March 7th, 2021 • 3h 1m
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.
Let Us Out!
Blue-checks are afraid of life getting back to normal. Really. They are tweeting this to their followers right now. '' twitchy.com
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 13:27
Emily Ramshaw, co-founder and CEO of @19thnews, tweeted on Friday night that she ''panicked about life inching back toward 'normal''':
Suddenly, today, I panicked about life inching back toward ''normal.''
I don't want to travel endlessly for work. I don't want my weekends to be over-committed with activities. I don't want to miss bedtime with my kid. I don't want to wear blazers '-- or, hell, even shoes.
'-- Emily Ramshaw (@eramshaw) March 6, 2021
You see, there have been many ''liberating'' moments in the past year that counter all the truly awful parts:
This year has been heartbreaking, depressing, paralyzing '-- in almost every way.
But some things about it have also been liberating, and I have to figure out how to cling to those things in a vaccinated future '-- even when others expect me not to.
'-- Emily Ramshaw (@eramshaw) March 6, 2021
The NYT's Taylor Lorenz agrees:
The thought of going back to my old routine horrifies me https://t.co/gwxwaH4rIG
'-- Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) March 6, 2021
As does former HuffPost editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen:
Yes to this. A thousand times yes. https://t.co/dVLvRA9wOl
'-- Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) March 6, 2021
Security expert Garrett Graff says he's ''terrified about returning to the life I had pre-pandemic'':
I started to feel so much of this this week too. I want to travel and eat out so badly'--and yet am terrified about returning to the life I had pre-pandemic. https://t.co/ijRyah6jFm
'-- Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) March 6, 2021
Conservative Mindy Finn feels this way, too:
I feel this in every way. I finally cleaned out my closet of heels the other day and put my beloved slipper collection in their place. Then, I cried tears of joy.
'-- Mindy Finn (@mindyfinn) March 6, 2021
Since some of y'all have subscribed to this exchange, I'll add: I received slippers as birthday gifts from two different loved ones a couple of weeks ago, and I felt completely seen.
'-- Mindy Finn (@mindyfinn) March 6, 2021
And CNN's Brian Stelter says ''this is exactly where'' his wife is ''right now'':
this is exactly where @JamieStelter is right now, and i think it helps to hear other people say it too
'-- Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) March 6, 2021
With all due respect to all of these blue-checks, GTFOH.
***
Trust the science. You do know science is racist, right?
Equivalent of Covid emissions drop needed every two years - study | Greenhouse gas emissions | The Guardian
Fri, 05 Mar 2021 01:36
Carbon dioxide emissions must fall by the equivalent of a global lockdown roughly every two years for the next decade for the world to keep within safe limits of global heating, research has shown.
Lockdowns around the world led to an unprecedented fall in emissions of about 7% in 2020, or about 2.6bn tonnes of CO2, but reductions of between 1bn and 2bn tonnes are needed every year of the next decade to have a good chance of holding temperature rises to within 1.5C or 2C of pre-industrial levels, as required by the Paris agreement.
Research published on Wednesday shows that countries were beginning to slow their rates of greenhouse gas emissions before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, but not to the levels needed to avert climate breakdown. Since lockdowns were eased in many countries last year, there have been strong signs that emissions will rise again to above 2019 levels, severely damaging the prospects of fulfilling the Paris goals.
Corinne Le Qu(C)r(C), lead author of the study, said the world stood at a crucial point as governments poured money into the global economy to cope with the impacts of the pandemic. ''We need a cut in emissions of about the size of the fall [from the lockdowns] every two years, but by completely different methods,'' she said.
Governments must prioritise climate action in their efforts to recover from the pandemic, she said. ''We have failed to understand in the past that we can't have tackling climate change as a side issue. It can't be about one law or policy, it has to be put at the heart of all policy,'' she said. ''Every strategy and every plan from every government must be consistent with tackling climate change.''
The study joins other research showing that the drastic fall in greenhouse gas emissions associated with the pandemic will have little impact on long-term climate goals, and may be followed by a swift rebound unless countries take rapid action to direct their economies away from fossil fuels.
''There is a real contradiction between what governments are saying they are doing to do [to generate a green recovery], and what they are doing,'' said Le Qu(C)r(C). ''That is very worrisome.''
Glen Peters, of the Cicero centre for climate research in Norway, who co-authored the paper, said structural changes were needed to economies around the world to move away from fossil fuels and other high-carbon activities.
''Emissions were lower in 2020 as fossil fuel infrastructure was used less, not because infrastructure was closed down,'' he said. ''When fossil fuel infrastructure is put into use again, there is a risk of a big rebound in emissions in 2021, as was seen in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2009.''
The paper, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, shows that many of the world's major economies were reducing their emissions before the pandemic. The Global Carbon Project, a team of scientists from around the world, found that 64 countries had cut their emissions in the period between 2016 and 2019 compared with 2011 to 2015, but 150 countries showed an increase in emissions in the latter period.
Countries must urgently intensify their efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, said Le Qu(C)r(C). The study shows that the annual rate of emissions cuts must increase roughly tenfold from 160m tonnes a year in high-income countries before the pandemic struck.
In lower-income countries, there was no real slowdown in emissions between 2016 and 2019 compared with the previous two five-year periods. Such countries must also drastically slow their rate of emissions increase in the future if the Paris goals are to be met.
Joeri Rogelj, a lecturer in climate at Imperial College London who was not involved in the study, said governments were in danger of slipping back on their climate commitments as a result of the pandemic and the rush to restart stalled economies.
''Governments need to use their recovery stimulus in smart, future-proof ways [but] other analysis has shown very few governments are taking this opportunity,'' he said. ''Currently, the actions and investments of many governments in response to Covid-19 are driving emissions in the opposite direction.''
Dave Reay, a professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, also not involved in the study, said: ''Already there are signs that instead of build back better, it is more often a case of build back, whatever. If we are to have any chance of getting back on track to meet the Paris goals, the route out of the pandemic must be both global and green.''
Coronavirus Police Surveillance Tags Are Now Here: Hong Kong First To Deploy
Sat, 06 Mar 2021 13:31
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Mar 4, 2021, 03:13am EST
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Mar 3, 2021, 06:33am EST
Microsoft Issues Critical Update Warning As Chinese Hackers Attack Exchange Servers","scope":{"topStory":{"title":"Microsoft Issues Critical Update Warning As Chinese Hackers Attack Exchange Servers","uri":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2021/03/03/microsoft-issues-critical-update-warning-as-chinese-hackers-attack-exchange-servers/","date":{"monthDayYear":"Mar 3, 2021","hourMinute":"06:33","amPm":"am","isEDT":false},"index":3}},"id":"7eq7c0n8q02800"},{"textContent":"
Mar 3, 2021, 06:30am EST
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Mar 3, 2021, 05:48am EST
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Mar 2, 2021, 09:00am EST
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Mar 2, 2021, 05:31am EST
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German Court in Weimar Declares Lockdown Unconstitutional - Alliance for Human Research Protection
Sat, 06 Mar 2021 13:50
A LANDMARK legal decision declared that regional containment policies '' including lockdowns, social distancing, prohibitions on gatherings by family or friends) are UNCONSTITUTIONAL. The judge called the lockdowns a ''catastrophically wrong political decision with dramatic consequences for almost all areas of people's lives.''
The judge ruled that the government violated the ''inviolably guaranteed human dignity'' under basic German law. This momentous, affirmative, liberating decision was handed down by a court of law in Weimar, Germany; the city whose name was adopted by the first German republic: 1919'--1933, until it was overturned by the Nazi regime. Hundreds of thousands of German people have demonstrated throughout the summer and fall of 2020, some protesters compared their struggle to anti-Nazi resistance; which led Germany's Foreign Minister Heiko Maas to bristle.
Forensic analysis of official data convinced the court that the epidemic situation that was used to justify the lockdown laws does not exist. The judge ruled that the government lacked sufficient legal grounds to impose the restrictions since there was no ''epidemic situation of national importance.'' He declared that the measures were an attack on the ''foundations of our society.''
Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, the lawyer who initiated the first German and American complaints and procedures stated:
''We consider this judgment to be extraordinary and of fundamental importance. It is transferable to all violations of Covid19 measures. It is also transferable to the current Renewed Containment and all applicable coronavirus regulations. Because the ''numbers of cases'' are decreasing, as are patients in intensive care units! The judge confirms this with an excellent demonstration.''
The battle over government dictatorial overreach and the assault on the rights and dignity of citizens in a democracy will be won in the courts of law.
Below Dr. Nicole Del(C)pine, MD, provides an in-depth analysis of the body of evidence that supports this momentous decision. She notes that one factor that helped Germany resist the epidemic better than other countries '' such as France '' is probably due to the early treatment of patients with hydroxychloroquine, antibiotics, vitamins, etc. She concludes that This crisis is purely political with a health pretext.
* Dr. Del(C)pine is a member of the Distinguished Advisory Board of the Alliance for Human Research Protection.
Nicole Delepine, MD
After PCR tests, the principle of confinement condemned by justice. Published on 1/26/2021 3:50 PM
German court declares regional lockdown UNCONSTITUTIONAL, politically major decision
Author (s): Nicole Del(C)pine for FranceSoir
Tribune: German court declares regional containment UNCONSTITUTIONAL, politically major decision [1]
Will Weimar again be the site of legal revolutions as at the time when the constitution ending the empire was drawn up after the First World War? [2] In any case, the judgment declaring confinement unconstitutional caused a stir in Germany and gave rise to several articles. Let us hope that it will also awaken French consciences, giving them the courage to take legal action against these liberticidal and unjustified measures inspired by the WHO which guides our governments [3] and promises them financial aid via the IMF like the President of Belarus has clearly stated [4] .
The Weimar judgment considered major
The social distancing rules imposed by the Thuringian government are deemed incompatible with the country's Constitution. Thanks to forensic analysis of official data, the judgment affirms that the epidemic situation used to justify the law does not exist. The lawyer Reiner Fuellmich who initiated the first German and American complaints and procedures comments as follows [5] : '' We consider this judgment to be extraordinary and of fundamental importance. It is transferable to all violations of Covid19 measures. It is also transferable to the current Renewed Containment and all applicable coronavirus regulations. Because the ''numbers of cases'' are decreasing, as are patients in intensive care units! The judge confirms this with an excellent demonstration . ''
Story
On the occasion of a judgment of a man having according to the accusation ''violated'' (here is a very big word), the strict confinement imposed by the government of the central state of Thuringia last spring, the legality of the measures imposed in Germany to curb an epidemic of questionable severity is back in the headlines. This is all the more interesting given that some countries, including ours talk about containment while the epidemic is stagnating or decreasing, that there are effective early treatments and that the overwhelming majority of hospitals are not full, contrary to what our authorities announce here and there.
Facts
This gentleman had celebrated a birthday with his seven [6] friends. On 24.04.2020, the person concerned was in the evening with at least seven other people in the backyard of the house X-Strae 1 in W. to celebrate the birthday of one of the participants. The eight participants in total were distributed among seven different households. However, a stay in public space is only authorized alone, in the circle of members of his own household and, moreover, at most with another non-domestic person ''according to local regulations.
The Weimar judge condemned a restriction limiting private gatherings to members of the same household and to a person outside of the same household, a rule which the accused had not respected. The judge said that the regional government itself had violated the ''inviolably guaranteed human dignity'' guaranteed by Article 1 of the German Basic Law by imposing such restrictions.
The accused was acquitted and relieved of the need to pay a fine of 200 euros ($ 243).
No sufficient reason for confinement
According to the court, the government did not have sufficient grounds to impose these restrictions since there was no ''epidemic situation of national importance'' at the time and the health system was not at risk of failure. collapse, the Robert Koch Institute having reported that the multiplication coefficient of Covid-19 had then fallen below 1.
At no time is there any real danger that the health service will be overwhelmed by a ''wave'' of patients with COVID-19. According to the register established on March 17, 2020, an average of at least 40% of intensive care beds in Germany were permanently available. In Thuringia, 378 beds were registered occupied on April 3, 36 of which were in covid-19 patients. During this time, there were 417 vacant beds. On April 16, two days before the publication of the regulation, 501 beds were recorded occupied, 56 covid-19, and 528 beds were vacant '... Thuringia recorded its highest number of covid-19 patients notified in the spring at 63 (April 28). Thus, at no time has the number of patients with COVID-19 reached a level that could have justified fears of an overflow of the health system.
This estimate of the real dangers of COVID-19 in spring 2020 is confirmed by an assessment of data from 421 clinics belonging to the Qualit¤tsmedizin Initiative, which found that the number of cases of acute respiratory infections (severe ARI) hospitalized in Germany in first half of 2020 was 187,174 '' lower than the figure for the first half of 2019 (221,841 cases), even though that figure included cases of ARI caused by covid. The same analysis showed that the number of cases in intensive care was lower in the first half of 2020 than in 2019 '...
The judge also said that the regional government did not have the right to introduce such far-reaching measures since it was for the legislator to do so (parliament and not district courts).
The Weimar court said the spring containment of Thuringia was a ''catastrophically flawed policy decision, with dramatic consequences for almost every area of ''people's lives . '' [7]
Health situation and confinement: disproportionate decision
The confinement imposed in Thuringia represents ''the most complete and deepest restrictions on fundamental rights in the history of the Federal Republic, '' the court said, calling these measures a '' disproportionate '' attack against the '' foundations of our society. ''
Consequences of a regional ordinance
The decision is not legally binding outside of Weimar, although each German court can render a judgment on the constitutionality of orders issued by any authority other than the Bundestag, federal parliament or regional parliament. Unless a law has been passed, each court can contradict the regulations if they appear unjustified
Impact of the Weimar judgment among some officials and local media
Like the other countries submitted to the WHO's international health council, containment measures are regularly re-imposed, and clearly unrelated to the virulence of the epidemic, which varies depending on the region, but faithfully following Ferguson's scheme, which had been planned in March 2020 (report 9) the succession of six confinements, in order to be able to move on to the major reset planned by the economic and world forum in Davos (read Klaus Schwab's brief available on the internet of the same name ). This crisis is purely political with a health pretext.
Germany is once again applying strict containment quite similar to that imposed by the federal government in November and which has been extended and reinforced several times since then [8] . Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet extended the restrictions until mid-February.
Neil Ferguson Dire Prediction
Appeal of the region against the judgment of the Weimar court
The Thuringian Regional Public Prosecutor's Office lodged a complaint against the court decision, requesting that it be reconsidered and possibly overturned, with the case being handed over to another judge. The judgment must be ''revised to develop the law and ensure a unified jurisdiction'' regarding the containment and its violation, a spokesperson for the prosecutor's office, Hannes Gruenseisen, told local media.
Containment is going badly in Germany, especially since the country has resisted the epidemic much better than France, probably due to the early and discreet treatment of patients with hydroxychloroquine, antibiotics and vitamins, etc., from the start, isolation patients, and consequently suffers [9] a lower mortality rate (622 / million at 26/1, according to the WHO. France on the contrary has prohibited early treatment and practiced so-called blind confinement because mixing patients and healthy leading to an explosion of direct (1113 / M) and indirect mortality due to lack of care and other complications of confinement.
image2.jpg
Comparison of Mortality '-- France vs Germany
Germany has seen protests against this measure on several occasions in various cities during the fall and winter of 2020. At one point, protesters even compared their struggle to anti-Nazi resistance, which did not go over well with Germany's Foreign Minister Heiko Maas.
Rationale for quashing the charge
The person concerned had to be acquitted for legal reasons because the articles on which the accusation was based are unconstitutional and therefore canceled. [10]
The court itself decided on the constitutionality of the norms, since the obligation of submission according to the consistent case law of the Federal Constitutional Court applies only to official federal and state laws, but not to district statutory orders.
''Judgment is powerful [11] :
The judge concluded that there were no ''unacceptable gaps in protection'' that could have justified resorting to general regulations. These measures ''violate the inviolable guaranteed human dignity'' in article 1, paragraph 1 of the Federal Constitution. ''
''Devastating accusation against the federal government .
It is striking how coldly Judge Weimar concluded this months-long discussion: the blanket contact ban is a harsh civil rights intervention. It is part of the fundamental freedoms of the individual in a free society to determine for himself with whom (on presumption of consent) and under what circumstances he or she will come into contact.
The free encounter between people for all conceivable ends is also a fundamental basis for society.
The state's obligation in this case is categorically to refrain from any intervention that deliberately regulates and limits that measure. Questions of how many people a citizen can invite to their home or how many people a citizen can meet in a public place to walk, play sports, run errands or sit on a park bench have absolutely no legitimate interest for the state.
By imposing a blanket ban on contact, the state '' albeit with good intentions '' attacks the foundations of society by imposing physical distance between citizens (''social distancing'').
No one, even in January 2020, could have imagined, in Germany, to be prevented by the state under penalty of a fine from inviting their parents to their home without banning other members of their family from the house, while that they were there. No one could have imagined that it would be forbidden to sit with three friends on a park bench. Never before in Germany had the state had the idea of ''imposing such measures to counter an epidemic.
Even the 2013 risk analysis ''Pandemic caused by the SARS-like virus'' (Bundestag publication 17/12051), which described a scenario of 7.5 million deaths in 3 years, does not consider a general ban on contacts (or ban on leaving home or general suspension of public life). Besides the quarantine and isolation of infected people, the only anti-epidemic measures he speaks of are the closure of schools, the cancellation of mass events and the question of hygiene recommendations (BT 17/12051, p . 61f).
''Although it appears that a shift in values ''has taken place over the months of the Covid crisis, with the consequence that many people find procedures once considered absolutely exceptional more or less 'normal' '' which, of course, also changes the outlook on the Constitution '' there is no doubt that by imposing a blanket contact ban, the democratic parliament has broken what was previously considered an obvious taboo.
''It should also be noted '' as an aspect worthy of special attention '' that the state, by imposing its general ban on contact in order to protect itself against infection, treats every citizen as a potential health threat. of third parties. If every citizen is seen as a threat from which others must be protected, that citizen is also deprived of the possibility of deciding what risks to take '' which is a fundamental freedom.
A citizen's choice to visit a cafe or bar at night and run the risk of respiratory infection in the name of social interaction and fun in life, or to exercise caution because he has a weakened immune system and therefore prefers to stay at home, is suppressed under the provisions of a general contact ban. ''
The report then details the judge's examination of the collateral damage caused by the confinement.
'' Declines in profits, losses suffered by companies, traders and independent professionals as direct consequences of the restrictions imposed on their freedoms. Losses for suppliers of directly affected companies; losses resulting from disruption of supply chains leading to production stoppages; losses resulting from travel restrictions.
-Wage losses due to reduced hours or unemployment
'' Bankruptcies and destruction of livelihoods and consequent costs of bankruptcies and destruction of livelihoods ''.
For Berlin, the Senate administration reported a 23% increase in child abuse for the first half of 2020 [12] .
According to a representative survey (Steinert / Ebert), during the spring confinement period, around 3 percent of women in Germany were victims of physical violence at home, 3.6 percent were raped by their partner, and in 6 , 5 percent of all children's homes were severely punished.
The number of statistically recorded suicides in Germany is not yet available for 2020, but the Senate administration in Berlin has reported a potentially significant increase in the number of suicides.
During the spring containment, more than 908,000 operations were canceled in Germany, not only so-called non-emergency operations, such as implantation of knee and hip joint prostheses, knee arthroscopy, cataract surgeries, etc., but also 52,000 cancer operations. [13]
According to a meta-analysis published (British Medical Journal) in November [14] this delay already increases the risk of death by 6 to 13% depending on the type of cancer, an eight week delay for breast cancer of 13%, a twelve-week deferral of 26 percent. Without being able to quantify in more detail, there is no doubt that the cancellation of the operations also resulted in deaths in Germany.
A study conducted by the Clinique du Haut-Rhin Waldshut-Tiengen [15] examined excess mortality in the district of Waldshut (170,000 inhabitants) in April 2020. On average, 165 people died there between 2016 and 2019 in April, compared to 227. in 2020, an excess mortality of 37%. Of the 62 additional deaths, only 34 could be associated with covid19, 28, or 45% of excess mortality are due to other causes of death . The study authors attribute these cases to reduced use of emergency medical facilities. Twice as many people have been found dead in their homes than the comparative average. These figures indicate that deaths are due to underutilization or delay in the use of health care.
Short, medium and long term damages were pointed out by the court
(1) Loss of schooling, teaching and impairment of psychosocial development of children due to failure or restrictions of school education or closure of other educational institutions
(2) Loss of cultural suggestions or experiences due to the closure of theaters, concert halls or opera houses and many other cultural institutions
(3) Loss of possibilities for artistic development by prohibitions which prohibit common music in orchestras or choirs.
(4) loss of community experiences / personal social cohabitation by banning meetings in associations, demonstrations, gatherings, closing bars, etc.
(5) Reduction of social development opportunities for children by closing kindergartens
(6) Isolation of children in accommodation without contact with other children by closing schools, kindergartens and play areas
The judgment report emphasizes that school is not only a place for the transmission of knowledge, but a place of social learning. School closures virtually suppress social learning and hinder the integration of children and young people.
Teaching by parents is difficult, particularly in certain disadvantaged areas. The social divide is therefore reinforced. The learning of German among children of migrant families is also seriously disrupted. ''Knowledge of German? Catastrophic for a third of the pupils [16] .
Economic consequences of containment According to the Weimar judgment, we note
''(1) Aid provided by the Federal State and the L¤nder to economic agents
(2) Tax losses due to the limitation of economic activity due to confinement
(3) Partial unemployment benefits and unemployment benefits that had to be paid following confinement
(4) Social assistance for people dependent on social assistance
The ''coronavirus shield'', a legislative package adopted on March 27, 2020, in Germany alone represented 1.173 billion euros (353.3 billion euros in aid, 819.7 billion euros in guarantees). The latest federal budgets were 356.4 billion euros (2019) and 346.6 billion euros (2018). Even if the guarantees provided are not per se ''lost'', the overall charges are expected to reach the aggregate level of several federal budgets.
Health and economic damage in southern countries secondary to confinements in rich western countries
The collateral damage already occurred or to be expected is enormous. The reasons are the interruption of tuberculosis control programs, childhood disease immunization programs, interruptions in food supply due to collapsed supply chains, etc.
The UN predicts the famine of more than 10,000 children per month during the first year of the pandemic (more than 10,000 children die of hunger each month due to covid19 [17]
In Africa alone, according to Federal Development Minister M¼ller, 400,000 additional victims are expected from malaria and HIV and half a million deaths from tuberculosis as a result of confinement (more victims by confinement than by virus: In Africa, crises have been dramatically worsened, according to an article by John Ioannidis [18] 1.4 million more deaths from tuberculosis are even expected over the next five years .
In the long term, containment-related excess mortality will likely be significantly larger than the death toll from COVID 19.
Since the containment policy in Thuringia is part of a general policy of almost all western industrialized countries, this damage is the indirect consequence also attributable to the pro rata and is therefore in principle linked to the examination of proportionality .
For this reason alone, the standards to be assessed here do not meet the requirement of proportionality. Added to this are the direct and indirect restrictions on freedom, gigantic financial damage, immense damage to health and spiritual damage.
The word '' disproportionate '' is too colorless to indicate the dimensions of what happened. The containment policy implemented by the Land government in the spring (and today again), of which the general ban on contact was (and remains) essential, is a catastrophic political error, with dramatic consequences for almost all sectors of human life, for society, for the State and for the countries of the South of the whole world ''.
Constitutionality of standards
In the case of legal ordinances which have not been adopted by the Bundestag or a regional parliament, each court is authorized to decide for itself their constitutionality. The articles cited [19] by the prosecution are not constitutional, because they are not based on a law passed in parliament.
They are unconstitutional for formal reasons, as provisions which deeply infringe on fundamental rights are not covered by the legal enabling basis in the Infection Protection Act.
The legislator must himself take all the essential decisions in fundamental normative fields, in particular in the field of the exercise of fundamental rights '' insofar as this state regulation is accessible '' and must not delegate them to the executive. regional.
The more essential legal regulations or other executive acts interfere with fundamental rights, the more specific the provisions of the implementing law must be.
Attack on human dignity
Thus with regard to isolation and prohibition of contact with people outside the family, a general prohibition of contact poses '' at least '' the question of the violation of the guarantee of human dignity.
Here the prohibition poses a problem because it constitutes a serious attack on the general freedom of action and also on the freedom of assembly, association, religion, profession and art, not only because it is addressed to all citizens, regardless of whether or not they are suspected of disease or contamination.
By prohibiting all citizens from meeting with more than one person outside the household, by prohibiting it not only in the public space, but also in freedoms in the family nucleus, the general prohibition of contact inevitably leads to other restrictions on fundamental rights.
Federal law provides that if persons suspected of disease, contamination of a communicable disease have been identified, the restriction can only be taken ''to the extent necessary to prevent the spread of the disease'', the latter not being nothing more than an explicit reference to the principle of proportionality already in force.
These are only absolute minimum conditions. The law can only carry individual measures, such as the closure of (individual) seaside resorts and not a general ban on contact.
To the extent that a general contact ban can be constitutionally compliant, at least precise regulation of the organizational conditions should be required in order to concretize precisely the necessary dangerous situation, but concrete provisions would also be necessary from the point of view legal consequences.
The principle of the rule of law is the imperative of precision in legislation. Laws cannot simply impose general regulations, which would give the authorities the license to act on whims, which would amount to an arbitrary rule.
According to the Federal Infection Protection Act (API), ''competent authorities'' must impose ''the required security measures''. Normally, this means that spreaders or those suspected of spreading infection may be placed isolated or contaminated areas closed.
The more a legal act of the executive intervenes in fundamental rights, the more the regulations of the enabling law must be PRECISE.
Intervention-intensive measures which, in themselves, require a specific regime, can only be authorized in the context of ''unforeseen developments'' using general clauses, this condition is not fulfilled as it stands.
Responsible local containment in proportion to the consequences in industrialized countries, linked to the proportionality test .
''There is no doubt that the number of deaths attributable to the measures of the containment policy exceeds by several times the number of deaths avoided by it. For this reason alone, the standards to be assessed here do not meet the requirement of proportionality. Added to this are the direct and indirect restrictions on freedom, gigantic financial damage, immense damage to health and spiritual damage''.
The word ''disproportionate'' is too colorless to indicate the dimensions of what happened.
[1] Un tribunal allemand d(C)clare le confinement r(C)gional INCONSTITUTIONNEL dans une d(C)cision politiquement explosive>> (exoportail.com)
[2] Nom donn(C) au r(C)gime de l'Allemagne apr¨s la Premi¨re Guerre mondiale (1919-1933).
N(C)e de l'effondrement du r(C)gime imp(C)rial, la premi¨re r(C)publique allemande, proclam(C)e par le social-d(C)mocrate Scheidemann Berlin, le 9 novembre 1918, ne prend forme qu'apr¨s l'(C)crasement de la r(C)volution spartakiste (novembre 1918-janvier 1919). Elle tire son nom de la ville o¹ se r(C)unit en f(C)vrier 1919 une Assembl(C)e nationale domin(C)e par les sociaux-d(C)mocrates et les mod(C)r(C)s, dont les travaux aboutissent la promulgation (ao>>t 1919) d'une Constitution qui fait de l'Allemagne un tat f(C)d(C)ral, le Reich, compos(C) de 17 tats (L¤nder) autonomes, eux-mªmes repr(C)sent(C)s au Reichsrat.
Encyclop(C)die Larousse en ligne '' R(C)publique de Weimar
[3] Le conseil mondial de l'OMS dicte tr¨s officiellement la conduite sanitaire des pays signataires dont la France (francesoir.fr)
[4] 950 Millions d'euros lui furent promis s'il confinait son pays. Il a dit non et racont(C) que d'autres pays avaient refus(C) mais soup§onnait que les plus ob(C)issants avaient c(C)d(C) au mirage de l'argent facile.
[5] Tribunal d'instance Weimar 6 OWi-523 Js 202518/20 : Free Download, Borrow, Streaming : Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/tribunal-dinstance-weimar-6-owi-523-js-202518-20 via
@internetarchive
[6] pas une rave partie 2000 qui au passage n'a d'ailleurs pas entrain(C) aucune vague de malades du Covid, ni mªme de pouss(C)e de contaminations, ni le moindre cluster
[7] Tribunal d'instance Weimar, jugement du 11.01.2021 '' 6 OWi-523 Js 202518/20 from ditions D(C)dicaces https://www.rt.com/news/513443-german-court-covid-unconstitutional/ et https://openjur.de/u/2316798.html
[8] N(C)anmoins toujours moins rigide qu'en France
[9] Nous n'en avons eu confirmation que tr¨s tardivement
[10] Le tribunal a d(C)cid(C) lui-mªme de la constitutionnalit(C) des normes, car l'obligation de soumission selon l'article 100 Abs.1 GG selon la jurisprudence constante de la Cour constitutionnelle f(C)d(C)rale (BVerfG, arrªts du 20 mars 1952, 1 BvL 12/51, 1 BvL 15/51, 1 BvL 16/51, 1 BvL 24/51, 1 BvL 28/51) s'applique uniquement aux lois officielles f(C)d(C)rales et des tats, mais pas aux ordonnances statutaires.
[11] 2020news traduction de Northumbrian Nomad
[12] Le niveau journalier du 02.07.2020, https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/corona-krise-trifft-frauen-und-kinder-besonders-gewalt-eskaliert-in-berlin-immer-haeufiger/25970410.html).
[13] https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article208557665/Wegen-Corona-In-Deutschland-wurden-908-000-OPs-aufgeschoben.html).
[14] Hanna, Mortality due to cancer treatment delay: systematic review and meta-analysis, BMJ 2020, 371, https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4087)
[15] (Kort¼m, Corona-Independent Excess Mortality Due to Reduced Use of Emergency Medical Care in the Corona Pandemic: A Population-Based Observational Study, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.27.20220558v1)
[16] >>. MONDE du 11.01.2021, https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/plus224000152/Geschlossene-Schulen-Was-das-fuer-Kinder-in-sozialen-Brennpunkten-bedeutet.html),
[17] https://rp-online.de/panorama/coronavirus/mehr-als-10000-kinder-verhungern-jeden-monat-krise-durch-corona-verschaerft_aid-52446949).
[18] Global perspective of COVID-19 epidemiology for a full-cycle pandemic, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13423),
[19] III.L'article 2, paragraphe 1, et l'article 3, paragraphe 3, paragraphe 1, 3. Th¼rSARS-CoV-2-EindmanVO
Masks and Muzzles
CamB on why women want masks to stay
I may have an answer regarding unnecessary mask wearing and why women are overrepresented. It's about the face makeup. I found this out in Japan pre-covid, I asked a local why there were so many women who wore masks on trains as opposed to the men, the woman I was with told me it was because they couldn't be bothered doing their face makeup for the morning and were just running errands which didn't require them to take off the mask
Texas Gold's Gym locations won't require masks for members, will reopen at 100% capacity next week | KXAN Austin
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 10:30
Gym equipment (KXAN Photo/Todd Bailey)
AUSTIN (KXAN) '-- Members won't have to wear masks in Gold's Gym locations in Texas once the statewide mask mandate is lifted next week, according to an email announcement from the company.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott put out new orders Tuesday which will lift the mandate and allow businesses to open at 100% capacity starting Wednesday, March 10.
While masks won't be a requirement for members, the company is still encouraging gym-goers to follow recommendations from public health officials. Employees will still be required to don a face-covering while at work, though.
The gym will also be expanding capacity to 100% on Wednesday.
''This will allow us to make additional spots available in our group exercise, group cycle and STUDIO classes as well as reopen some of our temporarily closed amenities,'' the email from Gold's Gym states.
Those temporarily-closed amenities include the basketball and racquetball courts, locker room saunas, and locker room hot tubs. Kid's Clubs and most pools will still be closed.
Beginning Wednesday, March 10, members will no longer be required to wear masks, though we strongly encourage everyone to continue to follow all recommendations from public health officials '' including wearing a mask and physical distancing '' to protect yourself and others while in the gym.
-Gold's GymThorough cleaning and regular sanitization of 'high-touch surfaces' will continue at all locations.
The only location that will still follow strict COVID-19 protocols is the Gold's Gym at the San Antonio Medical Center, since it is located on that campus, according to the email.
Gold's Gym acknowledges some members might not agree with the changes and have given them the option to freeze their membership for up to three months. You must contact your gym directly by going in person or by phone or email.
As of March 3, the YMCA of Austin is still requiring its members to wear masks, according to this online release. Masks must be worn at all times unless you're in the pool. This goes for YMCA locations Austin and Travis and Hays Counties.
Merkel's party slumps in polls as mask purchase scandal widens
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 11:32
Georg Nulein. Photo: DPA
AFP
news@thelocal.com
7 March 2021 | 11:35 CET
Support for German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative bloc hit a one-year low on Sunday, a key survey showed, hammered by growing anger over a sluggish vaccine rollout and a mask-procurement scandal. Merkel's CDU/CSU bloc fell to 32 percent in a survey carried out by the Kantar institute for Bild newspaper, a two-percent drop on last week that pushes Germany's biggest political force to its lowest level since March 2020.
''There are many reasons for the decline, and they all have to do with the pandemic,'' said Bild.
The slump is bad news for the conservatives ahead of regional elections in the states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Wuerttemberg on March 14.
READ ALSO: Supermarkets sell out of home tests hours after they go on sale
The two polls are being closely watched as a test of the national mood ahead of a general election on September 26 '-- which will be the first in over 15 years not to feature outgoing chancellor Merkel.
Merkel's centre-right CDU and their Bavarian CSU sister party hit a popularity peak of nearly 40 percent last spring, when Germany won plaudits at home and abroad for successfully suppressing the first Covid-19 wave.
(article continues below)
See also on The Local:But Europe's top economy was hit hard by a second wave at the end of 2020 and Merkel's coalition government has increasingly found itself in the firing line.
Despite months of painful shutdowns, the country's infection numbers have stopped falling in recent days.
The slow pace of Germany's vaccination campaign, snarled by distribution issues and red tape, as well as a delayed start to mass rapid coronavirus testing have further eroded confidence in the government's crisis management.
Adding to Merkel's woes is a growing scandal linked to the procurement of face masks early on in the pandemic.
A CSU lawmaker, Georg Nuesslein, was last month placed under investigation for bribery following accusations that he accepted some 600,000 euros to lobby for a mask supplier.
A similar controversy has embroiled CDU lawmaker Nicolas Loebel whose company took a 250,000 commission for acting as an intermediary in mask contracts. Loebel announced on Sunday that he was bowing out of politics.
Vaccines and such
Alessandro FB deplatforming over JJ post
Jabbin' Joe Biden
I'll consider the vaccine once its been approved by the FDA
How to Deal with Crushing Vaccine Jealousy
Fri, 05 Mar 2021 16:48
Kemal Yildirim | Getty Images
How to Stay In is a series about redefining "normal" life in order to take care of ourselves and one another during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It wasn't long after healthcare workers began receiving their first shots that Alex Soybel started seeing the vaccine selfies. The 25-year-old is in the process of applying for medical school, so her feeds were especially rife with uplifting messages from healthcare workers urging their followers to get vaccinated.
Soybel was conflicted. Getting shots into as many arms as possible is a good thing , she knew. But she couldn't help feeling frustrated whenever she saw a politician or medical professional who didn't interact with patients boast about their vaccination'--and post-vaccine vacations'--on social media when Soybel, who has a chronic illness, and her close friend, who is a cancer survivor, had to wait to get their vaccines.
''When I get on Instagram and see non-patient-facing medical professionals traveling out of the country post-vaccination, or going out to restaurants every night, it definitely is frustrating,'' Soybel said. ''My friend spent her teens with cancer, in the hospital, then isolating since she didn't have an immune system, only to be forced back indoors from a pandemic that will almost certainly kill her. A vaccine is her life'--it's not an indoor dining experience or a trip overseas.''
Despite a rocky start, vaccine distribution is gaining momentum. With three vaccines currently available in the U.S. and a slowly widening pool of people eligible for a jab, some folks further down the list are feeling the sting of vaccine FOMO. As peers and family members resume normal life, they're left in limbo, bitterly awaiting their chance to join the club.
While a typical fear of missing out hinges on the negative feelings , like regret and jealousy, associated with seeing other people having fun without you, vaccine FOMO includes a more complex range of emotions. For example, seeing that a friend was vaccinated can add to your own anxiety about potentially catching covid-19, or elicit sadness if you've lost someone to the virus. ''You can probably experience, depending on your perspective, frustration, anger, and maybe even disgust,'' Kevin Chapman , a therapist and founder of the Kentucky Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders told VICE.
Although these emotions can be uncomfortable, addressing them head-on is the way to go'--otherwise, you'll spend the next 3''6 months carrying around a mountain of frustration, which will start to gnaw away at your relationships and mental health. Here's how to handle your vaccine FOMO while you wait your turn for a jab.
Accept your emotions'--but don't get stuck in them.
Sure, there are emotions that make us feel great and ones that bring us down, but this doesn't mean some feelings are good and some are bad. All emotions, from grief to happiness, serve a purpose and aim to tell you something, Chapman said. Vaccine FOMO is no different. By accepting the frustration or even resentment at having not yet received the vaccine, you have more control over how you navigate those feelings.
However, try not to spend too much time ruminating on your negative emotions . Thoughts like ''I'm never going to get vaccinated'' are too rigid: You'll continue to feel miserable because the future you've imagined is steeped in disappointment. Saying ''I'm frustrated I can't get vaccinated and that's OK'--my time will come'' instead gives you permission to feel shitty while remaining realistic, since by all accounts, vaccines will be available to anyone who wants them this summer .
If you feel ashamed of your anger or judgment toward those getting vaccinated, make a point to be extra compassionate with yourself, Moe Brown , a licensed marriage and family therapist, told VICE. Vaccine FOMO ''can feel like grief, it can feel like loss, it can feel like rejection,'' they said. ''I encourage people to practice compassion and gratitude, not just for the things that you have, but for the fact that your body has fared you up until this point, gratitude for all the ways you have been able to provide [during] this pandemic.''
Focus on what you can control in the present moment.
Vaccine FOMO became real for Jacob Shamsian, a senior legal reporter at Insider, once his wife (a teacher), his grandparents, and his friends who work in healthcare all got their shots. Contrary to regular FOMO, which he could control by accepting more concert or party invitations, doing anything about his vaccine status is out of his grasp. ''It's not up to me whether I get a vaccine today or tomorrow,'' the 27-year-old told VICE. ''It's not like I have any way to change this, so I'm just going give myself permission to wallow in the delays here.''
Instead of thinking about all the things you can't control, put your energy toward things you can, like getting better masks for this final stretch, planning some safe activities to look forward to this spring, staying off of social media, tackling your mounting reading list, and safely maintaining interpersonal relationships, Brown said. Even appreciating a good meal can be a way to keep you grounded in the moment. You can easily get bogged down thinking about events in the past or future, Chapman said, when what's important is remaining vigilant'--staying healthy and safe in the present so you can make it to that future.
Be open and honest about the ways in which you're struggling.
After Brown's partner was inoculated, leaving Brown to grapple with a touch of vaccine FOMO, the couple had a conversation to figure out what it meant to be in a half-vaccinated relationship. ''I understand you have the vaccine, but this doesn't mean that I can now just change the course of how we live for the foreseeable future,'' Brown told their partner. ''I'm not able to change my habits. I can't travel.''
If your vaccinated parents keep sending you Airbnb listings hinting at a summer vacation, you can ask them to hold off since you're still unsure when you'll get your shot. Or make a point to propose outdoor masked plans with your vaccinated friends, and let them know you're worried about being left behind. It might feel awkward in the moment, but have the hard conversations and be honest about where your mix of frustration, jealousy, or resentment may stem from.
One caveat: While it might feel therapeutic to commiserate with a friend who's also feeling vaccine FOMO, don't allow yourselves to constantly feed into each other's misery, Chapman said. ''Being around other people and having a community of friends is a way to facilitate positive emotions,'' he said. ''On the other hand, misery loves company. And that can backfire if I'm around the wrong people.'' So be careful who you're venting to, and seek out friends who will validate your FOMO but still assure you of the reality: You will get through this.
Remember, we're all in the same boat.
When resources are scarce, those who are left out may feel unimportant or bitter'--which are valid reactions'--and quicker to make judgments about peers getting vaccinated, suspecting they didn't wait their turn or perhaps don't ''deserve'' it as much as other people
. And given the reality of the pandemic, where rich and powerful people were the first to receive access to testing, adequate masks, and now, occasionally, vaccines , it's natural to feel like the pandemic has created a new class system, Brown said.
When these thoughts arise, turn to compassion instead of criticism. Try drawing on similarities between you and the people you're annoyed with by explicitly using the phrase ''just like me,'' Brown said. Just like me, this person has a family they are worried about. Just like me, they felt excited to get their vaccine and to share a selfie of it. Just like me, they're a human who wants to feel safe in the pandemic.
A product of our ever-changing times, vaccine FOMO doesn't have to be a mood killer. Soybel, the med school hopeful, said she counters her FOMO by virtually teaching students about the pandemic, answering any questions they have about the virus and vaccine. There are times when she gets frustrated by the inoculation process, but then she remembers there's no perfect method for a phased rollout that doesn't leave certain populations in the lurch. Someone has to be at the end of the list, after all. Until it's her turn, Soybel is focusing on the positive side of staying home: ''Just reminding myself that I know I'm doing my part.''
Follow Allie Volpe on Twitter.
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Pfizer CEO's Israel visit cancelled because he is unvaccinated - report - The Jerusalem Post
Sat, 06 Mar 2021 12:39
Bourla said in December that he has not yet received the vaccine yet because he does not want to "cut in line." Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla introduces US President Joe Biden as the president toured a Pfizer manufacturing plant producing the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine in Kalamazoo, Michigan, US, February 19, 2021.
(photo credit: REUTERS/TOM BRENNER)
Pfizer CEO
Albert Bourla has cancelled his expected visit to Israel, after it turned out he was not vaccinated against coronavirus, N12 reported Friday.
The report noted that Bourla, as well as members of the delegation that was meant to accompany him during his visit, have not received the second dose of the vaccine.
As a result, it was decided to delay the visit by several days, which also posed a logistic challenge because of the upcoming Israeli elections.
Bourla said in December that he has not yet received the vaccine yet because he does not want to "cut in line," and would wait until his age group is next in line for getting vaccinated. As such, he has received the first dose, but not the second one yet.
Pfizer did not respond to
The Jerusalem Post's request for comment.
"We continue to be interested in visiting Israel and meeting with decision-makers," a Pfizer spokesperson told N12. "The visit to Israel will probably be scheduled toward the end of spring."
Bourla made headlines last week when in an interview given to NBC News he referred to Israel as the "world's lab" when it comes to coronavirus vaccine rollout, noting that "they are only using our vaccine."
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if(window.location.pathname.indexOf("656089") != -1){console.log("hedva connatix");document.getElementsByClassName("divConnatix")[0].style.display ="none";}When asked whether one could infect others after receiving two doses of the vaccine, he said: "It is something that needs to be confirmed, and the real-world data that we are getting from Israel and other studies will help us understand this better."
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San Diego Zoo vaccinates apes against COVID-19 - The San Diego Union-Tribune
Sat, 06 Mar 2021 13:47
Nine great apes at the San Diego Zoo are the first non-human primates to receive an experimental COVID-19 vaccine, zoo officials said Thursday.
Four orangutans and five bonobos have been vaccinated so far, with the zoo planning to immunize another three bonobos and a gorilla soon. These species, along with chimpanzees, are the closest cousins to humans, placing them at risk of contracting a virus that has spread rapidly from person to person.
Case in point: In mid-January, the Safari Park reported that its troop of eight gorillas developed COVID-19 after exposure to a keeper who had the virus, even though the employee had no symptoms and wore protective equipment.
''That made us realize that our other apes were at risk,'' said Nadine Lamberski, chief conservation and wildlife health officer for the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. ''We wanted to do our best to protect them from this virus because we don't really know how it's going to impact them.''
Many of the zoo's veterinarians and other staffers who work with animals have now been vaccinated against the coronavirus, but Lamberski says that wasn't the case in January.
At the time, she was already in touch with Zoetis, an animal health company once part of Pfizer. The company is developing a vaccine for animals that sparks immunity against the coronavirus by delivering a piece of the surface protein the virus uses to grab onto and infect cells. That's the same approach Novavax is using in a human COVID-19 vaccine that could be cleared for use in the U.S. in the coming months.
Zoetis had been testing its vaccine in minks, cats and dogs, says Lamberski, and it had about 27 doses to spare.
Those doses weren't authorized for use in people. So the zoo decided to use them on their apes, calculating that the dangers of using a vaccine that hadn't been tested on primates were outweighed by the risk of the animals contracting COVID-19.
UC San Diego zoologist Pascal Gagneux, an expert on primate evolution, thinks that was the right call.
''It makes quite a bit of sense. These animals are incredibly precious,'' he said. ''There's a very finite number of great apes in captivity.''
Gagneux says there are less than 200 bonobos in zoos around the world, and that the species is more closely related to people than they are to gorillas, underscoring their potential vulnerability to COVID-19.
Zoo staff inoculated the apes between late January and early February with two doses of the Zoetis vaccine, three weeks apart. These were voluntary injections. In other words, the animals had to willingly sit down, keep still and let a zookeeper prick them with a needle.
No big deal, right?
In fact, the zoo's apes are used to receiving flu and measles vaccines.
Some of the younger and more energetic apes, however, have been less keen to sit through getting their shots. Lamberski says staff will try again when the animals are more comfortable rather than risk any complications from anesthetizing them.
She adds that most of the animals haven't had any visible side effects. One or two, though, have rubbed their head or the area around where they got the injection.
It's hard to know for certain whether those behaviors had any link to the shot, but a bit of soreness and itchiness around an injection site is a common vaccine side effect. So is a headache.
Two of the vaccinated animals '-- one orangutan and one bonobo '-- have had blood samples taken since they've been inoculated, which will allow scientists to measure their level of antibodies: Y-shaped immune proteins that can latch onto a virus and prevent infection.
''This is a really precious opportunity to observe what happens to endangered great apes when they're vaccinated to a potentially important disease,'' Gagneux said. ''Nothing prevents COVID-19 from starting to infect the wild populations.''
New mRNA Cancer Drivers Revealed in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia | GenomeWeb
Sat, 06 Mar 2021 13:52
NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) '' New evidence has emerged today showing that the inactivation or alteration of cancer suppressor genes can take place even if DNA itself remains unaltered.
Reporting in Nature, investigators demonstrated that changes in mRNA due to a process called intronic polyadenylation (IPA) can drive development of some cancers by altering gene expression in a way that interferes with the proper functioning of tumor suppression mechanisms.
Led by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center molecular biologist Christine Mayr, the study involved sequencing normal and cancerous cells from a small cohort of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which revealed that IPA-driven mRNA changes do take place, and that '-- at least in this cancer type '-- can occur much more frequently than corresponding mutations in DNA.
A known molecular mechanism for cancer development and spread is the inactivation of tumor suppressor genes, which encode various tools the body uses to keep its cells from turning cancerous.
But evidence is building that the hobbling of tumor suppressors can take place not just due to changes in the DNA itself, but by alterations in messenger RNAs, which act as a go-between, translating the DNA code into its intended function in the body.
The implication of such findings is that cancer diagnostics that look only at DNA could be missing important molecular information about the forces driving the disease.
"Current cancer diagnostic efforts predominantly focus on the sequencing of DNA to identify mutations," Mayr said in a statement. "Our study demonstrates that cancer-gained changes in mRNA processing can essentially mimic the effects of somatic mutations in DNA, pointing to the need to look past DNA for answers to questions about what causes the disease."
In the study, Mayr and her colleagues used an RNA sequencing method they developed to examine normal and malignant B cells from 59 CLL patients. They found that the patients showed widespread tumor suppressor inactivation in mRNA even without a corresponding DNA alteration
According to the investigators, IPA truncated mRNAs in the CLL cohort predominantly affected genes with tumor-suppressive functions. In some cases (genes such as DICER and FOXN3) this appeared to result in the translation of truncated proteins which lack the tumor-suppressive effect that they would have in their full-length form. In several other cases (CARD11, MGA and CHST11) the altered proteins even acted in an oncogenic manner.
Overall, the team concluded that the inactivation of tumor-suppressor genes by aberrant mRNA processing appears to be significantly more prevalent in CLL, at least based on this cohort, than functional loss of these genes via DNA mutations.
The authors also reported that they saw truncated tumor-suppressor proteins not just for known tumor-suppressor genes but also in previously unrecognized or relatively understudied sequences.
Although the current study was in CLL, mRNA tumor drivers are likely not limited to this cancer, the authors wrote. The team has also found them in cases of T cell acute lymphocytic leukemia, for example. And other groups have reported similar findings in breast cancer.
In the case of CLL, the authors wrote that the findings help explain the puzzling fact that CLL cells have relatively few known DNA mutations.
According to the investigators, most CLL patients have either a single alteration or a normal karyotype. In light of this paucity of cancer drivers on the DNA level, the MSKCC authors wrote that the mRNA changes they investigated could potentially help scientists better understand the genesis and progression of the disease in greater numbers of patients.
Regardless, the team wrote that the results, coupled with growing evidence in other cancers, suggests that genetic testing that is limited to DNA may risk missing important information about the mechanisms that drive a cancer or that may be exploited to defeat it.
L¼beck Immunisation against Corona | Prof. Dr. Winfried St¶cker
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 13:34
In the past, an extremely powerful research & development division was built up in the Company Euroimmun under my direction, which is also involved in the diagnostics of infectious diseases. Our scientists were among the first to develop reagents for the identification of a whole range of newly emerging infections, often in close cooperation with specialists from international research institutes for infectious diseases, for instance in Germany the Bernhard-Nocht Institute (Hamburg) and the Robert-Koch Institute (Berlin): Crimean Congo, West Nile, Japanese encephalitis, usutu, dengue, chikungunya, mayaro, MERS corona, zika, SARS 1, ebola.
Based on the extensive experience in the development of reagents used for the diagnostics of viral infections, we created and produced, in a fast and targeted manner, a recombinant antigen construct for reliable detection of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. The construct is based on a receptor-binding domain (RBD, Arg319-Phe541) in the S1 subunit of the spike protein used by the virus to bind to receptors of the target cells. It was pretty clear for me that vaccination with this protein would provide protection from in the infection.
Some vaccinations have a large and some a very low risk potential. It makes a difference whether a healthy human being is injected with an attenuated virus or virus RNA or with a tiny inconspicuous recombinant protein that cannot cause much harm in the organism, except for specifically stimulating the immune system. For decades, recombinant antigens genetically engineered in culture cells have been used for vaccination against infectious hepatitis A and B. In earlier times, the vaccination antigen had been extracted from blood collected from persons with past hepatitis; the recombinant antigens, however, are artificially designed, easy to produce and do not harbour any infection risk '' a great step forward. I myself have vaccinated thousands of my employees with this kind of vaccines. However, it is important to perform three injections in the first quarter and to determine the antibody titre every five to ten years, followed by a booster, if necessary.
This uncomplicated vaccination scheme, which has proven itself over decades and uses a readily available trivial antigen, would have been the order of the day in the case of Covid-19. To adopt completely new approaches, for instance, of introducing virus RNA into the body of vaccinees whose organisms first have to synthesise the vaccination antigen, may be effective but many people are scared because they fear that the virus RNA will take on a life of its own and cause unexpected harm their bodies. For this reason, lengthy vaccination studies had to be carried out, while the virus could spread like wildfire. Moreover, the vaccine is hard to produce, requires an unbroken cold chain from the manufacture to the application, many people have allergic reactions to the additive polyethylene glycol that is necessary for stabilisation and half of the vaccinated persons have to take sick leave after the second shot. Above all, however, the manufacturing requires years until the need is met and every single person is vaccinated. During this time, scientists are able to make their mark and patent owners can make very good money, while millions of humans are dying because they could not be vaccinated in time. ''But woe to him who, hid from view, hath done the deed of murder base''! Who will follow hard upon his heels, I ask?
Similarly, coronaviruses produced in culture and inactivated thereafter are outdated as vaccination antigens in my opinion. With respect to hepatitis, they have long become obsolete. Why should they be used for corona? Similarly, nobody needs to be infected with vector viruses to introduce virus antigens into the body. I, for my part, use the ready-made, extracorporeally genetically engineered antigen, which carries virtually no risk. Until today, none of the one hundred persons I vaccinated in this way have become ill or had to take sick leave.
Some resistance has developed against my approach. People are unable or unwilling to recognise the great potential in the vaccination method that I suggested, although it is virtually risk-free, based on a dead vaccine, can be transported uncooled and stored in the fridge, does not introduce any scary genetic information of the virus into the body, does not contain an attenuated virus, does cause virtually no allergic reactions, and especially not against polyethylene glycol, can be administered in a doctor's practice, is nearly risk-free and would therefore be much better accepted by the population. It can also be produced in large quantities, which makes it extremely suitable for mass vaccination. The first vaccination was rather trivial than heroic. There was no vector, no RNA, no inactivated coronavirus, but only a tiny peptide.
Take three times 15 microgrammes of recombinant RBD of the S1 subunit (Arg319-Phe541) for one person. As adjuvant I used alhydrogel from InvivoGen. Shake thoroughly and take up 200 microlitres of the mixture with a tuberculin syringe. Take up 10 millilitres of sodium chloride solution? with a larger syringe and add the 200 microlitres, mix well. Take 500 microlitres of the mixture per shot and mix with a portion of the antigen. Make sure everything is sterile.
With a single 2000-litres reactor, 35 g of antigen can be produced per day, which would suffice for 1 million persons. Using a high-density culturing system, five times as much can be yielded. Within half a year it would be possible to produce enough vaccine for 80% of the population in Germany in a medium-scale laboratory.
I have asked the Paul-Ehrlich Institute (PEI), which is the German Federal Institute for Vaccines and Biomedicines, for permission to carry out this simple vaccination as soon as possible with a larger number of volunteers to find out whether it would work as well as with me and my family and whether these volunteers would also remain free of secondary effects, including exposed persons. If the PEI had not opposed to my plan, we would already have been able to put a manufacturer into the position to supply and effectively protect the entire German population.
But instead of agreeing to my suggestion, the PEI coolly sued me. May this was because they felt left out in their divine role '' I had already done a trial on five (!) persons (which I am entitled to do as a doctor, being allowed to mix together for therapy whatever I deem right. He, who is so knowledgable when it comes to the law, should know this) '' maybe to give an advantage to other applicants to whom they felt obliged? But I do not present myself as a manufacturer of vaccines; I do not have a profit motive. I have immediately gone public with my action on purpose and have not filed a patent application to prevent someone else from claiming this approach for themselves. The only thing I want is to show a safe and simple way of dealing with the pandemic in a quick and effective manner.
An emergency justifies unconventional means. With this pandemic we cannot wait for two years, as with other vaccines, until all doubts have been erased regarding potential secondary effects but we have to act quickly. In this respect, the PEI is found guilty of complete failure. The institute should have foreseen that the delivery of vaccines that they approved will take several years. In this situation, intelligent people would have examined all possible alternatives and supported their implementation. They would have thought immediately of the highly effective vaccination carried out in L¼beck and would have supported the project. By the end of 2021, the whole of Germany could be free of Covid-19! The vaccination of over a hundred patients with recombinant S1 RBD antigen in L¼beck was virtually without secondary effects and very effective. 95% of the vaccinees developed high concentrations of protective antibodies within six weeks.
The regulatory authorities are unable to cope. They can only act according to the book. They are helpless in the face of the catastrophe that they have caused themselves. They could and should have been the first to foresee the wildfire-like outbreak of the pandemic. If they had accepted my proposal straight away to vaccinate the population with such a simple antigen, the disease would have been prevented from spreading very quickly. Hundreds of thousands of people would not have been infected and ten thousands would not have died.
It is unbelievable how the PEI is payed court to, as if they were gods who like to take their time to approve a vaccine by determining, under certain conditions and by a lengthy and thorough examination of every tiny detail, whether every stamp is in the right place and every document is folded correctly, while the social life and the economy are breaking down. For me, these paralysing authorities are as bad as the disease itself and unworthy of carrying the name of Paul Ehrlich, whose achievements would have been impossible in the current environment of increasingly excessive bureaucracy. Entrepreneurial qualities are required instead of debilitating dirigisme and helpless stammering on TV. Our society would benefit from some competition for the PEI, something similar to the German Technical Inspection Association or the DEKRA.
In the current disastrous situation, no lengthy double-blind trials are required to clearly determine differences in the effectiveness. One should vaccinate the first thousand probands (ideally with the L¼beck method), thus making them immune straight away. If this succeeds, the next ten thousand people are vaccinated and, thereafter, the remaining population. But some clinicians always have an eye on their third-party funds, they want to proceed scientifically in the proven way and to first examine thoroughly if a vaccine candidate helps to develop more or fewer anti-covid antibodies. As not every vaccine, such as the one from L¼beck, will be able to induce very high concentrations of antibodies in 95% of patients that eliminate (neutralise) the coronavirus.
It is not necessary to first confirm a long-term effect by a time-consuming process. What is primarily required is to establish herd immunity as soon as possible and, in one or two years, when the pandemic has been largely contained it is decided how to proceed further. It should be mainly examined whether the side effects are within certain limits. This in particular is what takes too much time in RNA-based vaccines and co. With the L¼beck variant this question could be answered within six weeks.
Besides, my suggestion of a fast vaccination using the corona S1 antigen was received with great enthusiasm by several scientists. Others scolded the idea, criticising it without rhyme or reason: those who did not have the idea themselves or possibly get their research funds from (newly) established vaccine manufacturers. Some ''scientists'' might get so many third-party funds that they need to talk down my simple solution approach so as not to come away empty-handed. The manufacturers will indeed not permit a comparison because they fear that my vaccine might compete with their newly patented substances, making their patents worthless and putting into question their expected turnovers of hundreds of millions of dollars and euros. I do not rule out that our much admired godlike authority is not only hostile to innovation but, in closing their eyes to the simplest of solutions and suing me, might have acted for the account of someone else. And since so much money is at stake, I am even risking my life. ''Ye corona victims who sweep through upper air, though hushed be every human breath, the tidings of my murder bear,'' the victims of short-sighted ''scientists'', cowardly sticklers for the letter of law and bureaucrats.
The claim of the PEI that a positive antibody result in the vaccination certificate should only be recognised if it was produced by an approved vaccine must surely be seen in the same light. Persons with a past corona infection, who have earned their antibodies in earnest, will then also require vaccination, apparently to avoid that the minions miss out on money?. Can someone please sue the PEI?
In order to counter the silly accusation of some of these ''scientists'' that my self-test has no evidential value, I have yielded to the entreaties of some of my colleagues and friends and vaccinated them according to my scheme in legal manner, as I did with my family last April. As a doctor I am entitled to do this without requiring approval by an authority. During our vaccination series from December 2020 to January 2021, no relevant undesired side effects have been found and we detected very high titres of anti-spike IgG in 60 of 65 patients in our laboratory in L¼beck. Five vaccinees will receive a booster soon and 64 exhibited virus-neutralising antibodies. None of the vaccinated persons had to take sick leave. All of those positive for vaccination-induced antibodies are very happy about their new freedom.
Winfried St¶cker
[SM1]
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Blockchain, QR codes and your phone: the race to build vaccine passports - Protocol '-- The people, power and politics of tech
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 13:59
There will come a time, hopefully in the near future, when you'll feel comfortable getting on a plane again. You might even stop at the lounge at the airport, head to the regional office when you land and maybe even see a concert that evening. This seemingly distant reality will depend upon vaccine rollouts continuing on schedule, an open-sourced digital verification system and, amazingly, the blockchain.
Several countries around the world have begun to prepare for what comes after vaccinations. Swaths of the population will be vaccinated before others, but that hasn't stopped industries decimated by the pandemic from pioneering ways to get some people back to work and play. One of the most promising efforts is the idea of a "vaccine passport," which would allow individuals to show proof that they've been vaccinated against COVID-19 in a way that could be verified by businesses to allow them to travel, work or relax in public without a great fear of spreading the virus.
But building a system that everyone agrees with '-- and can access '-- is no small task. There are several companies working on competing projects to verify vaccinations. But beyond that, there are more than a few hurdles that could prevent vaccine passports from succeeding, from antiquated medical records systems to interoperability issues and privacy concerns. Here's how they could actually succeed.
Competing projects, similar standardsPretty much since the first blockchain white paper, people have been looking for perfect examples of where a distributed, immutable ledger could be valuable. There's obviously the push to use it for currencies, and companies have tried to use it for things like tracking food production and voting, but there are few use cases that have truly taken off, at least so far. "We've been working on this since 2014; we never thought that health care would be the kind of the use case that we take this mainstream," Jamie Smith, the senior director of business development at Evernym, a company focused on using the blockchain as a basis for verifying identities, told Protocol.
Smith said Evernym had been discussing its concepts with automakers, retailers, telcos, governments, loyalty companies and banks prior to the pandemic. One of those companies was IAG, the airline group that owns British Airways, which had been interested in the idea of contactless travel based on a single identity credential that follows you from the airport check-in to your gate. With the pandemic, that morphed into thinking about ways to verify that passengers have had negative COVID tests, and eventually, that they've received a vaccine. "From our perspective, it was a really easy lift to see," Smith said. "We're doing contactless travel, and we just added verifiable credentials for test results."
It's a similar genesis for IBM's Digital Health Pass initiative, which leader Eric Piscini said started about two years ago as a way to store people's entire health records in a safe, accessible platform. It also relies on the blockchain for its immutable record of proof, and both Evernym and IBM are part of an open-standards group called the Good Health Pass Collaborative, which aims to bring private credentialed vaccine records to business and people around the world. Companies are working on their own implementations of the standards, but Evernym's Smith said the data is meant to be portable from one passport to another.
Most of the companies working on passports say their systems are private by design, especially given that they're mainly working off the same open standards. In most cases, the health information only ever remains on a user's phone, but where it asks to verify that the user's information meets a system's standards '-- such as whether this person has had two COVID vaccines and should be allowed into an office '-- that information is recorded on a blockchain. "You can, using blockchain technologies, verify that someone has been tested recently, without having access to the underlying data," Piscini said. "I don't know any other technology where you can do that."
Similarly, the nonprofit Commons Project's CommonPass, backed by the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce, started out as a project to bring an analog to Apple Health for Android. JP Pollak, a senior researcher at Cornell and founder of the Commons Project, first launched CommonHealth to bring the sort of data and insights that Apple Health offers to iPhone owners to Android users. Last summer, the group started building an app that could take health data and privately share it with others '-- in that case, it was to help truckers stuck at the borders in East African countries who couldn't easily prove they'd taken COVID tests. This morphed into vaccine credentialing, with the group now working to pull together the various data streams needed to get a project like this off the ground.
"Health care institutions, EMR vendors, retail pharmacies, state vaccine registries, all issuing people a digital verifiable credential of their vaccination record that they could then use in the app of their choice, to be able to get access to various kinds of services," Pollak said. CommonPass is also working with the Mayo Clinic, as well as Epic Systems and Cerner, two of the largest EMR vendors.
Something for everyone With so many competing efforts to become the world's digital vaccine passport, it might seem that the country is heading for some sort of VHS versus Betamax format war for proving everyone has had COVID vaccines. But given that so many of the efforts are using the same standards, and in many cases, looking to embed their tech in someone else's app rather than their own, the race might be less about the best tech winning, and more about various approaches working in different situations.
"The intent is not to be the only company; we don't want to be the proprietary platform that everybody has to use because they have no choice," IBM's Piscini said. "That's not who we are right now: That's the IBM from 30 years ago, not the IBM of today."
For IBM, though, the selling point is that the company already works with so many other massive companies. Why look elsewhere for a vaccine passport solution if your airline booking system is already powered by IBM? "We believe our network is going to be more valuable than any other because of our scale and our ability to integrate the platform with CRM systems, building systems or stadium systems '-- we can do that every day," Piscini said.
IATA's digital passport app.Photo: IATA
For other companies, it's about securing new partnerships with major players in the hopes of finding that scale. Evernym, for example, is working with International Air Transport Association, the airline industry's trade association, on an air travel-specific app called Travel Pass. IATA is working with airlines and local governments to ensure it has the latest requirements to feed the app's rules engine. "It will say, 'Hey, you're flying JFK to Heathrow, you need a PCR test 48 hours in advance before you can land,'" Evernym's Smith said. "And of course, those policy changes are changing every day." Qatar, Emirates and Etihad Airways are all expected to start trialing the app in the next few weeks.
In other instances, the technology will live inside other companies' existing apps; why make someone download yet another app and add another hurdle to compliance? Instead, the experience will be rather like adding a loyalty account or TSA PreCheck number when booking a flight. Airlines and other venues restricting access will require uploading negative test results or vaccine records using one of these services. "You're going to be using the United or the Delta app, and they'll be using our solution or somebody else's, but you will do it via their app," IATA's Travel Pass lead, Alan Murray Hayden, told Protocol.
The World Health Organization is also working on its own offering, and recently convened the Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group. It's built upon the WHO's nearly century-old notion of the "yellow card" vaccination record, which first was used to document that travelers had been inoculated against diseases such as cholera and yellow fever. Evernym Chief Trust Officer Drummond Reed is part of the working group; he said there should be more to share in the coming months.
What could go wrong?It's entirely possible that as more people start to get vaccinated, vaccine passports start to become the norm. You walk to work '-- still masked, of course '-- scan a QR code reader in the lobby, and are let in. You go out for lunch, and your loyalty card app has a discount for in-store shoppers verifying they're vaccinated. Your concert ticket is also tied to health pass information that you shared earlier in the day with Ticketmaster. But there are more than a few hurdles ahead of the companies rushing to turn these concepts into realities.
First off, there's the '... reality '... of the real world that any digital system has to contend with. For anyone without access to the internet, digital vaccine credentials will prove difficult to acquire, though all the companies Protocol spoke with said they would offer a paper-based QR code for people who don't have smartphones. But there's also the issue of having to corral so many different stakeholders into one system, especially when some health care providers are still reliant on antiquated database systems or even paper records. "The amount of inefficiency in the system is tremendous," IBM's Piscini said.
But in the U.S. at least, all vaccinators are required to report COVID-19 vaccines to their state. Piscini said that even for people who just received a paper copy of their vaccine records, systems like IBM's can likely link up to the state's immunization registry and allow people to import records to a vaccine passport.
How CommonPass's app shows your records. Image: CommonPass
And states are willing to help out, Pollak said, adding that CommonPass has started working with Hawaii to roll out its offering for would-be tourists. "We're seeing a lot of state governments stepping up and doing a really good job with this," Pollak said. "It would be surprising if there wasn't a coordinated federal effort very soon." That being said, while many countries around the world are committing to working on vaccine passports, getting a straight answer out of the U.S. government on what it's doing has proven difficult. The State Department, which maintains America's traditional, analogue passports, referred me to Homeland Security, which referred me to the White House. The acting director and chief of staff of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kei Koizumi, told Protocol that "OSTP can't discuss projects we are working on before they are publicly announced."
But even with systems in place at a federal level, there's still a fair amount of education that needs to happen before people will trust systems like these. "There's a substantial gap in understanding and knowledge of how these systems work, and people's views, in terms of who should get access to which data," Pollak said.
"We assume there's a Facebook Borg in the sky, monitoring every interaction," Smith said. "The emergence of verifiable credentials breaks down that mental model, where actually it becomes more like decentralized bits of paper that I can carry around, and no one's to know that I've been sharing this information."
"Our belief is that if you do the right thing, from a platform point of view, protecting your privacy, and giving you control and access to the platform to everybody who wants to use it," Piscini said. "I think those are very basic things that allow the core of the platform that we build to generate adoption by the individuals."
Even with a system that works, there may still be holdouts to this potential new normal. "Some people are saying, 'I will never get vaccinated,'" Piscini said, "and I don't know if the airlines are going to say, 'Well, maybe you will never fly again.'"
Vaccine Passports Make a Mockery of Consent
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 11:33
Vaccine Passports Make a Mockery of Consent Sun 10:55 am +00:00, 7 Mar 2021 posted by Weaver
There has been a growing movement in favour of vaccine passports and they are currently '' under the name of Covid-status certificates '' being considered by the Government as a means ''of reopening the economy, reducing restrictions on social contact and improving safety''. Today we're publishing an original piece by a post-doc in the arts at a Russell Group university who argues that vaccine passports violate the principle of free and informed consent, as set out in the Nuremberg Code. Here are the opening paragraphs:
I once read a children's story about a princess who wanted to write a book. Unfortunately, she couldn't write, and sales were disappointingly low. The king then announced (I quote from memory):
that the people must have their choice. And so he issued a proclamation which gave all citizens a choice of:
a) Buying a copy of the princess's book Or b) Going to prison for one year
Sales boomed.
Buying a bad book and receiving a vaccination are different things, and prison has not yet been proposed for those who do not receive a COVID-19 vaccine. But that children's story wittily makes the point that any tyranny could be justified by a certain definition of 'choice', and I recalled it when I read Guy de la B(C)doy¨re's recent article on this site:
'''I'll lay my cards on the table. I am going to be vaccinated as soon as I can. That is my choice, and I am glad that it is my choice.
''I accept for example that in order to protect other people I needed to learn to drive and to have a driving licence to prove it. Similarly, I accept the normal passport as a means of proving who I am and protecting me and everyone else from maniacs and others not entitled to come to this country. I also accept that there are consequences of making choices. If I choose not to have a driving licence, then I would have to accept I cannot drive on a public road. And I doubt if anyone would want me to. If I chose freely not to have a passport then I would not be allowed to travel. So, I have no problem with the notion of vaccine choice as another facet of choice with consequences. I grew up at a time when large numbers of children had polio, a disease that gradually dwindled away as a result of the vaccine program.
''That is all about freedom of choice'...''
Here I attempt to lay out the basic case against the 'vaccination certificates' currently suggested, by various people, for everything from international travel to shopping. These proposals differ qualitatively as well as in degree.
Not a driving licence
Justifying comparisons along the lines of driving licences or hard hats do not resolve the issue, because there is a qualitative difference: this is not a proficiency test or a piece of clothing, it is a medical procedure.
That medical procedures require the explicit and free consent of the individual concerned, is accepted by legal authorities and international bodies.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Israel has already rolled out a vaccine passport scheme which operates through an app. It's a bit of a disaster, according to a recent report in Hareetz, and might not even do the job for which it was designed:
Cryptographers and information security experts who examined the official mobile app for Israel's ''Green Pass'', a Government-validated certificate for Israelis who have received both doses of the coronavirus vaccine, have found a string of flaws that pose a threat to its functionality. '...
Initially the app was supposed to be extremely simple and quick but the final product, experts and users says, is heavy and slow, taking up a large amount of memory. Moreover, the choice to use closed (as opposed to open) source code and the lack of involvement by security and privacy specialists has also caused concern among developers. Security experts and cryptographers who examined the app's code have discovered several problems that cast doubts on the reliability of its verification that someone has been vaccinated.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press 2: Vaccine passports are only a temporary solution and should die out in due course, according to Andr(C) Rogaczewski, Chief Executive of Netcompany, which has received contracts to develop a certification system. Andrew Bud, Chief Executive of iProov, which is also working on certification, is less sure: ''If, on the other hand, Covid continues to flare up and become more transmissible, it's possible that'.'.'.'vaccine certificates will be a routine part of daily life.''
Stop Press 3: The Adventure Island theme park in Southend-on-Sea has adopted what might well turn out to be a winning recruitment strategy: An absolute rejection of 'No Jab, No Job', as the Southend Echo reports.
James Miller, Operations Director at Adventure Island, told the Echo: ''Let there be no misunderstanding. Adventure Island is not against taking the jab nor are we encouraging people not to have it.
''Both my Dad (Philip Miller) and my cousin Marc, Managing Director, have taken the vaccine, so our position has nothing to do with the jab itself.
''It is the bullying, peer pressure, invasion of privacy, and the fact that it is not our right to tell people what to do with their bodies, that we cannot condone as a company.''
Watch James Miller's interview with Mike Graham on talkRADIO here.
https://lockdownsceptics.org/
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FDA Now Cautions Against Ivermectin'--the Vested Interests are Circling the Wagons
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 15:12
With mass media synchronization, that is recent ivermectin-based articles from both the New York Times and CNN covering negative news, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Gold Standard global food and drug regulatory body, has issued a cautionary statement targeting ivermectin. The crux of the agency's concern includes 1) Ivermectin is an off label treatment; 2) taking large doses of the drug can be harmful; 3) ivermectin should be used for ''legitimate'' source (e.g. anti-parasitic indication); and 4) animal medications should never be taken by humans. The basis for the agency's warnings are ''multiple reports'' of individuals that have received either medical support for taking the drug or hospitalization after self-medication with the type needed for animals. No such data backing those reports is included, however'--no warning letters, no examples from county or state health agencies or for that matter tangible reports from hospitals. TrialSite's suggests that the FDA is reacting to growing interest around America about the drug. Interestingly, as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) declared that there isn't enough information yet to recommend for or against the use of ivermectin, this now contradicts the FDAs' more forceful off-label use declaration. The NIH's stance of course was in the context of physician discretion, consenting patients, etc. As TrialSite suggests, the fix is on, powerful economic and sectoral interests are circling the wagons as drugs, politics and power predicts this particular research pathway doesn't benefit economic interests during the pandemic and beyond.
The FDA rightly and correctly cautions against any misinformation and cautions that it's not okay to take large doses'--they are completely correct. Moreover, they correctly identify that ivermectin can interact with other medication and that to date needs to be understood.
Sudden Interest
For several months, TrialSite followed study after study in various parts of the world showing ivermectin had at least some benefit targeting COVID-19. The mainstream media resonponse'--crickets. Now all of a sudden with one Colombian study that doesn't show stellar results, they take a particularly keen interest in the generic drug used to treat parasites, such as CNN now swooping in on the FDA edict as well as the Cali Colombia study, which statistically didn't reveal any benefit of the anti-parasite drug.
Toxic Reactions: Where is the Data behind the incidents?
Unlike some of the hydroxychloroquine debacle where the President of the United States promoted an investigational indication for COVID-19'--influencing abuse of the drug by at least some gullible and misinformed people, in this case TrialSite has sought out the data behind the flurry of concerns of late. While the FDA reports ''multiple reports,'' it provides no qualitative or quantitative backing for this declaration'--no data from state or county health agencies or hospitals for that matter.
For example, the most recent concerns behind ivermectin correlate with the Business Insider article where ABC News referred to recent incidents reported by the Missouri Poison Center; that is, they reported an increase in self-medication-related abuse of the drug leading to calls into their center. TrialSite reached out to both their Medical Director and Director to inquire about actual data. How many people called in? What was the nature of the incidents? To date and not surprisingly, crickets is the response.
TrialSite doesn't declare that the Missouri Poison Center story is incorrect but it's certainly interesting that this one story has led all the way up to a FDA cautionary declaration'--with no data to back it'--at least data that's publicly disclosed. In fact, to date, no media has come up with any actual person that has overdosed due to self-medication, which is strange.
More Research?
Moreover, in the recent edict, FDA directly acknowledged it hasn't reviewed any Ivermectin research. Really not at all? In the midst of a pandemic the agency hasn't looked into the ivermectin studies at all despite the fact that the World Health Organization itself is tracking the studies closely? So TrialSite knows that's not the case informally as individuals originating from the FDA domain are regulars on the TrialSite News platform, and this particular media reports on ivermectin clinical trials around the world. There are certainly many people at the FDA interested in the ivermectin studies, but they probably dare not utter a word.
TrialSite does have reports from various industry sources that the FDA, or at least certain individuals there, have held meetings about ivermectin research. If these reports are true then the agency in its most recent website declaration isn't being totally straight with the American public.
Regardless, so while over 40 studies have been completed and a growing number of researchers, physicians and health advocates recommend agencies such as the NIH to at least sponsor research, the FDA formally isn't interested at all given they haven't looked into any of it. If they were, some 40 studies with promising results would have triggered at least some initial review.
And again in some Eastern European nations now the drug has been authorized for use against at least mild COVID-19 but those are different legal jurisdictions and don't matter in America.
The meta-analyses generated by Dr. Tess Lawrie and Dr. Andrew Hill in the UK to that of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) in the USA are all but disregarded'--even though the NIH did ask the latter to present to the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel. While the number of studies indicating some benefit of ivermectin targeting COVID-19 is impressive to some, it's a non-starter for others. And it just so happens the latter have considerably more power, money and influence.
What's Going On?
The Ivermectin squeeze is on and the long knives are out and ready. The vested industry, government and medicinal industry concerns won't have any more of it'--deviating from the program that unfolds in front of one's very eyes. It starts with a story in the Business Insider reporting on claims of increases in toxicity involving self-medication-related abuse. While this most certainly could happen, as stated earlier, there is no data at least to date to back up the story. Ivermectin at recommended doses has a strong safety profile'--this has been established over the last few decades. Of course, no one should ever self-medicate, and TrialSite doesn't doubt that some gullible people out there would improperly engage in this activity. Not a good idea.
But there is no doubt that ivermectin use is not welcome off label, even with doctor's discretion. Again, the NIH's latest guidance basically passed in any direction'--they didn't recommend against or for in the context of off label use for ivermectin. While the FDA now takes a stronger stance, this most certainly will impact American medical society moving forward.
So as more countries in Eastern Europe, for example, formally embrace the drug and with dozens of studies now indicating positive attributes in the context of COVID-19, powerful vested interests won't tolerate any possibility of a cheap available alternative'--at least not now. Think Merck's press release, which highlighted the company's safety concerns for a drug that they not only helped develop but also gave away in the billions of doses'--and it has worked incredibly well for that indication. In the few decades of use, few deaths have ever been reported.
Think the censorship indicators, such as Facebook's algorithms and curators shutting down sites that simply report on Slovakia authoring the use of the drug for COVID-19, for example. Or most recently Facebook blocking Mary Beth Pfieffer's article on censorship.
But the reality is that a combination of vaccines and therapeutics (monoclonal antibodies, etc.) which TrialSite agrees are critically important, represents minimally $100+ billion in revenue over the next five years, if not considerably more. There is no way that any alternative, at least in America and probably Western Europe, will get in the way of that kind of reality. It's understandable. That's how the system works.
A TrialSite Take
While the FDA isn't directly criminalizing off label use, they have issued a strong statement that needs to be understood and respected and will serve to stop off label prescriptions by licensed physicians. They are the Gold Standard agency and while they publicly disclose no specific data (e.g. warning letters, specific reports, etc.) for the declaration'--only ''reports,'' they represent the law of the land when it comes to food and drugs.
So while TrialSite is concerned that the agency didn't share any examples, i.e. they didn't produce any warning letters targeting firms exploiting the use of ivermectin for pecuniary gain; or they precluded data based on state or county public health agencies, for example, they only reference vague reports. Again, the one report in the press TrialSite could pin down was one from Missouri Poison Center but there is no data backing the claim either, at least that's been publicly made available. TrialSite's attempt to inquire with this organization has been ignored to date.
The reality is that no medication for COVID-19 should ever be taken without a doctor's prescription, period. And as SARS-CoV-2 is a new and dangerous condition, at least in America the regulatory powers haven't been interested in this investigational approach.
The fact is that ivermectin-based research has not been formally embraced by most apex research agencies and regulators in the rich economies (USA, Europe, etc.), and most health systems and physicians follow Board or agency guidance. Despite what many consider significantly positive data produced in various meta-analyses, and individual cases such as the lawsuits where judges ordered the use of the drug, which seemed to have led to positive outcomes, these are just one off data points. The drug is being shut out of America for purposes of the novel coronavirus, at least for physician-prescribed, off label use because that's the effects this latest edict will have.
Drugs, Power, Politics
The development of drugs is a big, important business. Economically, this sector is worth over $1.2 trillion dollars and contributes not only to the incredible advances in medicines and technologies but also economies. As advanced economies morph into large, state-mediated ones, the vested interests of industry and government becomes ever more entangled and intertwined. The notion of a democratic and free market harkens to perhaps a different more innocent time'--or perhaps one that never existed frankly in any modern form.
But based on TrialSite's research in places like Africa, where several billion in so-called ''Vaccine Bonds'' will be floated to procure vaccine product to drug's like remdesivir that generate okay results at best in treatment results yet were supported by the state (e.g. federal government actors) each and every step during the pandemic while promising generic off label approaches are all but ignored, this pandemic represents massive business and financial opportunity in addition to an unprecedented platform for research and development-based innovation in medicinal advancement'--think mRNA-based vaccines developed in just months.
That the pandemic may actually lead to an economic boom of unprecedented proportions as capital, technicality and talent are unleashed based on the focused activities during the pandemic in the life sciences sector is not lost on many forces in society. The culture of medicine, drugs and health itself is complex, with a myriad of tangled interests, regulatory and administrative constructs, specialized scientific and medicinal knowledge, and rapidly advancing technologies that are hard to keep up with. The stakes are enormous for both human health and economy. A public that seeks economical and available alternatives would pressure their politicians to compel the agencies that the taxpayer actually in fact fund via Congress. That presupposes an organized, mobilized and activated set of public interests that in this case are not present in sufficient force.
Call to Action: With an FDA edict such as the one just issued, TrialSite communicates to its network in America (about 50% of the audience) that they (FDA) have to be respected. They are the Gold Standard regulatory body worldwide and represent the food and drug executive branch enforcement agency set up originally to ensure enforcement of the critically important Pure Food and Drug Act. They represent the law of the land when it comes to food and drugs.
Ivermectin Fails to Statistically Beat Placebo in Columbian Study & Mass Media Finally Takes Notice'--An Interesting Observation
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 15:12
Recently, the results of a new ivermectin study out of Columbia were reported in the medical journal JAMA. Led by Eduardo Lopez Medina, MD, a physician and researcher at the Center for Pediatric infectious Diseases in Cali, Columbia, the double-blind, placebo controlled randomized clinical trial was organized to test the efficacy of ivermectin in preventing progression of disease in adult patients with early states of COVID-19. Interestingly, as the results were not compelling, the New York Times decided to swoop in on the news. The study (Lopez 2021) team found the patient participants taking the 5-day course of ivermectin failed to significantly improve the time to resolution of the symptoms. Although the investigative team concluded that the study results failed to support the use of ivermectin as a treatment of mild COVID-19, they acknowledge that perhaps larger trials may be needed to better understand the effects of the drug on other clinically relevant outcomes. TrialSite suggests that the results of this study do little to change the comprehensive meta analyses currently generated from researchers in America and the UK.
The study results indicated the time to resolution of symptoms was shorter (10 vs. 12 days) but not statistically significant. Very few participants in this trial got seriously ill, but there were ''trends'' in favor of ivermectin. For example, 2% vs. 3.5% clinically deteriorated'--this is 2 points on the clinical scale but not significant. Additionally, a 2% vs. 5% required escalation of care, not statistically significant (although perhaps not a totally fair comparison as 4 of the recipients of placebo went to the hospital within 12 hours of randomization). Overall, the study drug was deemed safe with no increase in serious adverse events but again the statistically significant results were not there for ivermectin either.
In this study reported in JAMA, the team reported zero deaths associated with ivermectin and one control death. An interesting quirk in the study centered on the unusually high cumulative dosage of 1,500 μg/kg over five days. At that dose, 7.5x the normal, some non-life threatening and transient side effects can occur, notably blurring vision, and it was therefore appropriate for this study to track them, as shown from the study, supplementary file 2. Interestingly, the control group had exactly the same rate of these characteristics ivermectin-related adverse events as the ivermectin group; Diarrhea (30.2% v. 32.8%); Nausea (24.0% v. 23.7%); and blurred vision (16.0% v. 14.1%).
So, this study showed that both the ivermectin group and the control group had adverse events characteristic of ivermectin, at the same rate, within the limit of tolerability. Note that ivermectin is freely and inexpensively available over the counter without prescription in Columbia, the study locale.
These quirky results for IVM to treat mild cases of COVID-19 cases with no significant differences in deaths (0 for IVM, 1 for controls) stand in contrast to what happened in Peru as reported in a recent study when the army went in with mass IVM treatments through operation MOT, and state by state for those 10 states, excess deaths dropped 74% (mean reduction) over 30 days within 1-11 days after MOT start date. For the 25 states of Peru, the reduction in excess deaths correlated with the extent of IVM distribution and treatment with a p value of 0.002. These results are far more precise than the battlefield experience for penicillin in World War II, in which only general indications of good success were known, no RCTs at all, and then were followed with mass treatments of civilians.
Other Comments
While the results of this study cannot be denied, the measurement of time to symptom resolution as an outcome measure can also represent a challenge. Symptoms can be somewhat to quite heterogenous'--that is they can fluctuate, and can tend to linger on for a while even after the individual has recovered. There was a hint of difference between groups on some other outcomes that were more closely related to clinical deterioration, but for those outcomes they did not have enough statistical power to show whether there is a true difference.
Interestingly, the primary outcome was changed 6 weeks into the trial but the concern of many TrialSite readers, as picked up by their comments, was that medical journals and press appear to not mind when the randomized controlled trial reveals negative or neutral results associated with a repurposed drug.
Of course, this particular trial was conducted among young people with mild COVID so one would not expect a lot of deaths and other poor outcomes. However, one death in the placebo group is one death too many.
Media Bias?
Among other notable points was the New York Times' fascination with this particular ivermectin study results as none of the overwhelmingly positive study results, nor positive meta-analyses results, gained any attention from that nor other mainstream media.
Many in the TrialSite Network found it ironic that the prestigious paper swooped in on a neutral- to negative-leaning ivermectin study. After all, TrialSite has reported on one study after another that evidenced positive results. Yes, not all of these studies were designed the same but note there was no interest in major press for anything positive. But in this case, there was certainly considerable interest with bold declarations upfront. Interesting, no doubt.
The Importance of Meta Analyses
There are a few compelling meta-analysis studies circulating around North America and the United Kingdom, and these studies compare dozens of ivermectin-based trials. The net takeaway from these studies is an overwhelming positive outcome associated with the generic drug in the context of ivermectin and the coronavirus. Many challenge the underlying study quality of design, however, discounting the power of these broader analyses.
Whether one particular study is positive or negative, this hammers home the importance of meta-analysis studies. A relevant example is the remdesivir story. The U.S. FDA approved remdesivir on what Dr. Anthony Fauci himself declared as not the most compelling data (see TrialSite article) yet the World Health Organization in the Solidarity study revealed remdesivir wasn't beneficial at all. The reality is that remdesivir is beneficial and just because one study shows it wasn't doesn't stop Gilead from generating nearly $3 billion in revenues. But TrialSite did ask the question whether power and politics was also at play with the drug. It takes many studies to make up a meta analysis, which provides a more accurate picture of a drug's true efficacy.
Call to Action: TrialSite will continue to monitor the ivermectin study results as they are available and thereafter provide as much of an objective, non-commercially interested and unbiased perspective as possible. For example, despite this media platform's favorable view of the current ivermectin meta analyses currently circulating, this particular Columbian study falls under our ''TrialWatch Challenge'' category, meaning the results were neutral to negative.
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Italy blocks shipments of AstraZeneca Covid vaccine
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 15:35
Vials of AstraZeneca vaccine against coronavirus (COVID-19) during the first day of a mass vaccination of Police and Firefighters in the Wanda Metropolitan Stadium.
Marcos del Mazo | LightRocket | Getty Images
LONDON '-- The European Union has made its first intervention into the supply of coronavirus vaccines, with Italy blocking a shipment of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine to Australia on Thursday.
Reuters reported, citing two sources, that British pharma giant AstraZeneca had requested permission from Rome to ship around 250,000 doses from its Anagni, Italy, plant. However, the Italian government refused. The Financial Times also reported the same story and an EU official, who preferred to remain anonymous, later confirmed the move to CNBC.
A spokesperson for AstraZeneca declined to comment when contacted by CNBC. A spokesperson for the Italian Foreign Ministry wasn't immediately available for comment.
In January, the European Union placed temporary controls on the export of vaccines made inside the bloc, following a spat with AstraZeneca and wider supply issues. The EU has been under pressure for what critics describe as a slow rollout of Covid vaccines.
The European Commission, the institution leading the purchase agreements, has been blamed for not securing enough vaccines, and the region's medical agency has been criticized for taking too long to approve inoculations that have received the green light elsewhere.
The controls will last until the end of March and give powers to EU member states to reject authorizing exports if the vaccine makers do not honor contracts.
In January, AstraZeneca said it would be delivering far fewer doses to the EU in the spring than initially expected, due to production issues at its plants in the Netherlands and Belgium. On Jan. 31, it then said it would deliver 9 million additional doses in the first quarter to try to make up for the shortfall.
A German professor came up with a COVID19 antigen vaccine - and is now sued by the government.
The article by Spiegel is in German, let me know if you need me to translate it in full:
Here is a recent blog posts in English:
QUOTE "With a single 2000-litres reactor, 35 g of antigen can be produced per day, which would suffice for 1 million persons. Using a high-density culturing system, five times as much can be yielded. Within half a year it would be possible to produce enough vaccine for 80% of the population in Germany in a medium-scale laboratory."
Thomas
Variants
Europe staggers as infectious variants power virus surge
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 12:15
MILAN (AP) '-- The virus swept through a nursery school and an adjacent elementary school in the Milan suburb of Bollate with amazing speed. In a matter of just days, 45 children and 14 staff members had tested positive.
Genetic analysis confirmed what officials already suspected: The highly contagious coronavirus variant first identified in England was racing through the community, a densely packed city of nearly 40,000 with a chemical plant and a Pirelli bicycle tire factory a 15-minute drive from the heart of Milan.
''This demonstrates that the virus has a sort of intelligence. ... We can put up all the barriers in the world and imagine that they work, but in the end, it adapts and penetrates them,'' lamented Bollate Mayor Francesco Vassallo.
Bollate was the first city in Lombardy, the northern region that has been the epicenter in each of Italy's three surges, to be sealed off from neighbors because of virus variants that the World Health Organization says are powering another uptick in infections across Europe. The variants also include versions first identified in South Africa and Brazil.
Europe recorded 1 million new COVID-19 cases last week, an increase of 9% from the previous week and a reversal that ended a six-week decline in new infections, WHO said Thursday.
''The spread of the variants is driving the increase, but not only,'' said Dr. Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, citing ''also the opening of society, when it is not done in a safe and a controlled manner.''
The variant first found in the U.K. is spreading significantly in 27 European countries monitored by WHO and is dominant in at least 10 countries: Britain, Denmark, Italy, Ireland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Israel, Spain and Portugal.
It is up to 50% more transmissible than the virus that surged last spring and again in the fall, making it more adept at thwarting measures that were previously effective, WHO experts warned. Scientists have concluded that it is also more deadly.
''That is why health systems are struggling more now,'' Kluge said. ''It really is at a tipping point. We have to hold the fort and be very vigilant.''
In Lombardy, which bore the brunt of Italy's spring surge, intensive care wards are again filling up, with more than two-thirds of new positive tests being the UK variant, health officials said.
After putting two provinces and some 50 towns on a modified lockdown, Lombardy's regional governor announced tightened restrictions Friday and closed classrooms for all ages. Cases in Milan schools alone surged 33% in a week, the provincial health system's chief said.
The situation is dire in the Czech Republic, which this week registered a record-breaking total of nearly 8,500 patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Poland is opening temporary hospitals and imposing a partial lockdown as the U.K. variant has grown from 10% of all infections in February to 25% now.
Two patients from hard-hit Slovakia were expected to arrive Saturday for treatment in Germany, where authorities said they had offered to take in 10 patients.
Kluge cited Britain's experience as cause for optimism, noting that widespread restrictions and the introduction of the vaccine have helped tamp down the variants there and in Israel. The vaccine rollout in the European Union, by comparison, is lagging badly, mostly because of supply problems.
In Britain, the emergence of the more transmissible strain sent cases soaring in December and triggered a national lockdown in January. Cases have since plummeted, from about 60,000 a day in early January to about 7,000 a day now.
Still, a study shows the rate of decline slowing, and the British government says it will tread cautiously with plans to ease the lockdown. That process begins Monday with the reopening of schools. Infection rates are highest in people ages 13 to 17, and officials will watch closely to see whether the return to class brings a spike in infections.
While the U.K. variant is dominant in France, forcing lockdowns in the French Riviera city of Nice and the northern port of Dunkirk, the variant first detected in South Africa has emerged as the most prevalent in France's Moselle region, which borders Germany and Luxembourg. It represents 55% of the virus circulating there.
Austria's health minister said Saturday the U.K. variant is now dominant in his country. But the South Africa variant is also a concern in a district of Austria that extends from Italy to Germany, with Austrian officials announcing plans to vaccinate most of the 84,000 residents there to curb its spread. Austria is also requiring motorists along the Brenner highway, a major north-south route, to show negative test results.
The South Africa variant, now present in 26 European countries, is a source of particular concern because of doubts over whether the current vaccines are effective enough against it. The Brazilian variant, which appears capable of reinfecting people, has been detected in 15 European countries.
WHO and its partners are working to strengthen the genetic surveillance needed to track variants across the continent.
The mayor of Bollate has appealed to the regional governor to vaccinate all 40,000 residents immediately, though he expects to be told the vaccine supply is too tight.
Bollate has recorded 3,000 positive cases and 134 deaths '-- mostly among the elderly '-- since Italy was stricken a year ago. It took the brunt in the resurgence in November and December, and was caught completely off guard when the U.K. variant arrived, racing through schoolage children before hitting families at home.
''People are starting to get tired that after a year there is no light at the end of the tunnel,'' Vassallo said.
___
AP correspondents Jill Lawless in London, Karel Janicek in Prague, Vanessa Gera in Warsaw, Jamey Keaten in Geneva, Sylvie Corbet in Paris, Geir Moulson in Berlin and Jovana Gec in Belgrade contributed.
___
Follow AP's pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
China
Stanford Opens New Research Center Linked To The Chinese Communist Party | The Daily Wire
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 15:13
Stanford University introduced a new campus research hub that has ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
In mid-February, the university opened the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions. The center is run by the Freeman Spogli Institute, a foreign policy organization that is connected to the Chinese government. The Freeman Spogli Institute has a history of coopering with China, though it refuses to disclose whether it has taken money from the Chinese government.
According to a report by The Washington Free Beacon , the Freeman Spogli Institute has ties to Peking University in Beijing which is run by a former Chinese spy named Qiu Shuiping. A report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute designated Peking University as a ''high risk'' organization for its involvement in Chinese defense research and links to state-owned nuclear weapons programs.
Peking University has hosted joint projects with the University of Chicago as well.
The Center on China's Economy and Institutions website claims that the center's goals are to advance students' understanding of China's economic and political issues.
''The Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions is Stanford's home for empirical, multidisciplinary research on China's economy,'' the website claims. ''We aim to foster path-breaking research, create transformative student experiences, and advance public understanding of China's economy and its impact on the world.''
In an introductory guidebook to the center, staff claim that research briefs from the new Chinese-affiliated center will be shared with policymakers in Washington, D.C., as well as technology investment organizations and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
The same guidebook announced that the center will host an event with Professor Jean Oi on March 9. Oi is a founding member of Stanford's research center at Peking University.
Stanford's Chinese-affiliated center may soon have increased influence in Washington D.C. as President Joe Biden has nominated one of the organization's senior scholars for undersecretary of defense. According to a separate Washington Free Beacon report , Colin Kahl, a former Obama administration official, worked at the Freeman Spogli Institute.
Stanford is among many elite universities that host Chinese-affiliated programs on campus. The university also hosts a Confucius Institute, which functions as a propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party on America's college campuses. A review of federal records found that more than 100 U.S. universities have Confucius Institutes available to students.
Other universities partner with Chinese entities beyond Confucius Institutes as well. In 2015, Washington University-St. Louis joined an alliance with Xi'an Jiaotong University called the University Alliance of the Silk Road (UASR). The UASR has direct ties to the Chinese government.
The Daily Wire reported :
Washington University-St. Louis remains the only Northern American school to join the University Alliance of the Silk Road (UASR), which is an academic arm of the People's Republic of China.
The organization claims to be ''non-governmental,'' though Chinese-sanctioned media admits that UASR is part of the Chinese Communist Party's academic programming.
Universities often fail to disclose financial relationships to foreign adversaries such as China as well. Data from the Department of Education show that several top-tier universities, including Cornell and Yale, failed to report more than $3 billion in foreign gifts and funds, much of which came from hostile nations like China.
The Daily Wire is one of America's fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member .
ERCOT
Texas Opts Not to Fix $16 Billion Power Overcharge - WSJ
Fri, 05 Mar 2021 20:22
The Public Utility Commission of Texas on Friday signaled it didn't intend to reverse $16 billion in electric overcharges that an independent market monitor had flagged as stemming from the state's weeklong blackouts.
Commission Chairman Arthur C. D'Andrea said it was too difficult to reprice the energy markets and involved too many uncertainties.
''It is impossible to unscramble this sort of egg,'' he said.
Mr. D'Andrea said there were so many hedges and private transactions outside the view of the commission that taking a step designed to help consumers might have unintended consequences. ''You think you're protecting the consumer and it turns out you're bankrupting a co-op or a city,'' he said.
The commission met Friday morning to consider a recommendation from its independent market monitor, which concluded that Texas kept wholesale prices artificially high for 33 hours longer than warranted during a winter freeze last month, resulting in $16 billion in excess charges to consumers.
Amid the freeze, which resulted in mass blackouts that left millions of households in the dark for days, the three-member panel appointed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the state's grid operator to raise wholesale power prices to the peak price of $9,000 per megawatt hour.
The market monitor said in a report filed Thursday that those prices should have been lowered when the grid operator stopped instituting blackouts, not when it ended the energy emergency a day and a half later. It recommended reversing $16 billion in charges.
Earlier this week, the previous commission chair, DeAnn Walker, resigned under criticism, leaving as sitting commissioners Mr. D'Andrea and Shelly Botkin, who also indicated Friday that she wasn't inclined to order repricing.
Several market participants and consumer groups had urged the commission to reset and lower prices from $9,000. Vistra Corp. , which is one of Texas' largest power generators and also owns a major electric retailer, said not repricing ''would result in unjust and unreasonable outcomes.''
Texas is grappling with massive financial fallout following last month's electricity crisis, with the state's utility commission and power grid operator at odds over exactly what went wrong.
A few hours into the blackouts, the utility commission took the unusual step of abandoning the market-based pricing mechanism and ordering wholesale power prices to be at the $9,000 cap until grid-ordered blackouts ended.
The grid operator complied and kept prices at the cap price after it stopped ordering blackouts, but at that time local electric companies were still struggling to turn the lights back on and some continued to have widespread blackouts.
The extended four days of $9,000 prices'--an exponential increase over the normal prices in Texas, which last year averaged $22 a megawatt hour'--took a massive financial toll on some market participants.
Vistra said it sustained losses between $900 million and $1.3 billion. Many wind farm operators, which needed to purchase electricity because of hedge contracts, are in financial distress. A major electric cooperative has filed for bankruptcy protection.
The utility commission didn't vote to reject the independent market monitor's suggestion, leaving the door open for a change of policy in coming weeks.
Sen. Nathan Johnson, a Democrat from Dallas, said he considered the agency's decision a mistake. He said he would have supported a clawback to ease concern among power generators and retailers about regulatory intervention in setting market prices.
''That would have sent a stronger market signal,'' he said.
'--Katherine Blunt contributed to this article.
Write to Russell Gold at russell.gold@wsj.com
Texas electric industry financial crisis to grow as more costs surface | Reuters
Fri, 05 Mar 2021 20:28
(Reuters) - The Texas electricity market faces ''insurmountable distress'' as more gas and service bills come due, power industry officials said on Thursday at a hearing into financial fallout from the state's February blackout.
FILE PHOTO: The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) command center in Taylor, Texas August 14, 2012. REUTERS/Julia Robinson
High prices for emergency fuel and power saddled the companies that sell, transmit and generate electricity in the state with about $47 billion in storm-related costs. Those costs have led to one bankruptcy and put two retail providers out of business in the state.
Consumers facing bills for broken water pipes and food losses will see higher prices as costs get passed down through rate increases or fewer choices in providers, officials said. Future spending on weather defenses and grid linkages could add billions of dollars to the recovery. San Antonio's city-owned utility expects about $1 billion in extra costs.
''The market is facing a financial crisis and it's a very severe financial crisis,'' Catherine Webking, executive director of an industry lobby group told state lawmakers at a hearing in Austin on Thursday. ''You'll see more and more financial distress that is insurmountable,'' as bills for natural gas and financial collateral come due in coming weeks, she testified.
Vistra Corp., one of the largest utilities in Texas, forecast that buying natural gas at high prices triggered by the storm and selling power at fixed-rate prices will cut its profit by between $900 million and $1.3 billion, Vistra senior vice president Bill Quinn testified.
GAS SHORTAGESVistra's power plants ran between 20% and 30% below capacity because of a lack of natural gas, Quinn said. ''Getting gas to them was a challenge,'' he said, noting all four of the utility's gas providers could not meet their fuel commitments.
On Wednesday, grid operator Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) disclosed 12 energy companies and two municipal utilities were overdue on $2.21 billion for power and services during February.
Part of the deficit was covered by tapping internal grid accounts, but the rest eventually will be passed along to all grid users, straining those that have covered their initial bills, an official said.
ERCOT has little means to cover the charges, said Kenan Ogelman, the grid's vice president for commercial operations. It collects money from suppliers and pays generators, typically in four days. Texas may have to consider providing a financial backstop during future emergencies, he said in response to a question.
''This event has demonstrated some consideration for a grid instrument,'' Ogelman said. Multi-billion dollar service charges have led to collateral calls on top of the fuel bills. The short period to pay both has led to ''cascading concerns,'' he said.
The decision to hold power rates high to keep power plants running even after the emergency passed was management judgment, he said. ''In hindsight, it would look like that wasn't needed. In real-time it looked like it was needed,'' Ogelman said.
ERCOT normally uses a bid system to set prices but officials decided to set a $9,000 per megawatt hour charge that was about 450 times the price before the storm. It held at that $9,000 level for about 90 hours, leading to 10s of billions of dollars in charges over five days.
The state Public Utility Commission (PUC) on Friday is expected to vote on a proposal to claw back some charges for standby power and other services that were not provided. It could save grid users about $1.5 billion, Carrie Bivens, the state's independent market adviser told the PUC in a letter on Thursday. She previously estimated the storm would push up state-wide power costs by $47 billion.
for-phone-only for-tablet-portrait-up for-tablet-landscape-up for-desktop-up for-wide-desktop-up
Texas grid operator made $16 billion price error during winter storm, watchdog says | Reuters
Sat, 06 Mar 2021 12:34
(Reuters) - Power grid operator Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) made a $16 billion pricing error in the week of the winter storm that led to power outages across Texas, Potomac Economics, which monitors the state's power market, said.
FILE PHOTO: An electrical substation is seen after winter weather caused electricity blackouts in Houston, Texas, U.S. February 20, 2021. REUTERS/Go Nakamura//File Photo
ERCOT kept market prices for power too high for more than a day after widespread outages ended late on Feb. 17, Potomac Economics, the independent market monitor for the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which oversees ERCOT, said in a filing.
''In order to comply with the Commission Order, the pricing intervention that raised prices to VOLL (value of lost load) should have ended immediately at that time (late on Feb. 17),'' Potomac Economics said.
''However, ERCOT continued to hold prices at VOLL by inflating the Real-Time On-Line Reliability Deployment Price Adder for an additional 32 hours through the morning of February 19,'' it said, adding the decision resulted in $16 billion in additional costs to ERCOT's markets.
The findings of Potomac Economics were reported first Thursday by Bloomberg and the Texas Tribune.
The Public Utility Commission, the Texas power regulator, on Friday unanimously vetoed a request to cut about $16 billion from state power charges during the final day of the February cold snap, saying even a partial repricing could have unintended effects.
Separately, rating agency Moody's Investors Service downgraded ERCOT by one notch to A1 from Aa3 and revised the grid operator's credit outlook to ''negative'' on Thursday.
On Wednesday, ERCOT's board ousted chief executive Bill Magness, as the fallout continued from a blackout that left residents without heat, power or water for days.
The mid-February storm temporarily knocked out up to half the state's generating plants, triggering outages that killed dozens and pushed power prices to 10 times the normal rate.
Many of ERCOT's directors have resigned in the last week, and the head of the Public Utility Commission resigned on Monday.
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Elites
TWO MORE former aides accuse New York Governor Andrew Cuomo of sexual misconduct '-- RT USA News
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 14:34
Two more women have come forward with allegations of inappropriate workplace treatment by Governor Andrew Cuomo, bringing the total number of accusers in the escalating sexual misconduct scandal to five.
Ana Liss, 35, who served as Cuomo's policy and operations aide between 2013 and 2015, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that he once ''touched her on her lower back at a reception" and "once kissed her hand when she rose from her desk,'' making her feel uncomfortable.
In a separate interview, Cuomo's former press aide, Karen Hinton, claimed that back in 2000 he embraced her ''intimately'' in his ''dimly lit hotel room,'' and that she could ''physically feel he was sexually aroused,''according to News 4.
Cuomo's spokesman vehemently denied Hinton's accusations, calling her a ''known antagonist of the governor's who is attempting to take advantage of this moment.'' As for Ana Liss' allegations, the governor's adviser told WSJ that ''reporters and photographers have covered the governor for 14 years watching him kiss men and women and posing for pictures.''
That's what people in politics do.
Also on rt.com 'It's the Cuomo way': MORE aides describe 'cult' workplace as top NY Democrat says governor should quit if new accusers speak out Cuomo was first accused of harassment in December by former aide Lindsey Boylan, 36, who later detailed her accusation, saying he kissed her without consent and even once suggested a game of ''strip poker'' while they were on a private plane.
Another former aide, Charlotte Bennett, 25, later came forward detailing Cuomo's harassment of her and claiming he sought a sexual relationship. And a third woman, Anna Ruch, 33, accused the governor of unwanted touching at a wedding and blasted his ''predatory behavior.''
The governor is under fire in multiple scandals as his policies in relation to nursing homes amid the pandemic have also generated immense controversy, inflamed further last month after a top Cuomo aide acknowledged that the state had concealed its nursing home deaths to avoid handing a political win to the Trump administration. More than 15,000 New York nursing home residents have died of Covid-19, updated Health Department data shows.
The governor apologized this week for making women ''uncomfortable'' in the past, but denied any unwanted touching. On nursing homes, he has claimed his administration simply did not keep up with requests for information.
Also on rt.com 'No new directives, period': New York lawmakers vote to strip Governor Cuomo of emergency Covid powers with veto-proof majority Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
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Austin City Council apologizes for city's treatment of Black people
Thu, 04 Mar 2021 21:56
The Austin City Council voted Thursday to formally apologize for the city's involvement in segregation and systemic racism and initiate a process for creating a Black Embassy to assist Black-led businesses and organizations.
The actions stemmed from a proposal by Council Member Natasha Harper-Madison, the lone Black person on the council, who has a track record of authoring legislation to address the city's racist past. Thursday's item passed unanimously and received support from community members who called into the meeting.
''We cannot move forward unless we recognize the city council's role in creating the wealth gap between Black and white Austinites,'' Harper-Madison said. ''To be clear, 'gap' isn't even the right word. It's a chasm of inequality and inequity.''
Harper-Madison laid out a number of past events she says exacerbated a racial divide in Austin and hindered the progress of Black communities.
Among them: A 1928 city master plan that created a "Negro District;" a 1938 city seizing of Emancipation Park through eminent domain to build the first African-American housing project in the United States; and a 1959 vote for the creation of an urban renewal agency that led to a mass displacement of Black Austinites from their historic communities.
The resolution, which was crafted in partnership with the Black Austin Coalition, required an apology for these acts.
Co-sponsoring Harper-Madison's initiative were Mayor Steve Adler and council members Vanessa Fuentes, Kathie Tovo and Greg Casar. Only four council members are allowed to co-sponsor an item, otherwise there likely would've been additional support.
"We have to really take account of the fact that the success of the city and the state began at the expense of slaves," Adler said, citing statistics from the 1800s that showed the city's slave population grew at a faster rater than the population as a whole.
Adler added: "I believe that history is going to remember the years of 2020 and 2021 as the moment that pointed us in this direction of justice. These were the years that forced us to see injustice, unlike any time before. Like someone grabbing and holding our face between your hands and not letting us turn away, forcing us to look at the unfairness around us and our part in perpetuating it."
Thursday's action built on past initiatives by Harper-Madison to address racism in the city. Since joining the council in 2019, the items she has sponsored include making Juneteenth an official city holiday, declaring racism a public health crisis and directing the city manager to treat it as such, and igniting an effort to rename city assets associated with the confederacy and white supremacy.
Harper-Madison also led on the creation of a fair chance housing policy to reduce discrimination against renters with criminal history and an investigation into allegations of racism at the Austin Police Department. She also crafted an expansion of the areas where public alcohol consumption is permitted to include historically Black neighborhoods east of Interstate 35.
In the latest proposal, Harper-Madison presented a 2015 city study that showed minorities and women are less likely to own their own businesses due to discrimination. That's the background for the creation of the Black Embassy for business owners, which will provide resources and support for existing and future Black-led businesses and organizations. It's to be located centrally in East Austin, per the resolution, which directs the city manager to explore the use of city owned properties in that area.
The city manager also is directed to conduct a study outlining the economic value of the harm caused through racial disparities and refusal of resources by the city. This will be done through a partnership between the University of Texas' LBJ School of Public Affairs and Huston-Tillotson University.
The city manager is directed to complete the council's requests by Aug. 1.
The Austin City Council voted Thursday to formally apologize for the city's involvement in segregation and systemic racism and initiate a process for creating a Black Embassy to assist Black-led businesses and organizations.
The actions stemmed from a proposal by Council Member Natasha Harper-Madison, the lone Black person on the council, who has a track record of authoring legislation to address the city's racist past. Thursday's item passed unanimously and received support from community members who called into the meeting.
''We cannot move forward unless we recognize the city council's role in creating the wealth gap between Black and white Austinites,'' Harper-Madison said. ''To be clear, 'gap' isn't even the right word. It's a chasm of inequality and inequity.''
Harper-Madison laid out a number of past events she says exacerbated a racial divide in Austin and hindered the progress of Black communities.
NASA Needs to Rename the James Webb Space Telescope - Scientific American
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 14:35
The telescope's mirror is partially deployed during testing. Credit: Chris Gunn NASABecause of its ability to see more deeply into spacetime than any instrument before it, the Hubble Space Telescope has completely transformed the way we see the universe and ourselves. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), often dubbed ''the next Hubble,'' promises to do the same. Slated to launch later this year, JWST will peer more deeply into the universe than any optical or infrared telescope before it, promising to show us a vision of galaxies in their infancy and probe potentially habitable worlds. Such data not only provide insight into the universe but also help us humans situate our concerns in context. It is therefore unfortunate that NASA's current plan is to launch this incredible instrument into space carrying the name of a man whose legacy is at best complicated and, at worst, complicit.
James Webb, a career civil servant whose time at the Department of State under Truman included advancing the development of psychological warfare as a Cold War tool, was later the NASA administrator who oversaw the Apollo program. When he arrived at NASA in 1961, his leadership role meant he was in part responsible for implementing what was by then federal policy: the purge of LGBT individuals from the workforce. When he was at State, this policy was being carried out by men who worked under Webb. As early as 1950, he was aware of this policy, and there is clear evidence to suggest that he was involved in supporting Senate discussions that ultimately kicked off what is known today as the Lavender Scare.
Many astronomers feel a debt of gratitude for Webb's work as NASA administrator. Appreciation and nostalgia for a time that NASA thrived during the Apollo program are understandable as motivations for using the JWST name. But while appreciation and nostalgia might be important motivations, they are not sufficient. While Webb may have played a positive role at NASA, his greater legacy beyond NASA is relevant. Without the knowledge of Webb's silence at State and his participation in making psychological warfare a tool of the military industrial complex, perhaps our gratitude for his work was sufficient. With that knowledge, we think it is time to rename JWST because the name of such an important mission, which promises to live in the popular and scientific psyche for decades, is a reflection of our values.
Around 2015, the history of Webb's complicity with persecution came to light. Although some astronomers reacted at the time, many in the community believed the opportunity to change the telescope's name had passed. Recently, an astronomer reconstituted this conversation in a personal blog, highlighting the fact that a homophobic quote was misattributed to Webb on his Wikipedia page (click here for the original version of the post. Spurred by this attempt to cleanse Webb's image, astronomers on social media began to argue that in the absence of this specific quote, Webb was not responsible for homophobic activity.
But nothing central has changed. Webb was in leadership and in decision-making discussions as the Lavender Scare unfolded. Additional archival evidence, found by Columbia astronomer Adrian Lucy in the aftermath of the blog's publication with a quick search of the archives, underlines Webb's role as a facilitator of homophobic policy discussions with members of the Senate.
As a person in a management position, Webb was ultimately responsible for the policies enacted under his leadership, including homophobic policies that were in place when he later became NASA administrator. Some argue that if Webb was complicit, so was everyone working in the administration at the time. We agree. Thankfully, NASA is not launching a telescope named after the entire administration, and individually its members would be poor choices for the honor for some of the same reasons that Webb is.
Some might be tempted to see the proposal to rename JWST as litigating decades-old history, but in fact, discrimination against queer people, including scientists, affects the lives and career outcomes of many today and tomorrow. In 2016, the American Physical Society released the ''LGBT Climate in Physics'' report. A core result of the report was that many queer scientists fundamentally do not feel safe in their workplaces. The climate is exclusionary, and physicists with overlapping minoritized identities, including LBGT+ physicists of color, experience the most harassment and exclusion. LGBTQIA+ astro/physicists exist, and are marginalized. A 2021 study published in Science finds similar outcomes.
This fact is not new but rather a continuation of history that dates back to Webb's era. Frank Kameny was an astronomer who was hired by the U.S. Army Map Service. When he was unwilling to provide information about his sexual orientation, he was investigated and subsequently fired. His failure to win justice through the courts for gay rights in the military led him to spend the rest of his life as an activist. Though today's queer liberation organizing encourages us to question our relationship to the U.S. military, Kameny's case is a clear example of homophobic injustice during the era when Webb was active.
At a time when the same hypermasculinist fears that characterized the Lavender Scare and other ideological purges during the Cold War also animate the current incarnation of far-right movements across the globe, what signal does it send to current and future generations of scientists when we prioritize the legacies of complicit government officials over the dreams of the next generation? With the launch of JWST just a few months away, and a new presidential administration (and a new NASA administrator) taking the helm, NASA has an opportunity to choose a namesake for JWST that will embrace a future of freedom and inspiration for all.
This struggle is neither limited to science, nor the past: Just a few months ago, Representatives Castro and Cicilline introduced the LOVE Act, which ''requires the State Department to set up an independent commission to review the cases of individuals who were fired since the 1950's as a result of their sexual orientation, receive testimony, and correct employment records.'' Passage of the LOVE Act would prompt not only an apology from Congress for its past complicity in the Lavender Scare, but would provide protections for queer diplomats at home and abroad.
The legacy of James Webb is so far from the freedom dreaming that is possible through the lens of a telescope, and it is time for NASA to change the name to something better. We will use this new telescope to learn about galactic histories, which will provide insight into the fate the universe holds for us. We hope we have already learned some of the lessons about how humanity will move towards the future here on Earth rather than repeating mistakes of the past. There will always be complications when it comes to naming monuments or facilities after individuals. No hero is perfect.
Yet we can certainly name incredible heroes who worked tirelessly to liberate others. Before she became a conductor on the Underground Railroad, a disabled and enslaved Harriet Tubman likely used the North Star, just as Henry Bibb did, to navigate to freedom. Naming ''the next Hubble'' the Harriet Tubman Space Telescope (HTST) would ensure that her memory lives always in the heavens that gave her and so many others hope. The HTST could also serve as a reminder that the night sky is a shared heritage that belongs to all of humanity, including LGBTQIA+ people. The time for lionizing leaders who chose to be embedded in a history of harm is over. We should name telescopes out of love for those who came before us and led the way to freedom, and those who are coming up after us who should be cherished.
This is an opinion and analysis article.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)Chanda Prescod-WeinsteinChanda Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and core faculty in women's and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She researches dark matter, neutron stars and how ascribed identities shape knowledge in physics and is the author of The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.
Sarah TuttleSarah Tuttle is an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Washington, Seattle. She builds astronomical instruments that have been deployed at observatories around the world and sub-orbitally. Her primary area of study is the gas flow in and out of galaxies across redshifts, and she works to reimagine science frameworks through justice and equity.
Lucianne WalkowiczLucianne Walkowicz is an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and co-founder of the JustSpace Alliance. Walkowicz studies the ethics of space exploration, stellar magnetic activity, how stars influence a planet's suitability as a host for alien life, and how to use advanced computing to discover unusual events in large astronomical data sets.
Brian NordBrian Nord is a scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Chicago. He designs algorithms to decode the shape and evolution of the universe from cosmological experiments, and he works to re-imagine and re-build research spaces to be just and equitable.
David Brooks Resigns From The Aspen Institute
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 15:03
David Brooks has resigned from his position at the Aspen Institute following reporting by BuzzFeed News about conflicts of interest between the star New York Times columnist and funders of a program he led for the think tank.
Eileen Murphy, a spokesperson for the Times, said in a statement that editors approved Brooks's involvement with Aspen in 2018, when he launched a project called Weave. But current editors weren't aware he was receiving a salary for Weave.
"The current Opinion editors were unaware of this arrangement and have concluded that holding a paid position at Weave presents a conflict of interest for David in writing about the work of the project, its donors or the broader issues it focuses on," Murphy said.
She said Brooks resigned his position at Aspen and will remain a volunteer for the project.
''Going forward The Times will disclose this unpaid relationship,'' Murphy said. ''We are also in the process of adding disclosures to any earlier columns in which David refers to the work of Weave or its donors.''
Brooks's resignation comes after BuzzFeed News discovered further evidence of conflicts of interest and entanglements with corporate and billionaire donors to Weave.
Brooks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
BuzzFeed News first revealed Brooks never disclosed to Times readers that he takes a full-time salary for his work on Weave, or that its funders include Facebook, the father of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and other wealthy individuals and corporations. Brooks recently wrote a blog post for Facebook's corporate website in praise of Facebook Groups, a product that has often been a fount of misinformation and hate speech.
Brooks's behavior raises thorny ethical issues for the Times. By appearing in videos for Weave funders, he's lending the paper's credence to entities in which he has a stake. The revelations of these entanglements has angered the Times' newsroom, where reporters, who are typically not allowed to maintain outside jobs that would be perceived as jeopardizing their news judgment, have reported critically on Facebook. Murphy told BuzzFeed News that Brooks did not inform the paper that he was blogging for Facebook, or that Weave received funding from the company. His Weave salary was revealed by BuzzFeed News earlier this week.
Over the past 24 hours, BuzzFeed News discovered new evidence of potential conflicts. On March 15 of last year, as Americans faced a deadly pandemic, Brooks appeared on ''Meet The Press'' and offered some advice.
"We need to take moral steps to make ourselves decent neighbors to each other as we go through this thing. I think people should get on Nextdoor, this sort of 'Facebook for neighbors,''' he said.
Left unsaid by Brooks was that Nextdoor, a social network for neighborhoods, had donated $25,000 to Weave. A day before his appearance on the nationally televised NBC program, Brooks also tweeted to his nearly 250,000 followers, ''If you know someone who lives alone, ask them to join NextDoor.''
Another new revelation: Last month, Brooks appeared in a Walton Family Foundation video and did not disclose that the organization, run by the billionaire family that founded Walmart, also funds his project.
Brooks's failure to disclose these conflicts of interest added to the string of ethically questionable actions by the columnist and author related to his work on Weave.
The Aspen Institute told BuzzFeed News that Facebook's funding of Weave ended in 2019. However, Facebook is listed as a financial supporter of a project Weave helped launch and run in 2020, ''#WeavingCommunity During Crisis.'' The Aspen Institute said in a statement that the funds were managed by its partner, the Listen First Project. Still, Facebook's financing of a Weave partnership means Brooks had a connection to the company when he blogged for its website and appeared in a video it produced.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Nextdoor spokesperson confirmed the company's partnership with Weave, but declined to give further details.
After declining to say if it would release information about all Weave donors, the Aspen Institute provided BuzzFeed News with a list of Weave funders on Friday night.
Brooks has not responded to multiple requests for comment from BuzzFeed News. He made his first public comments about the growing scandal during his weekly Friday segment on the PBS NewsHour on March 5. While defending his work on Weave, Brooks made two false statements.
Asked about his failure to disclose that Facebook helped fund Weave, Brooks said that "we totally did disclose it because everything is public.'' The Aspen Institute has only publicly posted a list of Weave donations from 2018. Facebook is not on the list, and Brooks did not acknowledge taking a donation from the company to Times readers, or to his current bosses at the paper.
Brooks also falsely stated that "the Aspen Institute is completely transparent about who the donors are, and so we released the donors." Ultimately, the Aspen Institute didn't release its 2018 figures until asked by BuzzFeed News.
Nick Massella, a PBS NewsHour spokesperson, told BuzzFeed News the program was ''aware David was working with the Aspen Institute on this project but not of its funding nature.'' Massella did not respond to a request for comment about Brook's false statements on the program.
Brooks did not respond to a request for comment about his appearances on the PBS NewsHour and ''Meet The Press.''
BuzzFeed News first asked the Aspen Institute to disclose a full list of Weave funders on March 4. It declined to say if it would. But after Brooks's appearance on the PBS NewsHour the next day and another inquiry from BuzzFeed News, the Aspen Institute released what it said is a complete tally of Weave donors.
They include billionaires, their family members, and other philanthropists like Jacklyn G. and Miguel A. Bezos, the parents of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; the Resnick Foundation, the nonprofit of POM Wonderful founders Stewart and Lynda Resnick; the Einhorn Collaborative, the nonprofit of hedge fund manager David Einhorn; financier Robert K. Steel and his wife, Gillian; investor John B. Fullerton and his wife, Jessica; the Penner Family Foundation, the nonprofit of Walmart heiress Carrie Walton Penner; TPG Capital Founder James Coulter and his wife, Penny; cannabis entrepreneur Pete Kadens; and the Crown family, which is led by businessman Lester Crown; and the Walton Family Foundation. Weave's corporate sponsors include Allstate, Walmart, Facebook, M&T Bank, and Nextdoor.
Brooks has written frequently about income inequality for the Times.
''Some people who talk about inequality focus on the top 1 percent, and if you want to go after the hedge fund billionaires feel free,'' he wrote in an April column. ''But as inequality is actually lived out, it's the 20/80 gap that is most glaring and most unjust.''
Nextdoor declined to say how much money it gave Weave, but the Aspen Institute told BuzzFeed News that ''Nextdoor provided $25,000 to support several events, including a 3-day national gathering held in Washington, DC.''
The Aspen Institute previously said Facebook gave Weave $250,000 in December 2018 and told BuzzFeed News that ''Weave has received no other funds from Facebook.''
But in 2020, Weave was one of two organizations that launched a program called ''#WeavingCommunity During Crisis'' and Facebook is listed among the project's financial donors. A review of the Twitter accounts for #WeavingCommunity and Weave show the organizations repeatedly promoted Facebook as a tool to connect communities. In one example, Weave lauded a program that gave Facebook Portal video conferencing devices to seniors in nursing homes.
''The grateful reactions have ranged from 'tears of joy' to an overwhelming sense of relief,'' Weave tweeted.
In his Friday appearance on the PBS NewsHour, Brooks, the author of books including The Road To Character, said he would address ''concerns'' about his work with Weave. But he rejected the idea that he'd done anything wrong and misled the audience about what had been publicly disclosed about Weave's funding.
In a May 2019 appearance on the PBS NewsHour, Brooks talked about the importance of ethical standards in journalism.
''The one thing legacy media has is, we have basic standards below which it's unimaginable to sink ...'' he said. ''And if you do make an error, you correct it.''
Big TEch
New Google Storage Policy coming in July 2022 for Education organizations
The new storage model will provide schools and universities with a baseline of 100TB of pooled cloud storage shared across all of your users. This policy will go into effect across all Google Workspace for Education editions for existing customers in July 2022 and will be effective for new customers signing up in 2022.
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The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol | MinnPost
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 04:57
It was mid-March 1992, and Mark McCahill had never been to San Diego before. Back home in Minneapolis, the skies had been dumping snow for six months, and would keep at it for several more weeks. McCahill checked into the Hyatt Islandia, an 18-story high-rise hotel overlooking Mission Bay. ''There were palm trees,'' he recalls. ''Boy, was it nice.''
McCahill was then in his mid-30s and managing the Microcomputer Center at the University of Minnesota''Twin Cities, which facilitated the emerging use of personal computers on campus. He and Farhad Anklesaria, a programmer in the center, had been invited to address the 23rd Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an elite convocation of academics and government officials from around the world who were literally deciding how the internet should work.
Mark P. McCahill Papers, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota
''The gods of the internet,'' McCahill says, though in other circles they would have gone unnoticed. In his memoirs, another internet pioneer, Tim Berners-Lee, describes these gatherings as ''people in T-shirts and jeans, and at times no footwear. They would meet in different small rooms and talk excitedly.''
The internet then, as now, was a vast array of information stored in random computers around the world, only there was no easy or consistent access. It was difficult even to discover what was out there '-- there were no good search engines. The most popular protocol, or method of retrieving information from another computer, was FTP (file transfer protocol), the primitive, labor-intensive equivalent of knocking on someone's door and asking if you could carry away his piano.
The IETF had been convening since 1986 to iron out these issues, which had prevented the internet from becoming the ''Intergalactic Network'' its originators had foreseen, instead remaining the limited domain of physicists and the military. But this meeting felt different. For the first time, the internet seemed on the verge of going public.
On March 18, in a conference room of the hotel, Berners-Lee presented one possible breakthrough: the World Wide Web. It was evening. Many of the 530 conference attendees had already gone to the bar or to dinner. To the curious who stayed behind, Berners-Lee explained that the Web could be used to connect all the information on the internet through hyperlinks. You could click on a word or a phrase in a document and immediately retrieve a related document, click again on a phrase in that document, and so on. It acted like a web laid over the internet, so you could spider from one source of information to another on nearly invisible threads.
Two other programs with the potential to expand access to the internet '-- WAIS and Prospero '-- were discussed in the same session. In the reports of people who saw the presentation, the Web did not come across as the best of them, or even as particularly promising.
The next day, in the light of the afternoon, McCahill and Anklesaria presented the Internet Gopher. It was simple enough to explain: With minimal computer knowledge, you could download an interface '-- the Gopher '-- and begin searching the internet, retrieving information linked to it from anywhere in the world. It was like the Web but more straightforward, and it was already working.
In fact, most attendees needed little introduction to Gopher '-- the software had been out for months. It was the developers they were curious about, the Minnesotans who had created the first popular means of accessing the internet. ''People we'd never met were telling us how they were using our stuff and adding things to it,'' McCahill says. ''We had no idea how big Gopher was going to be until we experienced this firsthand and realized that growth could be exponential for a while.''
In the years that followed, the future seemed obvious. The number of Gopher users expanded at orders of magnitude more than the World Wide Web. Gopher developers held gatherings around the country, called GopherCons, and issued a Gopher T-shirt '-- worn by MTV veejay Adam Curry when he announced the network's Gopher site. The White House revealed its Gopher site on Good Morning America. In the race to rule the internet, one observer noted, ''Gopher seems to have won out.''
McCahill's father was an executive for Conoco, the oil company, which moved him around the country about every two years. McCahill was in junior high when the family finally settled in the Twin Cities. He graduated from the U in 1979 with a BA in chemistry, spent a year studying effluent in rivers, and realized he liked the computer analysis (''heavy number smashing'') more than the chemistry itself (''kind of dirty''). So he took a job in the U's Microcomputer Center, programming some of Apple's first personal computers.
The Twin Cities were a proto-Silicon Valley then, with a long history of producing some of the world's most powerful computers at UNIVAC, Control Data Corporation, and Engineering Research Associates, which supported the work of Honeywell, IBM, and other local tech firms. The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, or MECC, formed in 1973 to get computers in schools and created software for them '-- most famously The Oregon Trail. By the early 1980s, when only a fraction of schools in neighboring states had computers, there were about three or four in every public school in Minnesota.
When McCahill began working in the Microcomputer Center, a turf battle was heating up '-- ''a religious war,'' McCahill calls it '-- between ''the high priests of computing'' who oversaw the U's venerable mainframes, the enormous machines that once occupied entire rooms, and the growing cadre of personal-computer converts. ''Microcomputer guys were as far out of the mainstream as you could get and still be a part of the U's computer center,'' McCahill says. Anklesaria, who had earned a doctorate in genetics before gravitating to computer science, says the Microcomputer Center was ''a splinter group'' when he joined in late 1987. ''The mainframe was still the only thing '-- the Mac was considered a toy.''
McCahill sided with PCs. ''The idea of democratizing access to computing, putting computers in the hands of everyday people '-- that resonated with me, and that was part of all the early PC stuff,'' he says. ''If you were interested in PCs, you just absorbed that attitude by osmosis. It was in the air and the water.''
Slides from a 1992 Internet Gopher presentation explaining the protocol:
Mark P. McCahill Papers, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota
McCahill, who had long hair then that he now pulls into a ponytail, spent his free time wind-surfing on Lake Calhoun, and says the PC revolution ''looked like a good wave to ride '... it would enable me to do what I've tried to do ever since: take technology that is cutting edge and get it to the point that it's palatable to mom and dad and English majors.''
In the late 1980s, McCahill and Anklesaria developed the first popular internet email system, called POPMail. ''It was partly for selfish reasons,'' McCahill says. ''I wanted more people using email so I didn't have to walk down the hall to my mailbox to collect my phone messages on little slips of paper.'' Instead, secretaries could send an email. For that matter, so could callers.
At the same time, the U was determined to network its computers on the internet in a so-called campus-wide information system, or CWIS, and the schism was delaying development. By early 1991, a committee of more than 20 department heads and computing specialists had been meeting for months, producing a long list of demands '-- including the use of mainframe computers '-- but zero code. ''They had some complicated shit for doing searches that I didn't want to do,'' McCahill says. ''Farhad didn't want to write it at all.''
''But I had to show something,'' Anklesaria says. So he stripped the program down to its simplest parts '-- a basic protocol for making information in one place available somewhere else. He cobbled it together on a Mac, writing a server (a program enabling a computer to ''serve up'' requested files) and a client (how most of our computers are programmed, enabled to search for and request those files). ''And I said, 'This stuff kind of works.' Since we had nothing else, we went for it.''
Mark P. McCahill Papers, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota
A 1994 University of Minnesota alumni magazine spread featuring the Gopher protocol architects.
McCahill pushed for a full-text search engine '-- something we now take for granted '-- and borrowed the gist of one from a computer system called NeXT, which had recently been invented by Steve Jobs. ''We had this marriage of Farhad's super-simple protocol for saying give me a list of items, a menu,'' says McCahill, ''and my thing of having a way of searching, and we glued those two together.''
It was plain text '-- no pictures, given that modem speeds were so slow. And it was organized like the one information source most people alive in the early 1990s were familiar with: a library, with similar subjects grouped together. You just pointed your gopher, as the lingo went, to any Gopher site you wanted to explore, and there you were, burrowing through the internet. It was so simple that just about anyone could make it work, even an English major.
''It was one of the rare times when we both looked at each other and said, 'Holy shit, we've got a really good idea here,''' McCahill recalls. Anklesaria called it the Internet Gopher, a triple play on words: the U's mascot, a critter that digs, and a go-fer '-- one who fetches. ''We figured that if we called it Gopher, the committee couldn't complain,'' McCahill says. ''It's the school mascot!''
Sir Tim Berners-Lee '-- he was knighted in 2004 '-- was born in London in 1955, less than a year before McCahill. His parents were both mathematicians. While McCahill's father was being shipped from Colorado to Oklahoma to Minnesota, Sir Tim's parents were developing the world's first commercially available computer.
Berners-Lee grew up with the internet, or at least the concept of it. As a child, he built mock computers out of cardboard boxes. He came home from high school one day to find his father writing a speech on how computers might someday make intuitive connections, linking information the way the brain uses random associations to link thoughts.
Creative Commons/John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Tim Berners-Lee in a 2008 photo.
He was a teenager when the internet began as the ARPAnet, connecting a handful of computers at Stanford and other universities. It was designed as a defense, a secure means of communication should the Soviets destroy the American telephone system, though its practical purpose was to allow scientists to use the computing power at another facility for massive calculations.
Berners-Lee earned a degree in physics from Oxford '-- where he built his first computer with parts from an old television, a calculator, an electronics kit, and a car battery '-- then worked as a software engineer for a few years before taking a job with CERN, the famous particle-physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland. By then, in 1984, the internet had gone global; CERN was the largest internet node in Europe.
Yet using the internet was problematic even within the CERN lab. When you wanted information, Berners-Lee later recalled, ''often it was just easier to go ask people while they were having coffee.'' He decided he could do better. He had never forgotten his father's research on the brain, and when he wove the Web, it was based on this holistic, serendipitous, strangely rewarding experience of surfing from one vaguely related idea to the next.
He finished a model of the Web in 1989, but for years it went nowhere. The concept was too abstract and it only worked on NeXT computers. But in early 1991, just as McCahill and Anklesaria were conceiving the Internet Gopher in Minnesota, the first Web servers outside of CERN were switched on.
After outlining the Gopher protocol, McCahill and Anklesaria pulled together four programmers who worked in the Microcomputer Center to write the software. McCahill wanted it in a hurry. Not because he was racing Berners-Lee, but because he wanted it over with. He wanted it before the next CWIS committee meeting, in a month.
The programmers were young guys, mostly in their 20s and, like McCahill, mostly huge Nirvana fans. Paul Lindner, a coding wunderkind from northern Minnesota who was dubbed the Gopher Dude for his evangelism, had long metal-head hair and signed Gopher emails with lyrics like ''You have to spit to see the shine'' from Babes in Toyland. Early Gopher servers were named Mudhoney, Danzig, and Anthrax. The sole outlier in the microcomputer mosh pit was Bob Alberti, a programmer who named a server Indigo, as in the Indigo Girls.
MinnPost photo by Corey Anderson
Shepherd Labs on the University of Minnesota campus.
The center was in Shepherd Labs, a hulking cement building built like a tank in 1968 on the U's Minneapolis campus, with concrete floors and no windows. Early on, it was used for NASA materials research. ''There were pipes with strange fluids running through them,'' Lindner recalls.
The microcomputer team, in addition to developing software for the U, ran a showroom for students and faculty interested in buying a Mac, taught computer training classes, tested software, and served as a help center for people with PC problems '-- walk-in and call-in. ''Everyone would answer phones at least one day a week,'' Lindner says, ''even if you were programming. That way you were close to the pain you were inflicting on people '-- if programmers today still took calls, we'd have more user-friendly software.''
Gopher, however, was claiming more and more of their time. ''It became infectious,'' Lindner says. ''How can we build this into the science fiction of our dreams, access to all the information in the world, the library of everything?''
The team, in 36-hour sessions fueled by beer, pizza, and speed metal, finished writing Gopher in about three weeks. They installed the first computer running a Gopher server '-- a Mac SE/30, a little droid of a computer with an iPad-size monitor built in '-- in a narrow hallway between their offices and the showroom, in a closet with metal shelves. It became known as the Mother Gopher.
The committee meeting where the team first presented the Gopher protocol was a disaster, ''literally the worst meeting I've ever seen,'' says Alberti. ''I still remember a woman in pumps jumping up and down and shouting, 'You can't do that!' ''
Among the team's offenses: Gopher didn't use a mainframe computer and its server-client setup empowered anyone with a PC, not a central authority. While it did everything the U required and then some, to the committee it felt like a middle finger. ''You're not supposed to have written this!'' Alberti says of the group's reaction. ''This is some lark, never do this again!'' The Gopher team was forbidden from further work on the protocol.
After the meeting, McCahill leaned on the director of the computer center, a Chinese-American man named Shih Pau Yen, who had supported Gopher all along. ''I said I would quit before I stopped working on the coolest thing we'd ever created,'' McCahill says. Yen ran interference, and the Gopher team kept working on it in their own time.
''In this bureaucracy of little fiefdoms, where everyone had a hard time working together, the one thing that could unify us was telling everyone else off,'' Lindner says. ''That was our rallying cry.''
Finally, in April 1991, still unable to persuade the U to take on Gopher, Lindner released it into the wild. He made the Gopher software available via FTP '-- the most popular way to share information on the internet at the time '-- and wrote a brief, quiet announcement on an internet mailing list: Hey, we've got this thing, come and get it.
Within months, the team was hearing from Gopher users around the country. ''It was the first viral software,'' Alberti says. ''All these people started calling the U and pestering the president and other administrators, saying, 'This Gopher thing is great, when are you going to release a new version?' And the administrators said, 'What are you talking about?'''
The ban was lifted. Never numbering more than six core members, the team fanned out to conferences to spread the Gopher gospel, while continuing to improve and diversify the protocol. In the process they ended up laying the foundation for much of how we navigate the internet. The first hyperlinks. The first bookmarks. McCahill, thinking of windsurfing, even coined the term ''surf the internet.''
A video of veejay Adam Curry wearing an "Internet Gopher World Tour" T-shirt on MTV.
Within a year, there were hundreds of Gopher servers. Berners-Lee, who had publicly introduced the World Wide Web a few months after Gopher's debut, used Gopher to do it. ''People look at the World Wide Web today and think it sprang out of Tim Berners-Lee's forehead,'' Alberti says. ''But the fact is, the only way he was able to spread the word about the Web is because the Internet Gopher was there to allow people to download his files, find a discussion group, and talk about it.''
''We had the right product at the right time,'' McCahill says. ''People were looking to expand the internet beyond physicists' stuff. Gopher could do that. It was simple to use, it could network lots and lots of computers. It gave people a reason to say, hey, this internet is good.''
Lindner was solicited for side gigs '-- twice he went to Ecuador to set up Gopher for the country's fledgling internet. ''That's when I knew we were really onto something,'' he says, ''when I was helping wire a whole country.''
Al Gore, then a U.S. senator, came to visit. Four GopherCons, held between 1992 and 1995, drew reps from the New York Times, the World Bank, Microsoft, and other global heavyweights. The Gopher T-shirt, black and scribbly, listed the names of places with Gopher servers on the back, in the style of rock tour shirts. It was an apt metaphor, as Gopher team member Daniel Torrey told the Pioneer Press in 1996: ''We thought we were rock stars.''
Some team members dreamed of fortune to go with their fame. But the internet was not yet open for business. It had been built on dot-mil and dot-edu, on public funds. Programmers shared source code; if you needed something, someone gave it to you. A dot-com address was considered crass. It was ''as though all of TV was PBS,'' Lindner says. ''No commercials.''
Still, Alberti raised the profit potential of Gopher with Shih Pau Yen. Before coming to work in the Microcomputer Center, Alberti had helped create the first online multi-player role-playing game '-- called Scepter of Goth, an ancestor of World of Warcraft and the like. ''I said we should take this private, we should make a business of this and make some money off it,'' Alberti recalls. ''He looked at me like I'd just grown another head.''
Mark P. McCahill Papers, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota
Eventually, though, the U did want some money '-- for itself. At GopherCon '93, Yen announced that for-profit Gopher users would need to pay the U a licensing fee: hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on the size and nature of their business. Many users felt betrayed. In the open-source computing spirit of the day, they had contributed code to Gopher, helping the team keep up with the times. Now they were being asked to pony up.
The reaction deflated the team. As hard as they were expected to work on Gopher, they were never relieved of other duties, including answering the U's help line. ''We never got additional funding, we were going broke,'' Alberti says. ''We had the whole internet yelling at us, when are you going to update your software, when are you going to put images on Gopher pages, and make this smoother and better? And we're like: 'We're six guys!'''
For a while, the U threatened to get rid of them altogether, a bid to outsource the university's computer work, provoking one programmer to bug a computer in Morrill Hall, the U's administrative center, so the team could listen in on discussions.
Asking for a contribution seemed reasonable. When it backfired, the team posted a defensive letter to Gopher users in March 1993: '''... There has been a lot of hysteria, misinformation, and rumor floating around. '... In a time where we are having budgets slashed, it is impossible to justify continued (increasing) resources being allocated to Gopher development unless some good things result for the University of Minnesota. This is a fact of life. '... Before you go off and flame once more, ask yourself if you want to get YOUR particular server going with as little fuss and expense as possible ... or if you just want to stir up the soup.''
''That socially killed Gopher,'' Alberti says of the licensing fiasco.
Yet it wasn't the end. In 1993, Gopher was still far more popular than the World Wide Web, and Gopher traffic grew by 997 percent. But the Web was starting to catch up '-- that year, it grew by 341,634 percent.
At the San Diego internet conference, in 1992, Berners-Lee had pulled McCahill and Anklesaria aside on the last day of meetings and asked if they wanted to collaborate on a Web/Gopher hybrid. Some melding of their different designs '-- an internet super-system '-- though it wasn't clear how that might work.
''Tim is a great guy, but he's a little odd, a little scattered,'' McCahill says. ''Talking to him is like a ball of twine experience. The Web you see now, that's how he thinks.''
McCahill told Berners-Lee that he would need to look at the Web more closely. But it wasn't much to look at when McCahill went back to Minnesota and examined it. There were no graphics yet. It was still only running on NeXT computers. ''I wasn't feeling it,'' McCahill says. I told him, 'Tim, I don't think so.' Of course, I look back and say, 'I might have been wrong.' ''
Soon enough, the Web did have pictures and was available on more platforms. In 1993, the first popular Web browser, Mosaic, was introduced for sale, breaking the commercial taboo of the internet and suggesting '-- to McCahill at least '-- that tech investors had taken sides. ''The fix was in,'' he says.
In 1994, modem speeds doubled, and the interminable rendering of images on the Web '-- once dubbed the World Wide Wait '-- greatly accelerated. PCs began to be sold with these faster modems built in. To anyone looking for a simple, even crude explanation for the Web's rise, this is it: the ability to view a reasonable facsimile of a naked woman in the privacy of your own home. ''That's what came to drive a lot of the internet,'' Alberti says. ''Porn.''
The Internet Gopher, with his text-only menu and gloss-less, institutional mien, couldn't keep up. He had fallen off the wave, and almost overnight was revealed as a buck-toothed square, ignored by the girls on the beach, his surfboard held together by duct tape. ''Obsolesced,'' as one observer put it in 1994. A has-been.
''I remember the exact moment I knew I was no longer on the right track,'' says Lindner. ''It was September 9, 1993. I was invited to give a talk about Gopher at Princeton, and I had my slides all printed up on my little university-budget black-and-white foils. The person presenting before me was talking about the future of the Web, with full-color LCD projection. I said, 'I think I see where things are going.' ''
Courtesy of Bob Alberti
Mark McCahill's entry on the University of Minnesota's ''Wall of Discovery,'' which celebrates the accomplishments of students and faculty.
For McCahill, the realization happened on the street. ''I saw a URL on the side of a bus,'' he says. ''That's when I knew the Web was all about advertising. Gopher was not good for advertising. I knew it would start winding down.''
In the spring of 1994, Web traffic overtook Gopher traffic for the first time. Gopher, within a few months, began to decline. Its reign had lasted three years.
The coup de grce came from the U itself. In 1995, Dr. John Najarian, a renowned transplant surgeon at the university, was indicted for tax evasion, embezzlement, and fraud. Although Najarian was later cleared of all charges, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) put the U on probational status, threatening tens of millions of dollars in grants and the school's viability as a top research institution. ''It was an all hands on deck situation,'' McCahill says.
The issue was essentially simple: bad accounting. Paperwork was literally on paper, and transaction records sat around for weeks before making it into a ledger, if they made it in at all. The Gopher programming team was diverted to creating a more accountable accounting system for the U, what turned out to be the first Web-based transaction program. ''That's what my kick-ass development shop did for a year and a half,'' McCahill says, ''to show the NIH that we were cleaning things up.'' By the time they finished, the Internet Gopher was dead.
In the beginning, when the Mother Gopher was new and there were no other Gopher servers to link to, Gopherspace was empty. The Gopher team, to demonstrate the usefulness of their invention, dumped in a cookbook and searched for eggplant. As late as 1993, the most popular information in Gopherspace included recipes, weather, phone books, and movies of chemical reactions.
''Gopher represented a simpler, more na¯ve time,'' says one of its modern-day fans. Others call it ''a purer way'' of navigating the internet, of ''making structure out of chaos.''
Today, there are about 140 Gopher servers still out there, many of them relatively new. The tech world is not a sentimental place, but it does appreciate simplicity and irony in equal measure '-- many of these servers were set up on April Fool's Day.
MinnPost photo by Bill Kelley
Farhad Anklesaria: ''You have to be at the right time and place to have your technology take off and become popular.''
Cameron Kaiser, perhaps the Internet Gopher's greatest advocate these days (he runs a Gopher support site called the Overbite Project), figures he spends about 25 percent of his internet time in Gopherspace. ''It's actually rather nice to have a small ecosystem because no one's running annoying ads in Gopherspace or trying to track your browsing habits,'' he says. ''The protocol makes the former hard and the latter almost impossible.''
Courtesy of Paul Lindner
Paul Lindner
As the Web has become synonymous with the internet, and we conduct more of our lives online, we've learned to abide the misinformation, solicitations, and scams that thrive in its chaos '-- though it has changed us and society in ways we are only beginning to understand. If Gopher had won out, who knows how things would be different.
The Gopher team, who might understandably be disappointed, seem genuinely OK with how things turned out. More than OK, actually, as though they expected it. They were first, after all. And in the march of technology, the first are eventually last. ''This is the natural order of things,'' Anklesaria says. ''You have some building blocks '-- the natural thing to do is build on them. That's how civilization bootstraps and how we progress.''
If they are surprised by anything, it's that the Web was the system that surpassed them and has outlasted everything else. There was a protocol that was better than either the Web or Gopher, they say, called Hyper-G, developed in Austria, which never got off the ground. ''You have to be at the right time and place to have your technology take off and become popular,'' says Anklesaria. ''If you're at the base of a wave, you have a chance to rise with it. But if you're already on top of the wave and the wave has broken, that's not good '-- if you're too early, you won't last.''
MinnPost photo by Bill Kelley
Bob Alberti: ''The only way [Tim Berners-Lee] was able to spread the word about the Web is because the Internet Gopher was there to allow people to download his files, find a discussion group, and talk about it.''
On July 1, 1997, or maybe in 2009, most likely in the 2000s, someone walked into the closet in Shepherd Labs and unplugged the Mother Gopher. No one can agree on the date. No one from the Gopher team was around.
''While I was at the U,'' McCahill says, ''it was a point of pride that we'd keep running the server.'' But McCahill left in 2007 to become a systems architect at Duke University, developing instructional and research computing technology. Lindner left in 1996, having followed a Gopher side gig to Geneva, Switzerland, where he worked for the United Nations, and is now a software engineer for Google. Anklesaria retired last spring. Of the core Gopher team members, Alberti is the only one still at the U, as an information security architect.
At its peak, the Mother Gopher consisted of 10 Apple IIci computers. But when it was finally euthanized, who knows what shape it was in. There was no ceremony. Nothing was carted off to a museum. Gopherspace simply became emptier, and the world without the Web became harder to imagine.
BTC
NFT's
This ONLY works if we scam the entire market, like a group, like WSB
My thoughts are;
There's no fee to mint, so there's no real risk.
People will be posting their episode art anyway, why not list on mintable, perhaps a fan will buy for prestige like the knighthoods.
Distribution of the generated ETH to artists may be a problem as the fee to send the ETH may be more than the sale of the NFT, it's around $5 a transaction at the moment. I'd probably wait until a decent amount had been generated then send it straight to you. You could then decide to reward the artist from this pot at your own discretion or give me addresses to fund.
mintable.app/u/noagenda < the link where the NFTs will be listed.
Why Central Banks Want To Get Into Digital Currencies - YouTube
ECB intensifies its work on a digital euro
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 10:21
2 October 2020
Publication of Eurosystem High-Level Task Force report on digital euro Eurosystem needs to be ready for possible future decision to introduce digital euro Public consultation and experimentation to be launched The European Central Bank (ECB) today published a comprehensive report on the possible issuance of a digital euro, prepared by the Eurosystem High-Level Task Force on central bank digital currency (CBDC) and approved by the Governing Council.
A digital euro would be an electronic form of central bank money accessible to all citizens and firms '' like banknotes, but in a digital form '' to make their daily payments in a fast, easy and secure way. It would complement cash, not replace it. The Eurosystem will continue to issue cash in any case.
''The euro belongs to Europeans and our mission is to be its guardian,'' said Christine Lagarde, ECB President. ''Europeans are increasingly turning to digital in the ways they spend, save and invest. Our role is to secure trust in money. This means making sure the euro is fit for the digital age. We should be prepared to issue a digital euro, should the need arise.''
The Eurosystem task force, bringing together experts from the ECB and 19 national central banks of the euro area, identified possible scenarios that would require the issuance of a digital euro. These scenarios include an increased demand for electronic payments in the euro area that would require a European risk-free digital means of payment, a significant decline in the use of cash as a means of payment in the euro area, the launch of global private means of payment that might raise regulatory concerns and pose risks for financial stability and consumer protection, and a broad take-up of CBDCs issued by foreign central banks.
''Technology and innovation are changing the way we consume, work and relate to each other,'' said Fabio Panetta, member of the ECB's Executive Board and Chair of the task force. ''A digital euro would support Europe's drive towards continued innovation. It would also contribute to its financial sovereignty and strengthen the international role of the euro.''
A digital euro would preserve the public good that the euro provides to citizens: free access to a simple, universally accepted, risk-free and trusted means of payment. It also poses challenges, but by following appropriate strategies in the design of the digital euro the Eurosystem can address these.
The Governing Council has not taken a decision yet on whether to introduce a digital euro.
The Eurosystem will engage widely with citizens, academia, the financial sector and public authorities to assess their needs, as well as the benefits and challenges they expect from the issuance of a digital euro, in detail. A public consultation will be launched on 12 October.
Experimentation will start in parallel, without prejudice to the final decision.
For media queries, please contact Alexandrine Bouilhet, tel.: +49 172 174 93 66.
Notes: Link to the report on the ECB's website Hub: A digital euro CONTACT
European Central Bank
Brandon Smith '' We're Headed For 1929 Repeat
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 11:49
''They want an economic disaster,'' says Brandon Smith. After creating an inflationary bubble in the 1920's, the Fed engineered the Great Depression by raising rates. Brandon Smith thinks this game plan may be repeated in order to impose a permanent globalist lockdown and a digital world currency.
''The only unknown at this point is how they will go about their sabotage. Will the central bank continue to allow inflation to explode the cost of living in the U.S., or will they intervene with higher interest rates and allow stock markets to crash?''
Stagflation Subterfuge: The Real Disaster Hidden By The Pandemic
by Brandon Smith
(abridged by henrymakow.com)
'...Inflation or deflation?
The central bank has created a Catch 22, and many (including myself) believe that the Fed has created the conundrum deliberately.
All central banks are tied together by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the BIS is a globalist institution through and through. The globalist agenda seeks to trigger what they call the ''Great Reset,'' a complete reformation of the global economy and capitalism into a single one world socialist system'... managed by the globalists themselves, of course.
In my view, the Fed has always been a kind of institutional suicide bomber; its job is to self-destruct at the right moment and take the U.S. economy down with it, all in the name of spreading its cult-like globalist ideology.
The only unknown at this point is how they will go about their sabotage. Will the central bank continue to allow inflation to explode the cost of living in the U.S., or will they intervene with higher interest rates and allow stock markets to crash?
Either way, we face a serious economic crisis in the near future.
INCREASING INFLATION MEANS ECONOMIC RECOVERY
Mainstream economists will often argue that rising yields and inflation are a ''good thing.'' They claim this is a sign of rapid economic recovery. I disagree.
If ''inflation'' was the same as ''recovery,'' then there would not have been total economic collapses in Argentina in 2002, in Yugoslavia in 1994, or in Weimar Germany in the early 1920s.
I do not see recovery. What I see is the rapid devaluation of the dollar's buying power due to massive fiat printing through stimulus measures. The Fed and the U.S. government are buying a short-term surge in economic activity, but at a hidden cost. This is a condition that the Dollar Index does not even begin to address, but obvious in prices of necessary goods and commodities'...
LOCKDOWNS WERE A PRETEXT TO ERODE THE US DOLLAR
Let's make something clear first: The pandemic is NOT the reason for the stimulus flood. The pandemic did very little to hurt actual business in the U.S. Rather, it was the lockdowns that did most of the damage.
Think about that for a moment '' federal and state governments crushed the economy through lockdowns, then offered the solution of vast stimulus measures. This in turn is destroying financial stability and generating rapid price inflation.
Conservative states and counties that refused to shut down are recovering at a much faster pace than leftist states which imposed draconian restrictions on citizens. Yet, the lockdowns did nothing to stop the spread of COVID-19 in blue states. So, the lockdowns accomplished no discernible advantage for the public, but they did give the central bank a perfect rationale to further erode the dollar.
This resulting price inflation is something that not even the red states can escape.
For example, home prices are rapidly expanding beyond the market bubble of 2006. This is partially due to millions of people participating in perhaps the largest migration in the U.S. since the Great Depression. Anyone who is able is moving away from major cities into suburban and rural areas. But, home prices also have a historic habit of inflating along with currency devaluation. The cost of maintaining and remodelling an older home, or building a new home, rises as the prices of commodities like lumber inflate.
And lumber prices are certainly inflating! Softwood lumber prices are up at least 110% from a year ago, and are climbing as much as 10% in a week.
Home rentals also do not escape inflation, as the rising cost of maintaining properties forces landlords to increase rents. The only places where rents are decreasing are major cities that Americans are seeking to flee, such as New York and San Francisco'...
LOCKDOWNS ARE JUST AN EXCUSE TO CRUSH SMALL BUSINESS
This is why the COVID-19 lockdowns must continue and the pandemic fear factory must remain active. The globalists need a cover event for the Reset and they need to keep the citizenry under control, and the pandemic can be blamed for just about anything.
This is why the media is hyping the existence of ''COVID mutations.''
Do not be surprised if the Biden Administration tries to implement a national lockdown sometime this year in the name of stopping the spread of a ''more deadly'' COVID-19 variant.
It won't matter that the previous lockdowns were useless and all the data shows that keeping the economy open is a superior policy. It might seem like logic is going completely out the window, but there is a very logical reason for what is happening in the minds of globalists.
Stagflation comes into play through losses in certain sectors of the economy, high unemployment and the inability of wages to keep up with costs.
There is the continued dismantling of the small business sector, which, again, I believe is being destroyed deliberately. It's not a mistake that small businesses were predominantly targeted as ''non-essential'' during the lockdowns. It's also not a coincidence that the majority of COVID-19 PPP loans went to big box corporations while small businesses received almost nothing. The small business sector is being erased, leaving only the corporate sector to provide for consumers.
This may be why Democrats are so adamant about raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Wages are already rising according to market demand and region. The average non-skilled worker in the U.S. is making around $11 an hour. There is no need for the government to interfere, unless they have ulterior motives.
A $15 minimum wage would likely crush what's left of small businesses, and only corporations that are receiving the bulk of stimulus dollars will be able to afford to pay workers the higher rate. '...
Prices will continue to rise due to dollar devaluation, but the media and government will say that it has nothing to do with the dollar and everything to do with companies raising shelf prices to offset increased labor costs.
CONCLUSION
I suspect that the establishment will do everything in its power to distract the public from the biggest threat in the history of American society '' the stagflationary time bomb.
If they admit to its existence then the public could prepare for it, and they don't want that. If Americans were to decentralize their local economies, support local small businesses instead of big box retailers, start producing necessities for themselves, and developed currency alternatives like local scrip backed by commodities'... then they would be able to survive a national financial crisis.
In fact, I guarantee that any community, county or state that takes these steps will immediately be targeted by the federal government, further revealing the truth: The establishment wants the public to suffer.
They want economic disaster. They do not want people to have the option of taking care of themselves. They need people scared, desperate and malleable, or they will never achieve their Reset agenda.
'--'--
Related '' Rothschilds Courting Economic Collapse
https://www.henrymakow.com/2021/03/Brandon-Smith-Were-Heading-Toward-a-Repeat-of-1929.html
NFTs are a dangerous trap | Seth's Blog
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 12:31
Like most traps, they're mysterious and then appealing and then it's too late.
An NFT is digital treasure chest, a status symbol and an apparent item of value.
Like a Pokemon card, or an original Picasso drawing or the actual frame of a Disney animated film from 1955, NFTs are designed to be the one and only, a shred of non-fungible reality in a world gone digital.
You either own this thing or you don't.
To make it really clear, consider Honus Wagner. A Honus Wagner baseball card is quite rare (Wagner didn't permit the card to be made because he wanted nothing to do with cigarettes, foreshadowing some of the stuff below) and so there were fewer than 200 all in before production shut down. One of the cards last sold for more than $3,000,000.
Owning a Honus Wagner card doesn't mean you own Honus Wagner. Or a royalty stream or anything else but the card itself.
For years, this was part of the business model of the collectible card industry. Make billions of cards, most get thrown out, some rookies get famous, some cards go up in value.
Now, consider an oil painting. Perhaps it was stolen a long time ago, or became famous for other reasons. It's the one and only. If you somehow owned the Mona Lisa, it wouldn't mean that you own the woman who is portrayed in it, or any part of DaVinci, it would simply mean you own a canvas, one that others also want to own.
People can look at images of the Mona Lisa all day long without compensating you, because you simply own the original trophy, not the idea'...
But having it on your wall gives you a feeling, and telling other people you own it gives you another, slightly different feeling.
It's worth noting two things about the art example:
There's a three-thousand-year cultural history of owning priceless works of art. Most people understand that an original Rothko is a high-status luxury good.Almost all paintings are worthless (on a cash basis). They sell at garage sales for dollars, not millions, and original (and beautiful) works of art go unsold every day.So what's an NFT? It's a digital token (the same way a Bitcoin is a digital token) except it's a one and only, like a Honus Wagner, there's just one. One of these tokens might refer to something else (a video of a basketball shot, an oil painting, even this blog post) but it isn't that thing. It's simply a token authorized by the person who made it to be the one and only one. (The NBA has already sold more than $200 million in video clip highlight NFTs)'...
And so the trap:
CREATORS may rush to start minting NFTs as a way to get paid for what they've created. Unlike alternative digital currencies which are relatively complicated to invent and sell, it's recently become super easy to 'mint' an NFT. I could, for example, turn each of the 8,500 posts on this blog into a token and sell them on the open market.
The more time and passion that creators devote to chasing the NFT, the more time they'll spend trying to create the appearance of scarcity and hustling people to believe that the tokens will go up in value. They'll become promoters of digital tokens more than they are creators. Because that's the only reason that someone is likely to buy one''like a stock, they hope it will go up in value. Unlike some stocks, it doesn't pay dividends or come with any other rights. And unlike actual works of art, NFTs aren't usually aesthetically beautiful on their own, they simply represent something that is.
BUYERS of NFTs may be blind to the fact that there's no limit on the supply. In the case of baseball cards, there are only so many rookies a year. In the case of art, there's a limited number of famous paintings and a limited amount of shelf space at Sotheby's. NFTs are going to be more like Kindle books and YouTube videos. The vast majority are going to have ten views, not a billion. It's an unregulated, non-transparent hustle with 'bubble' written all over it.
THE REST OF US are going to pay for NFTs for a very long time. They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and trade. Together, they are already using more than is consumed by some states in the US. Imagine building a giant new power plant just to make Christie's or the Basel Art Fair function. And the amount of power wasted will go up commensurate with their popularity and value. And keep going up. The details are here. The short version is that for the foreseeable future, the method that's used to verify the blockchain and to create new digital coins is deliberately energy-intensive and inefficient. That's on purpose. And as they get more valuable, the energy used will go up, not down.
It's an ongoing waste that creates little in ongoing value and gets less efficient and more expensive as time goes on. For most technological innovations the opposite is true.
The trap, then, is that creators can get hooked on creating these. Buyers with a sunk cost get hooked on making the prices go up, unable to walk away. And so creators and buyers are then hooked in a cycle, with all of us up paying the lifetime of costs associated with an unregulated system that consumes vast amounts of precious energy for no other purpose than to create some scarce digital tokens.
[Here are some other views on this].
I wrote a book about digital cash twenty years ago. This is precisely the sort of cool project and economic curiosity that I want to be excited about. But, alas, I can see the trap and I wanted to speak up with clarity. I would usually make this into an episode of my podcast, but Everest's article deserved a link and more focus, so here you go.
Let's walk away from this one.
Words Matter
Is Anyways A Real Word? How to Use Anyways | Merriam-Webster
Sat, 06 Mar 2021 14:36
Anyways is a real word and has seen use meaning "in any manner or respect" for over 800 years. Many believe the newer usage of "anyways" meaning "at any rate, in any case" is not a real word, but it and other modern usages of "anyways" have consistent use for at least 100 years as well confirming that it is a real word.
The question of whether a word exists or not is one that many of our readers struggle with on a daily basis. Others, however, have no doubts about the existence of a specific word. An example of this second group may be found in the people who comment on our entry for anyways.
Yes, 'anyways' is in the dictionary.
Anyways is not a real word.
I'm amazed that that this improper use of the word anyway has become a real word. Bad English. I will NEVER use this word and I'm amazed at the people that use it with great authority.
UNBELIEVABLE! This is one of my pet peeves. Anyways is NOT a word. Webster is not the only one doing it either! The other dictionary cites I checked are also listingi it now and referring you to anyway.
Was looking for proof that it really is not a word, for my own satisfaction.
Earliest Usage of AnywaysNot only do we define anyways (gasp!), we give the word multiple senses (look away, children!). Is the English language dead and have we killed it? No. We define these senses because people have used this word in different ways over the years, and one of our duties as a dictionary is to attempt to catalog such variation of use. The oldest sense of anyways is ''in any manner or respect,'' and it is pretty old, having been in use since the early 13th century. Not only have we been writing anyways for 800 years, it wasn't just slipped in as a mistake in one or two old scrolls; the word may be found regularly over the centuries.
And M. Hurt, M. Iackson, M. Freeman, & M. Gregory testify, that he did of his own free will without compulsion anyways.John Darrel, A Detection of that Sinnful, Lying, and Ridiculous Discours'...., 1600
For such persons as cannot make use of these, I advise them, for Travelling, to make use of the half English saddles, which being well stuffed and soft in the Seat, almost as low before as behind, and exactly shapt, will although they be set upon little Cushions neatly stuffed, be abundantly closs and low upon the Horse's back, and have the same conveniences with the full English saddles, without being anyways incommode or uneasy to those who have soft and Tender Buttocks; people make such saddles wonderfully well at present.'--Jacques de Solleysel, The Parfait Mareschal, 1696
'...while the very near relationship that subsisted betwixt Boswells and the wife, now the widow of John Boll, are entirely exclusive of the idea, that he should have been anyways ignorant or uninformed as to such an event.'--Jean Ballantyne, Ans.-Mrs. Jean Ballantyne, to the Bill of Advocation, 1800
Current Usage of AnywaysWhen anyways is used today in the sense of ''to any degree at all,'' it is usually viewed as dialectical (which is not a fancy way of saying ''wrong''). But this is not the use of anyways that most people are complaining about. The sense provoking the most spleen is the one meaning ''at any rate, in any case.'' This sense is a relative newcomer to our language, having been documented in writing only since the early 19th century.
We see substantial written evidence in newspapers:
I wouldn't have a husband with one arm, anyways. I would have two arms. I would have two arms, if it was me, though instead of hands they'd only got hooks at the end, like our dustman.'--The Albion (New York, NY), 11 Sept. 1841
magazines:
Anyways, he could not jist then ha' stirred, having concertit a plan wi' his corporal, the man whom Donald had seen, and who had told him o' the buoat drawn up, as if to carry aff the malt.'--The London Magazine, Feb. 1828
and books:
Then I on'y ran this way an' that way, an' groaned for snow to knock off. I knowed we was driftun mubbe a twenty leagues a day, and anyways I wanted to be doun what I could, keepun up over th' Ice so well as I could, Noofoundland-ways, an' I might come to somethun, '-- to a schooner or somethun.'--Robert Lowell, A Raft That No Man Made, 1866
Anyways, he never come back to deny it. You've turned up, plain, plumb providential for all concerned.'--Rudyard Kipling, Captains Courageous, 1897
Anyways, I've got my opinion, and I'll resk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.'--Mark Twain, The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, 1874
In other words, we see written evidence for anyways pretty much everywhere.
Most of the early examples of anyways in this sense come from dialogue, or attempts to replicate a character's speech. This does not mean that the word is not real. It may be that many people wish that the word were not real, since they do not much care for it. However (and if we are the first ones to break this to you we are very sorry), wishing that something were not so is not a terribly effective way of effecting change in this world.
Modern uses of anyways are often encountered, used with a variety of meanings and in a variety of registers, in Canada and India.
Stop browsing your ex-partner's Instagram, says Renew's Amy Chan. "It's not loving to yourself when you're stalking your ex," she says. "You know the outcome of it is you're going to feel bad. But you do it anyways because you're addicted.'''--Megan Haynes, The Toronto Star (Toronto, Ont.), 9 May 2017
For now, the kids are under the care of their grandparents. "The boys' mother anyways wanted to leave them in her parents' custody.'''--The Hindustan Times (New Delhi, India), 8 Aug. 2017
While the CFL hopefully won't be making any further changes to its rules in the middle of the season, it will surely need to continue revisiting the balance between getting calls right and making the viewing experience the best it can be. It should probably be doing that all the time, anyways.'--Daniel Austin, The Calgary Herald (Calgary, Alta.), 3 Aug. 2017
Anyways, it's a WordIf a word has been in constant use for over 800 years, with tens of thousands of examples in writing across many linguistic registers, and is commonly and consistently used with specific meanings, it then becomes very difficult for us to understand how you could describe it as not 'real,' or not a 'word.' Unless, of course, you are using a sense of real or word that we are unfamiliar with.
If you are disappointed to hear that anyways is indeed real, perhaps we might supply you with a genuine fake word as consolation (we don't want you to feel sad). How about spuddlegruncher? It means ''the first glimmers of what will undoubtedly turn out to be a massive headache when one realizes that one is having an argument with someone who is basing their entire position on a dim memory of what a former English teacher told them long ago and a strong desire to tell someone else that they are wrong about something.''
Clips
VIDEO - Fauci: Troops who opt out of Covid vaccine are 'part of the problem'
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 15:34
A Paratrooper assigned to the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, prepares for a Airborne Operation at Fort Bragg, N.C., on May 7.
Spc. Hubert Delany III | US Army
WASHINGTON '' White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday that U.S. service members who are eligible to get the Covid-19 vaccine but opt out are inadvertently "part of the problem" of lengthening the pandemic.
"You're part of the solution to this outbreak," explained Fauci to a virtual audience during a town hall with Blue Star Families, a non-profit dedicated to issues facing military families.
"Because by getting infected, even though you may not know it, you may be inadvertently transmitting the infection to someone else, even though you have no symptoms," Fauci said. "In reality, like it or not, you're propagating this outbreak. So instead of being part of the solution, you are innocently and inadvertently being part of the problem by not getting vaccinated."
"You've got to think of your own health, which is really very important, but you got to think about your societal obligation, including people close to you personally as well as other members of families of other individuals," Fauci said.
Last month, the Pentagon acknowledged that about one-third of U.S. military service members declined to take the voluntary coronavirus vaccine.
U.S. Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Felicia White, a supply chief with Camp Kinser Post Office, gets her arm disinfected to receive her second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at the U.S. Naval Hospital Okinawa, on Camp Foster, Mar. 2, 2021.
U.S Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Zachary Larsen | U.S. Marine Corps
When asked if military leadership were disappointed with the revelation, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters last month that the decision to take the vaccine was ultimately up to each member of the force.
"Everybody is different and we want '-- what the secretary wants '-- is for the men and women of the department to make the best and most informed decision for them and for their health and the health of their families," Kirby said, adding that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin did get the vaccine.
Meanwhile, the military's U.S. Northern Command, which is responsible for the Pentagon's coronavirus efforts, has tasked thousands of service members to help vaccinate communities across the nation.
Last week, Austin embarked on his first official trip since ascending to the top spot at the Pentagon to meet with military commanders overseeing the Covid-19 response effort in California.
Austin also visited a FEMA vaccination center in Los Angeles, the first staffed by both active-duty military teams as well as National Guard personnel.
Active duty and Army National Guard soldiers prepare to receive a mock, drive-thru vaccine recipient during an exercise at California State University, Los Angeles, Feb. 14, 2021.
U.S Army Capt. Daniel Parker | U.S. Army
Austin said the Pentagon has prioritized getting factual information out to the force in order to bolster confidence.
"There's a degree of mistrust and I think we have to collectively work hard to dispel rumors and to provide facts to people," Austin told reporters traveling with him. "And it's been my experience that when armed with the facts, people will tend to make the right decisions."
"My counsel to everyone is, I mean, this saves lives. And it's not just about saving our life, it's about saving our partner's life, our neighbor's life, and in the military, you know, we thrive on teamwork and we have to think about our teammates, as well," he added.
VIDEO - 'The Gary Null Show: The Gary Null Show - 03.02.21 on Apple Podcasts
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 14:28
the covi-19 pandemic and legal questions against its orchestrators. Dr. Reiner Fuellmich is a German-American attorney and the founding chairman of the Investigative Corona Committee that is proceeding with class action lawsuits against some of the architects of the coronavirus panic. In the past Dr. Fuellmich was a faculty member o the Georg August University in Gottingen where he received his doctorate, and worked in the legal aspects of corporate banking at Deutsche Bank in Germany and Japan. He also has a background in medical law and in the 1980s was a research assistant at the Research Center for Medical and Pharmaceutical Law. For many years he has been practicing and has published papers on patient rights adn civil responsibility in the pharmaceutical industry.
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VIDEO-Arizona lawmaker opposes stricter punishment for child sex predators, saying it would harm people of color | The Post Millennial
Sat, 06 Mar 2021 13:26
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An Arizona lawmaker is opposing stricter punishment of child sex offenders, saying that the proposed bill would hurt people of color.
House Bill 2889 seeks to raise the sentences of convicted child molesters and rapists to mandatory life behind bars. The bill is sponsored by Rep. Leo Biasiucci, a Republican from Lake Havasu City. Currently, child sex predators in the Grand Canyon state can face anywhere from 10 to 20 years in prison'--with the potential for probation, parole or work release. But not everyone supports introducing stricter punishments for convicted sex criminals.
Rep. Pamela Powers Hannley, a Democrat representing the ninth district which includes Tucson, was the lone legislator who had voted against the bill on Monday.
''If our justice system were fair, the prison population would reflect the country's population in terms of race and ethnicity,'' Hannley later wrote on Facebook. ''We all know that people of color are disproportionately imprisoned in this country.''
The 69-year-old progressive also uploaded a video elaborating on her opposition to the proposed law change. ''Why would I vote against this bill? Because we know that the justice system in the United States is not colorblind.''
Hannley acknowledged that the bill relates to child sexual abuse, which she admitted is ''a tough subject.'' But she stressed the importance of abolishing mandatory sentencing regardless of the crime's nature. ''If you're against mandatory sentencing, you're against mandatory sentencing,'' Hannley said. She says her goal is to reduce incarceration numbers.
Hannley had previously called herself the ''Bernie Sanders of Tucson with Hillary Clinton's gender issues'' during her successful 2016 campaign where she defeated an incumbent Democrat in the primary.
Despite her opposition, HB 2889 passed the House 51-1 on Monday. The bill will go to the state Senate in the next few weeks.
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VIDEO-Yanis Varoufakis: Capitalism has become 'techno-feudalism' | UpFront - YouTube
VIDEO-Amy Bee the Phoenix on Twitter: "The new world of racial profiling. https://t.co/3KakvFQJYz" / Twitter
Fri, 05 Mar 2021 22:38
Amy Bee the Phoenix : The new world of racial profiling. https://t.co/3KakvFQJYz
Fri Mar 05 02:50:25 +0000 2021
PatriotPam : @AmyBeePhoenix I want to say 'unbelievable' but it's not anymore. Definitely wrongful termination
Fri Mar 05 22:37:29 +0000 2021
Kearney : @AmyBeePhoenix We all knew this was coming. Total BS! ð'¯ Grifting!
Fri Mar 05 22:37:00 +0000 2021
Reiur : @AmyBeePhoenix Stupidity is the new normal. Poor girl losing a job over that kind of bullshit. Just crazy.
Fri Mar 05 22:34:23 +0000 2021
Trump's BDS outreach coordinator : @AmyBeePhoenix Have white babies
Fri Mar 05 22:34:17 +0000 2021
greymattermatters : @AmyBeePhoenix It's wrongful termination in a company that is beyond FU! It's a shame that peopke can get away with'... https://t.co/WzYQiLa25z
Fri Mar 05 22:34:08 +0000 2021
stimulus covfefe : @AmyBeePhoenix Witch hunt https://t.co/IXDjqiyuae
Fri Mar 05 22:34:07 +0000 2021
Steven-o : @AmyBeePhoenix That's wrongful termination. The sad part is that these kinds of incidents will set race relations b'... https://t.co/sXSzGbH6Js
Fri Mar 05 22:33:27 +0000 2021
Eternal Words : @AmyBeePhoenix Hire an attorney.
Fri Mar 05 22:32:23 +0000 2021
ANTONIEO GRIFFIN : @AmyBeePhoenix Why don't you get you a good lawyer and sue them bastard's for letting you go unjustly?
Fri Mar 05 22:32:20 +0000 2021
NatsFan22ðºð¸No Summer Soldier or Sunshine Patriot : @AmyBeePhoenix Sweetie, trust me on this one.You do not want to work for a company that doesn't have your back.Best of Luck to you ð''
Fri Mar 05 22:32:17 +0000 2021
AggieDarkSide12 : @AmyBeePhoenix Wrongful termination easy money
Fri Mar 05 22:31:11 +0000 2021
Billy Goat : @AmyBeePhoenix @thedemureshark I'm like super smart k, I'm much smarter than you k, valley girls
Fri Mar 05 22:30:36 +0000 2021
Bobby Lee from Tennessee : @AmyBeePhoenix https://t.co/E2KYON76C0
Fri Mar 05 22:30:01 +0000 2021
Iona Minchener : @AmyBeePhoenix That is the most ridiculous thing I have heard in a very long time!!!!!
Fri Mar 05 22:29:44 +0000 2021
FanfareForTheCommonCold : @AmyBeePhoenix Sad
Fri Mar 05 22:29:32 +0000 2021
Tracey : @AmyBeePhoenix To those who think there's ''more to the story'' - they are now saying that white babies as young as 3'... https://t.co/M93iBb2J0C
Fri Mar 05 22:28:25 +0000 2021
Red Kryptonite : @AmyBeePhoenix Victim of anti white racism.. If you u keep telling one group they are eternal victims, this will ke'... https://t.co/fFsykMaXJm
Fri Mar 05 22:27:49 +0000 2021
VIDEO-Eastern Europe New Political Block | Armstrong Economics
Fri, 05 Mar 2021 16:58
The Central European countries are forming a block uniting AGAINST the rise of Marxist/Communism emerging from Brussels. I have been in contact with reliable sources and I can still confirm that I do not see how Schwab and his associates will succeed. It is impossible for them to conquer the world with their leftist Great Reset. Even the proposition that you will own nothing and be happy does not seem plausible insofar as success is concerned. They are counting on allowing the borders to be flooded with people from the third world to use that to overpower the domestic citizens.
I do not see China, Russia, or Central Europe lining up to kiss the ring of Klaus Schwab. I do not care how much money Gates and Soros throw in bribes behind the curtain to support the Great Reset. They will seriously damage the economy of the West by shifting the financial capital of the world to China, but they will not conquer the world as they are the real ''Dreamers'' in the equation.
VIDEO-Third stimulus check: Some Senate Dems call for automatic payments | WJTV
Thu, 04 Mar 2021 21:55
WASHINGTON (NEXSTAR) '-- A group of Democratic Senators sent President Joe Biden a letter Tuesday outlining a plan to bolster the bank accounts of Americans struggling economically because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The effort, led by Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, calls for recurring stimulus checks and automatic unemployment coverage that would be tied to economic conditions.
''This crisis is far from over, and families deserve certainty that they can put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads,'' the later read. ''Families should not be at the mercy of constantly-shifting legislative timelines and ad hoc solutions.''
The Senators are calling for the automatic payments to help those Americans who won't get unemployment insurance because they have seen their hours reduced, found unemployment at a lower paying job or left the workforce to help care for a loved one.
''Not only do these payments help keep families out of poverty, but they act as economic stimulus by increasing spending and supporting jobs,'' the letter states. ''When the CARES Act relief checks ran out, poverty rose, and many families saw spiraling debt. Automatic stabilizers will give families certainty that more relief is coming, allowing them to make the best decisions about how to spend their relief payments as they receive them.''
The letter has been signed by Senators Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.).
It's not clear how much the recurring stimulus checks would be for, and it appears that the group may have a tough road ahead after Biden and other Democrats bowed to party moderates Wednesday by tightening eligibility for stimulus checks as leaders prepared to move their $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill through the Senate.
At the same time, the White House and top Democrats stood by progressives and agreed that the Senate package would retain the $400 weekly emergency unemployment benefits included in the House-passed pandemic legislation. Moderates have wanted to trim those payments to $300 after Republicans have called the bill so heedlessly generous that it would prompt some people to not return to work.
The deal-making underscored the balancing act Democrats face as they try squeezing the massive relief measure through the evenly divided, 50-50 Senate. The package, Biden's signature legislative priority, is his attempt to stomp out the year-old pandemic, revive an economy that's shed 10 million jobs and bring some semblance of normality to countless upended lives.
Democrats have no choice but to broker compromises among themselves, thanks to their mere 10-vote House margin and a Senate they control only with Vice President Kamala Harris' tie-breaking vote. The party's moderate and progressive factions are competing to use their leverage, but without going so far as to scuttle an effort they all support.
''He's pleased with the progress that is being made with the rescue plan,'' White House press secretary Jen Psaki said of Biden, reflecting the flexibility he and all Democrats will need to prevail. ''He's always said he's open to good ideas.''
So far, Republicans have presented a unified front against the bill. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said he wants unanimous GOP opposition.
But Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, didn't rule out breaking ranks and supporting the measure. She told reporters her state's tourism industry has been walloped by the pandemic and said she's talked to administration officials about ''how this helps a state like Alaska.''
The Senate could begin debating the bill Thursday, but Democrats faced mountains of GOP amendments and other delays that could take days to plow through. The House will have to approve the Senate's version before shipping it to Biden, which Democrats want to do before the last round of emergency jobless benefits run dry March 14.
''I would expect a very long night into the next day and keep going on,'' said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., describing GOP plans to force votes.
Under the legislation, individuals earning up to $75,000, and couples up to $150,000, would get $1,400 checks per person. The House-approved version would gradually phase down that amount, with individuals making $100,000 and couples earning $200,000 receiving nothing.
Under Wednesday's agreement, the Senate bill would instead halt the payments completely for individuals making $80,000 and couples earning $160,000, said a Democratic official, who described the agreement only on condition of anonymity.
That means some people who received the last round of $600 relief checks approved in December wouldn't get anything this time. The liberal Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated that the pared-down Senate eligibility levels means 280 million adults and children would receive stimulus checks, compared to 297 million people under the House plan.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, perhaps the chamber's most conservative Democrat, has favored lowering the relief check eligibility limits and opposed t he House bill's minimum wage increase. He suggested Wednesday he'd back the emerging Senate legislation, saying it ''really does have enough good stuff that we should be able to make this work.''
In a swipe at moderates, Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., a leader of his chamber's progressives, called the new phase-out of relief checks a ''silly and stupid'' effort to appease ''the one or two people who can hold things up.''
Yet asked if the change could threaten the overall bill, Pocan said, ''Let's hope they don't screw too many things up. We need to get this done.''
Liberals were already angry after Senate Democrats jettisoned the House bill's minimum wage increase to $15 by 2025. They did so after the Senate parliamentarian said the chamber's rules wouldn't allow the boost in the bill and as Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., said they'd oppose its inclusion, sealing its fate.
The House version of the relief checks would cost $422 billion, making them the package's single most expensive item.
The two chambers' bills are largely similar, with both bearing money for state and municipal governments, COVID-19 vaccines and testing, schools, health care subsidies and tax breaks for children and lower-earning people.
Republicans continued lashing the measure as an overpriced Democratic wish list of liberal causes that lavishes help on many who don't really need it.
''Democrats had a choice,'' McConnell said. ''They chose to go it alone, tack to the left, leave families' top priorities on the cutting room floor.''
''This is not a liberal wish list,'' said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. ''This is an American wish list. When people want checks to help them get out of the morass, that's not a liberal wish list. That's what the American people want.''
Slowly, the Senate bill's contours were taking shape.
Senate Democrats were removing $1.5 million for a bridge between New York state and Canada and around $140 million for a rapid transit project south of San Francisco after Republicans cast both as pet projects f or Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (D''Calif.).
Aides to both Democratic leaders said the projects weren't new and had been supported by the Trump administration.
Democrats are using special rules that will let them avoid GOP filibusters that would require them to garner an impossible 60 votes to approve the legislation.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
