vigilantnews | Soon, mRNA technology will be coming to flu vaccines.
Supporters tout that the adaptability of mRNA technology allows for
quicker response times in developing vaccines that can more accurately
target circulating influenza strains, potentially making yearly flu
shots more effective.
Furthermore, work is being done to apply
mRNA technology to “treat” various other diseases. It is being explored
as a potential treatment for sickle-cell disease and the autoimmune disorder, multiple sclerosis. Additionally, its application in cancer treatment is under investigation, with the aim of harnessing the immune system to combat malignancies.
The fight against HIV, a long-standing global health challenge, is also on mRNA’s radar. Currently, three experimental HIV vaccines, built on an mRNA design akin to the COVID-19 vaccines, are in the early stages of human clinical trials.
The award to Karikó and Weissman is not without controversy.
Dr. Robert Malone, a renowned scientist, medical doctor, and pioneer in mRNA vaccine technology, made some fiery comments on “X.”
He stated, “Kariko and Weissman get the Nobel, not for inventing mRNA vaccines (because I did that) but for adding the pseudouridine that allowed unlimited spike toxins to be manufactured in what could have been a safe and effective vaccine platform, if safely developed.”
Malone
further criticized the integrity of the award process, suggesting undue
influence from pharmaceutical giants. “Pfizer has been campaigning for
this since 2020 - at first, they even claimed (as did Kariko) that she
invented the mRNA vaccine platform technology. Pfizer donates heavily to the Karolinska Institute, which awards the Nobel. Science has been hijacked again by big pharma.”
The
decision to honor Karikó and Weissman while omitting key contributors
like Dr. Robert Malone raises questions about the narrative that’s being
pushed surrounding mRNA technology. One thing is sure: COVID is just
the beginning. And what will likely ensue will be subsequent campaigns
to get more mRNA injected into every man, woman, and child.
attorneycox | The
“they” is our government (federal and state). The “we” is you and me,
and the other 300+ million Americans across our country.
Alas,
here we are, entering the final quarter of 2023, and we have the United
States government, and many state governments (including New York’s
former Governor Andrew Cuomo, current left-wing Governor Kathy Hochul, and the super-majority Dem legislature) proclaiming for all to hear that they did not force anyone to do anything detrimental these past 3.5 years. UNBELIEVABLE!
Did you hear this? They are actually saying with straight faces that
they didn’t force you to wear a mask, or lockdown and shutter your
businesses, or choose between taking an experimental drug or losing your
job… Nope! They did none of that. And you - well, you are flat out crazy if you think they did. You are lying. You are exaggerating and totally overreacting.
Unfortunately
for Big Brother, ooops, I mean unfortunately for our 100% reliable,
never-lies-to-us government, we have actual documents (including lawsuits),
news stories, social media posts, and videos of the government at all
levels mandating and forcing us to do all of those things, and more.
Here’s just one example of Biden himself, the “Big Guy,” mandating the
C19 shot:
Biden is not alone. No, no. His entire administration is
right there with him. His head of OSHA, Douglas Parker, is also now
lying through his teeth about the OSHA mandate that REQUIRED
(not suggested) that all employers in the entire nation with 100 or
more employees force their employees to get the C19 shot, otherwise they
had to wear a mask and test constantly for C19. (That OSHA mandate was
struck down by SCOTUS
last year because it was unconstitutional, by the way). Then there’s
the head of HHS, Xavier Becerra, saying there was never a mask mandate.
What?! Another blatant lie.
Please take the 2 minutes to watch this Congressman Kevin Kiley clip.
You truly won’t believe your ears with the bullsh#* these Biden agency
heads are spewing! As Congressman Kiley says in the video, the
government is trying to tell us that “2 + 2 doesn’t equal 4.” You don’t
get much more Orwellian than that!
Easy
answers: 1) they didn’t have the authority to do any of it (all of it
was unconstitutional) so they can’t justify and defend it now, and 2) if
they can convince you they didn’t do it before, then you won’t mind as
much when they do it again.
This should make your blood
boil. It’s particularly infuriating to those of us who were speaking
out from basically day one trying to tell people that the lockdowns, the
masking, the shots, the limited number of people at your wedding or at
your Thanksgiving table were all violations of the Constitution and our
basic human rights!
There isn’t a single working mRNA vaccine right now...,
How can you give a Nobel Prize for it?
Reduce transmission? – you seriously must be kidding at this point. I could never even dream to make that claim with a straight face at this point. Seriously, this is the kind of thing that is causing the damage to the reputation of medicine to be hyper-driven.
Morbidity – Given the number of instant severe problems that many patients had with the vaccine – even in the early days. Blood clots, pulmonary emboli, autoimmune and neurological issues…. And now that it is becoming obvious that it is the multiply boosted and vaxxed that seem to be having many more problems with getting infected over and over again – multiple studies are now showing this.
Again – if someone can please answer the question – If it seems that the multiply boosted are getting infected more often – and it seems that multiple infections increase the incidence of all kinds of problems – how are the vaccines helping?
Extreme morbidity and mortality – hospitalizations, etc. —– in the first year of the pandemic, this may have been so. However, as with any mitigation scheme, one must keep track over the entire event – and one also must keep track of those being harmed by the mitigation procedure.
The overwhelming majority of patients who are being admitted right now are vaxxed/boosted. I think the claim of improvement in morbidity early on was justified. I am not seeing this now. When taken in its entirety – I am not certain that we can make the claim that this vaccine program has been a success. It is going to take the entirety of the raw data over the entire country/world to really ascertain this. But yet, the authorities are completely unwilling to do so. Can you explain to me why that is? What about releasing all raw data is so problematic? Especially for “The Scientists”?
With regard to Nobel prizes. We all must remember that the Medicine Prize went to the gentleman who pioneered frontal lobotomies. The Peace Prize went to Obama who spent the next 8 years bombing weddings with drones. Sometimes Nobel prizes go pear-shaped.
It should truly be an award for those whose work has stood the test of time. I wonder what will be thought of this one awarded yesterday a generation from now.
It is significant that the Nobel recipients were not involved with the development of the mRNA spike protein vaccines. Their work was in developing a mechanism for repressing the immune system response to allow cells to absorb mRNA. This mechanism was then utilized by Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer in their vaccines.
I think this was simply a way to award “The Nobel Prize” to the vaccines without actually giving it directly to Big Pharma. – i.e. it is a propaganda move. Heaven forbid we get into the DAPRA project with Moderna concerning the Pathogen Protection Platform, which was to use mRNA to spur antibodies to send soldiers into an environment where the pathogen of interest was used as weapon. That was 2013, and DARPA stopped.
MOSCOW,
Oct 4 (Reuters) - Russia tested its emergency public warning systems
across the country on Wednesday, blaring out sirens and interrupting
some television and radio broadcasts to warn the population to stay
calm.
The
test, first conducted in 2020, is part of a new initiative that
requires authorities to conduct tests twice a year, starting from Sept.
1.
It
comes, though, amid the war in Ukraine that has triggered the deepest
crisis in Russia's relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile
Crisis.
At
around 10:40 a.m. Moscow time (0740 GMT), sirens wailed across some
parts of Russia and stern announcements demanded "Attention everyone!".
"The readiness of warning systems is being checked, please remain calm," speakers said in a stern male Russian voice.
"When
you hear the sound of a siren, you need to remain calm and not panic,
turn on the TV - any publicly accessible channel or radio - and listen
to the information message," the Ministry of Emergency Situations said
in a statement.
"The
warning system is designed to timely convey a signal to the population
in the event of a threat or emergency of a natural or man-made nature."
The
United States was also conducting a large-scale test of its public
warning systems on Wednesday, via U.S. mobile phones and TV and radio
stations.
The
purpose of the U.S. test is to ensure that the systems "continue to be
effective in alerting the public to emergencies, particularly at the
national level", the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, said
in a press release.
Many other countries have also conducted alert system tests for crises and disasters in recent years.
The
Russian test falls on the 91st anniversary of the creation of Russia's
civil defence system and follows nationwide educational drills in August
on practicing actions and procedures in emergency situations, Russian
media reported.
The
goal of Russia's tests is to assess the warning systems, the readiness
of personnel responsible for launching them and raise public awareness,
the emergency ministry said.
cynthiachung | [This
is a chapter from my newly released book ‘The Empire on Which the Black
Sun Never Set: the Birth of International Fascism and Anglo-American
Foreign Policy.’ For further details on different formats and how to
purchase click here.] The audio version of this chapter is available
here.
However, this is not the only blunder that the Canadian government has made recently and has blamed “ze Russians” for.
On
February 27, 2022, Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland
held a scarf bearing the slogan “Slava Ukraini,” meaning “Glory to
Ukraine,” with the “Blood and Soil” colors of the Ukrainian Insurgent
Army (UPA) (who collaborated with the Nazis during WWII and massacred Jews and Poles).
According to Freeland’s press secretary, this was just another case of a “classic KGB disinformation smear… accusing Ukrainians and Ukrainian-Canadians of being far right extremists or fascists or Nazis,” which is a confusing statement on multiple levels.
It
is not clear how this was a case of “Russian disinformation,” since the
picture is indeed authentic, Freeland did not deny this. And she was
indeed holding a “Blood and Soil” emblem, which originated with the
Nazis, clear for everyone to see. Lastly, it is confusing as to why the
Canadian government seems to be unaware that the KGB no longer exists.
Are they also under the impression that the Soviet Union still exists?
Not
irrelevant in all of this is the fact that Freeland’s grandfather was
the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper during WWII in Galicia and that she
is indeed aware of this and apparently unapologetic. Whenever she is
questioned about this, she does not deny anything, but simply blames
such a focus of inquiry on Russian disinformation with the intent to
“destabilize Western democracies.”
Interestingly, it was the Canadian newspaper “The Globe and Mail” who reported this story,
titled “Freeland knew her grandfather was editor of Nazi newspaper,”
thus, not a Russian publication last time I checked. And upon whom did
they base such information? None other than Freeland’s own uncle,
John-Paul Himka, who was at the time professor emeritus at the
University of Alberta.
forward |After the Forward
article about Hunka’s past was picked up by news outlets around the
world, Canadian lawmakers and Jewish groups rushed to condemn House
Speaker Rota for inviting him. In his mea culpa, Rota made it sound like
Hunka was a constituent from his district (called a “riding”) whom he
did not know much about. “This initiative was entirely my own,“ Rota
said, “the individual in question being from my riding and having been
brought to my attention.”
But Rejean Venne, an independent Canadian journalist, wrote in his Substack
newsletter this week that Rota and Hunka family members have had
numerous chances to cross paths over the years. Among Venne’s examples:
One of
Hunka’s sons, Martin, was chief financial officer of Redpath Mining, a
multinational corporation headquartered in Rota’s district. Redpath has
contributed to Rota’s campaigns and Rota has provided government funding for recreational facilities operated by Redpath. (The company did not respond to inquiries from the Forward made Thursday.)
North Bay
Pride, an LGBTQ+ organization, gave an award to Rota nine months after
Yaroslav’s granddaughter Leshya Lecappelain joined its board of
directors. In 2022 and 2023, North Bay Pride received more than $100,000 in funding from Rota. (Asked about this, a spokesperson for North Bay Pride said Lecappelain had not been on its board for several years.)
“Rota’s response that this was a
last-minute request doesn’t add up,” Venne said in an email interview.
“The Hunka family appears well connected in Rota’s district.”
The Forward could
not determine whether Hunka and Rota met before he was honored at
Parliament. Rota and others at the House of Commons did not respond to
several requests for comment sent Wednesday and Thursday.
Efforts to reach Yaroslav, Martin and
Peter Hunka, Lecappelain and other members of the family for comment
were also unsuccessful.
Endowments honoring Hunka and others tied to the SS
On Wednesday, the University of
Alberta said it would return the CA$30,000 endowment that Hunka’s sons
donated in 2019 in their father’s honor. The money was intended to fund
research at the school’s Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies.
But Per Anders Rudling, a university
alumnus and expert on Ukrainian nationalism who teaches at Sweden’s Lund
University, said the Hunka fund is just “the top of an iceberg.”
In an email to the Forward, Rudling
said the University of Alberta has “much larger endowments” honoring
other figures connected to the Waffen SS unit. The “most problematic,”
he said, is the Volodymyr and Daria Kubijovych Memorial Endowment Fund. At CA$450,000 — about $334,000 — it’s 15 times larger than the Hunka fund the university is returning.
Rudling described Kubijovych as
Ukraine’s chief collaborator with Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of
occupied Poland. Kubijovych played a crucial role in convincing the
Third Reich to create SS Galichina. He also lobbied for Ukrainians to
seize Jewish property and advocated for ethnic cleansing.
In comparison to Kubijovych, Rudling said, Hunka is “small fry.”
In a Facebook post
Thursday, Rudling also questioned university endowments named for other
Galichina Division veterans, including Roman Kolisnyk, Levko Babij and
Edward Brodacky.
Pointing to research he published in The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Rudling said, “I have tried to raise this issue in the past, to no avail.”
Asked about Rudling’s concerns, Michael Brown, a spokesperson for the University of Alberta, reiterated a statement
in which interim provost Verna Yiu said the school is “reviewing its
general naming policies and procedures, including those for endowments,
to ensure alignment with our values.” Yiu also expressed the school’s
“commitment to address anti-Semitism in any of its manifestations,
including the ways in which the Holocaust continues to resonate in the
present.”
The honors given to SS Galichina
fighters extend beyond academia. One of the University of Alberta’s
endowments is for its former chancellor Peter Savaryn, another SS Galichina member. In 1987, Savaryn was awarded theOrder of Canada,
among the nation’s highest honors, bestowed by Canada’s governor
general, the representative of the British Crown. Mary Simon, the
current governor general, has condemned the Hunka scandal as “a shock and an embarrassment.”
Controversial church leaders
When the Hunka endowment was announced
in 2020, the university said it would fund research on two “leaders of
the underground Ukrainian Catholic Church,” Cardinal Josyf Slipyj and Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky. (A metropolitan is akin to a bishop.)
Slipyi was a deputy in Ukraine’s 1941 self-proclaimed government,
which pledged to work closely with Germany under Hitler’s leadership.
Slipyi also assigned chaplains to SS Galichina and celebrated the unit’s
inaugural Mass. After the war, the Soviets sent him to gulag prison
camps.
But Sheptytsky’s legacy is layered. He
helped “dozens of Jews find refuge in his monasteries and even in his
own home,” according to Yad Vashem, while also supporting “the German army as the savior of the Ukrainians from the Soviets.”
Harvard University also houses a
Ukrainian Research Institute. Asked, after Alberta’s announcement,
whether that institute’s funding would be scrutinized for Nazi ties, the
university said in a statement that the institute had never received
money from the Hunkas, nor had it received donations designated for
research related to SS Galichina.
NYTimes | Russia’s strategy to win the war in Ukraine is to outlast the West.
But how does Vladimir Putin plan to do that?
American
officials said they are convinced that Mr. Putin intends to try to end
U.S. and European support for Ukraine by using his spy agencies to push
propaganda supporting pro-Russian political parties and by stoking
conspiracy theories with new technologies.
The
Russia disinformation aims to increase support for candidates opposing
Ukraine aid with the ultimate goal of stopping international military
assistance to Kyiv.
Russia has been
frustrated that the United States and Europe have largely remained
united on continued military and economic support for Ukraine, American
officials said.
That military aid
has kept Ukraine in the fight, put Russia’s original goals of taking
Kyiv and Odesa out of reach and even halted its more modest objective to
control all of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.
But
Mr. Putin believes he can influence American politics to weaken support
for Ukraine and potentially restore his battlefield advantage, U.S.
officials said.
Mr. Putin, the
officials said, appears to be closely watching U.S. political debates
over Ukraine assistance. Republican opposition to sending more money to
Kyiv forced congressional leaders to pass a stopgap spending bill on
Saturday that did not include additional aid for the country.
Moscow is also likely to try to boost pro-Russian candidates in Europe, seeing potential fertile ground with recent results. A pro-Russian candidate
won Slovakia’s parliamentary elections on Sunday. In addition to
national elections, Russia could seek to influence the European
parliamentary vote next year, officials said.
Russia has long used its intelligence services to influence democratic politics around the world.
U.S. intelligence assessments in 2017 and 2021 concluded that Russia had tried to influence elections in favor of Donald J. Trump.
In 2016, Russia hacked and leaked Democratic National Committee emails
that hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign and pushed divisive messages on
social media. In 2020, Russia sought to spread information denigrating
Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Though many Republicans in Congress argued Russia’s
goal was to intensify political fights, not support Mr. Trump.)
Ukraine's official English-language spokesperson/ propagandist, Sarah Ashton-Cirillo [she/ her]:
"The reality is Russians are not European...Russians have a different culture. Russians are Asian and ultimately they do come from the Moguols. They come from a grouping of people… pic.twitter.com/6kCnmH30Dp
DW | If you are an English speaker keeping up with the news of the Ukraine war,
you have probably heard of Sarah Ashton-Cirillo. The US national
arrived in Ukraine shortly after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine
began in February last year. A freelance journalist,
Ashton-Cirillo wanted to report from the front lines. Not long after
arriving in Ukraine, she developed close ties with the army before
deciding to join Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces (TDF), where
she was wounded on the battlefield in February 2023. Following her
recovery, Ashton-Cirillo was assigned to work on English-language media
for the TDF and was later appointed one of their spokespeople. Her
firebrand statements, combined with her transgender identity, made her a
favorite target of Russian propagandists and pro-Russian trolls online.
In an interview with DW, Ashton-Cirillo said that the hate directed at her on social media is a sign her work is effective.
"The words of Russian haters are meaningless," she told DW's Anna
Pshemyska. "I've been at the front lines, all of my colleagues have been
at the front lines, and I don't just mean as journalists. We have
fought at the front. And we have seen life and we have seen death."
"Words don't matter when you are understanding that your actions will
help contribute to not just the liberation of Ukraine, but the saving
of Ukrainian lives as well as Russian lives."
But Ashton-Cirillo's words do matter. Evidenced by the
ongoing controversy which was sparked after she posted a video on X,
formerly known as Twitter, in which she said that Russia's "war criminal
propagandists will all be hunted down."
Last week, the former journalist vowed to hunt down a "Kremlin
propagandist" saying, "next week, the teeth of the Russian devils will
gnash ever harder, their rabid mouths will foam in an uncontrollable
frenzy as the world will see a favorite Kremlin propagandist pay for
their crimes," Ashton-Cirillo added, without naming the person in
question.
"And this puppet of Putin is only the first," she said, addressing the public from a TDF studio.
Pressure from US senator
Ashton-Cirillo's comments reached Washington. US Senator J. D. Vance,
who opposes further US military aid to Ukraine, said the former
journalist "threatens physical violence to anyone who circulates
'Russian propaganda.'"
"I worry American resources could be supporting violence or the
threat of violence against people for speaking their mind," the senator
added. "Notably, any critic of America's incoherent policy in Ukraine
has been slandered as propagandists, including multiple presidential
candidates and American journalists. While we can debate the merits of
these accusations, engaging in protected speech should not invite
threats of violence," he added.
Although the TDF did not specify which comments made by
Ashton-Cirillo resulted in her immediate suspension pending an
investigation, it did say her recent remarks "were not approved by the
command of the TDF or the command of the [Armed Forces of Ukraine]."
Ashton-Cirillo told DW she stood behind her words and pointed to a peace plan put forward by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which foresees all criminals brought to justice.
"That includes the war criminal propagandists," she said. "War
criminals must be hunted down and be brought to justice. We have the
international tribunals ready."
She denied she was talking about targeting journalists and was instead focusing on Russia's "information warriors."
public |Last May, Oakland police arrested nine teenagers for a string
of almost three dozen robberies throughout the East Bay. In one of the
robberies, the juveniles brutally attacked
a 63-year-old woman in a busy upscale Oakland shopping district,
beating her in the head and dragging her by her hair across the
sidewalk. Then, they attacked a bystander who tried to intervene.
Within days, the perpetrators were set free with no charges.
When
you share stories like this one on social media, by far the most common
refrain you hear is, “They voted for this.” And that’s true: Last year,
Pamela Price, the far-left District Attorney for Alameda County, won
her election by a decisive 53%. Sheng Thao, the current Mayor of
Oakland, who once called to defund the police, won by a sliver.
But
even the most ardent criminal justice reform voters never imagined they
were voting for what Oakland has become. Crime has become a fixture of
daily life in the East Bay, and nowhere more than in Oakland. In the
most recent crime report
available, crime was up 28% in the city over the same week last year,
which was itself a huge crime year. Violent crime has increased by 19%,
robbery is up 30%, burglary by 44%, and auto theft by 52%. Oakland has
had 10,000 car burglaries so far this year, which is about one for every 43 residents.
Now,
the explosion of crime, which has impacted just about every Oakland
resident’s day-to-day life, is transforming the politics of this
famously ultra-progressive city.
“She is on the criminals’ side,”
an Oakland resident said of the District Attorney at a town hall meeting
on public safety. “To any of you who voted for her: Shame on you, and
elections have consequences. She told us what she was going to do, and
somehow, the majority of people in this town voted for her anyway.”
The room exploded in applause.
Price
ran on a decarceration platform. She defends her policies as the right
thing to do and says she is being unfairly blamed for rising crime. At a
recent community meeting, Price said she had let the kids who committed
the robbery spree go free because the youths were masked, and her
office could not discern which of the thieves was responsible for which
of the attacks.
She went on: “All counties across the state have
been asked to decriminalize young people. And so our county has adopted
that as a policy.”
The line was not a crowd-pleaser. A friend of
the 63-year-old victim, who had witnessed the crime, described putting
her friend in an ambulance and sending her to the emergency department.
“I just want to say that there must be consequences,” she told Price.
The audience clapped and cheered.
WSJ | You may
have heard that a mob of teenagers looted stores in downtown
Philadelphia on Tuesday night, and Target said the same day it is
closing nine stores in four states because of rampant crime. Rack up
more victories for progressive prosecutors.
The mobs in Philly hit Apple, Lululemon and Foot Locker stores in Center City, which ought to be a safe space
for civilized commerce. The Foot Locker store was “ransacked in a
coordinated attack,” said police. Police have made more than 50 arrests
and are investigating property damage and theft elsewhere in the city.
Some 76 incidents have been reported.
Interim Police Commissioner John Stanford
said police are looking into whether “there was possibly a caravan of a
number of different vehicles that were going from location to
location.” He added, “Everyone in the city should be angry.”
Anger is justified in particular toward District Attorney Larry Krasner, who waves away property crime. His office reports
424 retail theft charges so far in 2023—compared to more than 1,500 by
the same date in 2017, the year before he took office. Reports of retail
theft in Philly have increased by more than 30%—to 13,330—compared to a
year ago, according to the city’s latest weekly crime report.
Retail theft is a nationwide epidemic, according to a National Retail Federation (NRF) survey
released Tuesday. For the 2022 fiscal year, retailers reported a
“shrink” rate of 1.6%, mostly from theft, which as a percentage of all
retail sales would be a $112.1 billion loss for the industry, says NRF.
“We
cannot continue operating these stores because theft and organized
retail crime are threatening the safety of our team and guests, and
contributing to unsustainable business performance,” Target said in
explaining its decision to close two stores in Seattle, three in
Portland, Ore., three in San Francisco and Oakland, and one in New York.
Target said the closures are despite efforts to prevent theft by
“adding more security team members, using third-party guard services,
and implementing theft-deterrent tools across our business.” CEO Brian Cornell said in May that Target could lose $500 million from shrink.
More
than a quarter of retailers in the NRF survey reported closing stores
because of violence and crime, and 45% reduced operating hours. Of the
cities in Target’s closure list, all but Portland make the NRF survey’s
top-10 cities for organized retail crime in 2022.
George Soros
and the progressive DAs he finances claim to be helping the poor and
minorities, but those communities are the main victim of rampaging
theft. The Target store shutting down in New York is in Harlem, which
staged a renaissance during the Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg mayoralties. It is now sliding back into crime and disorder.
thephiladelphiacitizen | In the post-mortem press conference of Tuesday night’s looting
throughout the city, Interim Police Commissioner John Stanford went to
great pains to make clear that those who broke into stores to steal and
destroy property had nothing to do with the protest that preceded the
marauding mob. That was a peaceful gathering in reaction to Judge Wendy Pew’s mystifying dismissal of all charges for the shooting and killing of Eddie Irizzary
by police officer Mark Dial. What followed, Stanford said, was
committed by “criminal opportunists” who were “taking advantage of a
situation” and trying “to destroy our city … This had nothing to do with
the protests.”
He’s no doubt right, on one level. But on another, his analysis begs
some deeper context. Judging by the social media chatter, it wasanger over the judge’s ruling that at least prompted some chatter about an anti-social response: “WHAT TIME WE GOING SHOPPING?” read one post.
But let’s widen our lens even further. There’s plenty of evidence,
which we’ll get to, that civic disorder is viral in nature. Citizenship
is, after all, a social compact. We live together voluntarily, and when
messages get sent time and again that our once agreed-upon rules no
longer apply, or that they only apply to some, we know what happens: The
compact breaks. We get anarchy. We get nihilism. We get streets that feel unsafe, even if crime rates are coming down.
We are in a crisis of disorder
Make no mistake: Philadelphia, like other cities, finds itself in a
crisis of disorder — the bigger picture Stanford didn’t touch on. Think
about the messages Philadelphia sends out every day: Shoplifting under
$500 is all but legal now. ATVs can menacingly roar through city streets with impunity, despite a law signed by former Mayor Michael Nutter banning the same. So-called drag racing “meet-ups” are hijacking city roads and highways in the dead of night. In Kensington, police practice a policy of containment
when it comes to perhaps the most dystopian scene in the nation. And
now, a municipal court judge extends a special privilege and lets a
police officer walk for an act that certainly warranted a full hearing
in a court of law.
“Our clients never get to argue a justification defense at a
preliminary hearing,” Keisha Hudson of the Defender Association of
Philadelphia wrote in a statement after Pew’s stunning dismissal of the
charges against Dial. “Instead, our clients — all of whom are poor and
almost exclusively Black and Brown people — have their cases held for
trial, and they sit in jail for months awaiting their day in court.”
Obviously, this is no excuse for looting and rioting and other
antisocial acts. But how many times do we have to see that law-breaking
is contagious when laws are not enforced? Which brings us back to the
broken windows theory of policing, which I’ve written about before.
“We found that when
people observe that others violated a certain social norm or legitimate
rule, they are more likely to violate even other norms or rules, which
causes disorder to spread.” — researchers in a Science study.
Oh, no, he didn’t. Isn’t broken windows discredited? No. A Northeastern University study — which was essentially a study of studies — tried to debunk it, but unwittingly validated it.
(“Disorder does not encourage crime, but makes it easier to commit
crimes” essentially parrots the theory.) But wasn’t broken windows
racist? Hells, no. In the popular debate, broken windows has often
erroneously gotten lumped in with stop-and-frisk tactics — and the concomitant legitimate concerns of racial profiling.
Broken windows, which legendary former Police Commissioner Bill Bratton employed to turn around crime rates in both New York and
Los Angeles, is a theory of policing that mitigates against the virus
of disorder. That’s much needed in a city where a judge refuses to hold a
cop accountable, where kids are drag racing at 2am, where shots ring
out on crowded streets, and where shoplifters are effectively playing The Price Is Right in retail outlets every day.
Broken windows grew out of an Atlantic magazine article
written in 1982 by Harvard’s James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, a
criminal justice professor at Rutgers University. At a time when
policing was mostly reactive, they argued that small things matter in
communities, and that when nothing is done about the small things, they
grow to become big things. Prior to his passing a few years ago, Kelling
explained in Politico:
We expressed this in a metaphor. Just
as a broken window left untended in a building is a sign that nobody
cares, leading typically to more broken windows — more damage — so
disorderly conditions and behaviors left untended in a community are
signs that nobody cares and lead to fear of crime, more serious crime,
and urban decay. Good broken windows policing seeks partners to address
it: social workers, city code enforcers, business improvement district
staff, teachers, medical personnel, clergy, and others. Arrest of an
offender is supposed to be a last resort — not the first.
Here’s what’s critical: They came to this conclusion by actually
listening to those in poor, mostly minority, communities who were most
proximate to the problem. Even in neighborhoods with high murder rates,
residents would list comparatively minor transgressions like graffiti,
teens drinking beer in public parks, and subway turnstile jumping as
their top concerns. Why? Because they’d seen the degree to which, once
those conditions ran rampant, gun violence was not far behind. Add drag racing and judges who make up the rules as they go along to that list, right?
endoftheamericandream | It can be difficult to believe that the wild scenes that we are
witnessing on the streets of America are actually real. Earlier this
week, I wrote an article entitled “What Life Is Really Like In America’s Hellish Inner Cities”.
I wrote that article before the widespread looting that just erupted in
Philadelphia. Just when I think that conditions in our core urban
areas have reached a low point, they seem to find a way to get even
worse. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning of this crisis. As
economic conditions continue to deteriorate,
countless numbers of people will become very desperate. And when
countless numbers of people become very desperate, our society will
descend into a permanent state of chaos.
On Tuesday night, dozens of young people went on a rampage in the city of Philadelphia.
Dozens of people faced criminal charges Wednesday after a
night of social media-fueled mayhem in which groups of thieves,
apparently working together, smashed their way into stores in several
areas of Philadelphia, stuffing plastic bags with merchandise and
fleeing, authorities said.
A total of 52 arrests have been made so far, police said Wednesday.
Burglary, theft and other counts have been filed so far against at
least 30 people, all but three of them adults, according to Jane Roh,
spokesperson for the Philadelphia district attorney’s office.
he largest group consisted of approximately 100 young people, and
there was violence when the police finally confronted that group outside of a Lululemon store…
Police in the city said that a large group of around 100 juveniles kept moving from store to store and looting them.
Videos shared on social media show officers attempting to grab
thieves, some of whom are wearing Halloween masks, as they run riot
through a Lululemon store.
One officer manages to hit one of the looters with a punch after tackling them to the ground.
Many on social media seem to be quite entertained by videos of the
looting, but the truth is that this footage should break all of our
hearts.
nueburger |Silver piece is titled: "It's probably too late not to nominate Biden".
A bit of an awkward title, but you get the idea. In it he answers the
question: Do Democrats have a better chance of winning in 2024 with a
different nominee?
• With medium
confidence, I think the risks of a serious primary challenge to Biden at
this point in time would outweigh the benefits for Democrats.
• With low confidence, I think the risks of Biden volunteering not to run for a second would also outweigh the benefits for Democrats, but this is closer.
•
With low confidence, and taking full advantage of hindsight bias, I
think Democrats probably would have been better off if Biden had
announced 6-12 months ago that he wouldn’t seek a second term.
•
I think Biden’s situation is somewhat unprecedented and that these are
hard questions for Democrats. Almost no matter what happens, people in
2025 will treat the answers as having been more obvious than they
actually were. [emphasis Silver's]
In other
words, Silver thinks the Democrats — meaning Biden at this point, since
other Dem leaders seem totally deferential — have lost their window to
change horses. Here's why he thinks that matters:
[L]et’s imagine that one of the candidate’s on Chris Hayes’s list
—Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, JB Pritzker, Raphael Warnock and Gavin Newsom —
announces tomorrow that they’re challenging Biden. ... What would
happen?
Well, for one thing there would be an absolute media shitstorm. It would displace everything else from the news cycle — yes, even the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce news. Every critique of Biden would be highlighted and validated.
Still, the challenge probably wouldn’t
work. The opposing candidate would be very much at a standing start —
none of the candidates I mentioned have run for national office before,
and a presidential campaign typically takes six months to a year to get
up to speed. The value of optionality would be considerably diminished
if voters and party elites
didn’t have enough time to fully evaluate all their options. So the
most likely outcome would be Biden being nominated anyway, but with
battle scars that were probably harmful to him in the general election.
[emphasis mine]
That's scenario 1. Here’s scenario 2:
Let’s
say Biden calls a surprise press conference tomorrow — and he announces
that he’s had second thoughts and won’t run for a second term.
This
at least eliminates the possibility of primary-challenge-damaged-Biden
being the party nominee anyway. However, it creates other issues for
Democrats. The main one is what the hell happens to Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris consistency polls worse than Biden does against Trump.
But Biden would be under pressure to give her a full-fledged
endorsement. Even if Biden believed deep down that she wasn’t the best
nominee, a non-endorsement or half-assed endorsement would make for
another huge media shitstorm, without the party having little time to
navigate out of it.
What if that process did start now? What would be required to maximize the chance of success?
You’d
need Biden to stand down, you’d need party leaders to send a clear
message that they wanted an open nomination process and not just Harris
by default, and you’d need to make sure that Whitmer and/or other
candidates the establishment liked were actually interested in running
and the choice didn’t feel force-fed to voters. Ideally you’d also want
to do all of this without someone leaking to Politico or the Washington
Post and upending the process.
Silver dryly concludes "that’s probably too much to ask for." Too much indeed.
NYTimes | Garbage, feces
and needles run through the rivers in Missoula, Mont. On the streets of
San Francisco, tents are so thick that sidewalks in the Tenderloin
neighborhood have become “unofficial open-air public housing.” In
Portland, Ore., a blaze shut down an on-ramp to the Steel Bridge for
several days in March after campers tunneled through a cinder block wall
and lit a campfire to stay warm.
In a
surge of legal briefs this week, frustrated leaders from across the
political spectrum, including the liberal governor of California and
right-wing state legislators in Arizona, charged that homeless
encampments were turning their public spaces into pits of squalor,and
asked the Supreme Court to revisit lower court decisions that they say
have hobbled their ability to bring these camps under control.
The
urgent pleas come as leaders across the country, and particularly in
the West, have sought to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic and
restore normalcy in cities. In more than two dozen briefs filed in an
appeal of a decision on homeless policies in a southern Oregon town,
officials from nearly every Western state and beyond described desolate
scenes related to a proliferation of tent encampments in recent years.
They
begged the justices to let them remove people from their streets
without running afoul of court rulings that have protected the civil
rights of homeless individuals.
“The friction in many communities
affected by homelessness is at a breaking point,” the attorneys for Las
Vegas, Seattle and more than a dozen other cities, as well as national
municipal organizations, wrote in one brief. “Despite massive infusions
of public resources, businesses and residents are suffering the
increasingly negative effects of long-term urban camping.”
Homeless
rights advocates agreed that tent encampments were unsafe both for
their vulnerable occupants and the communities around them. But they
said the gathering legal campaign was merely an attempt to fall back on
timeworn government crackdowns rather than pursue the obvious solutions:
more help and more housing.
“They’re
seeking to blame and penalize and marginalize the victims rather than
take the steps they haven’t found the political will to take,” said Eric
Tars, the senior policy director at the National Homelessness Law
Center.
Homelessness has increasingly overwhelmed
state and local governments across the country. In California alone,
more than 170,000 people are homeless, accounting for about one-third of the nation’s homeless population.
More than 115,000 of those homeless Californians sleep on the streets,
in cars or outdoors in places not intended for habitation, according to a
federal tally of homelessness conducted last year.
Five
years ago, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in
case from Boise, Idaho, that it was unconstitutional for cities to clear
homeless camps and criminally charge campers unless they could offer
adequate housing. In the nine Western states covered by the circuit,
that ruling has since prompted billions of dollars of public spending on
homelessness.
tomsdispatch | Today, more than 38 million
people officially live below the federal poverty line and, in truth,
that figure should have shocked the nation into action before the
coronavirus even arrived here. No such luck and here’s the real story
anyway: the official measure
of poverty, developed in 1964, doesn’t even take into account household
expenses like health care, child care, housing, and transportation, not
to speak of other costs that have burgeoned in recent decades. The
world has undergone profound economic transformations over the last 66
years and yet this out-of-date measure, based on three times a family’s
food budget, continues to shape policymaking at every level of
government as well as the contours of the American political and moral
imagination.
Two years ago, the Poor People’s Campaign (which I co-chair alongside
Reverend William Barber II) and the Institute for Policy Studies
released an audit of America.
Its centerpiece was a far more realistic assessment of poverty and
economic precariousness in this country. Using the Census Bureau’s
Supplemental Poverty Measure as a baseline, which, among other things,
measures family income after taxes and out-of-pocket expenses for food,
clothing, housing, and utilities, there are at least 140 million people who are poor — or just a $400 emergency from that state. (Of that, there are now untold examples in this pandemic moment.)
As poverty has grown and spread, one of the great political weapons
of politicians and the ruling elite over the past decades (only
emphasized in the age of Trump) has been to minimize, dismiss, and
racialize it. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”
coded it into Republican national politics; in the 1980s, in the years
of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the fabricated image of “the welfare queen”
gained symbolic prominence. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton’s
welfare “reforms” enshrined such thinking in the arguments of both
parties. Today, given the outright racism and xenophobia that has become
the hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidency, “poor” has become a curse
word.
It is, of course, true that, among the 140 million poor people in the
U.S., a disproportionate number are indeed people of color. The
inheritance of slavery, Jim Crow, never-ending discrimination, and the mass incarceration
of black men in particular, as well as a generational disinvestment in
such populations, could have resulted in nothing less. And yet the
reality of poverty stretches deep into every community in this country. According to
that audit of America, the poor or low-income today consist of 24
million blacks, 38 million Latinos, eight million Asian-Americans, two
million Native peoples, and 66 million whites.
Those staggering numbers, already a deadweight for the nation, are
likely to prove a grotestque underestimate in the coronaviral world we
now inhabit and yet none of this should be a surprise. Although we
couldn’t have predicted the exact circumstances of this pandemic, social
theorists remind us that conditions were ripe for just this kind of economic dislocation.
Over the past 50 years, for instance, rents have risen faster than income in every city. Before the coronavirus outbreak, there was not a single county
in this country where a person making a minimum wage with a family
could afford a two-bedroom apartment. No surprise then that, throughout
this crisis, there has been a rise in rent strikes, housing takeovers,
and calls for moratoriums on evictions. The quiet fact is that, in the
last few decades, unemployment, underemployment, poverty, and
homelessness have become ever more deeply and permanently structured
into this society.
thesun | The Canada-based platform has come under scrutiny after being used by Brand to share videos as he denies allegations of rape and sexual assault.
He has been posting daily episodes of his Stay Free programme on Rumble since signing a deal with the website a year ago.
It now faces being regulated by UK media watchdog Ofcom under the new Online Safety Bill, which was approved by Parliament last week and is due to become law next month.
Tougher new rules could prompt Rumble's bosses to stop broadcasting to Britain, a tech expert has now suggested.
The new law says internet firms must prevent children from seeing pornography as well as any material promoting eating disorders, self-harm and suicide.
Violent content and material harmful to health, including misinformation about vaccines, will also be barred.
And platforms will also be told to take down illegal material such as videos inciting violence or race hate.
Former Facebook executive Lord Allan of Hallam told The Times a new crackdown could deter Rumble's management.
He said: "You can’t get out of this by saying, 'I’m a crazy American
platform, that’s not OK’, and that somehow you get a free pass - they
don’t get a free pass.
"Their whole philosophy is freedom of expression, a kind of 'screw you'.
"So when they get a letter from Ofcom saying, ‘Here are all the
things you’re going to have to do’, it seems to me the most likely
reaction is going to be they’re going to say, ‘Well, we won’t operate in
the UK any more'."
Failing to co-operate with Ofcom could put Rumble executives at risk of arrest if visiting Britain, it has been suggested.
Dame Caroline Dineage, who chairs the Commons'
Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, wrote to Rumble last
Thursday asking whether they would be "suspending Brand's ability to
earn money".
The comic and film star has 1.4million followers on Rumble.
Her letter came as YouTube announced it would be demonetising his account on their platform, meaning Brand could no longer cash in on ads accompanying his clips there.
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