with old colleagues and recurring guests celebrating his career and paying him lip service, his final message was filled with warning.
''My biggest worry is for my country,'' Williams said. ''I'm not a liberal or a conservative. I'm an institutionalist. I believe in this place. And in my love of my country I yield to no one, but the darkness on the edge of town has spread to roads and highways and neighborhoods.''
''Grown men and women who swore an oath to our constitution, elected by our constituents, possessing the kinds of college degrees I can only dream of have decided to join the mob and become something they are not, hoping we somehow forget who they were,'' Williams continued. ''They've decided to burn it all down with us inside. That should scare you to no end as much as it scares an aging volunteer fireman.''
While Williams made it clear he has no immediate plans post-MSNBC, he did leave the door open for a possible return to television at some point. He said, ''I will probably find it impossible to be silent and stay away from you and lights and cameras after I experiment with relaxation and find out what I've missed and what's out there.''
Williams's career as a journalist has been tumultuous towards the end. While anchor for NBC's flagship Nightly News, he was suspended and ultimately reassigned for exaggerating a harrowing helicopter ride in Iraq. Despite the professional setback, he is one of the more beloved anchors of the past 20 years. The mash-up raps of his from The Tonight Show have garnered tens of millions clicks online.
''As a proud New Jersey native, this is where I get to say, regrets, I've had a few, too few to mention,'' Williams said in his final minutes on the show. ''What a ride it's been. Where else, how else was a kid like me going to meet presidents and kings and the occasional rock star?''
The 11th Hour With Brian Williams aired weeknights at 11 p.m. on MSNBC.
Check out Vanna White's unconventional method of training Maggie Sajak to do her job:
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VIDEO - Telegram: Contact @SteelTruthChat
Sat, 11 Dec 2021 15:14
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