israelnationalnews | Coronavirus patients who recovered from the virus were far less
likely to become infected during the latest wave of the pandemic than
people who were vaccinated against COVID, according to numbers presented
to the Israeli Health Ministry.
Health Ministry data on the wave of COVID outbreaks which began this
May show that Israelis with immunity from natural infection were far
less likely to become infected again in comparison to Israelis who only
had immunity via vaccination.
More than 7,700 new cases of the virus have been detected during the
most recent wave starting in May, but just 72 of the confirmed cases
were reported in people who were known to have been infected previously –
that is, less than 1% of the new cases.
Roughly 40% of new cases – or more than 3,000 patients – involved people who had been infected despite being vaccinated.
With a total of 835,792 Israelis known to have recovered from the
virus, the 72 instances of reinfection amount to 0.0086% of people who
were already infected with COVID.
By contrast, Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely
to get infected after the shot than after natural infection, with over
3,000 of the 5,193,499, or 0.0578%, of Israelis who were vaccinated
getting infected in the latest wave.
According to a report by Channel 13,
the disparity has confounded – and divided – Health Ministry experts,
with some saying the data proves the higher level of immunity provided
by natural infection versus vaccination, while others remained
unconvinced.
Data show that: Experimental mRNA Therapeutic Jabs REDUCE: symptoms, hospital admissions, and fatalities.
Data also show that: The mRNA jabbed STILL become: infected; symptomatic; infectious; even super spreaders.
So what exactly does the planned vaccination passport aim to achieve other than a backdoor around lockdown protections and to create a two tiered political economy with no genuine biosecurity utility - only seething interpersonal resentment?
Polio vaccine gives a rough approximation of “sterilizing immunity.” You can fight off any infections by the polio virus for pretty much the rest of your life.
The state of the art Coronavirus ‘mRNA Therapeutics’ are showing a steep drop off in effectiveness after six to eight months. Even with that, vaccinated individuals can and do catch Covid and spread Covid.
Have you ever heard or read of someone who has had a polio vaccination giving it to anyone else afterward?
Even when people are willing to get the coronavirus ‘mRNA jab,’ most of the working class in this country cannot afford the opportunity costs of getting the ‘jab.’ No health ‘care,’ no paid, or even unpaid time off to recover from the after effects many experience from having had the shots, etc.
For some as yet unspecified reasons, the American Health Establishment has massively bungled its handling of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Even now, the ‘vaccinated’ are told that they do not need to mask in public, even when the evidence says otherwise; even when they can be the disease vectors that ignite new ‘hot spots’ of infection - simply by not staying masked in public.
I am highly suspicious of the nature of the “bungling” in evidence in Britain and America.
I suspect now that a decision was made to let the disease run wild so as to “cull the herd.” Having survived an infection last year, I've become emotionally detached from the demographic sub-populations targetted for Covid 'culling,’
Some years ago, I would more openly profess my Malthusian predilections. However, now that I can plainly see a cull being effected by Elites via nullification of the Social Contract - I'm much less sanguine about the prospects for population control and much clearer about the utility of plague for human livestock management.
NYTimes | Those who have been inoculated against
the coronavirus have little to worry about. Reports of infections with
the Delta variant among fully immunized people in Israel may have
alarmed people, but virtually all of the available data indicate that the vaccines are powerfully protective against severe illness, hospitalization and death from all existing variants of the coronavirus.
Even
a single dose of vaccines that require two shots seems to prevent the
most severe symptoms, although it is a flimsier barrier against
symptomatic illness — making it an urgent priority to give people second
doses in places like Britain that opted to prioritize first doses.
“When you have populations of
unvaccinated individuals, then the vaccines really can’t do their jobs,”
said Stacia Wyman, an expert in computational genomics at the
University of California, Berkeley. “And that’s where Delta is really a
concern.”
Britain’s experience with
the Delta variant has highlighted the importance not just of
vaccination, but the strategy underlying it. The country ordered
inoculations strictly by age, starting with the oldest and carving out
few exceptions for younger essential workers, outside of the medical
profession.
axios | State Republican lawmakers around the country are pushing bills — at
least one of which has become law — that would give unvaccinated people
the same protections as those surrounding race, gender and religion.
Why it matters: These
bills would tie the hands of private businesses that want to protect
their employees and customers. But they also show how deep into the
political psyche resistance to coronavirus vaccine requirements has
become, and how vaccination status has rapidly become a marker of
identity.
The big picture: On a national scale,
well-known GOP figures have recently escalated their rhetoric about the
vaccination effort, comparing it to Nazi Germany and apartheid.
At
a state level, there's more bite to the bark. Many Republican-led
states have enacted some kind of restriction on vaccine mandates or
vaccine "passports."
And some state lawmakersare
trying to make it illegal for employers, governments or private
businesses to treat unvaccinated people any differently than vaccinated
people, using the same language found in federal civil rights law.
“When we think about the normal
discrimination statutes…we have protected classes based on something
that is sort of inherent to you, with religion maybe being the one that
is a choice," said Lowell Pearson, a managing partner at Husch
Blackwell, which has been tracking the bills. "But vaccination status you certainly can control."
Between the lines: The
states with restrictions on vaccine requirements tend to have lower
vaccination rates than those without such laws, and cases are on the
rise in several of them.
Most of the measures are full of
loopholes or have limited application, meaning unvaccinated residents
may still face consequences for their decision.
But vaccine
requirements aren't very popular in general among employers, experts
said, although it is relatively common among private businesses to have
different rules for vaccinated and unvaccinated employees or customers.
Rather, the laws and low vaccination rates in states that have them both stem from the politicization of vaccination.
"It’s
difficult to see exactly why there’s such an intense reaction here,
except through the lens of hyper-partisan politics; that this has just
become another signal of party affiliation," said Nicholas Bagley, a law
professor at the University of Michigan.
dailycaller | The Democratic National Committee reportedly wants Short Message
Service (SMS) carriers to step in and police private text messages as
part of a new push against COVID-19 vaccine misinformation.
Allies
of President Joe Biden, including the DNC, plan to “engage
fact-checkers more aggressively” and work alongside phone companies to
combat misinformation about vaccines shared via social media and private
SMS messages, according to a Monday report from Politico.
White House officials are particularly frustrated with the characterization by some Republicans of their door-to-door pro-vaccination campaign, according to the report.
One example SMS message cited by Politico was sent by conservative
activist group Turning Point USA, in which co-founder Charlie Kirk
falsely contends that “Biden is sending goons DOOR-TO-DOOR to make you
take a Covid-19 vaccine. Sign the petition to: No medical raids in
America.”
“When
we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an
impediment to the country’s public health and will not shy away from
calling that out,” White House spokesman Kevin Munoz told Politico.
Big Tech platforms and corporate media outlets have consistently cracked down
on alleged “misinformation” throughout the pandemic, but in some cases,
they’ve censored or suppressed information that turned out to be true.
Perhaps the chief example is the lab-leak theory, which hypothesizes
that the pandemic originated from an accidental leak of the virus out of
the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
The Biden administration
has blamed misinformation for contributing to vaccine hesitancy and
slowing down the country’s vaccination campaign. Biden set a goal of
achieving a 70% vaccination rate by July 4, but the U.S. fell just short
of that benchmark.
“The failure to provide accurate public
health information, including the efficacy of vaccines and the
accessibility of them to people across the country, including South
Carolina, is literally killing people, so maybe they should consider
that,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last week.
politico | The Biden administration is casting
conservative opponents of its Covid-19 vaccine campaign as dangerous and
extreme, adopting a more aggressive political posture in an attempt to
maneuver through the public health conundrum.
The White House has decided to hit
back harder on misinformation and scare tactics after Republican
lawmakers and conservative activists pledged to fight the
administration’s stated plans to go “door-to-door” to increase
vaccination rates. The pushback will include directly calling out social
media platforms and conservative news shows that promote such tactics.
“The
big misinterpretation that Fox News or whomever else is saying is that
they are essentially envisioning a bunch of federal workers knocking on
your door, telling you you've got to do something that you don't want to
do,” Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said in an
interview on Sunday. “That's absolutely not the case, it's trusted
messengers who are part of the community doing that — not government
officials. So that's where I think the disconnect is.”
Fauci took some of that messaging to
Sunday cable news shows, including underscoring the idea that
door-to-door vaccination efforts are an attempt to remove barriers to
access and that 99.5 percent of deaths due to Covid are among people who
are unvaccinated.
“Those data kind of hits you right between the eyes,” Fauci said of the fatalities.
Beyond Fauci, press secretary Jen Psaki has pushed back on Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — a lawmaker she once said she’d
not mention from the podium — who compared the administration’s vaccine
campaign to Nazis. Jeff Zients, the White House’s Covid response
director, rebuked Republican Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, who contended
falsely in a tweet that government “agents” were going door-to-door to
“compel vaccination.”
Biden allied groups, including the
Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers
more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation
about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The
goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a
vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers
lessened or removed entirely.
“We are steadfastly committed to
keeping politics out of the effort to get every American vaccinated so
that we can save lives and help our economy further recover,” White
House spokesperson Kevin Munoz said. “When we see deliberate efforts to
spread misinformation, we view that as an impediment to the country's
public health and will not shy away from calling that out.”
undark |As a second wave
of Covid-19 infections tore through the United States in the summer of
2020, a partnership was forged between the Cleveland Clinic, one of the
nation’s premiere medical centers, and the Clorox Company, the
California-based maker of surface disinfectants. Sales of Clorox
products had been soaring since the beginning of the pandemic, when
public health agencies were still warning that SARS-CoV-2, the virus
that causes Covid-19, could lurk on surfaces, sickening people who
touched them. The company’s stock was also soaring, and at times it
struggled to keep up with demand.
Under the partnership, the company and the clinic would co-produce
public health guidelines to help the public navigate the Covid-19
pandemic. The arrangement continued into March of this year, when the
CDC Foundation — an independent nonprofit chartered by Congress to
support the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — joined the
group. Their ongoing campaign, the Clorox Safer Today Alliance, includes
ads for the brand that bear the Cleveland Clinic and CDC Foundation
logos. The Alliance advises companies — including United Airlines and
AMC Theatres — and individuals on navigating Covid-19 reopening, with an
emphasis on disinfecting surfaces.
This seemingly benevolent union in the name of public health has a
problem, critics say: a lack of compelling evidence that surface
disinfection plays any significant role in halting the spread of
Covid-19. Despite early speculation among experts that surface contact
was a key mode of SARS-CoV-2 transmission and subsequent rush among
consumers to purchase cleaning products at the outset of the pandemic,
the science supporting frequent surface disinfection as a response to
Covid-19 has largely faltered, many experts say.
Indeed, after nearly 18 months of investigation, most scientists
believe that airborne transmission is the chief concern, and that
overuse of surface disinfectants may well do more harm than good. “Your
efforts at cleaning are better spent towards cleaning the air than
cleaning the surfaces,” said Linsey
Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia
Tech and a prominent expert on Covid-19 transmission.
Given this, the continued relationship between two major public health
organizations and the Clorox Company — which appears well positioned to
profit from a particular interpretation of the science — has some
critics raising pointed questions about the appropriateness of the
arrangement and the misleading messages it might send to consumers. It
also comes amid ongoing scrutiny by experts and advocates of the effects
of corporate donations on scientific research and public health. Clorox
donated $1 million to the Cleveland Clinic this spring, and a press
release for the Safer Today Alliance notes that the company also donated
$1 million to the CDC Foundation in early 2020.
medrxiv |Background The purpose of this study was to evaluate the necessity of COVID-19 vaccination in persons previously infected with SARS-CoV-2.
Methods
Employees of the Cleveland Clinic Health System working in Ohio on Dec
16, 2020, the day COVID-19 vaccination was started, were included. Any
subject who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 at least 42 days earlier was
considered previously infected. One was considered vaccinated 14 days
after receipt of the second dose of a SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine. The
cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection over the next five months,
among previously infected subjects who received the vaccine, was
compared with those of previously infected subjects who remained
unvaccinated, previously uninfected subjects who received the vaccine,
and previously uninfected subjects who remained unvaccinated.
Results
Among the 52238 included employees, 1359 (53%) of 2579 previously
infected subjects remained unvaccinated, compared with 22777 (41%) of
49659 not previously infected. The cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2
infection remained almost zero among previously infected unvaccinated
subjects, previously infected subjects who were vaccinated, and
previously uninfected subjects who were vaccinated, compared with a
steady increase in cumulative incidence among previously uninfected
subjects who remained unvaccinated. Not one of the 1359 previously
infected subjects who remained unvaccinated had a SARS-CoV-2 infection
over the duration of the study. In a Cox proportional hazards regression
model, after adjusting for the phase of the epidemic, vaccination was
associated with a significantly lower risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection among
those not previously infected (HR 0.031, 95% CI 0.015 to 0.061) but not
among those previously infected (HR 0.313, 95% CI 0 to Infinity).
Conclusions
Individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit
from COVID-19 vaccination, and vaccines can be safely prioritized to
those who have not been infected before.
Summary
Cumulative incidence of COVID-19 was examined among 52238 employees in
an American healthcare system. COVID-19 did not occur in anyone over the
five months of the study among 2579 individuals previously infected
with COVID-19, including 1359 who did not take the vaccine.
plos | Once defined in rhetorical but ultimately meaningless terms as “the
conscientious, judicious and explicit use of current best evidence in
making decisions about the care of individual patients” [1],
evidence-based medicine rests on certain philosophical assumptions: a
singular truth, ascertainable through empirical enquiry; a linear logic
of causality in which interventions have particular effect sizes; rigour
defined primarily in methodological terms (especially, a hierarchy of
preferred study designs and tools for detecting bias); and a
deconstructive approach to problem-solving (the evidence base is built
by answering focused questions, typically framed as
‘PICO’—population-intervention-comparison-outcome) [2].
The
trouble with pandemics is that these assumptions rarely hold. A
pandemic-sized problem can be framed and contested in multiple ways.
Some research questions around COVID-19, most notably relating to drugs
and vaccines, are amenable to randomised controlled trials (and where
such trials were possible, they were established with impressive speed
and efficiency [3, 4]). But many knowledge gaps are broader and cannot be reduced to PICO-style questions. Were care home deaths avoidable [5]? Why did the global supply chain for personal protective equipment break down [6]? What role does health system resilience play in controlling the pandemic [7]? And so on.
Against
these—and other—wider questions, the neat simplicity of a controlled,
intervention-on versus intervention-off experiment designed to produce a
definitive (i.e. statistically significant and widely generalisable)
answer to a focused question rings hollow. In particular, upstream
preventive public health interventions aimed at supporting widespread
and sustained behaviour change across an entire population (as opposed
to testing the impact of a short-term behaviour change in a select
sample) rarely lend themselves to such a design [8, 9].
When implementing population-wide public health interventions—whether
conventional measures such as diet or exercise, or COVID-19 related ones
such as handwashing, social distancing and face coverings—we must not
only persuade individuals to change their behavior but also adapt the
environment to make such changes easier to make and sustain [10–12].
Population-wide
public health efforts are typically iterative, locally-grown and
path-dependent, and they have an established methodology for rapid
evaluation and adaptation [9]. But evidence-based medicine has tended to classify such designs as “low methodological quality” [13]. Whilst this has been recognised as a problem in public health practice for some time [11], the inadequacy of the dominant paradigm has suddenly become mission-critical.
Whilst
evidence-based medicine recognises that study designs must reflect the
nature of question (randomized trials, for example, are preferred only
for therapy questions [13]),
even senior scientists sometimes over-apply its hierarchy of evidence.
An interdisciplinary group of scholars from the UK’s prestigious Royal
Society recently reviewed the use of face masks by the general public,
drawing on evidence from laboratory science, mathematical modelling and
policy studies [14].
The report was criticised by epidemiologists for being “non-systematic”
and for recommending policy action in the absence of a quantitative
estimate of effect size from robust randomized controlled trials [15].
Such
criticisms appear to make two questionable assumptions: first, that the
precise quantification of impact from this kind of intervention is both
possible and desirable, and second, that unless we have randomized
trial evidence, we should do nothing.
It
is surely time to turn to a more fit-for-purpose scientific paradigm.
Complex adaptive systems theory proposes that precise quantification of
particular cause-effect relationships is both impossible (because such
relationships are not constant and cannot be meaningfully isolated) and
unnecessary (because what matters is what emerges in a particular
real-world situation). This paradigm proposes that where multiple
factors are interacting in dynamic and unpredictable ways, naturalistic
methods and rapid-cycle evaluation are the preferred study design. The
20th-century logic of evidence-based medicine, in which
scientists pursued the goals of certainty, predictability and linear
causality, remains useful in some circumstances (for example, the drug
and vaccine trials referred to above). But at a population and system
level, we need to embrace 21st-century epistemology and methods to study how best to cope with uncertainty, unpredictability and non-linear causality [16].
In
a complex system, the question driving scientific inquiry is not “what
is the effect size and is it statistically significant once other
variables have been controlled for?” but “does this intervention
contribute, along with other factors, to a desirable outcome?”. Multiple
interventions might each contribute to an overall beneficial effect
through heterogeneous effects on disparate causal pathways, even though
none would have a statistically significant impact on any predefined
variable [11].
To illuminate such influences, we need to apply research designs that
foreground dynamic interactions and emergence. These include in-depth,
mixed-method case studies (primary research) and narrative reviews
(secondary research) that tease out interconnections and highlight
generative causality across the system [16, 17].
nakedcapitalism | The evidence backing ivermectin’s efficacy against Covid-19 continues
to stack up, even as most health authorities refuse to approve its use.
The last two months have seen the publication of three peer-reviewed
meta-analyses demonstrating clear benefits. A review by Pierre Kory et
al summarised findings from 18 randomized controlled treatment trials, concluding
that ivermectin produced “large, statistically significant reductions
in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance.”
Another study, led by Doctor Andrew Hill, a well-respected international
medical researcher reported a 56% reduction in mortality together with
favourable clinical recovery and reduced hospitalisation.
A third study, by Andrew Bryant et al, analysed the existing data
from clinical trials according to conservative Cochrane meta-analysis
standards — a gold-standard in science. Published in the American Journal of Therapeutics,
the study found that “ivermectin prophylaxis reduced COVID-19 infection
by an average 86%”. The study concluded that “large reductions in
COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin”, adding that “the
apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a
significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.”
Still in Limbo
But national and supranational health authorities continue to drag
their feet. The US Food and Drug Administration, together with the
European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the World Health Organization,
insist that there is still not enough good quality data to approve
ivermectin as an off-label treatment against Covid. Its use, they say,
should therefore be restricted to well-designed, randomised control
trials.
Over 20 countries around the world, including India, Bolivia, Mexico
and Slovakia, have ignored that advice and are using the medicine, to
some degree or another, largely with significant success. The latest
country to do so is Indonesia, which is in the grip of its biggest wave
of infections to date. In most countries, however, the drug is still in
limbo as their respective health authorities await the outcome of large
randomised controlled trials.
The problem is that large randomised trials are prohibitively
expensive, costing millions of dollars to conduct. As a result, they
tend to be funded by large pharmaceutical companies seeking FDA or EMA
approval for the drugs they themselves have developed. It also makes it
difficult to secure new indications for generic medications that are
already approved for other purposes. After all, who is willing to invest
millions of dollars testing a drug that is likely to generate little,
if any, financial return?
But with the world fighting a losing battle against a fast-spreading,
rapidly evolving coronavirus that has sent the global economy spinning,
desperate times call for desperate measures. Money has been found and
mobilised. According to
Hill et al, there are at least five large, placebo-controlled clinical
trials on the use of ivermectin for COVID-19 currently underway.
One of them, dubbed the TOGETHER trial, is being conducted at
McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. The trial has been running since
last summer. The goal, according to
the trial’s official website, is to “identify which repurposed
therapies are most effective, in order to slow the pandemic while many
countries await the delivery of vaccines.”
The trial has already tested and “dropped” hydroxychloriquine,
lopinavir/ritonavir (an antiretroviral medication used in the treatment
and prevention of HIV/AIDS) and metformin (an anti-diabetes medication).
It is currently testing fluvoxamine (an anti-depressant),
interferon-lambda (a regulator of intenstinal viruses), doxazosin (used
to treat prostatic hyperplasia and hypertension) and ivermectin and will
report its findings in the coming months.
POLITICO | Americans are almost evenly divided
over whether schools or most private employers should require Covid-19
vaccinations as part of reopening, according to a POLITICO-Harvard survey that shows how politically fraught any kind of mandate would be.
Most Democrats support forcing
employees and students to be vaccinated before they return to work or
the classroom, and approve of government-issued documents certifying
their status. Republicans oppose the government or most employers
infringing on their individual choice.
The
survey lands as Biden administration officials, desperate to turn
around the country’s rapidly declining vaccination rates, are
barnstorming the country pleading with people to take the shot. But even
as the more transmissible Delta variant is raising alarms, the
administration has resisted a more aggressive approach, reiterating this
week that it has no plans to ask schools, states or employers to
require the vaccine.
The survey results suggest Biden’s
prudence is warranted, said Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy
and political analysis at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public
Health, who designed the poll.
“An important takeaway from the poll
is that in these [Republican-leaning] areas it is going to be very slow
in getting these people to agree to take a vaccine,” he said. “There is a
culture in part of the country that is very resistant to having the
government tell people how to live their lives.”
Even the president’s suggestion that
his administration would go door-to-door to promote the vaccine drew
swift rebuke from conservatives, some of whom raised the specter of the
federal government keeping a list of unvaccinated Americans that it
would soon be targeting. HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra on Thursday sought to reassure Americans that no such database exists
after he said his comments about the government's interest in ensuring
people are vaccinated were taken "wildly out of context."
foxnews | CNN medical contributor Dr. Leana Wen suggested Saturday that life needs to be "hard" for Americans who have not received a COVID-19vaccine and individuals who refuse to get shots should perhaps face weekly testings.
"It
needs to be hard for people to remain unvaccinated," Wen, the former
Planned Parenthood president, said. "Right now, it's kind of the
opposite."
Unvaccinated people, she fretted, can at the moment go about their lives as normal without any consequence.
"But
at some point these mandates, by workplaces, by schools, I think it
will be important to say, ‘Hey, you can opt out, but if you want to opt
out, you have to sign these forms, you have to get twice weekly
testing,’" Wen said. "Basically, we need to make getting vaccinated the
easy choice."
Wen's comments piggyback off an op-ed she wrote in the Washington Post urging
President Biden to mandate vaccinations nationally and scolding him for
not more aggressively using his platform. She argued the White House
Independence Day event would have been a perfect opportunity to share
that message.
"The
celebration could have been a chance to show that vaccination isn’t
just an individual decision, but one that affects the health of others —
including those already vaccinated," Wen wrote.
CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner also suggested Friday it was time to mandate vaccines.
mediaite | CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner told Erin Burnett
Thursday that he believed it was “time to start mandating vaccines” —
and recognizing that while the government could not do so, he applauded
efforts by employers, colleges, and other private organizations to
require the Covid-19 vaccine.
Burnett introduced the segment by mentioning the news that Pfizer would be filming for emergency use authorization for a third booster shot, in part to increase efficacy against the highly contagious delta variant.
“There’s still a third of the population in the United States that
hasn’t got a single dose” of the vaccine, said Burnett, and the Biden
administration has said that “it’s not their role to mandate people get
vaccinated,” instead going for a persuasive message. She played a
montage of President Joe Biden and several members of his administration
urging Americans to “please get vaccinated now.”
“Given where things are going, is it time to move on from saying please to mandating?” Burnett asked.
“I do think it’s time to start mandating vaccines,” Reiner replied.
“And I think that the private industry and private organizations will do
that. At GW university where I work, starting in fall, you can’t be on
campus unless you’re fully vaccinated.”
Currently, Reiner said, 75 million adults in the U.S. have chosen not
to get vaccinated. “That choice has consequences. Now, we can’t force
you to take a jab in the arm. But there are many jobs, perhaps, that can
prevent you from working if you decide not to get vaccinated. So I
think we need to be more proactive and we will see industry take the
lead in this.”
privacytogo | In 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt created Google Ideas. In typical Silicon Valley newspeak, Ideas was marketed as a “think/do tank to research issues at the intersection of technology and geopolitics.“
Astute readers know this “think/do” formula well – entities like the
Council on Foreign Relations or World Economic Forum draft policy papers
(think) and three-letter agencies carry them out (do).
And again, in typical Silicon Valley fashion, Google wanted to
streamline this process – bring everything in-house and remake the world
in their own image.
To head up Google Ideas, Schmidt tapped a man named Jared Cohen.
He couldn’t have selected a better goon for the job – as a
card-carrying member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Rhodes
Scholar, Cohen is a textbook Globalist spook. The State Department
doubtlessly approved of his sordid credentials, as both Condoleeza Rice
and Hillary Clinton enrolled Cohen to knock over foreign governments
they disapproved of.
More recently, the role of Google Ideas in the attempted overthrow of Assad in Syria went public thanks to the oft-cited Hillary Clinton email leaks.
Why scrap all that hard work when you can just rebrand and shift your regime change operations to domestic targets?
The four subheaders on Jigsaw’s homepage, Disinformation, Censorship, Toxicity, and Violent Extremism demonstrate this tactic at work.
There is no greater source of media disinformation than MSM and the information served up by Google search engines.
Big Tech are at the forefront of destroying free speech through heavy-handed censorship, Google among them.
Psychological manipulation tactics used by the social justice crowd doubtlessly instill toxicity in those subjected to them.
And
Google’s well-documented history of participating in bloody regime
change as described in this article are textbook cases of violent extremism.
Yet Jigsaw markets itself as combating these societal ails.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, just as Google’s
former company tag-line of “Don’t Be Evil” was a similar reversal of
reality.
And yes, regime change aficionado Jared Cohen is still the CEO of Google Jigsaw. In fact, Jigsaw, LLC was overtly brought back in-house as of October 2020.
NYTimes | The Substack model has no shortage of
skeptics. “A robust press is essential to a functioning democracy, and a
cultural turn toward journalistic individualism might not be in the
collective interest,” Anna Weiner argued
in The New Yorker last year. “It is expensive and laborious to hold
powerful people and institutions to account, and, at many media
organizations, any given article is the result of collaboration between
writers, editors, copy editors, fact-checkers and producers.” Most of
the journalism that thrives on Substack is commentary, which is often
cheaper than news to produce.
But that doesn’t mean that traditional news organizations are somehow safe from the competition. As Will Oremus writes
in Slate, commentators have historically acted as subsidies for the
more expensive and less glamorous work of local reporting — and, I would
add for news operations like this one, international coverage.
“The Times’s digital success has been built partly on a major expansion of its opinion section; magazines such as The Atlanticand
Mother Jones have relied on their best-known columnists to support
their originally reported features and investigations,” Oremus writes.
“It’s those personalities that Substack is going after and poaching.”
As a result, the paid subscription newsletter business is likely to favor writers who already have a national platform. “If you visit Substack’s website,” Clio Chang wrote
for The Columbia Journalism Review last year, “you’ll see leaderboards
of the top 25 paid and free newsletters; the writers’ names are
accompanied by their little circular avatars. The intention is
declarative — you, too, can make it on Substack.
But as you peruse the lists, something becomes clear: The most
successful people on Substack are those who have already been well
served by existing media power structures.”
It’s
doubtless a good deal for that small coterie of writers. But whether
the citizenry will benefit in the long run is another question. Sarah
Roberts, a professor at the School of Education and Information Studies
at the University of California, Los Angeles, has gone so far as to call
Substack “dangerous” and a “threat to journalism.”
“People
not inside journalism or media may not know the specifics, but they
often have a nebulous sense that there are norms — independence,
disclosure of compromise, editorial oversight and vetting of the
reporting,” she tweeted
in February. By decamping to an independent newsletter, “An
investigative reporter who has earned her bona fides in a newsroom and
under both strict editorial and journalistic principles, has just cashed
out and turned herself into an opinion writer.”
nymag | Between 2008 and 2019, the number of newsroom jobs in the United States fell by 26,000, according to the Pew Research Center. Over that same period, roughly 15,000 journalism majors
were graduating into the U.S. labor market every year. In addition to
making the competition for writerly employment exceptionally brutal,
these developments also raised the barriers to merely entering that competition: Since regional newspapers have collapsed faster than national outlets, what jobs remain are now (even more) heavily concentrated in a handful of extremely high-cost cities.
Faced
with a superabundant supply of underemployed writers, and increasingly
thin to nonexistent profit margins, all manner of media companies in
such cities have made a common practice of paying poverty wages for entry-level work.
Applicants accept these terms because the outlets offer (potentially,
eventually monetizable) “prestige,” and/or because they sought to
emulate the success of that publication’s star writers, and/or because
they had no other options, and/or because class privilege shielded them
from the worst consequences of their underpayment.
Like
the vast majority of the writers who create Substacks, the vast
majority of the interns who take unpaid to barely paid positions in
journalism will never attain the financial security of their
publications’ big-name writers. And those big-name writers — and the
interns who are able to approximate their success — are typically beneficiaries of an uneven playing field
tilted in favor of the upper-middle class. My own path to a decent job
in journalism was eased by parental subsidies, which made it possible
for me to accept $8-an-hour internships in New York City without
suffering malnutrition. The “advances” that most consequentially bias
who gets to write for a living and who does not derive from accidents of
birth.
The resurgence of labor organizing in media has
mitigated the industry’s exploitative treatment of entry-level workers
and the class bias inherent to it. And this is one of the many reasons
why unionizing newsrooms is a vital project. But labor unions alone
cannot solve the underlying problem of mass underemployment within the
industry. America does not have more competent journalists than it
needs. But it does have far more of them than media firms are capable of
profitably employing, amid the erosion of the ad-supported business model.
Which is one major reason why there are so many writers willing to provide Substack with content free of charge.
There
may be something distasteful about the fact that Substack benefits from
journalists’ financial desperation. But ultimately the core problem
here is not that a newsletter platform is helping cash-strapped writers
squeeze some tips out of their Twitter followings. The problem is that
legions of talented journalists are going underemployed, even as
statehouses across the country are going under-covered. Forcing Substack
to disclose every contract that it has ever offered will not free us
from the scam that is the modern media industry. Only publicly financing the Fourth Estate can do that.
The FBI submission to the Grand Jury in December of 2017 was four
months after congressman Dana Rohrabacher talked to Julian Assange in
August of 2017: “Assange told a U.S. congressman … he can prove the
leaked Democratic Party documents … did not come from Russia.”
(August 2017, The Hill Via John Solomon)
Julian Assange told a U.S. congressman on Tuesday he can prove the
leaked Democratic Party documents he published during last year’s
election did not come from Russia and promised additional helpful
information about the leaks in the near future.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who is friendly to
Russia and chairs an important House subcommittee on Eurasia policy,
became the first American congressman to meet with Assange during a
three-hour private gathering at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where
the WikiLeaks founder has been holed up for years.
Rohrabacher recounted his conversation with Assange to The Hill.
“Our three-hour meeting covered a wide array of issues, including the
WikiLeaks exposure of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] emails
during last year’s presidential election,” Rohrabacher said, “Julian
emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking
or disclosure of those emails.”
Pressed for more detail on the source of the documents, Rohrabacher
said he had information to share privately with President Trump. (read more)
Knowing how much effort the Intelligence Branch put into the false
Russia collusion-conspiracy narrative, it would make sense for the FBI
to take keen interest after this August 2017 meeting between Rohrabacher
and Assange, monitor all activity, and why the FBI would quickly gather
specific evidence (related to Wikileaks and Bradley Manning) for a
grand jury by December 2017.
Within three months of the EDVA grand jury the DOJ generated an indictment and sealed it in March 2018.
The DOJ sat on the indictment while the Mueller/Weissmann probe was ongoing.
As soon as the Mueller/Weissmann probe ended, on April 11th, 2019, a
planned and coordinated effort between the U.K. and U.S. was executed;
Julian Assange was forcibly arrested and removed from the Ecuadorian
embassy in London, and the EDVA indictment was unsealed (link).
As a person who has researched this fiasco; including the
ridiculously false 2016 Russian hacking/interference narrative: “17
intelligence agencies”, Joint Analysis Report (JAR) needed for Obama’s anti-Russia narrative in December ’16; and then a month later the ridiculously political Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in January ’17; this timing against Assange is too coincidental.
It doesn’t take a deep researcher to see the aligned Deep State
motive to control Julian Assange. The Weissmann/Mueller report was dependent on Russia cybercrimes for justification, and that narrative was contingent on the Russia DNC hack story which Julian Assange disputes.
♦ This is critical. The Weissmann/Mueller report
contains claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central
element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election. This
claim is directly disputed by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, as outlined
during the Dana Rohrabacher interview, and by Julian Assange
on-the-record statements.
The predicate for Robert Mueller’s investigation was specifically due to Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The fulcrum for this Russia interference claim is the intelligence
community assessment; and the only factual evidence claimed within the
ICA is that Russia hacked the DNC servers; a claim only made possible by
relying on forensic computer analysis from Crowdstrike, a DNC and FBI
contractor.
The CIA holds a self-interest in upholding the Russian hacking claim;
the FBI holds an interest in maintaining that claim; the U.S. media
hold an interest in maintaining that claim. All of the foreign countries
whose intelligence apparatus participated with Brennan and Strzok also
have a self-interest in maintaining that Russia hacking and interference
narrative.
Julian Assange is the only person with direct knowledge of how
Wikileaks gained custody of the DNC emails; and Assange has claimed he
has evidence it was not from a hack.
This “Russian hacking” claim was ultimately important to the
CIA, FBI, DOJ, ODNI and U.K intelligence apparatus, it forms the corner
of their justification. With that level of importance, well, right
there is the obvious motive to shut Julian Assange down as soon as
intelligence officials knew the Weissmann/Mueller report was going to be
public.
CTH | The contrast of ideological alignment between the HPSCI, SSCI and
Intelligence Branch is crystal clear when viewed through the prism of
cooperation. You can see which legislative committee holds the power
and support of the Intelligence Branch. The SSCI facilitates the
corrupt existence of the IC Branch, so the IC Branch only cooperates
with the SSCI. It really is that simple.
♦ The Intelligence Branch carefully selects its own members by
controlling how security clearances are investigated and allowed (FBI).
The Intelligence Branch also uses compartmentalization of intelligence
as a way to keep each agency, and each downstream branch of government
(executive, legislative and judicial), at arms length as a method to
stop anyone from seeing the larger picture of their activity. I call
this the “silo effect“,
and it is done by design. I have looked the at stunned faces when I
present silo product from one agency to the silo customers of another.
Through the advise and consent rules, the Intelligence Branch uses
the SSCI to keep out people they consider dangerous to their ongoing
operations. Any appointee to the intelligence community must first pass
through the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, before they get a
full Senate vote. If the SSCI rejects the candidate, they simply refuse
to take up the nomination. The president is then blocked from that
appointment. This is what happened with President Trump over-and-over
again.
♦ Additionally, the Intelligence Branch protects itself, and its
facilitating allies through the formal classification process. The
Intelligence Branch gets to decide unilaterally what information will be
released and what information will be kept secret. There is no entity
outside the Intelligence Branch, and yes that includes the President of
the United States, who can supersede the classification authority of the
Intelligence Branch. {Go Deep} and {Go Deep} This is something 99.9% of the people on our side get totally and frustratingly wrong.
No-one can declassify, or make public, anything the Intelligence
Branch will not agree to. Doubt this?… ask Ric Grenell, John Ratcliffe,
or even President Trump himself.
♦ The classification process is determined inside the
Intelligence Branch, all by themselves. They get to choose what rank of
classification exists on any work-product they create; and they get to
decide what the classification status is of any work-product that is
created by anyone else. The Intelligence Branch has full control over
what is considered classified information and what is not. The
Intelligence Branch defines what is a “national security interest” and
what is not. A great technique for hiding fingerprints of corrupt and
illegal activity.
[For familiar reference see the redactions to Lisa Page and Peter
Strzok text messages. The Intelligence Branch does all redactions.]
♦ Similarly the declassification process is a request by an
agency, even a traditionally superior agency like the President of the
United States, to the Intelligence Branch asking for them to release the
information. The Intelligence Branch again holds full unilateral
control. If the head of the CIA refuses to comply with the
declassification instruction of the President, what can the president do
except fire him/her? {Again, GO DEEP}
How does the President replace the non-compliant cabinet member?… They
have to go through the SSCI confirmation… See the problem?
CTH | Here we pick up the intelligence issues as they manifest after
9/11/01, and highlight how the modern version of the total intelligence
apparatus has now metastasized into a fourth branch of government. If
we take the modern construct we can highlight how and why the oversight
or “check/balance” in the system has become functionally obsolescent.
Factually, the modern intelligence apparatus uses checks and balances
in their favor. The checks create silos of proprietary information
that works around oversight issues. That’s part of the problem.
Ironically the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was
created in the aftermath of 9/11/01 expressly to eliminate the silos of
information which they felt led to a domestic terrorist attack that
could have been prevented. The ODNI was created specifically upon the
recommendation of the 9/11 commission.
The intent was to create a central hub of intelligence information,
inside the executive branch, where the CIA, NSA, DoD, DoS, and DIA could
deposit their unique intelligence products and a repository would be
created so that domestic intelligence operations, like the DOJ and FBI
could access them when needed to analyze threats to the U.S. This,
they hoped, would ensure the obvious flags missed in the 9/11 attacks
would not be missed again.
The DNI office created a problem for those who operate in the shadows
of proprietary information. You’ll see how it was critical to install a
person uniquely skilled in being an idiot, James Clapper, into that
willfully blind role while intelligence operatives worked around the
office to assemble the Intelligence Branch of government.
♦ The last federal budget that flowed through the traditional
budgetary process was signed into law in September of 2007 for fiscal
year 2008 by George W Bush. Every budget since then has been a
fragmented process of continuing resolutions and individual spending
bills.
Why does this matter? Because many people think defunding the IC is a
solution; it ain’t… not yet. Worse yet, the corrupt divisions deep
inside the U.S. intelligence system can now fund themselves from
multinational private sector partnerships (banks, corporations and
foreign entities).
CTH | That video of James Comey being questioned by Elise Stefanik was the
first example given to me by someone who knew the background of
everything that was taking place preceding that March 20, 2017,
hearing. That FBI reference point is a key to understand how the
Intelligence Branch operates with unilateral authority above congress
(legislative branch), above the White House (executive branch), and even
above the court system (judicial branch).
After four days of research and meetings in DC during 2020; amid a
town that was serendipitously shut down due to COVID; I found a letter
slid under the door of my nearly empty hotel room with an introduction
of sorts. The subsequent discussions were perhaps the most important.
After hours of specific questions and answers on specific examples I
realized why our nation is in this mess. That is when I discovered the
fourth and superseding branch of government, the Intelligence Branch.
The intelligence branch is an independent functioning branch of
government, it is no longer a subsidiary set of agencies within the
executive branch as most would think. To understand the intelligence
branch we need to drop the elementary school civics class lessons about
three coequal branches of government, and replace that outlook with the
modern system that created itself.
The intelligence branch functions, much like the State Dept, through a
unique set of public-private partnerships that support it. Big Tech
industry collaboration with intelligence operatives is part of that
functioning; almost like an NGO. However, the process is much more
important than most think. In this problematic perspective of a corrupt
system of government, the process is the flaw – not the outcome.
There are people making decisions inside this little-known,
unregulated and out-of-control branch of government that impact every
facet of our lives.
None of the people operating deep inside the Intelligence Branch were
elected; and our elected representative House members genuinely do not
know how the system works. I know this because I have talked to House
and Senate staffers, including the chiefs of staff for multiple House
committee seats. They are clueless. That is part of the purpose of me
explaining it, with examples, in full detail and sunlight.
unherd |The extraordinary spread in recent
months of what has become known, in the writer Wesley Yang’s phrase, as
“the successor ideology” has encouraged all manner of analysis
attempting to delineate its essential features. Is it a religion, with
its own litany of sin and redemption, its own repertoire of fervent
rituals and iconography? Is this Marxism, ask American conservatives,
still fighting yesterday’s ideological war?
What does this all do to speed along
policing reform, ask bewildered African-Americans, as they observe
global corporations and white celebrities compete to beat their chests
in ever-more elaborate and meaningless gestures of atonement? What kind
of meaningful anti-systemic revolution can provoke such immediate and
fulsome support from the Hollywood entertainment complex, from the
richest oligarchs and plutocrats on earth, and from the media organs of
the liberal state?
Composed with a feverish,
hallucinatory clarity, Althusser’s essay aimed to elucidate the manner
in which ideology functions as a means to prop up the political order,
observing that “no class can hold state power over a long period without
at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the Ideological
State Apparatuses”.
What are these ISAs? Contrasted with
the Repressive State Apparatuses — the police, the army, and so on — the
ISAs are the means by which the system reproduces itself through
ideology: Althusser lists the church, the media and the education system
along with the family, and the legal and political system and the
culture industry as the means through which the ideology of the
governing system is enforced. Althusser here develops Gramsci’s thesis
that the cultural sphere is the most productive arena of political
struggle, and inverts it: instead of being the site of revolutionary
victory, it is where the system reasserts itself, neutering the
possibility of political change through its wielding of the most
powerful weapon, ideology.
It is through ideology, Althusser
asserts, that the ruling system maintains itself in power: “the ideology
of the ruling class does not become the ruling ideology by the grace of
God, nor even by virtue of the seizure of state power alone,” he
states, “it is by the installation of the ISAs in which this ideology is
realised and realises itself that it becomes the ruling ideology.”
caitlinjohnstone | As someone whose life's work before his imprisonment was combing
through documents of an often classified nature, he'd have been in a
prime position to know. He'd have seen time and time again how a
nation's citizenry are not under the slightest threat from the secret
information in the documents that had been leaked to him from around the
world, but that it could damage the reputation of a politician or a
government or its military.
As the persecution of the WikiLeaks
founder continues to trudge on with the UK government's granting the
Biden administration permission to appeal a declined extradition request,
claiming that it can safely imprison Assange without subjecting him to
the draconian aspects of America's prison system which caused the
initial dismissal, it's good to keep in mind that this is being done
entirely for the purpose of controlling public access to information
that is inconvenient for the powerful.
Nothing WikiLeaks published endangered the American people, it
endangered a globe-spanning empire's ability to control our
understanding of what's happening in the world. This was a most
egregious offense as far as our rulers are concerned, and it could not
be allowed to stand.
So an example is being made. In less polite
times Assange would have been tortured and drawn and quartered in the
town square while the king looked on sipping from a goblet of mead. In
the days of polite liberal democracy our rulers must remain hidden, and
they must publicly torture dissidents to death in the name of national
security concerns.
Beneath all the spin and excuses, this is all being done to show everyone what happens to you if you reveal embarrassing truths
about the most powerful people on earth. If you compromise their
political security. It's telling the world, "If you ever try to
interfere in our control over the dominant narratives, this is what we
will do to you."
And, whether we fully understand what's really
happening or not, that's the message that is being ingested here.
Journalists who find themselves in a position to publish such things
going forward will find themselves thinking thoughts about what happened
to Julian Assange.
sootyempiric | In circles I run in one will often see people advised to read black
authors or engage with black thought. I take it the reason I see this so
often is that in the bits of philosophy I mix in it is i) seen as good
to be broad minded and well read in one's thought, and especially to be
in touch with wha people from marginalised groups are thinking -- and
ii) rare to actually be as much. This got me thinking about what this
means, what sort of tendencies of thought or theory one might expect to
encounter upon doing so.
For that reason I decided to categorise
some of the tendencies of black political thought that I often
encounter, and share that here. Each group is not much more than a loose
affinity group, united by a theme. But I tend to think I can recognise
instances of members of these groups when I see them - by what they
stress, how they argue, what sort of things they think possible or
impossible, or relevant or irrelevant. So I have tried to briefly
summarise the thematic links I am picking up on, and then link some
examples of each tendency to give the reader an idea of the sort of work
or theorising I would expect from each group.
To be clear, the following is highly idiosyncratic. I am not - not
- claiming that this in fact exhausts what's going on. In fact, I think
there are ways in which my experience is clearly going to be
unrepresentative, most obviously because I am not a political
philosopher or theorist of any sort, and so am not going to be properly
tapped into the right channels. This is a very me-centric look at
things, no pretences to the contrary. Nor am I claiming that these
categories are neatly distinct, lots of people I will mention could
fairly be said to participate in another of the named traditions. All I
am claiming is that here are some distinctive currents of black
political philosophy that I sometimes find myself interacting with or
responding to.
I don't want to delay the main event any further,
so below is my taxonomy and after that I will reflect a bit on what I
would take away from it.
Just got a seven day Facebook ban for quoting the declaration of Independence: pic.twitter.com/pDCvdA3VkK
Before
closing I really do wish to stress that there is a lot of very
interesting work that does not fit neatly into this categories, that
wasn't just a disingenuous disavowal of responsibility I can think of
specific instances of good work outside this. There have been a few
things exploring ideas about or around the notion of "post-racialism" (e.g.) or interpersonal relationships (e.g.). There continues to be work from some of our leading scholars on abiding issues related to colonialism or police racism that I do not think can be neatly categorised, and likewise with up and coming scholars working on wholenewissues.
Further, plenty of the people listed above cross categories - I
mentioned the case of the elder TáÃwò already, but I could also add that
Cornell West, Angela Davis, and Brittney Cooper all do public
intellectual work that could reasonably fit them in the liberal
tradition. Likewise Nikole Hannah Jones, Appiah, and Chris Lebron have
done work that would fit in the culturalist tradition. I couldn't and
wouldn't want to circumscribe black political philosophy in any silly
little list - there's a lot out there that this doesn't purport to
include, and one should not be too rigid about things.
Rather, I
see the value gained from the exercise to be this: there is a tendency,
even among friends, to treat black thought as monolithic. Having a ready
to hand taxonomy, along with some exemplars and notes about the
different habits of mind that characterise them, will help one discern
sources of difference, disagreement, and debate, internal to black
political thought. One should not insist upon everyone fitting into all
and only one box, but one should be on the look out for how different
authors lay emphasis on different themes and where that is likely to
pull them apart from other black political thinkers.
WSWS |New York Times Magazine staff writer and 1619 Project
creator Nikole Hannah-Jones announced in an exclusive interview on “CBS
This Morning” with co-host Gayle King that she was rejecting an offer of
tenure from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).
Instead,
Hannah-Jones explained that she would accept a tenured professorship at
Howard University in Washington D.C. as the Knight Chair in Race and
Reporting at the Cathy Hughes School of Communication.
Hannah-Jones will join writer Ta-Nehisi Coates (who wrote We Were Eight Years in Power
about the Obama administration) in founding the Center for Journalism
and Democracy at Howard. The center will be financed with $20 million
from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation
and an anonymous donor.
According to a university press release,
the new center “will focus on training and supporting aspiring
journalists in acquiring the investigative skills and historical and
analytical expertise needed to cover the crisis our democracy is
facing.”
The 1619 Project was published by the New York Times
in August 2019 and has been promoted with millions of dollars in
funding and a school curriculum developed by the Pulitzer Center on
Crisis Reporting. It falsely roots American history in an enduring
racial conflict between blacks and whites.
Hannah-Jones’ lead
essay, for which she won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, argued
that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery against the
British monarchy and that President Abraham Lincoln was little more than
a garden-variety racist.
The response of preeminent American historians Gordon Wood, James
McPherson, James Oakes, Clayborne Carson, Victoria Bynum and others
exposed the New York Times' effort to reinterpret American history. The World Socialist Web Site,
in addition to interviewing these historians, has thoroughly refuted
the falsifications of the 1619 Project and the lead essay written by
Hannah-Jones.
Her other writings have descended into outright
racism against whites. The historical falsifications which she promotes
and her limited journalistic record since beginning to write for the Times in late 2014—just 23 articles—would certainly qualify as red flags in her application for tenure.
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