1241: Curtain Wranglers

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Sat, 09 May 2020 20:51

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Fri, 08 May 2020 13:23

New data from the Department of Labor released Thursday show more than 3.2 million people filed new jobless claims as the economic destruction over pandemic panic continues to take its devastating toll.

That brings total new unemployment claims to more than 33 million, where one in five American workers in the labor market have filed for first-time benefits since mid-March lockdowns.

This @MSNBC graphic is astounding pic.twitter.com/Ix1uGABTDS

'-- Elizabeth Landers (@ElizLanders) May 7, 2020

The nationwide unemployment rate is expected to reach between 15 to 20 percent when the new jobs report comes out Friday. The latest unemployment rate reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was 4.4 percent in March before the coronavirus pandemic kicked off the widespread economic self-destruction landing millions out of work with pro-longed lockdowns still in place two months later.

To confront the unprecedented jobs losses, Congress rushed through several stimulus packages spending upwards of $3.5 trillion on immediate relief including funds for small businesses, hospitals, enhanced testing capability, state and local governments, and direct payment checks to individuals. Congress also beefed up unemployment insurance with an additional $600 a week while radically expanding eligibility requirements allowing millions more to go on unemployment who might otherwise remain on payroll with an employer granted assistance under a Paycheck Protection Program loan that mandate staff salaries to stay intact.

A new report from the conservative Heritage Foundation unveiled last week shows Congress likely made the problem worse through its expansion of unemployment benefits that incentivize collecting government handouts over earning a paycheck. According to the report, the median full-time American worker earning $48,000 a year would take home 15 percent more from unemployment than remaining in their full-time job.

The pair of Heritage economists estimate that Congress could inflate unemployment over the pandemic by upwards of 13.9 million as workers are able to rake in more on government insurance than they were previously making absent any income caps implemented in the CARES Act in March. In other words, a third of today's newly unemployed might have been avoided had Congress included responsible measures to cap benefits at 100 percent of a beneficiary's prior income with tightened eligibility requirements rather than the self-verification process featured instead.

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Sat, 09 May 2020 15:15

When Donald Trump signed the $2 trillion CARES Act rescue on March 27, there was immediate praise across the political spectrum for section 4022, concerning homeowners in distress. Under the rule, anyone with a federally-backed mortgage could now receive instant relief.

Forbearance, the law said:

'...shall be granted for up to 180 days, and shall be extended for an additional period of up to 180 days at the request of the borrower.

Essentially, anyone with a federally-backed mortgage was now eligible for a six-month break from home payments. Really it was a year, given that a 180-day extension could be granted ''at the request of the borrower.''

It made sense. The burden of having to continue to make home payments during the coronavirus crisis would be crushing for the millions of people put out of work.

If anything, the measure didn't go far enough, only covering homeowners with federally-backed (a.k.a. ''agency'') mortgages. Still, six months or a year of relief from mortgage payments was arguably the most valuable up-front benefit of the entire bailout for ordinary people.

Unfortunately, this portion of the CARES Act was conceived so badly that it birthed a potentially disastrous new issue that could have severe systemic ramifications. ''Whoever wrote this bill didn't have the faintest fucking clue how mortgages work,'' is how one financial analyst put it to me.

When homeowners take out mortgages, loans are bundled into pools and turned into securities, which are then sold off to investors, often big institutional players like pension funds.

Once loans are pooled and sold off as securities, the job of collecting home payments from actual people and delivering them to investors in mortgage bonds goes to companies called mortgage servicers. Many of these firms are not banks, and have familiar names like Quicken Loans or Freedom Mortgage.

The mortgage servicing business is relatively uncomplicated '' companies are collecting money from one group of people and handing it to another, for a fee '' but these quasi-infamous firms still regularly manage to screw it up.

''An industry that is just'... not very good,'' is the generous description of Richard Cordray, former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Because margins in the mortgage service business are relatively small, these firms try to automate as much as possible. Many use outdated computers and have threadbare staffing policies.

Essentially, they make their money collecting in good economic times from the less complicated homeowner accounts, taking electronic payments and paying little personal attention to loan-holders with issues.

They rely on lines of short-term financing from banks and tend to be cash-poor and almost incompetent by design. If you've ever tried to call your servicer (if you even know who it is) and failed to get someone on the phone, that's no accident '-- unless you're paying, these firms don't much want to hear from you, and they certainly don't want to pay extra to do it. Their cheapness helped provide some savings for customers, but there's a downside to this approach.

Last year, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), which includes the heads of the Treasury, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Fed, the aforementioned CFPB and others issued a report claiming mortgage service firms were a systemic threat, because they ''rely heavily on short-term funding sources and generally have relatively limited resources to absorb financial shocks.''

For Cordray, who has a book out called Watchdog that chronicles his time heading the CFPB, the worry about mortgage servicers was serious.

''Nonbanks are very thinly capitalized,'' he says. ''They haven't been very responsible in building up capital buffers.''

Enter the coronavirus. Even if homeowners themselves weren't required to make payments under the CARES Act, servicers like Quicken and Freedom still had to keep paying the bondholders every month.

It might be reasonable to expect a big bank like Wells Fargo or JP Morgan Chase to front six months' worth of principal and interest payments for millions of borrowers. But these fly-by-night servicer firms '' overgrown collection agencies '' don't have that kind of cash.

How did the worst of these firms react to being told they suddenly had to cover up to a year of home payments? About as you'd expect, by panicking and trying to pass the buck to homeowners.

Soon after the passage of the CARES Act, reporters like Lisa Epstein at Capitol Forum and David Dayen at the American Prospect started hearing stories that servicers were trying to trick customers into skipping the forbearance program. As David wrote a few weeks ago:

I started hearing from borrowers that they were being told that they could apply for three months forbearance (a deferment of their loan payment), but would have to pay all three months back at the end of the period'...

It soon came out that many servicers were telling homeowners that even if they thought they were getting a bailout break, they would still have to make it all up in one balloon payment at the end of the deferral period. This was a straight-out lie, but the motivation was obvious. ''They're trying to get people to pay any way they can,'' is how Cordray puts it.

Dayen cited Amerihome Mortgage and Wells Fargo, but other names also started to be associated with the practice. Social media began to fill up with stories from people claiming firms like Mr. Cooper, Bank of America and others were telling them they had to be prepared to make big balloon payments.

Same with the CFPB's complaint database, which began to be filled with comments like the following, about a firm called NewRez LLC:

If you have 4 months of mortgage payments laying around at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic you will be fine if not good buy [sic] to your house. I understand its a business and they will make a lot of money with I'm sure a government bailout and lots of foreclosures from not helping any american home buyers'...

Suddenly regulators and politicians alike were faced with a double-edged dilemma. On the one hand, the poorly-designed CARES Act placed servicers in genuine peril, an issue that left unfixed might break the mortgage markets '' not a fun experience for America, as we learned in 2008.

The obvious solution was to use some of the apparently limitless funding ammunition in the Federal Reserve to help servicers maintain their responsibilities. The problem was the firms that needed such help the most were openly swindling homeowners. If there's such a thing as regulatory blackmail, this was it.

Should the Fed open its war chest and create a ''liquidity facility'' to help mortgage servicers? It seemed like the obvious move '-- this really was a problem caused by a bailout that encouraged even people who didn't need forbearance to accept it '-- but how could this be done in a way that didn't put homeowners at more risk?

''This is the script of a heist flick, where homeowners get screwed in the end while servicers get the money,'' says Carter Dougherty of Americans for Financial Reform. ''If you combine money for servicers with strong consumer protections and a vigorous regulator, then the film could have a happy ending. But I'm not holding my breath.''

In early April, a group of Senators led by Virginia's Mark Warner sent a letter that pleaded with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to use some of the $455 billion economic stabilization fund to solve the problem. The letter included a passage that essentially says, ''We know these companies suck, but there's no choice but to bail them out'':

While we understand that some nonbank lenders may have adopted practices that made them particularly susceptible to constraints on their liquidity during a severe downturn, imposing a broad liquidity shock to the entire servicing sector is not the way to go about reform'...

The Senators put the problem in perspective, noting that as much as $100 billion in payments might be forborne under the CARES Act. This was a major hit to an industry that last year ''had total net profits of less than $10 billion.''

The CARES Act was written in March with such speed that it became law before anyone even had a chance to catch, say, a $90 billion-sized hole in the bailout's reasoning. Still, when the forbearances began and it started to look like the servicers might fail, there was talk among regulators and members of congress alike of letting failures happen, to teach the idiots a lesson.

But the Senators on the letter (including also Tim Kaine, Bob Menendez and Jerry Moran) decided this would ultimately be counterproductive, i.e. letting the economy collapse might be an unacceptably high price for the sending of a message to a handful of companies.

''The focus now should not be on longer-term reform, but on ensuring that the crisis now unfolding does as little damage to the economy as possible,'' is how the letter put it.

Although the letter urged the creation of a new bailout facility to contain the mortgage-servicer ick, that didn't happen, even after mortgage servicers stepped up lobbying campaigns. In mid-April, a string of news stories appeared in which servicers warned reporters of snowballing market terror '' as the New York Times put it, the ''strain is expected to intensify'' '' that would only be solved with a bailout.

No dice. In a repeat of the often-halting, often illogical responses to mushrooming crises of 2008, the first pass at a solution came in the form of a move by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), the overseer of Fannie and Freddie.

On April 21, FHFA announced they were coming to the rescue: servicers would no longer need to come up with six months of payments. From now on, it would only be four:

Today's instruction establishes a four-month advance obligation limit for Fannie Mae scheduled servicing for loans and servicers which is consistent with the current policy at Freddie Mac.

Which was fine, except for one thing: from the standpoint of most of these undercapitalized servicing firms, having to cover four months of payments is not a whole lot easier than covering six. ''It still might as well be ten years for these guys,'' is how one analyst put it.

Absent an intervention from the Fed, a bunch of these servicing firms will go bust. There will be chaos if even a few disappear. As we found out in 2008, homeowners facing servicer disruptions can immediately be confronted with all sorts of problems, from taxes going unpaid to payments vanishing to incorrect foreclosure proceedings taking place. Such problems can take years to resolve. Service issues helped seriously prolong the last crisis, as I wrote about in 2010.

Also, if your servicer disappears, someone still has to do the grunt work of managing your loan. To make sure your home payments are collected and moved to the right place, some entity will have to acquire what are known as the Mortgage Servicing Rights (MSRs) to your loan.

But MSRs have almost no value in a battered economy, which means it's likely no big company like a bank will be interested in acquiring them in the event of mass failures, absent some kind of inducement. ''They're not going to want that grief,'' is how one hill staffer puts it.

A third problem is that if some of these nonbank servicers go kablooey, a likely scenario would involve their businesses being swallowed up by big banks, perhaps with the aid of incentives tossed in from yet another bailout package.

This would again mirror 2008, in that a regulatory response would worsen the hyper-concentration problem and make big, systemically dangerous banks bigger and more dangerous, again.

As Dougherty says, the simplest solution would be opening a Fed facility to contain the servicer disaster, coupling aid with new measures designed to a) force servicers to keep more money on hand for a rainy day and b) stop screwing homeowners.

But the more likely scenario is just a bailout for now, with a vague promise to reform later. This would lead either to an over-generous rescue of some of our worst companies, or an industry wipeout followed by another power grab by Too Big To Fail banks.

The whole episode is a classic example of how governmental ignorance married to corporate irresponsibility can lead to systemic FUBAR, though we still don't know how this particular version will play out. As Cordray puts it, it's not easy to predict where failures in the mortgage servicer industry might lead.

''What's easy to predict, though,'' he says, ''is that it will be a mess.''

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Fri, 08 May 2020 12:53

This week, the Polish Hill skate park looks more like a sandbox than a place to try out new tricks. Pittsburgh Public Works has dumped pounds of sand around the park's bowl and at the base of the park's ramps.

Some skaters were outraged on social media, criticizing the move. Skate parks in California have taken similar measures to prevent skaters from gathering there.

The skate park was decommissioned along with basketball courts and other outdoor recreational facilities at city parks in March. But recently, according to Public Works Director Mike Gable, numerous tips came in about groups of skateboarders ignoring social distancing guidelines and skating in the park. Then came the sand.

''We don't take any pride in closing facilities. They're great assets,'' Gable said. ''But there is a directive out there and when it's not being followed, it creates a problem.''

Gable said West Penn Park, where the skate park is located, presents a unique challenge compared with other city parks due to its size.

''The area that the skate park is in is a very tight, confined space. The number of people using it was extraordinary and that's why it was closed,'' he said.

There are not currently plans to put sand in two of the city's other skate parks '--McKinley Park or Sheraden Skate Park. Neither of those parks have bowls, and as a result have been easier to manage during the closures, according to Gable.

Public Works will remove the sand when the parks are able to reopen, something Gable looks forward to.

''Hopefully in the next week or two we'll get some good news that we can maybe start opening some things up and getting back to normal,'' Gable said. ''That's what we're trying to get to.''

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Fri, 08 May 2020 13:03

Their modeling systems were wrong. Their numbers were highlyexaggerated. Despite this, they were prepared to go all the way '' to escalate avirus to astronomical proportions so they could shut this country down, shutthe world down, and attempt to control all populations into submission throughfear tactics and mind games. Why? What do they have to gain? Their masks cameoff when they began trying to control the minds of millions by feeding a deceptivenarrative, moving for mail-in ballots to manipulate the upcoming elections, shuttingdown the economy while deciding who's business was ''essential'' and who's was ''non-essential,''using tactics to keep people in a state of fear to make them vulnerable so theywill heed the advice of so-called ''experts'' when a vaccine is deployed,creating a trillion dollar industry, all while simultaneously putting a halt toall protests, conferences, and rallies.

Essentially, the goal is to destroy America and install a newPresident that can drive them to their end game. Ultimately, when everyone wastold to put on masks, their masks came off, and all was revealed. Most peoplesee right through their charades, if for no other reason, because they havebeen illegally forced to close their ''non-essential'' businesses, lost theirjobs, can no longer feed their families, and can see the unnecessary lengths theyhave gone to try to destroy EVERYONE, as they witness the real plague ''tyranny! For those who are still trapped in the false narrative, and arecomplying to all rules out of fear, that fear needs to be checked againstreality, as all of the evidence is out there.

The Washington Post wants everyone to believe that masks are a newfashion trend and have even brought Disney into the fold, trying to make this seem funwhile declaring ''masks are here to stay!'' They use the word ''solidarity'' tomake everyone feel as though they are a single unit working together to healthe world, when what they really mean is, ''we believe you are all sheep andwill listen to anything we tell you, so we will continue to program you to ourbenefit.''

The irony is, despite the legacy media and governors trying to''order'' people to wear masks under the guise of ''it's for everyone's safety andif you don't do it you may die or kill other people,'' the CDC and Dr. Faucithemselves have flat out said THEY WON'T PROTECT YOU.

When Vice President Pence was asked by Brett Baier at a Town Hall on May 3rd, about why hechose not to wear a mask when visiting the Mayo Clinic, his response was, ''well from early on the CDC has made itclear that you wear a mask to prevent you from conveying the coronavirus toother people, and since the President and I are in the unique position weare in, we're tested often.''

In an interview with CBS, NIAID Director Dr. Fauci, who is a part of the COVID-19 Task Force, clearly stated,

''There's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it's not providing the perfect protection people think that it is.''

The fact that he stated this in March versus April is totally irrelevant. He is an immunologist, and this is a clear cut statement that cannot be walked back.

It ''might make people feel a bit better,'' he said. Meanwhile, there arehundreds of thousands of people who are having incredibly adverse effects fromwearing the masks. It's hard to imagine why so many people would be dealingwith anxiety, PTSD, claustrophobia and other traumatic issues in this country (sarcasm),but wearing these masks are a big trigger for them. That would be classified asa mental disability. There are also people with physical disabilities such asasthma or respiratory issues and the masks make it difficult for them tobreathe. Furthermore, there are some people whose jobs require heavy lifting,and it's causing them a great deal of dizziness, not to mention those that wearprotective goggles or glasses are having to deal with them constantly foggingup. And, there are those with other debilitating physical issues where themasks create more problems, including those with hearing deficiencies that needto be able to read lips, which is tricky to do when everyone is sporting amask. According to the CDC, wearing masks for long periods of time, for examplean 8-hour work shift, can cause headaches. The CDC contends it will not causehypercapnia, though there is a lot of controversy over this.

Taking all of the above into consideration, the most telling of all is thefact that not only do these masks not protect people, they would need to besterilized on a regular basis, and by wearing the same mask over and over eachday, if anything '' they act as bacteria and virus collectors. Therefore, ifthey do not protect people, they cannot be sterilized, and are collectingbacteria, WHY are governors insisting people where them in public places? Onlyone conclusion can be drawn from this '' it is all for show to perpetuate thefear and keep the stigma in people's minds to prep them for an incoming vaccine,while doing whatever they can to prevent rallies and in-person voting for theelections. If this isn't obvious yet, then you need to start using your brainand stop letting them use it for you.

Sowhat can you do? What rights do you have when you are being told you MUST weara mask to enter a public store, that the experts have already confirmed willnot protect you? Some very smart people have been sharing this across socialmedia, and Corey took the time to review it to see if it is in fact justifiablein this particular case. It is very cut and dry and more people need to be madeaware of this. If you feel like you need to wear a mask because you have acompromised immune system or are elderly, that is your choice, but everyoneshould be made aware of their rights.

The American Disabilities ActYoucan grab the jpg image below and print it out to carry with you for yourconvenience. The bottom line is '' if you have amental or physical disability that prevents you from wearing a mask, no publicfacility or store can discriminate against you and require you to leave,especially a grocery store which is required for your survival. You do not haveto tell them what your disability is. That being said, one would suspect thatif a lot of people start acting on their rights, it's going to create an issueand mayors or governors may try to step in and implement another executiveorder that states you are a danger to others and therefore you must havesomeone else do your grocery shopping for you. But that's just not realistic,and they know this, so it will be interesting to see where this all goes. Inregard to business owners mandating masks via governors' orders, the employermay very well instruct the employee to leave the place of work with unpaidleave because there are no ''accommodations'' that could be provided that wouldreplace the mask requirement. Whether or not there is legal basis for thiswould be a question for an attorney. This of course, could create a whole otherissue for those seeking to go back to work, who are unable to wear a mask.

Their Masks Came Off '' It's All About Perception NowNotonly do these scoundrels who preach to wear a mask, not wear one themselves,many don't even abide by their own rules, such as IL Gov. Pritzker's wifetaking a trip to Florida. Of course, the rules don't apply for them andPritzker verbally attacked a reporter for daring to question him on it. NYCMayor DeBlasio is targeting the Jewish community while NY Gov. Cuomo has sentpeople off to their deaths at nursing homes while neglecting patients at hospitals, andis now touting that the educationsystem should be ''reimagined'' and built back better, and he plans to work withthe Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a blueprint to do this.Sure, why not? Gates already has his hands in every single cookiejar across the globe, with no exaggeration.

Neverforget, they create the illusions to give a false reality to a situation ornarrative so as to alter your perception and keep you in fear and under theircontrol. How many ways do they accomplish this?

Recently, CBS added fake patients to a testing area to create theappearance of a longer line. There were only a few actual people there to gettested and they were made to wait so CBS could stage this. These people aredisgusting! Link to full video.

The social media giants continue to censor and shadowban. Itdoesn't matter whether you have a small following or a huge following, twitterwill remove likes, followers, and reduce both the retweets and comment count ''and they do this in real time right before your very eyes. President Trump getsthe extra special treatment with mass scale reduction in numbers. He has beenaveraging 100,000 new followers every 48-hrs over the past couple of weeks.Just imagine what the real numbers are, based on the thousands of retweets andlikes they remove? Facebook and YouTube are removing anything and everythingthey determine goes against the narrative, especially if it's COVID related andyou point out negative facts about the World Health Organization. Oh yes, theyare all working overtime to hide the truth from everyone.

The term ''essential business'' is not new. Most people are just nowhearing about this, as it's being used to disqualify all of the other''essential'' businesses by simply making the claim ''they are not essential.''Over a decade ago, Google changed their algorithms and pushed this very tacticin the online retail world. So for those who had online businesses that were ''essential''for their survival, Google decided they were ''non-essential'' and pushed all ofthe big name stores to the top of the search results, deeming them more''essential'' for shoppers. This is not new, they merely brought it from thecyberworld to the real world, to crush all of the little guys, while drivingmore business to their cohorts stores.

Even though their modelling systems were way off, they exaggeratedthe numbers, have validated that they were off, have stated that we haveflattened the curve, informed us that the warmer weather and sun will kill thevirus, and said that states are ''opening back up,'' there are some states thatrefuse to get on board because they are pushers of the fear narrative. Theentire state of Oregon has had a total of 109 COVID-related deaths (withemphasis on ''related''), yet Governor Brown just declared theywill remain closed until July 6th!

IL Gov. Pritzker has released hundreds from prison under the guiseof them potentially catching the virus, including twowho had murdered children, while Chicago Mayor Lightfoot preaches ''wewill shut you down. We will cite you. And if we need to, we will arrest you,and we will take you to jail, period'...don't make us treat you like acriminal.'' Oh, the irony.

Meanwhile, CA Gov. Newsom is flying helicopters overbeaches warning people that the beach is closed and they cannot enter, while inthe great state of Texas, they are driving in armored vehicles to shut downpeaceful protests, arresting tattoo artists and sending a salon owner to jailfor seven days for opening their ''non-essential'' businesses before they were''allowed.'' Fortunately, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is calling for herimmediate release, and the Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick tweetedthat he will cover her $7k fine and volunteered to be placed under house arrestso she can go to work and feed her kids.

It is amazing how they decide what they deem to be ''essential''when in fact ALL businesses are essential for families to survive and thrive.How dare they distinguish, claiming that Walmart is more important than thesmall health store, or that a pet grooming location can open but a saloncannot. Do you see the hypocrisy and their clear attempt at showing just who isin control, while most people submit for fear of retaliation? Now imagine ifhundreds, thousands all stood up for their rights, didn't allow thisunconstitutional, illegal bullying, and could get back to work and feed theirfamilies?

People Are Fighting For Their RightsPeople are fighting back, running peaceful protests, exposingtheir outrageous tactics, opening their businesses, and going out in publicwithout a mask on. Not only that, there have been a lot of representativesacross the country that are standing up to governors, taking them to court, andfighting for our rights. This is all backfiring on them.

So what is their last ditch effort? They are trying to continuewith the masks to present visual eye candy for the fearful, while continuingwith escalating numbers and a threat of a ''second wave,'' while Bill Gatespostulates we should remain closed until a vaccine is ready. And, they arebuilding up armies of contact tracers to perpetuate the madness, whilecollecting data, and encouraging people to tell on their neighbors. This is theonly way they can keep their show going. There is much more to be told aboutthe contact tracing, and that's coming up in another Corey's Digs report soon!

One of the biggest concerns people have, aside from getting back to work, is the threat of a mandated vaccine. Corey's Digs did an extensive report on investigations and the battle for a vaccine, which lends a lot of insight to what is taking place. Since then, President Trump continues to state that they are working hard on getting a vaccine by the end of the year and that he needs a vaccine. Is Trump stating this to maintain control of a vaccine, should one come to fruition? Is he stating this until after all therapeutics have been tested and deemed to fight the virus without the need for a vaccine? Or does Trump really plan to have a vaccine produced, perhaps in a safer way than they have been done in the past? Do we really even need a vaccine for coronavirus? These are all of the questions rolling through everyone's minds right now. Corey's Digs is keeping a close eye on this as things progress, but one very important recent event to note is the ''virtual coronavirus vaccine summit'' that recently took place, whereby world leaders pledged billions for a vaccine. Leaders from Germany, Italy, Spain, France, UK, Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, Jordan, South Africa, Turkey, and China's ambassador to the European Union were all in attendance '' the U.S. did not attend.

Never stop fighting for your rights, your freedom, and justice.

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Sat, 09 May 2020 12:40

The American media watchdog organization, Media Research Center (MRC), stated the report behind the Trudeau government's call for requiring news websites and social media to obtain a government license to operate in Canada is ''terrifying.''

''Canada was one of the Allies that defeated fascism. Canadian soldiers fought for freedom and now the Canadian government seems eager to take that away,'' said Media Research Center (MRC) Culture Vice President, Dan Gainor.

''Watching an ally, a neighbour and a friend talk about regulating the free press shows where the far left wants to take, not just Canada, but any nation they control,'' he added.

CAP applaud this man's choice of words. ''Any nation they control'' alludes to belief that international forces beyond Canada's borders are the true controllers of our nation. How very astute of this fellow.

In this regard, there is no single person in Canada more dedicated to the erasure of national sovereignty than prime minister Justin Trudeau. The man is a one man ''wrecking crew'' for the decimation of 153 years of Canadian cultural identity.

Now, let's get a bit deeper: Gainor added he finds the thought of free and independent Canadian media maybe one day having to potentially relocate to the U.S., as Radio Free Europe did to people behind the Iron Curtain.

''There's a terrifying lesson in this for Americans,'' added Gainor. And pray-tell what is the lesson for Canada'-- that this draconian government measure is akin to a pleasant walk through a Canadian National Forest?

What all this spells is ominous as hell. Leaving the country in order to engage in freedom of speech? How entirely communist. Of course, as informed Canadians understand, Justin Trudeau is right now in the process of transitioning our nation from democracy to dictatorship.

See how neatly all this falls into line? Too bad 98% of Canadian society do not. This is where the socialist structure of media in Trudeau's post-modern nation come to the rescue.

The job is simple and direct: undermine all comprehension of Canadians in terms of understanding the massive social transition Canada is experiencing at present.

This, fellow patriots, is the well-worn recipe for socialist success within a dying democracy. In terms of media lockdown, ''this is a stepping-stone to the licensing and thereby control, of virtually all internet content. It's Orwellian, quite frankly.''

There you have it, fellow patriots. Too bad 98% of Canadian citizens will never ''have it.'' For the benefit of United Nations, Nation of Islam, Sikh Nationalism and Chinese communism, the Canadian establishment media will ensure these concepts never penetrate the consciousness of society.

Conservative MP Andrew Scheer told Trudeau in the Canadian House of Commons during Question Period that Canadians are ''suspicious'' of the licensing proposal.

''It's no wonder that Canadian's are suspicious about this, this is the same Prime Minister who has admiration for China's basic dictatorship, the same Prime Minister who he praised on Fidel Castro, a man who is responsible for the death of millions,'' Scheer said.

Interesting, eh? A direct hit upon the totalitarian leanings of the Trudeau government. What trans-pires as a result? Why, nothing at all.

Any other patriots pick up on this unusual development? The Trudeau government transitions from majority to minority government upon the Liberal victory in 2019.

Yet, subsequently'' the Trudeau government have more power than ever. Witness the messaging in such a phenomenon. What does it tell CAP? Simple''that Canada is now, in truth, a One Party State.

Hidden By Media: Billionaire George Soros, Justin Trudeau, And The GLOBALIST SEDUCTION Of Canada

Frankly, the Conservative Party of Canada can stand on its collective head until election day in 2023, and still they will not win. Peter McKay, Erin O'Toole''makes no difference who their leader is''the Liberals and their Third World political lock on government will win out in the end.

Rebel News Editor Ezra Levant also voiced his opposition to the idea of a media registry, saying in a Tweet sent out Monday:

''There are only two kinds of journalists in Canada now: those who are paid by Trudeau, and those who are banned by Trudeau.''

A part of the report called for increasing funding by a total of $1.2 billion to the state-owned and leftist Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, going as far to say the CBC has a ''critical role to play'' in shutting down supposed fake news websites.

A straight-up socialist media control tactic if there ever was one. What is King Trudeau up to here? Try a complete emulation of media control in the Trudeau family hero-nation of China.

With each passing day, Canada falls deeper into the political pit of communist media structure found in communist China. For millions of Old Stock Canadians, witnessing the demise of freedom and democracy in Canada in a painful experience.

This process began the day ex-Liberal Pierre Trudeau became prime minister of Canada. Then, some forty years hence, son Justin Trudeau was brought in to bury freedom and democracy in Canada for all-time.

'-- BRAD SALZBERG

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Sat, 09 May 2020 12:47

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Sun, 10 May 2020 09:33

Imagine a technology offering that knows your health history'--and your family's, and your neighbor's. That can alert you if anyone in your building has had Covid-19, or is at higher risk of exposure to it because of their job. That can check whether you have Covid-19, or antibodies to it. That, once there is a Covid-19 vaccine, administers it, and reminds you when you are due for a booster shot. Imagine if it could also check your temperature and blood pressure, make sure you got the latest information about other outbreaks you should be careful about, and be around to answer basic health questions'--all free of charge.

Now what if that offering was actually a network of people whose job is to make sure those they serve (often their own neighbors, or acquaintances) are as healthy and informed as they can be, not only about the coronavirus, but all sorts of health issues, including chronic diseases?

Enter community health workers: members of a community who have basic levels of health training and whose job it is to monitor, inform, and educate. They are one of the building blocks of healthcare in many countries that don't enjoy the resources of the US yet have developed ways to keep track of people's health at a local level. They are also widely employed in many rich countries to strengthen the public health system. In Germany, for instance, a country that has been relatively successful in limiting the Covid-19 toll, teams of contact tracers have been deployed to monitor the spread of the virus through the community.

While there are community health workers in the US (about 59,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics), they aren't part of a coordinated federal (or often, even state-level) effort, and only a few states have legally and educationally framed their profession.

Coronavirus might finally change that. Legislation proposed by senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Michael Bennet of Colorado, with support from 11 other senators, calls for the creation of a ''Health Force'' that would recruit hundreds of thousands of community healthcare workers. What proponents have described as ''one of the most ambitious and expansive public health campaigns'' in America's history enjoys the support of public health experts'--not only as a way to address the coronavirus emergency and create jobs, but also to strengthen America's weak public health system.

A new New DealPart of a packet of proposals presented last month by Democratic senators to address the health and economic toll of the coronavirus, the health-force plan calls for hiring and training hundreds of thousands of workers currently out of a job. These workers would be paid according to the prevailing wage and have benefits consistent with their status as public employees, a press representative for Gillibrand told Quartz.

There isn't yet a timeline for the proposal to be officially introduced in the senate.

Under the plan, the community health workers, once they've completed required training, would be deployed to tackle the coronavirus crisis by taking on responsibilities like testing and contact tracing. After the emergency, they would continue to be part of state and local healthcare programs, for instance by monitoring a community's cases of chronic disease, conducting screenings, or giving information on available healthcare resources.

It wouldn't be the first time America launched such a program. In fact, the plan is in line with the kind of interventions a US administration promoted the last time the nation dealt with a similarly crippled economy, in 1929. Back then, president Franklin D. Roosevelt's team introduced the Works Progress Administration, which provided millions of jobs in different areas of public life.

Whether through this or other measures, a strengthening of America's community health system is a key recommendation from public health experts, beyond the current emergency. ''We need to scale up a massive community health workers corp to do testing, but also to provide all the other social support that people need throughout the pandemic and into the future,'' Gregg Gonsalves, a public health scholar at Yale, told Quartz.

''Imagine you have 100 community health workers come to a small county in Mississippi to do Covid testing,'' Gonsalves said, ''and half of them end up staying and to do all sorts of other healthcare and social services that need to be done for these communities.''

In the US, the demographics and many of the places that have been hit hardest by the pandemic, both at a health and economic level, already suffered from deprivation and consequent poorer health. Turning attention to maintaining healthy communities would improve the quality of life and health in the long term, making people less vulnerable to future epidemics, too.

Recovery through preventionThe advantage of such models is that they focus on prevention and limiting the recourse to specialized intervention. They cut costs and are effective: There is a well-established correlation between having a strong presence of community and primary care and life expectancy, versus more frequent specialized care.

Enrolling a large cohort of community health workers would help vulnerable areas by providing jobs that don't require much training, and could be taken up even by people with lower levels of education who are unemployed. It could also be a step toward a fundamental rethinking of the US healthcare system, which is now geared toward treatment (and profit), rather than prevention.

Independent from the Health Force proposal, Gonsalves and Amy Kapczynski, a professor at Yale Law School, laid out in an article the priorities that a cohort of health workers'--they call it Community Health Corp'--should tackle, starting with contact tracing. They noted that it would be an effective and necessary way to track and protect those exposed to the coronavirus, without demanding that the whole community sticks to shelter-in-place measures. Testing, too, should be scaled up and become part of the corp's responsibilities.

Community health workers could then turn to information and support, and take on some of the other tasks'--from food distribution to emotional support'--that have so far been done by volunteers who will not be able to sustain the burden once society starts reopening.

As with tracing and health apps, there would be the issue of privacy, but it might be easier to guarantee that data collected in person is not misused. Gonsalves and Kapczynski also argue in their article that tracing done by a person would be more effective and go to lengths that can't be replaced by an app. Further, collecting information through coordinated community healthcare workers would help build a database of health conditions (coronavirus, and beyond) and medical records, to track epidemics. This would be a way into the creation of the universal electronic medical record system, which the US has long tried to implement.

Better monitoring would provide enormous improvement in containment strategies, and address the precarious state of data collected so far. Currently, there is still too much uncertainty in the numbers the US is collecting, says Gonsalves, and this is not just limited to the difficulty of accounting for asymptomatic cases. ''We don't even know how many [coronavirus] cases hospitals have at the moment,'' Gonsalves noted, pointing out that the margin of error is still high even in data coming from healthcare providers.

The post Senators want a US ''Health Force'' to tackle the coronavirus crisis'--and more appeared first on Quartz.

People

have had enough. The overwhelming majority of deaths in PA have been in nursing

homes. The hospitals were never overrun, in fact they are furloughing people

and hospitals are losing money by the billions due to cancelled elective

surgeries. We were told that even with social distancing, there was a huge

chance we would overload the system. Simply didn’t happen. And yet Wolf just

extended the stay at home order until June 4 without any data to back it up.

1.5 MILLION people in PA have lost their jobs. We are furious.

And

he wants to create a “Civilian Corps” that will pay you to monitor your

neighbors all in the name of science and contact tracing!! Sounds just

wonderful!!

Social Interactive Safety

Social Circle Safety

Social Connections

Social Proximity

Social Adjacency

Social Density

Social Network

Social Encounters

Infection Threat Score

Infection Risk Score

Disease Spread Score

Pestilence Propagation Level

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Archived Version

Sun, 10 May 2020 06:37

Now that Texas restaurants can reopen their dining rooms, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban hired a firm to evaluate how these establishments are implementing safety protocols intended to slow the spread of coronavirus, and the results are not exactly encouraging.

To conduct the analysis, Cuban enlisted the help of staffing company ShiftSmart, which assembled a team of secret shoppers to conduct research into how restaurants and other businesses were implementing Texas governor Greg Abbott's Open Texas guidelines. The secret shoppers called about a thousand businesses around the city to determine whether or not they were open, and made physical visits to around 300 establishments across Dallas to ''assess compliance against state reopening protocols.''

Cuban's study doesn't specify which restaurants were visited by secret shoppers, but does indicate the types of establishments that shoppers visited, like a ''steakhouse chain'' or ''fast-casual burger chain.''

According to the findings posted to Cuban's website, only 36 percent of all businesses included in the study that were allowed to reopen on May 1 actually chose to open their doors. Of those businesses, a staggering 96 percent failed to comply with all of the Open Texas guidelines. The shoppers observed that restaurants were more likely to comply with some requirements, like separating tables and asking employees to wear masks, than they were with guidelines like offering single use condiments or contactless payment.

It's not surprising that Cuban would conduct this kind of research. He's been a vocal critic of rushing to reopen businesses across the state, and is also an investor in a number of retail establishments and restaurants across the country, including Fat Shack and Pasta by Hudson, both seen on his ABC TV show Shark Tank.

Cuban will continue sending out secret shoppers over the coming weeks, with visits to ''hundreds of locations'' planned for the rest of the month.

I Hired a Team of Secret Shoppers to Find Out How Businesses Were Opening in Dallas. It's Not Good. [BlogMaverick] Sign up for the newsletter Eater Dallas Sign up for our newsletter.

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Archived Version

Sat, 09 May 2020 12:54

(C) Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Editor's note: The opinions in this article are the author's, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of Microsoft News or Microsoft. MSN Lifestyle Voices features first-person essays and stories from diverse points of view. Click here to see more Voices content from MSN Lifestyle, Health, Travel and Food.

T he cabin was restless . It was a weekday afternoon in late April, and I was among dozens of people boarding an airplane that most of us had assumed would be empty. Flight attendants were scrambling to accommodate seat-change requests. Travelers'--stuffed shoulder to shoulder into two-seat rows'--grumbled at one another from behind masks. An ominous announcement came over the in-flight PA system: ''We apologize for the alarming amount of passengers on this flight.'' Each of us was a potential vector of deadly disease.

I arrived at my assigned row, and found a stocky, gray-haired man in the seat next to mine. When I moved to sit down, he stopped me. ''Sit there,'' he said gruffly, pointing to the aisle behind us. ''Social distance.''

Not eager for a confrontation, I decided to comply. Within seconds, though, a flight attendant materialized and ordered me back to my assigned seat. My recalcitrant would-be seatmate, vigorously objecting to this development, responded by blocking my entrance to the row with his leg.

A standoff ensued, with the irate passenger protesting that there were plenty of empty rows where I could sit (there weren't) and the long-suffering flight attendant all but threatening to kick him off the plane (she didn't). Finally, he relented and I squeezed awkwardly into my seat as the man muttered profanities under his breath.

Why did I think flying would be easy right now?

In the days leading up to my trip, colleagues and family members had repeatedly expressed envy. ''I'm so jealous,'' one co-worker told me. ''Taking a flight without kids sounds like heaven,'' my wife said. The travel wasn't anything extravagant; I was going on a short reporting trip that couldn't be rescheduled. But I understood the sentiment. Like millions of Americans, I'd been social distancing for nearly two months'--cooped up at home, growing a gnarly quarantine beard, and manically wiping down groceries with Lysol. The prospect of packing a suitcase, putting on real pants, and boarding an airplane sounded like a thrilling indulgence, a grand adventure. Travel by air! Who could even imagine such a thing?

But flying during a pandemic turned out to be more stressful'--and surreal'--than I'd planned for. The scenes played out like a postapocalyptic movie: Paranoid travelers roamed the empty terminals in masks, eyeing one another warily as they misted themselves with disinfectant. Dystopian public-service announcements echoed through the airport'--''This is a message from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...'' Even the smallest, most routine tasks'--such as dealing with the touch-screen ticketing kiosk'--felt infused with danger.

My trip took place in two legs, and the first was weird mostly in the ways that I'd expected. All but a few of the shops and restaurants at Washington National Airport were closed. Beverage service in the main cabin was suspended (though apparently serving ginger ale to first-class passengers was ruled epidemiologically acceptable). My first flight was so empty that the pilot warned we would experience ''a very rapid acceleration for takeoff.'' The plane leapt into the sky and my stomach dropped. I spent much of the flight using my baggie of Lysol wipes to scrub and re-scrub every surface within reach.

The layover at O'Hare was where my fellow travelers' fraying nerves came more fully into view. In the restroom, men hovered over sinks like warriors returning from battle, fervently washing their hands and shooting menacing looks at anyone who got too close. At the food court, a shouting match broke out among several stressed-out strangers, and police had to intervene.

Outside the gate, passengers sat five or six seats apart, barely acknowledging one another, let alone attempting conversation. The eerie silence wore on me after a while. When my wife texted to ask how it was going, the best description I could muster was a grimacing emoji.

Flying has always been unpleasant, and rife with small indignities. It's likely that I was more alert than usual to the agitation of those around me. But as America lurches awkwardly toward an economic ''reopening'' in the weeks ahead, my fraught travel experience highlighted an unwelcome truth: The glittering allure of ''normalcy'' that waits on the other end of these stay-at-home orders is a mirage.

The things we miss most about our pre-pandemic lives'--dine-in restaurants and recreational travel, karaoke nights and baseball games'--require more than government permission to be enjoyed. These activities are predicated not only on close human contact but mutual affection and good-natured patience, on our ability to put up with one another. Governors can lift restrictions and companies can implement public-health protocols. But until we stop reflexively seeing people as viral threats, those old small pleasures we crave are likely to remain elusive.

I only had to sit next to my angry seatmate for a few minutes. Shortly after his tantrum, a flight attendant came back to our row and'--after treating the man to a withering glare'--informed me that I was being upgraded. I gathered my things and sheepishly made my way up the aisle while the aggrieved passenger sarcastically exclaimed, ''Ooh, first class!''

As the plane ascended, I pressed my head against the window and peered down at the disappearing runway. I tried to ponder the miracle of human flight, to savor this rare privilege I was experiencing. But then an unhappy thought asserted itself: How many people have touched this window today with their filthy hands? I jerked back, and squirted some hand sanitizer onto my forehead.

WATCH: The surreal experience of flying during a pandemic (provided by The Washington Post)

It’s when you advance one level deeper on your computer. You go beyond the windows and the mouse and interface directly with the data you need to process. Your primary navigation in this world are the HJKL keys.

Hey Adam -

You again mentioned Plaid on the last episode, and I found

myself thinking about how people are unknowingly using the service.

I started thinking, "I'd never sign up for

that." And then I thought about my household.

We use a service called YNAB (You need a budget) for

budgeting purposes. We've been with them for years - great service,

convenient, helps us track our money and stay on course financially. And

then I thought: "How do they import our transactions from the bank,

our mortgage?" and in the past, our car loans.

Well, turns out in their privacy policy, right

there it is (search for Plaid). You agree to use not only Plaid, but Finicity,

MX and Quovo - whatever those are. It's everywhere. And I thought I was being

careful.

The more you know...ITM.

Thanks -

--

Keith

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Sun, 10 May 2020 06:26

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Fri, 08 May 2020 13:09

Skiplink Navigation Jump to Homepage Jump to Navigation Jump to content Jump to contact page Skip to search Main Features This content was published on May 7, 2020 12:26 PM May 7, 2020 - 12:26 Prosecuting authorities resorted to telecommunications surveillance in about 1.5% of all criminal cases.

((C) Keystone )The annual report on Swiss surveillance operations in 2019 mentions the use of state-controlled monitoring software, known as GovWare, for the first time since it was authorised in 2018.

The criminal prosecution authorities and the Federal Intelligence Service (FIS) reported the use of spyware for the first time with 12 such completed interventions before the end of 2019. Most of the cases concerned serious offences that could endanger life and cause bodily harm, as well as serious violations of the narcotics law.

Since March 1, 2018, it has been possible to use such spyware and hidden antennas to eavesdrop on conversations or locate mobile phones (using IMSI-catchers). Investigators used hidden IMSI-catchers 103 times in 2019 compared to 84 in 2018. The majority of interventions were aimed at solving serious drug offences and urgent searches for missing persons.

Overall, the number of surveillance warrants increased by a total of almost 15%, with a total of 8,666 operations ordered (real-time monitoring of telephone and email conversations decreased by 15% but retroactive monitoring including antenna field searching jumped by a quarter).

Of the 544,781 offences recorded in the police crime statistics, the prosecuting authorities resorted to telecommunications surveillance in about 1.5% of cases. The proportion was significantly higher for crimes and offences presenting a collective danger (11.3%).

The cost of surveillance operations in 2019 amounted to CHF31.5 million ($32.3 million) compared to CHF28.5 million in 2018.

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Sat, 09 May 2020 13:46

A few days ago I received this message from one of my readers, Craig, who is worried about Bluetooth radiation:

Hi Lloyd, I have a quick question, or maybe not such a quick question. What's the best way to reduce radiation when listening to streaming audio on a cell phone: '' A Bluetooth headset? '' Does Bluetooth drastically cut down on radiation as compared to having the cell phone near my ear? '' A physical wired headphone? '' Does the radiation transmit up the headphone cable that's physically plugged into the phone? '' Those ''thick protector stickers'' that you apply to the outside of your cell phone? Unfortunately, I depend on the internet, and consequently cell phone, for the majority of my news; and tune into my favourite radio stations while driving for work, at the gym, or doing chores around the house. Do you have a chart or is there an article you can direct me to that contrasts/compares methods of getting the most sound to your ears with the least amount of radiation? Thanks for a great site and newsletters! Craig

Here is the answer I sent him :

Hi Craig

Thanks for your great question. Below is my not so quick answer :

Bluetooth Radiation '' What You Need To UnderstandBluetooth is the name of a wireless technology that uses pulsed radio frequency signals. Anybody that has been following my website will have just felt their ears prick up as I said the word ''pulsed''. Not good.

Here is what Dr. Andrew Goldsworthy has to say about pulsed radiation:

''Pulses carried by microwaves are particularly dangerous. This is because their very short wavelength allows the transmission of pulses with extremely rapid rise and fall times, and it is the rate of change of the fields (rather than their total energy) that does most of the biological damage'' Source.

Because when we talk about pulsed radio frequency signals we are of course talking about radiation, or in this case Bluetooth radiation. Read on'....

Bluetooth is now used extensively in today's world, in cell phone headsets, computer accessories such as keyboards, printers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), personal media players, GPS, gaming equipement, and also various medical health and wellness devices.

This Bluetooth technology is used for more and more personal and commercial applications. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group now lists over 6000 products that utilize Bluetooth technology.

All the more reason that we should be really clear as to what the potential dangers are with Bluetooth radiation.

Is All Bluetooth The Same?No.

Bluetooth transmits at frequency levels in the 2.4 GHz band. There are three power classes and it's these power classes which are your best indicator as to what level of Bluetooth radiation you're exposing yourself to :

Class 1 transmitters '-- are the most powerful, have a range of 100 meters and peak transmission power of 100 mW (milliwatt)

Class 2 transmitters '-- are usually found in mobile devices and they have a range of 10 meters and operate at 2.5 mW peak transmission power

Class 3 transmitters '-- these are the weakest and operate in a range of less than 10 meters and have a peak transmission power of 1 mW

So the first thing to do is to check what class of transmitter your Bluetooth headphone is. You should find this information in the manufacturers specification. I say 'should' because it seems some manufacturers deem in unnecessary to share this information. That's why I've done some research on this and listed at the bottom of the page a selection of the 'lower EMF' Bluetooth devices that are on the market.

What about Bluetooth radiation?

The radiation from your Bluetooth earpiece will zap you just the same because Class 1 Bluetooth headsets can expose you to the similar radiation levels to your cell phone if they're operated in close proximity to the body.

What Does Bluetooth Version Mean?Don't confuse Bluetooth version and Bluetooth Class. When looking at Bluetooth devices you'll often see terms like ''Bluetooth V2.1 compliant'' or ''Bluetooth version 3.0''. This tells you the Bluetooth software the device uses but Bluetooth version has nothing to do with Bluetooth class.

Bluetooth versions are all about offering enhanced data speeds. These data speeds are improving all the time as the technology evolves. Bluetooth version 1.0, the earliest Bluetooth version, offers a data transmission rate of 721 kbit/s. Version 3.0 HS offers a transmission rate of 24 Mbit/s. There's no correlation between Bluetooth version and Class.

Is a Bluetooth version with a lower transmission rate safer? It's possible but we don't know. There are no studies on this so we're pretty much in the dark.

What Does Science Say About Bluetooth Radiation?The science on this issue can seem confusing. The problem is there is a huge amount of funding bias and outright manipulation of the science in order to publish studies which show favorable results. The cellphone industry is ready to spend a considerable amount of money to protect its interests. Various studies support (American Cancer Society 2008, Martinez & Burdalow 2009) the view that Bluetooth headsets when used in conjunction with cellphones decrease the overall levels of SAR exposure to the head. Whereas other studies show a diversity of hazards from these exposures.

One study found that , ''men who keep cell phones in a trouser pocket in the talk mode while using a Bluetooth device may experience decreased fertility''. High-frequency electromagnetic fields can lead to a significant increase in blood pressure and affect biological processes in the body just the same as cell phones. Just two hours of exposure to high-frequency EMFs from a cell phone or Bluetooth headset, can cause irreparable DNA damage.

So to answer your questions Craig:

Does Bluetooth Drastically Reduce My Radiation Exposures Compared To Having The Cell Phone Against My Head?Not necessarily. Research shows that Bluetooth devices that fit in or around the ear typically have a Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) of 0.23 watts per kilogram (W/Kg). Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) is the rate at which your body absorbs radiation. Compare this average Bluetooth SAR level with any website that shows cell phone SAR levels and you'll find that some Bluetooth devices are worse than some of the low SAR cell phones.

In theory a Bluetooth device does drastically cut down radiation exposure compared to having the cell phone next to your ear if you could be sure that you were only exposing yourself to Bluetooth radiation. The problem is that when you use a Bluetooth headset that the transmission strength from the cell phone itself is not decreased. If for instance you are putting the phone in your pocket or clipping it to your belt then you are at the same time exposing your internal organs to radiation.

The Swiss Federal Office of public health recommends that cell phones should not be carried in a front trouser pocket when making calls and that it may be safest to hold the phone away from the body to reduce radiation. Studies (Whittow 2008) have also found that metallic objects situated near your waistline, such as coins, a belt buckle, rings, keys etc increased the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) in the body at different frequencies.

Two other points are worth noting here:

Bluetooth devices do not require measuring and reporting of the SAR values. So we're kept completely in the dark as to possible radiation absorption levels.The SAR measure is not a reliable safety standard. Click here to better understand this.Does The Radiation Transmit Up The Headphone Cable That's Physically Plugged Into The Phone?Yes, it can. The headphone can act as a sort of antenna for your cell phone giving the radiation a fast route into your brain. The science is sketchy on this but in my view, having tried wired headphones, they are not the solution to reducing your radiation exposure. This is now widely accepted and yet wired headphones continue to be sold by the boatload to the population at large.

To overcome the antenna effect of wired headphones use an airtube hands-free kit.

Do You Have A Chart That Contrasts/Compares Methods Of Getting The Most Sound To My Ears With The Least Radiation?I don't know of any comparative resource on this topic but to answer your question, ''what's the best way to reduce radiation when listening to streaming audio on a cell phone?''. Remember: distance is your friend .

In other words, avoid holding your cell phone next to your ear at all costs. If you do need to hold a cell phone next to your ear a Pong case can reduce your exposure.

Do cell chips offer protection from cell phone radiation?I've tried cell phone chips, diodes and neutralizers from many different suppliers. None of the devices I've tried worked. In some cases using these devices can be more dangerous than not using them.

Low EMF Bluetooth HeadsetsDespite reading all of the above if you're still committed to using a Bluetooth headset where does this leave you?

To determine how dangerous a Bluetooth device is, the best information we have to go on is the power classification, or the Class.

The worst offenders are Class 1 headsets. There are quite a few of these on the market, for instance the Callpod Dragon is a Class 1 Bluetooth headset and therefore to be avoided if radiation exposures are your main concern.

In an ideal world you'd use a Class 3 headset, which are the lowest powered headsets and therefore the safest. Unfortunately because most people's top priority is having a good strong signal Class 3 headsets are a relic of the past. That leaves us with the Class 2s.

The problem is the power classification of a headset takes some rooting out. The manufacturers are very 'low profile' about sharing this information. I've tried contacting a few of them '' most of them don't reply and the one's that do often don't know what I'm talking about.

Nevertheless I've rooted some out. Click here to see my listing of Class 2 Bluetooth headsets.

Conclusion '' Are Bluetooth Head Sets Dangerous?The frequency of Bluetooth wireless headsets is the same as that of microwave ovens. Microwave ovens use much higher power levels. But the power levels themselves are not the issue. Its the rate of change of the EMFs, the pulsing, that causes most of the biological damage. Bluetooth radiation is dangerous.

Bluetooth headsets are particularly dangerous because they are held within centimeters of the brain and they are used in conjunction with a cell phone. So you're getting double exposure. If you use Bluetooth in a car the effects are multiplied due to the Faraday cage effect.

So Craig, the bottom line is avoid Bluetooth headsets. Avoid Bluetooth radiation and practice safe cell phone use.

Some people are electrically sensitive, they can feel the effects of these exposures. But don't think that because you can't feel anything that you're not being affected by Bluetooth radiation and similar exposures. This is not what the studies are saying.

If you're not clear about the dangers of EMF to your health you might be interested in reading my extensive review of the scientific research.

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Archived Version

Sun, 10 May 2020 04:47

F or a few fleeting moments during New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday, the somber grimace that has filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something resembling a smile.

''We are ready, we're all-in,'' the governor gushed. ''We are New Yorkers, so we're aggressive about it, we're ambitious about it. '... We realize that change is not only imminent, but it can actually be a friend if done the right way.''

The inspiration for these uncharacteristically good vibes was a video visit from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joined the governor's briefing to announce that he will be heading up a blue-ribbon commission to reimagine New York state's post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.

''The first priorities of what we're trying to do,'' Schmidt said, ''are focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband. '... We need to look for solutions that can be presented now, and accelerated, and use technology to make things better.'' Lest there be any doubt that the former Google chair's goals were purely benevolent, his video background featured a framed pair of golden angel wings.

Just one day earlier, Cuomo had announced a similar partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop ''a smarter education system.'' Calling Gates a ''visionary,'' Cuomo said the pandemic has created ''a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates's] ideas '... all these buildings, all these physical classrooms '-- why with all the technology you have?'' he asked, apparently rhetorically.

It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent Pandemic Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the ''Screen New Deal.'' Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent '-- and highly profitable '-- no-touch future.

Anuja Sonalker, CEO of Steer Tech, a Maryland-based company selling self-parking technology, recently summed up the new virus-personalized pitch. ''There has been a distinct warming up to human-less, contactless technology,'' she said. ''Humans are biohazards, machines are not.''

It's a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor's offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails. Of course, for many of us, those same homes were already turning into our never-off workplaces and our primary entertainment venues before the pandemic, and surveillance incarceration ''in the community'' was already booming. But in the future under hasty construction, all of these trends are poised for a warp-speed acceleration.

This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screen ''shared'' on a mediated platform. It's a future that employs far fewer teachers, doctors, and drivers. It accepts no cash or credit cards (under guise of virus control) and has skeletal mass transit and far less live art. It's a future that claims to be run on ''artificial intelligence'' but is actually held together by tens of millions of anonymous workers tucked away in warehouses, data centers, content moderation mills, electronic sweatshops, lithium mines, industrial farms, meat-processing plants, and prisons, where they are left unprotected from disease and hyperexploition. It's a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable, and data-mineable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants.

If all of this sounds familiar it's because, pre-Covid, this precise app-driven, gig-fueled future was being sold to us in the name of convenience, frictionlessness, and personalization. But many of us had concerns. About the security, quality, and inequity of telehealth and online classrooms. About driverless cars mowing down pedestrians and drones smashing packages (and people). About location tracking and cash-free commerce obliterating our privacy and entrenching racial and gender discrimination. About unscrupulous social media platforms poisoning our information ecology and our kids' mental health. About ''smart cities'' filled with sensors supplanting local government. About the good jobs these technologies wiped out. About the bad jobs they mass produced.

And most of all, we had concerns about the democracy-threatening wealth and power accumulated by a handful of tech companies that are masters of abdication '-- eschewing all responsibility for the wreckage left behind in the fields they now dominate, whether media, retail, or transportation.

That was the ancient past known as February. Today, a great many of those well-founded concerns are being swept away by a tidal wave of panic, and this warmed-over dystopia is going through a rush-job rebranding. Now, against a harrowing backdrop of mass death, it is being sold to us on the dubious promise that these technologies are the only possible way to pandemic-proof our lives, the indispensable keys to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe.

It's a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor's offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails.

Thanks to Cuomo and his various billionaire partnerships (including one with Michael Bloomberg for testing and tracing), New York state is being positioned as the gleaming showroom for this grim future '-- but the ambitions reach far beyond the borders of any one state or country.

And at the dead center of it all is Eric Schmidt. Well before Americans understood the threat of Covid-19, Schmidt had been on an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign pushing precisely the ''Black Mirror'' vision of society that Cuomo has just empowered him to build. At the heart of this vision is seamless integration of government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants '-- with public schools, hospitals, doctor's offices, police, and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to private tech companies.

It's a vision Schmidt has been advancing in his roles as chair of the Defense Innovation Board, which advises the Department of Defense on increased use of artificial intelligence in the military, and as chair of the powerful National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, or NSCAI, which advises Congress on ''advances in artificial intelligence, related machine learning developments, and associated technologies,'' with the goal of addressing ''the national and economic security needs of the United States, including economic risk.'' Both boards are crowded with powerful Silicon Valley CEOS and top executives from companies including Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and of course, Schmidt's colleagues at Google.

Eric Schmidt, executive chair of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, speaks during a National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence conference on Nov. 5, 2019 in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

A s chair, Schmidt, who still holds more than $5.3 billion in shares of Alphabet (Google's parent company), as well as large investments in other tech firms, has essentially been running a Washington-based shakedown on behalf of Silicon Valley. The main purpose of the two boards is to call for exponential increases in government spending on research into artificial intelligence and on tech-enabling infrastructure like 5G '-- investments that would directly benefit the companies in which Schmidt and other members of these boards have extensive holdings.

First in closed-door presentations to lawmakers and later in public-facing op-eds and interviews, the thrust of Schmidt's argument has been that since the Chinese government is willing to spend limitless public money building the infrastructure of high-tech surveillance, while allowing Chinese tech companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Huawei to pocket the profits from commercial applications, the U.S.'s dominant position in the global economy is on the precipice of collapsing.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center recently got access through a Freedom of Information Act request to a presentation made by Schmidt's NSCAI one year ago, in May 2019. Its slides make a series of alarmist claims about how China's relatively lax regulatory infrastructure and its bottomless appetite for surveillance are causing it to pull ahead of the U.S. in a number of fields, including ''AI for medical diagnosis,'' autonomous vehicles, digital infrastructure, ''smart cities,'' ride-sharing, and cashless commerce.

The reasons given for China's competitive edge are myriad, ranging from the sheer volume of consumers who shop online; ''the lack of legacy banking systems in China,'' which has allowed it to leapfrog over cash and credit cards and unleash ''a huge e-commerce and digital services market'' using ''digital payments''; and a severe doctor shortage, which has led the government to work closely with tech companies like Tencent to use AI for ''predictive'' medicine. The slides note that in China, tech companies ''have the authority to quickly clear regulatory barriers while American initiatives are mired in HIPPA compliance and FDA approval.''

Image: NSCAI

More than any other factor, however, the NSCAI points to China's willingness to embrace public-private partnerships in mass surveillance and data collection as a reason for its competitive edge. The presentation touts China's ''Explicit government support and involvement e.g. facial recognition deployment.'' It argues that ''surveillance is one of the 'first-and-best customers' for Al'' and further, that ''mass surveillance is a killer application for deep learning.''

A slide titled ''State Datasets: Surveillance = Smart Cities'' notes that China, along with Google's main Chinese competitor, Alibaba, are racing ahead.

Image: NSCAI

This is notable because Google's parent company Alphabet has been pushing this precise vision through its Sidewalk Labs division, choosing a large portion of Toronto's waterfront as its ''smart city'' prototype. But the Toronto project was just shut down after two years of ceaseless controversy relating to the enormous amounts of personal data that Alphabet would collect, a lack of privacy protections, and questionable benefits for the city as a whole.

Five months after this presentation, in November, NSCAI issued an interim report to Congress further raising the alarm about the need for the U.S. to match China's adaptation of these controversial technologies. ''We are in a strategic competition,'' states the report, obtained via FOIA by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. ''AI will be at the center. The future of our national security and economy are at stake.''

By late February, Schmidt was taking his campaign to the public, perhaps understanding that the budget increases his board was calling for could not be approved without a great deal more buy-in. In a New York Times op-ed headlined ''I used to Run Google. Silicon Valley Could Lose to China,'' Schmidt called for ''unprecedented partnerships between government and industry'' and, once again, sounding the yellow peril alarm:

A.I. will open new frontiers in everything from biotechnology to banking, and it is also a Defense Department priority. '... If current trends continue, China's overall investments in research and development are expected to surpass those of the United States within 10 years, around the same time its economy is projected to become larger than ours.

Unless these trends change, in the 2030s we will be competing with a country that has a bigger economy, more research and development investments, better research, wider deployment of new technologies and stronger computing infrastructure. '... Ultimately, the Chinese are competing to become the world's leading innovators, and the United States is not playing to win.

The only solution, for Schmidt, was a gusher of public money. Praising the White House for requesting a doubling of research funding in AI and quantum information science, he wrote: ''We should plan to double funding in those fields again as we build institutional capacity in labs and research centers. '... At the same time, Congress should meet the president's request for the highest level of defense R & D funding in over 70 years, and the Defense Department should capitalize on that resource surge to build breakthrough capabilities in A.I., quantum, hypersonics and other priority technology areas.''

That was exactly two weeks before the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic, and there was no mention that a goal of this vast, high-tech expansion was to protect American health. Only that it was necessary to avoid being outcompeted by China. But, of course, that would soon change.

In the two months since, Schmidt has put these preexisting demands '-- for massive public expenditures on high-tech research and infrastructure, for a slew of ''public-private partnerships'' in AI, and for the loosening of myriad privacy and safety protections '-- through an aggressive rebranding exercise. Now all of these measures (and more) are being sold to the public as our only possible hope of protecting ourselves from a novel virus that will be with us for years to come.

And the tech companies to which Schmidt has deep ties, and which populate the influential advisory boards he chairs, have all repositioned themselves as benevolent protectors of public health and munificent champions of ''everyday hero'' essential workers (many of whom, like delivery drivers, would lose their jobs if these companies get their way). Less than two weeks into New York state's lockdown, Schmidt wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that both set the new tone and made clear that Silicon Valley had every intention of leveraging the crisis for a permanent transformation.

Like other Americans, technologists are trying to do their part to support the front-line pandemic response. '...

But every American should be asking where we want the nation to be when the Covid-19 pandemic is over. How could the emerging technologies being deployed in the current crisis propel us into a better future? '... Companies like Amazon know how to supply and distribute efficiently. They will need to provide services and advice to government officials who lack the computing systems and expertise.

We should also accelerate the trend toward remote learning, which is being tested today as never before. Online, there is no requirement of proximity, which allows students to get instruction from the best teachers, no matter what school district they reside in. '...

The need for fast, large-scale experimentation will also accelerate the biotech revolution. '... Finally, the country is long overdue for a real digital infrastructure'.... If we are to build a future economy and education system based on tele-everything, we need a fully connected population and ultrafast infrastructure. The government must make a massive investment'--perhaps as part of a stimulus package'--to convert the nation's digital infrastructure to cloud-based platforms and link them with a 5G network.

Indeed Schmidt has been relentless in pursuing this vision. Two weeks after that op-ed appeared, he described the ad-hoc homeschooling programing that teachers and families across the country had been forced to cobble together during this public health emergency as ''a massive experiment in remote learning.'' The goal of this experiment, he said, was ''trying to find out: How do kids learn remotely? And with that data we should be able to build better remote and distance learning tools which, when combined with the teacher '... will help kids learn better.'' During this same video call, hosted by the Economic Club of New York, Schmidt also called for more telehealth, more 5G, more digital commerce, and the rest of the preexisting wish list. All in the name of fighting the virus.

His most telling comment, however, was this: ''The benefit of these corporations, which we love to malign, in terms of the ability to communicate, the ability to deal with health, the ability to get information, is profound. Think about what your life would be like in America without Amazon.'' He added that people should ''be a little bit grateful that these companies got the capital, did the investment, built the tools that we're using now, and have really helped us out.''

Associate professor Carol Dysinger, right, of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts conducts her weekly remote-learning class for the graduate school filmmaking students on April 9, 2020 at her apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

I t's a reminder that, until very recently, public pushback against these companies was surging. Presidential candidates were openly discussing breaking up big tech. Amazon was forced to pull its plans for a New York headquarters because of fierce local opposition. Google's Sidewalk Labs project was in perennial crisis, and Google's own workers were refusing to build surveillance tech with military applications.

In short, democracy '-- inconvenient public engagement in the designing of critical institutions and public spaces '-- was turning out to be the single greatest obstacle to the vision Schmidt was advancing, first from his perch at the top of Google and Alphabet and then as chair of two powerful boards advising Congress and Department of Defense. As the NSCAI documents reveal, this inconvenient exercise of power by members of the public and by tech workers inside these mega-firms, has, from the perspective of men like Schmidt and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, maddeningly slowed down the AI arms race, keeping fleets of potentially deadly driverless cars and trucks off the roads, protecting private health records from becoming a weapon used by employers against workers, preventing urban spaces from being blanketing with facial recognition software, and much more.

Now, in the midst of the carnage of this ongoing pandemic, and the fear and uncertainty about the future it has brought, these companies clearly see their moment to sweep out all that democratic engagement. To have the same kind of power as their Chinese competitors, who have the luxury of functioning without being hampered by intrusions of either labor or civil rights.

All of this is moving very fast. The Australian government has contracted with Amazon to store the data for its controversial coronavirus tracking app. The Canadian government has contracted with Amazon to deliver medical equipment, raising questions about why it bypassed the public postal service. And in just a few short days in early May, Alphabet has spun up a new Sidewalk Labs initiative to remake urban infrastructure with $400 million in seed capital. Josh Marcuse, executive director of the Defense Innovation Board that Schmidt chairs, announced that he was leaving that job to work full-time at Google as head of strategy and innovation for global public sector, meaning that he will be helping Google to cash in on some of the many opportunities he and Schmidt have been busily creating with their lobbying.

Democracy '-- inconvenient public engagement in the designing of critical institutions and public spaces '-- has been the single greatest obstacle to the vision Schmidt has been advancing.

To be clear, technology is most certainly a key part of how we must protect public health in the coming months and years. The question is: Will that technology be subject to the disciplines of democracy and public oversight, or will it be rolled out in state-of-exception frenzy, without asking critical questions that will shape our lives for decades to come? Questions like, for instance: If we are indeed seeing how critical digital connectivity is in times of crisis, should these networks, and our data, really be in the hands of private players like Google, Amazon, and Apple? If public funds are paying for so much of it, should the public also own and control it? If the internet is essential for so much in our lives, as it clearly is, should it be treated as a nonprofit public utility?

And while there is no doubt that the ability to teleconference has been a lifeline in this period of lockdown, there are serious debates to be had about whether our more lasting protections are distinctly more human. Take education. Schmidt is right that overcrowded classrooms present a health risk, at least until we have a vaccine. So how about hiring double the number of teachers and cutting class size in half? How about making sure that every school has a nurse?

That would create much-needed jobs in a depression-level unemployment crisis and give everyone in the learning environment more elbow room. If buildings are too crowded, how about dividing the day into shifts, and having more outdoor education, drawing on the plentiful research that shows that time in nature enhances children's capacity to learn?

Introducing those kinds of changes would be hard, to be sure. But they are not nearly as risky as giving up on the tried-and-true technology of trained humans teaching younger humans face-to-face, in groups where they learn to socialize with one another to boot.

Upon learning of New York state's new partnership with the Gates Foundation, Andy Pallotta, president of New York State United Teachers, was quick to react: ''If we want to reimagine education, let's start with addressing the need for social workers, mental health counselors, school nurses, enriching arts courses, advanced courses and smaller class sizes in school districts across the state,'' he said. A coalition of parents' groups also pointed out that if they had indeed been living an ''experiment in remote learning'' (as Schmidt put it), then the results were deeply worrying: ''Since the schools were shut down in mid-March, our understanding of the profound deficiencies of screen-based instruction has only grown.''

Staff members at Woodlin Elementary School distribute computers to parents of Montgomery County students on March 26, 2020 in Silver Spring, Md.

Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

I n addition to the obvious class and race biases against children who lack internet access and home computers (problems that tech companies are eager to be paid to solve with massive tech buys), there are big questions about whether remote teaching can serve many kids with disabilities, as required by law. And there is no technological solution to the problem of learning in a home environment that is overcrowded and/or abusive.

The issue is not whether schools must change in the face of a highly contagious virus for which we have neither cure nor inoculation. Like every institution where humans gather in groups, they will change. The trouble, as always in these moments of collective shock, is the absence of public debate about what those changes should look like and whom they should benefit. Private tech companies or students?

We face real and hard choices between investing in humans and investing in technology. Because the brutal truth is that, as it stands, we are very unlikely to do both.

The same questions need to be asked about health. Avoiding doctor's offices and hospitals during a pandemic makes good sense. But telehealth misses a huge amount. So we need to have an evidence-based debate about the pros and cons of spending scarce public resources on telehealth '-- versus on more trained nurses, equipped with all the necessary protective equipment, who are able to make house calls to diagnose and treat patients in their homes. And perhaps most urgently, we need to get the balance right between virus tracking apps, which with the proper privacy protections have a role to play, and the calls for a Community Health Corps that would put millions of Americans to work not only doing contact tracing but making sure that everyone has the material resources and support they need to quarantine safely.

In each case, we face real and hard choices between investing in humans and investing in technology. Because the brutal truth is that, as it stands, we are very unlikely to do both. The refusal to transfer anything like the needed resources to states and cities in successive federal bailouts means that the coronavirus health crisis is now slamming headlong into a manufactured austerity crisis. Public schools, universities, hospitals, and transit are facing existential questions about their futures. If tech companies win their ferocious lobbying campaign for remote learning, telehealth, 5G, and driverless vehicles '-- their Screen New Deal '-- there simply won't be any money left over for urgent public priorities, never mind the Green New Deal that our planet urgently needs.

On the contrary: The price tag for all the shiny gadgets will be mass teacher layoffs and hospital closures.

Tech provides us with powerful tools, but not every solution is technological. And the trouble with outsourcing key decisions about how to ''reimagine'' our states and cities to men like Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt is that they have spent their lives demonstrating the belief that there is no problem that technology cannot fix.

For them, and many others in Silicon Valley, the pandemic is a golden opportunity to receive not just the gratitude, but the deference and power that they feel has been unjustly denied. And Andrew Cuomo, by putting the former Google chair in charge of the body that will shape the state's reopening, appears to have just given him something close to free reign.

This is the first installment in an ongoing series about the shock doctrine and disaster capitalism in the age of Covid-19.

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Sun, 10 May 2020 05:09

Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates is among the first investors in a new start-up aiming to build, launch and operate a collection of satellites that will deliver real-time video of the entire planet.

In April, Bellevue, Washington-based EarthNow announced its first round of funding raised from French aeronautical company Airbus, Japanese multinational conglomerate SoftBank Group and OneWeb founder Greg Wyler, in addition to Gates. The amount of the raise was not disclosed.

The start-up, founded in 2017, will deploy a "constellation" of advanced imaging satellites, which will provide real-time, continuous video of "almost" anywhere on Earth, according to an April written statement announcing the fundraise.

Eventually, EarthNow will even provide instant access to the footage of the Earth from a smartphone or tablet.

"We are excited by the prospect of giving everyone a stunningly-beautiful real-time window on your world from space. With EarthNow, we will all become virtual astronauts," says founder and CEO Russell Hannigan in a statement.

EarthNow founder and CEO, Russell Hannigan

Photo courtesy EarthNow

While current satellites are able to share visuals of Earth, they take "many minutes, hours and even days" to deliver images, according to the EarthNow website.

"With EarthNow's constellation of satellites, you will see events unfold as they happen," says Hannigan. Images will be available to users in as little as one second, says the website.

Combined with image enhancement techniques, the full color footage will be clear enough to track events from one horizon to another and users will be able to zoom in on a particular location for closer detail, the EarthNow website says.

At night, users will be able to see the lights from buildings in towns and cities, traffic on roads, lights from ships at sea, forest fires and lightening.

However, to protect individual privacy, the resolution will not allow a user to see any one specific person.

The footage will first be available to governments and business customers. Use cases of the EarthNow real-time data include catching illegal fishermen, monitoring hurricanes and typhoons as they develop, knowing when volcanoes erupt, tracking whale migration patterns, measuring the health of crops, observing conflict zones for quicker response times, according to the website.

The satellites will also have "machine intelligence," meaning they can "interpret" what they are seeing to aid in surveillance, the website says.

They are the first "lowcost, high-performance satellites [created] for mass-production," according to a statement from OneWeb founder and executive chairman, Greg Wyler, and will "help humanity understand and manage its impact on Earth."

Each one weighs approximately 500 pounds and the system is estimated to cost more than $1 billion, Hannigan told the Wall Street Journal.

The satellites will be deployed in stages, with the goal being "100% pole-to-pole global coverage," the website says. No time frame was provided.

EarthNow plans to create a more mass-market product that will provide instant access to real-time footage of the Earth to smart-device users.

Access to that kind of data naturally brings up privacy concerns. EarthNow says it will operate within the law.

"Privacy is fundamental to EarthNow," the start-up says on its website. "We will hire a 'Chief Privacy Officer' to ensure that we not only meet the privacy laws in jurisdictions where we operate, but also that we respect societal privacy. We will work closely with governments and the public at large to address privacy concerns, while providing visual Earth coverage for the benefit of humanity and our planet."

The satellites, developed by OneWeb, will be mass produced by Airbus in Toulouse, France and Florida, according to the written statement.

EarthNow is a spin-off of Intellectual Ventures, a business that helps inventors find a market for their inventions.

See also:

Microsoft exec turned founder: 6 things you need to know if you want to ditch corporate life for a start-upBill and Melinda Gates: This is why we give our billions awayBill Gates: 'A.I. can be our friend'Like this story? Like CNBC Make It on Facebook.

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Sun, 10 May 2020 05:45

Pedestrians pass in front of the Salesforce Tower in New York.

Victor J. Blue | Bloomberg | Getty Images

New York City is partnering with Salesforce to build the city's coronavirus contact tracing program, designed to track down and test everyone who's come into contact with anyone who tests positive for Covid-19, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Friday.

Salesforce will deploy a call center as well as a customer relationship and case management system that will help the city track potential cases and isolate people before they become sick, he said. The partnership will be "up and running" by the end of May, he said.

"It will allow us to track every case, analyze the data constantly, keep the right information on each and every case, manage the whole process efficiently," de Blasio said. "This is going to be a huge effort, just think how it grows and grows over the weeks, but it's something that if we do right continually will constrain this disease."

De Blasio announced that the city is implementing a "test and trace corps" that will be tasked with testing New Yorkers for the infection and tracing all cases and contacts of known positive infections.

The goal is to hire 2,500 public health "foot soldiers" by June, who will be trained using the contact tracing program led by former Mayor Mike Bloomberg in partnership with Johns Hopkins University. There have been nearly 7,000 applications for the program already, de Blasio said.

A spokesperson for Salesforce confirmed the company's partnership but didn't provide any further details.

In late April, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo tapped Bloomberg to head the state's contact tracing program. Bloomberg said his team is developing three smartphone apps to help the state trace every person who comes into contact with someone infected with Covid-19.

Cuomo has said the state will need to hire at least 30 contact tracers per 100,000 people in order to begin reopening the state's economy.

New York City has struggled to ramp up its testing capacity and has relied on social distancing measures to contain the outbreak. De Blasio has said that widespread testing and tracing of people who come into contact with infected individuals will be crucial to easing restrictions and reopening the city.

Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot said that nearly 1 million New York City residents have been exposed to the coronavirus, which is well above the number of confirmed cases.

The city has had to prioritize who gets tested, favoring those who are sick enough to be in the hospital, Barbot said.

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Sat, 09 May 2020 13:37

As the Wuhan coronavirus continues to spread, stay at home orders have shut down commerce in many parts of the world. Some have predicted a 40% contraction in the U.S. economy in the 2nd quarter of 2020. This means that China's economy, heavily dependent upon exports, will see no economic rebound for quite some time. In the mean time, the Trump administration has ''turbocharged'' its effort to relocate global supply chains from China to markets less hostile to the West.

The Epoch Times reports that China's manufacturing industries have completely imploded:

Chinese factories are ramping up production as the country struggles to get back on its feet from the pandemic-induced recession. Around 80 percent of the small and medium-sized businesses, and nearly all large firms have returned to work, according to China's commerce authorities. But analyses of recent data from the country suggests a quick rebound is nowhere in sight.

Export orders, including to China's top export markets of the United States and Europe, have shriveled up as the virus shatters the world economy and workforces continue to shrink, and companies are uncertain about the outlook ahead.

The China Beige Book, a project to collect data on commercial activity in China, says that reopening the nation's factories has come in fits and starts:

The good news is that almost all '-- 91% '-- of the more than 500 Chinese companies surveyed had reopened by late April, and about three-quarters were working on-site again, but just 42% were able to operate at more than half their capacity.

Worse, demand for goods and services from Chinese companies has plummeted. Foreign orders have fallen more than twice as fast as domestic ones, with orders from the U.S. contracting the most among China's major trading partners.

Crucially, 81% of executives at surveyed companies said they're worried about a resurgence of the coronavirus in the next three months. And 69% say April's tepid pace of economic activity may be ''as good as it gets'' for the next several months.

This follows news from February and March that China had its worst quarter ever in the first quarter of 2020.

This gives the Trump administration more ammunition in its attempts to move global supply chains away from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Reuters reported on Sunday:

Now, economic destruction and the massive U.S. coronavirus death toll are driving a government-wide push to move U.S. production and supply chain dependency away from China, even if it goes to other more friendly nations instead, current and former senior U.S. administration officials said.

''We've been working on [reducing the reliance of our supply chains in China] over the last few years but we are now turbo-charging that initiative,'' Keith Krach, undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment at the U.S. State Department told Reuters.

The report describes a ''whole-of-government'' effort in which free trade advocates seem to be losing their struggle with China hawks inside the administration. Citing national security concerns, many departments have joined in the process to figure out how to incentivize U.S. firms to move their operations out of the Chinese mainland. Options reportedly include 'reshoring' subsidies, tax incentives, developing closer ties to Taiwan, and ever higher tariffs on goods produced in China.

The United States is pushing to create an alliance of ''trusted partners'' dubbed the ''Economic Prosperity Network,'' one official said. It would include companies and civil society groups operating under the same set of standards on everything from digital business, energy and infrastructure to research, trade, education and commerce, he said.

The U.S. government is working with Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Vietnam to ''move the global economy forward,'' Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said April 29.

These discussions include ''how we restructure '... supply chains to prevent something like this from ever happening again,'' Pompeo said.

Industry groups have pushed back, noting that constructing new manufacturing facilities could take years. The winds appear to be shifting away from the CCP, however, as the world reacts to their documented record of deception regarding the COVID-19 that they caused and subsequently covered up. Momentum could easily lead to a consolidation of efforts to punish the CCP in economic and political ways.

Jeff Reynolds is the author of the book, ''Behind the Curtain: Inside the Network of Progressive Billionaires and Their Campaign to Undermine Democracy,'' available now at www.WhoOwnsTheDems.com. Jeff hosts a podcast at anchor.fm/BehindTheCurtain. You can follow him on Twitter @ChargerJeff.

Editor's Note: Want to support PJ Media so we can keep telling the truth about China and the virus they unleashed on the world? Join PJ Media VIP and use the promo code WUHAN to get 25% off your VIP membership.

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Sat, 09 May 2020 13:41

Editor's note: Andrew Korybko is a Moscow-based American political analyst. The article reflects the author's opinion, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The U.S. information warfare campaign against China has drastically intensified after an American government report accused China of covering up the severity of its COVID-19 outbreak. It was entirely predictable that the U.S.-weaponized narrative would eventually reach that extreme, but what's less widely understood is the reason why it's doing all of this in the first place. It's true that the country wants to distract from its failure in properly defending itself from the virus, but there might be a lot more to it than just that.

Secretary of State Pompeo spoke last week about the U.S. plans to shift supply chains away from China, specifically mentioning how it intends to cooperate with Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, and Vietnam to that end. This group of countries can be described as the Quad+ since it includes that framework's traditional American, Australian, Indian, and Japanese members alongside their three very close partners of New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, and Vietnam.

A report from Reuters on Monday added some additional insight into the role that the U.S. envisages the Quad+ playing vis-a-vis China. Titled "Trump administration pushing to rip global supply chains from China: officials", the piece quotes an unnamed official who spoke about America's plans to create a so-called "Economic Prosperity Network," which the outlet connected to Pompeo's aforementioned speech highlighting the six countries that the U.S. intends to work most closely with when it comes to restructuring global supply chains.

People wearing face masks wait outside a beauty salon and check cashing facility as COVID-19 continues to spread, Detroit, Michigan, the U.S., April 25, 2020. /Reuters

People wearing face masks wait outside a beauty salon and check cashing facility as COVID-19 continues to spread, Detroit, Michigan, the U.S., April 25, 2020. /Reuters

With this in mind, the U.S. information warfare campaign against China takes on an entirely new meaning. Instead of just being an attempt to distract the public from the Trump administration's failure to properly defend Americans from COVID-19 despite having had approximately a quarter of a year to do so since China informed the world about this danger at the end of last year, it can now be understood through the prism of "justifying" the creation of the "Economic Prosperity Network" and giving it an urgent impetus.

To explain, China's central role in the pre-coronavirus global supply chains was a natural development that followed the logic of globalization. The laws of economics strongly suggest that this will remain unchanged even after the pandemic ends for that very same reason, unless of course there's political interference to change that trajectory. The U.S. is attempting to do just that through its anti-Chinese information warfare campaign that's intended to manufacture the basis upon which it and others can demand "reparations."

It's unrealistic to expect China to behave like the losers of the two world wars from the last century by shelling out billions of dollars' worth of compensation when it hasn't been defeated in any conflict nor has any moral reason to do so after also suffering just like everyone else did from COVID-19. Rather, the purpose of pushing these demands is to subsequently use them as the "justification" for imposing more tariffs, first by the U.S. and then afterwards by its partners. These can in turn make it more costly for them to continue trading with China.

The intended cumulative effect of doing so is to restructure global supply chains away from China and towards the countries of the "Economic Prosperity Network" by manipulating the laws of economics through the U.S. political interference that's being portrayed as a "response" to the conspiracy theory alleging that China covered up the severity of its COVID-19 outbreak. In other words, the anti-Chinese infowar is actually driven by long-term economic interests, not just reactionary rhetoric to distract the masses.

That said, it'll be extremely difficult for the U.S. to establish its "Economic Prosperity Network" since it arguably involves much more risk than simply keeping things the way they are after the pandemic ends. The number of moving parts associated with this plan on both the government and private sector levels is intimidating and means that it's a lot easier for everything to go wrong than to succeed. As such, this strategy seems to be more of a grandiose delusion by the American president than any feasible plan, increasing the chances that it'll fail.

(If you want to contribute and have specific expertise, please contact us at opinions@cgtn.com.)

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sat, 09 May 2020 13:53

Delay cost the world 4 to 6 weeks: BND China's Xi Jinping (right) with WHO chief Tedros China's Xi Jinping (right) with WHO chief Tedros (AP photo)

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) '' Chinese leader Xi Jinping (ç'è‘å¹") asked World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to suppress news about the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, the German intelligence agency BND found, according to a report by German magazine Der Spiegel.

During a conversation on Jan. 21, Xi reportedly asked Tedros not to announce that the virus could be transmitted between humans and to delay any declaration of a coronavirus pandemic.

It took until the end of January before the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak needed to receive international attention. Because of China's delay, the world wasted four to six weeks it could have used better to counter the virus from spreading, the BND concluded.

Germany's Robert Koch Institute also said that China failed to reveal all relevant information at the outset of the epidemic, leading it to turn to the BND for advice, according to a report in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung quoted by CNA.

In a response to the German media reports, Chinese diplomats said the opposite was true, arguing that the communist country's handling of the virus had saved time which had been wasted by governments in other countries.

No I didn't but I have now, and the article says,

especially under the paragraph "The model" and elsewhere,

that it s a simulation, which is what I was referring to below.

This certainly looks like a poorly written one in that, in addition to

the intentional pseudo-randomness underlying the simulation, there are

additional hardware and configuration dependencies that cause the results to

differ. I would not call these latter random or stochastic in the statistical

sense, because despite its flaws, if the code were run multiple times on the

same hardware in the same configuration with fixed random number seeds, the

results would be identical, at least in single thread mode. Ferguson's

attitude about it is certainly poor., I was responding to what I thought

was your and John's unfamiliarity with the term stochastic and the

implication that results being not-identical and pseudo-random automatically

implies that they would be invalid. Admittedly my response should have

been better informed.

Richard

Link to Article

Archived Version

Fri, 08 May 2020 14:23

By Sanjay Mishra and Robert Carnahan, The Conversation

A century ago, on July 26, 1916, a viral disease swept through New York. Within 24 hours, new cases of polio increased by more than 68%. The outbreak killed more than 2,000 people in New York City alone. Across the United States, polio took the lives of about 6,000 people in 1916, leaving thousands more paralyzed.

Although scientists had already identified the polio virus, it took 50 more years to develop a vaccine. That vaccine eradicated polio in the U.S. in less than a decade. Vaccines are one of the most effective modern disease-fighting tools.

As of this writing, the fast-spreading COVID-19 has already infected about half a million worldwide, and has killed over 22,000 patients. There is an urgent need for a vaccine to prevent it from infecting and killing millions more. But traditional vaccine development takes, on average, 16 years.

So how can scientists quickly develop a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2?

As immunologists, we are trying to expedite development of vaccines and antibody therapeutics. We're currently developing novel vaccine candidates for Zika, and have successfully developed a potential protective antibody-based treatment'--in 90 days'--to stop that viral disease. Fast-track ''sprints'' like these are part of the Pandemic Protection Platform Program run by the Defense Advanced Research Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense to help us identify and deploy protective antibody treatments against viral outbreaks, such as SARS-CoV-2. Now other colleagues of ours are working on expediting a new type of vaccine for COVID-19.

A VACCINE PRIMERA vaccine trains the body's immune system to recognize some signature viral protein called an antigen. SARS-CoV-2, like other coronaviruses, is named for the crown-like spikes on its surface. There are three proteins on the surface of these viruses: the envelope, membrane and spike, which encapsulate a strand of RNA. This RNA molecule holds the genetic instructions that make up the virus.

But viruses do not make their own components. Instead, a coronovirus enters into the lung and possibly other respiratory track cells by attaching through to them via its spike protein. Once inside, the viral RNA becomes part of the host cell's protein production machinery, and produces new copies of viral proteins and RNA which then assemble into thousands of new viruses to spread the disease.

So one way to stop a disease is to block the virus from entering the cells. Vaccines do that by training the body to identify and attack the virus before it can infect healthy human cells.

A vaccine is essentially a pure preparation of one or more key components of the virus'--such as the envelope, spike or a membrane protein'--that is injected in the body to give the immune system a preview of the virus without causing disease. This preview tells the immune system to seek out and attack the virus containing those specific proteins if the real virus ever shows up.

However, developing vaccines based on viral proteins takes anywhere from years, such as for the human papilloma virus, to several decades, such as for rotavirus. Protein-based vaccines require mass production of viral proteins in facilities which can guarantee their purity. Growing the viruses and purifying the proteins at medically acceptable pharmaceutical scales can take years. In fact, for some of recent epidemics, such as AIDS, Zika and Ebola, to date there are no effective vaccines.

THE FAST TRACKTo make an effective vaccine more quickly against never-before-seen, fast-spreading viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, researchers at Vanderbilt and elsewhere are using alternate approaches. In one approach, instead of proteins, a new generation of vaccines, called mRNA vaccines, will carry the molecular instructions to make the protein.

Instead of the standard vaccines where viral proteins are used to immunize, an mRNA vaccine provides a synthetic mRNA of the virus, which the host body then uses to produce the viral proteins itself.

The biggest advantage of the mRNA vaccines is that they can bypass the hassle of producing pure viral proteins, sometimes saving months or years to standardize and ramp up the mass production.

The mRNA vaccines basically mimic the natural infection of the virus, but they contain only a short synthetic version of the viral mRNA which encodes only the antigen protein. Since the mRNA used in vaccination cannot become part of the person's chromosomes, they are safe to use. Such mRNA vaccines would also be safer than the weakened viral or protein-based vaccines because they do not carry the risk of the injected virus becoming active, or a protein contamination.

Using this strategy, biotechnology firm Moderna Inc. announced on Feb. 24 that it had rapidly developed an experimental COVID-19 mRNA vaccine called mRNA-1273, ready for clinical trials in humans. This vaccine candidate is funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The mRNA-1273 encodes for a stable form of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.

The idea of using mRNA to ask the human body to read the instructions and manufacture the viral proteins is not new. Researchers almost two decades ago demonstrated that externally supplied mRNA is translated into the encoded protein. However, mRNA is not a very stable molecule, which prevented those mRNA vaccines from becoming a reality. The mRNA-1273 vaccine being developed today uses chemical modifications to stabilize the mRNA and packages it into an injectable form using liquid nano particles.

RNA-based antibodiesBesides using mRNA as a vaccine, scientists are also using mRNA as a drug that can be given intravenously. In this case the mRNA encodes an antibody protein that is known to attack the virus. So instead of giving the patient a delivery of protein antibodies, physicians could instead give them the mRNA infusion for instructions to make their own copies of disease-fighting antibody proteins.

Effective antibodies can be quickly identified by screening the survivors of a disease. But producing such antibodies for therapy often faces hurdles of poor yields, inefficient purification and incorrect protein modifications.

The effectiveness of such strategy has already been demonstrated by James Crowe's team here at Vanderbilt. In animal studies, an antibody previously isolated from a survivor of Chikungunya, an emergent, mosquito-borne tropical viral infection that causes chronic and debilitating joint pain and arthritis was encoded as an mRNA and given to mice. The mRNA encoded antibody protected mice against infection and virus-associated arthritis, and also created protective antibodies in macaques. The mRNA based antibody is now undergoing clinical trials.

Similarly, specific antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 are being isolated from COVID-19 survivors. The genetic instructions for the most effective anti-coronavirus antibodies can be encoded as mRNA. These mRNA encoded antibodies can be used to treat patients needing urgent care.

While there are several promising new approaches, all of these are still experimental. Our best protection against COVID-19 currently remains prevention and containment of the disease. Until we have a good vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, social distancing and vigilance is our best weapon.

Sanjay Mishra is a postdoctoral scholar of pathology, microbiology and immunology at Vanderbilt University, and Robert Carnahan is an associate professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sat, 09 May 2020 12:38

As the global search for a COVID-19 vaccine accelerates, Canadians are calling for mandatory vaccination measures.

As the COVID-19 virus now counts millions of victims worldwide, and deaths number into the hundreds of thousands '' along with making a secondary casualty of the global economy '' the race to discover and produce a vaccine proceed continues apace around the globe, with a successful vaccine being the world's best chance to stop the virus and return a degree of normality to national and global affairs.

However, health analysts are concerned that large numbers of badly informed citizens with conservative beliefs, refusing to believe in science and accept vaccinations, could thwart the needed herd immunity that makes a broad-scale vaccination program effective.

As a result, calls have come for the vaccination, once tested, available, and safe, to be made mandatory by Canada's federal government.

Canada pledges more than $850M at EU global COVID-19 donor conference. PM @JustinTrudeau says funds will support Canadian medical research and development, international vaccine development, the WHO's work on vaccines, and help for developing countries. #cdnpoli #COVID19

'-- Marc-Andr(C) Cossette (@MarcCossette) May 4, 2020

How Could the Government Regulate the Need for Mass Vaccination?

There are two ways the government could make the vaccine mandatory: criminalization or regulation.

Criminalization is the harsher of the two methods, and would make failure to get the vaccine within a specified of time a criminal offense. Criminal penalties, including fines, probations, or jail time could be applied for a failure to obtain vaccination as mandated by public health authorities.

Just had to unfollow a friend on Facebook. Watched them progress from a health conscious person to an absolutely batshit crazy antivax, Covid 5G conspiracy theorist. The transition was quick, fuelled by misinformed on social media. Quite frightening.

'-- p.Tah (@pTah_XV) May 7, 2020

In contrast. regulation would not make the failure to get the vaccine a criminal offense, but would include other sanctions, including withholding tax refunds, federal benefits such as child tax, employment insurance, and pension, denying the ability to work, and denying a passport to those who put others at risk by failing to be vaccinated. Given the balance between the need for public health and personal liberty, the regulatory approach to mandatory vaccination is seen as the more likely response to the public health crisis.

For those who fail to have their children vaccinated, the state may have a simpler solution in declaring those children wards of the state in need of protective services until such time as they are vaccinated, vaccinating those children, and returning them to parental care. Similarly, seniors might be denied residency in care homes until such time as they are properly vaccinated.

POLL: Are you in favor of mandatory vaccination for children?

READ: https://t.co/h1g2r0MgKY

'-- Manila Bulletin News (@manilabulletin) February 10, 2019

In addition to the COVID-19 pandemic, public health officials have also pointed to the misinformation pandemic causing additional risk to Canadians and global citizens at this difficult time. With conservatives especially susceptible to misinformation and lacking a grounding in fact-based science, government may need to take extraordinary measures to ensure the safety of all Canadians. Mandatory vaccinations may constitute an infringement on Canadians' Charter rights, but such an infringement would be justifiable in a free and democratic society needing to protect its most vulnerable citizens.

For those who do not wish to engage in the social responsibility of properly informing themselves, government is likely to step in to ensure public protection and continued social functioning. The extent to which Canada's government is prepared to take strong and timely measures to protect citizens and the economy remains to be seen, as the race for a vaccine continues around the globe.

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Archived Version

Sun, 10 May 2020 05:22

I

116th CONGRESS

2d Session

H. R. 6666

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

A BILL

To authorize the Secretary of Health and Human Services to award grants to eligible entities to conduct diagnostic testing for COVID''19, and related activities such as contact tracing, through mobile health units and, as necessary, at individuals' residences, and for other purposes.

1.This Act may be cited as the COVID''19 Testing, Reaching, And Contacting Everyone (TRACE) Act .

2. (a)The Secretary of Health and Human Services, acting through the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, may award grants to eligible entities to conduct diagnostic testing for COVID''19, to trace and monitor the contacts of infected individuals, and to support the quarantine of such contacts, through'--

(1)mobile health units; and

(2)as necessary, testing individuals and providing individuals with services related to testing and quarantine at their residences.

(b)A grant recipient under this section may use the grant funds, in support of the activities described in subsection (a)'--

(1)to hire, train, compensate, and pay the expenses of individuals; and

(2)to purchase personal protective equipment and other supplies.

(c)In selecting grant recipients under this section, the Secretary shall give priority to'--

(1)applicants proposing to conduct activities funded under this section in hot spots and medically underserved communities; and

(2)applicants that agree, in hiring individuals to carry out activities funded under this section, to hire residents of the area or community where the activities will primarily occur, with higher priority among applicants described in this paragraph given based on the percentage of individuals to be hired from such area or community.

(d)In selecting grant recipients under this section, the Secretary shall ensure that grants are distributed across urban and rural areas.

(e)Nothing in this section shall be construed to supersede any Federal privacy or confidentiality requirement, including the regulations promulgated under section 264(c) of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (Public Law 104''191 ; 110 Stat. 2033) and section 543 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 290dd''2 ).

(f)In this section:

(1)The term eligible entity means'--

(A)a Federally qualified health center (as defined in section 1861(aa) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395x(aa) ));

(B)a school-based health clinic;

(C)a disproportionate share hospital (as defined under the applicable State plan under title XIX of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1396 et seq.) pursuant to section 1923(a)(1)(A) of such Act (42 U.S.C. 1396r''4 ));

(D)an academic medical center;

(E)a nonprofit organization (including any such faith-based organization);

(F)an institution of higher education (as defined in section 101 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 1001 ));

(G)a high school (as defined in section 8101 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 7801 )); or

(H)any other type of entity that is determined by the Secretary to be an eligible entity for purposes of this section.

(2)The term emergency period has the meaning given to that term in section 1135(g)(1)(B) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1320b''5(g)(1)(B) ).

(3)The term hot spot means a geographic area where the rate of infection with the virus that causes COVID''19 exceeds the national average.

(4)The term medically underserved community has the meaning given to that term in section 799B of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 295p ).

(5)The term Secretary means the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

(g)To carry out this section, there are authorized to be appropriated'--

(1)$100,000,000,000 for fiscal year 2020; and

(2)such sums as may be necessary for each of fiscal year 2021 and any subsequent fiscal year during which the emergency period continues.

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Archived Version

Sun, 10 May 2020 05:25

"When human laws contradict or discountenance the means which are necessary to preserve the essential rights of any society, they defeat the proper end of all laws, and so become null and void." '-- Alexander Hamilton

House proposal HR 6666, "The TRACE Act," ''To authorize the Secretary of Health and Human Services to award grants to eligible entities to conduct diagnostic testing for COVID''19, and related activities such as contact tracing, through mobile health units and, as necessary, at individuals' residences, and for other purposes'' violates the very idea of a civil society. It is a stunningly illegal power grab beyond what the Constitution offers the Congress, and an outright assault on the people to be deplored by all. And, it is also a massive waste of $100 billion '' allocated for 2020 alone.

HR 6666 violates inalienable rights to one's person, home and property, to one's life, freedoms, privacy and security. It is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, as well as the First, Fifth, Eighth and Ninth Amendments of the Bill of Rights. It is an illegal act of forced medical treatment upon We the People and an invasion into our local communities.

Further, the TRACE Act grants the DHHS head such broad authority as to empower any "entity" he desires to hunt down people with no reasonable suspicion of threat to public health as COVID is not proven to be an extraordinary or deadly disease. The CDC has admitted it counts other diseases as COVID cases and hasmassively overestimated and overstated the severity of the crisis tothe point of obvious fraud. This privately-funded agency, via the CDC Foundation, has a track record of such unhealthy, fear-mongering behavior.

HR 6666 also does not define what ''related activities'' are. Or what ''other purposes'' are.

Congressional proposal HR 6666 is unconstitutional, unacceptable and unlawful, and we demand that all representatives vote against this bill.

We do not consent to contact tracing, medical surveillance or forced medical intervention.

HR 6666 also violates international legal guarantees to which the US and all of its states are signatories and constitutionally mandated to protect and uphold.

Constitutional lawyer Robert Barnes notes: ''Our founders were intimately familiar with pandemics, viruses and plagues, yet they did not allow any to suspend our Constitutional liberties. Not one word in the Constitution about plagues or pandemics to exempt the government from any of our Bill of Rights.''

Neither does the US Code Section 42 override these guaranteed rights, including those of the states, which it attempts to do. Neither does the Commerce Clause allow any such violation of the rights of the people under the lie that Congress is regulating commerce between states. It is doing no such thing.

Congress's commitment to the Constitution appears to be nonexistent. It persists in allowing house arrest and movement restrictions of the healthy under the guise of a quarantine for the sick, while continuing to propose and pass unconstitutional laws while the people cannot fully engage in the democratic process.

The House and HR 6666's sponsors are in contempt of the people in proposing this legislation. Neither Congress nor DHHS is truly acting in the interest of public health.

Congress must not pass this law.

In contrast to our previous email, the prestigious NEJM has

published a new obvservational study regarding HCQ and COVID19. You can find it

at the following link:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2012410

Below are my favorite parts which highlight the implicit

bias in here (besides the fact that it was funded by NIH…).

Bottom of page 2:

A guidance developed by the Department of Medicine

and distributed to all the house staff and attending staff at our medical

center suggested hydroxychloroquine as a therapeutic option for patients

with Covid-19 who presented with moderate-to-severe respiratory illness, which

was defined as a resting oxygen saturation of less than 94% while they were

breathing ambient air. The suggested hydroxychloroquine regimen was a

loading dose of 600 mg twice on day 1, followed by 400 mg daily for 4

additional days. Azithromycin at a dose of 500 mg on day 1 and then 250mg daily

for 4 more days in combination with hydroxychloroquine was an additional

suggested therapeutic option. The azithromycin suggestion was removed on April

12, 2020, and the hydroxychloroquine suggestion was removed on April 29, 2020.

The decision to prescribe either or both medications was left to the discretion

of the treating team for each individual patient.”

This means that there is already implicit bias

here, as people needed to have moderate to severe disease to be considered.

Patients who did not receive it (there was no placebo) were less likely to be

offered it. Same story with The VA Study.

They also changed their protocols and

recommendations regarding both azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine during this

period, which is not very scientific.

Middle of page 3:

“Hydroxychloroquine Exposure

Patients were defined as receiving

hydroxychloroquine if they were receiving it at study baseline or received it

during the follow-up period before intubation or death. Study baseline was

defined as 24 hours after arrival at the emergency department.”

So, if they received a dose of it before they got

intubated, or they got it within 48 hours of symptoms, it counted the same way.

This is an incredible design flaw.

“End Point

The primary end point was the time from study

baseline to intubation or death. For patients who died after intubation, the

timing of the primary end point was defined as the time of intubation.”

So, when the endpoint is intubation OR death, and

BOTH occur, and the endpoint is TIME ITSELF, they chose to go with the value that

happened FIRST, making the all of the calculations that come out of it look

worse. Intubation and death are a little different, but we don’t need to go

there.

Last paragraph, page 8:

Clinical guidance at our medical center has been

updated to remove the suggestion that patients with Covid-19 be treated with

hydroxychloroquine. In our analysis involving a large sample of consecutive

patients who had been hospitalized with Covid-19, hydroxychloroquine use was

not associated with a significantly higher

or lower risk of intubation or death (hazard ratio,

1.04; 95% CI, 0.82 to 1.32). The study results should not be taken to rule out

either benefit or harm of hydroxychloroquine treatment, given the

observational design and the 95% confidence interval, but the results do not

support the use of hydroxychloroquine at present, outside randomized clinical

trials testing its efficacy.”

The numbers are easy to explain.

The point estimate is 1.04, which means there is a 4% chance that this could

possibly increase the chance of the primary endpoint

(intubation/death) happening. The CI, or confidence interval, is the value that

they are 95% sure (that’s where the 95% CI stands for) that the truth

lies. This means it could be anywhere from a 28% less likely for it to occur

(1-0.82 = 0.28) or 32% more likely (1.32 – 1 = 0.32) for it to occur.

The fact that this confidence interval crosses 1 (the interval is both lower

than 1 and higher than 1) indicates no statistical significance, where their

conclusion is derived from.

With the inherent bias in the

selection of patients, the changing of protocols, and the individual discretion

of the providers, as well as the lab values being totally opposite of other

clinical characteristics (HCQ patients did not have elevated d-dimers, lactate

dehydrogenase, ferritin, ESR, CRP, etc). there’s something going on here.

Watch the newsmedia focus on

this though instead of the restrospective study that I sent to you yesterday

where 91.7 patients were clinically cured by day 10, when they received it

properly, at a proper dose, for a proper amount of time.

https://www.physiciansweekly.com/covid-19-mixed-study-results-prompt-nyc-hospital-to-halt-hydroxychloroquine-use/

It’s already started.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sat, 09 May 2020 13:43

Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes Health May 8, 2020 by Amanda Morris,

Northwestern University Credit: CC0 Public DomainAfter studying global data from the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, researchers have discovered a strong correlation between severe vitamin D deficiency and mortality rates.

Led by Northwestern University, the research team conducted a statistical analysis of data from hospitals and clinics across China, France, Germany, Italy, Iran, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States.

The researchers noted that patients from countries with high COVID-19 mortality rates, such as Italy, Spain and the UK, had lower levels of vitamin D compared to patients in countries that were not as severely affected.

This does not mean that everyone'--especially those without a known deficiency'--needs to start hoarding supplements, the researchers caution.

"While I think it is important for people to know that vitamin D deficiency might play a role in mortality, we don't need to push vitamin D on everybody," said Northwestern's Vadim Backman, who led the research. "This needs further study, and I hope our work will stimulate interest in this area. The data also may illuminate the mechanism of mortality, which, if proven, could lead to new therapeutic targets."

The research is available on medRxiv, a preprint server for health sciences.

Backman is the Walter Dill Scott Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering. Ali Daneshkhah, a postdoctoral research associate in Backman's laboratory, is the paper's first author.

Backman and his team were inspired to examine vitamin D levels after noticing unexplained differences in COVID-19 mortality rates from country to country. Some people hypothesized that differences in healthcare quality, age distributions in population, testing rates or different strains of the coronavirus might be responsible. But Backman remained skeptical.

"None of these factors appears to play a significant role," Backman said. "The healthcare system in northern Italy is one of the best in the world. Differences in mortality exist even if one looks across the same age group. And, while the restrictions on testing do indeed vary, the disparities in mortality still exist even when we looked at countries or populations for which similar testing rates apply.

"Instead, we saw a significant correlation with vitamin D deficiency," he said.

By analyzing publicly available patient data from around the globe, Backman and his team discovered a strong correlation between vitamin D levels and cytokine storm'--a hyperinflammatory condition caused by an overactive immune system'--as well as a correlation between vitamin D deficiency and mortality.

"Cytokine storm can severely damage lungs and lead to acute respiratory distress syndrome and death in patients," Daneshkhah said. "This is what seems to kill a majority of COVID-19 patients, not the destruction of the lungs by the virus itself. It is the complications from the misdirected fire from the immune system."

This is exactly where Backman believes vitamin D plays a major role. Not only does vitamin D enhance our innate immune systems, it also prevents our immune systems from becoming dangerously overactive. This means that having healthy levels of vitamin D could protect patients against severe complications, including death, from COVID-19.

"Our analysis shows that it might be as high as cutting the mortality rate in half," Backman said. "It will not prevent a patient from contracting the virus, but it may reduce complications and prevent death in those who are infected."

Backman said this correlation might help explain the many mysteries surrounding COVID-19, such as why children are less likely to die. Children do not yet have a fully developed acquired immune system, which is the immune system's second line of defense and more likely to overreact.

"Children primarily rely on their innate immune system," Backman said. "This may explain why their mortality rate is lower."

Backman is careful to note that people should not take excessive doses of vitamin D, which might come with negative side effects. He said the subject needs much more research to know how vitamin D could be used most effectively to protect against COVID-19 complications.

"It is hard to say which dose is most beneficial for COVID-19," Backman said. "However, it is clear that vitamin D deficiency is harmful, and it can be easily addressed with appropriate supplementation. This might be another key to helping protect vulnerable populations, such as African-American and elderly patients, who have a prevalence of vitamin D deficiency."

More information: Ali Daneshkhah et al. The Possible Role of Vitamin D in Suppressing Cytokine Storm and Associated Mortality in COVID-19 Patients, MEDRXIV (2020). DOI: 10.1101/2020.04.08.20058578

Provided by Northwestern University

Medical Xpress is a web-based medical and health news service that is part of the renowned Science X network. Based on the years of experience as a Phys.org medical research channel, started in April 2011, Medical Xpress became a separate website.

Medical Xpress is a part of Science X network. With global reach of over 5 million monthly readers and featuring dedicated websites for hard sciences, technology, smedical research and health news, the Science X network is one of the largest online communities for science-minded people.

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Sun, 10 May 2020 05:54

Coronavirus patients with severe respiratory symptoms may benefit from being placed on their stomachs instead of on their backs while being treated. Lying prone on your stomach ''opens up parts of the lung'' that aren't open when a person is flat on his or her back. Anecdotal reports from doctors suggest that the prone position can dramatically improve blood oxygen levels and potentially increase survival rates. Visit BGR's homepage for more stories.The novel coronavirus pandemic has already claimed over a hundred thousand lives worldwide. With over 1.4 million active cases at last tally, there's still a lot of people that need saving, and the most critically ill patients are monitored around the clock in hospitals and intensive care units. Typically, these patients are positioned comfortably on their backs, but doctors are now realizing that a different posture could actually save lives.

As CNN reports, doctors dealing with coronavirus patients who are having trouble breathing are learning that flipping the individual over, onto their stomach rather than their back, can dramatically improve their condition. The news comes just one day after a different team of doctors made an intriguing discovery about one of the weirdest coronavirus symptoms that has been popping up in patients. This new repositioning technique appears to work for both sedated, ventilated patients with severe symptoms as well as patients who are not on ventilators, and it could lead to increased survival rates if it proves effective following further research.

Flipping a patient with breathing issues onto their stomach isn't an entirely new concept. Doctors in France experimented with the same technique for patients with severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) who were on ventilators to breathe. Those placed on their stomachs had a greater chance of surviving than those who remained on their backs.

Now, that same idea is being applied to coronavirus patients with breathing difficulties, and doctors say it's working. Anecdotal evidence suggests that placing a patient in the ''prone'' position can increase their blood oxygen levels dramatically in a short period of time.

''Once you see it work, you want to do it more, and you see it work almost immediately,'' Dr. Kathryn Hibbert, director of the medical ICU at Massachusetts General Hospital, told CNN. ''By putting them on their stomachs, we're opening up parts of the lung that weren't open before.''

It's great news, but there's a catch: Placing patients on their stomach doesn't come without its own share of risks. Depending on their condition, some severe patients may need deeper sedation to remain on their stomachs while being ventilated. Doctors ultimately have to make the call and decide for which patients the risk is justified.

An ongoing clinical trial at Rush University Medical Center aims to produce some hard data on how beneficial the technique is, and which patients benefit there most from being placed on their stomachs instead of their backs. The research could yield important, life-saving guidelines for COVID-19 patients.

Image Source: JEROME FAVRE/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

ITM gents,

I'm not sure how voting works in Holland, but in Germany it's like this: you

get a postcard with your name on it - the city knows where you live as you have

to register when you move to it - and it tells you when and where you can go

and vote.

Historically, it's been on Sundays, between 8 and 18 hours, I believe. If

you're out of town or can't make it to the voting place - usually a school or

Kindergarten in your neighborhood - you can send the postcard back at no charge

and ask for vote by mail papers. Which you then get and send back in time.

Done.

Now, this apparently isn't as much of a thing in the US just yet, or is it? I

thought you could already ask to vote for mail, so this German alien isn't

fully getting the hoopla about this:

https://twitter.com/nbcsandiego/status/1258842305538162688?s=20

Is it because you don't have to register here and thus can make up people

(how?) that can't vote in the first place?

Some analysis would be helpful, especially to international listeners.

Thank you for your courage,

- Roland

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Sat, 09 May 2020 11:21

Imagine that, when the votes are finally counted in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden squeezes out a narrow victory in the Electoral College. Then imagine that, weeks later, the nation is shocked to learn that President Donald Trump will receive a second term because a few previously unknown members of the Electoral College refused to vote for Biden.

A pair of cases the Supreme Court will hear next week, Chiafalo v. Washington and Colorado Department of State v. Baca, will decide if this scenario is even possible. Both cases involve ''faithless electors'' '-- members of the Electoral College who go rogue and refuse to vote for the candidate who won their state.

Washington and Colorado both have safeguards that are intended to prevent faithless electors. In Chiafalo, three electors in 2016 cast their ballots for Republican former Secretary of State Colin Powell, as part of a quixotic effort to place someone other than Trump in the White House. The idea was that, if they supported a relatively moderate Republican, maybe enough other members of the Electoral College would join them and place that person in the White House instead of Trump. These faithless electors were each fined $1,000.

Meanwhile, in Baca, an elector, also in 2016, attempted to vote for then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican. But before this ballot could be cast, Colorado removed the elector and replaced him with someone who dutifully voted for Democratic nominee (and Colorado winner) Hillary Clinton.

The legal dispute in both cases turns upon a narrow distinction between a state's power to appoint presidential electors, and its power to compel those electors to behave in a certain way after they are appointed. In Ray v. Blair (1952), the Supreme Court held that, before someone is appointed as an elector, they may be required to pledge that they will support their party's nominee. But Ray left unanswered the question of what happens if an elector violates this pledge after they join the Electoral College.

Ray held that ''even if such promises of candidates for the electoral college are legally unenforceable ... it would not follow that the requirement of a pledge'' is unconstitutional, a holding which explicitly avoids the question of whether an elector's pledge to support a particular candidate is ''legally unenforceable.''

That question is now before the Supreme Court. And, while there are profound practical reasons why the country shouldn't tolerate faithless electors, the legal issues presented by the Chiafalo and Baca cases are fraught and do not have clear answers.

Does the power to appoint an elector include the power to remove or discipline that elector?All 50 states choose members of the Electoral College through a popular election. Forty-eight states award all of a state's electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote in that state. The two remaining states, Maine and Nebraska, award two electoral votes to the winner of the statewide popular vote and then one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each of the state's congressional districts.

This norm, that members of the Electoral College will be chosen by popular election, emerged very early in American history. By 1832, every state except South Carolina chose electors by a statewide vote. South Carolina came around in the 1860s.

But the Constitution does not mandate popular elections for members of the Electoral College. On the contrary, it provides that ''each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.'' If the state legislature agrees to it, a state could potentially pick members of the Electoral College randomly by throwing darts at a phone book.

Because states have a nearly limitless power to decide how to appoint electors, they may impose virtually any condition on someone hoping to become an elector up until the moment when that elector is appointed. This is why Ray held that states could require potential electors to pledge to support a particular candidate before those electors were formally appointed.

But the electors who wanted to vote for someone other than Clinton in 2016 argue, in their brief to the Supreme Court, that a state's power to control its presidential electors ceases the moment those electors are appointed. Members of the Electoral College, this brief argues, are akin to federal judges, who are appointed by the president but cannot be removed from office if they displease that president. Or they are similar to senators, who prior to the ratification of the 17th Amendment were chosen by state legislatures '-- but could not be removed or sanctioned if they violated the state legislature's wishes after their appointment.

Colorado and Washington, meanwhile, argue that senators and federal judges are exceptions to a broader rule. As Washington argues in its brief, ''the 'default rule' is that the power to 'appoint' includes the power to remove.'' Judges cannot be removed by the person who appointed them because the Constitution explicitly states that federal judges ''shall hold their offices during good behaviour,'' and senators could not be removed by a state legislature because the Constitution provides that senators shall serve ''for six years.''

But absent explicit constitutional language indicating presidential electors must serve for a particular amount of time, the states argue, the default rule is that electors may be removed by the same body that appointed them.

There are, indeed, a bevy of Supreme Court cases stating that the power to make an appointment typically includes the power to remove the person appointed. As the Court stated in Myers v. United States (1926), ''the right of removal ... inheres in the right to appoint, unless limited by Constitution or statute.'' But most of these cases deal with the president's power to remove their own subordinates. The states' reliance on these cases largely raises the question of whether presidential electors are subordinate to their state's legislature.

All of which is a long way of saying that a Supreme Court justice who wants to allow faithless electors could draft a perfectly plausible opinion reaching that conclusion, while a justice who wants to forbid faithless electors could also draft a plausible opinion reaching the opposite conclusion.

There are profound practical reasons to oppose faithless electorsSetting aside the question of what the Constitution's text actually requires, the faithless electors' brief makes a strong argument that the Framers originally expected members of the Electoral College to exercise independent judgment.

while some Framers supported the idea of the people electing the President directly, there was concern that the people would be unable to select a President given the practicalities of the time. As it could take months for information to travel from one part of the nation to another, the realities of communication in 1787 would make any national campaign directed at the people impossibly difficult.

The Framers' solution was to create an intermediate body, with members appointed within each state in the manner the legislatures might choose, that would ''constitute a separate and coordinate branch of the Government of the United States.''

Every word of these two paragraphs may be true. Yet, while they make a good case for why presidential electors should exercise independent judgment in 1787, they also cut fairly strongly against the case for allowing such discretion today. It no longer takes months for information about a presidential candidate to travel across the nation '-- often it only takes minutes. We no longer need an ''intermediate body'' to weigh information that is not readily available to the masses.

Alexander Hamilton famously wrote that the Electoral College would enable the president to be chosen ''by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation.'' But even if Hamilton is correct that the framers imagine men of such stature being appointed to the Electoral College, that is emphatically not how the Electoral College operates today.

In 2020, the American people expect presidential electors to behave like robots, voting uncritically for whoever their state supported in the election. Members of the Electoral College are typically unknown, and their names rarely appear on any ballot. They possess none of the social capital Hamilton attributed to them.

Which brings us back to where this piece began. Imagine that, weeks after Election Day, Democrats learn that Biden's victory was ripped from them and handed to Trump by some obscure elector hardly any voters have ever heard of. Would Democrats simply throw up their hands and say ''well, shucks, that's what the Constitution requires,'' or would many of them treat this event like an illegitimate coup? (The same questions would apply to Republicans if it was Trump on the wrong end of electors' independence.)

The legitimacy of a president flows from more than just formal constitutional rules, it flows from a sense that the president was chosen in a fair and non-arbitrary process. Governments, as the Declaration of Independence proclaims, derive ''their just powers from the consent of the governed.''

There is no good answer to the question of whether faithless electors are permitted, at least as a formal legal matter. But if the justices choose to allow them, they are potentially endorsing chaos.

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Archived Version

Thu, 07 May 2020 15:47

Market Pulse

By Robert Schroeder

Published: May 7, 2020 2:41 pm ET

The Justice Department on Thursday said it is dropping the criminal case against President Donald Trump's first national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, the Associated Press reported. Flynn's prosecution became a rallying cry for Trump and his supporters in attacking the FBI's Russia investigation, as the AP writes. The Justice Department said it is dropping the case "after a considered review of all the facts and circumstances of this case, including newly discovered and disclosed information," reports the AP.

See original version of this story

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Archived Version

Sat, 09 May 2020 09:31

The Justice Department asked the justices to temporarily halt a lower-court order, arguing that the executive branch would suffer irreparable harm if the evidence is disclosed.

Lawmakers have asked to see secret grand jury evidence gathered by Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times WASHINGTON '-- The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to block Congress from seeing grand jury secrets gathered in the Russia investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, saying the executive branch would suffer irreparable harm if lawmakers see the evidence.

In a 35-page filing, Noel J. Francisco, the solicitor general, asked the justices to halt an order by a federal appeals court that imposed a May 11 deadline on the Justice Department to turn over the evidence to the House Judiciary Committee. He said the Justice Department should first get a chance to fully litigate an appeal of the ruling before the Supreme Court.

''The government will suffer irreparable harm absent a stay. Once the government discloses the secret grand-jury records, their secrecy will irrevocably be lost,'' Mr. Francisco wrote, adding, ''That is particularly so when, as here, they are disclosed to a congressional committee and its staff.''

House Democrats have argued that they need to see the grand jury evidence in part because of suspicions that Mr. Trump may have lied under oath in his written answers to Mr. Mueller, including about his campaign's advance knowledge of and contacts with WikiLeaks about its possession of hacked Democratic emails and plans to publish them.

But under Attorney General William P. Barr, the Justice Department has fought to prevent House investigators from seeing the grand-jury material, including information that was blacked out in the report on the Mueller investigation it released last year and underlying testimony transcripts those passages derived from.

Usually, Congress has no right to view grand jury evidence. But in 1974, the courts permitted lawmakers to see such materials as they weighed whether to impeach President Richard M. Nixon. Last summer, as the House Judiciary Committee weighed whether to impeach President Trump, it sought a judicial order to see certain Mueller grand jury materials, too.

The politically charged fight turns on a technical legal issue: whether the impeachment process, which begins with a House inquiry and can culminate in a Senate trial, counts as a ''judicial proceeding'' under an exception to grand-jury secrecy rules that permits sharing evidence for that purpose.

Both a Federal District Court judge ruled last fall, and a panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled this spring, that impeachment is a judicial proceeding, following the Nixon impeachment precedent. But the Trump administration has delayed any sharing of the evidence by continuing to argue at each level that it is not.

In the request to the Supreme Court that it halt the appeals court's order that the Justice Department turn over the material by May 11, Mr. Francisco argued that ''at least four justices'' '-- the number necessary to take an appeal '-- are likely to decide that the Supreme Court should weigh in on the issue, and that ''there is at least a fair prospect'' that a majority will eventually rule in favor of Mr. Trump.

But if the House has already seen the evidence in the interim, he argued, the executive branch will be harmed even if it ultimately wins the case. He noted that nothing could stop House Democrats from publicly releasing the evidence Mr. Mueller gathered by a simple-majority vote in the Judiciary Committee.

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Sun, 10 May 2020 04:25

Show caption Anthony Fauci and two other top members of the White House coronavirus taskforce will self-quarantine after potential exposure to Covid-19. Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters

Coronavirus outbreak Three members of the White House coronavirus taskforce have placed themselves in self-quarantine after contact with someone who tested positive for Covid-19. It comes as the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, prepares to unveil his ''roadmap'' to a new normality in a national broadcast and global infections pass four million.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Stephen Hahn, are all expected to work remotely due to potential exposure to Covid-19.

Fauci's institute said that he has tested negative for Covid-19 and will continue to be tested regularly. It added that he is considered at relatively low risk based on the degree of his exposure, and that he would be taking appropriate precautions to mitigate the risk to personal contacts while still carrying out his duties. While he will stay at home and telework, Fauci will go to the White House if called and take every precaution, the institute said.

New York warns of children's illness linked to Covid-19 after three deaths Redfield will be teleworking for the next two weeks after it was determined he had a low-risk exposure to a person at the White House, the CDC said in a statement Saturday evening. The statement said he felt fine and has no symptoms.

A few hours earlier, the Food and Drug Administration confirmed that Hahn had come in contact with someone who had tested positive and was in self-quarantine for the next two weeks. He tested negative for the virus.

All three men were scheduled to testify before a Senate committee on Tuesday, and it's understood they will be allowed to do that via videoconference.

Politico reported Hahn had come into contact with Katie Miller, vice president Mike Pence's press secretary, who tested positive for the virus on Friday. Her husband, Stephen Miller, is a top advisor to Donald Trump. On Thursday the White House confirmed that a member of the military serving as one of Trump's valets had also tested positive for Covid-19.

Trump, who publicly identified Miller's positive test, said he was not worried about the virus spreading in the White House. However, officials said they were stepping up safety protocols.

Dr Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will tele-work for two weeks. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP Redfield sought to use the exposure as a teachable moment. The CDC statement said if he must go to the White House to fulfil any responsibilities as part of the coronavirus task force, he will follow CDC practices for critical infrastructure workers.

Those guidelines call for Redfield and anyone working on the task force to have their temperature taken and screened for symptoms each day, wear a face covering, and distance themselves from others.

Trump has resisted wearing a mask. In a meeting with the nation's top military leaders on Saturday evening, he did not wear a mask during the brief portion that reporters were allowed to view. The generals around Trump were also unmasked, but participants did sit a few feet away from each other.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said the administration was stepping up mitigation efforts. It already requires daily temperature checks of anyone who enters the complex and has encouraged social distancing among those working in the building.

Elon Musk, meanwhile, announced he was suing authorities in California over Covid-19 restrictions that have kept his Fremont factory closed and threatened to move his operation out of the state.

''If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will be dependent on how Tesla is treated in the future,'' he tweeted.

In Britain, Boris Johnson is expected to unveil a coronavirus warning system for England when he outlines plans to gradually ease the lockdown in an address to the nation on Sunday evening.

It is understood that a warning system administered by a new ''joint biosecurity centre'' will detect local increases in infection rates, with the aim of altering restrictions locally in England. The alerts will range from green at level one to red at level five. Johnson is expected to say that the nation as a whole is close to moving down from four to three.

Trump and Fauci: America's future hangs on this delicate relationship The UK has the second highest death toll from the virus, at 31,662, with more than 266,500 infections. On Saturday the government told airlines it would introduce a 14-day quarantine period for most people arriving from abroad to try to avoid a second peak of the coronavirus outbreak.

South Korea's capital has ordered the closure of all clubs and bars after a burst of new cases sparked fears of a second coronavirus wave.

In Mexico, coronavirus patients were being turned away from hospitals on Saturday, as both public and private medical facilities quickly filled up and the number of new infections continued to rise. Of the 64 public hospitals in the capital's sprawling metro area designated to receive Covid-19 patients, 26 were completely full, according to city government data.

Mexico announced 1,938 new cases of the virus on Saturday, bringing the total to 33,460, along with 193 additional deaths, bringing fatalities to 3,353.

In other coronavirus developments:

The global tally of confirmed cases passed 4 million, with almost 280,000 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins university tracker.

President Trump on Saturday said the US would buy $3bn of dairy, meat and produce from farmers as unemployment soars and the prices that slaughterhouses pay farmers for animals have fallen in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Three children in New York have died from a rare inflammatory syndrome believed to be linked to the novel coronavirus, governor Andrew Cuomo announced.

China reported 14 new confirmed coronavirus cases on Sunday, the highest number since 28 April, and up from only one case a day earlier. Of the new cases, two were imported infections. The remaining 12 confirmed cases were locally transmitted, including 11 cases in the north-eastern province of Jilin.

Australia's most populous state of New South Wales will begin easing its coronavirus restrictions from Friday, with 10 people permitted at outdoor gatherings, up from two.

Air France will start checking passengers' temperatures when France's lockdown measures are eased on Monday.

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Archived Version

Thu, 07 May 2020 15:53

Backstory Let me start off by saying that this conspiracy documentary almost

had me. I aint going to lie, it almost took me down the rabbit hole. I even tried to get majority of family to watch it. I did this all without even thinking, without first conducting my own research into the claims made by the now viral video. That was a error on my part.

Lets get started DEBUNKING before someone else falls into the ''rabbit hole''.

Plandemic Documentary: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19 The ''documentary'' begins'...

At minute 1:55 in the film ''one of the most accomplished scientists of her time'' claims that she was arrested, but charged with NOTHING. At minute 1:58 she claims to have been held in jail with no charges, which if true would absolutely violate the 6th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States . 2:05 she claims there was ''no warrant'' for her arrest and at 2:13 she claims that her house was searched without a warrant which if true, would violate the 4th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and at 2:26 she claims that the stolen intellectual property was PLANTED in her house in California. At 2:57 she claims that the FBI are involved (they were not) and that her case is under seal so that no attorney can represent her or defend her, or they would be found in contempt of court, which if true would of course violates too many Constitutional rights to even list , basically ALL of them are being denied here'... according to her.

The Actual Criminal Charges vs. The Wild Claims by Dr. Mikovits In 2006 Dr. Judy Mikovits was hired as Research Director for a private foundation associated with UNR called Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease (WPI) in Reno, NV which was created by a very wealthy couple comprised of an attorney and a businessman whose daughter suffers from ''Chronic Fatigue Syndrome'' in an effort to find a cure for their daughter. When Dr. Mikovits went to work at WPI, her contract included clauses not unlike what is included when I do litigation support research for attorneys: her contract states that any and all of her work product belongs to WPI, she may retain NO COPIES of any of it. She most certainly was not authorized to remove any work product from WPI. To do so, is theft of intellectual property.

Dr. Mikovits was fired from WPI for refusing to turn over a cell sample shipment received at her lab to another researcher at the institute on September 29, 2011, the details of which are outlined in witness Max Proft's affidavit. (link below)

After Dr. Mikovits' departure, WPI discovered that 12 to 20 laboratory notebooks and flash drives containing years of research data were missing. In an initial statement through her attorney, Dr. Mikovits stated that she had received notice of her firing from WPI on her cell phone and immediately left Nevada for her home near Ventura, California. Dr. Mikovits denied having the notebooks and, in fact, Dr. Mikovits' attorney was requesting that the lab notebooks be returned to her so that she could continue to work on the grants she won while employed at the WPI and fulfill her responsibilities on these government grants and corporate contacts.

After WPI reported a theft to the University of Nevada police, and an investigation was launched and a subordinate research assistant and TENANT of Dr. Mikovits' in Reno named Max Pfost, provided a sworn affidavit detailing his own complicity in stealing the notebooks and delivering them to Dr. Mikovits. His sworn affidavit was the basis of the warrant for Dr. Mikovits' arrest and the search of her home in California. I recommend reading his affidavit in full because it provides a lot of relevant details in both the civil and criminal cases:

http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/268451-exh-1-reply-iso

Contrary to Dr. Mikovits' claim in ''Plandemic Documentary'' that she was arrested without warrant, held in jail without charges and additionally, her home searched without warrant, in fact, warrants for her arrest and the search and recovery of stolen property at her home WERE issued by the University of Nevada at Reno Police Department November 17, 2011. Dr. Mikovits was arrested at her California home on November 18, 2011 and charged with two felonies: 1. possession of stolen property and 2. unlawful taking of computer data, equipment, supplies, or other computer-related property. She was held without bail for 5 days while awaiting arraignment and hearing on extradition to Nevada '' which she waived '' after 18 laboratory notebooks belonging to WPI, as well a computer and other items were recovered from her home following the warranted search.

The criminal charges were later dismissed without prejudice pending the outcome of the civil trial against Dr. Mikovits for losses related to the stolen but mostly recovered notebooks. The ''gag order'' Dr. Mikovits refers to relates to the civil lawsuit WPI filed against her which Dr. Mikovits LOST and as a result, was ordered to pay attorney fees and damages to WPI. She chose to declare bankruptcy rather than pay.

In two sworn affidavits, Max Pfost details how Dr. Mikovits told him that ''WPI was going down'' and that she was going to see to it that at least half of a $1.5M R01 grant from the US National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease would follow her to a new employer. According to his affidavit:

''She stated she was going to try to move the R01 grant and the Department of Defense grants and stop the Lipkin study.''

The Lipkin study was a multi-centre trial, headed by Ian Lipkin, a virologist at Columbia University in New York, trying to prove or disprove once and for all Mikovits's largely discredited hypothesis that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is caused by a mysterious family of retroviruses, among them XMRV.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3448165/

The Lipkin study was commissioned by DR. ANTHONY FAUCI and this, is where Dr. Mikovits' true resentment and subsequent slanderous accusations against Dr. Fauci originate. Dr. Fauci may have cost Dr. Mikovits at least $750k in federal grant money by insisting on additional peer-reviewed research of her failed attempt to link the XMRV virus to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. https://www.virology.ws/2011/05/06/ian-lipkin-on-xmrv/comment-page-4/

Who is Judy Mikovits and what is she even talking about? In 1992 she earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from George Washington University. Her Ph.D. thesis was entitled ''Negative Regulation of HIV Expression in Monocytes'' and her empirical thesis research relates to repressor proteins that could inhibit HIV DNA from replicating. Her only published paper on HIV is not suppressed. In fact, this very documentary claims it its' very first moments that Dr. Mikovits DID revolutionize the testing/treatment of HIV/AIDS so'... did she or didn't she? Her thesis is available here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2187891/

Dr. Mikovits did do some post-graduate DNA research in molecular virology at the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity, National Cancer Institute, although she published zero research during her years there. Ze-ro. If Dr. Fauci stole her homework then'... where is this 1999 paper she claims she had ''in publication''? She doesn't have a copy? Her research associates don't have a copy???...CMON now I call bs.

It was while working for WPI in 2009 that Dr. Mikovits published the only significant research paper of her career in the journal Science, entitled ''Detection of an infectious retrovirus, XMRV, in blood cells of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome'', in which she and four other colleagues claimed to have found genetic markers indicating the presence of retroviruses including one called XMRV in the blood products of patients suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. When no other laboratory could replicate the results Dr. Mikovits published, she went back and altered the protocols for detection to make nearly all the results ''positive'' for XMRV and other retrovirus, which they concede was done in the edited abstract of their own research paper:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3073172/

By 2011 two of the original researchers including Dr. Lombardi had come to understand that the results they had published were only factually explainable by laboratory contamination and partially retracted their research, later petitioning to have their names removed from the study entirely:

''Four laboratories tested the samples for the presence of antibodies that react with XMRV proteins. Only WPI and NCI/Ruscetti detected reactive antibodies, both in CFS specimens and negative controls. There was no statistically significant difference in the rates of positivity between the positive and negative controls, nor in the identity of the positive samples between the two laboratories.

These results demonstrate that XMRV or antibodies to the virus are not present in clinical specimens. Detection of XMRV nucleic acid by WPI is likely a consequence of contamination. The positive serology reported by WPI and NCI/Ruscetti laboratories remained unexplained, but are most likely the result of the presence of cross-reactive epitopes. The authors of the study conclude that 'routine blood screening for XMRV/P-MLV is not warranted at this time'.''

https://www.virology.ws/2011/09/27/trust-science-not-scientists/

This did not stop WPI from bringing to market a laboratory test for XMRV at a cost of $500 to each patient for the financial benefit of WPI, that even Dr. Mikovits did not believe was providing accurate results according to her ''testimony'' in ''Plandemic Documentary'' on YouTube'...

https://phoenixrising.me/research-2/the-pathogens-in-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-mecfs/xmrv/xmrv-testing

In November 2011 Science published a NINE LABORATORY STUDY that also failed to confirm XMRV or other viruses in the blood of and therefore as a cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in patients. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/334/6057/814

By the end of 2011 Science had issued a full retraction of Dr. Mikovits' published findings in their journal:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/12/updated-rare-move-science-without-authors-consent-retracts-paper-tied-mouse-virus

Let's review the rest of the video for fun'... At minute 7:40 Dr. Mikovits begins to falsely claim that the Bayh-Dole Act has ''ruined'' science by allowing grant recipients to retain ownership claims to their inventions and get rich, but in reality, when it comes to Dr. Fauci (and university researchers similarly under contract with those institutions), by his contractual agreement with NIAID the ownership of those patents, in fact, resides with that agency and thus, with the taxpayers and THAT, is who will receive royalties from the grants Dr. Fauci employed in order to make his discoveries that lead to those patents. Those royalties go 1/2 to the NIAID, a taxpayer-funded agency in order to fund more research grants (like the one Dr. Mikovits has now been denied in light of her unethical practices) and the other 1/2 to the drug manufacturer. I don't see the problem with that.

Dr. Fauci and others at HHS applied for their first patent on a method for activating the immune system in mammals in 1995 and it did involve the Il-2 treatments Dr. Mikovits references in the video at minute 7:40, but nothing in the patent is unique to the treatment of HIV/AIDS; it looks like it most applies to use in treating leukemia and in fact, in the Background of the Invention [0010] included with the patent registration it states: ''No method of treatment of HIV with IL-2 has been disclosed which results in a sustained response or which yields long-term beneficial results.'' So how is it that this Dr. Mikovits sees fit to BLAME Dr. Fauci for AIDS deaths? It's slanderous.

https://patents.justia.com/patent/20030180254

At 9:17 we are hit with the biggest irony in the world when Dr. Mikovits criticizes Bill Gates' foundation for helping to fund research (making the FOUNDATION, not Bill Gates himself, possibly eligible for some claim if patents are filed and Stanford v. Roche is the standard that would apply, as it does to all of Dr. Fauci's patents), when the place that Dr. Mikovits was fired from (WPI) for misappropriating cell samples '' the place THROUGH which she was seeking a $1.5M research grant FROM NIAID '' is a PRIVATE FOUNDATION that was founded by an attorney and her husband, seeking a cure for their daughter's Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. WPI contractually had the same rights under Stanford v. Roche to any invention or discovery of hers and after she was fired for misappropriating samples and proven to be a thief of intellectual property, Dr. Mikovits was in danger of losing her own $1.5M grant from NIAID. That's her real beef here.

So, what is the truth? Did Dr. Mikovits ''discover'' a dangerous virus causing ''plagues of disease'' as this ''documentary'' claims and then finds herself silenced and bankrupted by the Deep State and Big Pharma? No, she absolutely did not. A man named Dr. Robert Silverman ''discovered'' the XMRV virus in prostate cancer samples and published his own findings attempting to link that virus to disease in 2006. https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.0020025

Dr. Mikovits met Dr. Silverman at a conference in 2007 and at that time Dr. Mikovits decided to start testing her Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients for the virus, using methods Dr. Silverman actually developed. Dr. Silverman has since stood by HIS discovery of XMRV, but has completely retracted his study linking the virus to the disease of prostate cancer.

After publications by Pathak and others, Silverman said he felt convinced that there was an error in his findings. ''I felt I couldn't rest until I figured out how it happened,'' Silverman told ScienceNOW. ''I wanted to get some closure.''''

https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/surprise-xmrv-retraction-40456

This absurd ''documentary'' then goes on to show video clips of doctors claiming they are being ''pressured'' to record deaths as Covid-19 but included again is Dr. Erickson, the now-debunked California doctor who DOES NOT ATTEND DYING PATIENTS IN ANY HOSPITAL and therefore, is absolutely NOT ''being pressured'' to fill out any ''death reports''.

At 14:52 Dr. Mikovits validates the claim that the filmmaker makes that doctors and hospitals are being ''incentivized'' to report cases as Covid-19 and Dr. Mikovits cites the figure of a $13,000 ''bonus''?? from Medicare?? That is so laughable. The overwhelming majority of hospitals in the United States are privately owned, so if ANY hospital is pressuring ANY doctor to falsely code Covid-19 claims with an expectation financial gain, that would be Medicare fraud. IS this documentary seriously meaning to allege that widespread Medicare fraud is being perpetrated by U.S. hospitals that doctors are complicit with? That is one hell of an accusation.

Dr. Mikovits works in laboratories and apparently understands very little about medical billing for patients, but I have had to deal with mountains of medical bills in personal injury and medical malpractice, so allow me to explain a few things supplemented with some of the newest information as regards Covid-19 coding and billing:

Patients' conditions are recorded including using diagnostic codes, for the purposes of billing and also empirical study. Diagnosis coding accurately portrays the medical condition that a patient is experiencing; ICD diagnostic coding accurately reflects a healthcare provider's findings. A healthcare provider's progress note is composed of four component parts: 1. the patient's chief complaint, the reason that initiates the healthcare encounter 2. the provider documents his or observations including a review of the patient's history, a review of pertinent medical systems, and a physical examination. 3. the healthcare provider renders an assessment in the form of a diagnosis 4. a plan of care is ordered. Diagnostic codes are used to justify why medical procedures are performed. If you don't code a patient for presumptive Covid-19, you cannot order and bill for a Covid-19 test, nor apparently justify hospital quarantine for a Medicare patient without charging the patient an additional co-pay UNLESS you code their diagnosis as Covid-19.

According to official guidance from the CDC, providers should only use code U07.1 to document a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 as documented by the provider, per documentation of a positive COVID-19 test result, or a presumptive positive COVID-19 test result. This also applies to asymptomatic patients who test positive for coronavirus. ''Suspected, possible, probable, or inconclusive cases of COVID-19 should not be assigned U07.1'' CDC emphasizes in the guidance. Instead, providers should assign codes explaining the reason for the encounter, such as a fever or Z20.828, ''Contact with and (suspected) exposure to other viral communicable diseases''.'' https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/icd/COVID-19-guidelines-final.pdf

Medicare and Medicaid do not have ''set amounts'' that are paid based on diagnostic codes. Dr. Mikovits is clearly as misinformed as half the internet right now but here is where they are getting the numbers they are twisting into fiction for their own purposes:

''To project how much hospitals would get paid by the federal government for treating uninsured patients, we look at payments for admissions for similar conditions. For less severe hospitalizations, we use the average Medicare payment for respiratory infections and inflammations with major comorbidities or complications in 2017, which was $13,297. For more severe hospitalizations, we use the average Medicare payment for a respiratory system diagnosis with ventilator support for greater than 96 hours, which was $40,218. Each of these average payments was then increased by 20% to account for the add-on to Medicare inpatient reimbursement for patients with COVID-19 that was included in the CARES Act.

Before accounting for the 20% add on, Medicare payments are about half of what private insurers pay on average for the same diagnoses. In the absence of this new proposed policy, many of the uninsured would typically be billed based on hospital charges, which are the undiscounted ''list prices'' for care and are typically much higher than even private insurance reimbursement.'' https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/estimated-cost-of-treating-the-uninsured-hospitalized-with-covid-19/

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/potential-costs-of-coronavirus-treatment-for-people-with-employer-coverage/

In case you were wondering, the reasons behind the 20% add on for patients diagnosed with Covid-19, are because according to the Kaiser Family Foundation Medicare already typically pays HALF what private insurers do, Medicare does not pay for additional PPE, Covid-19 patients often have the medical necessity of a private hospital room for quarantine purposes which Medicare does not normally cover and finally, the new Covid-19 coding allows hospital providers to bill for services they provide at alternate sites such as parking lot testing sites, convention centers or hotels, something we haven't dealt with before but for which they obviously deserve to be reimbursed. The $13k/$39k figures are simply what it cost on average in 2017 to care for someone with respiratory illness in a hospital, it is NOT some ''bonus'' that anyone is receiving. That is a lie.

17:13 Dr. Mikovits claims that hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine has been safely used for 70 years to treat a wide range of illnesses for which the FDA has approved its' use including lupus and rheumatoid arthritis but unfortunately, that is not the same thing as treating Covid-19, and Dr. Mikovits' peers have come to very, very different conclusions about its' application as a treatment for Covid-19:

''Data to support the use of HCQ and CQ for COVID-19 are limited and inconclusive. The drugs have some in vitro activity against several viruses, including coronaviruses and influenza, but previous randomized trials in patients with influenza have been negative (4, 5). In COVID-19, one small nonrandomized study from France (3) (discussed elsewhere in Annals of Internal Medicine [6]) demonstrated benefit but had serious methodological flaws, and a follow-up study still lacked a control group. Yet, another very small, randomized study from China in patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 found no difference in recovery rates (7).'' https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2764199/use-hydroxychloroquine-chloroquine-during-covid-19-pandemic-what-every-clinician

''In this phase IIb randomized clinical trial of 81 patients with COVID-19, an unplanned interim analysis recommended by an independent data safety and monitoring board found that a higher dosage of chloroquine diphosphate for 10 days was associated with more toxic effects and lethality, particularly affecting QTc interval prolongation. The limited sample size did not allow the study to show any benefit overall regarding treatment efficacy.'' https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2765499

OFFICALLY DEBUNKED Plandemic Documentary In todays world of information being pushed out at a rate that we can't even consume it all, we must do our own research. What made me question this video was all these claims but ZERO proof was shown. NONE NA-DA'...I almost fell for it'...Trust nothing '' Question Everything'....

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Fri, 08 May 2020 12:45

Members of the clinical staff wearing Personal Protective Equipment PPE care for a patient with ... [+] coronavirus in the intensive care unit at the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England, Tuesday May 5, 2020. (Neil Hall/Pool via AP)

ASSOCIATED PRESSBy now you've probably heard about or even seen the video ''Plandemic'' that's been spreading like wildfire through social media networks. This article is not the one you should give to your friend or relative or coworker who shared the video. This is an article for those who recognized the video as rife with conspiracy theories, misinformation and false claims, those who are frustrated and unsettled and disappointed in who they see sharing it, and those who want to know what to say when they see it. It explains why the video is successful, how to recognize propaganda like this for what it is, and explain why it is so, so, so important to speak up about this particular video.

What IS this video?

Plandemic interviews a scientist who was appropriately discredited for scientific misconduct and fraud. She is a known, established anti-vaccine advocate (despite her denial in the film), and she presents a long list of unsupported statements that involve COVID-19, various vaccines, HIV/AIDS, Anthony Fauci, pharmaceutical company collusion and other elements of an elaborate, long-running cover-up. It's a doozy, checking nearly every box in the long list of conspiracy theories and disinformation circulating about the coronavirus.

Why did my smart, thoughtful, informed friend share this?

What's most upsetting to many people is who they see sharing it: reasonable, intelligent people who normally don't fall for conspiracy theories or pseudoscience. What is going on?

Many people who are privately or casually sharing it are saying, ''This is interesting. What do you think of it?'' Most genuinely don't know what to make of it. They aren't trying to spread misinformation. They're not the types to believe or share conspiracy theories. They're taken in by the video's slick appearance and by its use of persuasive techniques and really want to know what you think, so you need to approach them respectfully about it. (We'll get to that.)

Why is this video suddenly everywhere? Why are so many drawn to it?

This video has been extremely successful at promoting misinformation for three reasons: First, it taps into people's uncertainty, anxiety and need for answers'--common reasons anyone is attracted to a conspiracy theory. Second, it is packaged very professionally and uses common conventions people already associate with factual documentaries. Third, it successfully exploits ancient but extremely effective methods of persuasion.

There is more uncertainty about our world right now than there has been in decades, perhaps a century, and the stakes are higher than ever. Everyone has so many unanswered questions'--including scientists, doctors, national leaders and others we ordinarily look to for answers. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. People want answers. Conspiracy theories can be comforting. This video appears to provide answers that fit together, that seem to make sense, that sound credible, or at least ''interesting and worth considering.'' (That's the hook. Next is the line.)

The video looks, sounds and feels like a documentary even though it isn't

Plandemic is part of a disturbingly successful trend in which deep-pocketed purveyors of pseudoscience produce slick, professional videos as credible-appearing documentaries. The lighting, narrative structure, the pacing, use of imagery, camera angles, editing techniques'--these are all common documentary filmmaking conventions that we've come to associate with factual information.

The people producing this video know what they're doing, and they're very good at it. On a subconscious level, no matter what words are being said, this video feels factual simply because of how it was produced. It's intentionally manipulative. It's a textbook example of effective propaganda. (That's the line. Next is the sinker.)

This video successfully employs ''pathos'' and ''ethos'' to persuade people

Aristotle introduced a concept over two thousand years ago that remains more relevant than ever: modes of persuasion, or rhetorical appeals. The three main appeals speakers can use to persuade others are ethos, pathos and logos.

Ethos is an appeal to the credibility and authority of the speaker, how they come across. The entire first third of Plandemic is dedicated to setting Judy Mikovits up as a trustworthy expert on everything the video will discuss. She sounds and looks calm, collected and competent. She uses scientific but understandable language. She tells a personal story that helps viewers connect with her and with the interviewer, who also comes across as compassionate, thoughtful and empathetic.

The video doesn't make a scientific argument or mention COVID-19 yet'--the only purpose of the first 8-10 minutes is get the audience to trust Mikovits. The problem is that most people will not have heard of Mikovits before this video. This is their first impression of her, and first impressions are very powerful. When people later hear she is anti-vaccine and that she falsified data, it will be harder for them to believe it. They already know she was accused of those things, but she and the interviewer convincingly make the case that she was innocent and framed. The filmmakers have so strongly invested in ethos that it will be hard for someone watching Mikovits for the first time to disregard their first impression of her as a wronged woman.

Pathos is an appeal to emotion. The video appeals to viewers' emotions by portraying Mikovits as a victimized underdog and by repeatedly using stock video of harrowing images, such as patients dying from AIDS and malnourished children in Africa. The video claims people are dying because they cannot get the appropriate treatments they need, appealing to viewers' sense of injustice. The video even uses stock images of a SWAT team arrest to make it look like she was arrested at home in a major operation'--but that's unrelated stock footage. In fact, Mikovits turned herself in without incident.

Logos is an appeal to facts and logic. This is where the film falls flat'--but it doesn't matter to many people because it so successfully uses ethos and pathos. For logos, the film takes intuitive ideas or those with a kernel of truth to them, and it twists them and amplifies them into exaggerated, false claims that sound reasonable because they're familiar. (The claim that staying home will weaken our immune systems without enough exposure to microbes is false, but it sounds reasonable because it builds on the hygiene hypothesis, which does have evidence.)

Instead of reasoned arguments with supportive evidence, the film uses a common debating strategy called the gish gallop. This technique overwhelms the audience with so many assertions and arguments at one time, without regard to how strong or true they are, that it's impossible to keep up with them or refute them all. It's usually pointless to try because it's the nonstop bombardment of statements coming at you that makes it effective. (This is partly why debunking this video isn't a productive use of time.)

The video also uses images of sciencey things'--labs, cells, scientific experiments, pictures of studies'--to substitute for logos. They look credible and factual whether they actually support the argument or not.

Hook, line, and sinker.

So what do you do when someone shares it?

First, don't call them or the video crazy. Don't chide them or mock them for sharing it. And don't insist they delete it immediately or tell people not to watch it'--that just makes it forbidden fruit, which is all the more attractive. (The filmmakers are already successfully using that strategy by telling people it will get taken down, and it has'--for copyright infringement since it uses several video clips without permission.)

They probably really want your opinion because they trust you. Don't violate that trust right off the bat. Use it. How you use it depends on what you know about them already and what's worked in the past. Science communicator and social scientist Liz Neeley has a fantastic piece at The Atlantic on how to talk to people about science'--and misinformation'--without alienating them. Go read it. Seriously. It will help you.

You might ask what they find so persuasive about it and move on from there, addressing those specifics.

You could also discuss how to know whether Mikovits really is an expert or not. Instead of just dropping a link, explain that it's impossible for her to be an expert in all the different topics she covers in that video'--that's not how scientific expertise works.

Emily Willingham, PhD, a science journalist and developmental biologist (and my co-author on a book we published in 2016), has an excellent public post on Facebook about how to vet experts for actually having expertise in a particular area. Having a PhD in biology doesn't make someone an expert in all of biology. No one human can know all that.

''Some people with advanced degrees are perfectly willing to elide their expertise or overreach on their claims just to get attention,'' Willingham writes. And she makes this extremely important point that's relevant to the final moment in Plandemic when a clip of Fauci warning about an inevitable pandemic in the coming years is used to suggest he caused it: ''Science and the process of scientific discovery are never about one giant. Evidence is incremental, data can be slow to come in. But people with expertise collectively know what's on the horizon here and have been warning about it for years. They were informed by history and their own training, their understanding of how novel infectious disease would behave in a globally connected society. No one'--NO SINGLE PERSON'--is going to have a sudden insight or make some clever connection no one else has considered or uncover some vast deep conspiracy that has eluded the other 7.7 billion people on Earth.''

If they like reading long articles debunking it, there are plenty to choose from. I'll list some at the bottom. But a systematic debunking of the video isn't likely to be successful. Talking about it and why it's persuasive might be.

Why should I bother saying anything at all? Can't I just ignore it?

Conspiracy theories like those in this video are actively, directly harmful and dangerous. They can influence people's behavior in ways that harm those people and public health'--including you personally'--in general. We can't afford to let these ideas run unchecked.

If you don't push back on them, even to those you love or don't want to upset, you're enabling them. You're allowing people to spew harmful, dangerous nonsense that kills people and demoralizes the millions of health care providers trying to save lives.

Many people try to avoid drama or debates on their social media accounts, and I respect that. But this video is not a time to ''agree to disagree'' because the stakes are too high. It's a matter of life and death. The false statements in this video can cause deaths.

If they share it on your Facebook wall, address it. If you see them share it on their walls, address it. You don't have to debate all night'--that's not productive for either of you. Maybe you just make a couple points and drop it. But don't let it go unchallenged.

Should you unfriend them? That depends.

I know many people just don't have the energy right now to push back'--we're all strung out, burnt out, stressed, and tired'--so be strategic about what you can tolerate. You might need to say, ''I'm sorry, I care about you as a person, but I cannot allow you to share dangerous, harmful misinformation about a life or death situation, so I will need to unfriend you until the pandemic is over.''

Or, maybe it's vital that they remain connected to you because your posts are some of the only good sources of accurate information they have which might penetrate their bubble. Maybe you can't afford to sever a relationship during a time with so much isolation already. It's your call.

Whatever you do, speak up at least once. The stakes are too high not to'--for all of us. We all have a social responsibility to push back against dangerous, harmful information, now more than ever.

Does speaking up even matter? Will it make a difference? Yes.

You might not convince them the video is conspiracy theory nonsense. That's fine. That may not be the goal. But here are three things you accomplish by speaking up even if you know you'll ''lose'' the battle:

Others see you push back. They'll get accurate information and see you calmly, maturely responding to the false statements. Ethos! Seeing you speak up erodes the bystander effect, typically used to explain why people are less likely to help in an emergency if others are around. If someone makes a racist comment and no one speaks up, others don't want to be the first. So be the first'--and it inspires and emboldens other people to push back on their walls too. Speaking against misinformation is contagious in a good way. If you do it, they realize they can and should too. And if they didn't know what to say before, they can copy/paste what you said and use that. Speaking up normalizes factual information and contributes to the mere exposure effect: the more a person is exposed to an idea, the more it becomes familiar and credible, no matter what the idea is. The more they hear it from you and others, over and over, the more they may gradually, unconsciously start to recognize the logical holes and embrace factual information. It won't happen overnight or because of one person, and they'll think it was their idea when it happens. But it can happen. Where can I get a good debunking of it all?

For a truly exhaustive claim-by-claim correction, this Google Doc from fire and emergency management educator Jim Chaffee includes sources to support every correction. ''The anti-vaxx agenda of 'The Plandemic''' at The Big Think describes seven conspiracy theories ''baked into'' Plandemic. Politifact has a pretty extensive fact-check on the video's claims: ''Fact-checking 'Plandemic': A documentary full of false conspiracy theories about the coronavirus.'' ''Why People Cling To Conspiracy Theories Like 'Plandemic''' from meteorologist Marshall Shepherd at Forbes offers other reasons people are drawn to conspiracy theories. For the most comprehensive rundown of Mikovits' history you could ever ask for, see ''Judy Mikovits in Plandemic: An antivax conspiracy theorist becomes a COVID-19 grifter'' at the Respectful Insolence blog. Snopes always does a thorough job: ''Was a Scientist Jailed After Discovering a Deadly Virus Delivered Through Vaccines?'' Want to know the real story on what happened to Mikovits? Read this Nature piece and this Science piece. An incredibly thorough list of all Mikovits' misdeeds and mistruths is available on this Facebook post from Ross Grayson; it also includes links to more helpful articles.

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Archived Version

Sat, 09 May 2020 11:13

A video interview of former NIH scientist, Dr. Mikovits, has been making the rounds and is being promoted as being critical of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The title of the 25 minute video is Plandemic. The link is at the bottom of the page. Don't be surprised if it does not open, though, since someone keeps blocking it.

I watched about half of this video and could not continue. This is nothing but inflammatory BS. Mikovits makes a lot of unsupported, sweeping statements that are just fearmongering and often flat wrong.

I mostly can't comment on the uncorroborated legal aspects and claims Mikovits makes in the video. They are just her opinions and statements with precious little evidence backing them up.

One silly thing she said that I can comment on was how, in the early 80s, she refused to give Fauci a copy of her controversial Science paper that was in press (meaning that it would be published in a couple of weeks) because it was ''confidential.'' That is nonsense. A paper in press is NOT confidential and authors usually freely share them with others and the press if important enough. It is BEFORE a journal accepts a paper for publication when they can be considered confidential. She goes on to say that ''several weeks later'' Fauci asked again for the paper. It probably would have been published by then. I have published in the journal Science and they move quickly. She also said Fauci held up the paper's publication, but that claim is highly suspect unless Fauci called the science into question. So, I believe that she is inflating this episode for her own ends.

She goes on to criticize the Bayh-Dole act, which suggests that she is a fringe activist who thinks that financial incentives are bad for science. In the past, if a federally funded university scientist came up with an invention, the government had dibs on who owned the patent and usually took it from the inventor. That was unfair to the researcher and the university where the research was done. The act changed that and allowed the inventors to own the patent to their discovery. It is a good and fair law in my opinion. There is nothing wrong with profiting from your ideas and she is among the fringe who think that is wrong. She is wrong.

She also made the amazing statement that there is no vaccine for any RNA virus that works (coronaviruses are RNA viruses). That is flat wrong. Flu is an RNA virus and the vaccines do work with varying efficacy depending on how well the CDC predicts which flu strain will be prevalent each year. Poliovirus is an RNA virus and there has long been very good vaccines for it. There are also several effective veterinary vaccines for different coronaviruses that cause animal diseases. So, her credibility takes a huge hit on this point.

She said it is very clear that the virus was manipulated and studied in a lab. I am a viral immunologist and have seen zero evidence to support that claim. In fact, I have seen some evidence to say that is not true. From the sequence data of the CoV-2 genome, it is clear that it was not engineered in a lab. If it was, there would be telltale signs of that in the genome. The Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher who studies coronaviruses has found dozens and dozens of different coronaviruses in bats from different places in China. She sequences their genomes and places them in an open library for any researcher in the world to investigate. The sequence of CoV-2 is not in the library and that strongly suggests, but does not prove, that her lab never worked with it.

Mikovits goes on to say that getting coronaviruses from animals is ''not how it works.'' Bullscat! It is quite clear that is how SARS and MERS coronaviruses came about. MERS came from a bat and passed through camels and into humans. She claims that such zoonotic transfer represents accelerated viral evolution that would take "800 years," but that does NOT have to be the case. Flu shuttles between the North and South hemispheres each year carried by migrating birds that poop around animals (often pigs) who pick up the virus and transfer it to humans. That happens every year. Current evidence is that the Wuhan coronavirus infected humans from some undetermined animal, and there is compelling evidence that humans gave it back to 7 big cats in the Bronx zoo and to two pet cats and one pet dog (so far). So, it quite easily shuttles between different species.

Basically, I got frustrated watching the video and didn't follow it to the end. I think that Mikovits has an unhealthy agenda. I would not put much credence into what she says. You can try to access the video here, if you still want to.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/PBtAd9MZZgIJ/?fbclid=IwAR3WtsiKQo8XRby6y5Eq9cKFNIjiz5kWfXcPnp1DRzzNKXf_sD-OP2U-ZX8

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Thu, 07 May 2020 15:22

Technology Why we can all expect more contactless experiences soon.

Shape

By Don Reisinger, Technology and business writer @donreisinger Getty Images

May 7, 2020

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Fri, 08 May 2020 04:17

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz lambasted the San Antonio City Council following news that they were set to vote on a resolution labeling terms for the coronavirus's Chinese origin as ''hate speech.''

''Resolution being voted on by San Antonio City Council this morning labels terms 'Chinese Virus' and 'Kung Fu Virus' as hate speech and 'all persons are encouraged to report any such antisemitic, discriminatory or racist incidents to the proper authorities for investigation,''' San Antonio, Texas, investigative reporter Jaie Avila wrote on Twitter Thursday.

Cruz, responding to a tweet from syndicated talk show host Joe "Pags" Pagliarulo, called the move ''nuts" and used the Twitter hashtag ''#nospeechpolice.''

The measure was passed unanimously by the San Antonio City Council moments after Cruz's tweet.

''Hate speech is more dangerous than the virus itself,'' council member Manny Pelaez said during the voting process, according to Avila.

President Trump and others were widely criticized by the press for referring to the coronavirus as the ''Chinese virus'' despite the fact scientists have concluded the virus originated there.

''It's not racist at all. No, not at all. It comes from China, that's why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate,'' Trump told reporters in mid-March.

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Fri, 08 May 2020 12:42

Construction at the COVID-19 field hospital at McCormick Place in Chicago on April 10. The city pared back plans for a 3,000-bed temporary hospital at the nation's largest convention center as infection numbers decreased. Nam Y. Huh/AP hide caption

toggle caption Nam Y. Huh/AP Construction at the COVID-19 field hospital at McCormick Place in Chicago on April 10. The city pared back plans for a 3,000-bed temporary hospital at the nation's largest convention center as infection numbers decreased.

Nam Y. Huh/AP As hospitals were overrun by coronavirus patients in other parts of the world, the Army Corps of Engineers mobilized in the U.S., hiring private contractors to build emergency field hospitals around the country.

The endeavor cost more than $660 million, according to an NPR analysis of federal spending records.

But nearly four months into the pandemic, most of these facilities haven't treated a single patient.

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Public health experts said this episode exposes how ill-prepared the U.S. is for a pandemic. They praised the Army Corps for quickly providing thousands of extra beds, but experts said there wasn't enough planning to make sure these field hospitals could be put to use once they were finished.

"It's so painful because what it's showing is that the plans we have in place, they don't work," said Robyn Gershon, a professor at New York University's School of Global Public Health. "We have to go back to the drawing board and redo it."

But the nation's governors '-- who requested the Army Corps projects and, in some cases, contributed state funding '-- said they're relieved these facilities didn't get more use. They said early models predicted a catastrophic shortage of hospital beds, and no one knew for sure when or if stay-at-home orders would reduce the spread of the coronavirus.

"All those field hospitals and available beds sit empty today," Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said last month. "And that's a very, very good thing."

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said: "These 1,000-bed alternate care sites are not necessary; they're not filled. Thank God."

Senior military leaders also said the effort was a success '-- even if the beds sit empty. Gen. John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked at a news conference if it bothered him to see the field hospitals go unused.

"For gosh sakes, no," Hyten said. "If you see beds full, that means the local capacity of the local hospitals to handle this [has] been overwhelmed. And now we're into an emergency situation."

The Army Corps started building more than 30 field hospitals, retrofitting convention centers and erecting climate-controlled tents, in mid-March. Agency officials pushed to get these facilities done fast '-- limiting the bidding process and often negotiating directly with contractors they knew could deliver on time.

"I tell our guys, you have three weeks," Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, said at a Pentagon news briefing in March. "You get as much as you can [get] done in three weeks. And then the mission is complete. We have a narrow window of opportunity. If we don't leverage that window of opportunity, we're gonna miss it."

At Chicago's McCormick Place, workers scrambled in April to transform the convention center into a massive temporary hospital with 3,000 beds '-- more than the biggest hospital in Illinois.

"This was an empty convention hall," Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said during a news conference while flanked by construction workers in hard hats and bright yellow vests. "Monumental, round-the-clock dedication is what got this done before we need it, preparing for saving lives in the event that things become as bad as some have predicted."

But just as construction got underway, states were issuing stay-at-home orders. And the spread of the coronavirus eventually began to slow.

Work on the field hospitals continued, though some projects were scaled back '-- including McCormick Place. The field hospital opened with one-third of the beds originally planned, and it closed its doors a few weeks later after treating fewer than 40 patients.

The same story is playing out across the country. In fact, most Army Corps field hospitals haven't seen a single patient.

In many parts of the U.S., hospitals were able to expand their capacity to keep up with the surge of coronavirus patients. But in New York, hospitals were overwhelmed, and local officials pleaded with the public to save hospital beds for people who needed them most.

"The mantra was, 'Don't come to the hospital, don't go to the doctor, stay home, stay home till your lips turn blue,' " said Gershon of NYU's School of Global Public Health. "Well, we now know that was a crazy set of advice."

Gershon said she worries that a lot of people followed that advice and that some may have died because of it '-- including a cousin of hers on Long Island. He stayed at home as he got sicker, Gershon said, and later died on a ventilator in the hospital.

Contractors built two field hospitals on Long Island, on the campuses of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and SUNY Old Westbury, at a total cost of more than $270 million.

The Army Corps limited the competition in awarding the projects to speed the process, which usually takes six to nine months, according to agency documents. Officials noted they were able to complete the contract award for the Stony Brook project in a "little more than three days."

"This time savings was critical in order for construction to begin as quickly as possible, supporting the unusual and compelling nature of the urgency of this procurement and the national emergency," the document said.

The two Long Island field hospitals were completed in late April. They never opened to the public and didn't treat any patients.

"That's outrageous," Gershon said. "That's completely crazy. I hope they didn't take them down."

The temporary hospitals in New York haven't been taken down. They're on hold in case they need to be reopened in the future, according to a state health department spokesman.

New York has "so far avoided the worst-case scenario we were preparing for," the spokesman said in a statement. "There has been a reduced need for hospital beds, and as of now we are not moving forward on purchasing supplies and equipment or securing staff for these sites."

Even in New York City, where the Army Corps field hospital did treat COVID-19 patients, it never reached full capacity.

"There are a lot of losers in it and not a lot of winners," said Dario Gonzalez, an emergency doctor with the New York City Fire Department who helped lead the medical response at the temporary hospital at the Javits Center in Manhattan.

"It was very disappointing," Gonzalez said. "Everybody was here, ready to work, ready to get patients in."

Medical supplies are viewed inside the Javits Center in March in New York City. The Javits field hospital treated about 1,100 patients while it was open for three weeks. Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images Medical supplies are viewed inside the Javits Center in March in New York City. The Javits field hospital treated about 1,100 patients while it was open for three weeks.

Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images The plan was for the Javits Center to take patients from overwhelmed hospitals in the city. But in practice it wasn't that easy. Some hospitals complained that the intake process was too complicated. And they sent few patients to Javits '-- even as they resorted to treating patients in the hallways.

During the three weeks it was open, the Javits field hospital treated about 1,100 patients. Gonzales said it could have handled a lot more.

"We all could have done a much better job," Gonzalez says. "And we've got to really get it together to get that right the next time."

Officials in other states such as Illinois and Michigan also said field hospitals can be quickly reopened if there's an increase in coronavirus cases.

"We really wanted to make sure that we were maintaining some of the physical infrastructure that has been built there. So that should we need it, it doesn't take us a long time to potentially turn that back on," said Allison Arwady, the public health commissioner in Chicago.

She said officials there are keeping a close eye on the number of COVID-19 patients in local hospitals.

"We watch it really closely every day," Arwady said. "And certainly if we start to see any direction that things are not going the right way, we stand ready in case that needs to be reassessed."

National Desk Senior Producer Walter Watson and intern Brooklyn Riepma contributed to this report.

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CLOSE

The recent revelation from Sanjay Gupta that medical marijuana is okay has some talking. The late-night comedians are leading the conversation. Listen to what they had to say, then vote for your fav. at opinion.usatoday.com.

About this series: Free Press sports columnist Jeff Seidel is writing stories to put a human face on the coronavirus pandemic. If you know someone Seidel should write about, email him at jseidel@freepress.com.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, took his position in a makeshift studio in front of a plasma screen. He stared into a camera and squeezed his eyes tight, trying to control his emotions. But it was impossible.

Charlotte Figi, a 13-year-old with epilepsy who Gupta had covered extensively, died April 7, presumably from complications from COVID-19, although initial tests came back negative.

''It's hard to talk about,'' Gupta said on CNN.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, left, has been consumed by coronavirus coverage. He gives daily updates on CNN. (Photo: Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images)

His voice cracked, and he looked down: ''I don't know what to say. I've got three daughters, they were asking me last night, 'how could this happen,' I don't know.''

Gupta, who was born and raised in Michigan, has turned into the face of CNN during the coronavirus pandemic, appearing on the network an average of 10 times a day, although his personal record is 17.

Gupta is exactly what America needs right now, a physician with a comforting bedside demeanor during these crazy times, someone who explains the science and public health policies with a simple, straight-forward approach, yet with a touch of compassion and empathy, finding the tricky balance between hope and honesty, while broadcasting from a windowless room in his basement as his family waits upstairs, trying to be quiet.

Yes, even Gupta is dealing with working-at-home issues.

More from Jeff Seidel:

How a community celebrated a World War II vet's 100th birthday, pandemic be damned

Olympic athlete-turned ER doctor attacks coronavirus as foe: 'We are going to win'

''We have the TV on, so when we see him, we can all be quiet and keep the dogs from barking,'' his wife, Rebecca said. ''It's like, oh my gosh. He's on. Nobody drop anything. Be kind.''

''No shrieks of laughter,'' Sanjay said.

''You haven't had any close calls with the dogs freaking out?'' I ask.

''We've had a couple,'' Rebecca said.

''I will just text from the basement: DOGS!''' Sanjay said and laughed.

They live in Atlanta but Sanjay still considers Michigan home. He went to Novi High School and earned his undergraduate and medical school degrees from the University of Michigan.

Rebecca and Sanjay met in Ann Arbor when she was doing her undergraduate studies at U-M in political science and biology. ''It's a great American story,'' Sanjay said. ''We met at a bar. We met at Rick's Cafe.''

Rebecca earned a law degree from South Carolina and is now a lawyer, venture capitalist and sits on the Michigan Medicine Advisory Group.

They have been married 15 years.

Sanjay is a neurosurgeon, who still makes rounds but has been spending most of his time during the pandemic working for CNN.

''What's it like having him work from home?'' I ask.

''It's actually great because otherwise he wouldn't be home,'' Rebecca said. ''I think the stress would be too much for him. It's great that the kids get to see him, the little bit of a break that he has.''

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Home baseSanjay has been repeating the same day, over and over, for months now. He wakes up before sunrise, goes for a 4-mile run, makes breakfast and then disappears into his basement, doing reports all day long in a makeshift studio.

''It's a little room in the basement, poor guy,'' Rebecca said.

When I approached CNN about doing this story, I asked a public relations person if I could set up an interview with Rebecca and she did grant me one. But the PR person encouraged me to check out Rebecca's Facebook account because she has written extensive posts about her husband, which proved to be insightful for this story, revealing a different side of Sanjay.

''As you might imagine his three daughters don't always appreciate his exuberance especially when he is waking them up at 6 a.m., and telling them he has already run, made breakfast and been working for a couple hours,'' Rebecca wrote. ''I barely tolerate it. Doors are slammed, and pillows are thrown. But, still he goes all in. It's some sort of genetic glitch with him.''

Dr. Sanjay Gupta does most of his television work on CNN from his basement, which allows him to spend more time with his wife and three daughters. (Photo: Warner Media)

CNN built the studio in his basement several years ago after a series of ice storms in the southeast. ''I couldn't get out of the house at that point,'' Sanjay said. ''And they said, 'Well, we need to have a backup plan.'

''I hadn't really used it much up until up until now. And now it's been used all the time.''

He works nonstop '-- sometimes forgetting to eat. In addition to his appearances on the network, he also makes videos, writes stories and books, does a daily podcast and records a Facebook Live show every week.

It's the same kind of pace he lived in the final year of his neurological surgery residency at U-M, working more than 100 hours a week.

''He does spend some time with me and the girls,'' Rebecca wrote. ''It is usually for about a half hour a day. Right after filing a report on the Erin Burnett show, he plods up the stairs around 7:30, and we have a family dinner. At 8:01, he heads back down to talk to Anderson Cooper. During that half hour this past Friday, his watch buzzed more than once a minute.''

Sanjay's idea of binging Netflix is watching six minutes of a one-hour program every week. Of course, it takes him weeks to finish a single episode.

When he is not on television, which isn't often considering he has done everything from a town hall with the Sesame Street characters to daily segments, Gupta is constantly reading and talking to sources around the world, needing to be well versed in everything from the science to the public-health issues.

''It is not just his waking hours, it also consumes his dreams,'' Rebecca wrote. ''I have been awoken by Sanjay muttering utterances of viral replication and inhibition. He forgets to eat but can remember inflammatory pathways like the back of his hand.''

The other day, Sanjay looked at Rebecca and said, ''I simply can't turn it off.''

''If he wasn't doing such important work, I would shoot him up with tranquilizers and make him sleep for a week,'' Rebecca wrote.

Sanjay has always been a workaholic. He has won seven Emmy Awards while covering wars in Iraq and Lebanon, a tsunami in Sri Lanka, Hurricane Katrina, and earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal.

But this pandemic has been different for him, producing a far greater pressure, because it affects every person on the planet.

Sanjay is 50 but Rebecca can see the responsibility and pace aging him.

''I think for the first time in 50 years, however, he is being tested at a level he never quite imagined,'' she wrote. ''It has only been 12 weeks, but my dear sweet man has probably aged 12 years. It is as if his 60th birthday came and went, and we all missed it in this state of perpetual quarantine.''

She worries about him working too hard.

''Physically, Sanjay is healthy,'' she wrote. ''This wife is more worried about the gray area that lies between mind and body. That area has been really challenged these past few weeks, and there have been some really sad moments lately for all of us, but especially for him.''

Coronavirus watchdogGupta wrote a story March 9, explaining why CNN was going to start calling the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. At the time, there were more than 100,000 cases and over 3,000 deaths worldwide but neither the World Health Organization nor the CDC was calling it a pandemic.

''I take this shift in language very seriously,'' Gupta wrote on CNN.com. ''Now is the time to prepare for what may be ahead. That could mean quarantines, closed schools and canceled events in your town. It might mean strain at work or taking a break from hobbies that usually bring you joy. It might mean putting off a family vacation or catching up over the phone instead of getting together.''

Two days later, the World Health Organization started calling it a pandemic as well.

Two months later, Gupta's predictions about how life could change have proved to be painfully accurate.

Sanjay Gupta, CNN (Photo: JOHN NOWAK, CNN)

When the virus began to spread, Sanjay urged people to take this seriously '-- to social distance and wash their hands, while sharing how it was affecting his own life. ''I was supposed to visit my own parents, who are in the late 70s, this past weekend, and I didn't do that trip,'' he said on CNN in March.

For the most part, Sanjay talks about COVID-19 with calm and composure.

But his emotions have bubbled over at times. He showed frustration while talking to Jake Tapper on March 17, when there were 5,700 cases and 105 deaths in the United States. ''I'm not someone who likes to be hyperbolic or shout these things from the roof, it's just not my nature, but we know what needs to be done,'' Gupta said. ''The government knows what needs to be done. Public health officials know what needs to be done. It's not happening right now'... Almost since the beginning of the year, we've been talking about the testing. We've been talking about the need for hospital preparedness. We've been talking about the need for social distancing. But I don't think any of those things have been done, yet, Jake. We are still way behind on testing.''

But it is natural bedside demeanor that comes across on TV, the way he has shown heart-felt concern for CNN host Chris Cuomo, who battled when he was battling COVID-19. ''Call me anytime. Love ya bro.''

And he has showed his subtle, playful sense of humor while appearing on New Day, CNN's morning show.

''Sanjay, as the audience can tell, you have been cutting your own hair,'' anchor John Berman joked.

Sanjay smiled. ''Come on,'' he said. ''First, I need to say, my wife has cut my hair, off and on, for the last 20 years, since I was a resident in neurosurgery and she does a pretty good job.''

''It looks fabulous,'' anchor Alisyn Camerota said.

Contagion ... in real life''Is it wild to think you were in the movie Contagion?'' I ask him.

Sanjay played himself in the 2011 movie, a reporter covering a pandemic.

''Yeah, you know, it is wild,'' he said.

Sanjay has put the movie on a list to watch again. Of course, a movie could take a few months for him to watch, when consuming it in short bursts.

''I think it was one of those things where it was thought of as just a scary movie at the time, you know, far-fetched and yet they always said that, yes, we understand that this is gonna frighten people but this is a real life scenario, these are part of the pandemic wargames that these people run,'' he said. ''So it is it is wild to go back and think about that and think about the language that we were using in terms of social distancing and the stay-at-home orders and all that stuff that now everybody knows.''

The Planet in Peril crew explores environmental issues around Lake Chad with Dr. Sanjay Gupta in Chad, Niger, Cameroon, and Nigeria, June 6-16, 2007. (Photo: Jeff Hutchens/Getty Images for CNN)

Party of fiveSanjay and Rebecca have three daughters: Sage, 14, Sky 13, and Soleil, 11. And Sanjay talks often about them on the air.

After the CDC came out with guidelines that everybody should be wearing masks, Soleil went up in the attic with some fabric to make some face masks. She has created them for CNN anchors Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo and Brooke Baldwin.

''She made some really wonderful masks and the one that she made me I wear whenever I go out,'' Sanjay said. ''Anderson and I had been doing these segments together so she decided to make one for Anderson. When she heard that Chris Cuomo and Brooke Baldwin got sick, she made them masks and sent them to them. It's really sweet.

''I think everybody wants to do their part. Everybody wants to feel empowered in some way. And it manifests in different ways.''

Sanjay is reluctant to find a silver lining in this pandemic, in the midst of so much suffering and pain.

But he says his family has grown closer, while sheltering in place.

''I asked Sanjay how much more challenging this story had been to cover compared to others,'' Rebecca wrote. ''In response, he said something I hadn't fully appreciated until just now as I am writing this. He reminded me of the Maya Angelou quote, which is roughly: people may not always remember what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.''

That's the thing about Sanjay.

The news might be frightening and depressing. But he makes you feel hope, staring into that camera, standing in front of a plasma TV, broadcasting from a windowless room in basement. Hour after hour. Day after day.

Exuding honesty with empathy.

American's bedside physician.

Just hoping the dogs stay quiet.

Contact Jeff Seidel: jseidel@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @seideljeff. To read his recent columns, go to freep.com/sports/jeff-seidel/.

The Detroit Free Press is on guard with breaking news, tips and analysis to help you through this crisis. But we need your help. Please subscribe to support Free Press journalists who are reporting on the coronavirus. Or you can make a tax-deductible contribution to the nonprofit Report for America to help us put new reporters on the ground in metro Detroit.

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Sun, 10 May 2020 08:31

May 7, 2020 2020-05-07T11:10:38-04:00 https://images.c-span.org/Files/942/20200507112202014_hd.jpg Vice President Pence delivers personal protective equipment (PPE) from FEMA to Woodbine Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in Alexandria, Virginia.Vice President Pence delivers personal protective equipment (PPE) from FEMA to Woodbine Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in Alexandria, Virginia.

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Sat, 09 May 2020 11:27

Eugene Jarecki is an award-winning filmmaker, author, and public thinker. He is a two-time winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, Emmy, and Peabody Awards. ''Combining the skills of journalist and poet,'' writes Variety, ''Eugene Jarecki sets the gold standard for political documentaries.'' Often focused on corruption, exploitation, or injustice in contemporary life, Jarecki's films weave compassionate storytelling with rigorous investigation.

His films include Why We Fight (2005 Sundance Grand Jury Prize/Peabody), Reagan (2011 Emmy), The House I Live In (2012 Sundance Grand Jury Prize, 2013 Peabody), The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002 Amnesty International Award), Freakonomics, The Opponent, and Quest of the Carib Canoe. His most recent feature, The King, nominated for a 2019 Grammy Award for Best Music Film of the Year, had its North American premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, following its international premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017.

Jarecki is also a noted commentator and activist on matters of U.S. defense, social justice, and foreign policy. He is the author of The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril (Simon & Schuster).

Early life and education [ edit ] Jarecki was born in New Haven, CT, grew up in New York, and attended Princeton University. He is the son of Henry Jarecki and Gloria Jarecki, a former film critic at Time Magazine. Jarecki is the brother of fellow filmmaker Andrew Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans, The Jinx) and finance executive Thomas A. Jarecki. His half-brother Nicholas Jarecki (Arbitrage) is also a filmmaker.

Career [ edit ] Jarecki trained as a stage director at Princeton but pivoted to film after graduating. His first short film Season of the Lifterbees premiered at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival before winning both a Student Academy Award and the Time Warner Grand Prize at the Aspen Film Festival.[1]

Jarecki then directed two feature films released in 2000. One was the documentary Quest of the Carib Canoe, which documents an effort by indigenous Carib Indians of the Island of Dominica to build an ancient ocean-going canoe and retrace their ancestors' path from South America's Orinoco Delta in what is now modern Guyana to the islands of the Caribbean.[2] His second film that year was a dramatic feature called The Opponent released by Lionsgate. In 2002, his first theatrical documentary feature The Trials of Henry Kissinger was released to critical acclaim. Winner of the 2002 Amnesty International Award, the film was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and has been broadcast in over thirty countries. In 2002, Trials was selected to launch both the Sundance Channel's DOCday venture as well as the BBC's digital channel, BBC Four.

By 2005, Jarecki had distinguished himself as a filmmaker unafraid of serious, penetrating investigations, when his film Why We Fight about the role of America's military-industrial complex in leading the nation into the tragic quagmire of the Iraq War, won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and a Peabody Award. He also received a nomination for Best Documentary Screenplay from the Writers Guild of America for the film.[3]

Alongside directors Alex Gibney, Morgan Spurlock, and Rachel Grady, Jarecki then directed a segment of the 2010 feature Freakonomics based on the 2005 book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival that year.

In 2011, Jarecki returned to the Sundance Film Festival with his Emmy Award-winning film Reagan, before its national television release on HBO on what would have been 40th President's 100th birthday. The next year, The House I Live In, his film about America's War on Drugs, won Jarecki a second Grand Jury Prize at Sundance as well as a second Peabody Award. The film, produced by Danny Glover, John Legend, Brad Pitt, and Russell Simmons, was released theatrically in several countries and was exhibited in over 130 U.S. prisons, churches, and statehouses, as well as on Capitol Hill. Along with the music video of the same name, featuring John Legend, and the viral short "JUST SAY NO...to the War on Drugs", (both directed by Jarecki), the film is credited with changing the national conversation on U.S. drug policy.[4]

In 2014, Jarecki took part in the first Ted Talk in the history of Cuba at Havana's Teatro Nacional.[5] Events that occurred in the days leading up to the talk became the subject of Jarecki's 2016 short film, The Cyclist (El Ciclista) which he directed for The New Yorker/Amazon.[6]

In 2015, Jarecki served as Executive Producer on the documentary feature film (T)ERROR, directed by Lyric Cabral and David Felix Sutcliff, which won Jarecki a Sundance Special Jury Prize and his second Emmy Award. That same year, he also executive produced Laura Israel's feature documentary Don't Blink '' Robert Frank about the late legendary photographer's work and career.

His most recent film, The King, produced by Steven Soderbergh, Errol Morris, and Rosanne Cash, premiered at Cannes and Sundance before its 2018 theatrical release by Universal Pictures and Oscilloscope Laboratories and its television premiere on PBS Independent Lens. Nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Music Film, The King is a musical road trip in Elvis Presley's 1963 Rolls Royce that features Alec Baldwin, Chuck D, Emmylou Harris, Mike Myers, Rosanne Cash, Van Jones, and Ethan Hawke, among others, tracing the rise and fall of Elvis as a metaphor for the country he left behind. Alongside the film, Jarecki created a series of music videos for artists such as Lana Del Rey, M. Ward, The Handsome Family, Immortal Technique, The Stax Music Academy All-Stars and more.

In 2018, Jarecki's first public contemporary art exhibit, entitled Promised Land, co-created by Laura Israel, Alex Bingham, and UK-based artist Georgina Hill, and produced by Andrew McLain, was featured at Miami Art Basel as part of ''This is Not America'' at the Faena Hotel, Miami Beach. A multiscreen video presentation, Promised Land was inspired by Jarecki's 2018 film, The King.[7]

In 2019, it was announced that Jarecki is returning to dramatic filmmaking with a yet-untitled action film about a Saharan, Tuareg nomad, who seeks revenge for a crime committed against his tribal customs. Jarecki wrote the screenplay with his son Jonas Jarecki, based on a best-selling novel. Addison O'Dea is producing.[8]

Public Policy [ edit ] As a public intellectual on U.S. domestic and international policy, Jarecki has appeared on a variety of national television programs including The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Real Time with Bill Maher, Fox & Friends, and Charlie Rose. In 2010, he created the short film Move Your Money, encouraging Americans to move their banking from "too big to fail" banks into smaller community banks and credit unions. It became a viral sensation leading to an estimated 4 million Americans moving their money out of major banks.[citation needed ]

Eugene Jarecki and Julian Assange as a hologram

Jarecki is also the Founder and Executive director of The Eisenhower Project, an academic public policy group, dedicated, in the spirit of Dwight D. Eisenhower, to studying the forces that shape American foreign policy. He has been a visiting fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies and is the author of The American Way of War (2008), published by Simon & Schuster/Free Press.

Jarecki has also participated as a speaker at several international conferences including Ted, Nantucket Project, and will.i.am's "TRANS4M" gathering for the i.am.angel Foundation.

At the 2014 Nantucket Project, Jarecki conducted a public interview with WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange as a hologram, beamed in to Nantucket from his place of asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.[9][10][11]

Jarecki wrote in The Guardian before the event, "it crosses my mind I may be abetting a crime or violating international extradition laws. But I reassure myself that, in this regard, the worldwide web remains a kind of wild wild west, and the virtual escape of a person is not (yet?) a crime."[12]

As a sequel to this interview, Jarecki publically interviewed former U.S. Army soldier Chelsea Manning at the 2017 Nantucket Project, after her 35-year prison sentence was commuted by President Obama. In the Guardian, Jarecki wrote, "Manning sees connections in the duty of the soldier who uncovers high crimes, to the death of secrecy in the digital age, to the role of the individual in a society where privacy is as besieged as sexual orientation."[13]

Films [ edit ] Feature Length [ edit ] Quest of the Carib Canoe (2000)The Opponent (2000)The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002)Why We Fight (2006)Reagan (2011)The House I Live In (2012)The King (2017) Shorts & Segments [ edit ] Season of the Lifterbees (short) (1993)Addiction (segment) (2007)Freakonomics (segment) (2010)Move Your Money (short) (2010)Reclaim Democracy (short) (2015)The Cyclist (El Ciclista) (short) (2016)Promised Land (short) (2018)Books [ edit ] The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril (Simon & Schuster, 2008)Quotes [ edit ] Eugene Jarecki at the 66th Annual Peabody Awards

From BBC Storyville interview about Why We Fight:

"It really followed on from the experience we had making The Trials of Henry Kissinger. That film came out in about 130 U.S. cities, and in every one I met with audiences and talked about the film. I thought I had made a film about US foreign policy but the audiences seemed to be most interested in talking about Henry Kissinger the man. To me, that felt politically impotent, because the forces that are driving American foreign policy are so much larger than any one man. With the next film I wanted to go further '' I didn't want to stop at an easy villain or a simple scapegoat. I wanted to have a much more holistic approach that really took on the whole system."From Huffington Post on Obama and Afghanistan:

"While the wisdom of escalation in Afghanistan is, by any historical standard, deeply questionable, Obama's willingness to employ rhetoric where statesmanship and vision are needed is disheartening. One might have hoped that, given the groundswell of support with which he was elected, the President might have felt buoyed to exercise greater resistance to the usual runnings of Washington and the ceaseless repetition of history."References [ edit ] External links [ edit ] Eugene Jarecki on IMDbWhy We Fight - Google Video, 1 hr 39 min 1 secThe Trials of Henry Kissinger - Google Video, 1 hr 19 min 41 secMove Your Money short film on YouTube"The Nature of the System/It's the System Not the Man: Eugene Jarecki in conversation with Williams Cole" The Brooklyn Rail (Dec 05 '' Jan 06)New York Magazine: "Childhood in New York", featuring JareckiBBC Storyville interviewBBC World interviewScott Horton interviewInterview '' Now Playing magazineEugene Jarecki Thursday, January 26, 2006 on The Charlie Rose ShowEugene Jarecki, Monday October 20, 2008 on The Daily Show with Jon StewartEugene Jarecki, Monday February 21, 2011 on The Colbert ReportEugene Jarecki Move Your Money, Monday January 11, 2010 on The Colbert ReportChris Hedges and Eugene Jarecki: The Failed War on Drugs. Truthdig, 11 April 2014.

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Sat, 09 May 2020 11:37

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings split the company in two in 2011, thinking that the growing ubiquity of high-speed Internet access would soon mean the end of their disruptive DVD mailing business. But neglecting the DVD business proved to be a mistake, and Netflix reversed course.

Ore Huiying | Getty Images

Netflix has a China strategy, but that doesn't involve launching its streaming service in the world's second-largest economy.

Instead, the U.S.-based streaming company has recently been spending more money on acquiring rights to Mandarin-language content and producing its own originals.

In September, the technology giant unveiled the cast for its Mandarin-language original TV series called "Nowhere Man." In January, it kicked off production for two more originals, called "Triad Princess" and "The Ghost Bride." Two of the shows will be filmed in Taiwan and one in Malaysia.

The aim is to create shows for the millions of Mandarin speakers outside of China. It's also looking to create or acquire shows that have global appeal.

Earlier this week, Netflix launched "The Wandering Earth" on its platform. That's been called China's first space epic and is the third-highest grossing film of 2019, according to Box Office Mojo. It was a huge hit in China when it was released earlier this year and Netflix has brought it to the global audience.

Netflix has also turned to partnering with Chinese streaming companies. On Thursday, Alibaba-owned streaming platform Youku said Netflix had bought the exclusive distribution rights outside of China for "I Hear You," a 24-episode romantic comedy.

Netflix declined to comment on that development when contacted by CNBC.

Netflix problems in ChinaIn January 2016, Netflix announced an expansion to 130 countries, but China was not part of that. It has never had a local product in China.

Instead, it partnered with iQiyi, a streaming service which is majority-owned by Chinese search giant Baidu. iQiyi is one of China's largest streaming platforms. In 2017, Netflix agreed to license some of its original content to iQiyi to access the Chinese market.

But that partnership has now ended, according to iQiyi CEO Gong Yu.

"We had an agreement with Netflix two years ago, (to distribute) its content in China, but because of the verification system and users' tastes, the effect wasn't that great, so we didn't continue the partnership anymore. We have partnered more with the six traditional major studios, in the U.S. and other regions," the CEO said in a Friday Mandarin-language interview translated by CNBC.

Netflix's adult cartoon "BoJack Horseman" was pulled from iQiyi in 2017.

The U.S. firm isn't planning to launch in China soon and, in the past, CEO Reed Hastings has said his company would need government permission to do so. Instead, it is focusing on gaining share in other lucrative markets like India.

For now, its China strategy is focusing on tapping into the Mandarin-speaking diaspora around the world. Analysts say that China may now be a closed door because of the company that it once partnered with.

"Netflix has made no headway in China whatsoever. Inevitably Netflix needs to partner, place greater focus on commissioning locally produced content and address censorships with its own originals. Essentially, it could revisit its licensing partnership with iQiyi that could benefit both parties given Netflix's global position. As well as work more closely with other providers including telcos and vendors like Huawei," Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at PP Foresight, told CNBC.

"However, it might be too late as iQiyi, the Netflix of China, continues to march ahead strongly."

'--CNBC's Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report.

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Sat, 09 May 2020 12:06

(Creative Commons License '' Reference) David E. Martin 2020 1 Notes for Monday, April 27, 2020 Laws that You Need to Know U.S. Constitution: Article One, Section 8, clause 8, To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries Article One, Section 9, clause 2, which states that "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus (a recourse in law challenging the reasons or conditions of a person's confinement) shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." The Sherman Act: 15 U.S. Code §'¯1. Trusts, etc., in restraint of trade illegal; penalty Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal. Every person who shall make any contract or engage in any combination or conspiracy hereby declared to be illegal shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court. The Clayton Act: 15 U.S. Code §2 Monopolizing trade a felony; penalty: Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $10,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $350,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding three years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court. 15 U.S. Code §'¯19 Interlocking directorates and officers: (a)(1) No person shall, at the same time, serve as a director or officer in any two corporations (other than banks, banking associations, and trust companies) that are'-- (A) engaged in whole or in part in commerce; and (B) by virtue of their business and location of operation, competitors, so that the elimination of competition by agreement between them would constitute a violation of any of the antitrust law. On April 25, 2003, the United States Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (hereinafter, ''CDC'') filed an application for a United States (Application Number US46592703P, subsequently issued as U.S. Patent 7,776,521) entitled ''Coronavirus isolated from humans''. Claim 3 ''A method of detecting a severe acute respiratory syndrome-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in a sample'...; and, Claim 4 - A kit for detecting a severe acute respiratory syndrome-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in a sample'..., provided the CDC with a statutory market exclusion right the detection of and sampling for severe acute respiratory syndrome-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV). Securing this right afforded the CDC exclusive right to research, commercially exploit, or block others from conducting activities involving SARS-CoV since 2003. On September 24,

(Creative Commons License '' Reference) David E. Martin 2020 2 2018, the CDC failed to pay the required maintenance fees on this patent and their rights expired with no notification issued by CDC alerting the private sector to this decision. From April 2003 until September 2018, the CDC owned SARS-CoV, its ability to be detected and the ability to manufacture kits for its assessment. During this 15-year period, the effect of the grant of this right '' ruled unconstitutional in 2013 by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Association for Molecular Pathology et al. v. Myriad Genetics '' meant that the commercial exploitation of any research or commercial activity in the United States involving SARS-CoV would constitute an infringement of CDC's illegal patent. It appears that, during the period of patent enforcement and after the Supreme Court ruling confirming that patents on genetic material was illegal, the CDC and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases led by Anthony Fauci (hereinafter ''NIAID'' and "Dr Fauci", respectively) entered into trade among States (including, but not limited to working with Ecohealth Alliance Inc.) and with foreign nations (specifically, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences) through the 2014 et seq National Institutes of Health Grant R01AI110964 to exploit their patent rights. It further appears that, during the period of patent enforcement and after the Supreme Court ruling confirming that patents on genetic material were illegal, the CDC and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (hereinafter ''NIAID'') entered into trade among States (including, but not limited to working with University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and with foreign nations (specifically, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences represented by Zheng-Li Shi) through U19AI109761 (Ralph S. Baric), U19AI107810 (Ralph S. Baric), and National Natural Science Foundation of China Award 81290341 (Zheng-Li Shi) et al. 2015-2016 It further appears that, during the period of patent enforcement and after the Supreme Court ruling confirming that patents on genetic material was illegal, the CDC and NIAID entered into trade among States (including, but not limited to working with University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and with foreign nations to conduct chimeric construction of novel coronavirus material with specific virulence properties prior to, during, and following the determination made by the National Institutes for Health in October 17, 2014 that this work was not sufficiently understood for its biosecurity and safety standards. In this inquiry, it is presumed that the CDC and its associates were: a) fully aware of the work being performed using their patented technology; b) entered into explicit or implicit agreements including licensing, or other consideration; and, c) willfully engaged one or more foreign interests to carry forward the exploitation of their proprietary technology when the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed that such patents were illegal and when the National Institutes of Health issued a moratorium on such research. Reportedly, in January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in China sent investigators to Wuhan Institute of Virology and found that, ''During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.'' The Washington Post reported that this information was contained in a cable dated 19 January 2018. Over a year later, in June 2019, the CDC conducted an inspection of Fort Detrick's U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (hereinafter ''USAMRIID'') and ordered it closed after alleging that their inspection found biosafety hazards. A report in the journal Nature in 2003 (423(6936): 103) reported cooperation between CDC and USAMRIID on coronavirus research followed by considerable subsequent collaboration. The CDC, for what appear to

(Creative Commons License '' Reference) David E. Martin 2020 3 be the same type of concern identified in Wuhan, elected to continue work with the Chinese government while closing the U.S. Army facility. The CDC reported the first case of SARS-CoV like illness in the United States in January 2020 with the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service reporting 650 clinical cases and 210 tests. Given that the suspected pathogen was first implicated in official reports on December 31, 2019, one can only conclude that CDC: a) had the mechanism and wherewithal to conduct tests to confirm the existence of a ''novel coronavirus''; or, b) did not have said mechanism and falsely reported the information in January. It tests credulity to suggest that the WHO or the CDC could manufacture and distribute tests for a ''novel'' pathogen when their own subsequent record on development and deployment of tests has been shown to be without reliability. Around March 12, 2020, in an effort to enrich their own economic interests by way of securing additional funding from both Federal and Foundation actors, the CDC and NIAID's Dr Fauci elected to suspend testing and classify COVID-19 by capricious symptom presentation alone. Not surprisingly, this was necessitated by the apparent fall in cases that constituted Dr. Fauci's and others' criteria for depriving citizens of their 1st Amendment rights. At present, the standard according to the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists Interim-20-ID-01 for COVID-19 classification is: In outpatient or telehealth settings at least two of the following symptoms: fever (measured or subjective), chills, rigors, myalgia, headache, sore throat, new olfactory and taste disorder(s) OR at least one of the following symptoms: cough, shortness of breath, or difficulty breathing OR Severe respiratory illness with at least one of the following: ' Clinical or radiographic evidence of pneumonia, or ' Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). AND No alternative more likely diagnosis Laboratory Criteria for Reporting '— Detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in a clinical specimen using a molecular amplification detection test. '— Detection of specific antigen in a clinical specimen. '— Detection of specific antibody in serum, plasma, or whole blood indicative of a new or recent infection.* *serologic methods for diagnosis are currently being defined After inflicting grave harm to the citizens of the United States of America in economic hardships resulting from their allegation of an ''epidemic'' or ''pandemic'', the CDC and the NIAID set forth, and the President of the United States and various Governors in the respective States promulgated, standards for lifting conditions in violation of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution that serve exclusively to enrich them. Both the presence of a vaccine or treatment and, or, the development of testing '' both that solely benefit the possible conspiring parties and their co-conspirators '' are set as a condition for re-opening the country. This appears to be an unambiguous violation of the Sherman Act and, if so, should be prosecuted immediately to the full extent of the law. The CDC and WHO elected to commit to a narrative of a novel coronavirus '' exhibiting properties that were anticipated in the U.S. Patent 7,618,802 issued to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill's Ralph Baric '' and, in the absence of testing protocols, elected to insist that SARS-CoV-2 was the

(Creative Commons License '' Reference) David E. Martin 2020 4 pathogen responsible for conditions that were consistent with moderate to severe acute respiratory syndrome. U.S. Constitution: Article One, Section 8, clause 8, To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries By Renewing their Illegal Patents on February 17, 2014 the CDC violated Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution By Renewing their Illegal Patents on February 17, 2014 the CDC willfully violated the law using tax payer funds in light of the Supreme Court ruling on June 13, 2013 Article One, Section 9, clause 2, which states that "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus (a recourse in law challenging the reasons or conditions of a person's confinement) shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." On March 4, 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsome appears to have violated the law of the State of California by issuing Executive Order N-33-20 based on the ''threat of COVID-19'' with no evidence that such threat existed as confirmed by serology or confirmed immunologic evidence. The Government Code sections cited in the Order (Government Code sections 8567, 8627, and 8665) require that criteria be met which do not include the ''threat'' of any condition but evidence of said condition. At that time, neither the CDC nor the WHO had sufficient testing in place to: a) confirm and isolate ''a novel coronavirus'' from other coronaviruses; b) California did not have pathology data to suggest that an epidemic was imminent; and, c) the rest of the United States was equally incapable of making any such assessment as a result of the aforementioned conspiring parties actions. Governor Newsome's Executive Order, followed by numerous other similar orders, all are based on the threat of a thing that may or may not exist. THERE IS NO CLINICAL DATA SHOWING THAT THE RESTRAINT OF HEALTHY INDIVIDUALS HAS ANY EMPRICAL DATA SUPPORTING ITS USE. NO EVIDENCE SUPPORTING EMERGENCY DECLARATIONS HAVE BEEN OFFERED WITH THE EXECPTION OF STATEMENTS MADE BY COLLUDING PARTIES SEEKING TO BENEFIT FROM VACCINATIONS, TESTING OR THE COMBINATION '' NEITHER OF WHICH CAN BE REASONABLY EXPECTED GIVEN PATENTS GRANTED TO AND HELD BY COLLUDING PARTIES. Sherman Act and Clayton Act violations receiving and directing funding only to those parties colluding around the infringement of the CDC's illegal patent. ' CDC; NIAID; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Wuhan Institute of Virology; National Institutes of Health; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; President's Task Force; Governors except North Dakota, Nebraska, Arkansas, Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Oklahoma Possible violation of 15 U.S. Code § 19 ' Dr. Fauci is on the Leadership Council of the Bill and Malinda Gates Global Vaccine Action Plan ' L e a h D e v l i n, D D S , M P H C D C F o u n d a t i o n B o a r d '' U NC C ha p e l H i l l

(Creative Commons License '' Reference) David E. Martin 2020 5 DOMESTIC TERRORISM - Still in Effect Until March 15, 2020 Section 802 of the USA PATRIOT Act (Pub. L. No. 107-52) expanded the definition of terrorism to cover ""domestic,"" as opposed to international, terrorism. A person engages in domestic terrorism if they do an act "dangerous to human life" that is a violation of the criminal laws of a state or the United States, if the act appears to be intended to: (i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; What Can You Do? '' Draft Letter to ACLU, U.S. Attorney for Your District, Congressman/Woman/Senator/Attorney General To Whom It May Concern: The Declaration of a State of Emergency and the ensuing lockdown '' which exempts persons deemed ''essential'' without any basis in scientific fact or in Critical Infrastructure definition under the U.S. DHS '' violates the legal standard set forth in Jew Ho v. Williamson, 103 F. 10, 26 (C.C.N.D. Cal. 1900). Due to the facts outlined here: http://www.invertedalchemy.com/2020/04/covid-19-anti-trust-argument.html 1. The Governor of Virginia could not have known that there was a virulent outbreak caused by a single pathogen (reportedly SARS CoV-2) when declaring the State of Emergency; 2. No scientific evidence has been offered justifying the declaration '' mere reporting of mortality and morbidity based on pneumonia symptoms does not an epidemic or pandemic make; 3. The Governor failed to provide adequate testing to confirm or deny the presence or absence of ''a novel coronavirus'' and, based on recent reports from incarcerated persons, it would appear that positive tests COULD NOT have been based on community transmission as 96% of confined persons have tested positive according to Reuters; and, 4. No effort has been made by the Governor or regional health authorities to overturn the established science published in JAMA that facemasks should not be worn by healthy individuals (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762694?fbclid=IwAR3fI10GKsPfg16ths4EKE6od7JrZT15U_CJ-OQJo96fMTbZWxuQDc_NGuU) and that social distancing that involves the confinement of healthy individuals has neither been tested nor validated with any science whatsoever. I kindly request that you take this matter up on behalf of the Citizens of Virginia.

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Sun, 10 May 2020 06:32

What to KnowMore than 33,000 people in the tri-state have died because of COVID-19, though officials acknowledge the real toll is likely higher; other indicators like infection rate and total hospitalizations continue to slowly declineNY Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order extending his legal authority to push back the current May 15 deadline as part of the "NY ON PAUSE" orderNJ Gov. Phil Murphy said Friday the state's two major testing sites will now provide testing to asymptomatic residents; the death toll climbed to 8,952, including a 4-year-old child, the state's youngest COVID victimNew York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order this week extending his legal authority to push back the state's May 15 "NY ON PAUSE" deadline, but stopped short of moving the date, according to Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa.

"Yesterday's Executive Order extended the underlying legal authority for the executive order BUT did not change the text of any of the directives in NY ON PAUSE & so the expiration date on May 15 still stands until further notice," DeRosa said.

The order that closed non-essential businesses in March is set to expire Friday unless delayed by Gov. Cuomo. Regions of the state that meet the governor's key benchmarks in restricting the spread of the virus will be allowed to start the reopening process by May 15; the first phase includes businesses in construction, manufacturing and retail with curb-side pickup.

Cuomo's spokesperson says he "gave less than accurate information" when he told NBC New York on Saturday the new order extended the "PAUSE" deadline from May 15 to June 7.

The governor had said for weeks he expected to allow his shutdown directive to expire after May 15 in some lesser-impacted parts of the state while extending it in others. In an interview on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" Thursday night, he indicated some regions would start to reopen "in about a week," but didn't offer any additional detail in his daily briefing the next day.

Tracking Coronavirus in Tri-State"When we get to May 15, I'll lay out the numbers and we'll say, 'This is what the numbers say,'" Cuomo said when asked about the directive Friday. "There's no doubt that this is a terrible period, but we have to get through it. If we make a mistake and we act too quickly the situation is only going to get worse and it's only going to get longer."

It seems likely that some northern and western parts of the state are ready to reopen, but there are still 21 New York zip codes whose COVID-19 numbers are still too high where the bulk of cases are located (and are disproportionately impacting communities of color).

"Upstate New York is dramatically different. We will talk about construction and manufacturing reopening upstate. Downstate I don't see those numbers dramatically enough," Cuomo said.

New York State reported 572 new hospitalizations on Saturday, the lowest number since mid-March, a sign of the state's progress since flattening the curve. Total hospitalizations and intubations are steadily but slowly declining.

Despite the good news, Cuomo said the addition of 226 COVID-related deaths highlighted the state's "infuriatingly constant" death toll. Saturday's number of deaths reflected an average from the previous five days and matched the number reported back on May 3.

As of Saturday, New York state had confirmed 21,271 virus deaths, with Cuomo adding another 226 to the toll. New York City reports another 5,327 probable COVID-19 fatalities; those combined with the state's 14,505 confirmed deaths in the five boroughs bring the city's toll to nearly 20,000.

Testing Expands in Minority CommunitiesGov. Cuomo launched a new tactic to expand COVID-19 testing in areas most impacted by the novel coronavirus by partnering with churches in hard-hit communities.

The governor announced Saturday that Northwell Health will facilitate testing in 24 churches in predominately minority communities in downstate New York.

''When you put the church based sites together with the drive-thru sites, together with the walk-in testing sites, and our sites at public housing, the coverage will be extensive,'' Cuomo said.

Cuomo said the decision to expand community testing in minority communities came after the state's antibody testing showed that 20 of the 21 zip codes with the most new COVID-19 hospitalizations have greater than average black and/or Latino populations.

''We saw the same thing in Hurricane Katrina. Those people who are on rooftops were not the wealthy white part of the community. They were predominately minority, they were predominantly low-income, those rooftops very often were public housing. So, this has been the pattern,'' Cuomo said. ''We get it, but we have to break the cycle.''

Northwell Health and Cuomo's office have partnered with 24 churches, 11 of which will open the week of May 12 while the remainder set for the week after.

Governor Cuomo announced the expansion of COVID-19 testing to 24 churches in downstate New York.

In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy said two sites will open shortly to collect blood plasma to provide potentially life-saving treatment to those with the disease. The governor said plasma donations will begin on Monday in Newark at the University Hospital and in Fairfield at the Red Cross blood center.

People who have recovered from COVID-19 can donate blood plasma to help those still sick, Murphy said. The plasma holds antibodies that may help seriously ill patients fight COVID-19.

New Jersey's toll hit 9,116 Saturday. Overall, the Garden State is seeing improvement on core metrics like hospitalization and infection rates. Murphy reopened state parks and golf courses last weekend and says he saw overwhelming compliance with social distancing and face-covering protocol.

The numbers ''are absolutely going in the right direction,'' Murphy said at a news conference, and must continue that trend as a big decision looms: when, and how, to reopen beaches as summer approaches. He said the reopening of beaches would proceed like the reopening of parks in many respects, adding that he expected to give guidance on early steps by next week.

That means the state probably will limit parking and seek to enforce social distancing and other measures, though Murphy said it would be difficult to enforce masks on the beach.

Expanded access to testing is key to one of Murphy's principles for getting New Jersey on the road to recovery. On Friday, he announced the state's testing sites at Bergen Community College and PNC Banks Art Center will start providing tests to asymptomatic residents.

While New York and New Jersey concentrate on bringing numbers further down, Connecticut has its eyes set toward a modified reopening in the coming weeks. While social distancing rules like requiring face masks in public will still be in place, some will be altered slightly. Gatherings will be allowed, but limited to five people. And residents over 65 are still encouraged to stay home.

As for the soft-reopening of the state, restaurants can serve diners as long as they have outdoor areas and operate at 50 percent capacity or less; bars will remain closed. Menus will be disposable, digital or written on a board. Offices, retail stores and hair salons will also reopen with strict limits on staffing, spacing and customers.

Infections have been confirmed in more than 503,000 people locally -- 333,122 in New York, 137,085 in New Jersey and 32,984 in Connecticut, though experts acknowledge the virus is likely far more widespread. New York City has more than 183,000 confirmed cases, but early antibody testing suggests up to 2.1 million may have been infected at some point.

Nationally, nearly 1.3 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19. More than 78,000 have died.

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Watch > Episode > Ice-T - Freedom Of Speech: Just Watch What You Say, Censorship During Coronavirus Lockdown

Pioneer Of Gangster Rap Ice-T, is an American rapper, actor, producer, and author.

He started his career as an underground hip-hop artist in Los Angeles, before signing his first record deal in 1987. Ice-T has since gone on to release 15 albums, appear in over 80 films, and star in NBC's ''Law and Order: Special Victims Unit'' for over 20 years.

Throughout his career he has encountered controversy and protest, especially for the song ''Cop Killer'', a commentary on police brutality and racism, that was widely censored and ultimately led to Ice-T's departure from Warner Records.

He is considered to be one of the pioneers of gangster rap, always on the forefront of new messages and mediums.

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Chapters

00:00 | Trailer.02:03 | Brian's introduction.02:47 | Ice-T's advice on freedom of speech '' just watch what you say.10:48 | The powerful forces telling YouTube to shut down London Real.11:45 | When the guns start firing you run for cover, you don't ask who's shooting.15:09 | How Ice-T coped in the ''Cop Killer'' furore.18:55 | The biggest fear on earth is for us all to become friends and understand each other's situation.21:22 | Why hip-hop culture expresses an artist's viewpoint more than other music genres.23:23 | Ice-T explains why his music resonated with the teenager Brian.28:36 | Why Ice-T's fans deeply connect to his music and how he feels about that responsibility.32:40 | How Ice-T's songs resonated with Brian during his time on Wall Street.35:30 | As with all his music, Ice-T was channelling his Original Gangster album.38:04 | Finding the legit hustle.40:43 | When Ice-T faced the dilemma of potentially destroying his rapping career.43:52 | How Ice-T has become the longest running actor in television history.49:09 | How he found what he calls the final level.56:51 | How he was always fly and how he has maintained that even through the downtimes.1:01:21 | Ice-T's views on Coronavirus, how it could affect the world and what is all you really need in life.1:06:53 | His straight-talking opinion of Donald Trump.1:10:52 | How at 62, he is able to still rock the room and if he will still be doing it at 72.1:14:17 | What it is means to him to have a child later in life.1:19:22 | The worst and best days of Ice-T's life.1:25:44 | What scares him.1:27:29 | Ice-T's prediction for the survival of our species.1:30:04 | Success secrets.1:30:41 | Ice-T's appreciation of his interview with Brian Rose.1:32:03 | Brian splits a bar on one of Ice-T's tracks.1:32:57 | Ice-T responds with one rhyme for the road.1:34:55 | Brian's summing up.

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Sun, 10 May 2020 05:14

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Sat, 09 May 2020 13:38

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration is ''turbocharging'' an initiative to remove global industrial supply chains from China as it weighs new tariffs to punish Beijing for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, according to officials familiar with U.S. planning.

President Donald Trump, who has stepped up recent attacks on China ahead of the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential election, has long pledged to bring manufacturing back from overseas.

Now, economic destruction and the U.S. coronavirus death toll are driving a government-wide push to move U.S. production and supply chain dependency away from China, even if it goes to other more friendly nations instead, current and former senior U.S. administration officials said.

''We've been working on (reducing the reliance of our supply chains in China) over the last few years but we are now turbo-charging that initiative,'' Keith Krach, undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment at the State Department told Reuters.

''I think it is essential to understand where the critical areas are and where critical bottlenecks exist,'' Krach said, adding that the matter was key to U.S. security and one the government could announce new action on soon.

The U.S. Commerce Department, State and other agencies are looking for ways to push companies to move both sourcing and manufacturing out of China. Tax incentives and potential re-shoring subsidies are among measures being considered to spur changes, the current and former officials told Reuters.

''There is a whole of government push on this,'' said one. Agencies are probing which manufacturing should be deemed ''essential'' and how to produce these goods outside of China.

Trump's China policy has been defined by behind-the-scenes tussles between pro-trade advisers and China hawks; now the latter say their time has come.

''This moment is a perfect storm; the pandemic has crystallized all the worries that people have had about doing business with China,'' said another senior U.S. official.

''All the money that people think they made by making deals with China before, now they've been eclipsed many fold by the economic damage'' from the coronavirus, the official said.

ECONOMIC PROSPERITY NETWORK Trump has said repeatedly that he could put new tariffs on top of the up to 25% tax on $370 billion in Chinese goods currently in place.

U.S. companies, which pay the tariffs, are already groaning here under the existing ones, especially as sales plummet during coronavirus lockdowns.

But that does not mean Trump will balk at new ones, officials say. Other ways to punish China may include sanctions on officials or companies, and closer relations with Taiwan, the self-governing island China considers a province.

FILE PHOTO: Containers of Chinese companies China Shipping and COSCO (China Ocean Shipping Company) are loaded on a container as it is leaving the port in Hamburg, Germany March 11, 2020. REUTERS/Fabian BimmerCommerce on Monday launched a national security probe that could lead to new U.S. tariffs on imports of key components of power transformers, saying it needed assured domestic access to such goods to be able to respond to power disruptions.

Discussions about moving supply chains are concrete, robust, and, unusually for the Trump administration, multi-lateral.

The United States is pushing to create an alliance of ''trusted partners'' dubbed the ''Economic Prosperity Network,'' one official said. It would include companies and civil society groups operating under the same set of standards on everything from digital business, energy and infrastructure to research, trade, education and commerce, he said.

The U.S. government is working with Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Vietnam to ''move the global economy forward,'' Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said April 29.

These discussions include ''how we restructure ... supply chains to prevent something like this from ever happening again,'' Pompeo said.

Latin America may play a role, too.

Colombian Ambassador Francisco Santos last month said he was in discussions with the White House, National Security Council, Treasury Department and U.S. Chamber of Commerce about a drive to encourage U.S. companies to move some supply chains out of China and bring them closer to home.

China overtook the United States as the world's top manufacturing country in 2010, and was responsible for 28% of global output in 2018, according to United Nations data.

The pandemic has highlighted China's key role in the supply chain for generic drugs here that account for the majority of prescriptions in the United States. It has also shown China's dominance in goods like here the thermal cameras needed to test workers for fevers, and its importance in food supplies.

HARD SELL FOR COMPANIES Many U.S. companies have invested heavily in Chinese manufacturing and rely on China's 1.4 billion people for a big chunk of their sales.

''Diversification and some redundancy in supply chains will make sense given the level of risk that the pandemic has uncovered,'' said Doug Barry, spokesman for the U.S.-China Business Council. ''But we don't see a wholesale rush for the exits by companies doing business in China.''

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Monday said Trump had already signed an order that could allow limits on imports of components for the U.S. power grid from Russia and China, and would soon issue a separate order that would require federal agencies to purchase U.S.-made medical products.

John Murphy, senior vice president for international policy at the Chamber of Commerce, said that U.S. manufacturers already meet 70% of current pharmaceutical demand.

FILE PHOTO: Chinese and U.S. flags flutter near The Bund, before U.S. trade delegation meet their Chinese counterparts for talks in Shanghai, China July 30, 2019. REUTERS/Aly SongBuilding new facilities in the United States could take five to eight years, he said. ''We're concerned that officials need to get the right fact sets before they start looking at alternatives,'' Murphy said.

Trump White House pledges to punish China have not always been followed by action.

A move to block global exports of chips to blacklisted Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, for example, favored by hawks in the administration and under consideration since November, has not yet been finalized.

Additional reporting by Alex Alper, David Lawder, Matt Spetalnick and David Brunnstrom; Writing by Heather Timmons; Editing by Tom Brown and Sonya Hepinstall

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Chicago Tribune |

May 08, 2020 | 3:12 PM

People run and walk on the Lakefront Trail near Foster Avenue on March 24, 2020, in Chicago.(John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)

Mayor Lori Lightfoot raised the possibility Friday of assigning different times of the day for joggers, walkers and bikers to use Chicago's lakefront and other popular outdoor areas that are now closed due to overcrowding during the coronavirus pandemic.

Lightfoot refused to set a timetable for when she might reopen lakefront parks, The 606 elevated trail and the downtown Riverwalk, which she closed in late March after residents flouted social distancing rules to pack into them on a warm weekend afternoon.

''A lot of that is going to be guided by the science, and I have to be confident that we can open up those larger venues, the lakefront, The 606, interior trails in a way that still allows us to maintain social distancing,'' Lightfoot said at a news conference to announce her five-phase framework for benchmarks that need to be met for reopening different parts of the city.

The mayor repeatedly has said she doesn't want to backslide as the city tries to move forward from the stay-at-home order, a stance she reiterated.

''When I made the hard decision '-- but I think appropriate decision '-- to close down the lakefront, it's because we talked, we talked, we talked, and people ignored it. Now the weather's even nicer, the lakefront is beautiful, it's an incredible attraction, we can't reopen it up and go back to where we were,'' she said.

But she also said she's open to outside-the-box ideas such as staggered start times for different modes of transportation along Lake Michigan.

''People have been sending me really interesting ideas about a phased reopening, even having segmented hours for particular types of activities, I think those are really interesting ideas,'' Lightfoot said.

Social distancing ambassadors to tell people to move farther apart could also be considered, she said.

''I think a lot about the ushers at Wrigley,'' she said. ''They're pretty tough. They're checking your ticket, they're making sure you're going to the right seat. We need to have the same kind of rigor, I believe, in thinking about reopening our parks and other big public spaces. So I see that as another area where we're going to be employing people where those jobs didn't exist before.''

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Fri, 08 May 2020 14:43

Replying to

@LaddMcNamara @Kingfreespeech My old doc dad would be rolling over in his grave to see SO MANY PEOPLE follow such bad advice. His cure, which he practiced - FRESH AIR AND SUNSHINE! Dig in the dirt, build a garden. Be in love. This mask thing is making people paranoid and sick. Fear and Panic is the real virus

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Fri, 08 May 2020 13:16

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Fri, 08 May 2020 13:07

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Fri, 08 May 2020 10:56

Matt McDermott @ mattmfm

2h Replying to

@mattmfm Trump's White House, summarized.

pic.twitter.com/e4gBg1o81H View conversation · Matt McDermott @ mattmfm

2h Replying to

@mattmfm No better example of the institutional failures that have happened during this crisis than the Vice President delivering empty boxes of masks to a nursing home before a gawking press.

View conversation · Matt McDermott @ mattmfm

18m Replying to

@jimmykimmel Additional context to

@jimmykimmel segment. With 75,000 Americans dead, Pence is joking about about empty boxes of PPE during a publicity stunt, after the White House press secretary said they had no time for "publicity stunts" in the middle of a crisis.

twitter.com/davidmackau/st'... View conversation · P(C) @ 4everNeverTrump

2h Replying to

@mattmfm 1) did they seriously bring empty boxes?2) I mean, what the fuck? They brought empty boxes?!?!3) it's not like a full box of masks is even that heavy4) seriously, fuck these people

View conversation · P(C) @ 4everNeverTrump

2h Replying to

@mattmfm 5) that was a decent bit of acting Pence did with the first box, it looked like he was actually straining. I thought his acting talents were limited to voice only

View conversation · Rob Cady🌊🇺🇸 @ robcady13

2h Replying to

@mattmfm @Stonekettle I love how he acted like it was really heavy on the first box, only to be exposed by the second one.

View conversation · ð'š--ð'šŽð'šŸð'š'ð'š— @ KevINthe406

2h Replying to

@robcady13 @mattmfm @Stonekettle pic.twitter.com/paXnZuOdF0 View conversation · jen pal @ jennyrachelpal

2h Replying to

@mattmfm pic.twitter.com/4HFBnywpbO View conversation · Barbiesarmy @ crockerbarbieg1

2h Replying to

@jennyrachelpal @mattmfm When I see this it wouldn't have surprised me at the start of quarantine if he went out to throw packages of toilet paper. He would think that's a great idea. People need to be reminded of his past idiocy daily and since 2017

View conversation · Caleb Hull @ CalebJHull

59m Replying to

@mattmfm You're a liar.

twitter.com/jerrydunleavy/'... twitter.com/jerrydunleavy/'... View conversation · Engineer Rob @ ChMEPRO

56m Replying to

@CalebJHull @mattmfm twitter.com/robprovince/st'... twitter.com/robprovince/st'... View conversation ·

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Thu, 07 May 2020 16:29

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Thu, 07 May 2020 15:43

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Thu, 07 May 2020 15:42

103 Bill Gates Explains What Normal Means Bill Gates is back with another TV hit series explaining how vaccinations work and what Normal means in today's society and how it will impact you tomorrow!

Info Share Links Added:16 hours ago

By: netcam (52.40)

Tags: Bill Gates, COVID19, Mandatory Vaccinations

Location: The Bunker

Views: 961 Replies: 51 Score: 103link:

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Thu, 07 May 2020 15:38

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Thu, 07 May 2020 15:23