technologyreview | The large number of people already infected with the coronavirus in
the US has begun to act as a brake on the spread of the disease in
hard-hit states.
Millions of US residents have been infected by
the virus that causes covid-19, and at least 160,000 are dead. One
effect is that the pool of susceptible individuals has been depleted in
many areas. After infection, it’s believed, people become immune (at
least for months), so they don’t transmit the virus to others. This
slows the pandemic down.
“I believe the substantial epidemics
in Arizona, Florida and Texas will leave enough immunity to assist in
keeping COVID-19 controlled,” Trevor Bedford, a pandemic analyst at the
University of Washington, said on Friday, in a series of tweets. “However, this level of immunity is not compatible with a full return to societal behavior as existed before the pandemic.”
The
exact extent to which acquired immunity is slowing the rate of
transmission is unknown, but major questions like school reopening and
air travel may eventually hinge on the answer.
What is known is
that after rising at an alarming pace starting in May, new cases of
covid-19 in Sun Belt states like Florida have started to fall. Some of
that may be due to social distancing behavior, but rising rates of
immunity are also a factor, according to Youyang Gu, a computer
scientist whose Covid-19 Projections is among 34 pandemic models tracked
by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Immunity
may play a significant part in the regions that are declining,” says
Gu. At least until the fall, which is how far his models look forward,
he says, “I don’t think there is going to be another spike” of
infections in southern states.
justthenews | Dr. Sonia Angell, California's director of the Department of Public
Health, abruptly resigned on Sunday. Angell, who had been in the
position for less than a year, reportedly resigned via an email sent to
the California Health and Human Services Agency.
Angell has, among others, been leading the state's battle against the
novel coronavirus. More than 10,000 Californians have died of the
illness, and most of the state remains on shutdown following a brief
reopening period in early summer.
"Our department has been front and center in what has become an
all-of-government response of unprecedented proportions to COVID-19. In
the final calculation, all of our work, in aggregate, makes the
difference," Angell reportedly wrote in her resignation letter.
Angell's departure comes as the state government reckons with a data
glitch that failed to log nearly 300,000 infectious disease
testing records, resulting in hindered decision-making at the highest
levels of the California government.
The secretary of California Health and Human Services, Mark Ghaly,
recently apologized to state residents for the error. "Bottom line, our
data system failed," said Ghaly. With more than half a million
reported cases of the virus, California tops the nation for positive
diagnoses. The data blunder, however, has impeded state authorities'
ability to determine policies moving forward, specifically the decision
on whether to reopen schools for in-person learning as the new school
year is set to begin.
dailymail | Thousands of coronavirus deaths are set to be wiped from the government's official count, it was claimed today.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock last month ordered an urgent review into how daily death counts are calculated in England because of a 'statistical flaw'.
Academics
found Public Health England's methods meant ministers count victims as
anyone who died after ever testing positive for Covid-19 — even if they
were hit by a bus after beating the disease months later.
It would've meant that, technically, no-one
could ever recover from the virus and all 265,000 of England's
confirmed patients would eventually have had their deaths attributed to
the disease.
The blunder could see up
to 4,000 deaths removed from England's official toll of 41,749,
according to reports. One of the leading experts who uncovered the flaw
told MailOnline his 'best guess' was that more than 1,000 people have
had their deaths wrongly recorded as caused by Covid-19.
It would've meant that, technically, no-one
could ever recover from the virus and all 265,000 of England's
confirmed patients would eventually have had their deaths attributed to
the disease.
The blunder could see up
to 4,000 deaths removed from England's official toll of 41,749,
according to reports. One of the leading experts who uncovered the flaw
told MailOnline his 'best guess' was that more than 1,000 people have
had their deaths wrongly recorded as caused by Covid-19.
turcopelier | Florida is home to 21,933,000 people (see here). How many have succumbed to Covid since March 6, when Florida's Government started keeping tabs on the disease? 7,084.
That means 0.032% of the population have died from Covid in the last
six months. To put this into perspective, the CDC reports for 2017 that
46,044 Floridians died from heart disease. I do not recall nightly news
broadcasts wailing hysterically about fat Floridians eating double
cheeseburgers and clogging their arteries. But less than 8,000 deaths in
six months and we are supposed to put on masks and hide in our closets?
Nonsense.
Let's take a closer look at Sarasota County over the last 30 days. According to the US Census, Sarasota County was inhabited by 433,742 souls as of July 1, 2019. Here are the numbers according to the Florida Covid 19 "Dashboard." Just follow this link and click
on Sarasota County. Five thousand nine hundred seventy four Sarasotans
tested positive since the first of July (July 7 to be precise). That is
1.3% of the total county population. Hospitalized? 360, which represents
0.08%. How about deaths? 160. That is roughly consistent with the
number of deaths recorded state-wide--0.036%.
What about neighboring Manatee County (seat of the city of Bradenton
and winter home of the Pittsburgh Pirates)? Manatee has a slightly
smaller population than Sarsota, weighing in with 413,655 happy inhabitants.
Eight thousand nine hundred fifty six Manatee maniacs tested positive
for Covid--i.e., 2.1%. More have been hospitalized--589, which
represents 0.14%. The death count is 189 or 0.045%.
Ever hear of the concept of "perspective?" I am sure that the
families of those whose kith and kin perished from Covid and/or
co-morbidities exacerbated by Covid don't care a whit about the stats.
But the truth is the disease is not spreading like wildfire. People are
not flooding the hospitals.
Have
one AI with godlike powers monitor everyone at all times but only
interfere if a little man commits a thought crime that poses an existential risk. Bostrom imagines that you little men could easily get used to living in
such a world, particularly once you realize that it doesn't make any
noticeable difference.
Many little men already believe that there is
literally a conscious being who watches everything they do - and - they're
cool with that. All Bostrom is suggesting is that the status quo establishment implement an unconscious mechanism that monitors everything
that you little men think, express, and potentially do.
Think about it, FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, that doesn't seem like it's worse, does it?
Here's Bostrom in conversation with Chris Anderson, the head of
TED. Bostrom suggests implementation of a system of mass government
surveillance in which each little man is fitted with necklace-like
“freedom tags” with multi-directional cameras.
Information gathered by these “freedom tags” would
be sent to “freedom centers”, where artificial intelligence monitors the
data, alerting human officers if they detect signs of a possible “black
ball” idea.
We are at greater risk from societal collapse arising
from poorly functioning social systems. We are at VASTLY greater risk from our subjugation to the corporate profit seeking egregoric structure and the specific extractive interaction with the
environment that this demonic construct demands. (our economizating virtual reality) than from some sort of Pandora's box technological black
ball.
We seem spastically incapable of eliminating fission and fusion weapons while struggling to implement and benefit from superior and safer thorium fission power generation technology. Rather than using improvements in
photovoltaics and batteries to raise the resilience of individuals and
small communities to natural disasters, we are using them to make
the overall electrical power distribution system less resilient.
Fermi's Paradox doesn't pivot on black ball technologies, rather, it pivots on primitive status seeking within a perversely incentivized archaic material culture. Intelligent species self-destruct because they fail to achieve their own possible psychological development. Fist tap Dorcas Dad.
caitlinjohnstone | From 2021 until nuclear armageddon Biden will be sitting off to the
side mumbling to himself as his brain turns to chowder while holdovers
from the Obama administration orchestrate cold war escalations against
China in retaliation for its 2020 “election meddling”.
~
You
will never, ever hate China enough to bring manufacturing jobs back to
the US. Playing along with bullshit narrative spin hoping it will bring
your jobs back will never work. You’re just helping opaque government
agencies advance their new cold war.
~
The dumbest thing
about believing foreign countries attacked American democracy is
believing America has any democracy to attack.
~
Thought
experiment: If you looked out the window right now and saw a mushroom
cloud growing on the horizon, how would you feel about the way you’ve
been spending your mental energy lately? Be honest with yourself.
~
If
we win this thing it won’t be because conspiracy analysts showed
everyone a bunch of complex financial connections or because Marxists
put a bunch of theory in everyone’s heads, it will be because clear,
simple pointing helped everyone notice the fact that they’ve been duped.
This
fight isn’t a game of addition, it’s a game of subtraction. You’re not
trying to get the mainstream rank-and-file public to understand a bunch
of complicated new information, you’re trying to remove the blindfold so
they can see something for themselves that they kind of already
suspected was the case.
Cripple public trust in the establishment
narrative control apparatus and you remove the only obstacle that’s been
stopping the people from using the power of their numbers to force real
change. They don’t need anything new, they need to exorcise the lies
that have blinded them and stop trusting in the words of liars.
counterpunch | It is a truism to suggest that the public has now been replaced by
the consumer; that the public good has been replaced by individual
desire; that public space has been reduced to the private visions of the
individual; that democracy has been sacrificed on the altar of
economics. As Wendy Brown writes, in, Undoing the Demos, 2012,
“Neoliberal reason, ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in
jurisprudence, education, culture, and a vast range of quotidian
activity, is converting the distinctly political character, meaning, and operation of democracy’s constituent elements into economic
ones.”. Thus, the Left’s traditional urge to build a bureaucracy that
restrains predatory commerce in the interest of the public good is
subverted by the growth of a corporate state designed to suppress its
vestigial caring dimension.
This neoliberal attribute fatally weakens the viability of the
obvious ‘Alternative’ to which Thatcher was so averse, that of
democratic socialism, which thrived in post-war Western Europe as it
emerged from the worldwide crisis. Those governments were driven by a
mission: to embrace responsibility for the health of all of their
citizens – rather than let it be controlled by black marketeers or
corporate looters; to ensure that elder care, youth services and
childcare be freely available – not powered by profit; to provide good,
free education to all – not restricted by its expense to the privileged
few; to declare that housing and adequate nutrition are a human right –
not resources to be leveraged by the financially strong; to assert that
homelessness has no place in an enlightened state – not accepted as a
necessary alternative to the supposed evils of welfare; to declare that
the mentally ill, together with the anxious and alienated, find a haven
in adequate social services – not left to swell the ranks of mendicant
street people; and to ensure that public order is maintained without a
militarized police force supporting the criminalization of poverty, the
presumption of Black and minority criminality and the thuggish treatment
of those it arrests. All these beneficent outcomes must now be sought
elsewhere. As Bruno Latour points out in his recent essay,
‘Are you ready to extract yourself from the Economy?’, “After a hundred
years devoted to socialism limited just to the redistribution of the
benefits of the economy, it might now be more a matter of inventing a
socialism that contests production itself”.
Latour makes the point that in the miraculous COVID-inspired halting
of production, travel and pollution, the world discovered a hitherto
unsuspected superpower – the power of interruption. We have the ability,
collectively, it now seems, to become globalization interrupters,
neoliberalism interrupters and interrupters of all those modes of
production that are destroying the habitability of the earth for humans
and our neighboring species. He suggests we have an opportunity of,
“Getting away from production as the overriding principle of our
relationship to the world.” This constitutes a retreat from the very
principle that informed the colonization of the Americas and continues
to inform its despoliation.
medium | I wondered if maybe I had been totally wrong from the start. Maybe I deserved what I got. Maybe I had
been too ambitious and competitive in the party. Late in 2018, I had a
conversation with the president of the original Wake progressives. He
began to discuss the work of that chapter, before there had been a
Caucus, from 2004 to 2016. He explained how they had worked to organize
precincts in the county, so they could get progressive chairs and vice
chairs who would thus be entitled to votes in Wake’s county party
meetings. He told me how they organized themselves at county conventions
to ensure that progressives would be elected from Wake to have a vote
in the state party. He explained similar efforts for similar offices in
the party. In other words, he told me that, for twelve whole years,
progressives in Wake, whom I had never met, were implementing the exact
same strategy, to a tee, that I had developed and written for my own
chapter in Orange.
And
this was my next Weinstein moment. It was that “Eureka” moment with
negative undertones, which I guess can be called a “Dysreka.” Just as
Bret and Eric, years later, saw their advancements being used and pushed
by someone else, I was getting the exact same confirmation about my
strategy (although he had not stolen it from me). This guy who had been
at it longer, whose chapter was the inspiration for the Caucus itself,
told me that I had stumbled upon the exact plan I was supposed to have
for my chapter.
I
don’t think this elected official from Hillsborough or this gentleman
from Wake have ever met each other. Nevertheless, they quickly moved to
shut down threats to the establishment of the Democratic Party here in
North Carolina, as soon as they detected it, in manner much like what
Weinstein has described. They were manifestations of the DISC, of an
autoimmune response in the Democratic Party, and they moved through
indirect, defamatory manners that played upon uninformed and ignorant
crowds to derail those in their paths.
These
events and others that I could tell really hurt. The chapter I had
organized was like a baby of mine or a work of art (and you guys can see
some of my art here on Medium to know what I mean by that). All the
work I did to make the Democratic Party more accountable, while also
trying to plant seeds to make it more electable, just blew up in my face
because actors who want to defend the system acted swiftly. The
corruption and abuse of power in the Democratic Party exists beyond the
DNC. It manifests itself through brutal patronage relationships at the
grassroots level as well that allow for decentralized policing and,
frankly, sabotage.
I
still think the Democratic Party can fix this country, but it needs a
lot of home repairs before it can do so. We need something to break the
Gated Institutional Narrative (another Weinstein term) that enables
this. At the moment I am mostly out of ideas, but I am attempting
another run for the NC House, here in Chapel Hill.
I
hope this story informs you all decently and that it motivates you to
do something good and productive, even though I know something like this
is likely to produce more anger. We really do not need more anger. We
need people who are more excited about the utopia and less about the
revolution. I also hope it inspires you to share your own encounters
with the DISC.
I
also hope Eric comes across this and can get a few ideas on what to do.
He is a Democrat like me, however begrudgingly, and he does have a role
to play in reforming it. For those of you Republicans out there, I hope
you are also noticing where the DISC exists in your party and are
thinking of how to counter it. Fixing America is going to be a
bi-partisan job, after all.
alternet | The capitalist economic system has always had a big problem with
politics in societies with universal suffrage. Anticipating that, most
capitalists opposed and long resisted extending suffrage beyond the rich
who possessed capital. Only mass pressures from below forced repeated
extensions of voting rights until universal suffrage was achieved—at
least legally. To this day, capitalists develop and apply all sorts of
legal and illegal mechanisms to limit and constrain suffrage. Among
those committed to conserving capitalism, fear of universal suffrage
runs deep. Trump and his Republicans exemplify and act on that fear as
the 2020 election looms.
The problem arises from capitalism’s basic nature. The capitalists
who own and operate business enterprises—employers as a group—comprise a
small social minority. In contrast, employees and their families are
the social majority. The employer minority clearly dominates the
micro-economy inside each enterprise. In capitalist corporations, the
major shareholders and the board of directors they select make all the
key decisions including distribution of the enterprise’s net revenues.
Their decisions allocate large portions of those net revenues to
themselves as shareholders’ dividends and top managers’ executive pay
packages. Their incomes and wealth thus accumulate faster than the
social averages. In privately held capitalist enterprises their owners
and top managers behave similarly and enjoy a similar set of privileges.
Unequally distributed income and wealth in modern societies flow
chiefly from the internal organization of capitalist enterprises. The
owners and their top managers then use their disproportionate wealth to
shape and control the macro-economy and the politics interwoven with it.
However, universal suffrage makes it possible for employees to undo
capitalism’s underlying economic inequalities by political means when,
for example, majorities win elections. Employees can elect politicians
whose legislative, executive, and judicial decisions effectively reverse
capitalism’s economic results. Tax, minimum wage, and government
spending laws can redistribute income and wealth in many different ways.
If redistribution is not how majorities choose to end unacceptable
levels of inequality, they can take other steps. Majorities might, for
example, vote to transition enterprises’ internal organizations from
capitalist hierarchies to democratic cooperatives. Enterprises’ net
revenues would then be distributed not by the minorities atop capitalist
hierarchies but instead by democratic decisions of all employees, each
with one vote. The multiple levels of inequality typical of capitalism
would disappear.
Capitalism’s ongoing political problem has been how best to prevent
employees from forming just such political majorities. During its
recurring times of special difficulty (periodic crashes, wars, conflicts
between monopolized and competitive industries, pandemics),
capitalism’s political problem intensifies and broadens. It becomes how
best to prevent employees’ political majorities from ending capitalism
altogether and moving society to an alternative economic system.
To solve capitalism’s political problem, capitalists as a small
social minority must craft alliances with other social groups. Those
alliances must be strong enough to defuse, deter, or destroy any and all
emerging employee majorities that might threaten capitalists’ interests
or their systems’ survival. The smaller or weaker the capitalist
minorities are, the more the key alliance they form and rely upon is
with the military. In many parts of the world, capitalism is secured by a
military dictatorship that targets and destroys emerging movements for
anti-capitalist change among employees or among non-capitalist sectors.
Even where capitalists are a relatively large, well-established
minority, if their social dominance is threatened, say by a large
anti-capitalist movement from below, alliance with a military
dictatorship may be a last resort survival mechanism. When such
alliances culminate in mergers of capitalists and the state apparatus,
fascism has arrived.
During capitalism’s non-extreme moments, when not threatened by
imminent social explosions, its basic political problem remains.
Capitalists must block employee majorities from undoing the workings and
results of the capitalist economic system and especially its
characteristic distributions of income, wealth, power, and culture. To
that end capitalists seek portions of the employee class to ally with,
to disconnect from other, fellow employees. They usually work with and
use political parties to form and sustain such alliances.
In the words of the great Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, the
capitalists use their allied political party to form a “political bloc”
with portions of the employee class and possible others outside the
capitalist economy. That bloc must be strong enough to thwart the
anti-capitalist goals of movements among the employee class. Ideally,
for capitalists, their bloc should rule the society—be the hegemonic
power—by controlling mass media, winning elections, producing
parliamentary majorities, and disseminating an ideology in schools and
beyond that justifies capitalism. Capitalist hegemony would then keep
anti-capitalist impulses disorganized or unable to build a social
movement into a counter-hegemonic bloc strong enough to challenge
capitalism’s hegemony.
gatesnotes | A global crisis has shocked the world. It is causing a tragic number
of deaths, making people afraid to leave home, and leading to economic
hardship not seen in many generations. Its effects are rippling across
the world.
Obviously, I am talking about COVID-19. But in just a few decades,
the same description will fit another global crisis: climate change. As
awful as this pandemic is, climate change could be worse.
I realize that it’s hard to think about a problem like climate change
right now. When disaster strikes, it is human nature to worry only
about meeting our most immediate needs, especially when the disaster is
as bad as COVID-19. But the fact that dramatically higher temperatures
seem far off in the future does not make them any less of a problem—and
the only way to avoid the worst possible climate outcomes is to
accelerate our efforts now. Even as the world works to stop the novel
coronavirus and begin recovering from it, we also need to act now to
avoid a climate disaster by building and deploying innovations that will
let us eliminate our greenhouse gas emissions.
You may have seen projections that, because economic activity has
slowed down so much, the world will emit fewer greenhouse gases this
year than last year. Although these projections are certainly true,
their importance for the fight against climate change has been
overstated.
Analysts disagree about how much emissions will go down this year, but the International Energy Agency puts the reduction around 8 percent. In real terms, that means we will release the equivalent of around 47 billion tons of carbon, instead of 51 billion.
That’s a meaningful reduction, and we would be in great shape if we
could continue that rate of decrease every year. Unfortunately, we
can’t.
Consider what it’s taking to achieve this 8 percent reduction. More
than 600,000 people have died, and tens of millions are out of work.
This April, car traffic was half what it was in April 2019. For months,
air traffic virtually came to a halt.
off-guardian | If you don’t like being forced to wear masks (and/or visors), or
being placed under house arrest or (for some reason) under a curfew, or
indeed, having to take hormone treatments…well don’t worry. Because the World Economic Forum has the solution – immunity passports.
uses blockchain technology to store encrypted data from
individual blood tests, allowing users to prove that they have tested
negative for COVID-19.
It goes on to say that using this kind of app is the only solution to getting everything back to (the old) normal:
CovidPass could also allow hotels, cinemas, theatres, sporting and concert venues to reopen safely.
If you think this all sounds like something from a dystopian novel,
well you’re right. But there’s a silver lining. The app which uses your
medical history to decide if you’re allowed to travel will be real
environmentally friendly:
CovidPass commits to mandatory carbon offsetting for each
flight passenger, to preserve the environmental benefits of reduced air
travel during the crisis.
So there’s that, at least.
*
It’s not hard to see the pattern taking shape here. Increasingly
strict social controls on what you can wear, where you can go, when you
can go there and so on and so on…and then the proposed solution.
A brief test and a little app that tracks your movement, or labels
you nice and clean, a brand new vaccination for anybody who wants it
(and most of the people who don’t) and then we can get back to normal.
It is manipulative blackmail of the worst kind, and it appears to be working.
Many historians point to his invention of a
diabolical “Southern Strategy,” which employed racially charged issues
such as law and order and welfare fraud to win racist votes in the
eleven Confederate states.
This story is wrong, too. While Nixon used racism, of course, he did
not invent the Southern Strategy. Southern slaveholders invented it at
the founding of the republic, and it has become a regular feature of
American politics.
For example, the former Confederate states were part of the
Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition. Southern support did not come for
free. Franklin Roosevelt’s programs were confined in what historian Ira
Katznelson has called the “southern cage.” That is why the Social
Security Act did not apply to agricultural and domestic workers, the
only jobs many African Americans in the south could get. This was FDR’s
Southern Strategy.
In 1980, after the Republican National Convention, nominee Ronald
Reagan chose to begin his campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi. This
small county is known for only one thing, the 1964 Ku Klux Klan murder
of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael
Schwerner. It was one of the worst atrocities of the civil rights era.
When Reagan told the crowd, “I believe in states’ rights,” everyone knew
what he meant. That was his 1980 Southern Strategy.
On July 26 of this year, Republican U.S. Senator Tom Cotton told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette he thought slavery was a “necessary evil.” Why? He was getting an early start on his 2024 Southern Strategy.
The outcome of the 1968 election had been decided four years earlier.
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Congress realigned
the American political parties. They kicked the Confederacy out of the
New Deal coalition by passing the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act,
Medicare, and Medicaid in 1964 and 1965.
The southern states had nowhere to go except the Republican Party,
which is what they proceeded to do. In 1968, Democrat Humphrey won only
one of the eleven Confederate states. The rest split between Nixon and
third-party candidate George Wallace, a former Alabama governor and a
raw segregationist. Polls showed if Wallace had not run, his votes would
have gone to Nixon by a two-to-one margin. Nixon’s electoral vote
margin over Humphrey would have been even larger than it was.
Except when Jimmy Carter won one term due to the Watergate scandal.
Republicans owned the White House for the next twenty-four years. And
since 1964, no Democratic presidential candidate has won the majority of
white votes in the South or nationwide.
thedailybeast | The City Council had
never considered whether or not to approve the rally because that had
never been a question. There had only been the formality of approving
the necessary road closures. The council did so again on June 15 even
though a survey showed that 60 percent of Sturgis residents favored
canceling this year's rally.
Sturgis officials sought to calm
rally opponents by saying the city was seeking to reduce the turnout by
curtailing the usual advertising. The official Sturgis website
nonetheless listed various exciting events for anyone tempted to attend.
There was this:
“JOIN US AUGUST 10TH, 2020 FOR THE 18TH ANNUAL MAYOR’S RIDE!! The City of Sturgis is excited to be hosting the 18th Annual Sturgis Mayor’s Ride during the 80th
Annual City of Sturgis Motorcycle Rally! This ride has been a special
part of the City of Sturgis Motorcycle Rally; not only for the amazing
beauty of the Black Hills but that it brings people together from all
over the word [world].”
The ultimate justification offered by the mayor and other city
officials was that the hordes of bikers were going to come anyway. They
noted that Rod Woodruff, owner of the Buffalo Chip campground and
concert venue, had announced his intention to be open for a 39th
consecutive rally. The campground’s Facebook page had this posting with a
message from a Hollywood actor:
“Hey there, Tom Berenger here.
Have you heard? Well, my friend Rod Woodruff at the Buffalo Chip let me
know that Sturgis 2020, the 80th anniversary, is ON! I don’t know about
you, but I’m packin’ her up here. I hope to see ya out there. God bless
America. And God bless the Buffalo Chip.”
The Buffalo Chip is the
area’s biggest, a biker mecca. It is also just outside the city limits
and an incorporated town unto itself. Sturgis could do nothing to
regulate it.
“We’re just celebrating good old American freedom,” Woodruff told The Daily Beast on Wednesday.
He
said he had unfolded the world’s largest American flag on July 3, so
Trump could see it while flying over on the way to the event at nearby
Mount Rushmore.
realclearinvestigations | While much speculation inside the Beltway says U.S. Attorney John Durham
will punt the results of his so-called Spygate investigation past the
election to avoid charges of political interference, sources who have
worked with Durham on past public corruption cases doubt he'll bend to
political pressure — and they expect him to drop bombshells before Labor
Day.
Durham’s boss, Attorney General Bill Barr, also pushed back on the
notion his hand-picked investigator would defer action. Under Democratic
questioning on Capitol Hill last week, he refused to rule out a
pre-election release.
"Under oath, do you commit to not releasing any report by Mr. Durham
before the November election?” Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-Fla.)
asked Barr, citing longstanding Justice Department policy not to
announce new developments in politically sensitive cases before an
election.
“No,” the attorney general curtly replied.
Justice Department policy prohibits
prosecutors from taking overt steps in politically charged cases
typically within 60 days of an election. Accordingly, Durham would have
to make a move by the Friday before Labor Day, or Sept. 4.
A low-profile prosecutor, Durham has kept a tight lid on his
investigation into the origins of the specious Russiagate investigation
of Donald Trump and his 2016 campaign, leading to rampant speculation
about who he might prosecute and whether he would take action ahead of
the Nov. 3 presidential election.
That could well be of historic consequence, since his probe involves
both the Trump administration and high-level officials in the previous
administration, including Trump's presumptive Democratic rival, former
Vice President Joe Biden. Recently declassified FBI notes show Biden
offered input into the investigation of Trump adviser Michael Flynn in
early January 2017. Another declassified document reveals that Biden was
among those who requested Flynn’s identity be “unmasked” in foreign
intelligence intercepts around that same time.
If Durham announces criminal indictments or plea agreements involving
former officials operating under the Obama-Biden administration,
or releases a report documenting widespread corruption, independent
voters could sour on Biden and sympathize with Trump. On the other
hand, kicking the ball past the election could dispirit Trump’s base.
On May 13, 2019, Attorney General William Barr appointed you
to review the origins of the 2016 Justice Department investigation into
Russian interference in the 2016 elections. At some point, this review
turned into a criminal investigation of the Justice Department’s
investigation into Russia’s efforts to undermine our democracy.
The need for your appointment was hard to understand at the time it
was made, since the Justice Department’s independent Inspector General
was already conducting a similar investigation that began in March 2018
into the same issues. On December 9, 2019, the Inspector General issued
his report
and concluded that the 2016 Russia investigation had had a legitimate
purpose and that there was no evidence of political bias against
President Trump in how the investigation had been initiated or
undertaken.
We are now in the closing stages of the 2020 presidential campaign.
Longstanding Department policies issued by the past three Attorneys
General who served during an election year make plain that Department
actions should not be taken in an election year that could influence or
affect an election. George J. Terwilliger III, who served as deputy
attorney general under Attorney General William Barr in the
administration of President George H.W. Bush, said in 2016, “There’s a longstanding policy of not doing anything that could influence an election.”
I strongly urge you to follow this policy and not to issue any
report, or bring any indictments, resulting from your investigation in
these closing weeks of the 2020 presidential election.
Any public action by the Justice Department in this pre-election
period that is associated with your investigation – which by its very
nature involves actions taken during the Obama-Biden Administration – is
bound to be used by President Trump for partisan political purposes to
promote his re-election effort against Vice President Biden.
In testifying
during his Senate confirmation hearings, Mr. Barr was asked whether
there are “policies in place that try to insulate the investigations and
the decisions of the Department of Justice and FBI from getting
involved in elections?” Barr said yes and explained that the party in
power has “their hands on the levers of the law enforcement apparatus of
the country, and you do not want it used against the opposing political
party.” But that is precisely what would occur here if a report is
issued on your investigation of the Russia investigation or if
indictments are brought at this critical stage of the presidential
election.
You should not permit your long and distinguished career in the
Justice Department to be permanently tainted, or your personal integrity
to be irreparably impugned, by what would plainly be an effort to use
your investigation to influence or affect the 2020 presidential
election.
NYTimes | Russia continues to use a network of
proxy websites to spread pro-Kremlin disinformation and propaganda in
the United States and other parts of the West, according to a State Department report released on Wednesday.
The
report is one of the most detailed explanations yet from the Trump
administration on how Russia disseminates disinformation, but it largely
avoids discussing how Moscow is trying to influence the current
campaign. Even as Democrats on Capitol Hill have urged the American
government to declassify more information on Russia’s efforts to
interfere with the election, President Trump has repeatedly told
officials such disclosures are unwelcome.
Most
of the report focuses on an ecosystem of websites, many of them fringe
or conspiracy minded, that Russia has used or directed to spread
propaganda on a variety of topics. Those include an online journal
called the Strategic Culture Foundation and other sites, like the
Canada-based Global Research. The document builds on information disclosed last week by American officials about Russian intelligence’s control of various propaganda sites.
Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo, who announced the release of the report on
Wednesday, said the State Department would offer rewards of up to $10
million for information to help identify any person who, acting at the
direction of a foreign government, tries to hack into election or
campaign infrastructure.
The report was prepared by the
department’s Global Engagement Center, whose mandate is only to examine
propaganda efforts outside the United States.
The
report states that the Strategic Culture Foundation is directed by
Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the S.V.R., and stands as “a
prime example of longstanding Russian tactics to conceal direct state
involvement in disinformation and propaganda outlets.” The organization
publishes a wide variety of fringe voices and conspiracy theories in
English, while trying to obscure its Russian government sponsorship.
George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton go back a long way. George
H.W.Bush headed the CIA and Bill Clinton was Gov.of Arkansas when the
drug smuggling operation with the Nicaraguan Contras occurred. Mena
Airport in Arkansas was a valued node on that drug trafficking network.
Foreign aid money laundering is part of the deal – it’s like a grub stake courtesy of the US tax payer.
Congress appropriates money
Money goes out as foreign aid
Foreign aid dispersed to companies that employ family and friends (Hunter Biden)
Family of Congress critters invested in companies that received the foreign aid.
Biden and company pulled the scam in Ukraine, Clinton’s did it in Haiti, Panama Papers etc….
shadowproof | According to documents filed by former NSA Director Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA was speculating in commodities linked to China and Russia
while receiving asymmetric information on the countries as part of his
job. The use of asymmetric or non-public information for financial gain
is a crime known as insider trading.
The shares Alexander bought and sold while head of the NSA include those connected to the secretive and politically sensitive potash
market. The potash market is largely controlled by Russia and Belarus
and one of the largest consumers of potash is China. With Russia and
China – two countries the NSA targets for intelligence – as major
players it is not hard to see how information coming across Director
Alexander’s desk could be useful in getting an information edge on other
speculators. Did he use his edge to profit?
Alexander also bought and sold shares in other commodities where
asymmetric information on Russia and China could have been beneficial.
On the same day he sold the potash company shares, Alexander also sold shares in the Aluminum Corp. of China Ltd., a state-owned company headquartered in Beijing and currently the world’s second-largest producer of aluminum.
U.S. government investigators have indicated that the company, known as
Chinalco, has received insider information about its American
competitors from computer hackers working for the Chinese military. That
hacker group has been under NSA surveillance for years, and the Justice
Department in May indicted five of its members…
U.S. officials have long insisted that the information that intelligence agencies steal from foreign corporations and governments is only used to make political and strategic decisions and isn’t shared with U.S. companies. But whether that spying could benefit individual U.S. officials
who are privy to the secrets being collected, and what mechanisms are
in place to ensure officials don’t personally benefit from insider
knowledge, haven’t been widely discussed.
And who knows if these were the only times Alexander was in a
position to have non-public information while trading? The NSA comes
across quite a bit of information that could be advantageous if someone
was looking to make some financial trades. Did Alexander ever use that
non-public information to trade in the financial markets?
Also troubling is former NSA Director Alexander’s attempts to
seemingly privatize knowledge and relationships gleaned from his
government service. Alexander has filed technology patents related to network intrusion and was recently forced to back off having an employee at his new company, IronNet Cybersecurity Inc, that still currently works for the NSA.
Alexander appears to be having some nice private benefits from his public service.
QAnon
is a far-right conspiracy theory and loosely organized network centered
around the belief that the U.S. is controlled by a cabal of child sex
trafficking, Democratic elites hell-bent on bringing down President
Trump.
Q
and others in the collective make it clear they believe the news media
is false. Kaplan says they often use the phrase “we are the news now”
and claim “they're identifying what's really going on as opposed to the
media lying to you,” he says.
Similar
to many evangelicals, QAnon supports seem to believe the world is on the
cusp of a great awakening. Adrian Hon, a game designer, says QAnon
reminds him of an immersive multiplayer game and he's worried people
could recreate the playbook.
Kaplan
says people have compared QAnon to larping — a real-life role-playing
game — because the group “puts what's going on, in some ways, in your
hands.”
“You can do the
research, you can feel involved, you feel like you can explain and
figure out what's really going on behind the scenes and can make sense
of ... what seems like chaos going around the world,” he says.
justice.gov | A federal grand jury today returned a superseding indictment charging
Edward Buck with four additional felonies, including that he allegedly
enticed victims – including a man who died at his West Hollywood
apartment after he administered drugs to him – to travel interstate to
engage in prostitution.
Buck, 65, was arrested
in September 2019 after being charged in United States District Court
with providing methamphetamine to a man who died after receiving the
drug intravenously. Since that time, federal authorities have continued
to investigate Buck for additional crimes.
The four additional counts charged today – bringing the
total number of charges in this case to nine counts – include one count
alleging that Buck knowingly enticed 26-year-old Gemmel Moore to travel
to the Los Angeles area to engage in prostitution. Buck allegedly
provided methamphetamine to Moore, who overdosed on the drug and died on
July 27, 2017.
Buck also is charged with another count of enticing another man to travel with the intent of engaging in prostitution.
The superseding indictment also charges Buck with one count
of knowingly and intentionally distributing methamphetamine, and one
count of using his residence for the purpose of distributing narcotics
such as methamphetamine, and the sedatives gamma hydroxybutyric acid
(GHB) and clonazepam.
Last year, a federal grand jury returned a five-count indictment
charging that Buck “engaged in a pattern of soliciting men to consume
drugs that Buck provided and perform sexual acts at Buck’s apartment,”
which is a practice described as “party and play.” Buck allegedly
solicited victims on social media platforms, including a gay dating
website, and used a recruiter to scout and proposition men.
Once the men were at his apartment, Buck allegedly prepared
syringes containing methamphetamine, sometimes personally injecting the
victims with or without their consent, according to the indictment.
Buck also allegedly injected victims with more narcotics than they
expected and sometimes injected victims while they were unconscious.
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