foxnews | A former Navy pilot says he witnessed UFOs flying in restricted airspace off the coast of Virginia nearly every day for two years beginning in 2019.
Former Lt. Ryan Graves told CBS’s "60 Minutes" that the unidentified objects — like ones seen in a Pentagon-confirmed Navy video near San Diego — are a security threat.
The latest firsthand account comes a month ahead of a report by the
national intelligence director and secretary of defense on unidentified
aerial phenomena, a measure that was including in a COVID-19 relief bill passed in December.
"I
am worried, frankly. You know, if these were tactical jets from another
country that were hanging out up there, it would be a massive issue,"
Graves said, according to a clip of the "60 Minutes" interview, which is
set to air Sunday. "But because it looks slightly different, we’re not
willing to actually look at the problem in the face. We’re happy to just
ignore the fact that these are out there, watching us every day."
Seamen
who have seen the unidentified objects believe they could be a secret
US technology, enemy surveillance devices, or something entirely
different, Graves told CBS.
"This is a difficult one to explain.
You have rotation, you have high altitudes. You have propulsion, right? I
don’t know. I don’t know what it is, frankly," the lieutenant told
correspondent Bill Whitaker as he watched an unclassified video.
"I would say, you know, the highest probability is it’s a threat observation program," Graves said, according to the report.
A
former defense official who spent years investigating unidentified
aerial phenomena told the network program that the vehicles have
technology vastly exceeding any human invention.
foxnews | Video taken aboard a US Navy ship off the coast of San Diego shows a mysterious, spherical object flying in the air before disappearing into the ocean, reports said Friday.
The
black and white clip, taken aboard the USS Omaha in July 2019, shows a
small round object flying parallel to the ocean, hovering for a moment
before it drops into the water out of sight.
"Whoa, it’s getting close," a voice can be heard saying in the clip as the craft got closer to the water’s edge.
"It splashed!" the voice said when the object hit the ocean.
The
clip was taken with a cell phone inside the ship’s Combat Information
Center, a classified location on the vessel where phones are not
allowed, a Navy source told The Post.
newyorker | Leslie
Kean is a self-possessed woman with a sensible demeanor and a nimbus of
curly graying hair. She lives alone in a light-filled corner apartment
near the northern extreme of Manhattan, where, on the wall behind her
desk, there is a framed black-and-white image that looks like a sonogram
of a Frisbee. The photograph was given to her, along with
chain-of-custody documentation, by contacts in the Costa Rican
government; in her estimation, it is the finest image of a U.F.O. ever
made public. The first time I visited, she wore a black blazer over a
T-shirt advertising “The Phenomenon,” a documentary from 2020 with
strikingly high production values in a genre known for grainy footage of
dubious provenance. Kean is stubborn but unassuming, and she tends to
speak of the impact of “the Times story,” and the new cycle of
U.F.O. attention it has inaugurated, as if she had not been its
principal instigator. She told me, “When the New York Times story came out, there was this sense of ‘This is what the U.F.O. people have wanted forever.’ ”
Kean
is always assiduously polite toward the “U.F.O. people,” although she
stands apart from the ufological mainstream. “It’s not necessarily that
what Greer was saying was wrong—maybe there have been visits by
extraterrestrials since 1947,” she said. “It’s that you have to be
strategic about what you say to be taken seriously. You don’t put out
someone talking about alien bodies, even if it might be true. Nobody was
ready for that; they didn’t even know that U.F.O.s were real.” Kean is
certain that U.F.O.s are real. Everything else—what they are, why
they’re here, why they never alight on the White House lawn—is
speculation.
Kean feels most at home in the
borderlands between the paranormal and the scientific; her latest
project examines the controversial scholarship on the possibility of
consciousness after death. Until recently, she dreaded the inevitable
dinner-party moment when other guests asked about her line of work and
she had to mumble something about U.F.O.s. “Then they’d sort of giggle,”
she said, “and I would have to say, ‘There’s actually a lot of serious
information.’ ” Her blunt, understated way of talking about
incomprehensible data gives her an air of probity. During my visit, as
she peered at her extensive library of canonical ufology texts—with such
titles as “Extraterrestrial Contact” and “Above Top Secret”—she sighed
and said, “Unfortunately, most of these aren’t very good.”
In her best-selling book, “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record,”
published in 2010 by an imprint of Random House, Kean wrote that “the
U.S. government routinely ignores UFOs and, when pressed, issues false
explanations. Its indifference and/or dismissals are irresponsible,
disrespectful to credible, often expert witnesses, and potentially
dangerous.” Her book is a sweeping reminder that this was not always the
case. In the decades after the Second World War, about half of all
Americans, including many in power, accepted U.F.O.s as a matter of
course. Kean sees herself as a custodian of this lost history. In her
apartment, a tranquil space decorated with a Burmese Buddha and bowls of
pearlescent seashells, Kean sat down on the floor, opened her file
cabinets, and disappeared into a drift of declassified memos, barely
legible teletypes, and yellowing copies of TheSaturday Evening Post and the Times Magazine featuring flying-saucer covers and long, serious treatments of the phenomenon.
Kean
grew up in New York City, a descendant of one of the nation’s oldest
political dynasties. Her grandfather Robert Winthrop Kean served ten
terms in Congress; he traced his ancestry, on his father’s side, to John
Kean, a South Carolina delegate to the Continental Congress, and, on
his mother’s, to John Winthrop, one of the Puritan founders of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony. She speaks of her family’s legacy in rather
abstract terms, except when discussing the abolitionist William Lloyd
Garrison, her grandfather’s great-grandfather, whom she regards as an
inspiration. Her uncle is Thomas Kean, who served two terms as New
Jersey’s governor and went on to chair the 9/11 Commission.
Kean
attended the Spence School and went to college at Bard. She has a
modest family income, and spent her early adult years as a “spiritual
seeker.” After helping to found a Zen center in upstate New York, she
worked as a photographer at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. In the late
nineteen-nineties, after a visit to Burma to interview political
prisoners, she stumbled into a career in investigative journalism. She
took a job at KPFA, a radio station in Berkeley, as a producer and
on-air host for “Flashpoints,” a left-wing drive-time news program,
where she covered wrongful convictions, the death penalty, and other
criminal-justice issues.
In 1999, a journalist
friend in Paris sent her a ninety-page report by a dozen retired French
generals, scientists, and space experts, titled “Les OVNI et la Défense:
À Quoi Doit-On Se Préparer?”—“U.F.O.s and Defense: For What Must We
Prepare Ourselves?” The authors, a group known as COMETA,
had analyzed numerous U.F.O. reports, along with the associated radar
and photographic evidence. Objects observed at close range by military
and commercial pilots seemed to defy the laws of physics; the authors
noted their “easily supersonic speed with no sonic boom” and
“electromagnetic effects that interfere with the operation of nearby
radio or electrical apparatus.” The vast majority of the sightings could
be traced to meteorological or earthly origins, or could not be
studied, owing to paltry evidence, but a small percentage of them
appeared to involve, as the report put it, “completely unknown flying
machines with exceptional performances that are guided by a natural or
artificial intelligence.” COMETA had resolved, through the process of elimination, that “the extraterrestrial hypothesis” was the most logical explanation.
Kean had read Whitley Strieber’s “Communion,”
the 1987 cult best-seller about alien abduction, but until receiving
the French findings she had never had more than a mild interest in
U.F.O.s. “I had spent years at KPFA reporting on the horrors of the
world, injustice and oppression, and giving voice to the voiceless,” she
recalled. As she acquainted herself with the plenitude of odd episodes,
it was as if she’d seen beyond our own dismal reality and the
limitations of conventional thinking, and caught a glimpse of an
enchanted cosmos. “To me, this just transcended the endless struggle of
human beings,” she told me, during a long walk around her neighborhood.
“It was a planetary concern.” She stopped in the middle of the street.
Gesturing toward a heavily overcast sky, she said, “Why should we assume
we already understand everything there is to know, in our infancy here
on this planet?”
NYTimes | What’s across the River Styx? Robert Thomas Bigelow would like to know.
Wouldn’t anyone, especially now? But Mr. Bigelow is not just anyone, or
any 76-year-old mourning a wife and confronting his own mortality. He’s a
maverick Las Vegas real estate and aerospace mogul with billionaire
allure and the resources to fund his restless curiosity embracing outer
and inner space, U.F.O.s and the spirit realm.
Now he’s offering nearly $1 million in prizes for the best evidence for “the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death.”
In
other words, was Hamlet right to call death an inescapable boundary,
“the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns?” Or does
consciousness in some form survive bodily death — what the Dalai Lama
called how we merely “change our clothes”?
Is Raymond Chandler’s Big Sleep only a nap?
Mr. Bigelow believes so. “I am personally totally convinced of it,” he said.
A daunting quest, perhaps fringe to some,
but the shaggy-maned and mustached entrepreneur, the sole owner of
Bigelow Aerospace and Budget Suites of America, is not easily put off.
He amassed a fortune to pursue his interests, including the designing
and building of inflatable astronaut habitats for NASA, like his
soft-sided expandable activity module called BEAM attached to the
International Space Station.
His
aerospace ventures have been financed by his Budget Suites business, one
of the first extended-stay rental chains, now housing some 15,000
people in three states. The profits have enabled him, he says, to sink
more than $350 million into Bigelow Aerospace, “my own real black hole,”
as he put it in recent phone interviews.
They have also enabled Mr. Bigelow to indulge a celebrated, if sometimes
derided, interest in what he called “anomalous events” including his
20-year ownership of a spooky Utah ranch overrun by flying orbs and
other creepy phenomena. The strange goings-on drew the interest of the
Defense Intelligence Agency and, through funding secured by Harry Reid,
the former Democratic Senate majority leader, led to the formation of a
Pentagon effort to study unidentified flying objects — the Advanced
Aerospace Threat Identification Program, revealed by The New York Times in 2017.
thesun | BILL Gates has been urged to come forward and give evidence about his
ties to Jeffrey Epstein - as it's revealed he bought homes near the
disgraced financier and one of his billionaire pals.
Lawyer Spencer Kuvin, who represents nine Epstein victims, told The Sun that Gates should volunteer any information about the perv or his pals that could help in the Ghislaine Maxwell investigation.
Gates and the billionaire pedophile first met each other in 2011 - three years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl in Florida - and met on numerous occasions
"The issue I have is a similar issue as with Prince Andrew," Kuvin told The Sun.
"Why are you taking business meetings with a person like that? I
question anyone's moral character who chooses to take business meetings
with someone who's exhibited that kind of behavior and admitted to that
type of behavior.
"With Bill Gates, his wealth and investigatory powers, I find it
incredibly hard to believe that he would not have known the full extent
of the allegations that have been brought against Epstein here for that.
"And yet he continued to take meetings with him. It just shows poor judgment."
Gates has always denied witnessing any wrongdoing during any of his meetings with Epstein. Prince Andrew has also denied any wrongdoing.
While records show Gates flew on Epstein's notorious Lolita Express in 2013, Gates claims he didn't know who the jet belonged to.
Melinda Gates was reportedly disturbed by her then husband's
relationship with the wealthy Epstein way back in 2013, telling friends
how uncomfortable she was in his company and that she wanted "nothing to
do with him", the Daily Beast reported.
The business magnate announced last week he and Melinda would be parting ways after 27 years of marriage.
Kuvin added that the timing of the divorce, the process of which is
believed to have started in 2019, by Melinda, around the time of
Epstein's arrest on sex trafficking charges "does seem suspect".
politico | Jeffrey Epstein has become a
near-universal villain in the public eye. Dozens of women, some of whom
were as young as 14 at the time, have accused him of molesting them over
two decades, primarily in the 1990s and 2000s, in Florida, New York and
New Mexico, as well as on his private Caribbean island. A number of
powerful men, from Britain’s Prince Andrew to lawyer Alan Dershowitz, have been accused in courtdocuments of having sex with a young woman Epstein introduced them to, allegations both men deny. One male associate of Epstein’s has been charged
in France. Other influential men were friends with Epstein or accepted
his money. Yet after reporting on Epstein for months and speaking to
associates like Oh, I came to a realization: Beyond these men exists a
group of women, possibly even larger,who helped keep Epstein’s massive sex-trafficking operation running for more than 20 years.
Dozens of these women worked for
Epstein, formally or informally. If you think of this group as a
pyramid, at the top sits Maxwell, a longtime Epstein employee and
confidante who now stands accused of recruiting minors for Epstein and sex-trafficking
a 14-year-old girl, charges she denies. Below her were women Epstein
employed as assistants, who allegedly scheduled and managed dozens of
minors for Epstein to abuse. There were also women like Oh who brought
friends to meet Epstein and received gifts or access to his wealth.
These women aren’t household names,
even for people following Epstein’s story. But his victims say they were
key to grooming and deceiving them and allowing Epstein to operate with
impunity. In fact, most of Epstein’s victims were introduced to him
through other women, according to the 12 victims I’ve spoken with over
the past year and a half, as well as dozens of allegations in court and
in the media. Often, victims say, it was the women around Epstein who
tried to make them feel comfortable, as if what they were experiencing
was normal or harmless.
Once Epstein began to face legal
scrutiny, other women made it easier for him to rehabilitate himself and
reemerge with his power and social cachet largely intact. Two women
served as the lead prosecutors on his case when he first faced charges,
in 2006, and were closely involved in crafting his federal
non-prosecution agreement, plea deal and lenient sentence. For those
without deep knowledge of the case, Epstein’s short incarceration of 13 months in a county jail
could be read as a signal that, whatever crime he had committed, it
wasn’t that bad. After his release, a number of female socialites and
professionals helped to welcomeEpstein, by then a registered sex offender, back into elite circles. His abuse then continued, court documents assert.
To point this out is not to excuse any of the men or prestigious institutions—universities, banks, funds—that
also helped to protect Epstein, nor is it meant to hold women to a
higher standard. But as a woman myself, I have been struck by the sheer
number of women around Epstein, and many of the victims I’ve spoken with
say they feel especially betrayed by those who violated the unspoken
rule that women protect other women, especially minors.
miamiherald | The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has cleared Palm Beach
state prosecutors and the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office of any wrongdoing
in connection with the lenient criminal prosecution and liberal jail
privileges received by sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
FDLE
investigators found no evidence that Barry Krischer, who was the Palm
Beach state attorney when the case was investigated in 2005-2006, or his
assistant state attorney on the case, Lanna Belohlavek, committed any
crimes, accepted any bribes or gifts, or did anything improper in their
handling of the case, according to a 24-page summary of the state probe
into their actions obtained Monday by the Miami Herald.
FDLE’s criminal investigation was ordered by Gov. Ron DeSantis following a series of stories
in the Miami Herald, beginning in 2018. The series detailed how Epstein
received unprecedented federal immunity and served a short jail
sentence in 2008. After the series, Epstein was indicted in New York in
2019 on new sex trafficking charges, but died a month later behind bars
while awaiting trial. His death was ruled a suicide by hanging.
The state’s probe was two-fold: focusing on Krischer’s initial
decision not to prosecute Epstein, a wealthy New York financier accused
of molesting and raping more than a dozen middle and high school girls
at his Palm Beach mansion; and on Palm Beach Sheriff Ric Bradshaw’s
role, if any, in Epstein’s unusual accommodations while he was in
custody in the Palm Beach county jail.
In 2007, Epstein’s
criminal case was taken over by the Miami U.S. Attorney’s Office, which
compiled enough evidence to charge him in a 53-page sex crime
indictment. However, Miami’s U.S. attorney at the time, Alexander
Acosta, approved a non-prosecution agreement giving Epstein and an
untold number of other conspirators immunity in exchange for Epstein
agreeing to plead guilty to relatively minor state charges and serve
what turned out to be a 13-month sentence in the Palm Beach county jail.
FDLE released three summaries of its investigation Monday — an
examination of the state attorney’s office’s handling of the case; a
look at allegations that Epstein sexually abused two women while he was
on work release in Palm Beach; and an inquiry into whether anyone in the
Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office committed any crimes or received any
benefits for giving Epstein special privileges while he was
incarcerated.
Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article251285139.html#storylink=cpy
Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article251285139.html#storylink=cpy
Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article251285139.html#storylink=cpy
NYTimes | At Fort Bragg,
soldiers who have gotten their coronavirus vaccines can go to a gym
where no masks are required, with no limits on who can work out
together. Treadmills are on and zipping, unlike those in 13 other gyms
where unvaccinated troops can’t use the machines, everyone must mask up
and restrictions remain on how many can bench-press at one time.
Inside Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles, where lines not long ago snaked for miles with people seeking coronavirus vaccines, a special seating area allows those who are fully inoculated to enjoy games side by side with other fans.
When
Bill Duggan reopens Madam’s Organ, his legendary blues bar in
Washington, D.C., people will not be allowed in to work, drink or play
music unless they can prove they have had their shots. “I have a
saxophone player who is among the best in the world. He was in the other
day, and I said, ‘Walter, take a good look around because you’re not
walking in here again unless you get vaccinated.’”
Evite and Paperless Post are seeing a big increase in hosts requesting that their guests be vaccinated.
As the United States nudges against the
soft ceiling of those who will willingly take the vaccine, governments,
businesses and schools have been extending carrots — actually doughnuts, beers and cheesecake — to prod laggards along. Some have even offered cold hard cash: In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine this week went so far as to say that the state would give five vaccinated people $1 million each as part of a weekly lottery program.
On Thursday, federal health officials offered the ultimate incentive for many when they advised that fully vaccinated Americans may stop wearing masks.
Now, private employers, restaurants and
entertainment venues are looking for ways to make those who are
vaccinated feel like V.I.P.s, both to protect workers and guests, and to
possibly entice those not yet on board.
Come
summer, the nation may become increasingly bifurcated between those who
are permitted to watch sports, take classes, get their hair cut and eat
barbecue with others, and those who are left behind the spike protein
curtain.
You can resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic.
You can resume activities without wearing a mask or staying 6 feet
apart, except where required by federal, state, local, tribal, or
territorial laws, rules, and regulations, including local business and
workplace guidance.
If you travel in the United States, you do not need to get tested before or after travel or self-quarantine after travel.
You do NOT need to get tested before leaving the United States unless your destination requires it.
You still need to show a negative test result or documentation of recovery from COVID-19 before boarding an international flight to the United States.
You should still get tested 3-5 days after international travel.
You do NOT need to self-quarantine after arriving in the United States.
If you’ve been around someone who has COVID-19, you do not need to stay away from others or get tested unless you have symptoms.
However, if you live or work in a correctional or detention facility
or a homeless shelter and are around someone who has COVID-19, you
should still get tested, even if you don’t have symptoms.
WaPo | Delta
Air Lines chief executive Ed Bastian said Friday that new employees who
join the company will be required to be vaccinated for the coronavirus.
The
announcement makes Delta the only major U.S. airline to require
vaccines for at least a portion of its workforce. While most carriers
have taken steps to boost vaccination rates, including setting up
centers at airports to encourage employees to get the shot, others
aren’t requiring they do so.
In an interview on CNN,
Bastian said: “Any person joining Delta in the future, we’re going to
mandate that they be vaccinated before they can sign up with the
company.” The vaccine will continue to be optional for workers already
at the airline.
“I’m
not going to mandate and force people if they have some specific reason
why they don’t want to get vaccinated, but I am going to strongly
encourage them and make sure they understand the risk to not getting
vaccinated,” Bastian said.
Even
so, those who opt not to be vaccinated might encounter limits to the
work they can do, he said. For example, he said unvaccinated employees
may not be able to fly international routes since shots might be
required in other countries.
Bastian
said more than 60 percent of Delta’s 75,000 employees have received at
least one dose of the vaccine, adding that he expected between 75 and 80
percent ultimately would be vaccinated.
realclearpolicy | We hear a lot about “unity” these days. The Biden administration
promises and even demands it. Meanwhile, Republicans (and some
Democrats) charge the administration with hypocrisy because its radical
programs can’t garner a legislative majority — let alone the consensus
support the word “unity” implies. But the charge of hypocrisy misses the
point: The demand for unity is dangerous because it aims to undermine
the genuine diversity that is essential to a free people.
To call for unity is, in effect, to call for obedience. But free
people are not obedient. Free people should obey the law, of course, but
they do so only because they have consented to the law. And before
consent comes debate: Free people air differing opinions that reflect
their differing backgrounds and experiences, rather than bowing to those
who claim they know what’s best. Free and open debate — and the
diversity of viewpoint such debate implies — is therefore essential to
lawmaking in a democratic republic.
This is our constitutional inheritance. Our lawmaking process is
structured by mechanisms — such as the separation of powers, checks and
balances, and lesser rules like the Senate filibuster — that ensure the
views of the minority are not simply brushed aside by a fleeting
political majority. Of course, from time to time, Americans do come
together as one nation, for instance in the face of great tragedies or
crises. Yet, unfortunately, such crises can easily be exploited or
manipulated to stifle dissent and centralize political power.
RT | Merriam-Webster is again redefining language to fit a narrative,
this time framing its definition of “anti-vaxxer” to include not only
people who oppose vaccination, but also those who are against
inoculation mandates.
The definition on Merriam-Webster's website says “anti-vaxxer” means “a person who opposes vaccination or laws that mandate vaccination.”
It’s not clear when it was written to include opposition to forced
jabs, but many observers noticed for the first time on Wednesday.
“Welcome to ‘1984.’ This is the Ministry of Truth,” rapper and podcaster Zuby said on Twitter, referring to George Orwell’s dystopian novel.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary has changed their definition of 'anti-vaxxer' to include
'people who oppose laws that mandate vaccination'.
Other reactions were similar, with many commenters noting that they now fit the dictionary definition of “anti-vaxxer,”
even though they believe in the benefits of vaccinations and choose to
receive the shots themselves. Merriam-Webster's definition appears to
dismiss the concept of favoring a product personally but being opposed,
on principle, to forcing others to use it.
arvix |Controversial understandings of the coronavirus pandemic have turned data visualizations into a battleground. Defying public health officials, coronavirus skeptics on US social media spent much of 2020 creating data visualizations showing that the government’s pandemic response was excessive and that the crisis was over. This paper investigates how pandemic visualizations circulated on social media, and shows that people who mistrust the scientific establishment often deploy the same rhetorics of data-driven decision-making used by experts, but to advocate for radical policy changes.Using a quantitative analysis of how visualizations spread on Twitter and an ethnographic approach to analyzing conversations about COVID data on Facebook, we document an epistemological gap that leads pro- and anti-mask groups to draw drastically different inferences from similar data. Ultimately, we argue that the deployment of COVID data visualizations reflect a deeper sociopolitical rift regarding the place of science in public life.
This paper has investigated anti-mask counter-visualizations on social media in two ways: quantitatively, we identify the main types of visualizations that are present within different networks (e.g., pro-and anti-mask users), and we show that anti-mask users are prolific and skilled purveyors of data visualizations. These visualizations are popular, use orthodox visualization methods, and are promulgated as a way to convince others that public health measures are unnecessary. In our qualitative analysis, we use an ethnographic approach to illustrate how COVID counter-visualizations actually reflect a deeper epistemological rift about the role of data in public life, and that the practice of making counter-visualizations reflects a participatory, heterodox approach to information sharing. Convincing anti-maskers to support public health measures in the age ofCOVID-19 will require more than “better” visualizations, data literacy campaigns, or increased public access to data. Rather, it requiresa sustained engagement with the social world of visualizations andthe people who make or interpret them.While academic science is traditionally a system for producing knowledge within a laboratory, validating it through peer review,and sharing results within subsidiary communities, anti-maskers reject this hierarchical social model. They espouse a vision of science that is radically egalitarian and individualist. This study forces us to see that coronavirus skeptics champion science as a personal practice that prizes rationality and autonomy; for them, it is not a body of knowledge certified by an institution of experts. Calls for data or scientific literacy therefore risk recapitulating narratives that anti-mask views are the product of individual ignorance rather than coordinated information campaigns that rely heavily on networked participation.
Recognizing the systemic dynamics that contribute to this epistemological rift is the first step towards grappling with this phenomenon, and the findings presented in this paper corroborate similar studies about the impact of fake news on American evangelical voters [98] and about the limitations of fact-checking climate change denialism [42].Calls for media literacy—especially as an ethics smokescreen to avoid talking about larger structural problems like white supremacy—are problematic when these approaches are deficit-focused and trained primarily on individual responsibility. Powerful research and media organizations paid for by the tobacco or fossil fuel indus-tries [79,86] have historically capitalized on the skeptical impulse that the “science simply isn’t settled,” prompting people to simply“think for themselves” to horrifying ends. The attempted coup on January 6, 2021 has similarly illustrated that well-calibrated, well-funded systems of coordinated disinformation can be particularly dangerous when they are designed to appeal to skeptical people.While individual insurrectionists are no doubt to blame for their own acts of violence, the coup relied on a collective effort fanned by people questioning, interacting, and sharing these ideas with other people. These skeptical narratives are powerful because they resonate with these these people’s lived experience and—crucially—because they are posted by influential accounts across influential platforms.Broadly, the findings presented in this paper also challenge conventional assumptions in human-computer interaction research about who imagined users might be: visualization experts tradition-ally design systems for scientists, business analysts, or journalists.
Researchers create systems intended to democratize processes of data analysis and inform a broader public about how to use data,often in the clean, sand-boxed environment of an academic lab.However, this literature often focuses narrowly on promoting expressivity (either of current or new visualization techniques), assuming that improving visualization tools will lead to improving public understanding of data. This paper presents a community of users that researchers might not consider in the systems building process (i.e., supposedly “data illiterate” anti-maskers), and we show how the binary opposition of literacy/illiteracy is insufficient for describing how orthodox visualizations can be used to promote unorthodox science. Understanding how these groups skillfully manipulate data to undermine mainstream science requires us to adjust the theoretical assumptions in HCI research about how data can be leveraged in public discourse.What, then, are visualization researchers and social scientists todo? One step might be to grapple with the social and political dimensions of visualizations at the beginning, rather than the end, of projects [31]. This involves in part a shift from positivist to interpretivist frameworks in visualization research, where we recognize that knowledge we produce in visualization systems is fundamentally“multiple, subjective, and socially constructed” [73]. A secondary issue is one of uncertainty: Jessica Hullman and Zeynep Tufekc
Dr. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of
California, San Francisco called the exchange “very, very troubling.”
“What seems strange to me here is there would be this very intimate
back and forth including phone calls where this political group gets to
help formulate scientific guidance for our major public health
organization in the United States,” Ghandi told The Post. “This is not
how science-based guidelines should work or be put together.”
The New York Times on Tuesday published a report
from David Leonhardt that questioned the CDC’s recent guidance on mask
wearing outdoors. Upon releasing the new guidelines in April, the agency
announced that “less than 10 percent” of COVID-19 transmission was
occurring outdoors.
According to the report, the 10 percent figure is “almost certainly
misleading.” A review of the data by the Times found that certain cases
in the study were misclassified as outdoor transmission and quoted
numerous experts who contend the share of cases linked to the outdoors
is less than 1 percent, and could be as low as 0.1 percent.
“I’m sure it’s possible for transmission to occur outdoors in the
right circumstances,” Dr. Aaron Rictherman of the University of
Pennsylvania told the Times, “but if we had to put a number on it, I
would say much less than 1 percent.”
As noted in the report, the CDC’s newest guidance on summer camps
says these facilities should require mask wearing “at all times” with
few exceptions. Considering the low rate of outdoor transmission and the
fact that many summer camp activities take place outside, it seems
unnecessary to have hordes of children playing outside with masks on.
“Dr. Walensky, I used to have the utmost respect for the guidance
from the CDC. I always considered the CDC to be the gold standard. I
don’t anymore,” Collins said Tuesday during the hearing.
“Here we have unnecessary barriers to reopening schools, exaggerating
the risks of outdoor transmission and unworkable restrictions on summer
camps. Why does it matter? It matters because it undermines public
confidence in your recommendations,” Collins said.
foreignpolicy | “It’s an act of war,” said
Christopher Miller, former President Donald Trump’s last acting
secretary of defense. He was talking about alleged attacks on diplomatic
and intelligence personnel by an unknown microwave directed-energy
weapon. But before the United States declares war on the unknown enemy
wielding that weapon, we should know what it is—and whether it exists at
all.
Every few weeks, another alleged attack on Americans is reported, some recent, some decades ago. The symptoms are neurological, such as dizziness, headaches, and brain damage. The first wave of reports came in 2016,
from the American and Canadian diplomatic missions in Havana, hence the
name “Havana syndrome.” Since then, similar cases have been reported in
other places, including China; Washington, D.C.; and Syria. State
Department and intelligence personnel make up most of those affected.
The State Department and the CIA have investigated Havana syndrome, with much criticism by the victims and their legal counsel. The Jasons, a group of defense advisors, have been reported to be studying the incidents. Most recently, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine also conducted a study
that concluded a microwave attack was the most plausible explanation;
it also considered chemical pollutants, infectious agents, and
psychological and social factors, and found all these explanations
wanting.
Here’s the problem. Aside from the reported syndromes, there’s no
evidence that a microwave weapon exists—and all the available science
suggests that any such weapon would be wildly impractical. It’s possible
that the symptoms of all the sufferers of Havana syndrome share a
single, as yet unknown, cause; it’s also possible that multiple real
health problems have been amalgamated into a single syndrome.
It’s not the first time microwaves and embassies have mixed. From 1953 to 1976,
the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was bathed in high-powered microwaves coming
from a nearby building. The purpose seems to have been related to
espionage—activating listening devices within the embassy or interfering
with American transmissions. But a 1978 study concluded that there were
no adverse health effects.
Back in the United States, microwave ovens came into common use during the 1970s.
Their ability to heat food by imperceptible waves created many myths.
How they actually work is well understood. Some molecules, notably
water, absorb microwaves and turn them into heat. That happens across
the microwave and visible spectrum: Substances absorb energy of a higher
frequency and turn it into heat. It’s why sunlight heats surfaces.
There’s a persistent myth that microwaves heat things from the inside
out. Anyone who has heated a frozen dinner knows that this is not true.
The outer part of the frozen food thaws first, because it absorbs the
microwaves before they can reach the inner part. Back in the day, when I
was working for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, I had to debunk the
idea that microwave heating could produce oil from underground oil
shale. Water and minerals between the shale and the microwave source
above ground would absorb the microwaves. In the same way, if a directed
microwave beam hit people’s brains, we would expect to see visible
effects on the skin and flesh. None of that has accompanied Havana
syndrome.
"It's not a vaccine anyway?" She is admitting having conscious awareness, she never informed him before he took his sample away for analysis ... Is that the first to cry ... "I was just doing my job"
Luke 1-5 Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. 2 For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. 3 Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops. 4 And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. 5 But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him. Fist tap Dale.
jonathanturley | Under a free speech approach, cakeshop owners have a right to refuse
to prepare cakes that offend their deep-felt values, including
religious, political or social values. Thus, a Jewish cakeshop owner
should be able to decline to make a “Mein Kampf” cake for a local
skinhead group, a Black owner to decline to make a white
supremacist-themed cake, or a gay baker to decline to make a cake with
anti-LGBT slogans. While these bakers cannot discriminate in selling
prepared cakes, the act of decorating a cake is a form of expression,
and requiring such preparation is a form of compelled speech.
In the same way, NFL teams have a free speech right to prevent
kneeling or other political or social demonstrations by players during
games, Citizen’s United has a right to support political causes — and,
yes, Facebook has a right to censor speech on its platform.
Free speech also allows the rest of us to oppose these businesses
over their policies. We have a right to refuse to subsidize or support
companies that engage in racial or content discrimination. Thus, with
social media companies, Congress should not afford these companies legal
immunity or other protections when they engage in censorship.
These companies once were viewed as neutral platforms for people to
exchange views — people who affirmatively “friend” or invite the views
of others. If Big Tech wants to be treated like a telephone company, it
must act like a telephone company. We wouldn’t tolerate AT&T
interrupting calls to object to some misleading conversation, or cutting
the line for those who misinform others.
As a neutral platform for communications, telephone companies receive
special legal and economic status under our laws. Yet, it sometimes
seems Facebook wants to be treated like AT&T but act like the DNC.
In defending Big Tech’s right to censor people, University of
California at Irvine law professor Richard Hasen declared that “Twitter
is a private company, and it is entitled to include or exclude people as
it sees fit.” That is clearly true under the First Amendment. It also
should be true of others who seek to speak (or not speak) as
corporations, from bakeries to sports teams.
Yet, when the Supreme Court sent back the Masterpiece Cakeshop case in 2018 for further proceedings, an irate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)
declared: “Masterpiece Cakeshop is a commercial bakery open to the
public, and such services clearly must be made available to the public
on equal terms … No business or organization open to the public should
hide their discriminatory practices behind the guise of religious
liberty.” But Pelosi applauded when social media companies barred some
members of the public based on viewpoint discrimination on subjects
ranging from climate change to vaccines to elections.
The difference, of course, is that Masterpiece Cakeshop was willing
to sell cakes to anyone but refused to express viewpoints that conflict
with the owners’ religious beliefs. Conversely, social media companies
like Twitter and Facebook are barring individuals, including a world
leader like Trump, entirely from their “shop.” And, taking it one step
further, Facebook has declared it will even ban the “voice of Donald Trump.”
Big Tech is allowed to be arbitrary and capricious in corporate
censorship. However, our leaders should follow a principled approach to
corporate speech that does not depend on what views are being silenced.
Because Elizabeth Warren was right. This “never was about a cake” or a
tweet or “likes” for that matter. It was always about free speech.
nationalreview | The association of danger with permissiveness has warped the “expert
class” that is supposed to inform the public. Throughout the pandemic,
public-health officials have betrayed their view that they do not trust
the public with good news; they seem to fear that an inch given will be a
mile taken. And so, even during one of the most successful vaccine
rollouts in the world, CDC director Rochelle Walensky warned of “impending doom” just a month ago. But no doom was in the offing.
And the expert class has also corrupted itself. The short circuit of
the pandemic has led to a dramatic tightening of groupthink among
public-health pundits. One would normally expect that a variety of
experts would come up with a variety of recommendations, precisely
because, like everyone else, they value the risks differently. But
instead, public-health pontificators have tried to guard their authority
with an ersatz sheen of unanimity.
When Dr. Martin Kulldorff expressed his view that the pause of
Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine would do more harm than good, the CDC
threw him off its vaccine-safety advisory committee. Four days later,
Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was made available again, but the
visible dissent was too much to abide. Kulldorff had pioneered
many of the processes by which the CDC detects the safety of vaccines.
But he had expressed his view that the urge to vaccinate everyone was as superstitious
as being anti-vaccine. Twitter, preposterously, put a misinformation
tag on this tweet, based on the superstition that there is only one
valid “expert” answer — and no valid debates among experts. Kulldorff’s
worst crime, apparently, was expressing his views in person in the
presence of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.
I used to think that the COVID era would snap to a close once
vaccines removed the danger from the most vulnerable — and that the
human urge to connect would assert itself dramatically in a new roaring
’20s. Now I’m not so sure. A significant portion of the public and some
of our leading institutions have internalized entirely new habits of
thought and life. The circuit between truth, science, fear, and caution
and virtue needs to be unwired — and reprogrammed.
caitlinjohnstone | It sure is interesting how stuff keeps happening that makes free
speech on the internet something dangerous which must be curtailed.
Covid, the Capitol riot, Russian propaganda, all of which just happen to
require tightening restrictions on our single best tool against the
powerful.
Had online platforms not agreed to curtail speech in
alignment with the US empire, they would with 100 percent certainty have
been broken up by antitrust cases and been replaced by other
monopolistic companies that would censor in alignment with imperial
interests.
You’re not permitted to ascend to power within the
system unless you cooperate with existing power structures. If you
don’t, you’ll be stopped in your tracks and replaced with someone who
will.
A rookie journalist who doesn’t advance narratives favorable
to US imperialism will keep getting called to the editor’s desk until
they get the message. When rookie social media sites first showed up it
was the same thing, except instead of the editor’s desk, it was US
congressional hearings.
NYMag | Take, for instance, this paper
from 1995: “High Recombination and Mutation Rates in Mouse Hepatitis
Viruses Suggest That Coronaviruses May Be Potentially Important Emerging
Viruses.” It was written by Dr. Ralph Baric and his bench scientist,
Boyd Yount, at the University of North Carolina. Baric, a gravelly
voiced former swim champion, described in this early paper how his lab
was able to train a coronavirus, MHV, which causes hepatitis in mice, to
jump species, so that it could reliably infect BHK (baby-hamster
kidney) cell cultures. They did it using serial passaging: repeatedly
dosing a mixed solution of mouse cells and hamster cells with
mouse-hepatitis virus, while each time decreasing the number of mouse
cells and upping the concentration of hamster cells. At first,
predictably, the mouse-hepatitis virus couldn’t do much with the hamster
cells, which were left almost free of infection, floating in their
world of fetal-calf serum. But by the end of the experiment, after
dozens of passages through cell cultures, the virus had mutated: It had
mastered the trick of parasitizing an unfamiliar rodent. A scourge of
mice was transformed into a scourge of hamsters. And there was more: “It
is clear that MHV can rapidly alter its species specificity and infect
rats and primates,” Baric said. “The resulting virus variants are
associated with demyelinating diseases in these alternative species.” (A
demyelinating disease is a disease that damages nerve sheaths.) With
steady prodding from laboratory science, along with some rhetorical
exaggeration, a lowly mouse ailment was morphed into an emergent threat
that might potentially cause nerve damage in primates. That is, nerve
damage in us.
"And we need to stop hunting for new exotic diseases in the wild, shipping them back to laboratories, and hot-wiring their genomes to prove how dangerous to human life they might become." https://t.co/N2Cnhk5Xde
A
few years later, in a further round of “interspecies transfer”
experimentation, Baric’s scientists introduced their mouse coronavirus
into flasks that held a suspension of African-green-monkey cells, human
cells, and pig-testicle cells. Then, in 2002, they announced something
even more impressive: They’d found a way to create a full-length
infectious clone of the entire mouse-hepatitis genome. Their “infectious
construct” replicated itself just like the real thing, they wrote.
Not
only that, but they’d figured out how to perform their assembly
seamlessly, without any signs of human handiwork. Nobody would know if
the virus had been fabricated in a laboratory or grown in nature. Baric
called this the “no-see’m method,” and he asserted that it had “broad
and largely unappreciated molecular biology applications.” The method
was named, he wrote, after a “very small biting insect that is
occasionally found on North Carolina beaches.”
In
2006, Baric, Yount, and two other scientists were granted a patent for
their invisible method of fabricating a full-length infectious clone
using the seamless, no-see’m method. But this time, it wasn’t a clone of
the mouse-hepatitis virus — it was a clone of the entire deadly human
SARS virus, the one that had emerged from Chinese bats, via civets, in
2002. The Baric Lab came to be known by some scientists as “the Wild
Wild West.” In 2007, Baric said that we had entered “the golden age of
coronavirus genetics.”
“I would be afraid to look in their freezers,” one virologist told me.
Baric
and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the two top experts
on the genetic interplay between bat and human coronaviruses, began
collaborating in 2015.
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*Kwanzaa 2025 Umoja Message *
2025 | Annual Kwanzaa Theme: "Practicing the Seven Principles in Dimly-Lit
Times: Lifting Up the Light, Hurrying the Dawn"...
The computer scientist and the engineer look at AI
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Half baked thought:
In discussions about AI, claims are often made about both capabilities and
societal effects, and in practice the boundary is pretty ...
Free To A Good Home
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I know what gooning is same as I know what felching is but I don't care to
remind myself all that often about it. The Internet just keeps exposing the
ni...
If Free Will Is False, Destiny Is True
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Free will is like God: perhaps dead, its absence having something to say
about morality (what Nietzsche meant by “Gott ist tot” was that the
Christian God ...
FREE BOOK: On Nonviolence
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“Michael Barker’s interrogation of nonviolent protest tactics and regime
change is both timely and important. Drawing on cases ranging from American
democr...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
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(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
