newsweek | "Can someone please help explain to me how is it possible in the
United States of America that these police officers keep getting away
with murder?" Sweet said. "My husband Daniel Shaver was shot and killed
five years ago while crying on the ground pleading for his life saying,
'Please don't shoot me.' He was compliant. He was unarmed. He didn't
even have shoes on."
In another video, Sweet referred to the spate of police killings in the U.S., such as the death of George Floyd.
"People, it's time to wake up," she said. "Even when you comply and
you try and you beg for your life and you say 'please don't shoot me'
and you tell them that you can't breathe and you cry and you plead and
you beg... they don't care.
"Because some cops are just out
looking to kill people and they get away with it. And it keeps
happening. And it's going to keep happening until people wake up and
demand change."
In her videos, Sweet also spoke about how Brailsford, the officer who
fatally shot Shaver, would get a pension for the rest of his life,
while she and her children are struggling financially.
According
to reports, Brailsford signed an agreement in 2018 to be rehired by the
Mesa Police Department temporarily so he could apply for accidental
disability pension and medical retirement due to a PTSD diagnosis. The
PTSD stemmed from the shooting of Shaver and the resulting prosecution,
an attorney for the officer told ABC15 in 2018.
"He
was charged with second-degree murder, acquitted and then reinstated so
he could get PTSD benefits for claiming disability for murdering my
husband," she said in one video. "He's collecting a pension for the rest
of his life. Meanwhile, my daughters and I are losing our housing and
don't know where we're going to move next month and we don't have a
working vehicle. Tell me how this is justice."
Sweet, who lives in Durango, Colorado, explained on a GoFundMe page
to raise funds to support her family that she and her children will have
nowhere to live from the end of May. That page has so far collected
more than $75,000 in donations.
In a post on the page earlier this
month, she said the city of Mesa is "interested" in settling the
lawsuit and a mediation has been ordered.
newrepublic | Gates can hardly
disguise his contempt for the growing interest in intellectual property
barriers. In recent months, as the debate has shifted from the WHO to the WTO, reporters
have drawn testy responses from Gates that harken back to his prickly
performances before congressional antitrust hearings a quarter-century ago.
When a Fast Company reporter raised
the issue in February, she described Gates “raising his voice slightly and
laughing in frustration,” before snapping, “It’s irritating that this issue
comes up here. This isn’t about IP.”
In interview after interview, Gates has dismissed his critics on the
issue—who represent the poor majority of the global population—as spoiled
children demanding ice cream before dinner. “It’s the classic
situation in global health, where the advocates all of a sudden want [the
vaccine] for zero dollars and right away,” he told Reuters in late January. Gates has larded the insults
with comments that equate state-protected and publicly funded monopolies with
the “free market.” “North
Korea doesn’t have that many vaccines, as far as we can tell,” he told TheNew York Times in November. (It is curious that he chose North Korea as an example and not
Cuba, a socialist country with an innovative and world-class vaccine
development program with multiple Covid-19 vaccine candidates in various stages
of testing.)
The
closest Gates has come to conceding that vaccine monopolies inhibit production
came during a January interview with South Africa’s Mail & Guardian. Asked about the growing
intellectual property debate, he responded, “At this point, changing the rules
wouldn’t make any additional vaccines available.”
The first
implication of “at this point” is that the moment has passed when changing the
rules could make a difference. This is a false but debatable claim. The same
can’t be said for the second implication, which is that nobody could have
possibly foreseen the current supply crisis. Not only were the obstacles posed
by intellectual property easily predictable a year ago, there was no lack of people making noise
about the urgency of avoiding them. They included much of the global research
community, major NGOs with long experience in medicines development and access,
and dozens of current and former world leaders and public health experts. In a May 2020 open letter, more than 140
political and civil society leaders called upon governments and companies to
begin pooling their intellectual property. “Now is notthe time … to leave this massive and moral task to market
forces,” they wrote.
Bill Gates’s position on intellectual property was consistent
with a lifelong ideological commitment to knowledge
monopolies, forged during a vengeful teenage crusade against the open-source
programming culture of the 1970s. As it happens, a novel use of one category of
intellectual property—copyright, applied to computer code—made Gates the
richest man in the world for most of two decades beginning in 1995. That same
year, the WTO went into effect, chaining the developing
world to intellectual property rules written by a handful of executives from
the U.S. pharmaceutical, entertainment, and software industries.
ritholtz |Spoiler alert: Forget the 40% capital gains
rate — its DOA, merely misdirection, designed to distract from the real
show. My best deductive reasoning leads me to conclude the
administration has decided that the 1% have amassed so much money and
power, that they deserve their own (higher) tax bracket.
That is the philosophy behind the new cap gains proposal: Treat the top 1% as unique, and tax them accordingly.
Allow me to share my thinking about the proposed doubling of the
capital gains tax rate to 40%. I am not going to weigh in on whether or
not I support it — thats not especially relevant — but rather,
how we got here, and what might be going on behind the scenes, and what
is more likely to occur (if anytrhing). Contrary to some of the hyperbolic hysteria you may have seen on social media, there is a method to the madness.
But first, my priors: Following World War Two, the United
States enjoyed an unprecedented expansion of the middle class. Corporate
CEOs earned about 25 times what the average worker made; jobs with good
benefits were plentiful, wages rose regularly. Education and healthcare
was affordable.
That began to change when Stagflation took root in the 1970s; change
accelerated under President Reagan as tax rates were slashed. Not long
after that, audits and enforcements at the IRS began to decrease.
Capital began to outpace Labor – modestly at first, and then more
significantly. In the 1990s, President Clinton introduced a tax changeintended
to limit executive pay – but it had the exact opposite effect, shifting
more of their compensation from wages to stock options. This led to the
creation of vast fortunes including an increased number of millionaires and billionaires. It was the law of unintended consequences writ large. That was before President Trump cut the Corporate tax rate in 2017.
Today, Corporate CEOs earned about 200+ times what the average worker makes (or 320x or whatever); good jobs with good wages and benefits are much less plentiful, Education and healthcare are unaffordable.
Hence, that is from whence my analysis begins. I believe that
strategically, the proposed 40% is a misdirection, and a brilliant one
at that. It is not at all what this is truly about.
bloomberg | Charles Myers was sitting in a first-class seat on a flight from New
York to Dallas when his phone started blowing up Thursday. News had just
broken that the wealthiest Americans could soon face a tax rate as high as 43.4% on gains from their investments.
The chairman of Signum Global Advisors wasn’t thrilled.
“Raising
capital gains taxes hurts the capital markets,” he said in a text
message. “Better to raise the personal top marginal rate and estate tax.
Leave capital gains and dividends alone.”
Myers has raised funds for Joe Biden, and
wasn’t shocked by the White House’s plan because it was part of the
president’s campaign. But the donor doesn’t think that 43.4% rate will
make it into final legislation.
As the plane descended, he added: “Over-taxing success is un-American.”
Pressure has been building to raise levies on the
wealthy after decades of tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the
top 1%. Politicians at the national and state levels have recently
proposed or passed higher rates, but the measures were largely focused
on income taxes.
The plan to target investment gains strikes at the heart of what makes the wealthiest Americans ever more wealthy.
The
country’s richest 1% own more than 50% of the equity in corporations
and in mutual fund shares, according to Federal Reserve data. The next
9% of the wealthiest own more than a third of equity positions. Added
together, the top 10% of Americans hold more than 88% of shares.
Meanwhile, the bottom 90%’s equity exposure
has been dropping for almost two decades. That meant last year’s stock
market surge widened the nation’s wealth gap further, leaving the 10
richest Americans with more than $1 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Now,
Biden wants to help pay for a raft of social spending that addresses
long-standing inequality by taxing investment gains more, according to
people familiar with his proposal.
Billionaire
venture capitalist Tim Draper isn’t persuaded. He said raising federal
rates to as high as 43.4% would sound the death knell for Silicon Valley
and American job creation.
propublica | “Inequality is a
cumulative process,” said Karen Petrou, author of “The Engine of
Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America” and managing
partner of the Washington-based consulting firm Federal Financial
Analytics. “The richer you are, the richer you get, and the poorer you
are, the poorer you get, unless something puts that engine in reverse,”
she said. “That engine is driven not by fate or by untouchable phenomena
such as demographics but most importantly by policy decisions.”
Under President Joe Biden,
the federal government is trying to both create jobs and funnel lots of
money to people like Tan with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan
stimulus package. Indeed, Tan is grateful for the $4,200 in stimulus
funds she recently received. “This country has really, really blessed me
a lot,” said Tan, a naturalized citizen who emigrated from Indonesia in
1984.
The Biden administration
is also pushing for a $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill. But even
without a penny yet having been spent on that, the federal government is
running up record budget deficits, with more to come.
A considerable part of
current and future deficits will be indirectly financed by the Fed,
which has been increasing its holdings of Treasury IOUs and
mortgage-backed securities by at least $120 billion a month, and has
directed its trading desk to increase purchases “as needed” to maintain
smooth functioning in the financial markets.
During Donald Trump’s four
years as president, the Fed added $2.25 trillion to its holdings of
Treasury IOUs, which helped cover the $7.8 trillion of debt the Treasury
issued to finance budget deficits during the Trump years. It’s likely
the central bank will be the biggest source of finance for Biden’s
deficits, just as it was for Trump’s.
Why does that matter?
Because when the Fed buys securities, it does so with money that it
creates out of thin air. Pumping more money into the financial system
increases the money supply, and some of that cash inevitably ends up
making its way into the stock market, boosting prices.
Biden is making tax
increases a big part of his infrastructure pitch, which in theory would
make that legislation less reliant on the Fed. But it doesn’t mean taxes
will go up anywhere near as much as he’s proposing. Or that taxes and
spending will rise in lockstep. After all, spending is a lot more
popular than raising taxes.
Now, let’s step back a bit and see how we got to this point.
During the 2008-09
financial crisis, the Fed initiated “quantitative easing,” a policy
under which the central bank buys massive amounts of Treasury IOUs and
other securities to inject money into the markets and stimulate the
economy. Then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke championed that approach, which
complemented aggressive moves by the Treasury and helped keep giant
banks and the world financial system from cratering. (Lots of people
still lost their homes to foreclosure, another example of how helping
the financial system might not help average people. But that story has already been told.)
Before May 2020, M1 consists of (1)
currency outside the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve Banks, and the
vaults of depository institutions; (2) demand deposits at commercial
banks (excluding those amounts held by depository institutions, the U.S.
government, and foreign banks and official institutions) less cash
items in the process of collection and Federal Reserve float; and (3)
other checkable deposits (OCDs), consisting of negotiable order of
withdrawal, or NOW, and automatic transfer service, or ATS, accounts at
depository institutions, share draft accounts at credit unions, and
demand deposits at thrift institutions.
Beginning May 2020, M1
consists of (1) currency outside the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve
Banks, and the vaults of depository institutions; (2) demand deposits at
commercial banks (excluding those amounts held by depository
institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign banks and official
institutions) less cash items in the process of collection and Federal
Reserve float; and (3) other liquid deposits, consisting of OCDs and
savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts). Seasonally
adjusted M1 is constructed by summing currency, demand deposits, and
OCDs (before May 2020) or other liquid deposits (beginning May 2020),
each seasonally adjusted separately.
For more information on the
H.6 release changes and the regulatory amendment that led to the
creation of the other liquid deposits component and its inclusion in the
M1 monetary aggregate, see the H.6 announcements and Technical Q&As posted on December 17, 2020.
Suggested Citation:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US),
M1 Money Stock [M1SL],
retrieved from FRED,
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis;
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL,
April 27, 2021.
outsidevoices |Last May, several months into a global pandemic that
had capsized the economy, hog farmers had a problem on their hands.
With restaurants closed, demand for their product had evaporated. With
outbreaks shuttering meat processing plants all over the country, they
had nowhere to send their animals to be slaughtered. If kept alive, the
pigs would quickly outgrow facilities designed to hold them only for
highly abbreviated lives, and the costs of feeding and watering them
would become astronomical.
So some major pork producers, among
them Iowa’s largest, Iowa Select Farms, made a horrifying decision. They
would mass exterminate their animals in one fell swoop, using a
technique that promised efficiency for themselves but guaranteed
incomprehensible suffering for the pigs.
The method was called “ventilation shutdown,”
and it entailed, basically, roasting the pigs alive. Workers would
close all of the vents into the barns, shut down the air conditioning,
and pipe steam into the buildings until the animals died by asphyxiation
or hyperthermia, a process that took several hours. Then a worker would
walk through the piles of corpses with a captive bolt gun, shooting
whatever stragglers had survived.
The company, however, was
unaware that there was a whistleblower within their ranks. An ISF truck
driver named Lucas Walker, who had long been appalled by the company’s
treatment of its pigs, had informed an activist named Matt Johnson of
the company’s plans. Johnson snuck into the barns, placed hidden
cameras, and recorded video and audio of the massacre to later release
to the news media.
Neither Johnson nor Walker is what most people of conscience would
consider a dangerous political extremist. They had no desire to bring
any physical harm to anyone; on the contrary, they were moved by the
cause of putting a halt to needless suffering. But both a new state law
in Iowa and a bill currently being considered in Congress could render
them such in the eyes of the criminal justice system. It is just one
example of the moral hazard posed by the ongoing effort in Congress and
within the Biden administration to erect a new domestic security state
apparatus in response to the Trump years and the Capitol Riot — an
effort the CIA has joined, while animal rights groups and environmental
campaigners have been explicitly listed among its targets.
ipsnews | Producers and consumers seem helpless as food all over the world
comes under fast growing corporate control. Such changes have also been
worsening environmental collapse, social dislocation and the human
condition.
Longer term perspective
The recent joint report – by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and the ETC Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration – is ominous, to say the least.
A Long Food Movement,
principally authored by Pat Mooney with a team including IPES-Food
Director Nick Jacobs, analyses how food systems are likely to evolve
over the next quarter century with technological and other changes.
The report notes that ‘hi-tech’, data processing and asset management corporations have joined established agribusinesses in reshaping world food supply chains.
If current trends continue,
the food system will be increasingly controlled by large transnational
corporations (TNCs) at the expense of billions of farmers and consumers.
Big Ag weds Big Data
The Davos World Economic Forum’s (WEF) much touted ‘Fourth Industrial
Revolution’ (IR4.0), promoting digitisation, is transforming food
systems, accelerating concentration in corporate hands.
New apps enable better tracking across supply chains, while
‘precision farming’ now includes using drones to spray pesticides on
targeted crops, reducing inputs and, potentially, farming costs.
Agriculture is now second only to the military in drone use.
Digital giants are working with other TNCs to extend enabling ‘cloud
computing’ infrastructure. Spreading as quickly as the infrastructure
allows, new ‘digital ag’ technologies have been displacing farm labour.
Meanwhile, food data have become more commercially valuable, e.g., to
meet consumer demand, Big Ag profits have also grown by creating ‘new
needs’. Big data are already being used to manipulate consumer
preferences.
With the pandemic, e-retail and food delivery services have grown
even faster. Thus, e-commerce platforms have quickly become the world’s
top retailers.
New ‘digital ag’ technologies are also undermining diverse,
ecologically more appropriate food agriculture in favour of
unsustainable monocropping. The threat is great as family farms still
feed more than two-thirds of the world’s population.
IR4.0 not benign
Meanwhile, hi-tech and asset management firms have acquired significant
shareholdings in food giants. Powerful conglomerates are integrating
different business lines, increasing concentration while invoking
competition and ‘creative disruption’.
The IPES-ETC study highlights new threats
to farming and food security as IR4.0 proponents exert increasing
influence. The report warns that giving Big Ag the ‘keys of the food
system’ worsens food insecurity and other existential threats.
Powerful corporations will increase control of most world food
supplies. Big Ag controlled supply chains will also be more vulnerable
as great power rivalry and competition continue to displace multilateral
cooperation.
judicialwatch |Judicial Watch announced today that it received 540 pagesand a supplemental four pagesof
documents from the office of the Secretary of State of California
revealing how state officials pressured social media companies (Twitter,
Facebook, Google (YouTube)) to censor posts about the 2020 election.
Included in these documents were “misinformation briefings” emails that
were compiled by communications firm SKDK, that lists Biden for President as their top clientof
2020. The documents show how the state agency successfully pressured
YouTube to censor a Judicial Watch video concerning the vote by mail and
a Judicial Watch lawsuit settlement about California voter roll clean
up.
The
records were obtained in response to Judicial Watch’s California Public
Records Act (CPRA) requests to the Office of the California Secretary of
State for records related to the Office of Election Cybersecurity’s
database of social media posts; communications with social media
companies; and other social media related records regarding the 2020
elections. Judicial Watch filed the requests after a December 2020 report surfaced that the state agency was surveilling, tracking, and seeking to censor the speech of Americans:
“These
new documents suggest a conspiracy against the First Amendment rights
of Americans by the California Secretary of State, the Biden campaign
operation, and Big Tech,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
“These documents blow up the big lie that Big Tech censorship is
‘private’ – as the documents show collusion between a whole group of
government officials in multiple states to suppress speech about
election controversies.”
caitlinjohnstone | This year has marked the first time ever
that trust in news media dropped below fifty percent in the United
States, continuing a trend of decline that's been ongoing for years.
And actually it doesn't ultimately matter what mainstream pundits and
reporters believe is the cause of the public's growing disgust with
them, because there's nothing they can do to fix it anyway. The mass
media will never regain the public's trust.
They'll never regain
the public's trust for a couple of reasons, the first of which is
because they'll never be able to become trustworthy. At no point will
the mass media ever begin wowing the public with its journalistic
integrity and causing people to re-evaluate their opinion of mainstream
news reporters. At no point will people's disdain for these outlets ever
cease to be reinforced and confirmed by the manipulative and deceitful
behaviors which caused that disdain in the first place.
A
propaganda outlet will never be anything other than a propaganda outlet.
A lot of half-awake people with one eye open and one eye closed will
notice how the news media don't practice journalism and don't report the
facts, and they'll assume that something went wrong at some point.
"Just do your jobs and report the news!" they'll shout in frustration.
But nothing has gone wrong, and they are doing their jobs. They are doing their jobs extremely well.
mediamatters | The feminist writer Naomi Wolf garnered fame during the 1990s for her book The Beauty Myth
and her work as an adviser to the presidential campaigns of Bill
Clinton and Al Gore. But in recent years, she’s been better known for
promoting an array of unhinged conspiracy theories, most recently
regarding the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. This combination
has made her a perfect guest for Fox News.
Fox is far more interested in turning coronavirus into a political
cudgel than in giving users accurate health information. And so the
network’s hosts lean on Wolf’s liberal credentials while giving her a
platform to claim that the Democratic response to the pandemic is aimed
at dissolving society and enacting a totalitarian state comparable to
Nazi Germany.
Since mid-February, she appeared at least seven times on Fox to discuss her views on the pandemic: twice apiece on Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Revolution with Steve Hilton, and three times on Fox News Primetime, the most recent of which came Monday night. Wolf cited the notorious anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during that interview
to argue that Dr. Anthony Fauci, Bill and Melinda Gates, the state of
Israel, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were engaged
in some sort of nebulous but sinister vaccine conspiracy.
It is irresponsible for a news outlet to give Wolf that sort of
credulous attention. Her social media channels are littered with absurd
claims about the virus and its vaccines. Between her first and second
Fox appearances alone, she tweeted that a new technology allowed the delivery of “vaccines w nanopatticles that let you travel back in time”; that the Moderna vaccine is a “software platform” that allows “uploads”; and that due to face masks, children now lack “the human reflex that they when you smile at them they smile back” and have “dark circles under [their] eyes from low oxygen.”
On Sunday night, Wolf cited purported reports of women
who “bleed oddly [from] being AROUND vaccinated women,” pointing her
followers to a Facebook group which at one point had been titled “All
Vaccines are Fake.”
aier | For decades, Anthony Fauci was an unrecognizable government
bureaucrat to anyone who lived outside of the D.C. Beltway. He would pop
up out of obscurity and into the conversation every few years in the
event of a niche issue involving infectious diseases. That all changed
with the COVID-19 pandemic, which elevated the once-irrelevant mandarin
to stardom. Today, he is a media mainstay. The celebrity doctor, who has
become best known for his routine peddling of quackery related to the
coronavirus, has developed a cult following thanks to his consistent
political activism and regular appearances across a plethora of media
platforms.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) —
where Fauci has held the top post for 38 years — now accommodates their
celebrity doctor by maintaining a dedicated list of his media
appearances. Scroll through the “Fauci In The News” tab on the NIAID
website and you will find page after page of Dr. Fauci’s seemingly
endless schedule of media hits. By my count, he has accumulated well
over 300 media appearances over the past year alone. On Sunday, Fauci
got a high dose of his television fix, racking up 4 separate TV
appearances on ABC, CNN, CBS, and NBC.
The partial list, which was last updated on April 19, shows that
Fauci has collected 309 media appearances over the past year alone. By
comparison, in 2019, Fauci made about 1 media appearance per week.
Additionally, the “Fauci In The News” list does not account for many of
Fauci’s appearances on random celebrity YouTube channels, podcast hits,
radio interviews, livestreamed conferences and the like, which easily
send his average media hits over the past year to well over one
appearance per day.
When Anthony Fauci isn’t in front of a camera, he’s said to be on the
front lines battling the pandemic as the nation’s “foremost infectious
diseases expert,” a label that is somehow justified by his track record
of being a government bureaucrat for half a century. However, other than
working his way up the ranks of a government bureaucracy, and using
crafty political maneuvers to build his personal status in Washington,
D.C. and around the world, it’s unclear what exactly Fauci has
accomplished to deserve this label.
With all of that time in front of a camera, it might make some wonder
if the celebrity bureaucrat has time to actually follow the latest data
and statistics on the pandemic. Given his routine blunders, his lack of
transparency, and his advocacy for continued shutdowns (there are now
over 50 published scientific studies
that show lockdowns don’t work), it’s safe to say that the NIAID
director is either ignorant and clueless and/or purposely advocating for
measures that do not work to “stop the spread.”
Conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf on FOX News Primetime: "[Anthony Fauci] doesn't work for us... He got a million dollars from the state of Israel..." (h/t @kampeas) pic.twitter.com/Z6KECpc2tf
NYTimes | “Fauci” was a dirty word uttered from the stage of the Conservative
Political Action Conference in Florida in February. “Fauci” is a dirty
word prevalent in conservative publications. In Breitbart News several
days ago, Fauci was dismissively referred to as America’s top “public
health celebrity.” “Fauci Fallacies at All-Time High” was a recent
headline in The Washington Free Beacon. In the span of one week this
month, National Review published articles titled “Anthony Fauci Has Worn
Out His Welcome,” “Anthony Fauci’s Misadventures in Fortune-Telling”
and “Another Dismal Sunday-Show Circuit for Dr. Fauci.”
Just a few days ago in The Washington Post, Dan Diamond mentioned Fauci antipathy
in the opening paragraph of a report about people who refuse to get
vaccinations against the coronavirus. The message from one focus group
of such people, he noted, was that “if you’re trying to win over
skeptics, show us anyone besides Dr. Fauci.”
Philip
Bump, one of Diamond’s colleagues at The Post, correctly observed that
“Fauci has become what Trump always wanted him to be: the scapegoat for
unpopular government recommendations.”
But
it’s even bigger and weirder than that. “He doesn’t work for us,” the
writer Naomi Wolf said on Fox News on Monday, referring to Fauci and
reacting to a $1 million prize
given to him by a philanthropy in Israel as a recognition of his, yes,
public service. She cast the money as evidence that he was “so
conflicted” and not sufficiently guided by concern for the “public
health of the American people.”
weforum | The World Economic Forum’s Centre for Cybersecurity
has created a community of security and technology leaders to identify
future global risks from next-generation technology in order to avert a
cyber pandemic.
The initiative convenes over 150 global
experts from the world’s leading companies, research institutions and
public-policy departments. Major collaborators include Palo Alto Networks, Mastercard and KPMG, and support from such institutions as Europol, ENISA and NIST.
The critical technology transformations on
which future prosperity relies – ubiquitous connectivity, artificial
intelligence, quantum computing and next-generation approaches to
identity and access management – will not just be incremental challenges
for the security community.
Unless action is taken now, by 2025
next-generation technology, on which the world will increasingly rely,
has the potential to overwhelm the defences of the global security
community.
Next-generation technologies have the
potential to generate new risks for the world, and at this stage, their
full impact is not well understood. There is an urgent need for
collective action, policy intervention and improved accountability for
government and business.
Without these interventions, it will be
difficult to maintain integrity and trust in the emerging technology on
which future global growth depends.
kentik | Last month, astute contributors to the NANOG listserv highlighted
the oddity of massive amounts of DoD address space being announced by
what appeared to be a shell company. While a BGP hijack was ruled out,
the exact purpose was still unclear.
Until yesterday when the Department of Defense provided an explanation to reporters from the Washington Post about this unusual internet development. Their statement said:
Defense
Digital Service (DDS) authorized a pilot effort advertising DoD
Internet Protocol (IP) space using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). This
pilot will assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP
address space. Additionally, this pilot may identify potential
vulnerabilities. This is one of DoD’s many efforts focused on
continually improving our cyber posture and defense in response to
advanced persistent threats. We are partnering throughout DoD to ensure
potential vulnerabilities are mitigated.
I
interpret this to mean that the objectives of this effort are twofold.
First, to announce this address space to scare off any would-be
squatters, and secondly, to collect a massive amount of background
internet traffic for threat intelligence.
On the first point, there is a vast world of fraudulent BGP routing
out there. As I’ve documented over the years, various types of bad
actors use unrouted address space to bypass blocklists in order to send
spam and other types of malicious traffic.
On
the second, there is a lot of background noise that can be scooped up
when announcing large ranges of IPv4 address space. A recent example is
Cloudflare’s announcement of 1.1.1.0/24 and 1.0.0.0/24 in 2018.
For
decades, internet routing operated with a widespread assumption that
ASes didn’t route these prefixes on the internet (perhaps because they
were canonical examples from networking textbooks). According to their blog post soon after the launch, Cloudflare received “~10Gbps of unsolicited background traffic” on their interfaces.
And
that was just for 512 IPv4 addresses! Of course, those addresses were
very special, but it stands to reason that 175 million IPv4 addresses
will attract orders of magnitude more traffic. More misconfigured
devices and networks that mistakenly assumed that all of this DoD
address space would never see the light of day.
Conclusion
While
today’s statement from the DoD answers some questions, much remains a
mystery. Why did the DoD not just announce this address space themselves
instead of directing an outside entity to use the AS of a long dormant
email marketing firm? Why did it come to life in the final moments of
the previous administration?
We
likely won’t get all of the answers anytime soon, but we can certainly
hope that the DoD uses the threat intel gleaned from the large amounts
of background traffic for the benefit of everyone. Maybe they could come
to a NANOG conference and present about the troves of erroneous traffic
being sent their way.
I think it is critical to note the huge number of nursing home
workers that are young women under 40 – both nursing and support staff. I
do not have exact numbers but just from experience over 3 decades – I
would say that demographic is 50-75% of the employees in nursing homes
and rehab centers.
An unvaccinated health care worker at a Kentucky nursing home set off a Covid-19 outbreak among many staff and residents who were already vaccinated, according to a new study. https://t.co/P4cpVzkIHR
The NYTimes tweet above places the blame of the outbreak of COVID
among vaccinated patients and staff at the doorstep of a young
unvaccinated female worker. Of course – it is all the fault of the young
rube making a disastrous decision. No one ever talks about the actual
reasons why she is making that decision.
I have heard all these stories of the menstrual problems after the
vaccine for weeks. Because I am an internist, that topic does not come
up very often. However, I had my first patient encounter this week with a
custodial staff member in a local nursing home. She has had a Mirena
IUD in place for the past 12 months. She had minimal but appropriate
menstrual flow with the device until late February. She had her 2nd
Pfizer shot in late Feb – and then 1 day later began to have profound
and severe menstrual flow. Way way worse than ever in her life. She has
Obamacare – so she has a $10000 deductible – so she avoids doctor visits
like the plague. Her husband finally dragged her in, tired of paying
for literally boxes of pads every 2-3 days. She had bled her hemoglobin
down to 6. My initial impression was the IUD had become somehow
dislodged and damaged her. NOPE – No evidence of that found on exam by
OBGYN. Perfect working order. No infections. No nothing – just a very
profoundly hypertrophied endometrium. She is going to be fine and
getting taken care of. Interestingly, I have NEVER not once seen this
kind of thing with an IUD. I have no explanation why this or any other
menstrual issues are happening with these vaccines.
BUT she has shared this finding with all the other women at work –
and informed me yesterday a not so small number of them had very strange
menstrual issues after their shot. Including a 60 something who had her
first period in 20 years starting 2 days after her Pfizer 2nd dose.
I would make this point – there were enough women in the vaccine
trials – to have noted this problem during the trials. And yet nothing
was said. Was it noticed? Was it documented? I have learned from my OB
GYN colleagues this week that indeed they have been seeing this issue –
not in huge numbers – but definitely a phenomenon.
So you have young women with a problem like this going on at enough
frequency that the rumor mill is engaged in a big way. Many know
personally women who have stories.
And as usual – crickets chirping – from our federal officials. And they wonder why there is no trust.
You see – as a PCP – I deal with human nature – the human condition. One of the fundamental issues of young people is having children – especially women. You start having this issue occur and no one in authority is even making an attempt to address it – and what do you think is going to happen?
The older I get – the more I am beginning to believe that these
elites are really not humans – they may be lizards in disguise after
all.
And even more importantly – these young women are critical in the
vaccination effort because of their jobs – as documented in the tweet
above.
And unfortunately – one has not far to look to see how far the medical elites have their heads up their asses.
Dr. Gawande – I know you live in an ivory tower – and love to make
proclamations from on high. Those of us who work with real patients and
real people know that if you keep talking like that – the staffs of the
nursing homes are just going to walk. Indeed, it has already started –
talk to the HR folks in any of them across this country. You pay them so
well – that they could just as easily be working at Burger King.
Keep it up – and we will have an even bigger problem than you can even possibly imagine.
My God – a little bit of trust and credibility goes along way. My
profession has learned this over decades – and the medical elite in
charge have just shat all over that decades of hard work in no time.
NYTimes | Millions Are Skipping Their Second Doses of Covid Vaccines
Nearly
8 percent of those who got initial Pfizer or Moderna shots missed their
second doses. State officials want to prevent the numbers from rising.
More than five million people, or nearly 8
percent of those who got a first shot of the Pfizer or Moderna
vaccines, have missed their second doses, according to the most recent
data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is more
than double the rate among people who got inoculated in the first several weeks of the nationwide vaccine campaign.
Even
as the country wrestles with the problem of millions of people who are
wary about getting vaccinated at all, local health authorities are
confronting an emerging challenge of ensuring that those who do get
inoculated are doing so fully.
The
reasons vary for why people are missing their second shots. In
interviews, some said they feared the side effects, which can include
flulike symptoms. Others said they felt that they were sufficiently
protected with a single shot.
The stakes are high because there is only
one vaccine authorized in the United States that is given as a single
shot. The use of that vaccine, made by Johnson & Johnson, was paused
this month after it was linked to a very rare but serious side effect
involving blood clotting. Federal health officials on Friday recommended restarting use of the vaccine, but the combination of the safety scare and ongoing production problems is likely to make that vaccine a viable option for fewer people.
The
C.D.C.’s count of missed second doses is through April 9. It covers
only people who got a first Moderna dose by March 7 or a first Pfizer
dose by March 14.
RT | A hospital system in Houston, Texas has required all staff to be
vaccinated against the coronavirus by summertime, prompting protests
from employees, who’ve launched a petition against the mandate as the
deadline draws near.
The Houston Methodist
hospital system said its employees must take the shot by June 7, making
it the first healthcare provider to issue a mandate, stiffening its
rules after previously offering $500 to any worker who received the
inoculation voluntarily. Those who decline may be fired.
“Mandating
the vaccine was not a decision we made lightly, but science has proven
that the Covid-19 vaccines are very safe and very effective,” said Houston Methodist CEO Marc Boom in a message to staff reported by CBS News on Friday.
By
choosing to be vaccinated, you are leaders – showing our colleagues in
health care what must be done to protect our patients, ourselves, our
families and our communities.
Consisting
of a medical center and six community hospitals, Houston Methodist may
soon be joined by other Texas healthcare facilities, with Boom noting
that the Memorial Hermann hospital and Baylor College of Medicine have
concrete plans to follow suit, and that “countless” others around the US are now considering the move.
A
majority of workers at Houston Methodist have already been vaccinated,
or around 89% as of Friday. Of the hospital network’s 1,200 managers,
who were given an earlier deadline of April 15, two decided to leave
their positions – later criticized by Boom for “putting themselves before the safety of our patients.”
The rule-change has prompted some pushback, however, with Houston Methodist nurse Jennifer Bridges launching an online petition against it last week, garnering more than 3,100 signatures by Friday evening.
“If
you want the vaccine that is great but it should be your choice. It
should not be forced into your body if you are not comfortable with it!” the petition says.
Many
employees are scared that they will lose their job or be forced to
inject the vaccine into their body against their will to keep their jobs
and feed their family. We just want the power to choose for
ourselves...
Bridges later told
the Houston Chronicle that she would only take the immunization once it
received full FDA approval, potentially a years-long process.
CDC | Racism is a system pdf icon[224 MB, 16 Pages]external icon—consisting
of structures, policies, practices, and norms—that assigns value and
determines opportunity based on the way people look or the color of
their skin. This results in conditions that unfairly advantage some and
disadvantage others throughout society.
Racism—both interpersonal and structuralexternal icon—negatively
affects the mental and physical health of millions of people,
preventing them from attaining their highest level of health, and
consequently, affecting the health of our nation.
A growing body of research shows that centuries of racism in this
country has had a profound and negative impact on communities of color.
The impact is pervasive and deeply embedded in our society—affecting
where one lives, learns, works, worships and plays and creating
inequities in access to a range of social and economic benefits—such as
housing, education, wealth, and employment. These conditions—often
referred to as social determinants of health—are key drivers of health inequities within communities of color, placing those within these populations at greater risk for poor health outcomes.
The data show that racial and ethnic minority groups, throughout the
United States, experience higher rates of illness and death across a
wide range of health conditions, including diabetes, hypertension,
obesity, asthma, and heart disease, when compared to their White
counterparts. Additionally, the life expectancy of non-Hispanic/Black
Americans is four years lower than that of White Americans. The COVID-19
pandemic, and its disproportionate impact among racial and ethnic minority populations is another stark example of these enduring health disparities.
To build a healthier America for all, we must confront the systems
and policies that have resulted in the generational injustice that has
given rise to racial and ethnic health inequities. We at CDC want to
lead in this effort—both in the work we do on behalf of the nation’s
health and the work we do internally as an organization.
About those "rulers of BLM" - Never forget that Obama is the poster child and his cousin Warren Buffett is the money behind Black Lives Matter. Once you understand these basic facts, you can transcend the useless idiocy of talking in terms of "left" and "right", communist, fascist, conservative, progressive, etc..., rather, you can maintain laser-focus on who is doing the behavior and what their concrete-specific objectives can be discovered to be.
There
is, however, another version of events, in which the heartfelt
dedication to racial justice is only the forward-facing side of a more
complicated movement. Behind the street level activism and emotional
outpouring is a calculated machinery built by establishment money and
power that has seized on racial politics, in which some of the biggest
capitalists in the world are financially backing a group of
self-described “trained Marxists”—a label that Cullors enthusiastically
applies to herself and the group’s other co-founders.
These
bedfellows, whose stories and fortunes are never publicly presented as
related, are in reality intertwined under the umbrella of a fiscal
sponsor named the International Development Exchange. A modestly endowed
West Coast nonprofit with origins in the Peace Corps—which for decades
supported local farmers, shepherds, and agricultural workers across the
Global South—IDEX has, in the past six years, been transformed into two
distinct new things: the infrastructure back end to the Black Lives
Matter organization in the United States and also, at the very same
time, an investment fund vehicle driven by recruited MBAs and finance
experts seeking to leverage decades of on-the-ground grantee
relationships for novel forms of potentially problematic lending
instruments . And it did so with help from the family of one of the most
famous American billionaires in history—the Oracle of Omaha
himself.
About the police, as currently
configured, these economic burdens have been determined to be obsolete and a decision has been taken to do away with
their current barely governable configuration. Part of the War on Drugs
was to keep cops from policing their own neighborhoods. Even if they
live in the city they serve, they cannot work in the jurisdiction they
live in, as it may create a conflict of interest. Police not knowing
residents is policy, not accident.
Many police,
firefighters/EMTs, and other city employees do not live in the cities
that employ them. As the ratio of local residents working for a city
steadily declines, so does the performance of that city’s government.
It’s a terrible situation, made demonstrably worse by state laws that
struck down residency requirements for city employees statewide, in
contravention of home rule guarantees. State preemption of local control
is destroying municipal governments throughout numerous states. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
With
the military, it seems odd that progressives are just now waking up to
the idea that an all-volunteer force somehow may mysteriously end up
with a disproportionate number of right-wing members. Maybe we have a
similar phenomenon with police. So I would suggest a draft not only for
the military but also for local police. Everyone at a young age should
experience one or the other, or maybe both, for a few years. Then
perhaps we could have informed discussions and dispense with most of the
righteous ranting.
We should also dispassionately
consider how dangerous a police officer’s job actually is – compared to a
truck driver, carpenter, farmer and host of other jobs…. hint, you will
find that a cops level of danger in their job does not make the top ten
list. And as for stopping crime, the police are
really, really bad at it. According to FBI stats, only 4% of major
crimes reported to police end in someone being convicted of a
crime and only half of all major crimes are reported. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
If
we are actually concerned with public safety, with crime control, with
having a public institution who’s mandate is actually to serve and
protect the citizenry, then we need to design a whole new system from
the ground up. Trying to reform the policing system we have into doing
what we want it to do is doomed to fail. We need to start with a system
that is accountable to the populace it serves, and that is designed
specifically to provide security to that populace. We should not waste another moment trying to reform a
system that was designed for entirely different purposes than to protect
and serve the public.
So all the soap opera and
machismo pushed by cops – that their job is so tough and dangerous –
reduces to mush when held to the light of evidence. Continuing in that
vein, by and large, police officers are exceptionally well-paid for the
minimal qualifications required to get the job. Moreover, there are the
power and prestige attractions associated with being narratized as
heroic first responders and all that folderal. When you take into
consideration official overtime pay, and the pay available for
moonlighting, policing is one of the few remaining occupations in which a
certain demographic with nothing more than a high-school diploma can
realistically achieve a 6 figure income. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
This is why
police have so little difficulty parting with the 6-8% annual vigorish
to their “fraternal orders”. The fraternal lodges are the real command
and control systems for police departments. The chief of police is
typically a bureaucratic figurehead whose job it is to run interference
with politicians – and to a limited degree – the public.
In the interest of supporting citations – I offer the following link - but recommend a google search on – fop brad lemon tow lot scandal
This
is a wonderful mid-sized urban anecdote of most of the moving parts
involved with the structure of power, prestige, and accountability in
contemporary policing. Abusive policing is concentrated among a
relatively small proportion of police officers. The majority of U.S.
police probably spend their entire careers without any incidence of
corruption or brutality. The problem is that police
abuse is protected, unconditionally, resulting in either no or
disproportionately low consequences for their actions. What results is
that some naturally violent or naturally corrupt people will seek out
police careers because it allows them to fulfill these desires without
consequence. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
There’s an endemic debate over what people are saying when they refer
to ‘the west’. Is the west defined by its whiteness, its wealth, its
liberal democracy? Should we call it the ‘highly developed countries’,
the ‘advanced economies’, the ‘first world’, or the ‘global north’? I
think most of these terms misses what is distinctive about this set of
places. The countries we think of as ‘western’ are all countries where
Catholicism was once dominant but is now in varying levels of retreat.
Western countries are ‘post-Catholic’.
Catholicism
has certain distinctive effects on a place. Crucially, Catholicism
situates politics as subordinate to morality. In medieval Catholic
states, the monarch derives authority from the pope or from divine
right. This means the monarch’s legitimacy depends on the monarch having
the right moral orientation. In other parts of the world, politics and
morality were more heavily enmeshed. In the Byzantine Empire, the
emperor was supreme in both religious and temporal matters. In the
Islamic world, the caliph combined both political and religious
authority. In China, different dynasties embraced and promoted the
teachings of many different schools of thought at varying points. It was
only in the Catholic west that politics and morality were firmly
separated, with the former rendered clearly subordinate to the latter.
Are
corporations now deriving their "authoriteh" from the rump
"professional" class mediocrities comprising the
diversity-inclusion-equity clergy? Can the ecclesiastical congregation
of diversity-inclusion-equity offer absolution? Or merely economic cancellation...,
Given the weakness of post-Catholic morality - the only pervasive corporate values I see nowadays boil down
to Overton's Window of permitted discourse - and - expected prompt and
unquestioning compliance on the part of economically captured consumers. The pretend ethics of
diversity-inclusion-equity have been quickly and none too subtly
supplemented by "trust the science" indoctrination and compliance. If
our corporate feudal lords can only police what we say or have ever
said, that only scratches the surface of intended moral orthodoxy. If they can
police what we do in ways that extend down to our genomes, then the post-Catholic corporatism has transcended the wildest fantasies of the pre-reformation Holy Roman Church.
The
government can't police your intentions or your expressions or your
behaviors anywhere near as well as corporations with amorphous
community standards and big data, algorithms, and inexpensive filipino and
south asian comment moderators.
Did you happen to see Warren Buffett's cousin and
the diversity commander-in-chief peddling some highly suspect
"trust the science" theocracy just last sunday on teevee? When everything's said and done, if
we can't persuade you to comply, we've got some community standard
digital passports coming your way here shortly so that you can show and
prove your true belief in a way that the penitents of old never previously had to do in their confessionals...,
Rejuvenation Pills
-
No one likes getting old. Everyone would like to be immorbid. Let's be
careful here. Immortal doesnt include youth or return to youth. Immorbid
means you s...
Death of the Author — at the Hands of Cthulhu
-
In 1967, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes wrote of
“The Death of the Author,” arguing that the meaning of a text is divorced
from au...
9/29 again
-
"On this sacred day of Michaelmas, former President Donald Trump invoked
the heavenly power of St. Michael the Archangel, sharing a powerful prayer
for pro...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
