Wednesday, September 29, 2021

Making the Internet a Safe Space for Snowflakes and Karens

The social media giant YouTube will begin banning content it deems “anti-vaccine,” claiming that sowing skepticism about the coronavirus vaccine has led to reduced vaccination rates across the country.

“Misinformation researchers” have claimed for years that vaccine skepticism on YouTube was leading to reduced vaccination rates not only for COVID-19 vaccines but for childhood disease vaccines as well. But YouTube has resisted targeting anti-vax skeptics, saying that maintaining a relatively open platform was a free speech issue.

But the social media company has come under increasing threat from government regulators who want YouTube and other social media sites to spout only government-approved ideas about vaccines. The YouTube ban could easily include bans on content that discusses side effects or vaccine efficacy.

Any subjective interpretation of “anti-vaccine skepticism” has to be placed in the larger context of having a robust debate about the efficacy and safety of vaccines.

The immediate effects of the YouTube ban include taking down channels belonging to vaccine skeptics Robert F. Kennedy, who heads a vaccine skeptic organization, and Joseph Mercola, an alternative medicine entrepreneur
Both advocates claim they are only about exposing government and corporate lies about vaccines.

Washington Post:
The anti-vaccine movement goes back to well before the pandemic. False scientific claims that childhood vaccines caused autism made in the late 1990s have contributed to rising numbers of people refusing to let their kids get shots that had been commonplace for decades. As social media took over more of the media landscape, anti-vaccine activists spread their messages on Facebook parenting groups and through YouTube videos.

The anti-vaccine movement now also incorporates groups as diverse as conspiracy theorists who believe former president Donald Trump is still the rightful president, and some wellness influencers who see the vaccines as unnatural substances that will poison human bodies. All of the government-approved coronavirus vaccines have gone through rigorous testing and have been scientifically proved to be highly effective and safe.
The ban is not about proving or disproving whether government-approved vaccines are safe and effective. The ban is about using subjective criteria to silence some voices who disagree with the dominant medical and scientific views on vaccines.
“We’ll remove claims that vaccines are dangerous or cause a lot of health effects, that vaccines cause autism, cancer, infertility or contain microchips,” [Matt] Halprin, [YouTube’s vice president of global trust and safety] said. “At least hundreds” of moderators at YouTube are working specifically on medical misinformation, he added. The policy will be enforced in all of the dozens of languages that YouTube operates in.
The company is also expanding its work to bring more videos from official sources onto the platform, like the National Academy of Medicine and the Cleveland Clinic, said Garth Graham, YouTube’s global head of health care and public health partnerships. The goal is to get videos with scientific information in front of people before they go down the rabbit hole of anti-vaccine content.
One can certainly understand YouTube wanting to ban some of the skeptics for totally off-the-wall claims about microchips being in vaccines. But it should be pointed out that the mRNA COVID vaccines manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer are revolutionary not only in how they prevent disease but in how they’re manufactured. They simply haven’t been in existence long enough for detailed, long-term studies on mRNA vaccines to be completed.

Should people be penalized for raising issues about mRNA vaccines that the FDA has so far resisted studying? Shouldn’t YouTube be erring on the side of caution in allowing vaccine skeptics to at least point this out?

Certainly, the skepticism should be fact-based. But it shouldn’t be up to YouTube to determine what those “facts” might be and who gets to interpret them.

Sunday, September 26, 2021

The Politics of Fear

...and those responsible for creating it:

Friday, September 17, 2021

Durham Finally Roots Out and Exposes the Source of the Trump-Russia Conspiracy and Proves it ALL FICTION!


U.S. Special Counsel John Durham has released an indictment [pdf here] of Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann for lying to federal investigators in 2016 about the people and motives behind his FBI contact. He failed to tell them his intent was to spread a false Alfa Bank conspiracy theory on behalf of the Clinton campaign.

Working for the Perkins Coie law firm, while under contract with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, partner Michael Sussmann contacted FBI Legal Counsel James Baker to pitch evidence that a Russian bank was in digital communications with servers in Trump Tower. The Alfa Bank allegation was one of the key components for the ridiculous Trump-Russia narrative put together by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Sussmann wanted the FBI to investigate Donald Trump, so that Hillary Clinton could push a political fabrication about Donald Trump working with Russians to steal the presidential election.

According to the indictment, Sussmann failed to tell the FBI that he was giving them this information on behalf of the Clinton campaign. The FBI investigated the claims and found nothing; however, it was the appearance of the investigation that Clinton needed in order to leak/push the Trump-Russia story to the media and stir up the controversy. There had to be something to the “Trump-Russia” story, because the FBI was investigating it. That fabricated smear served its intended purpose, and the media ran with it.

With the indictment now public, The New York Times also now admits Michael Sussmann was their source for stories they wrote about Alfa bank:

New York Times – […] In early September, the indictment said, Mr. Sussmann met with a New York Times reporter who would later draft a story about Alfa Bank, and also began work on a so-called white paper that would summarize and explain the researchers’ data and analysis, billing the time to the Clinton campaign.

On Sept. 12, the indictment said, Mr. Sussmann called Mr. Elias, the Clinton campaign lawyer, and spoke about his “efforts to communicate” with the Times reporter about the Alfa Bank allegations. Both billed the call to the campaign. And three days later, Mr. Elias exchanged emails with top campaign officials about the matter. (read more)

[…] Mr. Sussmann also continued to push the Alfa Bank story to reporters. A month before the election, as Times editors were weighing whether to publish an article the reporter had drafted, Mr. Sussmann told him he should show the editors an opinion essay saying the paper’s investigative reporters had not published as many stories regarding Mr. Trump as other media outlets, the indictment said. (read more)

Perkins Cole is “law firm-1”. Mark Elias is “campaign lawyer 1”. The “US Investigative Firm” is Fusion GPS. “Tech Executive-1” is likely Shawn Henry of Crowdstrike, although there are other possibilities.

In March 2016, Fusion GPS approached Perkins Cole to discuss potential engagement in the development of opposition research on Donald Trump, fully aware that Perkins Cole represented both the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.

In April 2016, Perkins Coie retained Fusion GPS on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Towards the end of the month, on April 29, Perkins Cole partner Michael Sussmann contacted Shawn Henry of CrowdStrike Services to hire the organization for the Democratic National Committee after a series of phishing e-mails started to affect their employees.

Before June 14, 2016, Sussmann, CrowdStrike Services and the Democratic National Committee carefully crafted a damage control story with regards to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, which Dmitri Alperovitch and Shawn Henry released to Ellen Nakashima at The Washington Post.

On June 14, 2016, Nakashima, with contributions from Tom Hamburger, published the article “Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump” in The Washington Post.

After the article’s publishing, a number of bipartisan computer scientists — which included “John McCain Republicans” — started to search for Russian infiltrators. The members of the group were scattered across America and were numerous (there were at least nine members). To search for the infiltrators, they used the Domain Name System (DNS).

In late July 2016, a member of the bipartisan computer scientist organisation, known by the alias “Tea Leaves”, discovered potential malware moving from the Alfa Bank server to the Trump Organization server. The information “Tea Leaves” discovered was then circulated among his colleagues.

“Tea Leaves himself told The Intercept that he had to keep his identity and methods a secret because, ‘I run a cybersecurity company and I do not want DDOS and never have we been DDOS, nor do I want other attention.’” — The Intercept

“I also spoke with academics who vouched for Tea Leaves’ integrity and his unusual access to information. ‘This is someone I know well and is very well-known in the networking community,’ said Camp. ‘When they say something about DNS, you believe them. This person has technical authority and access to data.’” — Franklin Foer, Slate

October 31, 2016, Franklin Foer published the article, “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?”, in Slate. This article was then retweeted by Hillary Clinton in a tweet which read: “It’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia.



This was soon followed by a statement from Jake Sullivan, tweeted through Hillary Clinton’s account: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”

At the same time, days before Election Day 2016, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee ceased funding Fusion GPS’s research. Fusion GPS then passed Steele’s reports to Marc Elias at Perkins Cole.

The rest, as they say, is history….

From the Durham Indictment:



 

Camp Philadelphia

 
Thom Nickels, "Camp Philadelphia: The City of Brotherly Love is being overwhelmed by homeless tent cities."
Daniel, 37, has been dealing drugs in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood for years. The Lancaster County native has seen drastic changes on two fronts: the increased potency of the drugs on the market and the resulting behaviors of addicts, many of them homeless, buying these drugs. Gone are the days, he says, when one could purchase crystal meth and be certain that there were no additives in it. Today, fentanyl (a synthetic opioid stronger than morphine) is added to most street drugs. Daniel says the addition of fentanyl is intended to get the buyer addicted as quickly as possible because addiction ensures future sales.

Fentanyl has changed what it means to get high. Its users generally find themselves in a zombie-like state, unable to communicate or walk in a straight line. Some experience aggressive behaviors, hallucinations, and paranoia. Users who combine fentanyl with K2/Spice, a synthetic cannabinoid, often wind up screaming inanities in public or lose control of their bodily movements. In Kensington, it’s common to see K2 users behave as if they were in the throes of an epileptic seizure—they dance out into city traffic, arms and legs jerking violently, or thrash about on the ground, while those in a fentanyl trance stand immobile, bent over, their faces almost touching the ground.

In 2020, Philadelphia officials estimated the number of homeless people in the city at 300; police put the number at 650. The Office of Homeless Services has recently revised its estimate of the number of people living on the streets to 958. One homeless couple I met traveled to the city from Pittsburgh because they heard that Philadelphia was the place to go for affordable drugs. I encountered Elvis, 30, as he sat on the sidewalk near the local firehouse in my neighborhood while his wife, a tall, statuesque blonde, canvassed traffic with a “Homeless and Hungry” cardboard sign. “My wife makes better money than I do when she works traffic,” Elvis told me, “so I sit here and watch her to make sure she’s okay.”

The Cloak of Gyges Lifted Once Again Reveals Biden Incompetence...

From the NY Times:
In one of the final acts of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, the United States fired a missile from a drone at a car in Kabul. It was parked in the courtyard of a home, and the explosion killed 10 people, including 43-year-old Zemari Ahmadi and seven children, according to his family. The Pentagon claimed that Ahmadi was a facilitator for the Islamic State, and that his car was packed with explosives, posing an imminent threat to U.S. troops guarding the evacuation at the Kabul airport. “The procedures were correctly followed, and it was a righteous strike.” What the military apparently didn’t know was that Ahmadi was a longtime aid worker, who colleagues and family members said spent the hours before he died running office errands, and ended his day by pulling up to his house. Soon after, his Toyota was hit with a 20-pound Hellfire missile. What was interpreted as the suspicious moves of a terrorist may have just been an average day in his life. And it’s possible that what the military saw Ahmadi loading into his car were water canisters he was bringing home to his family — not explosives. Using never-before seen security camera footage of Ahmadi, interviews with his family, co-workers and witnesses, we will piece together for the first time his movements in the hours before he was killed. Zemari Ahmadi was an electrical engineer by training. For 14 years, he had worked for the Kabul office of Nutrition and Education International. “NEI established a total of 11 soybean processing plants in Afghanistan.” It’s a California based NGO that fights malnutrition. On most days, he drove one of the company’s white Toyota corollas, taking his colleagues to and from work and distributing the NGO’s food to Afghans displaced by the war. Only three days before Ahmadi was killed, 13 U.S. troops and more than 170 Afghan civilians died in an Islamic State suicide attack at the airport. The military had given lower-level commanders the authority to order airstrikes earlier in the evacuation, and they were bracing for what they feared was another imminent attack. To reconstruct Ahmadi’s movements on Aug. 29, in the hours before he was killed, The Times pieced together the security camera footage from his office, with interviews with more than a dozen of Ahmadi’s colleagues and family members. Ahmadi appears to have left his home around 9 a.m. He then picked up a colleague and his boss’s laptop near his house. It’s around this time that the U.S. military claimed it observed a white sedan leaving an alleged Islamic State safehouse, around five kilometers northwest of the airport. That’s why the U.S. military said they tracked Ahmadi’s Corolla that day. They also said they intercepted communications from the safehouse, instructing the car to make several stops. But every colleague who rode with Ahmadi that day said what the military interpreted as a series of suspicious moves was just a typical day in his life. After Ahmadi picked up another colleague, the three stopped to get breakfast, and at 9:35 a.m., they arrived at the N.G.O.’s office. Later that morning, Ahmadi drove some of his co-workers to a Taliban-occupied police station to get permission for future food distribution at a new displacement camp. At around 2 p.m., Ahmadi and his colleagues returned to the office. The security camera footage we obtained from the office is crucial to understanding what happens next. The camera’s timestamp is off, but we went to the office and verified the time. We also matched an exact scene from the footage with a timestamp satellite image to confirm it was accurate. A 2:35 p.m., Ahmadi pulls out a hose, and then he and a co-worker fill empty containers with water. Earlier that morning, we saw Ahmadi bring these same empty plastic containers to the office. There was a water shortage in his neighborhood, his family said, so he regularly brought water home from the office. At around 3:38 p.m., a colleague moves Ahmadi’s car further into the driveway. A senior U.S. official told us that at roughly the same time, the military saw Ahmadi’s car pull into an unknown compound 8 to 12 kilometers southwest of the airport. That overlaps with the location of the NGO’s office, which we believe is what the military called an unknown compound. With the workday ending, an employee switched off the office generator and the feed from the camera ends. We don’t have footage of the moments that followed. But it’s at this time, the military said that its drone feed showed four men gingerly loading wrapped packages into the car. Officials said they couldn’t tell what was inside them. This footage from earlier in the day shows what the men said they were carrying — their laptops one in a plastic shopping bag. And the only things in the trunk, Ahmadi’s co-workers said, were the water containers. Ahmadi dropped each one of them off, then drove to his home in a dense neighborhood near the airport. He backed into the home’s small courtyard. Children surrounded the car, according to his brother. A U.S. official said the military feared the car would leave again, and go into an even more crowded street or to the airport itself. The drone operators, who hadn’t been watching Ahmadi’s home at all that day, quickly scanned the courtyard and said they saw only one adult male talking to the driver and no children. They decided this was the moment to strike. A U.S. official told us that the strike on Ahmadi’s car was conducted by an MQ-9 Reaper drone that fired a single Hellfire missile with a 20-pound warhead. We found remnants of the missile, which experts said matched a Hellfire at the scene of the attack. In the days after the attack, the Pentagon repeatedly claimed that the missile strike set off other explosions, and that these likely killed the civilians in the courtyard. “Significant secondary explosions from the targeted vehicle indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material.” “Because there were secondary explosions, there’s a reasonable conclusion to be made that there was explosives in that vehicle.” But a senior military official later told us that it was only possible to probable that explosives in the car caused another blast. We gathered photos and videos of the scene taken by journalists and visited the courtyard multiple times. We shared the evidence with three weapons experts who said the damage was consistent with the impact of a Hellfire missile. They pointed to the small crater beneath Ahmadi’s car and the damage from the metal fragments of the warhead. This plastic melted as a result of a car fire triggered by the missile strike. All three experts also pointed out what was missing: any evidence of the large secondary explosions described by the Pentagon. No collapsed or blown-out walls, including next to the trunk with the alleged explosives. No sign that a second car parked in the courtyard was overturned by a large blast. No destroyed vegetation. All of this matches what eyewitnesses told us, that a single missile exploded and triggered a large fire. There is one final detail visible in the wreckage: containers identical to the ones that Ahmadi and his colleague filled with water and loaded into his trunk before heading home. Even though the military said the drone team watched the car for eight hours that day, a senior official also said they weren’t aware of any water containers. The Pentagon has not provided The Times with evidence of explosives in Ahmadi’s vehicle or shared what they say is the intelligence that linked him to the Islamic State. But the morning after the U.S. killed Ahmadi, the Islamic State did launch rockets at the airport from a residential area Ahmadi had driven through the previous day. And the vehicle they used … … was a white Toyota. The U.S. military has so far acknowledged only three civilian deaths from its strike, and says there is an investigation underway. They have also admitted to knowing nothing about Ahmadi before killing him, leading them to interpret the work of an engineer at a U.S. NGO as that of an Islamic State terrorist. Four days before Ahmadi was killed, his employer had applied for his family to receive refugee resettlement in the United States. At the time of the strike, they were still awaiting approval. Looking to the U.S. for protection, they instead became some of the last victims in America’s longest war. “Hi, I’m Evan, one of the producers on this story. Our latest visual investigation began with word on social media of an explosion near Kabul airport. It turned out that this was a U.S. drone strike, one of the final acts in the 20-year war in Afghanistan. Our goal was to fill in the gaps in the Pentagon’s version of events. We analyzed exclusive security camera footage, and combined it with eyewitness accounts and expert analysis of the strike aftermath. You can see more of our investigations by signing up for our newsletter.”

Saturday, September 4, 2021

America the Beautiful - Philadelphia 2021 - Reaping the Rewards of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" Programs

Kensington Philadelphia Drug & Crime Problems 

Violent crime and drug abuse in Philadelphia as a whole is a major problem. The city’s violent crime rate is higher than the national average and other similarly sized metropolitan areas.1 Also alarming is Philadelphia’s drug overdose rate. The number of drug overdose deaths in the city increased by 50% from 2013 to 2015, with more than twice as many deaths from drug overdoses as deaths from homicides in 2015.2 A big part of Philadelphia’s problems stem from the crime rate and drug abuse in Kensington. 

Because of the high number of drugs in Kensington, the neighborhood has a drug crime rate of 3.57, the third-highest rate by neighborhood in Philadelphia.3 Like a lot of the country, a big part of this issue is a result of the opioid epidemic. Opioid abuse has skyrocketed over the last two decades in the United States and Philadelphia is no exception. Along with having a high rate of drug overdose deaths, 80% percent of Philadelphia’s overdose deaths involved opioids2 and Kensington is a big contributor to this number. This Philly neighborhood is purportedly the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast with many neighboring residents flocking to the area for heroin and other opioids.4 With such a high number of drugs in Kensington, many state and local officials have zoned in on this area to try and tackle Philadelphia’s problem.

But don't worry folks, the City is "helping" (below video captured on August 19, 2021)...

Video above from Friday night Sept 3, 2021... within 2 weeks of "cleanup"

Looks like the taxpayer's return on their tax investments is a few hours of slightly cleaner streets followed by 364 1/2 days of  misery denied by testimony of self-congratulatory backslapping elected officials dedicated to "solving the city's problems".

Follow the dai;ly saga of Philadelphia's Kensignton Avenue here.

EVERY Kind of People...

...remember the days when most Americans had jobs?

They don't teach much about those days in the history books...
...but if Slavery deserves chapters devoted to it in the history books of American children, doesn't the "Cave of the Negroes" incident also deserve more than a "footnote" in the chapter on American-Japanese Internment Camps?  How about the story of the American middle class before the elite "Great Society" programs designed by "experts" solved all of America's social problems except for 'racism' which turned out to have been "systemic" (aka - originating in elite opinion itself) all along?