The Democrat-media complex has been hammering Texas for its recent
spike in Coronavirus cases, blaming Republican Governor Abbott for
reopening too early.
Radical Marxist Harris County judge Lina Hidalgo slammed Abbott
during a presser on Friday and said, “The harsh truth is that our
current infection rate is on pace to overwhelm our hospitals in the very
near future. We opened too quickly.”
But what’s really going on in Texas?
A senior executive at a Texas ER chain contacted former NY Times reporter Alex Berenson and revealed the real reason for the spike in Coronavirus ‘cases.’
Record Breaking Number Of Coronavirus Cases In U.S. As States Reopen
JB Neiman, a Managing Partner and General Counsel of a Texas-based
company that owns 13 free-standing clinics in the state of Texas said he
‘wants people to hear his story as opposed to the mainstream media.’
Neiman explained that in June, his clinics tested over 2,231 patients
and saw a COVID-19 positive test rate close to 20% (was 4-6% positive
in May).
What are the COVID-19 positive patients experiencing?
Here’s the breakdown:
Do You Think The Media Is Overstating The Danger Of COVID?
The executive pointed out that the “vast majority of the cases are mild to very mild symptoms.”
More testing kits means they are able to test a broader group of patients.
Clinically, they’ve had “very few hospital transfers because of COVID.”
Vast majority of patients are better within 2-3 days and would be
described as “having a cold (a mild one at that) or symptoms related to
allergies.
Most patients are given a steroid shot and antibiotics and by the
time they have follow-up calls, the patients are no longer experiencing
any symptoms.
What is driving people to the ER?
The executive breaks that down:
Roughly half have been told by their employer to get a test — if
they have a sneeze or a cough, their employer tells them to go home and
get tested.
The other half just want to know if they have COVID (some have mild symptoms and some have no symptoms).
What else is going on in the ICU?
Here’s the breakdown:
The hospital ICUs are filled with really sick people with NON-COVID
issues. They didn’t come in earlier because they were scared and now
they are SUPER SICK.
From multiple sources at different hospitals: They have plenty of capacity and no shortage of acute care beds.
All patients are tested for COVID: “You have some percentage of
patients listed as COVID patients who are non COVID symptomatic and that
the hospitalization rate is somewhat driven by hospitals taking in
their normal patients with other medical issues.”
Discharge planners are being pressured to put COVID as
primary diagnosis because it pays significantly better, according to JB
Neiman.
JB Neiman concluded: “What we are seeing at our facilities is more of
a positive story…You have more people who are testing positive with
minimal symptoms. This means the fatality rate is less that commonly
reported.”
Wondering what’s really happening in Texas?
Here’s the email, from a senior executive at a Texas ER chain that sees
thousands of patients a month. He went on the record – a brave move. I’m
going to let him speak for himself. (Two tweets of screenshots. Worth
reading to the end.) pic.twitter.com/4xuBdTIFIc
The media completely ignores the fact that Coronavirus deaths have
dropped significantly which is why they are concentrating on the new
‘cases.’
Sunday coronavirus positivity: deaths hit a new
low, down to 273. Lowest coronavirus deaths since March 25th per linked
data, down nearly 10% from last Sunday. https://t.co/Mb4uw9QkyR
The
following is the full text of an opinion piece written by climate
activist and energy expert Michael Shellenberger which was originally
published by Forbes but pulled a few hours later. Shellenberger, a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and Green Book Award Winner, told
The Daily Wire in a statement hours after Forbes deactivated the piece,
“I am grateful that Forbes has been so committed to publishing a range
of viewpoints, including ones that challenge the conventional wisdom,
and was thus disappointed my editors removed my piece from the web site.
I believe Forbes is an important outlet for broadening environmental
journalism beyond the overwhelmingly alarmist approach taken by most
reporters, and look forward to contributing heterodoxical pieces on
energy and the environment in the future.”
On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to
formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30
years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world.
It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.
I may seem
like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate
activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.
But as an
energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony,
and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to
serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an
obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled
the public.
Here are some facts few people know:
Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declinedby an area nearly as large as Alaska
The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
Carbon emissions have been declining in rich nations including Britain, Germany and France since the mid-seventies
Adapting to life below sea level made the Netherlands rich not poor
We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture
I
know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many
people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.
In
reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific
studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food
and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the
International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other
leading scientific bodies.
Some people will, when they read this
imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I
lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist
revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In
my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small
farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions
at Nike factories in Asia.
I became an environmentalist at 16 when
I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save
the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California.
In
my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the
Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few
years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil
fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions.
Until last year, I
mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s
because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any
other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an
“existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”
But
mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation
campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few
times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who
misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by
and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the
public.
I even stood by as people in the White House and many in
the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an
outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a
lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.
But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”
The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.”
Mainstream
journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the
world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.
As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.
Whether
or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may
be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about
the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed
and thus, understandably, frightened.
I thus decided I had to
speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I
needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.
And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never
covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species
extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.
Some highlights from the book:
Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress
The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
The
most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is
moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium
100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50%
We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4%
Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did
“Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300% more emissions
Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
The
colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a
backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants
Why were we all so misled?
In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never
I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations.
Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from
fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced
the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty
“sustainable.” And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern
civilization are behind much of the alarmism
Once you realize just
how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly
unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped.
Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it.
The
news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate
change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop.
The
ideology behind environmental alarmsim — Malthusianism — has been
repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.
But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.
The
coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis”
into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, Covid-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.
Scientific
institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility
through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence
and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform.
Facts
still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and
independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at
legacy publications.
Nations are reorienting toward the national
interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good
for nuclear and bad for renewables.
The evidence is overwhelming
that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than
the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.
And
the invitations I received from IPCC and Congress late last year, after
I published a series of criticisms of climate alarmism, are signs of a
growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the
environment.
Another sign is the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists, and environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
“This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,”
says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.
“We
environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being
ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the
former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often
we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love:’ a
challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets.
Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always
well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the
‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but
an attainable, future.”
That is all I that I had hoped for in
writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree that it’s
perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist,
progressive, and climate activist felt the need to speak out against the
alarmism.
I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.
The United Nations (U.N.) announced Sunday
the electric car boom will result in a number of devastating ecological
side effects for the planet.
While the shift to electric cars reflects ongoing efforts to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, the UN warns
that the raw materials used to produce electric car batteries are
highly concentrated in a small number of countries and their extraction
and refinement pose a serious threat to the environment.
The U.N. trade body, UNCTAD, has issued a new report
breaking down some of the unintended negative consequences of the
shift, which include ecological degradation as well as human rights
abuses.
The report notes that metals such as cobalt, lithium, manganese,
copper, and minerals like graphite “play a significant role in
energy-related technologies such as rechargeable batteries that are used
in a variety of applications ranging from electronics to electric
vehicles as well as in renewable energies such as nuclear, wind, and
solar power.”
Several of these raw materials are quite rare and have few or no
substitutes and they come from specific areas of the globe. More than
half the world’s supply of lithium, for example, a key component of
lithium-ion batteries, comes from beneath the salt flats in the Andean
region of Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina.
The production of these raw materials “is often associated with
undesirable environmental footprints, poor human rights and worker
protection,” the report asserts.
In Chile, for instance, “lithium mining uses nearly 65% of the water
in the country’s Salar de Atamaca region, one of the driest desert areas
in the world, to pump out brines from drilled wells,” the U.N. notes,
because nearly 2 million liters of water are needed to produce a ton of
lithium.
This has “contributed to environment degradation, landscape damage
and soil contamination, groundwater depletion and pollution,” the U.N.
states.
In its report, UNCTAD estimates that some 23 million electric cars
will be sold over the coming decade and as a result the market for
rechargeable car batteries is forecast to rise by over 700 percent in just four years, from its current level of $7 billion to $58 billion by 2024.
Along with lithium, another key component of electric car batteries
is cobalt, and two-thirds of all cobalt production happens in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), The U.N. observes.
The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports that about 20 percent of
cobalt supplied from the DRC comes from artisanal mines, “where human
rights abuses have been reported, and up to 40,000 children work in
extremely dangerous conditions in the mines for meagre income.”
The U.N. also fears that cobalt-copper mines in DRC may contain
sulphur minerals that contribute to Acid mine drainage (AMD), a
phenomenon that causes pollution or contamination of surface water,
thereby increasing the toxicity of rivers and drinking water.
“The environmental impacts of graphite mining are very similar to those associated with cobalt mining,” the report adds.
Last December, a prominent professor at the Copenhagen Business School said that attempts to rein in global warming by driving electric cars were nothing other than “pointless virtue signaling.”
“It is absurd for middle-class citizens in advanced economies to tell
themselves that eating less steak or commuting in a Toyota TM-0.18%
Prius will rein in rising temperatures,” stated Bjørn Lomborg, the
director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist.
“Although I am a vegetarian and don’t own a car, I believe we need to
be honest about what such choices can achieve,” Lomborg declared.
Although electric cars are “branded as environmentally friendly,” the
fact is that “generating the electricity they require almost always
involves burning fossil fuels,” he stated.
“Moreover, producing energy-intensive batteries for these cars
invariably generates significant CO2 emissions,” he wrote, so that
electric cars have a huge carbon deficit when they hit the road, and
“will start saving emissions only after being driven 60,000 kilometers.”
Even if the percentage of electric cars in the world were to rise to
15 times their present numbers, electric cars would only reduce global
CO2 emissions by 1 percent, he declared, citing a report from the
International Energy Agency (IEA).
For his part, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said that in 2018,
electric cars saved 40 million tons of CO2 worldwide, sufficient to
reduce global temperatures by a mere 0.000018°C — or a little more than a
hundred-thousandth of a degree Celsius — by the end of the century.
“If you think you can save the climate with electric cars, you’re completely wrong,” Birol said.
Charles Murray's Coming Apart documents
the growing alienation among adults with differing levels of formal
education. This lack of connectedness has grown in tandem with government expansion to generate a de facto ruling class that is profoundly out of touch with small-town America. In this interview, Murray explains how some Americans are chafing under this recent development:
[A]gain
and again you've had people who were experts who were advocating and
passing policies that ordinary people looked at and said, "This is
absolutely nuts." ... Another problem with the experts — and I think
that this gets to a lot of the visceral anger that people have — is that
the experts have been recommending policies for other people for which
they do not have to bear the consequences.
People in the managerial class are unaware of these consequences because they rely on bogus studies legitimized
by a clerisy of media columnists and college professors who never met a
big government program they did not like. This passage from "America's Ruling Class" by Angelo Codevilla sums up the nature of this groupthink:
Today's
ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational
system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably
uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a
social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular
sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and
saints.
According
to Codevilla, these values are shared by establishment politicians from
both parties, but only the modern Democrat Party openly embraces
them. This is why today's mainstream Democrats are backed by the most
powerful corporate forces in
post-industrial society. The unholy alliance between big government
and big business became a permanent fixture of the political landscape
during the New Deal,
but thanks to the left's special relationship with the media and higher
education, few Democrat voters are aware of this development. How
do we shed light on the party of the ruling class? Where can we
reliably compare and contrast the effects of Democrat and Republican
policies on common Americans? Since Washington, D.C. is a moral swamp
where Deep State bureaucrats
use all means at their disposal to destroy all adversaries to the
ruling class, more can be learned at the state level. Small
businesses are in a sense the "canary in the coal mine" because they
lack the resources and social connections to reasonably navigate
burdensome regulations. The owners of these businesses also tend to
have an independent streak that does not sit well with many of the
credentialed elites who regulate them. The tight correlation between
political affiliation and small business friendliness presented in Table
1 and Graphs 1 and 2 torches any reasoned case for Democrats
representing ordinary Americans. It is no paradox that the same political party that receives nearly all donations from big labor unions also drove away blue-collar jobs (Table 2). This job loss had a bigger impact on minorities who disproportionately relied on them (Tables 3 and 4). This is why black Americans are fleeing in droves from the Northeast and West coasts and settling in Southern states with right to work legislation. In the NYT opinion piece "The
Pathway to Prosperity is Blue," college professors Jacob Hacker and
Paul Pierson make a case for the blue state model by citing data on
education, standard of living, and life expectancy. It is almost common
knowledge that the northeast states have the highest percentages of
adults with college degrees (Table 5). This region's world-class
universities and cultural amenities play a major role in their snob
appeal, but the oppressive environment for small business, and the
ongoing losses of working-class residents with concurrent gains in more affluent professionals
demonstrates that these blue states have been gentrifying at the
expense of very people Democrats claim to care about the most. Hacker
and Pierson's shallow analysis reminds us why America's most prestigious
universities are a laughingstock to people living in the real world. Root columnist Michael Harriot compared racial disparities between
North and South and concluded that black-white disparities for
employment, education, criminal justice, and political participation are
on average smaller in the South. Harriot speculated that the racial
disparities in the North are a result of northerners who "politely tuck
their racism in their pockets" while discriminating in their hiring
decisions and school district choices. Though I am tempted to concur
with Mr. Harriot, I do not blame these disparities on hidden racism. I
think the main causes of racial inequality in blue states are pride and
privilege — not pride or privilege based on race, but the
self-congratulatory pride that comes with voting for the party that pays
more lip service to minorities and the privilege of being sheltered
from the adverse consequences of the policies you support. Both of
these reinforce a smug complacency that discourages these
holier-than-thou progressives from exploring facts outside their echo
chamber. Hacker
and Pierson insist that the key drivers of growth are not low taxes or
lax regulations, but "science, education, and innovation." In other
words, the benighted plebs who do not contribute this highbrow economy
need to put up and shut up while more qualified experts run their lives
and their livelihoods. This elitism might explain why eight of the
states highlighted in blue were ranked among the worst for widening pay disparities. America
is not slouching toward Gomorrah. It is on a trajectory to Babel, a
power-hungry metropolis founded upon the utopian delusion that human
expertise could bring Heaven to Earth. If you look to Washington as a
panacea for the ills of society, you may get your way, because despotism
is the path of least resistance. Enjoy
your new overlords. They may not grant your every wish, but they will
stop those Bible-clinging "deplorables" from triggering your delicate
sensibilities. Antonio
Chaves teaches biology at a local community college. His interest in
economic and social issues stems from his experience teaching environmental science. His older articles with graphs and images are available here. Table 1:Political affiliation and small business friendliness Graph 1: Graph 2: Graph 1, Graph 2, and Table 1: Democratic advantage scored by Gallup in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. Small business friendliness scored by Thumbtack.
This ranking excludes Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Mississippi,
Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Vermont
because they were scored by Thumbtack less than three times from 2012
to 2016. All the data compiled for Graph 2 is available here. * GPA scores are based on the following numerical equivalents: A = 4, B = 3, C = 2, D = 1, F = 0, A+ = 4.3, A- = 3.7, etc. ** Based on a one-tailed T-test the difference is significant at P = 0.00001.
Table 2:Political affiliation and share of blue-collar jobs Table 2: Democratic advantage scored by Gallup in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. Share of non-agricultural blue-collar jobs compiled by Blue-Collar Jobs Tracker.
This ranking excludes Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Mississippi,
Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Vermont
because they were scored by Thumbtack less than three times from 2012
to 2016. * Based on a one-tailed T-test the difference is significant at P = 0.00001. Table 3:Political affiliation and unemployment by race Table 3: Democratic advantage scored by Gallup in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. Unemployment by race compiled by 24/7 Wall Street.
This ranking excludes Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Mississippi,
Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Vermont
because they were scored by Thumbtack less than three times from 2012
to 2016. * To
provide more realistic data on black communities, states where
African-Americans make up less than 5% of the state population are
excluded from the average. ** Based on a one-tailed T-test the difference is significant at P = 0.005. *** Based on a one-tailed T-test the difference is significant at P = 0.02 Table 4:Business friendliness and unemployment gap between white and black Table 4: Small business friendliness scored by Thumbtack. Unemployment by race compiled by 24/7 Wall Street. The
states highlighted in blue are among the ten most progressive. The
states highlighted in red are among the ten most conservative. This
ranking excludes Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Mississippi, Montana,
North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Vermont because
they were scored by Thumbtack less than three times from 2012 to 2016. * Based on a one-tailed T-test the difference is significant at P = 0.005. Table 5:Political affiliation and percent of adults with college degrees Table 5: adults with college degrees compiled by the US Census. Democratic advantage scored by Gallup in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016.
This ranking excludes Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Mississippi,
Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Vermont
because they were scored by Thumbtack less than three times from 2012
to 2016. * Based on a one-tailed T-test the difference is significant at P = 0.00002.
The
other day, the New York Times was subtly and not so subtly promoting
the claim that President Trump was standing callously by and coddling
Russia's Vladimir Putin even as Putin was busily offering the Taliban
bounties for the bodies of dead U.S. servicemen. It was the old "Trump
is a Russian agent" canard whipped out in a new form.
The
intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White
House's National Security Council discussed the problem at an
interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials
developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a
diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an
escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the
White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.
Heartless
bastard, allowing Russia to pick off our men while he kaffeeklatsched
with Putin and invited him to the G-7. Anything for his Russian master. President
Trump denied it. His acting director of National Intelligence at the
time, Richard Grenell, denied it vehemently. Grenell's disavowal of the
leak of such "partial intelligence" was something I noted here. And for what it's worth, even the Russians denied it. But
the Times pressed on with the claim and even did some additional
reporting to claim that it had proof. The Guardian helped the Times
along with a follow-up story beginning with "Outrage Mounts about..." Fortunately, there was CBS's Catherine Herridge, who batted back at the press at its own game — and found some pretty exculpatory backing for the Trump administration's statements: Bzzt. False issue. Fake news. Egg all over the Times' face. Herridge
is an experienced reporter and the best in the business. The story she
filed came in response to some extremely shoddy journalism, promoting
the hoary claim that President Trump was a Russian agent, something the
Times got assorted awards for promoting, including the Pulitzer. It's
almost as if it was their own now-discredited previous reporting they
were promoting, complete with Deep State claims. Report
phony stuff up just in time for elections, promote fake claims that are
all but impossible to check under cover of intelligence, whip up fake
feeding frenzy of scandal with your buddies, see how it works? Another top reporter, Lara Logan, has noted some pretty atrocious news reporting standards: That
leaves the Times to beat the dead horse of "what the president knew"
even as the preponderance of evidence points to his not knowing at
all. If the Times sticks to this, that's propaganda, a false picture in
the name of promoting a political motive. And
it's particularly despicable when it's done with politicized
intelligence. Imagine if the scenario were true: President Trump knew
and set up a savage retaliation for Putin he didn't want anyone to know
about? That's the problem with "partial" intelligence, as Grenell
noted. It wasn't true, and now senior officials are playing the same
game as the Times' original sources. What a sorry picture this is when
all they had to do was report the news truthfully, in service of no
"narrative."
Liberal Media Sure Are Obsessed With Villifying #Parler As Alternative To Twitter
Posted by Fuzzy SlippersSaturday, June 27, 2020 at 7:30pm
“A whopping 500,000 users
[including Legal Insurrection] signed up for social-media platform
Parler after Twitter shut down two conservative accounts this week”
There have been many attempts to create a Twitter alternative, but in the wake of Twitter’s decision to censor a tweet by President Trump and its permanent bans on prominent right-leaning accounts like that of meme master CarpeDonktum, Parler is attracting users at a startling rate.
So startling is the growth of Parler, a free speech-friendly Twitter
alternative, that the leftstream and #NeverTrump media are attempting to
vilify it as the refuge of racists and white supremacists and fascists.
Oh my!
The headlines are hilarious:
Newsweek: “Who Owns Parler? Social Media Platform Offers Safe Space for the Far Right”
The Bulwark:
“The Far Right Establishes Autonomous Zone Safe Space App Parler: ‘Free
Speech!’ cry the snowflakes seeking a place to vent about their
triggered feelings.”
Hollywood Reporter: “‘I’m Done’: Right-Wing Personalities Ditching Twitter for Parler Over Claims of Censorship”
Fast Company: “I joined Parler, the right-wing echo chamber’s new favorite alt-Twitter”
Forbes: “As Twitter Labels Trump Tweets, Some Republicans Flock To New Social Media Site”
Yahoo News: “Parler, a right-wing social media site, lures conservatives, but Trump sticks with Twitter — so far”
A whopping 500,000 users signed up for social-media
platform Parler after Twitter shut down two conservative accounts this
week, according to user metrics obtained by Mediaite.
The surge brings the two-year-old platform’s total number of users to
1.5 million, according to data provided by the company, an increase of
50 percent. The company, co-founded in 2018 by John Matze and Jared
Thomson, bills itself as a “non-biased free speech” alternative to
Twitter that applies broadcast standards to content its users publish —
meaning it doesn’t censor political speech, but does prohibit certain
content, such as hardcore pornography, that Twitter permits.
The development comes after Twitter on Tuesday banned Carpe Donktum, a
well-known meme creator whose content is often shared by President
Donald Trump, and locked an account belonging to National Pulse
editor Raheem Kassam. Those actions sparked outcry from conservatives
who encouraged users to join Parler, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who
on Thursday said he had joined the platform because it “gets what free
speech is all about.”
The goal of Big Tech was to silence or mute conservative voices via shadow banning
and removing the accounts of those who didn’t have a means of or a
platform for fighting back. They want us tweeting into the abyss,
thinking we are reaching people while they have ensured that we are not.
They want to silence us, not move us to a platform where we can
organize, coordinate, and share information. That, I think, is their
worst nightmare writ large, and that is precisely why the leftstream and
#NeverTrump media are spitting venom at Parler. Sen. Ted Cruz sums it up best:
Despite their hyperbolic hysteria, Parler is home to a huge number of conservatives, not just the banned and KKK. CNBC reports:
Jim Jordan, Elise Stefanik and Nikki Haley all have something in common, other than a strong affection towards President Trump.
The three Republican politicians joined social media app Parler this
week, adding their profiles to a site that’s emerged as the new digital
stomping ground for anti-Twitter conservatives. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas
arrived earlier this month and Rep. Devin Nunes of California started in
February, while Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has been a member since
2018, the year the app launched.
. . . . The catalyst for the latest growth surge was a story from The
Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, which said that the Trump
administration was looking for alternatives to Facebook and Twitter over
concern that more content is going to be blocked as the election
campaign heats up. The Journal named Parler as a possible alternative.
Two days later, Parler was the top-ranked iPhone app in the news
category, ahead of Twitter and Reddit, and 24th overall, just behind
Venmo and WhatsApp, according to App Annie. User growth surged to 1.5
million from 1 million over the course of about a week, said John Matze,
Parler’s 27-year-old founder and CEO.
Indeed, there are a large number of conservative voices on Parler that we all know and love, including Legal Insurrection!
And yours truly:
Our very own Katya and Stacey are there, too!
While the site is currently attracting a lot of conservatives and there’s a report
that the Parler CEO is hoping more lefties join, I’ve been there only
two days and have already received an awesome parlay from a leftie
troll:
Don’t you just love every. single. word? From the condescending
“darling” right through to the leftie who loves feels over facts
admonishing me not to “let the facts get in your way.” Leftie trolls
are pure giggle. I can’t get enough of them, and I suspect that we will
be seeing a lot more of them as the right moves to Parler. They won’t
be able to help themselves. If President Trump makes the plunge
. . . forget about it. Twitter is toast. Every single leftie from the
Democrat media stenographers to every Democrat and leftie loon will
have to follow. Or be left behind in their own leftie safe space, a
left-wing echo chamber the right abandoned them to due to their own
hubris in silencing our voices. Seems fitting somehow, doesn’t it?
[FS edit to subheading: moved notice of LI joining Parler for clarity]
During
the last two years of the Obama administration, some unusual purchases
were made. Large quantities of ammunition were purchased, as were
firearms, mostly for somewhat obscure agencies or agencies with no real
need for such weaponry. Estimates are that over 1 billion rounds of
ammunition were ordered, which resulted in making ammunition scarce for
the normal civilian market. Also significant was Obama's troublesome statement made during his campaign, as follows
We
cannot continue to rely only on our military ... we've got to have a
civilian security force just as powerful, just as strong, just as
well-funded. We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order
to achieve the national security objectives we've set.
What
national security objectives? Surely, he is not talking about arming
the civilian population, as he wants to disarm us. Why would he want
such a "civilian security force"? Could it be that he realized he
couldn't use the U.S. military to enforce his social dysfunction for
multiple reasons? One is the Posse Comitatus laws, and another was the
simple fact that the military likely would refuse his orders. Looking
below, we can see he was arming agencies under his Executive Branch control. The
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service spent $4.77 million
purchasing shotguns, 7.62mm caliber rifles, night-vision goggles,
propane cannons, liquid explosives, pyro supplies, buckshot, LP gas
cannons, drones, remote-control helicopters, thermal cameras, military
waterproof thermal infrared scopes and more. The
SBA loaded up their arsenals with Glock pistols. The Fish folks spent
approximately $410,000 on their Glocks and rifles and modified their
Glocks with silencers. The
Department of Health and Human Services was outfitted with
sophisticated weaponry normally carried by Special Forces, stored at an
undisclosed location. Others include:
Department of Energy: approximately $50,000 worth of M-16 fully automatic rifles
General Services Administration: approximately $16,000 in shotguns and Glocks
Bureau of Reclamations: approximately $697,000 for firearms and ammunition
EPA: almost $70,000 for ammunition
Smithsonian: approximately $42,500 for ammunition
Social Security: approximately $61,000 for ammunition
$426,268
on hollow-point bullets, including orders from the Forest Service,
National Park Service, Office of Inspector General, Bureau of Fiscal
Service, as well as Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshals, and
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The latter three, sure, but
the Forest Service, National Park Service, and Inspector General's
Office?
Bureau of Engraving and printing: approximately $100,000 on firearms
U.S. Mint: almost $180,000 for ammunition
Bureau of Fiscal Services: approximately $672,000 on ammunition and firearms
Department of Agriculture: $1.1 million for weapons and ammunition
We
are now seeing anarchist groups like Antifa, BLM, and others carrying
nice weaponry. Just look at a recent photo of a CHAZ resident with his
tricked-out AR-15 or M-16. There are now several
left-wing gun clubs such as the Socialist Rifle Association, Huey P.
Newton Gun Club, Trigger Warning Queer & Trans Gun Club, and the
John Brown Gun Club, with the last one often asked to provide security
around the Seattle area for protests and rallies. We now know that Obama and Holder set up selling guns to the Mexican drug cartels in what is known as Fast and Furious. Perhaps
it is high time that the president orders a detailed inventory and
audit of these weapons and ammunition. If anything is missing, where is
it? Also, has any of these weapons been used in any known crimes? Most
have probably forgotten about Obama's aforementioned statement and his
subsequent unusual purchases for odd agencies, but maybe we had better
wake up and take a look around before it is too late.
The Black Lives Matter organization has called
for dismantling the nuclear family, something that likely extends beyond
the goals of many supporters. Pictured: A resident of Tulsa, Oklahoma,
sports a "Black Lives Matter" mask Friday during Juneteenth celebrations
in Tulsa's Greenwood district, site of a massacre of black residents in
1921.
(Photo: Seth Herald/AFP/Getty Images)
Black Lives Matter as a movement, or at least a slogan, recently has attracted broad support in favor of racial equality and opposition to police brutality.
Two-thirds of Americans say they either strongly or somewhat support the Black Lives Matter movement, according to a Pew Research poll.
However, at least one self-described “trained Marxist” founded the organization behind the movement,
and that organization also has called for dismantling the nuclear
family—something that likely extends beyond the goals of many
supporters.
“This hardcore cadre, they are parasitic on genuine outrage and
genuine injustice,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research
Center, an investigative think tank, told The Daily Signal in a phone
interview.
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“I don’t know anyone on the planet who doesn’t think the George Floyd
death was an injustice,” Walter said. “That’s why it was against the
law. That’s why they [the four Minneapolis police officers involved]
are being prosecuted. Most of the people out protesting are going to be
moved by the outrage of the moment. The problem is that you have this
cadre.”
Walter was referring primarily to the three founders of Black Lives
Matter as well as a board member with Thousand Currents, the leading
funder of the group.
Here are four things to know about the founders and organization behind Black Lives Matter.
1. Are BLM Leaders ‘Trained Marxists?’
The Black Lives Matter movement began
after the 2013 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, 17, in Sanford,
Florida, and picked up after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown,
18, in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri.
The group’s co-founders are Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza, all of them black women.
“The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame,” Khan-Cullors said in a 2015 interview with Real News Network. “Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.”
Khan-Cullors continued:
We are super-versed on, sort of,
ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is
build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk. We
don’t necessarily want to be the vanguard of this movement. I think
we’ve tried to put out a political frame that’s about centering who we
think are the most vulnerable amongst the black community, to really
fight for all of our lives.
Khan-Cullors, who serves as strategic adviser to the Black Lives
Matter Global Network Foundation, is an artist and organizer from Los
Angeles, according to the group’s website.
Khan-Cullors, 36, is also the founder of Dignity and Power Now, a
group that advocates for incarcerated people and their families. A
Fulbright scholar, she is the New York Times best-selling author of the
book “When They Call You a Terrorist.”
Garza, an organizer in Oakland, California, is also special projects
director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, an advocacy group
for domestic workers.
Garza, 39, was named to The Root’s 2016 list of 100 African American
achievers and influencers and is the recipient of the 2016 Glamour Women
of the Year Award and the 2016 Marie Claire New Guard Award. She was
recognized as a Community Change Agent at the BET’s 2016 Black Girls
Rock Awards.
While two founders of Black Lives Matter are on the West Coast,
Tometi works out of New York. The group’s website describes her as a
“Nigerian-American writer, strategist, and community organizer” and a
“transnational feminist.”
Tometi, 35, created online platforms and social media strategy during the early days of the movement.
She also is executive director of the Black Alliance for Just
Immigration and, according to the website, is featured at the National
Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
2. What’s the Official Organization?
More than one Black Lives Matter appears to exist, but the one
primary associated with its best-known founders and that receives the
largest level of donations is the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.
According to the group’s website, the organization has a national network of about 40 chapters.
The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation didn’t respond
directly to questions from The Daily Signal. After two days of
inquiries, spokesman Jordan Jackson said in an email that the
organization was “inundated” with media requests.
“Should someone be available to fulfill this request,” Jackson wrote, “I will circle back here as soon as possible.”
In 2016, the left-leaning grantmaker Thousand Currents, a 501(c)(3)
nonprofit group, became the financial sponsor of the Black Lives Matter
Global Network Foundation.
As a result, the foundation doesn’t have its own tax-exempt status and is instead a project of Thousand Currents that doesn’t yet have to file what are called 990 forms with the Internal Revenue Service.
Thousand Currents reported $3.35 million
in donations earmarked for the BLM Global Network Foundation in 2019,
according to Capital Research Center, a watchdog group for nonprofits.
Pledges of donations skyrocketed after the May 25 death of Floyd, a
handcuffed black man, in police custody in Minneapolis. Those donors
include major corporations.
“Thousand Currents has been a fiscal sponsor of BLM since 2016, and
serves as the back office support, including finance, accounting, grants
management, insurance, human resources, legal and compliance. Donations
to BLM are restricted donations to support the activities of BLM,”
Thousand Currents said in an email to The Daily Signal.
It deferred other questions to the BLM Global Network Foundation.
Thousand Currents reportedly
gave a total of $90,130 in grants to the Santa Clarita,
California-based Black Lives Matter Foundation, according to its tax
filings for fiscal years 2017 and 2018.
This second organization, according to BuzzFeed, is a one-man operation
separate from the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. After
Floyd’s death, the foundation in Santa Clarita raked in $4.3 million in
donations, BuzzFeed reported.
To add to the mix, a separate Movement for Black Lives has financial sponsorship from the Alliance for Global Justice.
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation
gave a three-year $900,000 grant through Thousand Currents to help
organize local BLM Global Network Foundation chapters, according to
Capital Research Center.
More recently, several major corporations announced they were donating to Black Lives Matter.
Amazon announced it would give $10 million to 12 groups, including BLM Global Network Foundation, while Microsoft vowed to give $250,000 to it. Airbnb announced it is giving a total of $500,000 to the NAACP and the BLM Global Network Foundation.
The George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations reportedly
contributed about $33 million to groups associated with the Black Lives
Matter movement. However, it isn’t clear whether that money made it to
the BLM Global Network Foundation, according to Capital Research Center.
3. What Does the Organization Want?
Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation doesn’t hide its more out-of-the mainstream views, although many of them are stated in broad terms.
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure
requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’
that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the
degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable,” the
organization says on its website.
The website uses the word “comrades” several times, in one instance
to say: “We practice empathy. We engage comrades with the intent to
learn about and connect with their contexts.”
Although the organization states that “We are unapologetically Black
in our positioning,” it focuses heavily on something that traditionally
has not been part of African American activism—sexual orientation and
gender identity:
We make space for transgender
brothers and sisters to participate and lead. … We are self-reflexive
and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift
Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be
disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence. …
We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered.
Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation says it is a “queer-affirming network.”
“When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves
from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief
that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose
otherwise),” it says.
It also fights age discrimination, stating: “We cultivate an intergenerational and communal network free from ageism.”
4. What Is Thousand Currents?
Thousand Currents, which underwrites the Black Lives Matter Global
Network Foundation, describes itself as an organization that “envisions
a world where humanity thrives as a creative force that is in
reciprocal [sic] and interdependent with nature, and creates loving,
equitable and just societies.”
Notably, the vice chairwoman of the board of directors for Thousand Currents is Susan Rosenberg, a convicted felon who participated in bombing buildings in the Northeast and Washington, D.C.
In an email Wednesday, The Daily Signal asked Thousand Currents about
Rosenberg’s position on the board of directors. That morning, the
organization’s webpage about the board included a short bio of
Rosenberg. By late afternoon, that page no longer was available and a
message said: “Ooops. Sorry. This page doesn’t exist.”
Rosenberg was part of M19, short for May 19th Communist Organization. Her memoir “An American Radical,” details her 16 years in federal prison.
At her sentencing hearing in 1984, Rosenberg urged supporters to “continue to fight for the defeat of U.S. imperialism.”
“One of the biggest bombs they had went off in the U.S. Capitol and
tore up that fine Democratic slave owner John C. Calhoun’s portrait,”
Capital Research Center’s Walter said of Rosenberg and M19. “The Weather
Underground wasn’t really radical enough for her. Some of those people
ended up wimping out and going off to be stock brokers and whatever.
That wasn’t good enough for her and she stayed radical.”
M19’s bombings reportedly
were for the sake of causing enough disruption to prevent President
Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984. Rosenberg was a member of the
Weather Underground in the 1960s. President Bill Clinton commuted her
58-year sentence on his last day in office in January 2001.
According to Capital Research Center, Thousand Currents
also is a grant-making organization that assists various other
left-of-center causes and has focused heavily on opposing genetically
modified organisms.
Donors include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the
NoVo Foundation, and the Libra Foundation. It had annual revenue of
$6.8 million in 2018.
We
are seeing jurisdictions everywhere imposing mask bans at a rate that
approaches the number of bars being threatened with liquor license
revocation for failing to enforce social distancing. If that sentence
seems complicated, then you are beginning to appreciate just how
confusing all the arguments are about face coverings. After all, we
have N95s, surgical masks, homemade cloth masks
(enjoy the video), and the classic train robber bandana. Just for good
measure, as I wore my cup-style dust mask on my last pass through
Costco, I saw staff members wearing required face coverings that came
from lathe section at Woodcraft.
Figure 1: Mask styles.
It
should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that these
masks are not all identical in their intended use and possible function
against viruses. The bandana and face shield represent the extreme of
one side of the spectrum. The shield blocks large objects (relative to
viruses) traveling from striking the user's eyes at high speeds. The
bandana blocks the good guys from seeing who the bad guy is. In both
cases, breathing around them is very easy, and aerosols aren't
blocked. They may be effective against a sneeze, but ordinary breathing
or talking defeats them easily. The cup-style dust mask falls roughly
into that same category. Let's look at the better masks. I wore surgical masks daily for 36 years as an anesthesiologist. Their purpose was to reduce the chance that I would infect an open wound with bacteria from my mouth. This article of faith has been shown to be false. If
staff who are working outside of the immediate sterile field do not
wear masks, there is no increase in wound infections. And this is in a
closed environment where staff will be present for hours. This casts a
very large cloud of doubt on the utility of masks for COVID-19. Another problem arises when we look at the use of masks by the public. Even accepting the uncertain premise
that masks are useful, "incorrect use and disposal may actually
increase the risk of pathogen transmission, rather than reduce it, especially when masks are used by non-professionals
such as the lay public." Given that most "masks" are simply kept handy
for use when required, set aside, and then re-used, most mask-wearing
by the public is likely to increase virus exposure, not reduce it. But
do properly used surgical masks reduce disease spread in the general
public? To say there are almost no data would not be overstating the
case. When households with sick kids were examined, even rigorous
mask-wearing provided no statistically significant improvement in adult infections. Let's
put that in plain English. Even if you did everything to protect
yourself with surgical masks, even keeping it on when your kid wants to
see your face, it might reduce your chance of getting sick, but
we can't prove it. And that's in a well designed study intended to get
a meaningful result. "[H]ousehold use of face masks is associated with
low adherence and is ineffective for controlling seasonal respiratory disease" (emphasis added). What about homemade cloth masks? In a study using influenza,
masks made from cotton T-shirts "should only be considered as a last
resort to prevent droplet transmission from infected individuals." They
were only one third as effective when worn by the sick person as a
surgical mask. If you're sick, they're better than nothing, but that's
not much. The CDC says,
"Cloth face coverings may slow the spread of the virus and help people
who may have the virus and do not know it from transmitting it to
others." Translation: It might help, but we don't have any data to back that up. As
we can see from other studies, even surgical masks have minimal benefit
in preventing you from getting sick. This was confirmed in a hospital study. Cloth
masks had a "relative risk" of flu infection thirteen times greater
than medical masks. "Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor
filtration may result in increased risk of infection." What about the fabled N95 respirator masks? "Respirators
work as PPE only when they are the right size and have been fit-tested
to demonstrate they achieve an adequate protection
factor." Translation: If you haven't gone through the fit-testing I've
been through (the first model didn't fit!), N95s won't reduce your
exposure to the virus. Sorry. I
think it's pretty easy to see that a mask is not a mask is not a
mask. There are wide variations, and some face coverings are utterly
ineffective at preventing the spread of infection. Others may provide a
small degree of protection to other people if you are
infected. Surgical masks are reasonably effective, but carrying a
folded cloth to cough into is just as effective. And you'll probably
put it in the laundry more frequently than your mask. To
protect yourself, you need an N95 respirator mask that is properly
fitted. Then you need to re-sterilize it every four hours using UV
light or properly dispose of it and start over with a new one. That is
too expensive for most people. The
outside world is the safest place you can be. The state of Florida has
zero cases of COVID-19 that can be traced to outside
transmission. During the day, solar UV kills all viruses very quickly,
and there's always enough air movement to disperse aerosols, making them
non-infective. It has become clear that virtually all cases have been
spread in closed spaces with prolonged (>10 minute) exposure. And as
the studies I've cited show, other than N95s, masks are no help
there. For that matter, six-foot spacing doesn't help, either, since
the aerosols that transmit the virus aren't adequately dispersed. Caregivers
in a high-intensity environment should have all the fitted N95s they
need. Beyond that, it's time to recognize that the only person who
should be wearing a mask is the Lone Ranger.
