1627: White Ringer

Hi Adam

I grew up in Switzerland and moved to gitmo about 15 years ago. I have visited Davos numerous times (of course not when the douches were there).

I don't know where you got your pronunciation from, but the "S" in DavoS is NEVER silent! It is DavoS...!! We Swiss people also pronounce the "o" a bit more, almost like "DavooS". Try it, you might like it ;-)

ITM

Thomas

Not sure if this perspective will shed light on anything, but I do Wal-Mart grocery deliveries occasionally and have noticed a phenomenon.

Today I had an order in which all of the meat ordered was plant based crap.. chicken patties, nuggets, ground "meat" and even... plant based fish sticks.

Upon delivery was a very nice brick home in a gated community.

I've noticed this many times before and can predict the type of house based on certain product types... such as those more expensive brown and white eggs as another example.

Maybe it's a sophisticated marketing campaign of some sort... those who buy expensive groceries might buy other dumb stuff?

Have also noticed that these phony meat products are taking up more shelf space as time goes on.

Interesting how they are more expensive though 😄

Coconut Pete

Hey Adam,

I’ve just listening to the latest podcast and I wanted to give insight about evangelical Christianity. Lol first of all John was way off base. Evangelical Christianity is not connected to a denomination essentially any Christianity of any denomination can be an evangelical. Most churches even have a mix of evangelical and non evangelical Christians. However some denominations and some churches have a higher percentage of evangelicals. To determine if someone is an evangelical they need to ascribe to 4 principals. First is that they had a conversion experience, which means they can point towards a specific time where they decided to die to the world and start living for Christ. Second, they must believe in sola scriptura, which means that they believe that the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God, and the Bible is the sole authority not church leaders. Third they must live with a Biblical world view in their daily life and evangelize to non-Christians. Lastly, they must believe, that humans are inherently sinful, that Jesus’ death on the cross was an atoning sacrifice that cleanses us from sin, and that his sacrifice is the only thing that can save us, not good works.

Thanks for all that you do,

Luke

Adam—I’ve read Trump’s opening brief, attached. It’s good. The arguments track what you and I expected and have discussed at length. As we also expected, Trump has given SCOTUS multiple paths for handing him a win (although who knows what will actually happen). Here’s a quick breakdown of his five arguments.

The president isn’t subject to § 3 of the 14th Amendment. As expected, Trump invokes various canons of construction to make a textual case that § 3 just doesn’t apply to the presidency. Among other things, he looks to other constitutional provisions suggesting that the president is not an “officer” who would be subject to § 3, and that an officer can only be someone appointed by the president, who logically can’t appoint himself. Trump also cites the presidential oath: Section 3 applies only to those who’ve taken an oath to “support” the Constitution, but the president’s oath makes no mention of “supporting” it. Rather, it says only that he will “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution. This is a fair point. Trump also cites at length what we call “persuasive authority” (as opposed to “binding authority”) to support his interpretation of § 3—mostly nonbinding precedent and learned commentaries.

Again, this is a dark art, and we can expect a “canon volley” from both sides (yes, I went there). I still maintain that Trump has the longer putt, but I confess it’s a close call and I have no idea what the Robed Ones are thinking.

Trump didn’t commit an insurrection. Although SCOTUS may not have to reach this issue, Trump says that it should do so because otherwise it would leave “wiggle room” for legislators “use section 3 as a cudgel to bar President Trump from the general-election ballot or from taking office.” After detailing Trump’s words and deeds on January 6, the brief observes that the plaintiffs “must show that President Trump’s own conduct—and not the conduct of anyone at the Capitol . . . qualifies as ‘insurrection.’ And this they cannot do.”

Precisely. In finding that Trump is an insurrectionist, the trial court relied on expert testimony from Peter Simi, a sociology professor who devotes his existence to “political extremism and ‘the communication styles of far-right political extremists.’” Among other things, Simi opined that Trump and his followers have a “coded language based in doublespeak.” That is, let’s not consider his actual words and deeds—let’s speculate about what telepathic messages he was sending. If I may say so, that’s nutty, dangerous, and legally wrong on multiple levels. Check out Simi’s bio and behold his many publications: https://www.chapman.edu/our-faculty/pete-simi 🙄

Only Congress may enforce § 3. A quote sums up this argument perfectly: “A presidential candidate’s eligibility for office should not be resolved by having a state trial court evaluate opinion testimony from a sociology professor and copy factual findings from a hearsay-filled and partisan congressional committee report, and then demand that reviewing courts defer to its factual findings.”

Section 3 does not prohibit candidates from running for office, but only from holding office. Trump argues that even if § 3 were to apply, it wouldn’t stop a purported insurrectionist from appearing on the ballot. That is, it might block him from taking the office, but not necessarily. After all, § 3 says that Congress can always remove the impediment before Inauguration Day by a 2/3 vote—which it has done many times. This provision, Trump argues, is proof that Congress, not the states, should control who gets to hold office.

The Colorado judiciary violated the Electors Clause because the state legislature did not give it the power to order the Secretary of State to take Trump off the ballot. You’ll recall we talked about the Electors Clause when discussing Mike Johnson’s appearance on a recent CBS interview. The Electors Clause says that a state’s legislature must make (or at least ratify) the rules for selecting electors. Here, the Colorado Supreme Court violated the clause by ordering the Secretary of State to remove Trump from the ballot—something Colorado’s statutes don’t allow.

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Sat, 20 Jan 2024 16:47

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Ukraine's artificial intelligence (AI) development continues at a frightening pace beyond that of even tech giants in the U.S. and China as the war with Russia lurches toward a third year, but experts highlighted America's critical role in helping that rapid advance.

"What I think we underestimate in the U.S. military is the actual cost of the infrastructure required to do this in combat," Benjamin Jensen, senior fellow of Future War, Gaming and Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Fox News Digital.

"Ukraine is doing it because they're building it from the bottom up, and it's antifragile '... it's small, it's scalable, it works, and they know what to do it," Jensen said. "We're trying to do it very Pentagonese from the top down, which means we're going to spend tens of billions of dollars for a couple of high-profile failures versus spending, you know, one million dollars on nine failures and one success."

The U.S. discovered Ukraine's unbelievable advancement with AI just months into the war. Brett Velicovich, a Fox News contributor embedded in Ukraine in 2023, claimed the advancements Ukrainian technicians had achieved and how they had achieved them were "out of this world," and the U.S. had no idea about any of it.

AI WILL IMPACT 60% OF US JOBS, INCREASE INEQUALITY WORLDWIDE, IMF WARNS

Velicovich and other experts described the various ways Ukraine had utilized AI, including facial recognition to locate war criminals, systems to help drone guidance and target selection, satellite analysis to gather evidence of war crimes and identification of Russian disinformation and propaganda.

President Biden meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

Jensen, who is also a professor of strategic studies at the Marine Corps University School of Advanced Warfighting, discussed the culmination of those efforts in Ukraine's Delta situational awareness system, which integrates a range of systems, including visual recognition and geolocation mapping, fed data by open source participation from the Ukrainian people.

Ukraine unveiled the system in late 2022, but it received little press despite proving enormously helpful in processing the huge amount of battlefield data to guide the Ukrainian forces on the battlefield with active targeting and coordination.

WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?

Praise for Ukraine's ingenious efforts notwithstanding, Jensen highlighted the role the United States foreign aid programs have played in helping make these advancements a reality. AI requires data to train the model and platforms, and the United States Agency for International Development programs helped fund the Ukrainian digital identity system.

The data sharing and tech partnerships between the U.S. and Ukraine allowed Kyiv to quickly simplify and enhance the system, speeding up everything from aid and assistance delivery to civilian notifications of incoming attacks and helping to find missing persons.

The Ukrainian military's Grad multiple rocket launcher fires rockets at Russian positions on the frontline near Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Thursday, Nov. 24, 2022. (AP Photo/LIBKOS, File)

James Hess, professor at the School of Security and Global Studies at the American Public University System, agreed that U.S. data not only helped Ukraine achieve these incredible developments, but it also continues to do so.

"To understand the battlefield environment is time-consuming and its complex, and that's, of course, why it's so important because the amount of data is overwhelming," Hess explained, referring to the American role in the process.

WHERE IS THE AI BOOM? EXPERTS CAUTION NEW TECH WILL TAKE TIME

"Overwhelming data, which can also be a form of bad data, because if you have too much, you can't really work through that effectively, so that's one of the impetus behind using AI is to help alleviate the overwhelming data concerns," Hess continued, noting that few batches of data can be larger than that from a battlefield environment.

"In the case with Ukraine, it's not just personnel help. It's also sensor help; it's also processing help; it's also the process of targeting process," Hess added. "All those different forms of help are extremely valuable to Ukraine, and I don't see that [help] ending anytime soon."

A view of destroyed armored vehicles and tanks belonging to Russian forces after they withdrew from the city of Lyman in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on Oct. 5, 2022. (Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Hess revealed that the real question and drive for development in Ukraine increasingly focus on how to more seamlessly communicate the data collected and processed by AI to troops for real-time use to speed up on-field targeting and coordination.

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"A lot of the research and focus right now '' in the United States and China as well '' how I can be enabled to go directly from sensor to shooter," Hess said. "Of course, that brings up other challenges and concerns: Where does that information get verified? Who's validating it before that shooter is processing it?"

"I don't think we're seeing a case where in Ukraine the humans [are] out of the loop by any means," Hess assured. "It's still certainly human in the loop, but as AI develops, the process is going to be that the human in the loop '... is continuously backing away as the AI becomes more capable and the algorithms more refined, and that's kind of where it's going."

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Sat, 20 Jan 2024 16:27

The publisher of Sports Illustrated is laying off much of the storied magazine's entire staff.

The news, first reported by Front Office Sports, came less than 24 hours after publisher The Arena Group announced ''a significant reduction in its workforce,'' comprising 100 employees. Arena said it continued to manage ''substantial'' debt and recently missed payments, and that the layoffs were part of ''cost-cutting measures to initiate a transformative shift towards a streamlined business model.''

According to FOS, Sports Illustrated's parent company, Authentic Brands Group, has sought to revoke Arena's license to publish SI after Arena missed a payment.

Richard Deitsch of The Athletic separately tweeted Friday an image of an email sent out to workers that said ''staff'' who worked for the Sports Illustrated brand were being laid off.

The union representing SI's staff said in a tweeted statement that it had been notified of Arena's intention to ''lay off a significant number, possibly all'' of its union-represented staff.

''This is another difficult day in what has been a difficult four years for Sports Illustrated under Arena Group (previously The Maven) stewardship,'' the union said in a statement. ''We are calling on ABG to ensure the continued publication of SI and allow it to serve our audience in the way it has for nearly 70 years,'' the statement read, using an acronym for Authentic Brands Group.

In a statement, Authentic Brands confirmed it had terminated The Arena Group's license to serve as the publisher of Sports Illustrated as a result of its failure to pay its quarterly license fee '-- but said that the SI brand would live on.

"Authentic is here to ensure that the brand of Sports Illustrated, which includes its editorial arm, continues to thrive as it has for the past nearly 70 years," the company said. "We are confident that going forward the brand will continue to evolve and grow in a way that serves sports news readers, sports fans, and consumers."

Arena Group said in a statement it continues to negotiate with Authentic and that it will continue to produce Sports Illustrated until the negotiations are resolved.

"We hope to be the company to take SI forward but if not, we are confident that someone will," it said. "If it is another business, we will support with the transition so the legacy of Sports Illustrated doesn't suffer.''

Long published by Time-Life, Sports Illustrated was sold by successor group Time Inc. to Meredith Corp., best known for publishing Better Homes & Gardens, in 2018, whereupon it was reduced to a biweekly publication.

In 2019, Authentic, which owns a host of clothing and lifestyle brands, purchased SI.

Sports Illustrated drew headlines last fall after the tech news outlet Futurism reported that it appeared SI had published AI-generated stories, photos and authors.

Following those reports, Arena ousted CEO Ross Levinsohn and replaced him with Manoj Bhargava, the founder and CEO of Innovations Ventures, known for creating the 5-hour Energy drink. Bhargava himself subsequently stepped down in January to avoid unspecified potential conflicts of interest.

Arena also oversees TheStreet, Parade and Men's Journal.

The Sports Illustrated brand may yet live on in an unexpected form: In 2022, Authentic announced it had partnered with a developer and a hospitality group to launch Sports Illustrated Resorts, ''a new premium, lifestyle resort and entertainment destinations.'' The first location has already opened in the Dominican Republic.

Rob Wile Rob Wile is a breaking business news reporter for NBC News Digital.

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Sun, 21 Jan 2024 18:21

An opening is seen in the fuselage of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, Boeing 737-9 MAX, on Jan. 7, 2024, in Portland, Oregon. A door-sized section near the rear of the plane blew out over the Portland, Oregon, area on Jan. 5 on its way to Ontario, California. (NTSB/Getty Images/TNS)

As details emerge about the incident that blew a hole in an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 midflight last week, the region's aviation legal experts are raising questions about quick, $1,500 cash payments the airline provided passengers aboard the near-catastrophic plane trip.

Twenty minutes after Flight 1282 took off from Portland last week, a piece of fuselage broke loose, opening a significant hole in the side of the aircraft and tearing the shirt off one teenager sitting nearby. Several passengers were treated for nonlife-threatening injuries after the plane landed safely back in Portland, though investigators are still working to determine what exactly happened.

''The one thing you know is that this is somebody's fault,'' said Charles Herrmann, an aviation attorney who's represented dozens of families of victims in past airplane crashes, including the crashes in 2018 and 2019 of two Boeing 737 MAX 8 airliners.

Since the incident, investigators determined the panel that blew off was a door plug used to seal a fuselage cutout for an optional emergency exit door that is used only by a few airlines with high-density seating.

''It's overwhelmingly obvious that that plug should not have come out,'' Herrmann said. ''The cause of that plug coming out is either outright negligence, or somebody didn't do what they were supposed to do, didn't tighten those bolts down, or didn't inspect (the plane) properly.''

On Thursday, six passengers filed a potential class-action lawsuit against Boeing, claiming the manufacturer owes them and the other 165 passengers aboard Flight 1282 compensation for injuries and other harms caused by the incident. Alaska Airlines is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

Alaska refunded passengers on Flight 1282 and, within 24 hours, provided each with a $1,500 cash payment ''as an immediate gesture of care,'' according to a Thursday statement from the SeaTac-headquartered airline. The payment was intended to ''cover any incidental expenses to ensure their immediate needs were taken care of.''

Alaska is also offering passengers 24/7 access to mental health resources and counseling sessions from Empathia, a behavioral health and emergency management company and airline partner.

''We are in communication with our guests of Flight 1282, and will continue to work with them to address their specific needs and concerns,'' the Alaska statement said.

'$1,500 is just not enough'Quick cash payments for passengers are common in these types of incidents, particularly ones where no one died, said Robert Hedrick, an attorney with Aviation Law Group in Seattle. There can sometimes be value in the offer, he said.

''That early payment can soften hard feelings passengers may have,'' Hedrick said. But in this case, the $1,500 offer is a ''drop in the bucket,'' he added.

''Would I exchange what they went through for $1,500? There's no way,'' Hedrick said. ''When you get in that area of sort of offensively low offers of money, it's insulting.''

Vi Nguyen, 27, who was on the flight, said in an interview the payment did not reflect the terror of the experience.

''It was very traumatic,'' Nguyen said. ''I don't want to sound greedy, but I feel like $1,500 is just not enough.''

An Alaska spokesperson confirmed Thursday evening that the payments were automatically transferred to all Flight 1282 passengers. No stipulations or agreements were involved.

In their lawsuit filed Thursday by attorneys Daniel Laurence and Furhad Sultani of Stritmatter Kessler Koehler Moore law firm, six Flight 1282 passengers and one family member of a passenger describe various injuries, physical and emotional, that include a concussion, soft tissue injuries, internal bleeding in one person's ear and difficulty breathing. One passenger who suffers from a seizure disorder triggered by stressful situations said he experienced a seizure after he disembarked.

Plaintiffs in the case, which was filed in King County Superior Court in Seattle, are asking for compensation related to treatment for health conditions and psychological injuries, as well as costs from the cancellation of travel plans and missed work and the value of lost personal items.

The complaint also alleges many of the emergency oxygen masks that dropped down midflight did not work.

More possible legal claimsOther legal claims could be on their way, though several Seattle-area aviation attorneys this week said passengers should not necessarily feel rushed to file.

''We've seen emotional distress and PTSD come out many days, weeks or even months after accidents, when symptoms may develop,'' Hedrick said. ''I think passengers should first take care of themselves. There's no rush to make a claim.''

Flight 1282 passengers will likely have valid negligence claims against the airline or the manufacturer, depending on results of a National Transportation Safety Board investigation, said Herrmann, who generally represents passengers in these types of cases.

''When you look at Alaska Airlines ... you have the affirmative duty to ensure the safety of your passengers to the utmost of your ability,'' Hermann said.

There could also be product liability claims, which would cite a violation of the Washington Product Liability Act, which the Thursday complaint pointed to, or similar laws.

''You're responsible for this, whether you were negligent in manufacturing or not, if the product turned out to be defective,'' Herrmann said.

The complaint also alleges deviation, or a change from the original plan, and issues with consumer expectation.

Hedrick said he sees several possible legal cases, mainly open to those who were on Flight 1282, but also potentially for travelers whose flights were canceled or delayed due to the FAA's grounding of all MAX 9s '-- though he encouraged those passengers to try and work it out with the airlines first. Outside of passenger claims, he also noted potential airline claims against Boeing or Spirit AeroSystems, the Boeing supplier that builds MAX 9 fuselages.

''They have a serious loss of revenue by grounding their whole fleet of MAX 9 planes,'' Hedrick said. ''Then the cost of repairs, and they may seek reimbursement for having to reroute their passengers. But that usually won't happen in litigation.''

Hedrick has spoken with some Flight 1282 passengers already, but noted they ''might not file anything right away.''

''I usually advise passengers to take care of themselves and their families and get stable,'' he said.

In general, each claim depends on the individual experience of the passenger.

Several factors dictate what type of claim a passenger wants to file, including their ticket and whether their overall trip was domestic or international; the seat they were in and how close it was to the hole in the plane; and if they had other physical or mental conditions before getting on the flight that could have been exacerbated by the experience, said Seattle aviation attorney and longtime pilot Jimmy Anderson.

''Two people sitting next to each other could have vastly different recoveries,'' he said. ''If someone had ear surgery in the past, for example, they might have a completely different decompression experience than someone sitting next to them.''

He said he is looking forward to learning more from investigations of the incident.

''Early on in aviation, there were a lot of accidents that were considered acts of God,'' Anderson said. ''It was difficult to determine what caused the plane crash, and also difficult to determine whether the failure that happened was foreseeable.''

Now, he added, aviation accidents are ''almost universally preventable.''

''That's because most of the problems incurred by aircraft manufacturing and design are foreseeable,'' he said. ''The question is about what happened and what could've been done to prevent it.''

Nate Bingham, who works with Anderson and has represented victims of aviation accidents in the past, reiterated that it's still a bit early to say what exactly went wrong on Jan. 5. Many passengers might not yet even realize the extent of their injuries, he said.

''Usually people feel the need to rush to the courthouse,'' Anderson said. ''The reality is that it rarely benefits people to be in a rush, but rather thinking through things is usually the better way.''

(Seattle Times business reporter Lauren Rosenblatt and Seattle Times contributor Deborah Bloom contributed to this story, which includes information from The Seattle Times archives.)

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Sat, 20 Jan 2024 16:58

Financial inclusion is a cornerstone of development, and since 2011, the Global Findex Database has been the definitive source of data on global access to financial services from payments to savings and borrowing. The 2021 edition, based on nationally representative surveys of about 128,000 adults in 123 economies during the COVID-19 pandemic, contains updated indicators on access to and use of formal and informal financial services and digital payments, and offers insights into the behaviors that enable financial resilience. The data also identify gaps in access to and usage of financial services by women and poor adults.

Download the Report | Download the Data | Download the Little Data Book | Executive Summary Visualization

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Worldwide account ownership has reached 76 percent of the global population'--and 71 percent of people in developing countries.The gender gap in account ownership across developing economies has fallen to 6 percentage points from 9 percentage points, where it hovered for many years. Receiving digital payments such as a wage payment, a government transfer, or a domestic remittance, catalyzes the use of other financial services, such as storing, saving, and borrowing money.In developing economies, about 40 percent of adults who paid utility bills (18 percent of adults ) did so directly from an account. In China, about 80 percent of adults made a digital merchant payment, whereas in other developing economies 20 percent of adults did so. COVID-19 boosted the adoption of digital financial services: About 40 percent of adults in developing economies excluding China who made a digital merchant payment using a card, phone, or the internet, and more than one-third of adults in developing economies who paid a utility bill directly from an account, did so for the first time after the start of the pandemic.Mobile money has become an important enabler of financial inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa'--especially for women'--both as a driver of account ownership and of account usage through mobile payments, saving, and borrowing.About half of adults in developing economies could access extra funds within 30 days if faced with an unexpected expense.Download the Report | Download the Data | Executive Summary Visualization

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Sat, 20 Jan 2024 16:50

CNN '--

The United States killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a drone strike, President Joe Biden said Monday in a speech from the White House.

''I authorized a precision strike that would remove him from the battlefield, once and for all,'' Biden said.

Zawahiri, who just turned 71 years old, had remained a visible international symbol of the group, 11 years after the US killed Osama bin Laden. At one point, he acted as bin Laden's personal physician.

Zawahiri was sheltering in downtown Kabul to reunite with his family, Biden said, and was killed in what a senior administration official described as ''a precise tailored airstrike'' using two Hellfire missiles. The drone strike was conducted at 9:48 p.m. ET on Saturday was authorized by Biden following weeks of meetings with his Cabinet and key advisers, the official said on Monday, adding that no American personnel were on the ground in Kabul at the time of the strike.

Senior Haqqani Taliban figures were aware of Zawahiri's presence in the area, the official said, in ''clear violation of the Doha agreement,'' and even took steps to conceal his presence after Saturday's successful strike, restricting access to the safe house and rapidly relocating members of his family, including his daughter and her children, who were intentionally not targeted during the strike and remained unharmed. The US did not alert Taliban officials ahead of Saturday's strike.

In a series of tweets, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said, ''An air strike was carried out on a residential house in Sherpur area of Kabul city on July 31.''

He said, ''The nature of the incident was not apparent at first'' but the security and intelligence services of the Islamic Emirate investigated the incident and ''initial findings determined that the strike was carried out by an American drone.''

The tweets by Mujahid came out prior to CNN reporting Zawahiri's death. Mujahid said the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan ''strongly condemns this attack on any pretext and calls it a clear violation of international principles and the Doha Agreement.''

Biden, who was kept abreast of the strike against Zawahiri as he isolated with a rebound case of Covid-19, spoke outdoors Monday from the Blue Room Balcony at the White House.

Zawahiri, Biden said, ''was deeply involved in the planning of 9/11, one of the most responsible for the attacks that murdered 2,977 people on American soil. For decades, he was the mastermind of attacks against Americans.''

''Now, justice has been delivered and this terrorist leader is no more. People around the world no longer need to fear the vicious and determined killer,'' he continued. ''The United States continues to demonstrate our resolve and our capacity to defend the American people against those who seek to do us harm. We make it clear again tonight, that no matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide, if you are a threat to our people, the United States will find you and take you out.''

The President said the precision strike targeting was the result of the ''extraordinary persistence and skill'' of the nation's intelligence community.

''Our intelligence community located Zawahiri earlier this year '' he moved to downtown Kabul to reunite with members of his immediate family,'' Biden said.

The strike comes one year after Biden ordered the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, prompting Taliban forces to rapidly seize control of the nation.

Biden said on Monday that when he withdrew US troops from the country, he ''made the decision that after 20 years of war, the United States no longer needed thousands of boots on the ground in Afghanistan to protect America from terrorists who seek to do us harm, and I made a promise to the American people, that we continue to conduct effective counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and beyond. We've done just that.''

Biden pledged that Zawahiri ''will never again allow Afghanistan to become a terrorist safe haven, because he is gone and we're going to make sure that nothing else happens.''

The President concluded by expressing gratitude to US intelligence and counterterrorism communities, saying that he hopes Zawahiri's death will bring some measure of closure to the friends and families of 9/11 victims.

''To those who continue to seek to harm the United States, hear me now: We will always remain vigilant and we will act '' and we will always do what is necessary to ensure the safety and security of Americans at home and around the globe,'' he concluded.

A senior counterterrorism analyst told CNN that it would have been impossible for Zawahiri to be in Kabul without the invitation and acquiescence of at least a small number of Taliban, whether from the Haqqani network or another part of the group.

The analyst said that this strike was embarrassing for the Taliban as they had claimed there were no foreign fighters in Afghanistan and no al Qaeda.

He added that recent statements from Zawahiri had suggested the al Qaeda leader was feeling more relaxed. The statements had referred to more recent events, the analyst said, adding this potentially revealed a complacency that may have led to the successful strike.

The issue now arises as to who will be Zawahiri's successor.

The current al Qaeda No. 2, Saif al Adel, is thought to have been in Iran, according to United Nations reports.

The analyst said that this raised an urgent issue for the Iranians who now have to choose between expelling the new al Qaeda leader or harboring him.

A former official in the Afghan government with an intimate grasp of counterterrorism said that he had heard al Adel had already left Iran for Afghanistan.

Zawahiri comes from a distinguished Egyptian family, according to the New York Times. His grandfather, Rabia'a al-Zawahiri, was an imam at al-Azhar University in Cairo. His great-uncle, Abdel Rahman Azzam, was the first secretary of the Arab League.

He eventually helped to mastermind the deadliest terror attack on American soil, when hijackers turned US airliners into missiles.

''Those 19 brothers who went out and gave their souls to Allah almighty, God almighty has granted them this victory we are enjoying now,'' al-Zawahiri said in a videotaped message released in April 2002.

It was the first of many taunting messages the terrorist '' who became al Qaeda's leader after US forces killed bin Laden in 2011 '' would send out over the years, urging militants to continue the fight against America and chiding US leaders.

Zawahiri was constantly on the move once the US-led invasion of Afghanistan began after the September 11, 2001, attacks. At one point, he narrowly escaped a US onslaught in the rugged, mountainous Tora Bora region of Afghanistan, an attack that left his wife and children dead.

He made his public debut as a Muslim militant when he was in prison for his involvement in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

''We want to speak to the whole world. Who are we? Who are we?'' he said in a jailhouse interview.

By that time, al-Zawahiri, a young doctor, was already a committed terrorist who conspired to overthrow the Egyptian government for years and sought to replace it with fundamentalist Islamic rule. He proudly endorsed Sadat's assassination after the Egyptian leader made peace with Israel.

He spent three years in prison after Sadat's assassination and claimed he was tortured while in detention. After his release, he made his way to Pakistan, where he treated wounded mujahadeen fighters who fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

That was when he met bin Laden and found a common cause.

''We are working with brother bin Laden,'' he said in announcing the merger of his terror group, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, with al Qaeda in May 1998. ''We know him since more than 10 years now. We fought with him here in Afghanistan.''

Together, the two terror leaders signed a fatwa, or declaration: ''The judgment to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilians or military, is an obligation for every Muslim.''

The attacks against the US and its facilities began weeks later, with the suicide bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 200 people and wounded more than 5,000 others. Zawahiri and bin Laden gloated after they escaped a US cruise missile attack in Afghanistan that had been launched in retaliation.

Then, there was the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, when suicide bombers on a dinghy detonated their boat, killing 17 American sailors and wounding 39 others.

The culmination of Zawahiri's terror plotting came on September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 people were killed in the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center and Pentagon. A fourth hijacked airliner, headed for Washington, crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought back.

Since then, al-Zawahiri raised his public profile, appearing on numerous video and audiotapes to urge Muslims to join the jihad against the United States and its allies. Some of his tapes were followed closely by terrorist attacks.

In May 2003, for instance, almost simultaneous suicide bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killed 23 people, including nine Americans, days after a tape thought to contain Zawahiri's voice was released.

The US State Department had offered a reward of up to $25 million for information leading directly to his capture. A June 2021 United Nations report suggested he was located somewhere in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that he may have been too frail to be featured in propaganda.

Terry Strada, the chair of 9/11 Families United '' a coalition of survivors and families of victims of the September, 11, 2001, terrorist attacks '' expressed gratitude for the strike, but called on the President to hold the Saudi Arabian government accountable for alleged government complicity in the attacks.

The group has criticized the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour, which began its third competition at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster at the end of July '' some 50 miles from Ground Zero in Manhattan.

''I am deeply grateful for the commitment of intelligence agencies and our brave military's dedication and sacrifices made in removing such evil from our lives. But, in order to achieve full accountability for the murder of thousands on Sept. 11, 2001, President Biden must also hold responsible the Saudi paymasters who bankrolled the Attacks,'' Strada said in a statement.

''The financiers are not being targeted by drones, they are being met with fist pumps and hosted at golf clubs. If we're going to be serious about accountability, we must hold EVERYONE accountable,'' Strada added '' appearing to reference the President's controversial gesture with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

This story has been updated with additional developments on Monday.

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Ukraine's artificial intelligence (AI) development continues at a frightening pace beyond that of even tech giants in the U.S. and China as the war with Russia lurches toward a third year, but experts highlighted America's critical role in helping that rapid advance.

"What I think we underestimate in the U.S. military is the actual cost of the infrastructure required to do this in combat," Benjamin Jensen, senior fellow of Future War, Gaming and Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Fox News Digital.

"Ukraine is doing it because they're building it from the bottom up, and it's antifragile '... it's small, it's scalable, it works, and they know what to do it," Jensen said. "We're trying to do it very Pentagonese from the top down, which means we're going to spend tens of billions of dollars for a couple of high-profile failures versus spending, you know, one million dollars on nine failures and one success."

The U.S. discovered Ukraine's unbelievable advancement with AI just months into the war. Brett Velicovich, a Fox News contributor embedded in Ukraine in 2023, claimed the advancements Ukrainian technicians had achieved and how they had achieved them were "out of this world," and the U.S. had no idea about any of it.

AI WILL IMPACT 60% OF US JOBS, INCREASE INEQUALITY WORLDWIDE, IMF WARNS

Velicovich and other experts described the various ways Ukraine had utilized AI, including facial recognition to locate war criminals, systems to help drone guidance and target selection, satellite analysis to gather evidence of war crimes and identification of Russian disinformation and propaganda.

President Biden meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

Jensen, who is also a professor of strategic studies at the Marine Corps University School of Advanced Warfighting, discussed the culmination of those efforts in Ukraine's Delta situational awareness system, which integrates a range of systems, including visual recognition and geolocation mapping, fed data by open source participation from the Ukrainian people.

Ukraine unveiled the system in late 2022, but it received little press despite proving enormously helpful in processing the huge amount of battlefield data to guide the Ukrainian forces on the battlefield with active targeting and coordination.

WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?

Praise for Ukraine's ingenious efforts notwithstanding, Jensen highlighted the role the United States foreign aid programs have played in helping make these advancements a reality. AI requires data to train the model and platforms, and the United States Agency for International Development programs helped fund the Ukrainian digital identity system.

The data sharing and tech partnerships between the U.S. and Ukraine allowed Kyiv to quickly simplify and enhance the system, speeding up everything from aid and assistance delivery to civilian notifications of incoming attacks and helping to find missing persons.

The Ukrainian military's Grad multiple rocket launcher fires rockets at Russian positions on the frontline near Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Thursday, Nov. 24, 2022. (AP Photo/LIBKOS, File)

James Hess, professor at the School of Security and Global Studies at the American Public University System, agreed that U.S. data not only helped Ukraine achieve these incredible developments, but it also continues to do so.

"To understand the battlefield environment is time-consuming and its complex, and that's, of course, why it's so important because the amount of data is overwhelming," Hess explained, referring to the American role in the process.

WHERE IS THE AI BOOM? EXPERTS CAUTION NEW TECH WILL TAKE TIME

"Overwhelming data, which can also be a form of bad data, because if you have too much, you can't really work through that effectively, so that's one of the impetus behind using AI is to help alleviate the overwhelming data concerns," Hess continued, noting that few batches of data can be larger than that from a battlefield environment.

"In the case with Ukraine, it's not just personnel help. It's also sensor help; it's also processing help; it's also the process of targeting process," Hess added. "All those different forms of help are extremely valuable to Ukraine, and I don't see that [help] ending anytime soon."

A view of destroyed armored vehicles and tanks belonging to Russian forces after they withdrew from the city of Lyman in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on Oct. 5, 2022. (Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Hess revealed that the real question and drive for development in Ukraine increasingly focus on how to more seamlessly communicate the data collected and processed by AI to troops for real-time use to speed up on-field targeting and coordination.

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"A lot of the research and focus right now '' in the United States and China as well '' how I can be enabled to go directly from sensor to shooter," Hess said. "Of course, that brings up other challenges and concerns: Where does that information get verified? Who's validating it before that shooter is processing it?"

"I don't think we're seeing a case where in Ukraine the humans [are] out of the loop by any means," Hess assured. "It's still certainly human in the loop, but as AI develops, the process is going to be that the human in the loop '... is continuously backing away as the AI becomes more capable and the algorithms more refined, and that's kind of where it's going."

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Sat, 20 Jan 2024 16:27

The publisher of Sports Illustrated is laying off much of the storied magazine's entire staff.

The news, first reported by Front Office Sports, came less than 24 hours after publisher The Arena Group announced ''a significant reduction in its workforce,'' comprising 100 employees. Arena said it continued to manage ''substantial'' debt and recently missed payments, and that the layoffs were part of ''cost-cutting measures to initiate a transformative shift towards a streamlined business model.''

According to FOS, Sports Illustrated's parent company, Authentic Brands Group, has sought to revoke Arena's license to publish SI after Arena missed a payment.

Richard Deitsch of The Athletic separately tweeted Friday an image of an email sent out to workers that said ''staff'' who worked for the Sports Illustrated brand were being laid off.

The union representing SI's staff said in a tweeted statement that it had been notified of Arena's intention to ''lay off a significant number, possibly all'' of its union-represented staff.

''This is another difficult day in what has been a difficult four years for Sports Illustrated under Arena Group (previously The Maven) stewardship,'' the union said in a statement. ''We are calling on ABG to ensure the continued publication of SI and allow it to serve our audience in the way it has for nearly 70 years,'' the statement read, using an acronym for Authentic Brands Group.

In a statement, Authentic Brands confirmed it had terminated The Arena Group's license to serve as the publisher of Sports Illustrated as a result of its failure to pay its quarterly license fee '-- but said that the SI brand would live on.

"Authentic is here to ensure that the brand of Sports Illustrated, which includes its editorial arm, continues to thrive as it has for the past nearly 70 years," the company said. "We are confident that going forward the brand will continue to evolve and grow in a way that serves sports news readers, sports fans, and consumers."

Arena Group said in a statement it continues to negotiate with Authentic and that it will continue to produce Sports Illustrated until the negotiations are resolved.

"We hope to be the company to take SI forward but if not, we are confident that someone will," it said. "If it is another business, we will support with the transition so the legacy of Sports Illustrated doesn't suffer.''

Long published by Time-Life, Sports Illustrated was sold by successor group Time Inc. to Meredith Corp., best known for publishing Better Homes & Gardens, in 2018, whereupon it was reduced to a biweekly publication.

In 2019, Authentic, which owns a host of clothing and lifestyle brands, purchased SI.

Sports Illustrated drew headlines last fall after the tech news outlet Futurism reported that it appeared SI had published AI-generated stories, photos and authors.

Following those reports, Arena ousted CEO Ross Levinsohn and replaced him with Manoj Bhargava, the founder and CEO of Innovations Ventures, known for creating the 5-hour Energy drink. Bhargava himself subsequently stepped down in January to avoid unspecified potential conflicts of interest.

Arena also oversees TheStreet, Parade and Men's Journal.

The Sports Illustrated brand may yet live on in an unexpected form: In 2022, Authentic announced it had partnered with a developer and a hospitality group to launch Sports Illustrated Resorts, ''a new premium, lifestyle resort and entertainment destinations.'' The first location has already opened in the Dominican Republic.

Rob Wile Rob Wile is a breaking business news reporter for NBC News Digital.

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Sat, 20 Jan 2024 15:01

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Saturday January 20 2024A software update by Apple turned down the volume at Audioboom last year, with the podcast platform yesterday spelling out the effects of the change on its download numbers.

In a trading update, the London-listed company said it had made revenue of $19.2 million in the last three months of 2023, up 37 per cent on the previous quarter and 5 per cent year-on-year. However, it is expected to make only $65 million in revenue for the entire year, compared with $74.9 million the year before. It also revealed an underlying earnings loss of $1.5 million in 2023, down from a $3.6 million underlying earnings profit in the previous year.

The announcement wiped 10 per cent, or 32½p, of Audioboom's shares, which closed on 292½p

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Fri, 19 Jan 2024 23:26

A grand jury in New Mexico indicted Hollywood actor Alec Baldwin Friday on an involuntary manslaughter charge related to the unintentional shooting of a woman on the movie set of ''Rust.''

The grand jury issued the indictment nearly one year after the initial charges brought against him were dropped, according to The New York Times. He had initially been charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter related to the death of 42-year-old cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in Oct. 2021.

The indictment charges the actor with two separate counts of involuntary manslaughter, though he can only be convicted of one, the Times reported. The felony charge alleges he had a ''total disregard or indifference for the safety of others,'' and the other accuses him of negligent use of a firearm.

Baldwin could face 18 months in prison if convicted of the new charge, according to The New York Times.

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) '-- A grand jury has indicted actor Alec Baldwin in connection with a 2021 fatal shooting on a movie set in New Mexico.

'-- Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) January 19, 2024

Baldwin's attorneys Luke Nikas and Alex Spiro said they ''look forward to [their] day in court,'' according to the Times.

On set, Baldwin held a prop gun that was not discharged and unintentionally struck Hutchins in the chest, who was later airlifted to the University of New Mexico Hospital where she succumbed to her injuries. A bullet gave director Joel Souza a non-life-threatening wound in the shoulder.

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO '' OCTOBER 27: First Judicial District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies for the state of New Mexico speaks during a press conference at the Santa Fe County Public Safety Building to update members of the media on the shooting accident on the set of the movie ''Rust'' at the on October 27, 2021 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. On October 21, 2021, Director of Photography Halyna Hutchins was killed and director Joel Souza was injured on set while filming the movie ''Rust'' at Bonanza Creek Ranch near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The film's star and producer Alec Baldwin discharged a prop firearm and a bullet hit Hutchins and Souza. (Photo by Sam Wasson/Getty Images)

Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza, with District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies (R), speaks to the press on October 27, 2021, about the criminal investigation regarding the fatal shooting and wounding of crew members on the set of the movie ''Rust,'' in Santa Fe, New Mexico. (Photo by NICK LAYMAN/AFP via Getty Images)

Baldwin has denied responsibility for Hutchins' death, telling ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that he did not ''pull the trigger'' and would ''never point a gun at anyone'' during a December 2021 interview. He also asserted that he was told the gun did not contain any live rounds and that no live ammunition was supposed to be on set.

The first indictment had been dropped after the prosecution received evidence indicating the gun may have been designed in a manner of making it easy for it to go off without pulling the trigger, the Times reported. A forensic report commissioned by the prosecution concluded that Baldwin must have pulled the trigger for the gun to fire rounds, leading to the revival of the case, the Times reported. (RELATED: Joy Behar Suggests New Mexico Special Prosecutor Is Charging Alec Baldwin Because She's 'A Big Republican')

ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO '' OCTOBER 23: Photos of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins are displayed before a vigil held to honor her at Albuquerque Civic Plaza on October 23, 2021 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Hutchins was killed on set while filming the movie ''Rust'' at Bonanza Creek Ranch near Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 21, 2021. The film's star and producer Alec Baldwin discharged a prop firearm that hit Hutchins and director Joel Souza. (Photo by Sam Wasson/Getty Images)

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA '' NOVEMBER 17: ''Rust'' script supervisor Mamie Mitchell speaks during press conference with Gloria Allred as a lawsuit is filed against Alec Baldwin for on-set film shooting on November 17, 2021 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images)

The movie's armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, is also facing an involuntary manslaughter charge, according to the Times. She pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to appear before a judge in February.

The producers of the film, ''Rust,'' had received complaints about risks to the safety of cast and crew, including accidental discharges and labor unrest. Six crew members reportedly walked off the set to protest the working conditions just hours before the fatal shooting.

Mamie Mitchell, a script supervisor attached to ''Rust,'' announced a lawsuit against Baldwin on Nov. 17, 2021. A California judge determined Oct. 31 that Mitchell could move forward with her civil lawsuit, barring some of the claims, but allowing most. Mitchell ultimately claimed, after amendments to her original claims, that she's the victim of assault and battery, ''intentional infliction of emotional distress'' and negligence. The bullet did not hit Mitchell. Gloria Allred, an attorney for some of celebrities' biggest cases, represents her.

Alec Baldwin insists he did not ''pull the trigger'' that killed Hutchins:

Watch body cam footage of the shooting's aftermath:

''The View'' co-host Joy Behar said Baldwin is being charged because special prosecutor is Republican:

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Fri, 19 Jan 2024 20:20

Thanks to new EU privacy regulations, the new Outlook displays a disturbing disclosure there that users elsewhere never see: Microsoft is using the app to harvest personal data and selling it advertisers that use it to display targeted ads both inside and outside the app.

''It looks like Outlook is no longer simply an email service,'' Proton's Edward Komenda writes in a new post to the privacy focused company's blog. ''It's a data collection mechanism for Microsoft's 772 external partners and an ad delivery system for Microsoft itself.''

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This disclosure explains that Microsoft and 772 of its partners are scanning the PC on which the new Outlook runs specifically to identify the user, storing and/or accessing information on that PC, delivering personalized ads and other content, and otherwise deriving ''audience insights.'' A separate ''Choose your ads layout'' window, also shown only in the EU, explains that Outlook will display dismissible ads in your mailbox by default, but that you can move the ads into a banner above the mailbox instead. Some ads from Microsoft and its partners literally appear as if they were new emails, confusing users.

''Thanks to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, Europeans are at least informed that a small village of third parties will be able to look at their data,'' Komenda explains. ''UK users can explore a 'List of Advertising Partners,' which shows the disturbing number of ad companies working with Microsoft. Americans, thanks to their government's refusal to pass privacy legislation, are never even informed this is happening.''

To be clear, Microsoft does not use personal data in email to target ads. But Microsoft's privacy statement explains why it doesn't need to do that to build a profile of you, as it targets ads based on ''your interests and favorites, your location, your transactions, how you use our products, your search queries, or the content you view.'' It then sells that data to advertisers and other online entities, including service providers.

Microsoft's expanded push into advertising was no doubt triggered by Google's successes in this market, and the firm announced in 2021 that it wanted to double the size of that business to $20 billion. But Microsoft is now ''addicted'' to these revenues, Komenda charges, which is why it has expanded its customers exposure to advertising.

Yes, Proton sells privacy'--I wrote about the release of its native email client recently'--and so you may view these charges as self-serving. That's fine, but be sure to read the Proton blog post in full, including the many links it has to other examples. I've made this point about Microsoft Edge, in particular, but it's pretty clear that Microsoft today is, in Komenda's words, no different than the Googles and Metas of the world. And that is a problem.

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Fri, 19 Jan 2024 18:11

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Hi

In Phase 7 I would like to see the following please.

Podcast:VerifyOwnershipPodcast:Activity previously EventsPodcast:ChatPodcast:Country - to counter balance Podcast:Location Podfans uses 'Country' to find podcasts from a particular country. e.g Home Grown Hits. It allows users/fans to change the country tag and see podcasts from a different country/language

PodFans Search Filters showing Country.

PodFans Admin view enabling Podcasters to select their country.

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I'd still like consideration for the proposals for notes and other rich data in chapters (which seem increasingly pointless to be a separate file with everything else we're cramming in the RSS feed). This would make Podcasting 2.0 chapters actually better for the audiences instead of merely a separate file that benefits almost no one differently after publishing. #400

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I see the Phase 7 list in the top post has grown, although it is not based on any of the suggestions above. Was their inclusion perhaps based on upvotes of the respective proposals? If so, I would like to draw attention to the following which has the next highest votes behind those already included:

V4V without bitcoin #538 There might be some bias within this developer community toward Bitcoin that is not representative of the larger world, and this may be reflected by suggestions that we can solve the underlying problem behind my proposal by still using Bitcoin under the hood and converting dollars into Bitcoin when topping up a wallet. But that's a completely separate idea and is not what I'm proposing here. The proposal is to simply add plain old PayPal as one of the payment types in addition to Bitcoin. Is there any reason why we can't consider that? There's no mystery behind it, listeners would just use a familiar currency and a familiar payment method that they may have greater trust in, and which they may indeed already be signed up for, lowering their friction to participate in V4V. Having choice is a good thing, and this is a choice that is currently lacking in V4V.

#538 (reply in thread) gives a concrete example of what the XML would look like:

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Fri, 19 Jan 2024 17:50

California health officials have shortened the COVID-19 isolation guidelines for those who test positive as the department aims to focus more on people who are the most at risk of severe illness while also working to minimize school and workplace disruptions.

As of Jan. 9, people who test positive for COVID-19 but have mild symptoms and have been fever-free without the help of medication may return to school or work after one day of isolation.

Previously, the recommended guidelines called for five days of isolation.

''The reason for these changes is that we are now at a different point in time with reduced impacts from COVID-19 compared to prior years due to broad immunity from vaccination and/or natural infection, and readily available treatments for infected people,'' a representative with the California Department of Public Health told KTLA in an email statement.

''Most of our policies and priorities for intervention are now focused on protecting those most at risk for serious illness. Additionally, previous isolation recommendations were implemented to reduce the spread of a virus to which the population had little immunity and had led to large numbers of hospitalizations and deaths that overwhelmed our healthcare systems during the pandemic.''

Health officials still recommend that people who test positive for COVID-19 wear a mask, avoid contact with those who have a higher risk of catching severe COVID-19 and, if needed, seek medical treatment, according to the updated guidelines. COVID-19 vaccinations are also still recommended by health officials.

The CDPH reported 3,011 new COVID-19 hospital admissions in California as of Jan. 12.

When looking at county data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicated that areas like Merced, Mariposa and Orange counties had a medium COVID-19 hospitalization rate.

Other areas like Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Ventura counties had low COVID-19 hospitalization rates.

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Fri, 19 Jan 2024 17:12

A bombshell has emerged in the debate on the origins of COVID, with J.J. Couey, one of the original founders of DRASTIC'--a grassroots group assembled to investigate SARS-CoV-2's origins'--renouncing the lab leak theory, saying he now believes the lab leak theory represents a kind of controlled opposition or ''double bluff'' in order to perpetuate the pandemic state of emergency.

To date, DRASTIC members have generally held steadfast to the line that COVID must have arisen due to a lab leak. Perhaps for this reason, DRASTIC's work has been endorsed by some of the world's most prestigious media outlets, including the Economist , the New Yorker , the Atlantic , the Intercept , Vanity Fair , and Newsweek .

These endorsements lend Mr. Couey considerable high-level authority as to the origins of the virus. For him to renounce the lab leak theory as controlled opposition thus marks a monumental shift in the debate surrounding the origins of COVID.

In his podcast series, Couey tells of how he became convinced that the lab leak theory had to be true in early 2020 because the idea was initially censored, which he now refers to as being ''Scooby-Doo'd.''

And this was me, remember I was saying there was a lab leak and what do these guys say, what is the general story that you can serially passage it in animals or serially passage it in some cell culture and that can result in some change that results in a pandemic. This I believe is false. I believe I was one of many people who was misled, there's my picture as Sherlock Holmes, thinking I'd solved this mystery of where the virus came from. And I think what happened is I was Scooby-Doo'd. They essentially made us believe that by censoring the lab leak it had to be true, because the emails say that Fauci was covering it up, the furin cleavage site says that it must be a lab leak. There's even evidence of restriction enzyme sites that I did a story on for CHZ before I really realized what I think happened to me and a lot of us is we were tricked into believing something that's not biologically true'...

I started the same way a lot of us did, very early on in February 2020: It's gotta be a lab virus! It's gotta be a lab virus otherwise it wouldn't go around the world, it's gotta be a lab virus otherwise they wouldn't cover it up, it's gotta be a lab virus otherwise why would they fire me? And a lot of people were played like this, maybe entire newscasts, maybe entire networks, maybe entire vaccine committees, maybe entire CDC committees, maybe entire White House staffs.

Couey now believes the illusion of a coronavirus pandemic has been spun almost entirely through the recoding of ordinary all-cause mortality as ''COVID deaths'' through manipulative death coding and the widespread abuse of faulty PCR tests that would register positive due to the presence of just about any coronavirus; essentially, the entire response to COVID has been one giant fraud .

The WHO declared a pandemic of a novel, dangerous virus'...that enabled a larger percentage of all-cause mortality than pneumonia and influenza to be prioritized as a national security threat composed of vaccine-preventable deaths. So you and I and the ''no-virus'' people all know that the PCR test was used to inflate the number of cases and to extend a wide net so that they could claim that this pandemic was much much larger than it was, no one's going to argue about that. But the question is how did that work? Did it work because the PCR test was so weak and so aspecific and so vulnerable to false positives if you ran it up to enough cycles'--or, is one of the central myths that they've told us which is SARS-CoV-2 got out twice but it disappeared again, is completely false. What's much more likely is that on the background of an untold number of coronaviruses, many of which are related to SARS-1, a PCR test that's aimed at SARS-2 will have a lot of overlap with background viruses, so anyone that has some coronavirus, a certain percentage of them is likely to have a coronavirus that will register on any one of these EUA tests'...

They also changed the way we think about all-cause mortality, and this is a huge bamboozlement because think about it now as you look back, they have led us to believe there was a new cause of death'--''a new cause of death!'''--and everybody who died of it shouldn't have died because it was a new cause of death and if Peter Daszak wouldn't have been tweaking viruses we wouldn't have this problem. They convinced people around the world that the PCR tests were evidence of this, and at the same time they never talked about all-cause mortality.

Couey believes the perceived increase in pneumonia deaths can be explained almost entirely by iatrogenesis and the poor medical protocols that were rolled out by the World Health Organization and other public health and national security authorities with the onset of COVID.

If you think about how they rolled out the tests and the fact that they admitted that anybody who tested positive within 28 days of a death was considered a COVID death, it's very easy to explain why, by telling everybody there's no treatment for the pneumonia you see, that antibiotics won't work for the pneumonia you see, that mechanical ventilation might stop the spread for the virus that you don't see'-- that all of these changes that were introduced into our healthcare system, all the huge shifts that occurred in the way that we treated people, the way we treated other diseases, and the way that we reacted to a respiratory virus should this test come up positive, is easily responsible for creating these bumps in pneumonia deaths'... What I'm suggesting is, it seems to me from a wide variety of data sets, that the change in protocol, the lack of protocols, the ridiculous suggestive protocols, the horrible pharmaceutical protocols that were enacted, could easily explain why we went from a very steady number of pneumonia-based deaths to a doubling or tripling of pneumonia-based deaths. Couple that with using tests to rope in everyone who ever went to a hospital and now you see how this theatre was created'...

Couey agrees that the entire idea of a lab leak due to gain-of-function research represented a kind of ''double bluff,'' or an exercise in reverse psychology. As one physician summarized on Couey's podcast:

In my opinion, there never was a pandemic, nothing went around the world, and that's the end of it really. I've been thinking to myself that the gain-of-function thing was a ''double bluff'' if you'd like, with the purpose that you've described, and you brilliantly described why they might have done all these things. But I agree with you: there wasn't a pandemic in the world, it didn't go around the world, it never had the capacity to go around the world.

Couey: Yeah, I think that's the summary.

Another physician agreed that the idea of a lab leak was part of a narrative in which ''public health'' was being used to introduce communist values across society.

We're being sucked into this idea of ''what's good for the public.'' That's socialism, that's communism, that's dictatorship. ''All of you sacrifice your lives for the good of _!''

Couey goes into considerable detail about the biological evidence that led him to believe in the impossibility that a coronavirus lab leak could have led to a pandemic, due to the constant and inherent instability of individual coronavirus genomes'--including those that have supposedly constituted the ''COVID pandemic.'' No coronavirus genome or viral clone has ever defied this law of nature. This makes the lab leak theory every bit as nonsensical as the theory that the virus suddenly popped out of some animal at the Wuhan wet market , especially in light of the now-overwhelming evidence that COVID was already spreading globally many months before the initial events in Wuhan.

They've made us believe that mother nature can make a combination of genes or Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance and Zhengli Shi can make a combination of viral genes that will endow the virus with properties that only can be created when the virus is purified like that and made in enough quantity to do anything at all with it. My guess is if there was a virus, it was a viral clone, and that's why they could actually think that for a short period of time a PCR test would mean anything at all'... and at that stage, you're once again screening the background and any coronavirus with a homologous protein of those two would likely pull up a PCR positive and there you go, they've converted almost all respiratory disease to a national security priority that's vaccine targetable and nobody can argue with them because it was declared in an emergency.

The tricky part about this is, of course, that that means there was really no danger except for what they did to us. Because this isn't real. Yes, there was a cave in 2012 where they found that three people or four people got a very similar disease to SARS-CoV-2 but it didn't spread. It didn't wipe out a hospital, or a town, or a city. It ended with four or five people and some sampling'... You don't get a citywide outbreak because of the variability and the constant instability of a genome of an RNA virus'... And I think they're full of bull. I think the reason why they're telling us this is because they want us to surrender our individual sovereignty and invert our rights to fascism, and then we got Scooby-Doo'd. Because they're trying to make us believe that ''yeah you can also stitch pieces together and make chimeric viruses and then those viruses will go around the world like wildfire,'' and that's just not biologically plausible.

So this is what I think happened, they Scooby-Doo'd us and they tricked us into slowly but surely, even the TV watchers think it's probably a lab leak, I mean obviously it's a lab leak, and isn't that just perfect then. Because now the WHO is needed forever and the threat of people buying equipment on eBay and building gain-of-function viruses in their garage is real. And the possibility that China's doing it and America's doing it and oh my gosh imagine the fear that they could create'... and forever after it would be codified in every story that mother nature is capable of doing something that she's not, and they know she's not, but they've told you a story that most of the time if you take a PCR test you never would have gotten a positive before 2020, but that's a lie! And it's basically based on that lie alone, and I think most of us know that in our hearts, that without that PCR test this never would have gone anywhere, without an ability to round everybody up with a PCR test to try to shift more of the all-cause mortality rate under the umbrella of a ''novel virus.''

Couey believes the actual capabilities of gain-of-function research have been exaggerated at all levels in order to perpetuate the narrative that a pandemic could have resulted from a lab leak.

Gain-of-function is exaggerated on purpose at all levels because natural zoonosis is a ghost'... The chimeric paper that they combine a SARS virus with a new bat spike protein and it kills more cells than the other clone did is also just a story. It's a story about two synthetic viruses in a dish that make more plaques than the other one, and then we think ''Wow they're making gain-of-function viruses, this is crazy, imagine what they're not telling us!'' Scooby-Doo'd. We've been fooled.

All these things that we thought about it, all these things they describe about it, they are describing, interestingly enough, only attributes of a clone. Everybody that looked at the sequence was looking at only one sequence: The original one. ''Ooh it's enriched to ACE2! It's got a furin cleavage site!'' And then we went on and on about AIDS inserts and all this other stuff. Why don't we track the AIDS inserts now then? Why don't we talk about whether the furin cleavage site is still present? Why don't we talk about the proteogenic aspects of the spike and then track those sequences? Why do we keep talking about the original spike when we know that there's no conceivable way that if this virus was released in Wuhan, then the virus could both circle the Earth and also maintain a fidelity that didn't slowly but surely erode the toxicity of whatever the spike protein was originally. You can't have it both ways, but I believe, because of the Scooby-Dooing that's occurred to us, we're actually allowing that to happen.

Couey thinks the lab leak narrative is being used by powerful government and financial interests with ulterior motives. For example, the lab leak theory has recently been endorsed by WHO Director Tedros Adhanom and Jeffrey Sachs , both of whom have long histories of servicing the Chinese Communist Party. As Couey says:

Most of all, we can't assume that there's only one virus'--one source of respiratory disease is absurd. Before 2020, this would've been considered absurd. So this is Jeffrey Sachs not too long ago on CNN doing the exact Scooby-Doo thing. And now you can see why it's Scooby-Doo, because it is, they are trying to lead the public in the direction of ''we solved it!'''...So it's really, Jeffrey Sachs is one of these guys who's playing the same Scooby-Doo game, where as they stumble forward they want you to come to the conclusion that it is possible that a coronavirus can explain the last two-and-a-half years, and it cannot.

This game has been going on for some time. The lab leak theory was launched in no small part by former Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger , arguably the single official most responsible for bringing lockdowns to the United States. In early 2020, many of the scary videos purporting to show mass death in Wuhan'--which were all later proven fake'-- specifically invoked the possibility of a lab leak as a reason to be terrified of the virus. Other high level members of the US national security community, including the former Director of National Intelligence and the former Secretary of State , have staked their reputations on the idea that the virus came from the Wuhan lab .

As a founder of DRASTIC, Couey has unique insight into the dynamics of how the lab leak narrative has been used as controlled opposition. Couey tells of how the mainstream media narrative surrounding DRASTIC was effectively hijacked by the US National Security Council'--likely because the NSC wanted the appearance of a grassroots group to popularize a theory which they really wanted everyone to believe to begin with, evidence be damned.

This is a video from I think it's April of 2021 or February of 2021. And Newsweek and Vanity Fair also covered this same group called DRASTIC. And you can hear in that video, Tucker Carlson will list out the people that started the group, and only one American is listed, and that is Jamie Metzl, who was a National Security Council member in the Clinton administration. And they take the narrative and say that these people are responsible for making it plausible to consider that it was a lab leak. And in reality, of the five people that originally started DRASTIC, I was one of them. And none of those articles covered any of the people that were in DRASTIC originally. None of them. So we knew already then that something was going on, but I didn't understand what. And what I realized now is that I've essentially been fooled just like everyone else. I'm a human being, and I got played. I got Scooby-Doo'd.

Tucker Carlson was one of the most influential individuals who talked Donald Trump into signing onto lockdowns in early 2020.

We got covered in Vanity Fair and Newsweek and it was quite an interesting time, because some people in DRASTIC were very happy to get covered but other people were noticeably upset that they completely credited the entire organization to one guy with everything but CIA cufflinks, essentially stealing the story from us and yet fueling this Scooby-Doo episode of us figuring out that ''Oh it's DRASTIC, and DRASTIC figured out that it was a lab leak! Thank goodness for these guys!''

As Couey describes, the initial ''Scooby-Dooing'' of the lab leak theory led to a perception that a lab leak was being covered up by national security officials in the United States and China, which made the theory popular. But this is essentially the opposite of what's actually happened. Rather, the national security community has been doing just about everything in their power to convince the public that the COVID pandemic was the result of a lab leak, primarily out of a desperate effort to justify the initial lockdowns in which they played an outsized role , similar to their desperate attempts to identify weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in the years following the invasion of Iraq. Hence the steady drumbeat of well-funded document dumps and FOIA requests hyperfocusing on Fauci and other scientists' discussions of a possible lab leak in early 2020.

For its part, the Chinese government pretends to be covering up a lab leak by publishing full-throated denials of a lab leak on an almost daily basis . This is not consistent with a real coverup. For example, mainstream media outlets across the western world have covered up the harms of lockdowns, not by constantly denying such harms occurred, but instead by simply pretending the subject does not exist. Likewise, in order to cover up the Tiananmen Square Massacre, CCP cadres at all levels are trained to pretend they have no clue that anything of significance ever took place at Tiananmen Square'--it's just a square. The CCP's constant denials of a lab leak can thus only be seen as an exercise in reverse psychology, a way to convince the world that the virus was lab-made, without saying so outright, in order to justify all the totalitarian lockdowns and mandates from China to which they've been subject.

Couey warns that the lab leak narrative is being perpetuated by those he believed were the ''good guys'''--all according to a planned narrative to justify the biosecurity state in perpetuity.

When somebody says ''I want to get to the bottom of this,'' that's a very easy thing to say'--everybody wants to understand what happened here'-- but I assure you there are some people who don't want YOU to understand what's happened here, and they want you to come to one specific conclusion. And that's why I say we've been Scooby-Doo'd, because we've been tricked into believing that we've solved the mystery, that we've found out who the bad guy is, but we haven't even gotten close'...

I feel there is a concerted effort both in the mainstream media, and in social media, and among the people that you call ''dissidents'' to change your mind for a reason'... I believe that by convincing you that there was a gain-of-function virus, and that gain-of-function viruses are possible, and that serial passage can lead to a pandemic, is a narrative which allows the biosecurity state to exist in infinity and the global public health security state to be fundable, to be justifiable, and to be supernational, dissolving national sovereignty for all intents and purposes.

So all these people are part of a machine that wants to convince you that there is a national and indeed global security health threat from gain-of-function viruses that will never go away'... The sustaining of that narrative is being done by people that I thought were good guys.

The matrix is real. It's a set of stories that has actually trapped both sides. The side that loves the vaccines and believe the PBS NewsHour and think either MSNBC or Fox News is more right than the other, but they all agree that ''Oh it's probably a lab leak! So we should probably do something about those lab leaks!'' It's all gone exactly as planned, and I was part of creating that narrative'... It's a very incredible play that they've done to us, and I believe the play is still being executed on all sides that we can see.

Controlled opposition is a difficult topic, not only because it's messy, but also because it's not black-and-white. An individual might disingenuously toe one line in order to maintain access to unique financial and media opportunities, even while genuinely believing in other aspects of the cause. By contrast, fully-transparent activists are often too honest for our own good, making it difficult for our work to get much publicity.

Nonetheless, Couey tells of the tremendous social pressure and financial temptation to which those like him have been subject in order to perpetuate the lab leak narrative. In one instance, after he renounced the lab leak theory, his former DRASTIC colleague Charles Rixey seemed to rub in the fact that Robert Malone snubbed Couey, inviting Rixey to his ranch instead of him.

As they purport to inform you, they are actually telling you what now turn out to be boldfaced lies, lies about the capabilities of mother nature and lies about the capabilities of gain-of-function research. This all started with this podcast I was on which really doesn't say anything controversial. Nine days later I saw Robert Malone and he couldn't ''remember'' me. Had no idea even after I tried to tell him we did this podcast together. But at the same meeting he remembered Charles Rixey and in fact invited Charles Rixey over to his house to discuss the Diffuse proposal. And in fact, he even said that in front of me. And Charles Rixey went out of his way to tell me no less than three times in person: ''Isn't it weird that Robert Malone remembered me and not you? Can't believe I'm going to go to his ranch.''

This financial pressure is not surprising, as billions of dollars have been spent to keep the lab leak narrative alive. A recent report on the lab leak theory from Vanity Fair and ProPublica, for example, was financed in part by $5 million in funding from serial financial criminal Sam Bankman-Fried and his fraudulent cryptocurrency empire at FTX . It's not clear why it took $5 million of stolen money to fund a half-baked article with little new information, but this is telling as to the quantity and ethics of the funding that's gone toward keeping the lab leak theory at the forefront of the public conversation.

Couey emotionally describes the alienation and ostracism he's experienced since he renounced the lab leak theory from those he thought were his friends. He believes many of his former colleagues are simply telling people what they want to hear, regardless of the evidence.

If people who are your friends, and who came to you as part of a united front of people who were interested in saving humanity from whatever this is, and then they suddenly change their mind about you, they suddenly walk away, they don't bother calling anymore'--oh, ok'... This has happened quite often in the last two weeks or so, where people behave as though the reality on the board is not happening'...

These are not people behaving like serious adults. Either they're playing at a game, or they're being told what to do, or they're not thinking very straight. Because while they insist on this constantly brittle narrative, they also insist on insulting me, they also insist on coming down hard on me, accusing me of saying things, doing things. <Couey chokes up. Long pause.>

I'm a human just like you are. But I have a family, and I've put a lot on the line night after night. And I put myself on the line the last couple days because I think there are people who are not behaving honestly, people who are telling stories on the screen while acting differently behind the scenes'... These people are not really following whatever the science is. They're following preconceived notions and they haven't really deviated from these preconceived notions for over a year and a half. No extra data matter, no extra observations matter, no retrospective view matters, nothing. The same brittle narrative for almost two years now'... They can tell all the stories they want, they can stream all they want, nobody's watching anymore, and the reason nobody's watching is because they can see through this consistently brittle narrative that they keep repeating over and over. It's sad, really.

Telling people what they want to hear is, unfortunately, nothing new with regard to the lab leak theory. For example, the United States Senate recently released a report concluding that the COVID pandemic was ''most likely'' the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Yet these same senators exerted precisely zero effort to hold China accountable for that lab leak, or even to stop Peter Daszak from obtaining more funding for this same gain-of-function research. If these Senators actually believed what they were saying, one would certainly expect that'--if only for the safety of themselves and their own family members'--they'd want to put a stop to this research which supposedly resulted in a pandemic claiming millions of lives.

This leads to a dynamic in which many insist there must have been a lab leak simply because they see other successful people insisting there must have been a lab leak. At the highest level, however, this Party line serves the interests of the COVID narrative and its chief instigators in multiple ways. As I outlined in Snake Oil :

By using controlled opposition figures to sponsor the COVID-19 lab leak and bioweapon theories, the CCP advanced each of these goals. First, CCP opponents were wrongfully convinced that SARS-CoV-2 was exceptionally dangerous'--its origins worth investigating. Second, CCP opponents were lulled into complacency, following leaders who promised to find the virus' origin, but who had no real intention of holding the CCP accountable. Finally, opponents of the CCP could be misdirected to pour their energies into a wild goose chase to find SARS-CoV2's origin, while opposition to lockdowns was silenced'...

That politicians and media outlets were, by 2021, talking about a lab leak while ignoring the thousands of citizens slaughtered by China's bad guidance on mechanical ventilators was a demonstration of controlled opposition at work. Regardless of one's views on lockdowns, everyone should have been outraged by the bad ventilator guidance that killed thousands of innocent patients. Leaders' silence on this subject spoke volumes as to their credibility on holding Beijing accountable for anything, especially complex virological theories.

For the political right, the lab leak theory was a bit like ''follow the science'' was to the political left. Many of those loyal to the political right saw leaders endorsing the lab leak theory and fell in line. Just as the Soviets had learned through their domination of Eastern Europe, democracy could be subverted more easily by corrupting officials on both the left and the right. Corrupt one side and you can mislead 40 or 50% of the population; corrupt both sides and you can mislead 80 or 90% of the population'...

Snake Oil sets out why the lab leak theory always had to be a controlled opposition narrative from a logical perspective. Yet previously it was a lonely position among major COVID commentators to assert that the lab leak theory represented a ''double bluff'' and an exercise in reverse psychology. The endorsement of the double bluff argument by a founder of DRASTIC thus marks a sea change in the debate on COVID's origins.

For those who've long seen through the COVID fraud, what Couey says may not be particularly new. Yet apart from his scientific background and his status as a founder of DRASTIC'--a group that's been endorsed by many of the world's most elite media outlets'--what gives Couey's testimony such power is that he's experienced firsthand the powerful social and financial forces that have kept the lab leak theory alive as controlled opposition, regardless of the evidence.

Couey's testimony effectively settles the debate. We can all sleep easy knowing that the lab leak narrative is false, and in fact was never anything more than a part of a broad totalitarian psychological operation to usurp our national sovereignty. Scooby-Doo'd indeed.

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book . Already got the book? Leave a quick review .

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Fri, 19 Jan 2024 16:53

AbstractThis specification details the serialization of a stream of social activities using the JSON format. Activities are important in that they allow individuals to process the latest news of people and things they care about.

Table of Contents1. Introduction2. Notational Conventions3. JSON Serialization 3.1. Example Activities 3.2. Activity Serialization 3.3. Media Link Serialization 3.4. Object Serialization 3.5. Collection Serialization4. The Activity Stream JSON Document5. Comparison of Identifier Values6. The "post" Verb 6.1. Implied "post" Activity7. The "activity" Object Type8. Extension Object Types and Verbs9. Other Representations10. Requirements for Re-publishers11. Security Considerations12. IANA Considerations13. License14. Errata15. Normative ReferencesAppendix A. Acknowledgements§ Authors' Addresses

1. IntroductionIn its simplest form, an activity consists of an actor, a verb, an object, and a target. It tells the story of a person performing an action on or with an object -- "Geraldine posted a photo to her album" or "John shared a video". In most cases these components will be explicit, but they may also be implied.

It is a goal of this specification to provide sufficient metadata about an activity such that a consumer of the data can present it to a user in a rich human-friendly format. This may include constructing readable sentences about the activity that occurred, visual representations of the activity, or combining similar activities for display.

The basic properties that comprise the description of an activity are defined in the following sections.

Within this specification, an object is a thing, real or imaginary, which participates in an activity. It may be the entity performing the activity, or the entity on which the activity was performed. An object consists of properties defined in the following sections. Certain object types may further refine the meaning of these properties, or they may define additional properties.

Some types of objects may have an alternative visual representation in the form of an image, video or embedded HTML fragments. A Media Link represents a hyperlink to such resources.

An Activity Stream is a collection one or more individual activities. The relationship between the activities within the collection is undefined by this specification.

2. Notational ConventionsThe text of this specification provides the sole definition of conformance. Examples in this specification are non-normative.

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119] ( Bradner, S., ''Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels,'' March 1997. ) .

This specification allows the use of IRIs [RFC3987] ( Duerst, M. and M. Suignard, ''Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs),'' January 2005. ) . Every URI [RFC3986] ( Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and L. Masinter, ''Uniform Resource Identifier (URI),'' January 2005. ) is also an IRI, so a URI may be used wherever below an IRI is named. There are two special considerations: (1) when an IRI that is not also a URI is given for dereferencing, it MUST be mapped to a URI using the steps in Section 3.1 of [RFC3987] ( Duerst, M. and M. Suignard, ''Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs),'' January 2005. ) and (2) when an IRI is serving as an id value, it MUST NOT be so mapped.

3. JSON SerializationActivities are serialized using the JSON format, as defined in [RFC4627] ( Crockford, D., ''The application/json Media Type for JavaScript Object Notation (JSON),'' July 2006. ) . Alternative serializations MAY be used but are outside the scope of this specification.

In the JSON serialization, absent properties MAY be represented either by an explicit declaration of the property whose value is null or by omitting the property declaration altogether at the option of the publisher; these two representations are semantically equivalent. If a property is having a value whose type is a JSON array, the absence of any items in that array MUST be represented by omitting the property entirely or publishing it with the value null, and MUST NOT be represented as an empty array, except as otherwise stated in the definition of a specific property.

Unless otherwise specified, all properties specifying date and time values within the JSON serialization, including extensions, MUST conform to the "date-time" production in [RFC3339] ( Klyne, G., ''Date and Time on the Internet: Timestamps,'' July 2002. ) . In addition, an uppercase "T" character MUST be used to separate date and time, and an uppercase "Z" character MUST be present in the absence of a numeric time zone offset.

3.1. Example ActivitiesFollowing is a simple, minimal example of a JSON serialized activity:

Adam—I’ve read Trump’s opening brief, attached. It’s good. The arguments track what you and I expected and have discussed at length. As we also expected, Trump has given SCOTUS multiple paths for handing him a win (although who knows what will actually happen). Here’s a quick breakdown of his five arguments.

The president isn’t subject to § 3 of the 14th Amendment. As expected, Trump invokes various canons of construction to make a textual case that § 3 just doesn’t apply to the presidency. Among other things, he looks to other constitutional provisions suggesting that the president is not an “officer” who would be subject to § 3, and that an officer can only be someone appointed by the president, who logically can’t appoint himself. Trump also cites the presidential oath: Section 3 applies only to those who’ve taken an oath to “support” the Constitution, but the president’s oath makes no mention of “supporting” it. Rather, it says only that he will “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution. This is a fair point. Trump also cites at length what we call “persuasive authority” (as opposed to “binding authority”) to support his interpretation of § 3—mostly nonbinding precedent and learned commentaries.

Again, this is a dark art, and we can expect a “canon volley” from both sides (yes, I went there). I still maintain that Trump has the longer putt, but I confess it’s a close call and I have no idea what the Robed Ones are thinking.

Trump didn’t commit an insurrection. Although SCOTUS may not have to reach this issue, Trump says that it should do so because otherwise it would leave “wiggle room” for legislators “use section 3 as a cudgel to bar President Trump from the general-election ballot or from taking office.” After detailing Trump’s words and deeds on January 6, the brief observes that the plaintiffs “must show that President Trump’s own conduct—and not the conduct of anyone at the Capitol . . . qualifies as ‘insurrection.’ And this they cannot do.”

Precisely. In finding that Trump is an insurrectionist, the trial court relied on expert testimony from Peter Simi, a sociology professor who devotes his existence to “political extremism and ‘the communication styles of far-right political extremists.’” Among other things, Simi opined that Trump and his followers have a “coded language based in doublespeak.” That is, let’s not consider his actual words and deeds—let’s speculate about what telepathic messages he was sending. If I may say so, that’s nutty, dangerous, and legally wrong on multiple levels. Check out Simi’s bio and behold his many publications: https://www.chapman.edu/our-faculty/pete-simi 🙄

Only Congress may enforce § 3. A quote sums up this argument perfectly: “A presidential candidate’s eligibility for office should not be resolved by having a state trial court evaluate opinion testimony from a sociology professor and copy factual findings from a hearsay-filled and partisan congressional committee report, and then demand that reviewing courts defer to its factual findings.”

Section 3 does not prohibit candidates from running for office, but only from holding office. Trump argues that even if § 3 were to apply, it wouldn’t stop a purported insurrectionist from appearing on the ballot. That is, it might block him from taking the office, but not necessarily. After all, § 3 says that Congress can always remove the impediment before Inauguration Day by a 2/3 vote—which it has done many times. This provision, Trump argues, is proof that Congress, not the states, should control who gets to hold office.

The Colorado judiciary violated the Electors Clause because the state legislature did not give it the power to order the Secretary of State to take Trump off the ballot. You’ll recall we talked about the Electors Clause when discussing Mike Johnson’s appearance on a recent CBS interview. The Electors Clause says that a state’s legislature must make (or at least ratify) the rules for selecting electors. Here, the Colorado Supreme Court violated the clause by ordering the Secretary of State to remove Trump from the ballot—something Colorado’s statutes don’t allow.

Hey Adam,

I’ve just listening to the latest podcast and I wanted to give insight about evangelical Christianity. Lol first of all John was way off base. Evangelical Christianity is not connected to a denomination essentially any Christianity of any denomination can be an evangelical. Most churches even have a mix of evangelical and non evangelical Christians. However some denominations and some churches have a higher percentage of evangelicals. To determine if someone is an evangelical they need to ascribe to 4 principals. First is that they had a conversion experience, which means they can point towards a specific time where they decided to die to the world and start living for Christ. Second, they must believe in sola scriptura, which means that they believe that the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God, and the Bible is the sole authority not church leaders. Third they must live with a Biblical world view in their daily life and evangelize to non-Christians. Lastly, they must believe, that humans are inherently sinful, that Jesus’ death on the cross was an atoning sacrifice that cleanses us from sin, and that his sacrifice is the only thing that can save us, not good works.

Thanks for all that you do,

Luke

Was listening to episode 1625 and surprised to hear about commentary on SFI - the Santa Fe Institute.

My family member was intimately tied to SFI being a good friend of Murray Gell-Mann - one of the key founders of it - If you don’t know, Murray won the Nobel for inventing the Quark.

I could give you a lot of background that may not interest you but I would say you’re not far off on your take on what goes on there.

Originally, SFI was about physics and complex systems research. They have truly brilliant and wonderful people like Geoffrey West and Fred Cooper there.

However, since David (Krakauer) took over as director, there is definitely a change in the atmosphere of ideas being discussed.

I think a good example of the contrast is a documentary about SFI that includes a wonderful interview with Geoffrey West and then several w David. The contrast is striking in my mind. I won’t give away more than that so as not to bias you more than I already probably have.

Again, you may not be interested but if you want to enjoy a 45 min documentary sometime, here is one on SFI.

A playground for geniuses: Inside the Santa Fe Institute

bigthink.com

Aka and preferred to remain as

The Baron at Large

ITM John & Adam

In episode 1619 John talks about returning to a game shop to buy some moose and discovering that it had closed down.

John says: “well maybe if myself and others who like eating elk and moose had supported the place just for maybe once in a while instead of waiting five years to go down there to place would still be in business”

It really hit me that I’ve been listening for a long time now and I’ve done nothing to help keep the show going.

I’ve always wanted to make a one off big donation to the show but I’ve never been financially sound enough to do so.

After hearing this story I knew I had to help protect the show that I love. I started a small sustaining donation and even though I still don’t feel like I’m anywhere near to returning value for value I wanted to do my part to help keep the show going and avoid a similar situation with the game shop.

Thank you for all you both do.

-Stewart

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Sun, 21 Jan 2024 15:39

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After a photo caught Donald Trump literally red-handed, social media users are speculating about the cause of the mysterious marks.

The picture posted on 17 January captured the former president in a classic pose '-- with one arm lifted, waving to the crowd '-- but his hand showed a notable difference: bright red spots covering his fingers and palm.

The term ''Trump bumps'' has since trended on X as social media users are trying to guess the cause, from medical conditions to golf wounds to the result of a fall to makeup to ketchup.

''What if he just had some nuggs and it's ketchup,'' one user wondered.

One user noted that the 2024 Republican frontrunner could have fallen: ''It's not uncommon for 77 yo people to fall. His campaign should explain.''

Another user concluded Mr Trump was wearing ''hand makeup.''

The Trump campaign has not confirmed the cause. The Independent has reached out to the Trump campaign.

The account Patriot Takes noted that his hand didn't look like that at his rally in New Hampshire the day before. Patriot Takes later posted a photo of Mr Trump's hand at his press conference in New York for the E Jean Carroll trial.

''His spots appear less red, but you can still see them,'' the account wrote.

The question even reached MSNBC's ''Morning Joe'' where co-host Joe Scarborough asked: ''Do we have any answer on what's on Donald Trump's'... his hands are bleeding.

''Looks like he has a sore'...'' co-host Willie Geist speculated. Mika Brzezinski then cut in and asked, ''Is that magic marker?''

This isn't the first time recently that photos of the 2024 candidate have sparked wild speculation about is going on with Mr Trump behind the scenes.

Last month, a firestorm erupted after a photo circulated, showing the former president standing on two rectangular pads while he was speaking at Mar-a-Lago.

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Sun, 21 Jan 2024 15:36

During a discussion titled 'Defending Truth,' The editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal admitted to Davos elites that the legacy media no longer 'own the facts' and people are much more likely to question what they report as truth.

Emma Tucker told a crowd at the World Economic Forum, ''I think there's a very specific challenge for the legacy brands, like the New York Times and like the Wall Street Journal.''

She continued, ''If you go back really not that long ago, as I say, we owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well.''

''If it said it in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, then that was a fact,'' Tucker further stated, adding ''Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news and they're much more questioning about what we're saying.''

Watch:

During the same discussion, Věra Jourov, Vice-President of the European Commission, complained about the rise of 'disinformation' being a ''security threat,'' noting ''It was part of the Russian military doctrine that they will start information war, and we are in it now.''

''Disinformation is a very powerful tool,'' Jourov continued, adding that ''In the EU we are focusing on improving of the system where the people will get the facts right. We don't speak about opinions. We are not correcting anyone's opinions or language. This is about the facts.''

Watch:

Here is the full discussion:

As we highlighted earlier in the week, Jourov has spent her Davos time meeting the heads of the likes of YouTube and Meta and ensuring they ''play by the rules,'' while her boss, Ursula von der Leyen called for overarching globalist control over the flow of all information in the digital age.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews

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Two Chicago journalists reported that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has become so "stressed out" that he was hospitalized for panic attacks. John Kass and Anita Padilla broke the news on WGN-AM's Chicago Way Podcast on January 16, saying that Johnson needed medical help due to increasing stress.They were talking about the illegal immigrant problem on air when Kass said "No amount of anti-depressants can cure him of this problem.""I know, it's so true," Padilla said. "And you know, I actually, you brought it up, I was gonna bring it up.""The panic attacks?" Kass asked. "The mayor's panic attacks? Can we talk about that?""Can we talk about that?" Padilla asked. "Because sources told me, two sources told me that he has been in the hospital for these panic attacks. And he is stressed out because this is a big, big job for him.""He wasn't ready for it," Kass said."He's not ready for it, he is not ready for it," Padilla said. "He is not. He's not a leader. I'm sorry. He's not a leader. And you know a leader you know, brings people up and supports them and the Chicago Police are still waiting to see where that comes from. Yeah, he put in a good superintendent. But I still think that he needs to prove himself to the police. You know, where does he stand on that? But this immigration issue? This is not helping him at all this situation.""And you know, when you call yourself a 'sanctuary city', you call yourself a 'sanctuary state' and guess what's gonna happen?" Padilla said."Don't blame Texas," she continued, "because Texas if you look at what they're dealing with, they have a massive influx. We don't even show the videos on television, the amount of people that are just standing around, you know, and now they're desperate because what happens when people don't have money or they don't have food, they they start breaking into things. They start committing crimes they start working for the cartels, they start doing human trafficking, they start becoming victims of human trafficking. So they had to do'-- what are they gonna do with all these people'-- they had to get them out of their city, and well, sanctuary city, you're the sanctuary city. So you're gonna get what you asked for."

Johnson has been under increasing pressure while on the job as illegal immigrants continue to pour into the city, fueled by Texas Governor Greg Abbott's bussing of the individuals from the border region to Democrat-led cities. He has asked Texas to stop sending illegal immigrants north, to no avail. Johnson has gone so far as to suggest that Abbott has staged an attack on "

leaders of color" by shipping illegal immigrants to Chicago and New York, headed by Mayor Eric Adams.

"He is attacking democratically-run cities, and particularly cities that are being led by black leaders or leaders of color," Johnson said. "This is unconscionable. I mean, it's a very raggedy approach. And quite frankly, not only is it reckless and raggedy, but it is evil-spirited."

Padilla worked for NBC 5 from 1997-2007 and for Fox 32 from 2007-2023 before taking a position with Florida Voice News.

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Sat, 20 Jan 2024 19:46

LONDONDERRY, New Hampshire '-- Upstate Rep. Elise Stefanik made her debut Saturday as a campaign surrogate for Donald Trump 2024, saying she would be ''honored'' to be his VP '-- while ripping his rival Nikki Haley as a ''non-starter'' for the pick.

''He's going to make the right decision. I trust him to make the right decision for him. So he's going to look for qualities that he thinks are important,'' Stefanik (R-Schuylerville) told reporters at Poor Boy's Diner in Londonderry, amid speculation that she's on a short list to be his VP pick. ''I'd be proud to serve in a Trump administration in any capacity.''

Haley '-- who is within seven percentage points of Trump in at least one poll '-- has also emerged as a possible VP contender, but is the wrong choice because she is ''attacking Trump viciously every single day,'' Stefanik said.

''It's a non-starter. It's a non-starter for voters,'' she said.

Trump has said he has chosen who will be on his ticket but has not made the decision public.

Aristide Economopoulos Donald Trump claims that he has selected who will be on his ticket but has not made that information public. Aristide EconomopoulosStefanik told The Post she would serve in his administration ''in any capacity,'' adding she'll ''do everything we can to win this election this November.''

Stefanik has been fiercely loyal to Trump and was the first member of Congress to endorse him for his re-election campaign '-- before he announced it himself '-- and has been one of his strongest supporters through his legal battles.

She also has been seeing some support from the MAGA base. At Trump's HQ in Concord, volunteers led a ''VP'' chant following her remarks later in the morning.

Elise Stefanik has been one of the fiercest defenders of Trump throughout the 2024 election cycle. Aristide Economopoulos Volunteers started a ''VP'' chant for Stefanik. REUTERSStefanik first showed up on stage Friday evening to stump for him in Concord, before swinging through a diner to speak to voters Saturday morning and then rallying volunteers at the Trump HQ.

Over the course of her swing, Stefanik leaned into her New York roots, arguing New Hampshire shares a lot of the same issues as her home state.

''We have so much in common with New Hampshire, so I feel right at home in the cold, in the snow. I've campaigned like this before,'' she said in Londonderry, adding she wants to ''put up a win in New Hampshire'' and ''really unify House Republicans.''

Elise Stefanik was the first congressperson to endorse Donald Trump's reelection. Aristide Economopoulos Stefanik relied on her roots in upstate New York to relate to New Hampshire voters. AP''My district really tells the story of today's Republican Party and the America First movement under President Trump. This is a district that House Republicans, at the House level, struggled to win,'' she said. ''It's one of the swingiest districts in our direction, so I'm seeing that first hand '-- how he's grown the Republican Party.''

She also stressed the record-breaking migration at the northern border as an issue that unifies her home district with the Granite State and called for all other GOP candidates to drop out of the race so the party can unify behind Trump.

Trump won the Iowa caucus on Jan. 15, defeating Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by a 30-point margin. In New Hampshire on Jan. 23, Trump hopes to increase his numbers, telling voters at his Friday night rally that ''margins are important.''

Stefanik said ''their momentum is definitely in support'' of Trump, who was boosted by ''a very important endorsement'' from former 2024 presidential candidates Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Vivek Ramaswamy.

For those who have not endorsed Trump, ''voters are paying very close attention,'' she warned.

At the Trump HQ in Concord on Saturday, Stefanik stressed to volunteers that New Hampshire needs to build on the ''momentum'' that he got in Iowa, again stressing her New York background as a way to connect with voters on the northern border.

''Hearty people, pro-America people, America First people, '-- this is Trump country. Just like my district. I know we have a couple New Yorkers here,'' she said. ''We're a border district in my district, and this is a border state as well.''

Trump plans to hold rallies throughout the weekend before Tuesday's primary, hitting cities throughout the state.

On her future plans with the former president, Stefanik wouldn't divulge more details, but said she and Trump ''talk on a regular basis.''

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Complexity arises in any system in which multiple agents interact and adapt to one another and their environments. Examples of these complex systems include the nervous system, the Internet, ecosystems, economies, cities, and civilizations.

Complexity science explores all of those systems, and more. And at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, the globe's smartest minds are researching across disciplines, cultures, and schools of thought to answer the biggest questions in science and philosophy.

Our host Kmele Foster stepped into the Santa Fe Institute '-- renowned for its collaborative environment of vast disciplines and schools of thought '-- to speak with some of the most eccentric and genius minds in our world today.

Dispatches from The Well, Episode 3:

- The basic premise of this rocket is: Child, last remaining human on the planet, wants to get into the stars, escape from the Earth, which is plagued or something, and doesn't understand that a rocket that has no engine will not fly. So this is a rocket with no engine. And so it's a symbol of the striving to succeed.

- Yeah.

- But doomed failure. And I like that poetic idea that the whole enterprise has a bit of that character.

- Yeah.

- You know, scientific institutions, especially mathematical ones can feel a little bit forbidding, and many people's experience have has been traumatic. But I think if you drive up to SFI and you see this absurd rocket that could never fly- I think it just, it makes you feel slightly more at ease.

- Yeah.

- It is a signal to people that we are trying to enjoy what we do.

- And that there are mysteries here that are confounding even to the brightest minds who show up and have no idea what the backstory is.

- Exactly. Yes, if you came onto the campus and saw this, you'd think, "What the fuck?"

- I've come to the Santa Fe Institute because I'm hoping to make some progress in my journey to try and get closer to some answers to life's big questions. I've already visited with a bunch of different scientists and a number of different contexts, and I've learned a lot about astronomy and particle physics, but I haven't figured out how to integrate that into some sort of big picture. The Santa Fe Institute is a place that was born out of a desire to break down the boundaries between scientific disciplines. Founded in 1984 by an august group of scholars who wanted to look at how things like physics, biology and computer science might be able to help us better understand the messy stuff of life. They wanted to create an environment where experts in their respective fields had the opportunity to engage in a kind of freeform transdisciplinary collaboration. Considering the incentives in scientific research for staying in one's lane, it's not the sort of endeavor that seemed likely to succeed, but the credentials of its founders, Nobel laureates among them, combined with their conviction, brought SFI into existence. So a lot of things about the Santa Fe Institute that I find really interesting, it has a kind of monastery vibe to it here in the high desert, up on a hill, got these buildings crammed with really thoughtful people doing interesting work, thinking novel thoughts. But these are people who are contemplating some of the deepest questions about existence and consciousness and the meaning of life. Why things are the way they are. There's something really inspiring about that. And in that respect, well, yeah, I guess it is not like a monastery, it's just a monastery. 'Cause that's what you do at a monastery, right? The focus here is on studying complex systems ant colonies, market economies, cities. The dizzying complexity found in all of these self-organizing systems emerges through the interaction between smaller constituent parts. The folks here at SFI are looking for the underlying rules that make all of these systems behave the way they do. And they're driven by the expectation that some of these rules may actually be applicable to any number of different systems- perhaps unlocking answers to some of life's biggest questions. In this episode, we journey to New Mexico, diving deep with the brilliant minds at the Santa Fe Institute.

- Don't tell anyone.

- To uncover how their boundary-pushing insights might shed light on humanity's eternal search for meaning and purpose, in our vast, miraculously complicated, rapidly expanding and incomparably mysterious cosmos. This is "Dispatches from the Well."

- And this of course is the inscription of the doors of Plato's Academy. And this is essentially say, "Anyone ignorant of geometry shall not enter," which is a bit harsh.

- David Krakauer's head of the Santa Fe Institute, this charismatic, Oxford-trained evolutionary biologist is a true polymath with an astonishing range of interest in the sciences and beyond. These are helpful attributes to have since David is leading what is perhaps one of the most intellectually diverse and genuinely interdisciplinary institutes of scientific research on the planet. David is responsible for so many things. He's corralling all of these diverse intellects, trying to keep his finger on the pulse of what's happening in all of these various interdisciplinary studies, and also handling all the minutia that goes along with just running an institution like SFI. But while he's doing all of that, he's constantly on the hunt for new talent to bring into the milieu at SFI so that they can help inspire great thinking and do even more interesting work. So how long have you been at SFI?

- Too long.

- Can you put a number on it, can you recall?

- Just over 20 years.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- In terms of the architecture of the building, was it largely as we see it when you came?

- No, what this was, is this part of the building was a house. Yeah, so the basic premise was no corridors and the ratio of open space to individual office space inverted.

- Okay.

- And, so yeah, the so we have an archeologist with the quantum field theorist, there's no departments, there's no divisions, there's no labs. None of that nonsense. You look like you're being very thoughtful over there on the board.

- Yeah, I'm taking advantage of the office space we have.

- Yeah, did you see us coming before you started performing?

- I did, yeah. But I was also working on this one.

- You reminded me of something that you've shared with me before. These three M's: it's the mountain monastery metropolis.

- Yes.

- Could you put that into context for me?

- Yeah, I'm very interested in this idea of what makes for a creative environment that's hospitable and stimulating. So this led to this tripartite creative workflow, which is, if you want to be really original and challenge convention, you better be on your own- it's a solitary pursuit. That's the mountain. You go into the mountain, but at a certain point, you've drunk a little bit too much of your own Kool-Aid. And you need a community that is congenial and understands you to give you honest feedback. That's the monastery. Your, your Benedictines, you're distortions, you are the same order, same values, but you're still competitive. And that's, that's where you take the idea next to really cultivate it in community. And then when you are pretty certain that it's robust and correct, you take it to the metropolis where everyone is out to kill you and trade it with the world. I view SFI, right, as the monastery in the mountains.

- Your role here at SFI is one in which I imagine you're curious about all of these topics, but you're also helping to, are you adjudicating disputes?

- No.

- Are you facilitating just creating an environment for them to unfold in?

- I think a lot of people feel uncomfortable with the unknown, the uncertain, the noisy, the unresolvable. But I don't, so here, for me it's people first, I'm very interested in quality of mind and then quality of mind in community that you don't feel aggrieved or put upon when someone doesn't agree with you. And none of us here agree with anybody. I mean, you know, that's the game. Uncertainty and debate are not negative. I mean, not knowing and discussing and arguing to come to knowledge is what's desired. Right, so in that sense of embryonic idea of what the scientific method is, this sort of like harmonics. There's a resonance of approximate truth. And then it goes out of tune and you fight again, and then it comes back into tune. And so I think my role is partly to just make it a very comfortable environment for people to feel they can do that.

- That uniquely collaborative environment is part of what drew theoretical physicist Geoffrey West here decades ago.

- They said, "Look, you should come here and do whatever you like, 'cause you could do whatever you like here- that's the whole point of this place." And I thought, "Great, no administration, no bureaucracy and so on, sounded perfect."

- Geoffrey would eventually end up running the place, serving as SFI's president in the mid-2000s. He left and then came back again. And what I noticed is that there seems to be a real gravity about the place. SFI draws people back to it over and over again. So, while Geoffrey helped shape the culture at SFI, seems obvious that he benefited from it in tangible ways too. I wanna just talk about your career.

- Yeah, okay.

- And your life as a scientist, how did you arrive here?

- I've always been fascinated by the usual kind of childhood sophomoric questions about what is it all about? What's the meaning of life?

- Those sophomore questions are the questions that brought me here.

- Which never end, which never end. And I was attracted to science and I was very good at mathematics. So it was a good combination that led me to getting my doctorate in physics. I was recruited to build up a high-energy physics group at Los Alamos across the valley. But meantime, this place sort of started to evolve in the '80s by a group of very distinguished scientists. And their concern was much more that there were these big questions to do with the, so to speak, the messiness of the planet. And these are really important questions, and they cross disciplines and they felt that there should be a place that brings them all together. But I, to be honest, and I probably get killed for this, I didn't think it was serious.

- Why not?

- Well, I just felt that it was kind of a retreat. They weren't gonna do serious science, but I was completely wrong because by that time in the intervening years from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, I began to appreciate that there were equally fundamental questions that were to do with what's on this planet, maybe life.

- I'm wondering if you feel as though you have sufficient answers to those big questions now?

- The meaning of life. Why are we here, why do I care?

- So how do you sneak up on those in a way that doesn't just leave you exhausted?

- It does leave me exhausted. Well, it leaves me, well, puzzled of course. First of all, let's say, I'm gonna back off a second.

- Okay.

- Of course, one of the great puzzles which people have asked is the role of mathematics, the generality of it. And that in some very simple, trivial way, it was saying something powerful about the Universe. And that led me much later in life, in fact, much more recently to realize, in my own formulation of what the whole point of this is, what the whole point of everything is. There are only two points as far as I can tell.

- Okay.

- One is to love and to care, love meaning in its general sense. Because as far as I can tell, nothing else on this planet and nothing else in the Universe caress about anything. Those trees or the little animals running around, they don't care. But we do terrible things, and we've done terrible things. We on this planet, but we are the only part that actually caress, has morals and ethics, and I think that's extraordinary. So love, I consider that. So that's one thing, but something supersedes all that. The point of it is to understand, the whole point, this whole exercise, the whole thing of whole society and of having evolved consciousness to whatever, the whole point of all of that was for us to understand because we are the thoughts of the Universe so that the Universe can understand itself, otherwise it's meaningless. And walking through the forest when I see all these trees and I admire them, and then suddenly I realized, "My God, I know there's order, those trees don't even know it, but somehow I've been blessed with this, whatever that I know this, there's something kind of platonic about it." It was wonderful, and that was a kind of spiritual experience, I would say. And some of the work that I do has brought me to that. And I think that's why we're here.

- It's hardly surprising to hear a decorated scientist talk about understanding as one of the reasons for our being here. But to have him pair that with something as universal as love is a bit surprising. And while it's not necessarily what I expected to hear him say, it's a response that resonated with me in a really profound way. It also seems to be a real indication of just the kind of unique place the Santa Fe Institute happens to be, where researchers can go from discussing the intricacies of quantum mechanics to talking openly about these universal human values and feelings, and to connect those things with the work that they're doing here. So there are a few things I wanted to ask about- but one in particular was the iconography that I see above these doors. Can you tell me what's going on?

- Yes, we have a press, SFI press. So I thought we need to design our own book with our own SFI font.

- Okay.

- And the idea was, is a font that no one can read.

- Okay.

- And I was particularly interested in this in a bloody minded way, because people will often go to bookshelves and they'll just look at the spines. They won't even bother pulling the book out. So what I want you to do is all our books have unreadable spines, which is silly and childish. And so, you can't be in the Library of Congress if that's the case. So we had to capitulate and give in. And so, but anyway, so you'll see all of our literature and these are number systems and alphabets have our SFI font glyph.

- Okay.

- And so what these are in fact numbers, what you're looking at.

- Okay, I've come to understand that there is a method to David's mischievous, freewheeling approach to scientific research. It reflects the intellectual culture at Santa Fe Institute. It's a place that allows its researchers the freedom to think about things that they aren't expert in, in unique, interesting, out of the box ways. It encourages this kind of cross pollination in a way that other places simply don't. I think it might be essential to the work that's being done at Santa Fe Institute. See, the core of what they do here is complexity science, an inherently interdisciplinary field of study exploring the many adaptive and emergent systems that make our lives possible with the specific goal of providing a clearer picture of the world than any one research discipline could. Now that's a mouthful, so we'll try to drill down here: Think living organisms, financial markets, climate systems or even pop culture. You could, for example, have a sophisticated understanding of how human cellular biology works. But would that really give you a better understanding of why Pokemon is popular? To understand that you actually need to understand culture and economics, trade flows, the science of color, the history of video games, child psychology, even intellectual property law, and plenty of other things. That is a complex system. And what has emerged from the interaction of all those component parts is the highest grossing media franchise of all time. One of the daunting things about trying to get to the bottom of complex systems is that you need to understand extraordinarily different disciplines of scientific research. And the reality is that for people who spend all of their time studying one field, specialization, they can often have a very difficult time having conversations across fields.

- If you look at the way that we come to understand the world, there are poets, there are musicians, there are high-energy physicists, there are mathematicians. What is it about the Universe, living and non-living, that that seems to require very different forms of expertise? Now, there are people who say, "We don't, in the end it's just quantum field theory, all that stuff, it's just noise. If we really understood the Universe deeply, we'd just all be physicists." And of course, many of us consider that very muddle headed. So how do you explain the need for new ideas, new disciplines, at different scales of organization? And that's where emergence comes in. And it turns out that one of the interesting properties of the Universe and the world is that it can be understood as a set of hierarchies, each of which becomes somewhat independent of the levels below. Right, and understanding how that comes about is the 'emergence problem.' Right, and the way I often say this is that if you go to a new city and you need to get around and you go to rent a car, what you need to understand is the map of the city, not the physics of the engine. And COVID for me was the "come to Jesus moment" of reckoning with excessive specialization. Because what happened with COVID, it was a virus, right? It becomes an immunological problem that becomes an epidemiological problem, which becomes a transport problem, which becomes an economic problem, which becomes a human well-being and professions problem, which becomes a school problem, etc. So what happened during the course of the pandemic is that our sensibilities matured in understanding that what we are dealing with here was a complex system. There were other dimensions to this problem that were being neglected precisely because we were not reckoning with the interconnectedness of the system. So it's not just that it's the neglect, it's actually pathologically dangerous for the well-being of the planet that we do this kind of atomization all the time at the level of the disciplines.

- For David and his colleagues at SFI, grappling with complexity in an interdisciplinary way is a matter of urgent importance. They can't presume that people who are outsiders in a particular field don't have anything to offer when it comes to understanding some important question that they've been wrestling with, or perhaps even shed new light on an urgent concern that we're struggling to put into words. It's the Cormac McCarthy reading room. So it should be no surprise that perhaps one of the greatest wordsmiths of the English language, the late Cormac McCarthy, found a home at the Santa Fe Institute.

- 'Yeah, I don't know, people ask me why I'm here, I'm here because, Brian Arthur likes to say that the best thing about the Santa Fe Institute is they really have good "craic." Well craic is a Gaelic world. C-R-A-I-C, it means chat. And and that's what you have here. You have really good chat.

- Yeah.

- And any given day you may learn something just astonishing. But that's why I'm here. I wouldn't normally live in Santa Fe. It's a little artsy from my taste, but I tried to get them to move the institute to Texas, but they said-

- Thank God that didn't happen.

- They didn't think that was a good idea.'

- Yeah, so this: Cormac McCarthy desk, and he just colonized any available space and he liked this. It was quiet, it was in an environment of books. He would work anywhere, it's funny. I mean, one of the places that he really loved working, I'd see him is in Baskin Robbins- and he loved coffee ice cream.

- But he would take the typewriter over to Baskin Robbins?

- Take the typewriter, take his pen.

- And can you tell me what he worked on at this desk?

- "Starts with the Road", "No Country for Old Men", "Stella Maris", "The Passenger". Yeah.

- Wow.

- And right next door, which is so funny, was Sam Shepard working at the same time on his version of "Oedipus: A Particle of Dread".

- Wow.

- Wow, whereas we here, worked on "Galactus."

- Well that works too.

- Yeah, this is yours, I assume.

- This project of kind of reconciling the humanities and the sciences, what is it that inspires that specific project?

- My litmus test, my Turing test of people is that is just this restless, curious mind that doesn't second-guess the kind of ideas that are gonna make their work better. Artists, scientists, painter, composer, doesn't matter. We had to transcend the boundaries of the natural and the social sciences- that distinction couldn't hold. And so we just got rid of it day one. I remember when I was first talking to Sam Shepard, he came in, he doesn't like science, he never liked scientists. He thought scientists were hubristic. They thought they understood everything. Whereas his world is a world of enormous doubt and strife. But very quickly he found himself in a community that actually resembled his own. So there was him finding that cultural affinity. Now look at someone like Cormac McCarthy- the fuel, the coal in his fire was always intellectual, philosophical, scientific, mathematical concepts. So for him to be a writer of the kind of writer he was and became increasingly towards the end of his career, he couldn't be anywhere else.

- Just curious about obviously this extraordinary literary legacy.

- Yeah.

- But the very particular kind of legacy here at SFI.

- Of Cormack McCarthy.

- Yeah.

- That's a very raw question to ask in a way now 'cause it's so recent, but important. And there are just lots of dimensions to him in this contribution. And one was his surly iconoclasm, right. But as a model for what it means to kind of go solo, there's that- there is the work ethic all day long, I'd hear him typing on his Olivetti, the 22 typewriter, all day long. It's like, and I go to tea and I come back and he's still typing. I think, "What am I doing?" So there was this other side, which was great work requires a lot of work. And the other side- was that synthesis, that distillation of ideas into representations, in his case, aesthetic, that process of distillation and abstraction, either into aesthetics or into testable models and theories, that we have in common. And I actually consider that the hallmark of a really great mind, which is the extent to which you can own something. I mean, we don't really invent anything out of whole cloth. Right, but we synthesize if we're fortunate and we make it our own. And I think that seeing how that's done, you know, daily for over 20 years, that was really illuminating.

- Wandering the halls, it still feels like there's something of Cormac in the place. And I'm beginning to understand why he fit in so well here, contributing to the conversations, the good craic that you find in places throughout the institute, but especially here at the lunch table. So wait, is there a finite amount of energy in the Universe?

- You would know most.

- If you take the total energy of the Universe today compared to when it was very close to the Big Bang-

- Every day at noon, most of the people here at the institute gather in the atrium for lunch. And they often wind up in these heady conversations that will last until the late afternoon. It was genuinely inspiring to be able to sit down with them and leap into their conversations, to eavesdrop on them, talking openly about their uncertainty, wrestling with ideas that they were currently considering, and oftentimes discussing ideas that they perhaps only recently had set aside because they realized there was no, there, there. All the answers beget more questions. At some point you gotta hit a wall. Is there frustration when you reach a point like that? You recognize all of these nested questions?

- I don't know, you just paint the picture and you leave things out and you put things in. Yes, but the process is the fun part.

- The process, is the important thing. And you know, if we recognize that as human beings, we are just in some intermediate step in evolution. Right, I think I find it easier to come to terms with the fact that we are not going to solve all the problems. Why should we be able to solve all the problems, right? Because after all, there's nothing ultimate about us. Right, it's just.

- There's something ultimate about 'me.'

- Sorry?

- There's something ultimate about me.

- Why?

- I am.

- I see myself sometimes, you know, like as a mushroom. So you know how when you see a mushroom, it's like the fruiting body of a huge organism underground. There's like all the threads of information that led to me, which is DNA that I got from my parents, that they got from their grandparents and so on. Information that I got now from you, all the bacteria that I have in my body, all of these things came together in me. And I'm now this individual, but this is not actually the individual. It's like the mushroom, the individual is the whole organism underground.

- But that gives a sense of purpose, right?

- Sure.

- I mean, there is, there is a sense of agency, there is a sense of being part of perhaps some larger project, which is unfolding. It doesn't have to have anybody's purpose in it. But to be able to do ones bit, to add to the complexity, to add to the intertwining, to the creation of new structures, right, is a purpose.

- The average person goes about their day. They go to work, they go shop at Costco, keep their fridge full, pick up the kids and bring them home. They don't have this other aspect of the conversation that perhaps allows them to imagine themselves as this mushroom that is producing information contributing to the something.

- I don't know, I think that if you think about all the people who just at home, sit and write poems that they don't show anyone or take pictures because they want to do like art or read books and read books to their kids. Or I think like other than all the authors we know and all the artists we know and all the scientists we know, it's nothing compared to the vast Universe of the real artists and real scientists that are kind of underground. So I don't know if we're allowed to say that there's like these people that just go to work and come back and go to sleep and never think about anything. I don't think they exist or I don't know. I mean, I don't know them.

- But I've read a lot of popular science books and listened to a number of public intellectuals, and I'll often hear descriptions of the Universe who say it is purposeless.

- Obviously the Universe generated purpose, right? I mean, that's obvious, right? I mean, I have a purpose. You have a purpose. Like every time you go to eat something, you have a purpose.

- Sure.

- So the Universe obviously generated that.

- You will find a whole spectrum of people who will think more about these things or less about these things. So there's no establishment of view on these.

- If there is, if any, the only view is that these are difficult questions.

- Thank you all for indulging me. I imagine your conversation is usually a lot more enlightening than what I brought to bear, but I enjoyed it.

- Thanks for coming in, yeah. And asking your question.

- Okay. Is this the best way to get to the monoliths?

- Yeah, let's go this way.

- So we've arrived at one of the monoliths here on the property.

- Walking up to it and touching it is part of the ritual.

- Okay.

- Yeah, it has its origins in the film "2001," and this is the Arthur C. Clark Kubrick singularity technology. So yeah, so it's a blackboard. It's also over 1,000 pounds of slate. So it's an artwork and it's functional and you know, I don't know, it was a symbolic of this utopian idea that humans in conjunction, almost in a symbiotic relationship with primitive technologies could do incredible things. Slate and chalk. It's almost like a cave wall, right?

- Yeah.

- I love that idea of, "I'm writing this thing on a 2001 monolith." It just add that little edge of humility actually a kind of playfulness that, most of this is gonna be garbage, most of this is gonna be wrong. And just, that's okay. And I think if you know that, it's not about taking the pressure off, it's just giving you a better sense of what you really are going to do here.

- Among the many things David has been working on here is developing a theory of life. In 2021, he co-authored a paper on the topic with astrobiologist Chris Kempes. Now astrobiology is a curious field to even imagine existing, but it totally does. I wanted to talk about you personally, and how you developed an interest in this particular area of science, and go back as as far as you can.

- Yeah, so as a kid, I had a dual interest in dinosaurs and stars.

- It's always the dinosaurs.

- It's always the dinosaurs. And I think for me the key kind of interest for both fossils and outer space was sort of an indescribable sense of vastness. Right, so just how big time can be. You know, how distant these very radically bizarre creatures in the past could be, and then how just vast space was. And so I would go around telling people, "I wanna be an astronomer and a paleontologist." And I think in a weird way that's an astrobiologist because we use the principles of the history of life to try and look for life in space.

- What is it you all do to explain to someone? Do you work directly with Mulder and Scully or how does this work exactly?

- So we're thinking about looking for life in the Universe, but a lot of what we're trying to do is develop general theories of life that even tell us how to search for life. So part of what we can do is look at the huge diversity of life we have on our planet and use that diversity to try and extract some general principles.

- Do you give much thought to the probability that life on other planets is going to be like life here?

- So my answer to your question is sort of yes and no. I think there's a whole bunch of features of life that are absolutely contingent to our own evolutionary history here. So I don't think life elsewhere uses exactly the same molecules that we use. For example, I think DNA as a genetic code or even as a genetic molecule, is unlikely to be preserved across the Universe. But the idea of storing information is very general. And I think that's always beneficial to life to be able to store information and propagate it into the next generation. So I'd be willing to bet on genetics, but I wouldn't be willing to bet on DNA as the molecule that does genetics.

- You did something really sneaky there a moment ago, when I think biology, I think about cells and stuff. But when you were talking about life, you described it in this broader way, like the preservation of information, the transmission of knowledge. Could you talk a little bit about what life actually is, how that's different from biology and if that's a distinction that we need to be more aware of.

- Okay, we don't fully have a theory of life yet, but what it may start to look like is a bunch of traits, all of which live on a spectrum. So you could think about intelligence as a certain sort of trait that lives on a spectrum. You could think about individuality as a trait that lives on a spectrum and some combination of that equals life. And so we think that once we start to expand the perspective of life, we may realize, "Oh, there have actually been other origins of life after the initial one where most of the processes of life are present."

- I'm wondering if finding these parallels between different fields and obviously we're kind of limiting ourselves to Earth for the moment. Knowing that there are these laws that seem to govern like evolutionary biology and the development and emergence in the cosmos broadly, if that makes you more or less optimistic that there is other life, even if it is very much not necessarily like ours?

- Realizing that there are these general processes that show up over and over again should give us hope for finding life elsewhere. I mean, it should make the likelihood maybe seem higher than we would expect because you could say, "Well, there's lots of types of processes that could lead to this sort of runaway evolutionary trajectory where things get more complicated." You know, I'm sort of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I think life is everywhere.

- Yeah.

- And the rest of the week I think it's super rare.

- Are you sadder on the rest of the week or?

- Well I think it implies different things.

- Okay.

- So if life is incredibly rare, it makes us think about human culture and our own planet in a much different light, right? Because it tells us just how rare and special this planet is. And many of our challenges become about preserving life, not just preserving humanity, but it's nice to think about life everywhere in the Universe to think about it being a general process of the Universe rather than a specific process of our planet.

- At the sunset, I broke out the Unistellar telescope that I've been traveling with for a few weeks now. This my third child. Hoping that the dark skies in New Mexico would finally give us an opportunity to do some serious stargazing. This would be the first real stargazing experience.

- We can help you.

- Please.

- Okay, right now we're shooting a dark frame and calibrating.

- Okay.

- Ready to go, so you're tuned in. You want go to a galaxy or someplace?

- What do we got?

- Sombrero.

- Sombrero's really nice.

- Sombrero's beautiful.

- Okay.

- That's pretty cool for tonight.

- Wow.

- So you're talking about Santa Fe Institute? I am currently a friend of the institute.

- Okay.

- At points in time I've been artist- and naturalist-in-residence. But right now I'm a radio astronomer and the last 10 years I've been working with transient luminous events.

- And what are they exactly?

- Well, they're optical flashes of light generated by a super strong lightning stroke and they look like big kachinas in the sky. They're psychedelic and they're incredible.

- If it's okay with everyone, I'd like to invite other people to come see what you guys are seeing.

- Sure, yeah.

- Hey, Chris.

- One of the first times we went out together, he said "Do you wanna see the moon of Jupiter?" There's a good line for you.

- Chris, what is it, how would you define Nebula?

- Yeah, free-floating gas in space, yeah.

- Gas and dust, gas and dust.

- There's a perception of science as rigid and closed, but to really make any headway in trying to understand this strange and mysterious world that we all live in, you have to be open and creative.

- Wow, that's incredible.

- I'm thankful that there are places like this, monasteries of the mind where thoughtful people can come together, forge community, and explore questions about the nature of reality. While the work here is rigorous and driven by data, it'ss unconstrained by orthodoxy or the boundaries erected between disciplines, you have these people who are contributing to the community, who are primarily artists, spinning narratives about the world around them in whatever medium they work in, invested in the same big questions and bold insights. What I'm perhaps most moved by is the culture of generosity and humility that exists here. As David said to me, "It's precisely those who choose not to learn who are confident."

- Let's see where M13 is.

- At the moment, the only thing I am really confident of is that I still have a great deal to learn. And so, our journey continues. It's the end of the evening and we've done a bit of stargazing. We looked at some nebula, some galaxies, and everyone is listening to me waiting to see if I'm going to say something really profound and I'm going to disappoint them. I wasn't sure if anyone was gonna come, but then we got a nice cross-section of folks and yeah, good company is fine company. I made that up this afternoon. I think it makes sense.

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Sat, 20 Jan 2024 17:08

PROJECT KNOWLEDGE on Instagram: "Kevin Roberts, President of conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, directly told globalists at the WorldEconomicForum2024 "You are part of the problem,'' adding that it's "laughable" that they think they are protecting democracy. ðŸ' For our Alterative Content @ProjectUprising @Project.Knowledge @Project_Knowledge"

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Fri, 19 Jan 2024 17:44

Sarah Kate Ellis on Instagram: "We're expecting to see more than the 600 anti-LGBTQ bills proposed last year. Once the bills are proposed, the damage is done. It creates a false narrative that LGBTQ people are less than, we're not valuable, that we need to be governed against and we need to be policed in our own country. Now more than ever, we need business to stand up and speak out. If we're not fighting for LGBTQ people, we're going to continue to see the erosion of democracy. An excerpt from the Corporate Allyship in a Fractured World panel at the World Economic Panel #WEF24 - Dominic Arnall (he/him) CEO, Open for Business - Alex Kalomparis (he/him) SVP, Public Affairs & Executive Co-Sponsor, Pride Alliance, Gilead - Sarah Kate Ellis (she/her) President & CEO, GLAAD - Kelley Robinson (she/her) President, HRC - Marco Ziegler (he/him) Sr. Managing Director, Office of the CEO Lead, Global Pride Executive Sponsor, Accenture - MODERATOR: Ina Fried (she/her): Chief Technology Editor, Axios The panel was hosted by: Accenture, Deutsche Bank, Edelman, GLAAD, HRC, Open for Business, and the Partnership for Global LGBTIQ+ Equality (PGLE) You can watch the full panel at the link in my bio."

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Fri, 19 Jan 2024 17:40

Tesla Review 1stby Adam Curry

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Fri, 19 Jan 2024 17:14

Laxatives are not a weight-loss aid, but doctors worry some people are still not getting the message '-- especially as they look for cheaper, more accessible alternatives to weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound.

Almost 1 in 10 adolescents have used "ineffective and potentially harmful" nonprescribed weight-loss products such as laxatives, diuretics and diet pills, researchers reported in JAMA Network Open in January 2024.

The use of weight-loss products happens "at high levels in adolescents, especially girls," and can have long-term health consequences, they conclude.

The meta-analysis included 90 studies with more than 604,000 participants around the world.

Some people have been treating laxatives like a ''budget Ozempic,'' The Wall Street Journal reported in September 2023, a reference to the blockbuster Type 2 diabetes drug many Americans are using off-label for weight loss.

That may be one reason there's been a high demand for over-the-counter laxatives. Other possible reasons include an aging population, sedentary lifestyles, less healthy diets and people taking more medications, which can contribute to constipation, NBC News reported.

In September 2023, a spokesperson for the pharmaceutical company Sanofi told NBC News that the company was seeing ''unprecedented demand'' for its Dulcolax products to the point ''some retailers temporarily may not have certain Dulcolax products on their shelves.''

Using laxatives to try to lose weight is not a new phenomenon '-- doctors say people, often young women, have been doing it for a long time '-- but it may be gaining new attention on social media platforms.

Experts from the American College of Gastroenterology strongly warn against the practice.

''You should never conflate laxatives with weight loss. Laxatives are not intended for weight loss. Don't even go there,'' Dr. William Chey, chief of the division of gastroenterology and hepatology at the University of Michigan, tells TODAY.com.

''It's not a safe way to lose weight, and it's also not a long-lasting way to lose weight,'' adds Dr. Lin Chang, vice-chief of the division of digestive diseases at UCLA.

The National Eating Disorders Association calls laxative abuse '-- defined as frequent use of the products to lose weight '-- ''serious and dangerous.''

Can laxatives help with weight loss?Laxatives can cause you to lose a little weight '-- a few pounds at most '-- in the short term by causing you to pass the stool that's in your body, Chey says. Taking excessive amounts of laxatives leads to diarrhea and the loss of fluids.

''So really what you're losing is stool and water weight, which is not real weight loss,'' he notes.

''Maybe their belly will feel flatter,'' but it's temporary and the weight will come back in a few days as the person rehydrates, Chang says.

It might feel like you've had a very satisfying bowel movement, but you're not losing weight, said Dr. Roshini Raj, a gastroenterologist and clinical associate professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, in a TODAY segment that aired Jan. 17, 2024.

"The only thing you're losing is water and electrolytes, and those are both very important things," Raj warned. "Abusing laxatives in this way is potentially quite harmful and doesn't give you any benefit of true weight loss."

At standard doses, laxatives don't stop the body from absorbing of food, fat and calories. To get that effect, you'd have to take such a big dose that it induces diarrhea, which is potentially dangerous, the experts warn.

What are the dangers of using laxatives for weight loss?Taking laxatives to the point where you're having significant diarrhea can cause dehydration and throw off the electrolytes in your body, the doctors say. Symptoms include dizziness, lightheadedness, blurred vision and tingling in the feet or hands.

''It's not safe to have electrolyte disturbances, particularly for people who have heart disease, for example,'' Chang says. ''That's (from) more excessive use. But I know people will do that '-- they'll do excessive use of things to lose weight.''

A person who takes so many laxatives that they're no longer absorbing nutrients could potentially become malnourished, Chey says. An early sign of that would be a deficiency in fat-soluble vitamins such as A, D and K.

''When you induce a lot of diarrhea, you basically just flush those through and you don't give the body a chance to absorb them,'' he notes.

There's also the potential of laxative dependency with some products. People can build a tolerance and have to keep raising the dose. Chang has had patients who had to take 17 or 30 tablets to have a bowel movement.

She's also observed that people who take laxatives because they want to lose weight can develop constipation symptoms.

Will laxatives help with belly fat?No, laxatives will not help with belly fat, Chang says.

What are the best natural laxatives?Eating two kiwifruits a day improves constipation and abdominal comfort, a study published in The American Journal of Gastroenterology 2023 found.

Other fruits, such as peaches, plums, cherries and apples, can have a laxative effect, Chey noted. Chang also advised eating five prunes a day.

Bottom line: Fiber in the diet, exercise and hydration are important for regularity.

But you don't have to have a bowel movement every day. Normal bowel frequency is anywhere between three times per week and three times per day, both experts say.

When is it appropriate to take a laxative?Take it if you have constipation, which can mean different things to different people, Chang says. A simple definition is having fewer than three bowel movements per week or having difficulty evacuating stool, she notes.

If adding fiber to your diet, exercise and hydration don't relieve constipation, try osmotic laxatives, such as MiraLax, she advises. They cause water to be retained with the stool, softening it so it's easier to pass.

Stimulant laxatives, another type, stimulate the smooth muscle of the bowel to contract, but they often have more side effects, Chang notes.

Use a laxative just on occasion when you need it.

''Using the laxative now and again, it's totally fine,'' Chey says. ''If you start to notice that you're persistently being constipated and having to use laxatives on a regular basis, it's time to see your doctor.''

A. Pawlowski A. Pawlowski is a TODAY health reporter focusing on health news and features. Previously, she was a writer, producer and editor at CNN.

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Fri, 19 Jan 2024 16:39

A New York midwife has been fined $300,000 for giving homeopathic pellets to 1,500 children instead of their required vaccinations for diseases like hepatitis, measles and polio.

The penalty, announced by the state's Department of Health on Wednesday, came after an investigation found that Jeanette Breen had entered nearly 12,500 false vaccine records into New York's Immunization Information System since 2019.

It's the first settlement of its kind for a scheme to create false immunization records, the department said.

The pellets Breen administered were taken orally as a series and supplied by an out-of-state homeopath, the department said in a release. They are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as an immunizing agent.

Erin Clary, a public information officer with New York's health department, said the nature of the scheme suggests that the affected children's parents or guardians "sought out and paid Breen related to their children's immunizations and immunization records," but that the parents or guardians were not the subject of the investigation.

Breen told NBC News that she had no comment. Her attorney David Ekew wrote in an email that when Breen was informed of the investigation, she "fully cooperated."

"She paid the fine, entered into the stipulation of settlement and intends to fully comply with the requirements of the agreement. From her perspective, this matter is over, done with, and closed and she is now moving on with her life," Ekew said.

The children whose vaccine records were falsified ranged in age from around 4 to 18 and attended 300 different schools, mostly in Long Island where Breen practiced. Their immunization records have been voided, so they will have to receive all the required vaccinations before returning to the classroom.

None of the fake records were for Covid vaccines. Rather, the list included tetanus, hepatitis B, chickenpox and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) shot, among others.

By law, New York requires health care providers to submit accurate vaccination information to its immunization system. In 2019, the state eliminated religious and other nonmedical exemptions to vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, following a series of major measles outbreaks that sickened more than 1,100 people. Breen's falsification scheme appears to have started several months after New York's rule changed.

Currently, a measles outbreak in Philadelphia has led nine people to be diagnosed. None had immunity, meaning they either never got vaccinated or had not contracted measles before.

Dr. Arthur Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, said he had heard of Breen before the penalty was announced because her name was mentioned in Facebook groups where users discussed how to dodge vaccination requirements.

"I saw people saying, 'If you want to avoid a vaccination but still be able to send your kids to school, go here,'" Caplan said. "She put so many people at risk for communicable diseases by lying."

Breen has paid $150,000 of her fine. The rest was suspended, contingent on her compliance with state laws and the terms of the agreement, which prohibits her from accessing the New York State Immunization Information System and from administering any vaccine that would be reported there.

But Caplan said the state should go further.

''She has been found guilty and fined a huge amount for lying and promoting quackery so her license should go,'' he said. ''She's dishonest and putting innocent people at risk.''

Eskew did not comment on questions about whether Breen should lose her license.

The New York State Education Department, which is responsible for prosecuting misconduct among medical professionals '-- including the loss of a license '-- said it could not comment on Breen's case for confidentiality reasons.

The New York State Association of Licensed Midwives denounced the vaccine fraud in a statement, saying it opposes "any actions that harm the public and stands firm against outliers in our profession who operate outside clinical and moral standards."

"It is the hope that the recent news stories concerning one NYS midwife will not detract from the vital work that over a thousand NYS midwives are doing every day," it added.

Although Breen's penalty is a first in New York, a California doctor was arrested in 2021 for falsifying Covid vaccination records after administering similar homeopathic pellets.

Natalie Kainz Natalie Kainz is a news associate for NBC News.

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Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:15

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