merylnass | It seems he used to tweet about eugenics. He liked it.
And it seems he remains intrigued with it.
Meryl’s
COVID Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new
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But
he was not impressed with the talks by me, Aseem Malhotra, Robert
Malone, Sasha Latypova. Guess what? This was not a science conference
in Stockholm. It was a conference about what has really been going on
these past three years. He likes the straw man argument.
So
who is this Kevin Bass, who some commenters to my last post described
as a twitter troll regarding nutrition and low carb diets. Why is he
apologizing for mistakes that the system made? Like, he admitted to
LOTS of mistakes?
He
had to explain to his followers that with the Newsweek piece he has
reinvented himself. He has decided to stop being an attack dog and
instead bring us sweetness and light. Oops. He forgot his new persona,
however, when he attacked the Stockholm conference. Who will he be
tomorrow?
newsweek | Our emotional response and ingrained partisanship prevented us from
seeing the full impact of our actions on the people we are supposed to
serve. We systematically minimized the downsides of the interventions we
imposed—imposed without the input, consent, and recognition of those
forced to live with them. In so doing, we violated the autonomy of those
who would be most negatively impacted by our policies: the poor, the
working class, small business owners, Blacks and Latinos, and children.
These populations were overlooked because they were made invisible to us
by their systematic exclusion from the dominant, corporatized media
machine that presumed omniscience.
Most of us did not speak up in
support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them.
When strong scientific voices like world-renowned Stanford professors
John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, or University of California
San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi, sounded the
alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced severe censure by
relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific
community—often not on the basis of fact but solely on the basis of
differences in scientific opinion.
When former President Trump pointed out the downsides of
intervention, he was dismissed publicly as a buffoon. And when Dr.
Antony Fauci opposed Trump and became the hero of the public health
community, we gave him our support to do and say what he wanted, even
when he was wrong.
Trump was not remotely perfect, nor were the
academic critics of consensus policy. But the scorn that we laid on them
was a disaster for public trust in the pandemic response. Our approach
alienated large segments of the population from what should have been a
national, collaborative project.
And we paid the price. The rage
of the those marginalized by the expert class exploded onto and
dominated social media. Lacking the scientific lexicon to express their
disagreement, many dissidents turned to conspiracy theories and a
cottage industry of scientific contortionists to make their case against
the expert class consensus that dominated the pandemic mainstream.
Labeling this speech "misinformation" and blaming it on "scientific
illiteracy" and "ignorance," the government conspired with Big Tech to
aggressively suppress it, erasing the valid political concerns of the
government's opponents.
And this despite the fact that pandemic
policy was created by a razor-thin sliver of American society who
anointed themselves to preside over the working class—members of
academia, government, medicine, journalism, tech, and public health, who
are highly educated and privileged. From the comfort of their
privilege, this elite prizes paternalism, as opposed to average
Americans who laud self-reliance and whose daily lives routinely demand
that they reckon with risk. That many of our leaders neglected to
consider the lived experience of those across the class divide is
unconscionable.
Incomprehensible to us due to this class divide,
we severely judged lockdown critics as lazy, backwards, even evil. We
dismissed as "grifters" those who represented their interests. We
believed "misinformation" energized the ignorant, and we refused to
accept that such people simply had a different, valid point of view.
We
crafted policy for the people without consulting them. If our public
health officials had led with less hubris, the course of the pandemic in
the United States might have had a very different outcome, with far
fewer lost lives.
My motivation for writing this is simple: It's clear to me that for
public trust to be restored in science, scientists should publicly
discuss what went right and what went wrong during the pandemic, and
where we could have done better.
It's OK to be wrong and admit
where one was wrong and what one learned. That's a central part of the
way science works. Yet I fear that many are too entrenched in
groupthink—and too afraid to publicly take responsibility—to do this.
Solving
these problems in the long term requires a greater commitment to
pluralism and tolerance in our institutions, including the inclusion of
critical if unpopular voices.
Intellectual elitism, credentialism, and classism must end. Restoring trust in public health—and our democracy—depends on it.
stevekirsch |Science used to be about data and what the data shows. Sadly, today, science is about what the CDC says, even if there is no data in support of the recommendation whatsoever.
The most stunning example of this is the “six foot rule.” Did you know that it was entirely fabricated out of thin air? From Presidential Takedown page 49:
What
is even more stunning is that the CDC has never admitted this publicly.
This is evidence that they are a corrupt organization and the
corruption goes to the very top of the organization.
We have over two years of data. Why not make it public?
We
now have over two years worth of death and vaccination data for people
who died after getting a COVID shot, yet nobody wants to see the record
level data tied to the vaccination dates?!?!
Let me be perfectly clear:
This is an abject failure of the entire medical community for not demanding to see this data.
People paid for us to see this data with their lives. Why is it being hidden from us?
In the US, hundreds of millions of people participated in a massive clinical trial and have data to share with people. At
least 500,000 of the participants paid the ultimate price: they
sacrificed their lives to send a message to America about the vaccines.
It is extremely disrespectful to these people to ignore their death
data and not share it with the public. Why are we not allowing these
people to share their data?
Do you think if we could ask
those people right before they died, “Do you want to let others know
what killed you?” Do you think they would all say, “No! Don’t let anyone
know. Please keep it a secret!”?
Every
institution in the world that is recommending or requiring COVID
vaccination should be DEMANDING to see this data made public
John Beaudoin and I have been calling for the death data to be set free and made public. We have been ignored.
Why aren’t any of these organizations calling for data transparency here so we can learn the truth?
The mainstream medical community
Heads of state throughout the world
The CDC
The FDA
The White House
Congress
The mainstream media
Public health authorities
Any doctor or nurse who recommends the jab to patients
Universities who mandate the vaccines for students, staff, or faculty
Any organization that supports COVID vaccines for their members, employees, or visitors
The data exists in VSD as well. But the CDC won’t allow anyone to see it.
The
data exists in every state health department. But you can’t FOIA it
because it requires a join to avoid PII problems and FOIA requests are
not allowed if they generate effort like that. So FOIA requests won’t
work.
It’s time for everyone to demand that our health authorities “Show us the data!”
We should all refuse to comply until they produce it.
brianoshea | Project Veritas recently released a video featuring "Jordon Trishton Walker," Pfizer executive who revealed shocking new info. But finding anything about him is tough. Here is what I've found so far.
thedailybeast |The Daily Mail took down a digital article last week that promoted Project Veritas’ latest sting operation
alleging that a Pfizer executive admitted the pharmaceutical giant was
making a “more potent” version of COVID in order to create new vaccines
for sale.
Following days of anti-vaxxers and right-wing media outlets
complaining about the article’s quiet deletion, and hours after The
Daily Beast reached out to the tabloid, the piece was back online—and
was completely changed.
Senior reporter Andrea Cavallier, the
article’s original author, was originally removed from the byline but
has since reappeared. The updated article,
which came back online Monday afternoon, now largely focuses on
Pfizer’s response to Project Veritas’ video and the far-right activist
group’s suggestion that the company is practicing “gain-of-function”
research. In addition to Cavallier, the byline now features health
editor Connor Boyd and health reporter Caitlin Tilley.
“Our
original story did not carry a response from Pfizer. We temporarily took
the story down while we vigorously pursued answers,” a Daily Mail
spokesperson told Confider. “Now Pfizer has responded, we are able to
report that they have confirmed they manipulated the covid
virus—although they insist there was no gain of function. This updated
story is now fully live again.”
In a video that went viral
in right-wing social media circles, a person Project Veritas claims is
Pfizer’s director of research and development tells an undercover
journalist that the company is “exploring” the possibility of “mutating”
viruses in monkeys so as to “preemptively develop new vaccines.”
“You’re
not supposed to do gain-of-function research with viruses,” the man,
whom Project Veritas claims is named Jordon Trishton Walker, added.
“Regularly not. We can do these selected structure mutations to make
them more potent. There is research ongoing about that. I don't know how
that is going to work. There better not be any more outbreaks because
Jesus Christ.”
The video blew up among conservatives, especially vaccine skeptics. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson fumed
about the “near-total media blackout of this story” about how Pfizer
was conducting “Frankenstein science.” GOP lawmakers soon began sending letters
to the company’s CEO asking him to confirm whether Pfizer was taking
part in gain-of-function research, citing Project Veritas’
“investigative report.” (Conservatives have latched onto
the theory that Dr. Anthony Fauci funded gain-of-function research in
Wuhan, largely blaming the “lab leak theory” for possibly creating
COVID-19.)
The Mail’s initial piece on the video
essentially gives a play-by-play of Project Veritas’ video while noting
the outlet reached out to Pfizer for comment. Shortly after it went up
on Thursday, however, the article was nowhere to be found on the
website. And its disappearance soon drew notice.
“Hi, @MailOnline
can you clarify why you have appeared to remove this story from your
website?” British parliament member Andrew Bridgen tweeted on Thursday. Bridgen was recently suspended by his own Conservative Party for peddling conspiracy theories about vaccines and comparing the side effects of COVID shots to the Holocaust.
After the Mail
piece was pulled offline, Pfizer released an online statement
responding to the allegations made about the company following the
publication of Project Veritas’ video.
“In the ongoing development
of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain
of function or directed evolution research,” the statement, released Friday night,
said. “Working with collaborators, we have conducted research where the
original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein
from new variants of concern.”
The statement also added that “in a
limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known
gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the
assessment of antiviral activity in cells.” The Mail’supdated article, which went back up on Monday afternoon, now largely focuses on Pfizer’s response to the undercover video.
Fin d’siecle American imperial capitalism in a nutshell: At what point do we realize that the only function of our psychopathic elites is the creation of the debt that the banks need to back all of their notational value? The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
For decades by a concerted effort, financial capitalists have been undermining the security of this country, undermining democracy, dimming the light of freedom, capturing our politicians and perverting the constitution to the benefit of themselves, creating a free market (free for the rentiers instead of free from the rentiers).
For example, our elites have created brittle companies while saying they were making companies more resilient. Leveraging profits into the service of debt to create ‘shareholder value’. Creating Just in Time supply chains that are also brittle and ripe for exploitation and manipulation in the cause of efficiency. Imposing an unjust tax revenue system that raised the cost of living and the cost of doing business for most people – relative to their income - and - which decreased taxes for exploitive financial rentierism. We have Bernie Sanders saying that there should be no billionaires…as if the legislation and tax favoritism that enables the extraction of these billions did not come from his own votes for legislation and tax laws.
Instead of America leading the world and promoting democracy and freedom by example, we have a ruling elite (yes, we elected most of these sell-outs via the heavily moneyed election process – even politicians who want others to not buy their elected office complain and beg for cash but never mention the corruption evident in our campaign finance laws or the necessity of raising so much bribe money) — this elite that feels the only way to defend and secure democracy is through financial coercion and brute force that, in fact makes us less secure and less a democracy.
Those who would give up essential liberty and embedding the desire for the basic human rights of “life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.” the ideal that no one is to be ruled by another
without their consent…to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
kunstler | “The White House has taken the entire West in such a direction and speed
of triumphalism, arrogance and “egregious” imbecility that there is no
going back or reversal possible without a total defeat of the official
narrative and the consequent eternal shame.” — Hugo Dionisio
The New York Times — indicted this week as a chronic purveyer of untruths by no less than their supposed ally, The Columbia Journalism Review — is lying to you again this morning.
This whopper is an artful diversion
from the reality on-the-ground that Ukraine is just about finished in
this tragic and idiotic conflict staged by the geniuses behind their
play-thing President “Joe Biden.” By the way, it’s not a coincidence
that Ukraine and “JB” are going down at the same time. The two organisms
are symbionts: a matched pair of mutual parasites feeding off each
other, swapping each other’s toxic exudations, and growing delirious on
their glide path to a late winter crash.
The point of the war, you recall, is
“to weaken Russia” (so said DoD Sec’y Lloyd Austin), even to bust it up
into little geographic tatters to our country’s advantage — that is, to
retain America’s dominance in global affairs, and especially the
supremacy of the US dollar in global trade settlements.
The result of the war so far has been
the opposite of that objective. US sanctions made Russia stronger by
shifting its oil exports to more reliable Asian customers. Kicking
Russia out of the SWIFT global payments system prompted the BRIC
countries to build their own alternative trade settlement system.
Cutting off Russia from trade with Western Civ has stimulated the
process of import replacement (i.e., Russia making more of the stuff it
used to buy from Europe). Confiscating Russia’s off-shore dollar assets
has alerted the rest of the world to dump their dollar assets
(especially US Treasury bonds) before they, too, get mugged. Nice going,
Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken, and the rest of the gang at the Foggy
Bottom genius factory.
All of which raises the question: who
is liable to bust up into tatters first, the USA or Russia? I commend
to you Dmitry Orlov’s seminal work, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects, Revised & Updated.
For anyone out there not paying attention the past thirty-odd years,
Russia, incorporated as the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991. The USSR
was a bold experiment based on the peculiar and novel ill-effects of
industrialism, especially gross economic inequality. Alas, the putative
remedy for that, advanced by Karl Marx, was a despotic system of
pretending that individual humans had no personal aspirations of their
own.
The Soviet / Marxist business model was eventually reduced to the comic aphorism: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
It failed and the USSR gurgled down history’s drain. Russia reemerged
from the dust, minus many of its Eurasian outlands. Remarkably little
blood was shed in the process. Mr. Orlov’s book points to some very
interesting set-ups that softened the landing. There was no private
property in the USSR, so when it collapsed, nobody was evicted or
foreclosed from where they lived. Very few people had cars in the USSR,
so the city centers were still intact and people could get around on
buses, trams, and trains. The food system had been botched for decades
by low-incentive collectivism, but the Russian people were used to
planting family gardens — even city dwellers, who had plots out-of-town —
and it tided them over during the years of hardship before the country
managed to reorganize.
Compare that to America’s prospects.
In an economic crisis, Americans will have their homes foreclosed out
from under them, or will be subject to eviction from rentals. The USA
has been tragically built-out on a suburban sprawl template that will be
useless without cars and with little public transport. Cars, of course,
are subject to repossession for non-payment of contracted loans. The
American food system is based on manufactured microwavable cheese
snacks, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizzas produced by giant companies.
These items can’t be grown in home gardens. Many Americans don’t know
the first thing about growing their own food, or what to do with it
after it’s harvested.
There’s another difference between
the fall of the USSR and the collapse underway in the USA. Underneath
all the economic perversities of Soviet life, Russia still had a
national identity and a coherent culture. The USA has tossed its
national identity on the garbage barge of “diversity, equity, and
inclusion,” which is actually just a hustle aimed at extracting what
remains from the diminishing stock of productive activity showering the
plunder on a mob of “intersectional” complainers — e.g., the City of San
Francisco’s preposterous new plan to award $5-million “reparation”
payments to African-American denizens of the city, where slavery never
existed.
As for culture, consider that the two
biggest cultural producers in this land are the pornography and video
game industries. The drug business might be a close third, but most of
that action is off-the-books, so it’s hard to tell. So much for the
so-called “arts.” Our political culture verges on totally degenerate,
but that is too self-evident to belabor, and the generalized management
failures of our polity are a big part of what’s bringing us down — most
particularly the failure to hold anyone in power accountable for their
blunders and turpitudes.
This unearned immunity might change,
at least a little bit, as the oppositional House of Representatives
commences hearings on an array of disturbing matters. Meanwhile, be wary
of claims in The New York Times and other propaganda organs
that our Ukraine project is a coming up a big win, and that the
racketeering operations of the Biden family amount to an extreme
right-wing, white supremacist conspiracy theory. These two pieces of the
conundrum known as Reality are blowing up in our country’s face. It
will be hard not to notice.
kanekoa |The real person who was the benefactor to, and the boss of,
Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, at the Ukrainian gas
company Burisma Holdings, was not the CEO of Burisma Holdings, Mykola
Zlochevsky, but it was instead Ihor Kolomoysky, who was part of the newly installed Ukrainian Government, which the Obama Administration itself had actually just installed in Ukraine, in what the head of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor correctly called “the most blatant coup in history.”
Shortly after the Obama Administration’s Ukrainian coup, on March 2, 2014, Kolomoysky, who supported Yanukovych’s overthrow, was appointed the governor of Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. Hunter Biden, with no experience in the industry or region, would join Kolomoysky’s Burisma Holdings two months later, on May 12, 2014.
A 2012 study of Burisma Holdings done in Ukraine by the AntiCorruption Action Centre (ANTAC), an investigative nonprofit co-funded by American billionaire George Soros and the U.S. State Department, found that the true owner of Burisma Holdings was none other than Ukrainian billionaire-oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky.
The
study, which was funded to dig up the corruption of Ukrainian President
Viktor Yanukovych, instead found that Ihor Kolomoysky “managed to seize
the largest reserves of natural gas in Ukraine.”
Burisma Holdings
changed owners in 2011 when it was taken over by an off-shore Cyprus
enterprise called Brociti Investments Ltd, and subsequently, moved
addresses under the same roof as Ukrnaftoburinnya and Esko-Pivnich, two
Ukrainian gas companies which happened to be also owned by Kolomoysky
through off-shore entities in the British Virgin Islands.
Oleh
Kanivets, who worked as CEO of Ukrnaftoburinnya, confirmed Kolomoysky as
the owner of Burisma Holding in the 2012 report saying, “The Privat
Group is the immediate owner. This company was founded by Mykola
Zlochevsky some time ago, but he later sold his shares to the Privat
Group.”
In other words, Hunter Biden’s boss and benefactor at
Burisma Holdings is the same Ukrainian billionaire-oligarch who also
claimed the position of boss and benefactor over Volodymyr Zelensky
before he became Ukraine’s president.
Kolomoysky Owns 1+1 Media Group
Kolmoysky, who currently holds a net worth of $1.8 billion,
making him the 1750th richest person in the world, owns holdings in
metal, petroleum, and the media sector, where he has had a long history
with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
For years, Zelensky’s company produced shows for Kolmoysky’s TV network, 1+1 Media Group,
one of the largest media conglomerates in Ukraine. Zelensky achieved
national fame, portraying a president on a hit television sitcom called Servant of the People, which was broadcasted on a channel owned by Kolmoysky.
In 2019, Kolmoysky’s media channels gave a big boost to Zelensky’s presidential campaign, while Kolmoysky even provided security, lawyers, and vehicles
for Zelensky during his campaign. Kolmoysky’s bodyguard and lawyer
accompanied Zelensky on the campaign trail as Zelensky was chauffeured
around in a Range Rover owned by one of Kolmoysky’s companies.
The Pandora Papers showed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his TV production partners were beneficiaries of a web of offshore firms
created in 2012, the same year Zelensky’s production company entered
into a deal with Kolomoysky’s media group, which allegedly received $41
million in funds from Kolomoysky’s Privatbank.
Zelensky’s political rival, President Petro Poroshenko, commented
on their connection during the campaign trail, “Fate intended to put
me together with Kolomoyskiy’s puppet in the second round of the
elections.”
After Zelensky’s victory, Kolomoysky, who
had spent the last few years living between Israel and Switzerland,
returned to Ukraine to keep up his relationship with the new president, nominating over 30-lawmakers to Zelensky’s newly established party and maintaining influence with many of them in parliament.
thepostil |“We are fighting a war against Russia and not against each other,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, January 24, 2023.
(For an unauthorised biography of Baerbock, see here).
On July 27, 1993, the US Department of Defense (DoD) and the
Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (MoD) signed a Memorandum of Understanding
and Cooperation on Defense and Military Relations, establishing a
programme of defence cooperation at the Department-Ministry-level, with
“substantive activities” between those offices being launched in July
1994 (Cf. Lt. Col. Frank Morgese, US-Ukraine Security Cooperation 1993-2001: A Case History). Since that date, the Ukraine has teemed with US military advisors of every stripe.
The Morgese case study is a blow-by-blow review of the US military
activity in the Ukraine between 1993 and 2001, designed to set up the
Ukraine for her destruction. So detailed a review, that it would swamp
the layman. Accordingly, we propose another document dating from 1994, readable by the laymen amongst us, and which spells out thirty years in advance, the full-blown War Plan for a zombie Ukraine.
Its author, Barry R. Posen (Rand, CFR, MIT, Woodrow Wilson
Foundation), belongs to the leather-armchair school of strategy the US
so excels in: arranging for others to die for the US living standard.
For obvious reasons, only Posen’s assessment of Russian military
strength is dated. The remainder of his study predicts with such ghastly
exactitude both events in the Ukraine over the last 20 years and the
expected, indeed hoped for, Russian response, that one readily perceives
that this is no prediction, but rather a fully-formed proposal for
War—complete with Posen’s dismay, very faintly-veiled, at Operation
Barbarossa’s failure, and his pleasure at the “high cost” Barbarossa
exacted on Russia.
To give our readers the flavour of Posen’s text, we have selected a
few, notable paragraphs from this Must-Read, one which Russia surely
cannot have missed. All quotations are so marked and in italics.
theguardian | It is no surprise that the pursuit and deadly beating of Tyre Nichols was set in motion by a police traffic stop.
Despite
repeated criticism of this practice, and the widespread availability of
body-cam and cellphone footage, the number of fatalities from such
encounters shows no sign of declining.
Between 2017 and November 2022, 730 people were killed by police
during these incidents. More than once a week during that time, someone
not being pursued or investigated for a violent crime met their death
after a traffic stop. An alarming number were stopped on the pretext of
any one of a hundred or more petty traffic code violations.
How did police achieve the power, and impunity, to stop motorists seemingly at will?
Beginning
in the 1920s, police departments experienced rapid growth because the
mass uptake of car ownership called for adequate traffic enforcement.
Until then, uniformed officers on wheels had mostly been chasing
gangsters and robbers. Would they have the legal right to stop otherwise
law-abiding motorists driving in their own private vehicles? Even
without a warrant? Yes, the courts decided, because the cars were being
operated on public roads.
As Sarah Seo has shown,
over the ensuing decades, judges granted more and more powers to the
police to stop and search vehicles. In particular, they were given the
authority to do so on the mere pretext of suspecting criminal activity –
in what is now known as a pretextual traffic stop. But what constitutes
a “reasonable” pretext is still a legal gray area. The fourth amendment
is supposed to protect us against searches and seizures that are
“unreasonable”. The problem is that when fourth amendment cases are
brought against police, courts and juries routinely defer to the
officer’s testimony.
This judicial tilt in favor of discretionary authority inevitably led to abridgments of civil liberties, and worse.
That
it would lead to racial profiling was foreordained. The ability to hit
the road is often seen as an American birthright, manifest in the
freedom to travel from coast to coast, unrestricted and unsurveilled.
Yet the right to enjoy this liberty has never been enjoyed evenly,
because of the restrictions historically placed on the movement of Black
(and, in many regions, brown) people by vigilantes, police and other
government agents.
Today’s warrantless traffic
stops are part of the lineage of the many efforts to limit the access
of people of color to the heavily mythologized freedom of the open road.
So, too, the well-known perils of “driving while Black” or brown are
amplified by the paramilitary technology embedded in today’s police
cars. Such features include drone-equipped trunks, bumper-mounted GPS
dart guns, automatic license plate readers, voice diction technology,
facial and biometric recognition, thermal imaging, augmented reality
eyewear, smart holsters, ShotSpotter gunfire detectors, and advanced
computers and software that allow instant access to government and law
enforcement databases. “Hot spot” policing requires hi-tech cars to move
in formation, through targeted urban neighborhoods. In 1960, James
Baldwin compared an officer
“moving through Harlem” to “an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile
country”. Today’s saturation patrols, like Scorpion, the Memphis unit
that hunted down Nichols, bear more of a resemblance to
counter-insurgency missions by special operations forces.
levernews | Massachusetts Democrats have a bold new proposal for prisoners:
donate your organs or bone marrow, and get as little as a couple of
months off of your sentence. The legislation, which has attracted five
cosponsors in the state House, raises major bioethical concerns for the 6,000-plus
people currently held in the Bay State’s prisons. In essence, the bill
would ask prisoners which is more important to them: their freedom, or
their organs and bone marrow.
The bill appears to go significantly
beyond other organ-donation policies for prisoners. The Federal Bureau
of Prisons says that prisoners may donate their organs while incarcerated, but only to immediate family members. In 2013, the state of Utah allowed
organ donation from prisoners who died while being incarcerated. Most
other states do not allow organ donations from prisoners at all.
The
Ethics Committee of the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit
that administers organ transplants in the United States, has panned
proposals like the Massachusetts bill. “Any law or proposal that allows
a person to trade an organ for a reduction in sentence… raises numerous
issues,” the committee says in a position statement on their website.
The legislation, HD 3822,
states, “The Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program shall allow
eligible incarcerated individuals to gain not less than 60 and not more
than 365 day reduction in the length of their committed sentence in
[prison], on the condition that the incarcerated individual has donated
bone marrow or organ(s).”
A five-member “Bone Marrow and Organ
Donation Committee,” only one of whom is designated to be a prisoners’
rights advocate, would decide how much time off prisoners would receive
from donating organs.
There is a long history in the medical field of doctors experimenting
on and abusing prisoners, including in Massachusetts. While current
rules prohibit the state Department of Corrections from “the use of an
inmate(s) for medical, pharmaceutical, or cosmetic experiments,” in
1942, a professor at Harvard Medical School injected64 Massachusetts prisoners with cow’s blood as part of World War II military research, killing one of the subjects.
The current bill might not even be legal. According to a 2007 ABC News report
on a similar proposal in South Carolina, “It's probably going to be
considered a violation of federal law. Congress passed the National
Organ Transplant Act in 1984 that makes it a federal crime "to knowingly
acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable
consideration for use in human transplantation. It is likely 180 days
off a sentence could constitute ‘valuable consideration.’”
The ABC
News story noted another potential problem with the idea: Prisoners
have “a much higher incidence of HIV, AIDS, Hepatitis, and even
tuberculosis than the general population,” so it might not be safe to
use their organs in transplant procedures.
The Massachusetts
bill’s two sponsors, Democratic State Reps. Carlos Gonzalez of
Springfield and Judith Garcia of Chelsea, did not respond to requests
for comment. Gonzalez is the co-chair of the Joint Committee on Public
Safety and Homeland Security, which has oversight over corrections in
the state.
kansascitydefender | It is easy to see how police are the dominant authority in these murders. Another news story,
released by KSHB Kansas City two days after Malcolm Johnson’s murder,
works to legitimate the narrative by exclusively using police and FBI
perspectives. In the story, Public Information Officer Sgt. Jacob
Becchina says, “We train tirelessly from day one to give officers every
tool both physically, mentally and tactically to work through those
situations so that they have the best chance to make the best decisions
that they can,” suggesting again that this outcome was the best possible
and truly could not have gone any other way.
The article also quotes a retired FBI agent and former cop, completely
uninvolved in the case, who adds legitimacy through admitted ignorance:
“Unless there are circumstances that we don’t know about, I think this
will be found to be a justifiable use of force.” The article follows
this with information about Johnson’s backstory that does not pertain to
the actual incident in the convenience store.
Becchina is one of KCPD’s three Public Information Officers, a
euphemism for marketing and PR cops who push information out to
journalists and are functionally in-house propaganda machines. PIOs
write press releases and often, as the primary spokespeople for all
incidents, prevent the media from talking to the cops involved. In a 2016 study
conducted by the Society of Professional Journalists, 196 survey
respondents at a variety of news outlets shared that over half of them
regularly experienced PIOs blocking their interview attempts with
police.
A third of these respondents said that it was the department’s policy
to prohibit interviews with anyone other than the PIO, Chief, or other
executive cops. Every reporter I asked about PIOs had a similar story of
being blocked from access to crucial information. “The police would
rarely speak to me; I had to go through the city manager and rely on
insufficient press releases,” a reporter for a small city’s only
newspaper told me. Others spoke of problems with purposeful
misinformation or information withholding, discrimination based on news
outlet, and exhausting runarounds.
As paid members of the police force who report directly to the Chief,
Public Information Officers create the narratives that most breaking
news stories reproduce. In a vlog called “What I’ve Learned Being a Public Information Police Officer” (posted 11/23/19), a YouTuber called officer401 talks about the process of getting information to the public:
“Something major happens…you go back to your office, you type up this
long press release, and you send it out to the public and all the news
agencies. Within minutes you have reporters from all over the country
calling you. I’ve had people from the New York Times call me, I’ve had
people from People Magazine call me. And they all want further
information about your story….there’s something strangely satisfying
that when you put out that press release, hours later you’re watching
the news and every station that’s talking about your story is literally
reading your press release word for word.”
Because reports are sealed due to “pending investigations,” crime scenes
are closed, and involved cops are not available for comment or
questions, the rapidfire media cycle forces reporters to rely on PIO
press releases for all initial reporting. Having a dedicated PR staff
means police committing these acts of violence have someone at the ready
to handle any incidents with necessary time, energy, and media
connections, something completely foreign to the average person, not to
mention someone who has been incapacitated or killed by police.
A lack of transparency and public understanding makes it so that the
average person knows nothing of the way PIOs impact news stories.
Further adding to the confusion, television reporters often head to the
scene of the crime to do their reporting, which–again–is frequently
taken verbatim from the PIO’s press release. Visually, the presence of a
reporter at the scene suggests they have a kind of eyewitness
authority–that they themselves have gathered information from the crime
scene, possibly talking to cops and witnesses. This seeming objectivity
gives the police narrative even more power.
kansascity | Authorities on Friday identified a 31-year-old Kansas City man who was fatally shot by a police officer the day before in an incident that also left a police officer shot in the leg.
Malcolm D. Johnson was killed during a confrontation at a
gas station near East 63rd Street and Prospect Ave., according to the
Missouri State Highway Patrol.
Kansas City police officers had identified a suspect in
an aggravated assault investigation around 6 p.m. Thursday, Sgt. Andy
Bell, a spokesman for the highway patrol, said Thursday.
Two officers went inside the gas station and tried to arrest him when “a fight, a struggle ensued,” Bell said.
The man drew a handgun and shot one of the other officers
in the leg as an additional two officers arrived on the scene to help
with the arrest. The officer who was shot returned fire, fatally
shooting the man, Bell said.
“The officer in self-defense returned fire,” Bell said.
Johnson was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. The officer was
being treated for his injuries and was in stable condition Friday.
The highway patrol has been the lead investigative agency for police shootings in Kansas City
since June 2020. Up until then, the Kansas City Police Department
investigated its own officers, a practice that was criticized by the
community.
LATimes | As they do every week during football season, the Lowe family
gathered Sunday morning to watch the NFL games on two big flat screens
in the South Los Angeles home of the family matriarch.
But as the
San Francisco 49ers prepared to face off against the Philadelphia
Eagles, there was one fewer family member watching. Anthony Lowe, 36, had been shot and killed by Huntington Park police officers Thursday afternoon.
Instead of talking football, the family spoke in hushed tones of the grainy cellphone video
they’d seen the night before: Lowe, a double amputee, trying to run
from Huntington Park police officers on what was left of his legs while
holding a long-bladed knife.
Lowe’s lower legs had been amputated
last year. In the video, he appears to have just dismounted from a
nearby wheelchair. As he scrambled down the sidewalk away from the
uniformed officers, two police sport utility vehicles drove into the
frame and parked, blocking the camera’s view.
The video, which was posted on Twitter on Saturday, then abruptly ends; no footage of the ensuing gunfire has been released.
Yatoya
Toy, Lowe’s older sister, identified the man running from police as her
brother. She said that his legs had been amputated after an altercation
with law enforcement in Texas, and that the family also has questions
about that incident.
“This is the first [Sunday] where he
ain’t watching the game with us. It’s what he loves to do,” Toy said.
She still uses present tense when referring to her brother, who has two
teenage children. “He’s the life of the family. He brings happiness,
joy; he loves to dance. He’s very respectable, he loves his mother. He’s
the favorite uncle. The kids all love him.”
Lowe’s death is a
devastating loss for the close-knit Lowe family, Toy said. And it comes
at a time of increased scrutiny of police brutality and violence after a
string of high-profile incidents, including the beating death of
29-year-old Tyre Nichols by Memphis Police this month.
The
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s homicide unit is
investigating Lowe’s shooting, as it typically does for all shootings
involving Huntington Park Police Department officers, according to the
unit’s Lt. Hugo Reynaga.
A detective with the homicide unit
stopped by the home of Dorothy Lowe, the dead man’s 53-year-old mother,
Saturday to interview family. They responded, Toy said, by peppering the
detective with questions about Anthony’s death.
The answers the
detective provided were vague and unpersuasive, said Tatiana Jackson,
another sister of Lowe. Their biggest question: What was so threatening
about a disabled double amputee with a knife that it necessitated
shooting him?
azcentral | A Pima County grand jury found that there was
insufficient evidence to charge a Tucson police officer who shot and
killed a man in a wheelchair in 2021.
After former police officer, Ryan Remington, fatally shot a man in a motorized wheelchair in Nov. 2021, it was announced that he would be charged with manslaughter in Aug. 2022 by Pima County Attorney Laura Conover.
The
case went to the Grand Jury and found there was not enough evidence to
pursue, however, the state could still decide to charge.
According
to Tucson police, Remington fatally shot the man, identified by police
as Richard Lee Richards, at a Lowe's parking lot near Valencia and
Midvale Park roads at about 6 p.m. on Nov. 29, 2021. Remington was
working off-duty as a security guard when he responded to a shoplifting
call at a nearby Walmart.
Police
said an employee informed them when they confronted the shoplifting
suspect, Richards, to show a receipt for the toolbox he was suspected of
taking, he pulled out a knife and told the employee, “Here’s your
receipt.”
Police said Richards then traveled to a Lowe’s
store across the parking lot in his motorized wheelchair. Tucson police
released bodycam footage showing Remington following Richards across the
parking lot as he called for backup, saying Richards “pulled a knife on
me.”
Officer Stephanie Taylor also responded
to the scene. After both officers told Richards not to enter the Lowe’s,
Remington fired his gun nine times into Richards' back and side,
causing Richards to immediately fall from his chair. He was pronounced
dead at the scene.
localmemphis | Davis was most recently police chief in Durham, North Carolina. She
beat out several other candidates, including three from inside the
Memphis Police Department and that has some wondering why someone
already on the force wasn't chosen.
"I'm convinced the public and the officers are all going to want to be on her team," said Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland.
Strickland says he has no doubts C.J. Davis is the right woman to put
in charge of the Memphis Police Department, but his pick hasn't gone
without criticism. Some activists wanted more input from the public
regarding who was chosen, others have questioned why one of the three
internal candidates --who all have a long history with the department--
wasn't picked.
"I was given eight finalists who were all really top quality. I just
thought C. J. Davis was the best qualified. I didn't go into this
thinking I want someone from out of town one gender or another one race
or another. I just wanted to pick the best person," said Strickland.
Strickland says despite Davis' name was added into mix late in the
game, "she went thru the exact same process as the other candidates did,
the same background check, same interview panels."
Strickland says he has not, and will not, make suggestions for who she puts in command under her.
"I think Chief Davis needs to get here and get approved, talk to the
men and women in leadership of the Memphis Police Department and make
her own choice. This is the way I have done it with all my chiefs and
directors. I don't really mandate their deputies or number two in their
departments," said Strickland.
Durham is smaller than Memphis. Critics also have questions about her
ability to lead such a large department in a city with so much crime.
Strickland's thoughts about that?
"Let's not forget she spent approximately 25 years in Atlanta and
Memphis is similar to Atlanta in the size, scope, and challenges, so I
think she is well prepared," said Strickland. "I would expect her to
bring some fresh eyes to old challenges we've had. Memphis has had a
challenge with crime for decades, gun crime for decades, and it's gotten
worse.
So why did Strickland choose her instead of the other candidates? "I
think she has the right leadership skills, and I think that is what sets
her apart to lead our city through these rough waters of trying to
reduce violent crime and retain and recruit more officers."
When it comes to Friday's citizens' questions for Davis, Strickland
says he has no input regarding what questions will or won't be asked to
Davis. Strickland says the event is being moderated by the Memphis
NAACP.
meaww |Cerelyn "CJ" Davis,
who is currently under fire after severe beating and the death of Tyre
Nichols by her police officers, has earlier also faced controversy for
leading the infamous REDDOG Unit while serving in Atlanta. The Memphis police chief
formed a unit, called SCORPION, two years ago, consisting of 40 cops.
But it was shut down after Nichols died on January 10 because of alleged
police brutality. It has been said that three of the five officers
involved in the alleged assault were from the SCORPION team.
Like SCORPION, REDDOG was also deactivated over a decade ago after allegations of “excessive force” and “police brutality” came to light, The Daily Mail reported. The page of Davis on the website
of the Memphis Police Department also mentions that. It states, “As a
Commander, she led the Special Operations Section, which included SWAT,
Mounted Patrol, Motors, Helicopter Unit, Vice & Narcotics, REDDOG
Unit, all Federal Task Force Officers, HIDTA Task Force, Cyber Crimes,
Gangs & Guns, and the Surveillance Unit.”
In 2011, Mayor Kasim Reed ended REDDOG after cops of the unit raided a gay bar in September 2009 after receiving tips on illegal drug use
and sex. They also reportedly took severe measures against those
present there, which led to a federal lawsuit. A year later, the city of
Atlanta had to give $1.025 million to the complainers.
Now, activist Hunter Dempster, who is an organizer with Decarcerate
Memphis, has compared the two infamous police units. He told
DailyMail.com, “They are literally an oppression force. The trust
between the citizens and the police in Memphis is about as bad as you
could ever imagine in a Metropolitan city. They are unchecked doom
squads that can do whatever they want. Davis' REDDOG unit was disbanded,
so how are you going to take the same premise of a disbanded unit to
your new job?”
Dempster continued saying, “Davis is doing her best
to say all the best social justice buzzwords and accountability – but
she is just giving lip service and empty promises and trying to make
herself look good,” before adding, “It shouldn't take someone dying for
something to happen. They are violent bullies who pull you over, wave a
gun in your face, and beat you up. They terrorize poor black and brown
communities.”
theonion | In an attempt to quell public outrage over the upcoming release of
body-cam footage showing the deadly beating of Tyre Nichols by five of
its officers, the Memphis Police Department continued to urge calm
Thursday in light of the unspeakable evil they had committed. “I
understand that this heinous atrocity beyond the comprehension of anyone
with a shred of basic human decency might be upsetting to some, but we
are asking everyone to please maintain their composure,” said police
chief Cerelyn Davis, explaining that while it was regrettable that
officers were mercilessly slaughtering innocents in the streets with
complete disregard for their humanity, it was no excuse for causing a
big commotion. “This barbaric instance of malice and savagery need not
inspire uproar. I pray that cooler heads prevail during this time of
unending death and misery being inflicted upon the powerless masses.”
Davis went on to insist that any sign of unrest would only give the
forces of unconscionable evil an excuse to impose even more wanton
suffering on those who have no choice but to endure it.
NYPost | The chief of police in Memphis in charge of the five officers who fatally beat and tasered motorist Tyre Nichols was fired from a previous law enforcement job after a botched probe.
Cerelyn “CJ” Davis became the first female police chief in Memphis’
history in 2021 and is currently in the international spotlight after
five cops brutally beat Tyre Nichols.
She was fired from the Atlanta police department in 2008 for her
alleged involvement in a sex crimes investigation into the husband of an
Atlanta police sergeant, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Two detectives accused Davis of telling them not to investigate
Terrill Marion Crane, who was married to sergeant Tonya Crane after the
police department obtained photos of him with underage girls.
A federal grand jury later indicted Terrill Crane on child
pornography. He pleaded guilty to one count of child pornography in
2009, the newspaper reported.
The indictment was issued after Atlanta police took no action in the
case and a subsequent investigation by the city pointed to Davis as the
reason. Davis was demoted from major to lieutenant before being fired
from the force that she had joined in 2008.
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