Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Senior Executive at Texas ER Chain Reveals Real Reason For Spike in Coronavirus Cases

Senior Executive at Texas ER Chain Reveals Real Reason For Spike in Coronavirus Cases

Senior Executive at Texas ER Chain Reveals Real Reason For Spike in Coronavirus Cases


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.”
The media completely ignores the fact that Coronavirus deaths have dropped significantly which is why they are concentrating on the new ‘cases.’
As this ER executive clearly explained, the vast majority of new Coronavirus cases are mild to very mild symptoms (or asymptomatic).

On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare

SHELLENBERGER: On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare

   DailyWire.com
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (L) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) hold a news conference to introduce legislation to transform public housing as part of their Green New Deal proposal outside the U.S. Capitol November 14, 2019 in Washington, DC. The liberal legislators invited affordable housing advocates and climate change activists to join them for the announcement. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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 declined by 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.

Monday, June 29, 2020

U.N. Warns of Devastating Environmental Side Effects of Electric Car Boom

U.N. Warns of Devastating Environmental Side Effects of Electric Car Boom

U.N. Warns of Devastating Environmental Side Effects of Electric Car Boom

electric car
Marc Heckner via Unsplash
5:09
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.

Who's the Real Party of the Rich?

Who's the Real Party of the Rich

Who's the Real Party of the Rich?

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 2012201320142015, 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 2012201320142015, 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 2012201320142015, 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.

Another Deep State hoax blown out of the water: Trump never briefed about Russian bounties —Herridge

Another Deep State hoax blown out of the water: Trump never briefed about Russian bounties —Herridge


Another Deep State hoax blown out of the water: Trump never briefed about Russian bounties —Herridge

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

Liberal Media Sure Are Obsessed With Villifying #Parler As Alternative To Twitter


Liberal Media Sure Are Obsessed With Villifying #Parler As Alternative To Twitter



 
 
Posted by    Saturday, 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”
Over the course of only a few days, Parler gained a whopping 500k new users, so the pearl-clutching on the left is, for once, warranted.
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:
https://parler.com/profile/Maddpatriot/comments
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]

Sunday, June 28, 2020

Where are all the guns and ammo purchased under Obama?

Where are all the guns and ammo purchased under Obama? 

Where are all the guns and ammo purchased under Obama?

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.

Friday, June 26, 2020

4 Things the Liberal Media Won’t Tell You About Black Lives Matter

4 Things the Liberal Media Won’t Tell You About Black Lives Matter

 4 Things the Liberal Media Won’t Tell You About Black Lives Matter


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.

What good do the masks do, really?

What good do the masks do, really?

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.