The Blog

2020-

2020-12-16 i
VACCINE NEWS I
"The middle-aged worker had no history of allergies, but had an anaphylactic reaction that began 10 minutes after receiving the vaccine at Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau, Alaska"

Alaska Health Worker Had a Serious Allergic Reaction After Pfizer’s Vaccine

The person had no history of allergies. Two similar reactions happened last week in Britain.

A health care worker in Alaska had a serious allergic reaction after getting Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine on Tuesday, symptoms that emerged within minutes and required an overnight hospital stay.

The middle-aged worker had no history of allergies, but had an anaphylactic reaction that began 10 minutes after receiving the vaccine at Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau, Alaska, a hospital official said. She experienced a rash over her face and torso, shortness of breath and an elevated heart rate.

Dr. Lindy Jones, the hospital’s emergency department medical director, said the worker was first given a shot of epinephrine, a standard treatment for severe allergic reactions. Her symptoms subsided but then re-emerged, and she was treated with steroids and an epinephrine drip.

When doctors tried to stop the drip, her symptoms re-emerged yet again, so the woman was moved to the intensive care unit, observed throughout the night, then weaned off the drip early Wednesday morning, Dr. Jones said. He said the woman felt well, remained enthusiastic about the vaccine and was set to be discharged later Wednesday.

Although the Pfizer vaccine was shown to be safe and about 95 percent effective in a clinical trial involving 44,000 participants, the Alaska case will likely intensify concerns about possible side effects. Experts described the woman’s symptoms as potentially life-threatening, and said that they may prompt calls for tighter guidelines to ensure that recipients are carefully monitored for adverse reactions.

... The Alaska woman’s reaction was believed to be similar to the anaphylactic reactions two health workers in Britain experienced after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine last week. Like her, both recovered.

Those cases are expected to come up on Thursday, when F.D.A. scientists are scheduled to meet with the agency’s outside panel of experts to decide whether to recommend that regulators approve Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use.

Although Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are both based on the same type of technology and similar in their ingredients, it is not clear whether an allergic reaction to one would occur with the other. Both consist of genetic material called mRNA encased in a bubble of oily molecules called lipids, although they use different combinations of lipids.

... Pfizer also said that the vaccine is recommended to be administered in settings that have access to equipment to manage anaphylaxis.

... Anaphylaxis can be life-threatening, with impaired breathing and drops in blood pressure that usually occur within minutes or even seconds after exposure to a food or medicine, or even a substance like latex to which the person is allergic. (read more)

2020-12-16 h
BETWEEN NUSQUAMA AND UTOPIA VIII
"How did Seattle get here? Look no further than the City Council, which has aided and abetted this rising criminality by crippling the Seattle Police Department."

How Going Soft On Drugs And Crime Has Turned Seattle Into Another American Wasteland

A new documentary takes an unforgiving look at the steady decay of 'the best city in America,' exposing how Seattle’s misguided politicians have accelerated crime, addiction, and homelessness under the guise of compassion.

“Seattle no longer feels the need to stop anyone from doing anything for any reason, at any time. The most stunning city in America is dying, all right.”

So begins “The Fight for the Soul of Seattle,” a 90-minute documentary produced by KOMO News, which for years has reported on Seattle’s pervasive drug problems and associated perils. The local news station, which premiered the feature last weekend, produced a similarly themed broadcast entitled “Seattle is Dying” last year that received more than 10 million views and several regional film awards.

Over the last 10 years, Seattle has experienced a dramatic increase in crime tied to rampant addiction and homelessness. For example, the Seattle Police Department reported a 50 percent increase in calls related to life-threatening emergencies, assault, and burglary, as well as an 80 percent increase in calls for domestic violence. In 2020 alone, the murder rate was double the average of the past decade.

Through investigative reporting that mixes in testimony from citizens, city officials, and even addicts, the film lays out its central thesis: There exists a “philosophical divide” when it comes to governing Seattle, with city leaders on one side and failed citizens on the other. Unless these politicians change course and shift from their misguided compassion to real solutions, these epidemics will escalate and ultimately destroy the Emerald City.

CHAZ: A Symbol of Seattle’s Decay

Perhaps the most significant demonstration of Seattle’s stark divide was in the city’s response to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, also known as CHAZ or CHOP, a six-block stretch that was overtaken and declared independent by local activists amid this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. In a move that garnered national attention, the City of Seattle instructed police to cede control of the area, which included a police precinct as well as homes, businesses, and citizens suddenly left to fend for themselves.

City officials outwardly touted the zone as a quaint block party where people sang around bonfires and distributed free kebabs. Mayor Jenny Durkan suggested CHAZ would bring about a “summer of love,” and city councilmembers cheered with celebratory selfies.

Those grounded in reality, however, recognized the truth: The zone bred lawlessness and violence. “In eight days, there were five shootings in the CHOP area, with six victims,” KOMO reported. “There was a rape and various assaults and beatings and buildings set on fire.”

Still, the city refused to step in until it was too late. On June 20, 19-year-old Lorenzo Anderson was shot and killed. Police couldn’t clear the area, and first responders were too late. A week later, 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. was killed. Police did not arrive until five hours after the shooting.

Even after the zone’s dissolution, violence and protests have continued largely unabated. In August, activists tried to cement shut a police precinct and set it ablaze with the express intent of trapping officers inside to die. Looting and rioting have all but destroyed the city’s retail core, contributing to the closures of more than 140 businesses, from big-name department stores such as Macy’s and Columbia to iconic local businesses such as Bergman Luggage and Zanadu comics.

... The events of this year have brought to the fore Seattle’s preeminent failing: It has mistaken nonintervention for compassion and has tolerated addiction, crime, and homelessness to the point of cruelty. As former addict Ginny Burton warns, leaving addicts unsupported and expecting them to make rational choices for themselves is its own form of insanity. “As a society,” she says, “we’re loving people to death.”

... The fight for the soul of Seattle, it seems, is not between left and right, nor between the government and the people. It is between those who prefer to look away and those who see this crisis for what it is. (read more)

2020-12-16 g
BETWEEN NUSQUAMA AND UTOPIA VII
"You were perhaps a victim of this persistent, pernicious, and preposterous push to peddle a four-year degree to every person with a pulse,"

Mike Rowe: I Don’t Want To Pay For Your Useless College Degree

In a Facebook post Monday, TV host and personality Mike Rowe denounced student loan forgiveness and encouraged people to reconsider taking on debt for a four-year degree that may not even land them a job.

“Many it seems, suspect that I’ll be supportive of these efforts since I’ve written at length about the outrageous rise of college tuition and the scandalous ways in which hundreds of thousands of students have been conned into borrowing ridiculous sums of money to purchase degrees that never lead to an actual job,” Rowe wrote.

“Well, for the record, I do not support student loan forgiveness,” he added.

Sharing a National Review article on the issue, Rowe explained that forgiving student loans is not only unfair to those who have already sacrificed to pay off their loans but it “would send a terrible message to the very same universities that already gouge their customers with sky-high tuition.”

“Tuition will never come back to Earth if we bail out those who borrowed more than they could repay,”

... Instead of taking on debt for a four-year degree, Rowe encouraged people to explore all of their options including learning tangible skills and trades.

“This is why I’ve spent the last twelve years discouraging people from slipping into hock at the outset of their careers. This is why I push back against the insane notion that a four-year degree is the best path for most people,” he said. “I don’t want to see more people borrow money they can’t afford to pay back. But nor do I wish to pay it back for you. I will, however, encourage you to apply for a work-ethic scholarship, and wish you every success in the future.” (read more)

2020-12-16 f
BETWEEN NUSQUAMA AND UTOPIA VI
"Ask partners outside your home about COVID-19 status before you meet and engage in sex."

Pennsylvania Health Department Issues Preferred COVID Orgy Regulations: Wear a Face Covering, Avoid Kissing, Wash Hands Often

The Pennsylvania Department of Health led by Dr. Rachel Levine [an ex-man] issued new rules for large gatherings “where you might end up having sex.” These large gatherings “where you might end up having sex” are also commonly referred to as orgies.

Large gatherings are not safe during COVID19, but if you attend a large gathering where you might end up having sex, below are tips to reduce your risk of spreading or getting COVID-19 through sex:

... From the Pennsylvania Department of Health (Safer Sex and COVID-19):

Four Strategies to Reduce the Risk of Spreading COVID-19 During Sex

1. Know how COVID-19 spreads:

•mainly from person-to-person
•between people who are in close contact with one another (within about 6 feet)
•through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks, which can land in the mouths or noses of people who are nearby or possibly be inhaled into the lungs
•through particles in the saliva, mucus, or breath of people with COVID-19
•from people who do not have symptoms

2. Consider your level of risk.

•You are your safest sex partner.
•Your next safest partner is someone you live with.
Having close contact, including sex, with someone you live with who has a low risk of having COVID-19 infection helps prevent spreading COVID-19.
•If you do have sex with others outside of your household:

•Have as few partners as possible, and pick partners you trust.
•Talk about COVID-19 risk factors with your partner(s), just as you would discuss safer sex topics including, PrEP, condoms, and dental dams.
•Ask partners outside your home about COVID-19 status before you meet and engage in sex. Do they have symptoms (Coronavirus Symptoms & Testing), or have they had symptoms in the last 14 days? (Most people with COVID-19 have symptoms, but some people do not.)

Asking about symptoms is not a perfect way to know whether someone has COVID-19.

•Has your partner(s) been diagnosed with COVID-19 using a nasal swab or saliva test?

Large gatherings are not safe during COVID19, but if you attend a large gathering where you might end up having sex, below are tips to reduce your risk of spreading or getting COVID-19 through sex:

•Limit the number of partners.
•Try to identify a consistent sex partner.
•Wear a face covering, avoid kissing, and do not touch your eyes, nose, or mouth with unwashed hands.
•Wash your hands with soap and water often, and especially before and after sex. If soap and water are not available use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer.
•If you usually meet your sex partners online, consider taking a break from in-person dates. Video dates, sexting, subscription-based fan platforms, or chat rooms may be options for you.

3. Protect yourself and your partners from COVID-19 during sex.

•Avoid kissing. Kissing can easily pass the virus.
•Wear a face covering or mask.
During COVID-19, wearing a face covering that covers your nose and mouth is a good way to add a layer of protection during sex with those outside your household.

4. Skip sex if you or your partner are not feeling well.

•If you feel unwell, or even start to feel unwell, avoid kissing, sex or any close contact with others.
•If you have been exposed or think you may have been exposed to someone with COVID-19, avoid close contact with anyone outside your household and follow the Pennsylvania Department of Health's guidance about how to prevent exposing others.

For more information about signs and symptoms of COVID-19, visit Coronavirus Symptoms & Testing.
(read more)

2020-12-16 e
BETWEEN NUSQUAMA AND UTOPIA V
"“Only the Devil knows what sick nightmares, hatched in the depraved fantasies of guys like Zinnia, may soon be mandated by the Feds under Democrat rule. Those who aren’t on board will be silenced by “hate speech” laws. Their children will be confiscated.”"

LGBT Activist Calls For ALL Children to Be Put on Puberty Blockers

Ludicrously argues that natural puberty is wrong because kids can’t consent.

An LGBT activist has called for ALL children to be put on puberty blockers until a decision is made as to what gender they are going to be.

Yes, really.

Zachary Antolak began as a gay man but now identifies as a lesbian woman named Zinnia Jones and is in a polyamorous relationship with another lesbian named Heather and a ‘trans woman’ named Penny.

What better example of obvious mental stability to decide which chemicals to bombard your children with?

“If children can’t consent to puberty blockers which pause any permanent changes even with the relevant professional evaluation, how can they consent to the permanent and irreversible changes that come with their own puberty with no professional evaluation whatsoever?” tweeted Jones.

“An inability to offer informed consent or understand the long-term consequences is actually an argument for putting every single cis and trans person on puberty blockers until they acquire that ability,” he added.

Presumably, the people deciding upon which gender the child will be after a period of God knows how long being poisoned with drugs that block their natural development will be Jones and his ilk.

“It isn’t easy to believe that the federal government will one day mandate puberty blockers for all children until their teachers and other liberal social engineers have had time to convince them they want to be the opposite sex,” writes Dave Blount. “But then, a few years ago, no one would have believed that the federal government would force schools to allow boys who say they are girls to use private facilities intended for people who really are girls. Now it is mainstream Democrat policy.” (read more)

2020-12-16 d
BETWEEN NUSQUAMA AND UTOPIA IV

Children in Quarantine Not Allowed to Unwrap Their Own Christmas Presents Under COVID Rules

All packages delivered “will be opened and checked for safety reasons.”

Children currently in hotel quarantine over Christmas in Western Australia have been told they will not be allowed to unwrap their own Christmas presents due to the threat of COVID.

Current law mandates that all travelers arriving from other countries undergo a 14 day hotel quarantine before they are allowed to go to their next destination.

This has left many forced to spend Christmas in temporary accommodation, but rules on gift giving have made the experience even more burdensome.

In a letter by the state’s Deputy Chief Health Officer Robyn Lawrence, hotel guests are told that all packages delivered by friends and family “will be opened and checked for safety reasons.”

“As the hotels are busy, please limit the number of packages and deliveries you receive and ask those dropping them off not to wrap them, as they will be opened,” states the letter.

This means that children will have their presents unwrapped by hotel staff or security guards before receiving them. (read more)

2020-12-16 c
BETWEEN NUSQUAMA AND UTOPIA III
"In short, we just watched a Third World-style election within the borders of the greatest country in the history of the world. "

Never Again!

A 10-point plan to fix America’s shameful voting system.

Nobody quite knows what is going to happen with President Trump’s challenges to the 2020 election, but one thing is certain—America should not conduct another national election without massive reforms.

In short, we just watched a Third World-style election within the borders of the greatest country in the history of the world. People voting for weeks, mail-out and mail-in ballots flying everywhere—on trucks across states lines, through post offices populated with partisans, into drop boxes monitored by no one, onto election machines with shadowy ownership where vote tallies apparently were shipped overseas and where states took days to count ballots while others counted them in hours.

The vast majority of Republicans believe massive cheating occurred and so do nearly half of Democrats. Even the corrupt liberal media’s refusal to cover the fraud can’t completely hide it.

We are not going to fully trace the lineage that got us where we are today except to say Democrats have scratched and clawed for change after change to erode election security over the course of several decades while Republicans have been frozen in fear refusing to oppose them.

We can work out the details but the principles remain. Citizens of every state in America should have an opportunity to vote on the following reforms and starting now our organization will fight to make sure they do:

1) With limited exceptions, Election Day is Election Day. No more voting for a month.

2) To make it equally accessible for everybody, Election Day will be a national holiday. Nobody will be denied a chance to vote.

3) Photographic voter ID will be required without exception. There is no valid argument against this important safeguard. In addition, all ballots must be signed and fingerprinted.

4) No more absentee ballots, except for military personnel or for voters who are medically impaired.

5) Early voting should be eliminated or sharply curtailed to just the weekend before the election.

6) All votes must be counted by Election Day. No more phantom ballots showing up hours or weeks later.

7) Paper ballots should be the normtabulated on machines unconnected to the internet.

8) No more same-day registrations. All voter registration rolls must be finalized before the election.

9) All voter records, including on Election Day, must be available online in as close to real time as possible so everyone can know what is going on. Election Day counting should be video recorded.

10) All election vendors should be American companies. No voter information should ever leave the country.

Conservatives across America should make this Restore American Elections Act their number one priority in 2021, no matter what happens between now and January 20. Yes, Democrats seized on COVID-19 to rig the rules of the 2020 election and Republicans need to un-rig them now while the nation’s attention has been heightened. (read more)

2020-12-16 b
BETWEEN NUSQUAMA AND UTOPIA II
"The Left, oftentimes under the guise of so-called liberal enlightenment, tries to “immanentize the eschaton”—to bring their definition of heaven to earth. "

Pride and Illegitimacy

The 2020 elections call the legitimacy of the Democrats—their presidential candidate and those down ballot, as well—into question.

n the 10th chapter of Ecclesiastes we read, “The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker. For the beginning of pride is sin; and the one who clings to it pours out abominations. The Lord overthrows the thrones of rulers; and enthrones the lowly in their place.”

Since time immemorial humans have tried—through their own arrogance and supposed knowledge—to supplant the all-knowing God to become godlike.

It is first recorded in the early chapters of Genesis with a tempting bite from the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.

Over and over again, in biblical literature and in subsequent history, we find the same aberrant phenomenon repeating itself.

That’s why in Judaism, pride was called “the root of all evil.” It is as if we never learn.

Since the violent terror of the French Revolution, man has thrown off any semblance of normative, God-given rules and exerted—a pure lust for power.

The Left, oftentimes under the guise of so-called liberal enlightenment, tries to “immanentize the eschaton”—to bring their definition of heaven to earth. We saw this most vividly in the 2020 U.S. election and the false promises made by the Democrats and their compliant, senile, illegitimate leader.

In political theory, this means trying to bring about the final, heaven-like stage of history in the present fallen world.

In any context, it means attempting to make that which belongs to the afterlife happen here and now—on earth.

In other cases, it means killing God altogether or denying His very existence.

In the process, instead, what we find is modern history littered with movements, leaders and ideologies that, as the poet William Blake shouted, “‘More! More!’ is the cry of a mistaken soul; less than All cannot satisfy Man.”

In the 20th century alone more than 120 million lives were lost in wars and campaigns started by the Left: national socialism, Communism, genocides, revolutions, and various “liberations.” This year we commemorated the start of the last such world war in Poland.

The Left never has enough power.

We also heard the chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was very enthused by the fact that religion is on the wane in America and that the secularist persuasion has endorsed and embraced the increasingly leftist Democratic Party.

The Republicans, too God-fearing, evangelical, and anti-revolutionary, are to be banished and censored in the latest pride of the Left.

The Left has clear ambition to wipe out all transcendent faiths as the “opium of the people,” as Karl Marx termed them.

His ardent follower, Vladimir Lenin, called for a leftist revolution by the “vanguard of the proletariat,” to take hold of all history.

Listen to some of the Democrats’ voices over the years, demonstrating the ominous pride of the Left:

... In overt actions to steal the election from the rightful winners and insert their lame duck, senile cut-out, the Left has manufactured the greatest pride of all—a corrupting of power that Lord Acton himself predicted years ago in his famous dictum: absolute power corrupts absolutely. (read more)

2020-12-16 a
BETWEEN NUSQUAMA AND UTOPIA I

Utopia is literally nowhere. Thomas More (he who lost his head, not Thomas Moore, the Irish poet) entitled his great work, Nusquama, but someone at the printer in Louvain substituted the Greek equivalent, perhaps to make it sound more exotic. Either way, it is no place; yet Utopians keep trying. They will never “immanentize the eschaton.”

2020-12-15 l
COMMITTEE COUNTERS QUESTIONS ABOUT SARS-CoV-2’s ORIGINS
“I wouldn’t mention binding sites here. If you start weighing evidence there’s a lot to consider for both scenarios.” By “both scenarios,” Bedford appears to refer to lab-origin and natural-origin scenarios.

New emails show scientists’ deliberations on how to discuss SARS-CoV-2 origins

Newly obtained emails offer glimpses into how a narrative of certainty developed about the natural origins of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, while key scientific questions remained. The internal discussions and an early draft of a scientists’ letter show experts discussing gaps in knowledge and unanswered questions about lab origin, even as some sought to tamp down on “fringe” theories about the possibility the virus came from a lab.

Influential scientists and many news outlets have described the evidence as “overwhelming” that the virus originated in wildlife, not from a lab. However, a year after the first reported cases of SARS-CoV-2 in the Chinese city of Wuhan, little is known how or where the virus originated. Understanding the origins of SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease COVID-19, may be crucial to preventing the next pandemic.

The emails of coronavirus expert Professor Ralph Baric — obtained through a public records request by U.S. Right to Know — show conversations between National Academy of Sciences (NAS) representatives, and experts in biosecurity and infectious diseases from U.S. universities and the EcoHealth Alliance.

On Feb. 3, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) to “convene meeting of experts… to assess what data, information and samples are needed to address the unknowns, in order to understand the evolutionary origins of 2019-nCoV, and more effectively respond to both the outbreak and any resulting misinformation.”

Baric and other infectious disease experts were involved in drafting the response. The emails show the experts’ internal discussions and an early draft dated Feb. 4.

The early draft described “initial views of the experts” that “the available genomic data are consistent with natural evolution and that there is currently no evidence that the virus was engineered to spread more quickly among humans.” This draft sentence posed a question, in parentheses: “[ask experts to add specifics re binding sites?]” It also included a footnote in parentheses: “[possibly add brief explanation that this does not preclude an unintentional release from a laboratory studying the evolution of related coronaviruses].”

In one email, dated Feb. 4, infectious disease expert Trevor Bedford commented: “I wouldn’t mention binding sites here. If you start weighing evidence there’s a lot to consider for both scenarios.” By “both scenarios,” Bedford appears to refer to lab-origin and natural-origin scenarios.

The question of binding sites is important to the debate about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Distinctive binding sites on SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein confer “near-optimal” binding and entry of the virus into human cells, and make SARS-CoV-2 more contagious than SARS-CoV. Scientists have argued that SARS-CoV-2’s unique binding sites could have originated either as a result of natural spillover in the wild or deliberate laboratory recombination of an as-yet-undisclosed natural ancestor of SARS-CoV-2. (read more)

(read even more: FOI documents on origins of SARS-CoV-2, hazards of gain-of-function research and biosafety labs)

(read yet more: Scientist with conflict of interest leading Lancet COVID-19 Commission task force on virus origins)

2020-12-15 k
SMARTMATIC COUNTERS AVALANCHE OF EVIDENCE

Vote Machine Company Threatens Legal Action Against Conservative Media

Demands retractions from Fox News, Newsmax, OAN for spreading “disinformation”

Voting Machine company Smartmatic has delivered legal notices to three conservative news networks, demanding retractions of claims that the company was involved in rigging the election in favour of Joe Biden.

According to reports, Smartmatic has issued legal notices to Fox News, OAN and Newsmax, accusing the networks of a “campaign [that] was designed to defame Smartmatic and undermine a legitimately conducted elections.”

The company is said to have accused Fox News of having “embarked on a disinformation campaign against Smartmatic,” by allowing Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell to make claims of vote fraud.

“Over the course of the campaign, Fox News published and republished dozens of false and misleading statements regarding Smartmatic,” the notice is said to read.

The legal notice also reportedly claims there is “no evidence or credible source to support” the vote rigging claims, and that anyone “would have easily discovered the falsity of the statements and implications being made about Smartmatic by performing even a modicum of investigation.”

The legal notice is also said to have specifically named Fox News hosts Lou Dobbs, Jesse Watters, and Maria Bartiromo, and indicates that Smartmatic could pursue legal action against them personally:

... “This campaign is an attack on election systems and election workers in an effort to depress confidence in future elections and potentially counter the will of the voters, not just here, but in democracies around the world,” Smartmatic chief executive Antonio Mugica said in a statement. (read more)

2020-12-15 j
TRUMP COUNTERS ELECTORAL FRAUD

68% error rate in Michigan Voting Machines. Should be,
by law, a tiny percentage of one percent. Did Michigan
Secretary of State break the law? Stay tuned!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2020

Tremendous problems being found with voting machines. They
are so far off it is ridiculous. Able to take a landslide victory and
reduce it to a tight loss. This is not what the USA is all about.
Law enforcement shielding machines. DO NOT TAMPER, a crime.
Much more to come!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2020

2020-12-15 i
LIN WOOD COUNTERS ELECTORAL FRAUD

America is in dire need of a good housecleaning. Way too much corruption
& greed. @realDonaldTrump is going to clean it up for We The People. Steady.

“But now the LORD my God hath given me rest on every side,
so that there is neither adversary nor evil occurrent.”
– 1 Kings 5:4 pic.twitter.com/JPZHFJiQhM

— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) December 15, 2020

I agree 100% with this statement in well-written editorial:

“This election is the climax of the battle between freedom and
communism, between good and evil.”

I am also 100% certain @realDonaldTrump will take action.
Trump is a genius. He has a plan. https://t.co/Xa7Wb1FpHs

— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) December 15, 2020

Communist propaganda tools are NEVER allowed to speak truth.
Go to @OANN , @newsmax or @EpochTimes. They are not owned,
operated, or controlled by Communists or Communist sympathizers.
#FightBack Against CCP https://t.co/mUxUwFAOVC

— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) December 15, 2020

President Trump @realDonaldTrump is a genuinely good man.
He does not really like to fire people. I bet he dislikes putting people
in jail, especially “Republicans.”

He gave @BrianKempGA & @GaSecofState every chance to get it right.
They refused. They will soon be going to jail. pic.twitter.com/7PMBLc8L2N

— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) December 15, 2020

2020-12-15 h
ARIZONA COUNTERS ELECTORAL FRAUD

Arizona Does What All States Should Do – Issues Subpoenas – Forensic Audit to be Completed in Maricopa County

Arizona is doing what all states should be doing after yesterday’s shocking report was released of the Dominion voting systems used in Antrim County Michigan. Arizona is issuing subpoenas and is going to complete a forensic audit in their state of the 2020 election results for President.

Yesterday the results were released from a forensic audit performed in Antrim County in Michigan. The results were shocking, showing nearly 70% of all ballots were labeled for adjudication where they were then processes somewhere (which is unknown because this portion of the systems was tampered with).

Today, Arizona Rep. Mark Finchem announced a forensic audit is going to be performed in Arizona. (read more)

2020-12-15 g
SURVEILLANCE COUNTERS LIBERTY
"But the rest of us would do well to expand the range of our considerations beyond moral praise and blame, and start to consider the vastly more important story of the rise of a regime of universal surveillance and the collapse of the public/private boundary that has been foundational for the progress and happiness of Western societies for the past half a millennium or so."

The Work-Pleasure-Surveillance Machine Threatens All of Us

What happens when our homes become our employers’ offices?

You will surely have heard by now of Jeffrey Toobin. Last week the CNN legal analyst and New Yorker writer was participating in an “election simulation” via Zoom, with other staffers from the magazine and employees of WNYC. Masha Gessen played Donald Trump; Toobin played the courts. At some point, believing his computer’s camera was turned off (or “muted” as he would later say, a confusion that seems to bespeak sincerity), Toobin engaged in a sexual act. He was swiftly suspended from his position at the magazine, and from his role as news analyst at CNN.

I do not wish to say anything more about Toobin. As always with such incidents, it is far more interesting to stop and dwell on what they reveal about our current technological and cultural moment. The social media mobs relished this juicy scandal. The shitposters turned it into a source of easy jokes (election simulation/erection stimulation), while other more purportedly high-minded commentators saw it as yet another opportunity for the display of their own towering high-mindedness and righteousness. This was, they said, standard-fare workplace sexual harassment—perhaps even assault. The possibility of interjecting more humane interpretations was forestalled by accusations that to do so would be to lapse into “himpathy.”

Yet anyone who believes that this latest incident has to do with an individual man’s naughtiness is going to have an awfully hard time making sense of the years to come. For one thing, even if Toobin was in some sense “at work,” he was also at home, and he was in front of a screen that presumably also serves for him as a portal to many worlds besides his work world. That is the fact that should properly occupy us, for things were not always this way. Until very recently, the machines we used for our work were different than the ones we used for watching movies, speaking with our friends and loved ones, or, if we are so inclined, searching out visual aides to our erotic imaginations—which are presumably a good thing, and are in any case ineradicable.

Until even more recently, the place in which we worked was also different from the place in which we lived. Before the pandemic, and before the telecommunications revolution it has cemented, the separation between the workplace and the home was a foundational assumption for the vast majority of workers, whatever their occupations. Even if we sometimes took work home, this did not mean that home itself became the workplace, subject to the same regulation and control that we have for the past few centuries tolerated for eight hours a day outside the home—but not after we have clocked out and returned to our safe hearths, where, with William Carlos Williams, we are free to dance around naked and imagine ourselves “the happy genius of my household.”

Stories like Toobin’s are going to keep rolling in. The joke-makers are surely going to continue making jokes. Cancelers will cancel. But the rest of us would do well to expand the range of our considerations beyond moral praise and blame, and start to consider the vastly more important story of the rise of a regime of universal surveillance and the collapse of the public/private boundary that has been foundational for the progress and happiness of Western societies for the past half a millenium or so.

This most recent story, though not the same in all respects, should remind us of the 9-year-old boy in Louisiana who was suspended from fourth grade in September after his teacher spotted a BB gun in the frame of his webcam during online class. The school board found him “guilty of displaying a facsimile weapon while receiving online instruction.” The boy was “at school,” but he was also at home—and there is no reason to believe that had he been at school in the pre-pandemic sense he would have brought his facsimile weapon with him, or that the accidental glimpse of a toy gun on a child’s shelf was likely to have caused any kind of meaningful harm to his classmates, teachers, or anyone else. So let us allow ourselves a moment of himpathy for a 9-year-old Black boy in America who has already been started down the path toward a life of perpetual surveillance and “correction” without even leaving home.

It turns out there are numerous cases of disciplinary measures brought against students and employees who have violated rules of online engagement that did not exist, and could not have existed, a year ago. A certain teenager I know well received a mild reprimand for making a collage of cow udders into his Zoom background; he pretended to take a triumphant drink every time he answered a question correctly, until the teacher put a stop to that (LOL). Clearly to some degree the eternal impulse among adolescents to “push it” must be controlled on Zoom as anywhere else, but a humane reprimand is something quite distinct from an official disciplinary measure or, worse still, a criminal complaint.

... The technological drive toward user-friendliness and reduction has also led to an unprecedented conglomeration of the many different facets of our lives. Some of these facets—the private, intimate, and human facets in particular—are in the course of being suppressed and penalized by forces whose logic works to eliminate everything that constitutes us other than the economic facet. Over the centuries work has killed human beings in countless ways, but never has work’s natural hostility toward humanity as such been clearer.

The real surprise in the present techno-cultural moment is not that the economy hates human beings, but that many individual human beings are currently volunteering their service as foot soldiers of the anti-human economy. Thus when a man is brought low by this strange new conjuncture of technology, pandemic, and poor judgment, the scandal-thirsty mob rushes to interpret what has happened as if only the latter of these three were of any interest. Many people sincerely believe that it is an adequate response to the story to say, “Well I've never done anything like that,” and thence to join in the mockery or denunciation of the man who, evidently, has. But this is much like the shrug from the person with only anodyne political opinions who learns of government surveillance of dissidents, and can come up with no thought more interesting than, “Well that would never happen to me.” The question is not whether you’ve wanked at work, but what is work, anyway? And if in the near future all will be work, where then will you wank?

We’ve arrived at a worrisome moment where social media dictate our social norms, and on social media even the expression of compassion for the wrong sort of person comes across as a form of dissent. The mob is drunk on the new power that surveillance provides them, seemingly unaware of the many ways it could come back to bite them next. Under such circumstances, it is indeed an act of dissent to say it: I have compassion for Jeffrey Toobin. He got swept up in something much larger than he is, something that threatens all of us. (read more)

2020-12-15 f
SPECIFICITY COUNTERS GENERALITY
"Lumping several individual words that have specific meanings into a single generic word that has a general meaning was a rather common approach of Hasidic Yiddish."

Lost Yiddish Words

The language contemporary Hasidim use in everyday life borrows from English and simplifies a richer linguistic ancestor—and yet is more alive

Yiddish was the language of my childhood, my first language, the one in which I learned to speak and later, to read and write. In Hasidic Williamsburg, where I was born and raised, Yiddish rumbled all around me. It was a natural part of the environment, sounding native to the very air. Certainly, I’d never thought to question or analyze my feelings about it. Was Yiddish a pretty language? Was it expansive? Did its grammar rules make sense? Did it have colorful metaphors? Beautiful imagery? Had you asked me such questions when I was growing up, I would not have known how to answer. Yiddish was Yiddish. Just that.

Now English, that was another story. I began learning English in the first grade, and the older I grew, the more I became enamored of the language. English was sophisticated. It was the language of grown-ups, with gorgeous synonyms for nearly every adjective and lovely words like kaleidoscope and susurrus and serendipity whose S’s floated from my mouth into the air like the softest of clouds.

That I became a writer was inevitable. And that the English language was my toolkit seemed equally ordained.

But then I fell into my literary translation career—“fell into” being the precise description of what happened, though that is a story for another time—and suddenly, I was surrounded by a network of “Yiddishists,” secular people who revered Yiddish, who spoke about the language in romantic, sentimental tones, who quoted Yiddish writers with the same awe my English professors used to quote Chekhov and Austen and Hemingway. The Yiddishists argued over word usage and grammar with an earnestness that can only ever be exhibited by pedantic language-loving nerds, one of whom, I discovered, was I.

My transformation into a bona fide Yiddishist, albeit a Hasidic one, occurred in barely noticeable increments, but all at once I found myself nodding along to phrases like “ancestral language” and “cultural responsibility” and “endangered heritage” with the same earnestness as my Yiddish-loving colleagues. Suddenly, the beauty of a certain Yiddish phrase could make my breath catch. And one day I realized, to my utter surprise, that not only was Yiddish no longer a child’s language to me, but instead rang so richly and resonantly in my ears, its words moved me as no other language could. Yiddish had always been where I felt most at home, but now it had captured my heart.

Perhaps this was inevitable. When we immerse ourselves in any artistic genre or skill, we develop a richer appreciation for it, and the deeper we are absorbed by it, the greater grows our appreciation. As a literary translator, I was in as deep as one can get. Fretting over the precision of each word. Listening for the cadence in the sentences. Struggling over each passage or paragraph I translated, so that its music would make itself heard. How could I not fall in love with the language?

But there was something else, though it took me a book’s worth of translating before I realized it. I had grown up on Hasidic Yiddish. The Yiddish I spoke (and speak) is homey and friendly and gives me a sense of confidence and belonging. It is alive! We Hasidim use it in our daily interactions: to converse, to argue, to ask, to explain. We use it to express our emotions: our anger, our sadness, our frustrations, our joy, our pride, our glee. We use it to write notes to our children’s teachers and to write books and articles for each other to read. We use it. Nearly nobody else does. But for all its life and vibrancy, Hasidic Yiddish is missing a whole bunch of words. No wonder I hadn’t noticed the language’s beauty. So many of its beautiful words had been lost.

... But in truth, I myself was annoyed. The language lover in me couldn’t help it. Why had we abandoned so many gorgeous, effervescent Yiddish words? I took into account that a writer’s language is different from daily speech and perhaps the words I’d found in my books hadn’t been used as pervasively in general conversations as they were on the written page. Still, there was no denying that those words had been alive during those times. Like the Yiddish spoken language of contemporary Hasidim, at least those words used to have a heartbeat.

... Yiddish was the language of my childhood, but it was in adulthood that I learned it. Learned its words (literally) and learned its heart. It is a living thing, this language of Yiddish, and like all live objects, it continues to move into unexpected territories, touching people and agitating them, expanding and contracting, growing and evolving. It is Yiddish. Just that, but more than that. (read more)

2020-12-15 e
PROGRESSIVES COUNTER SOCIAL REALITY
"Progressivism originated as an Anglo-American alternative to socialism and populism in the late 19th century. "

What Is Progressivism?

The dream of a utopia administered by technocrats

Twenty years ago, few Americans identified as “progressive.” Ralph Nader’s first Green Party presidential campaign changed that. Naderites needed a way of distinguishing themselves from the followers of the establishment Democrat Al Gore. In searching for a way to explain their politics to others they reached back to a term whose roots went back to the early 20th century.

In current American “leftist” discourse, “progressive,” its sister term “liberal,” and their distant cousin “socialist” all tend to overlap in general use. So it shouldn’t be surprising that all three terms are poorly understood by their opponents and adherents alike. Even admirable populist critics of America’s establishment left like Thomas Frank and Glenn Greenwald miss what progressivism truly represents and the key, degrading, historical role it has served in the development of American political culture.

Progressivism originated as an Anglo-American alternative to socialism and populism in the late 19th century. More specifically, progressive political culture was a way for the Gilded Age’s new self-styled “cosmopolitan” wealthy elite class to feel good about fighting for reforms of America’s laissez faire economic structures—but, in a manner that didn't threaten the larger Anglo-liberal tradition, or the Protestant moral norms it relied upon.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, as railway workers, brutal Pinkerton “security” forces, and even battalions of the Army battled it out in violent clashes, the reform tradition in the United States took shape in two distinctly American modes: populism and progressivism. Populism was a bottom-up movement of Middle American struggling farmers, poor working folk, and tradesmen frustrated with a late-19th-century banking and monetary system they saw as “rigged” against them. Progressivism took off as a movement of the guilt-laden offspring of coastal industrialists who looked down their noses upon the Middle American populists and the “Jays” of their “hay seed” “bumpkin” culture.

Where populism was a rural revolt against the overweening power exercised by big cities over the rest of the country, progressivism was an urban movement led by a well-educated, urban, coastal elite, which was top-down in conceptions and mannerisms. While the radical element of this new progressive class identified with what they thought of as the “other half of society” (what we would today probably call the “marginalized” or “underprivileged”), it’s important to note that progressives did not necessarily wish to give voice to the poor or the suffering. Instead, progressive intellectuals sought to elevate themselves as spokespeople for the downtrodden, on terms that cemented the grip of their own class on power.

Rather than a break or interruption in the WASP chauvinism that characterizes most of the country’s political culture, progressivism is little more than a peculiar variation of it —and wokeism is merely a new version of progressivism, updated for the secular mode of the “anti-racist” age.

... It is no accident that contemporary progressives understand universities as the central outlet to spread—and enforce—their new pseudo-secularized woke religion. The original progressives, as Eisenach notes, “saw the university as something like a ‘national church’—the main repository and protector of common American values, common American meanings, and common American identities.”

Unlike populists, who wanted state intervention in the economic sphere to help supply them with the means for personal and social autonomy, progressives wanted aggressive state intervention into the social sphere that would deprive working people of individual choices—for “their own good.” Progressives—then as now—understand “social justice” as occurring through moral reform within the self, but believe this personal transformation must be directed by morally enlightened elites wielding state power to prohibit the masses from engaging in “bad behaviors.”

Progressive temperance advocates therefore happily joined forces with the early-20th-century American religious right to tell Germans, Italians, and the “new” immigrants of Eastern Europe they needed to move away from their “festive” and “drinking” cultures toward the Puritan discipline of Anglo asceticism. Progressives thoroughly believed if “drink” was outlawed these new immigrants would no longer struggle to keep the lights on, domestic violence would “disappear,” and their adorable little children wouldn’t have to work in wretched conditions where Jacob Riis could take lamentable photos of them that made elites sad.

In our secular, post-Protestant age, contemporary progressives likewise seek to morally shame the working classes and working poor into thinking their behavioral choices and retrograde beliefs are responsible for the country’s hardships. However, in a blindness inherent to the movement, today’s progressives patently refuse to acknowledge that most working class and working poor “people of color” are mostly socially conservative. The disjuncture between the avant-garde social values of today’s progressives and the targets of their empathy is exemplified in the new refashioned spelling of Latinos and Latinas as “Latinx”—a boutique academic term that is rejected by or else unknown to the vast majority of people to whom it is supposed to apply. Woke identitarian progressivism offers non-BIPOC or LGBTQ+ persons (the far majority of the population) a nightmarish denial of their individual experiences and hardships. Progressives are then shocked when the targets of their derision become angered, and further pathologize them.

Class condescension and a paternalistic attitude to the laboring classes lives at the core of progressivism, both in its early 1900s origins and its 2020s “woke” offshoot. This moralistic bias informs the confident declarations from educated professionals clustered in hub cities that the only reasons Middle American “Trump supporters” have for opposing mass immigration is xenophobia and racism. Progressives at The New York Times point to graphs created by neoliberal economists that show low-skill illegal immigrants do not in fact replace, or compete with, established American citizens for jobs. They offer these graphs never acknowledging that the field of economics, like most in the so-called “social sciences,” is one where nearly any thesis can be “proven” by pairing a skewed data set with the “right” assumptions. Why would anyone, except of course a bigot or an ignoramus, question the knowing class?

Progressivism is a mindset driven, if not ruled, by the technocratic impulse. The foundation of the progressive critique of laissez-faire liberalism arose largely due to late-19th-century American intellectuals’ envy of Kaiserreich-era theories of the German state; the American system of elite, research-centered higher education originated as an imitation of the German model. During the Gilded Age, jaunting off to Germany for a stint of graduate work was a key rite of passage for many American intellectuals, and most of the key figures of the progressive movement received at least part of their education in Germany. During an era when very few Americans attended higher education, more than 9,000 Americans studied at German universities—nearly 2,000 in 1880 alone.

From their experiences in German classrooms, many progressive intellectuals gained exposure to the country’s mandarin model of civil service scholars—professors and university-trained experts to whom the Prussian government looked for advice when crafting social, economic, and political policy.

... Unlike populists and socialists, progressives did not embrace the language of class conflict when protesting large proprietorship capitalism. They did, though, concur with Marxists’ love affair with expansive state power. Progressives had no complaints about working people answering to elite-controlled institutions and organizations as long as those institutions agreed with their preferred sensibilities—just like contemporary progressives like Obama and Kamala Harris have never had any qualms taking millions from Silicon Valley lobbyists and “entrepreneurs,” who, like the politicians themselves, boast the requisite elite credentials.

The real problem with America, contemporary progressives believe, doesn’t lie in the system that makes their families and friends rich. It lies within the uncouth behaviors and general immorality of the undereducated Americans whose lives they must rationalize. The “racist” police, the “sexist” and “homophobic” rubes saying nasty things to their coworkers or on Twitter may not have much wealth or capital, but their class standing is much less important, according to the progressive mindset, than the power conferred by their white or male “privilege.”

In the progressive model, counteracting the thought crimes and behavioral failings of American heartlanders provides the mandate for their coastal superiors to monopolize power while pushing economic inequality to the periphery of legitimate social concern. Clinton- and Obama-style progressives would gladly usher in a world where everyone is employed at the woke Amazon-ExxonMobil-Kraft-Apple-Disney megacorporation complex. Even if most workers are systematically disempowered by this setup, there’s still justice in such a future as long as the corporate executive committee is allotted equitable “representation” to “marginalized” identities and the full range of gender expressions.

Walter Benn Michaels, the accomplished literary scholar and author of The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality argues that affirmative action serves one central purpose: allowing wealthy white liberals to feel good about their privileges. What's the fun in winning the supposedly meritocratic game if you know it’s rigged in your favor? Every “Black” and “brown” face wealthy and well-connected white elites see next to them in an Ivy League classroom, corporate boardroom, or academic committee meeting lets them know that the system is just—and that they earned their own places based on their merits. As for the poor, the vast majority of whom are white, if they wanted a better future they could have “studied harder in school” or, as Rahm Emmanuel recently put it, “learned to code.”

... In the woke version of the state of nature, all ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and genders would, if not for systemic racism and bias, be found equally in all job categories, educational admissions, and government offices. Aggressive diversity, equity, and inclusion practices are carried out in the name of anti-racism and similar ideologies with the aim of restoring society’s supposedly natural, uncorrupted state.

Today’s woke progressives demand Americans recognize cultural differences but never accept any differences in outcome. Representational correctness has become the greatest unifying orthodoxy among elites—so much so that even right-wing institutions and think tanks today refrain from confronting the utopianism that lies beneath it. No one wants to be called a “racist”—and woke progressives use the threat of this charge to bully opponents into submission.

... Now well into its second act, progressive racialism serves the same function it did in the Gilded Age: Hiding class and regionalist prejudice beneath cultural battles. Smiling darkly in the shadows lurks America’s unspeakable injustice—an economic system that is generous to the rich and cruel to the poor. (read more)

2020-12-15 d
SYNTHETIC VIRUS COUNTERS MALE FERTILITY
"Spermatogenesis damage was observed in COVID-19 patients."

Pathological and molecular examinations of postmortem testis biopsies reveal SARS-CoV-2 infection in the testis and spermatogenesis damage in COVID-19 patients

In late December 2019, the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), was identified in Wuhan, China, and the ensuing pandemic has led to more than 50 million infected individuals and more than one million deaths by November 10, 2020 (https://covid19.who.int/). Pathologic investigations of autopsy tissue have focused primarily on the lung, heart, and kidney, whereas morphologic data on testis injury and the effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection on spermatogenesis are limited. Although two groups did not detect SARS-CoV-2 in the semen or testes of recovered COVID-19 patients,1,2 another group confirmed SARS-CoV-2 in the semen of patients.3 Therefore, it is currently unknown whether SARS-CoV-2 infection impacts spermatogenesis and male fertility. In the present study, we evaluated the effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection on spermatogenesis by examining the pathophysiology and molecular features of testes obtained from five male COVID-19 patients at autopsy.

... Spermatogenesis damage was observed in COVID-19 patients. (a) Histological analyses of testicular sections from COVID-19 patients (patients 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) and uninfected controls (controls 1, 2, and 3) showing numerous degenerated germ cells sloughing into the lumen of the seminiferous tubules of all five COVID-19 patients; normal spermatogenesis was observed in control patients.

... SARS-CoV-2 can induce cellular and humoral immune changes and destroy antiviral immunity at an early stage in COVID-19 patients.4,5 To ascertain how male GC loss occurs in patients with COVID-19, we investigated the presence of apoptosis and inflammatory reactions in the testicular cells. TUNEL assays revealed that the number of apoptotic cells in COVID-19 testes was significantly higher than that in control testes (Supplementary Fig.Â S1e, f), raising the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 damages the immune privilege and innate immune homeostasis of the testis.

... The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein binds to the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor through its receptor-binding domain. In turn, ACE2 employs the serine protease TMPRSS2 to activate the S protein, allowing its HR1 and HR2 domains to interact with each other and form a six-helical bundle (6-HB) to mediate membrane fusion between the virus and a target cell.7,8,9 Therefore, we next examined the protein and mRNA levels of ACE2 and TMPRSS2 in the testes. Although both ACE2 and TMPRSS2 proteins were predominantly expressed in the cytoplasm and membrane of spermatocytes, spermatids, and Sertoli cells in control testes, elevated ACE2 and TMPRSS2 levels were observed in the seminiferous tubules of all patients with COVID-19.

... Collectively, our findings provide direct evidence that SARS-CoV-2 can infect the testis and GCs, indicating the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on spermatogenesis and male fertility. Nevertheless, further study is essential to reveal the underlying mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 infection of testicular cells and the correlation of testis infection with the clinical course of COVID-19. (read more)

2020-12-15 c
MAN COUNTERS FATE
"Among the lessons he took away from this experience was the futility of violent agitation as a means of bringing about social progress for black Americans."

Emancipation by Example

Born in obscurity, poverty, and slavery, Booker T. Washington became the first widely recognized leader of black Americans.

There is no question that there are injustices in the world, and that all of us, over our lifetimes, should hope to leave the world a better place than it would otherwise have been without us — no matter how small that difference may be. But how best to accomplish this? Through violent and bloody revolution? Or through patiently doing our duty in all aspects of our lives to the best of our abilities?

Booker T. Washington, the subject of this essay, chose the latter path, and through his hard work, persistence, and genius, he not only rose “up from slavery” in the wake of the Civil War, he also became an emancipator by example, one who left the world a far better place than it otherwise would have been. His way for achieving social justice is not the way of today’s Black Lives Matter revolutionaries who never experienced the slavery or racial discrimination that Booker T. Washington did. But it is the correct way, both during his time and today.

This article originally appeared in the November 22, 1999 issue of The New American. Will Grigg, who passed away in 2017, was a senior editor of The New American from 1995-2006.

Although his most significant accomplishments took place in the late 19th century, Booker Taliaferro Washington (who died in 1915) committed his public life to an issue that has been particularly nettlesome in the 20th century — the question of race relations. Born into slavery on April 5, 1856 on the plantation of James Burroughs near Hale’s Ford, Virginia, Washington’s origins were so obscure that he knew neither his specific date of birth, nor the identity of his father. On one occasion, alluding to the skimpy knowledge of his origins, Washington wryly noted that he “felt assured that his birth was a certainty,” but could attest with reasonable certainty of little else in his background.

Well into adulthood, Washington was unsure even of the name with which he was born. “From the time when I could remember anything, I had simply been called ‘Booker,’” recalled Washington in his 1901 memoir Up From Slavery. “Before going to school it had never occurred to me that it was needful or appropriate to have an additional name. When I heard the school-roll called, I noticed that all of the children had at least two names, and some of them indulged in what seemed to me the extravagance of having three.” Knowing that a surname would be demanded of him, the youngster quickly improvised: When the teacher “asked me what my full name was, I calmly told him, ‘Booker Washington’ as if I had been called by that name all my life; and by that name I have since been known.” (read more)

2020-12-15 b
DEMOCRAT COUNTERS TRANSGENDERISM

Protect Women’s Sports Act

Title IX is a historic law that positively changed everything for
women & girls. This video explains how, and why I introduced the
Protect Women’s Sports Act – to clarify, uphold & strengthen the
original intent of Title IX, ensuring a level playing field for
girls & women. pic.twitter.com/B0647yCGmW

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) December 13, 2020

2020-12-15 a
AMERICAN COUNTERS CRITICAL RACE THEORY
"The present social-justice movement has Marxist roots:"

A Critical Analysis of Critical Race Theory

Critical Race Theory and ”wokeness” mean demanding social justice for some identity groups, while attacking others, in the name of fairness.

As you read and watch the news, do you feel like you’ve been transported to a different world? A world in which right is called wrong, good is called evil, rioters and vandals are called protesters and demonstrators, and criminality is called “social justice”? A world in which faceless masked people scream slogans that seemingly make no sense? A world in which racial neutrality is denounced as racism, while overt racism — provided it is for the right race and against the wrong race — is politically correct?

Then welcome to the “woke” ideology of 2020 and its “social justice”!

Welcome to a world that uses terminology that ordinary Americans weren’t brought up with and don’t understand, and often gives language the opposite meaning from common understanding.

Welcome to a world that proclaims tolerance and respect for all religions, except Christianity.

It’s been coming for awhile. But when the COVID-19 crisis hit, social-justice warriors saw their opportunity. The media and the Left (am I being redundant?) used the fear of dying, and the lockdowns resulting from that fear, to drive popular public opinion to demand federal aid. The administration pushed for stimulus packages, but the new funds for COVID spending were created out of thin air — and didn’t come as a result of taxing real wealth — meaning that there are now more U.S. dollars in the economic chasing the same amount of goods. This drove up the price of goods (inflation) and thereby caused great hardship, especially to low-income people.

The Left went a few steps (miles) further, following Rahm Emanuel’s mantra, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” The radical Left actually resisted and delayed the stimulus agreed to by Republicans unless the bill included key elements of the Left’s agenda: making corporations reveal pay statistics by race and race statistics for corporate boards, bailing out Post Office debt, requiring early voting, requiring same-day voter registration, bailing out student loans, requiring that one-third of board members of companies seeking assistance must be chosen by the workers, provisions on official time for union collective bargaining, fully offsetting airline emissions, releasing greenhouse gas statistics for individual flights, providing for retirement plans for community newspaper employees, and instituting a $15 minimum wage and permanent paid leave at companies seeking assistance. Most of these conditions were utterly unrelated to the pandemic or to economic recovery, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Left were willing to hold the country hostage unless their radical wish list was granted. Fortunately, saner minds prevailed and the Left was forced to back down — this time.

And so, the country hunkered down and hoped for recovery. But retaining the status quo was not an option for the Left: just putting people in masks and making them stay home wasn’t enough. The movement needed a “trigger” to start the agitation for radical change.

... The present social-justice movement has Marxist roots: Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors openly proclaimed that she and her fellow organizers are “trained Marxists.” Marxism teaches that the central fact of history and human existence is one of economic class struggle, with oppressed classes working for the violent overthrow of their so-called oppressors. And despite Marxist promises of equality and a classless society in a workers’ paradise via revolution and strict socialism, Marxism has universally led to totalitarian thought control, starvation, and mass extermination of those whom the Communist Party regards as suspect.

In the early 1900s, an offshoot of Marxism, often called Cultural Marxism, stressed that the class struggle is not just economic warfare between the poor and the rich. Rather, it is a much broader struggle between races, sexes, cultures, ideologies, and all types of identity groups, and it must be spread not just by overt Marxist indoctrination but by influencing culture, media, entertainment, music, literature, schools, labor unions, and even churches. At first centered in the Frankfurt School in Germany, Cultural Marxism spread to Geneva and other parts of Europe, and to American universities. The movement’s students became the New Left radicals of the 1960s, led by the Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, the Youth International Party (Yippies), and other groups. The streets and campuses erupted into demonstrations and, sometimes, violence. The Vietnam War was the central catalyst that ignited the movement, but ending the war was only one of their goals. Racism, police brutality, economic injustice, and “authority” in general were targets, and America was portrayed as an oppressive country that exploited other nations and its own oppressed classes. Professors urged students to question and challenge authority (unless a student challenged the professor’s authority; then they went ballistic!).

The ’60s faded into the ’70s, and then came the Reagan era of the ’80s. Many of the hippies and yippies became yuppies, their radicalism faded, and they decided that working and earning a living wasn’t so bad after all. But many became teachers, professors, and school administrators; others went to work for foundations. And they spent the next several decades training a new generation of radicals. We’ve seen the fruit of their labor on the streets and campuses this past summer. The year 2020 has been replay of the 1960s, with an important difference: In the 1960s, local government officials and law enforcement stood against the radicals, but in 2020, local officials (often themselves products of 1960s radicalism) have often supported the radicals and have ordered law enforcement to stand down.

To understand the mind-set of the Cultural Marxism of the 2020s, we need to clarify several key concepts:

... Countering Woke Thinking

Countering woke thinking is difficult. First, it is hard to reason with people for whom truth is subjective and logic is a “construct” of the oppresser. And it is impossible to awaken someone who is only pretending to be asleep. Pointing out that proportionately more blacks than whites are killed by police officers because blacks (especially young black males), proportionately, commit more violent crimes than whites, and that in 2015, 89 percent of black murder victims were killed by other blacks will probably not persuade a person who has concluded, based on feelings, that “the police victimize black people.”

But you might help a person understand that he doesn’t run his life by feeling. He (we hope) doesn’t buy a car, plan a diet, or obtain healthcare based on what “feels right.” So why build a worldview on that kind of thinking?

And if truth is subjective and there are no absolutes, then why is the oppression that the Cultural Marxists always harp against always absolutely wrong?

Second, if a woke person believes oppression is always wrong because it violates the fundamental principle of equality, you might then ask, “Why do you believe in equality, especially considering people have varying levels of abilities, physical attributes, effort, and more? Why do Americans in general believe all people are equal, and why is this principle so fundamental? As he fumbles for an answer, point out to him that equality is a uniquely Judeo-Christian concept, and that as Joshua Berman of Bar-Ilan University observes in his book, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke With Ancient Political Thought,

If there was one truth the ancients held to be self-evident it was that all men were not created equal. If we maintain today, that in fact, they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, then it is because we have inherited as part of our cultural heritage notions of equality that were deeply entrenched in the ancient passages of the Pentateuch. (read more)

2020-12-14 j
DEFENDING THE REPUBLIC FROM THREATS BOTH FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC

Sometimes Life Really is Like a Bad Dream

... I would suppose, for instance, that Mr. Trump’s military intelligence allies saw, in real time on election night, all the packets of internet data that Dominion vote tabulation machines in the USA sent across the Atlantic to the Dominion server lodged in the CIA’s Frankfurt, Germany, cyberwarfare station. This, you understand, when those Dominion machines in the USA were forbidden by law to be connected to the Internet. If you’re a regular reader here, you will recall the recent report of a US Army special forces operation going into the Frankfurt CIA station directly after the election and seizing servers there. Assume that they underwent forensic dissection afterward. If you were President DJ Trump, would you suspect that the CIA might be playing dangerous games with you (and by extension, the nation)? Are you aware that China has a 75 percent investment stake in the holding company that now owns Dominion? Are there grounds to suppose that China somehow interfered in the election? With assistance from an eager Democratic Party and the CIA?

Would Mr. Trump, of all people, let such a thing stand? Especially considering the evidence that the putative “winner” of the election, Joe Biden, the kid from Scranton, PA, was up to his eyeballs, with the rest of his family, in Chinese funny-money? (Not to mention money from Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia, and other lands?) Note: information about this evidence gleaned from Hunter Biden’s forgotten laptop was deliberately suppressed in October by the major newspapers and cable news stations, with help from Facebook, Twitter, and Google, along with a claque of “fifty former and current intel officials” led John Brennan, who denounced the reports from The New York Post in a public letter as “Russian disinformation” — yet another seditious conspiracy among the swamplings.

Are you aware that in the weeks since the election there have been unusual movements of US military aircraft around the country, including C-130 “Hercules” troop carrier planes? And that the navy has two carrier groups out along the Pacific Coast and three strung along the Atlantic coast? That’s what I hear. Remember, the president cleaned house at the top of the Pentagon this fall, and probably not for nothing. Sounds like preparation for something… some extraordinary executive action to prevent the national security risk known as Joe Biden from being sworn-in as president — in the absence of anything else in a strictly constitutional way that would keep that from happening, like a Supreme Court decision that would order the rare passing on of the disputed 2020 election to the House of Representatives for resolution, with a strong statistical likelihood that the body would re-elect Mr. Trump.

These are the sorts of things I imagine the Supreme Court justices might be palavering about and weighing over their sherry in the comfortable back room of their august clubhouse. There is, of course, the likelihood that such a momentous decision to send the vote to the House would provoke a violent, batshit crazy response from the Democratic Party’s street warriors, BLM and Antifa — thus the C-130 flights perhaps deploying troops around the country. This time, expect the Black Blocs to get their asses kicked, and swiftly. Expect also a mind-blowing raft of arrests of political celebrities on charges like treason. Does it sound like a bad dream? Yeah, kind of does. But there it is. (read more)

2020-12-14 i
Who Counts the Votes of the Presidential Electors?

Six Swing States (PA, GA, MI, WI, AZ and NV) and New Mexico Pick Slate of Electoral Delegates for President Trump and Joe Biden – Here’s What It Means

As the day comes to a close, seven states convened and picked a slate of electors for President Donald Trump as well as Joe Biden.

Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico all selected a slate of electors for President Trump as well as Joe Biden. (read more)

2020-12-14 h
DON'T SAY YOU WEREN'T WARNED

EXECUTIVE ORDER

Executive Order on Imposing Certain Sanctions in the Event of Foreign Interference in a United States Election

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.) (NEA), section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (8 U.S.C. 1182(f)), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, find that the ability of persons located, in whole or in substantial part, outside the United States to interfere in or undermine public confidence in United States elections, including through the unauthorized accessing of election and campaign infrastructure or the covert distribution of propaganda and disinformation, constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States. Although there has been no evidence of a foreign power altering the outcome or vote tabulation in any United States election, foreign powers have historically sought to exploit America’s free and open political system. In recent years, the proliferation of digital devices and internet-based communications has created significant vulnerabilities and magnified the scope and intensity of the threat of foreign interference, as illustrated in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment. I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with this threat.

Accordingly, I hereby order:

Section 1. (a) Not later than 45 days after the conclusion of a United States election, the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the heads of any other appropriate executive departments and agencies (agencies), shall conduct an assessment of any information indicating that a foreign government, or any person acting as an agent of or on behalf of a foreign government, has acted with the intent or purpose of interfering in that election. The assessment shall identify, to the maximum extent ascertainable, the nature of any foreign interference and any methods employed to execute it, the persons involved, and the foreign government or governments that authorized, directed, sponsored, or supported it. The Director of National Intelligence shall deliver this assessment and appropriate supporting information to the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security.

(b) Within 45 days of receiving the assessment and information described in section 1(a) of this order, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the heads of any other appropriate agencies and, as appropriate, State and local officials, shall deliver to the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Secretary of Defense a report evaluating, with respect to the United States election that is the subject of the assessment described in section 1(a):

(i) the extent to which any foreign interference that targeted election infrastructure materially affected the security or integrity of that infrastructure, the tabulation of votes, or the timely transmission of election results; and

(ii) if any foreign interference involved activities targeting the infrastructure of, or pertaining to, a political organization, campaign, or candidate, the extent to which such activities materially affected the security or integrity of that infrastructure, including by unauthorized access to, disclosure or threatened disclosure of, or alteration or falsification of, information or data.

The report shall identify any material issues of fact with respect to these matters that the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security are unable to evaluate or reach agreement on at the time the report is submitted. The report shall also include updates and recommendations, when appropriate, regarding remedial actions to be taken by the United States Government, other than the sanctions described in sections 2 and 3 of this order.

(c) Heads of all relevant agencies shall transmit to the Director of National Intelligence any information relevant to the execution of the Director’s duties pursuant to this order, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law. If relevant information emerges after the submission of the report mandated by section 1(a) of this order, the Director, in consultation with the heads of any other appropriate agencies, shall amend the report, as appropriate, and the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall amend the report required by section 1(b), as appropriate.

(d) Nothing in this order shall prevent the head of any agency or any other appropriate official from tendering to the President, at any time through an appropriate channel, any analysis, information, assessment, or evaluation of foreign interference in a United States election.

(e) If information indicating that foreign interference in a State, tribal, or local election within the United States has occurred is identified, it may be included, as appropriate, in the assessment mandated by section 1(a) of this order or in the report mandated by section 1(b) of this order, or submitted to the President in an independent report.

(f) Not later than 30 days following the date of this order, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Director of National Intelligence shall develop a framework for the process that will be used to carry out their respective responsibilities pursuant to this order. The framework, which may be classified in whole or in part, shall focus on ensuring that agencies fulfill their responsibilities pursuant to this order in a manner that maintains methodological consistency; protects law enforcement or other sensitive information and intelligence sources and methods; maintains an appropriate separation between intelligence functions and policy and legal judgments; ensures that efforts to protect electoral processes and institutions are insulated from political bias; and respects the principles of free speech and open debate.

Sec. 2. (a) All property and interests in property that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of any United States person of the following persons are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any foreign person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security:

(i) to have directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference in a United States election;

(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, any activity described in subsection (a)(i) of this section or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property or interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.

(b) Executive Order 13694 of April 1, 2015, as amended by Executive Order 13757 of December 28, 2016, remains in effect. This order is not intended to, and does not, serve to limit the Secretary of the Treasury’s discretion to exercise the authorities provided in Executive Order 13694. Where appropriate, the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of State, may exercise the authorities described in Executive Order 13694 or other authorities in conjunction with the Secretary of the Treasury’s exercise of authorities provided in this order.

(c) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section apply except to the extent provided by statutes, or in regulations, orders, directives, or licenses that may be issued pursuant to this order, and notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the date of this order.

Sec. 3. Following the transmission of the assessment mandated by section 1(a) and the report mandated by section 1(b):

(a) the Secretary of the Treasury shall review the assessment mandated by section 1(a) and the report mandated by section 1(b), and, in consultation with the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, impose all appropriate sanctions pursuant to section 2(a) of this order and any appropriate sanctions described in section 2(b) of this order; and

(b) the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the heads of other appropriate agencies, shall jointly prepare a recommendation for the President as to whether additional sanctions against foreign persons may be appropriate in response to the identified foreign interference and in light of the evaluation in the report mandated by section 1(b) of this order, including, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, proposed sanctions with respect to the largest business entities licensed or domiciled in a country whose government authorized, directed, sponsored, or supported election interference, including at least one entity from each of the following sectors: financial services, defense, energy, technology, and transportation (or, if inapplicable to that country’s largest business entities, sectors of comparable strategic significance to that foreign government). The recommendation shall include an assessment of the effect of the recommended sanctions on the economic and national security interests of the United States and its allies. Any recommended sanctions shall be appropriately calibrated to the scope of the foreign interference identified, and may include one or more of the following with respect to each targeted foreign person:

(i) blocking and prohibiting all transactions in a person’s property and interests in property subject to United States jurisdiction;

(ii) export license restrictions under any statute or regulation that requires the prior review and approval of the United States Government as a condition for the export or re-export of goods or services;

(iii) prohibitions on United States financial institutions making loans or providing credit to a person;

(iv) restrictions on transactions in foreign exchange in which a person has any interest;

(v) prohibitions on transfers of credit or payments between financial institutions, or by, through, or to any financial institution, for the benefit of a person;

(vi) prohibitions on United States persons investing in or purchasing equity or debt of a person;

(vii) exclusion of a person’s alien corporate officers from the United States;

(viii) imposition on a person’s alien principal executive officers of any of the sanctions described in this section; or

(ix) any other measures authorized by law.

Sec. 4. I hereby determine that the making of donations of the type of articles specified in section 203(b)(2) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(2)) by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order would seriously impair my ability to deal with the national emergency declared in this order, and I hereby prohibit such donations as provided by section 2 of this order.

Sec. 5. The prohibitions in section 2 of this order include the following:

(a) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; and

(b) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.

Sec. 6. I hereby find that the unrestricted immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and I hereby suspend entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of such persons. Such persons shall be treated as persons covered by section 1 of Proclamation 8693 of July 24, 2011 (Suspension of Entry of Aliens Subject to United Nations Security Council Travel Bans and International Emergency Economic Powers Act Sanctions).

Sec. 7. (a) Any transaction that evades or avoids, has the purpose of evading or avoiding, causes a violation of, or attempts to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.

(b) Any conspiracy formed to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.

Sec. 8. For the purposes of this order:

(a) the term “person” means an individual or entity;

(b) the term “entity” means a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation, group, subgroup, or other organization;

(c) the term “United States person” means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person (including a foreign person) in the United States;

(d) the term “election infrastructure” means information and communications technology and systems used by or on behalf of the Federal Government or a State or local government in managing the election process, including voter registration databases, voting machines, voting tabulation equipment, and equipment for the secure transmission of election results;

(e) the term “United States election” means any election for Federal office held on, or after, the date of this order;

(f) the term “foreign interference,” with respect to an election, includes any covert, fraudulent, deceptive, or unlawful actions or attempted actions of a foreign government, or of any person acting as an agent of or on behalf of a foreign government, undertaken with the purpose or effect of influencing, undermining confidence in, or altering the result or reported result of, the election, or undermining public confidence in election processes or institutions;

(g) the term “foreign government” means any national, state, provincial, or other governing authority, any political party, or any official of any governing authority or political party, in each case of a country other than the United States;

(h) the term “covert,” with respect to an action or attempted action, means characterized by an intent or apparent intent that the role of a foreign government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly; and

(i) the term “State” means the several States or any of the territories, dependencies, or possessions of the United States.

Sec. 9. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, I find that because of the ability to transfer funds or other assets instantaneously, prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render those measures ineffectual. I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in this order, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 2 of this order.

Sec. 10. Nothing in this order shall prohibit transactions for the conduct of the official business of the United States Government by employees, grantees, or contractors thereof.

Sec. 11. The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of State, is hereby authorized to take such actions, including the promulgation of rules and regulations, and to employ all powers granted to the President by IEEPA as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of this order. The Secretary of the Treasury may re-delegate any of these functions to other officers within the Department of the Treasury consistent with applicable law. All agencies of the United States Government are hereby directed to take all appropriate measures within their authority to carry out the provisions of this order.

Sec. 12. The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of State, is hereby authorized to submit the recurring and final reports to the Congress on the national emergency declared in this order, consistent with section 401(c) of the NEA (50 U.S.C. 1641(c)) and section 204(c) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1703(c)).

Sec. 13. This order shall be implemented consistent with 50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(1) and (3).

Sec. 14. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

/s/ DONALD J. TRUMP

THE WHITE HOUSE,

September 12, 2018.

2020-12-14 g
JOHN ROBERTS, CHIEF COMPROMISED COWARD OF THE SUPREME COURT

Loud Arguments in US Supreme Court Chambers over Texas Lawsuit - COURT INTIMIDATED

"Hal, as you know I am a clerk for one of the Justices on SCOTUS. Today was like nothing we have ever seen. The justices are arguing loudly behind closed doors.

The Justices met in a closed and sealed room, as is standard.

Usually it is very calm, however today we could hear screaming all the way down the hall.

They met in person, because they didn't trust telephonic meeting as secure.

Chief Justice Roberts was screaming

"Are you going to be responsible for the rioting if we hear this case?"

"Don't tell me about Bush v. Gore, we weren't dealing with riots then"

"You are forgetting what your role here is Neil, and I don't want to hear from the two junior justices anymore. I will tell you how you will vote."

Justice Clarence Thomas says "This is the end of Democracy, John."

When they left the room, Roberts, the Libs and Kavanugh had big smiles. Alito and Thomas were visibly upset. ACB and Gorsuch didn't seem fazed at all."

Clearly Chief Justice Roberts is intimidated by the ANTIFA/Left-wing rioting. Well, one has to wonder if maybe he can intimidated more by some actions of the right wing? (read more)

2020-12-14 f
THE GOWNED CLOWNS

The Supreme Court’s Claim of Discretion is Unconstitutional

... They need to go back to the Supreme Court and argue that the Judiciary Act of 1925 is UNCONSTITUTIONAL because it created discretion to hear cases when the Supreme Court is the ONLY court created by the Constitution.

The Supreme Court made it abundantly clear that “The Supreme Court alone possesses jurisdiction derived immediately from the Constitution, and of which the legislative power cannot deprive it.” Stevenson v Fain, 195 US 165, 167 (1904). In Reid v Covert, 384 US 1, 41 (1987) this Court quoted Lord Coke: “God send me never to live under the law of conveniency or discretion.” The jurisdiction of this Court was created by the Constitution. It requires an amendment to the constitution to alter that jurisdiction, not a statute passed by Congress. Therefore, the Judiciary Act of 1925 is unconstitutional.

The only court required by the Constitution is the Supreme Court and every Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States are required to take two oaths before they may execute the duties of their appointed office – (1) the Constitutional Oath to defend it and (2) the Judicial Oath.

Therefore, anyone can see on its face that the Judiciary Act of 1925 is unconstitutional for it violates their oath to defend the constitution when they have the discretion to not hear cases. Previously, the Supreme Court ruled and ignored this time when it defined “discretion” by saying “the term ‘discretion’ denotes the absence of a hard and fast rule.” Langnes v Green, 282 US 531, 541 (1931). This means that those in power do not have to obey any law, even the Constitution. The Supreme Court also said, “it is obvious that discretion does not exist where there is no power to act except in one way.” Jones v SEC, 298 US 1, 18 (1936). When judges and politicians claim discretion, they claim to be ABOVE the law of men. (read more)

2020-12-14 e
THE HACK

US Agencies and FireEye Were Hacked Using SolarWinds Software Backdoor

State-sponsored actors allegedly working for Russia have targeted the US Treasury, the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), and other government agencies to monitor internal email traffic as part of a widespread cyberespionage campaign.

... The motive and the full scope of what intelligence was compromised remains unclear, but signs are that adversaries tampered with a software update released by Texas-based IT infrastructure provider SolarWinds earlier this year to infiltrate the systems of government agencies as well as FireEye and mount a highly-sophisticated supply chain attack.

"The compromise of SolarWinds' Orion Network Management Products poses unacceptable risks to the security of federal networks," said Brandon Wales, acting director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has released an emergency directive, urging federal civilian agencies to review their networks for suspicious activity and disconnect or power down SolarWinds Orion products immediately.

SolarWinds' networking and security products are used by more than 300,000 customers worldwide, including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and education institutions.

It also serves several major US telecommunications companies, all five branches of the US Military, and other prominent government organizations such as the Pentagon, State Department, NASA, National Security Agency (NSA), Postal Service, NOAA, Department of Justice, and the Office of the President of the United States.

An Evasive Campaign to Distribute SUNBURST Backdoor

FireEye, which is tracking the ongoing intrusion campaign under the moniker "UNC2452," said the supply chain attack takes advantage of trojanized SolarWinds Orion business software updates in order to distribute a backdoor called SUNBURST.

"This campaign may have begun as early as Spring 2020 and is currently ongoing," FireEye said in a Sunday analysis. "Post compromise activity following this supply chain compromise has included lateral movement and data theft. The campaign is the work of a highly skilled actor and the operation was conducted with significant operational security."

This rogue version of SolarWinds Orion plug-in, besides masquerading its network traffic as the Orion Improvement Program (OIP) protocol, is said to communicate via HTTP to remote servers so as to retrieve and execute malicious commands ("Jobs") that cover the spyware gamut, including those for transferring files, executing files, profiling and rebooting the target system, and disabling system services.

Orion Improvement Program or OIP is chiefly used to collect performance and usage statistics data from SolarWinds users for product improvement purposes.

... The campaign, ultimately, appears to be a supply chain attack on a global scale, for FireEye said it detected this activity across several entities worldwide, spanning government, consulting, technology, telecom, and extractive firms in North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

The indicators of compromise (IoCs) and other relevant attack signatures designed to counter SUNBURST can be accessed here. (read more)

2020-12-14 d
OF COURSE, THEY CHEATED

Antrim County Michigan Forensics Audit Results of Dominion Voting Machines Released

... 2. We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results. The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud. Based on our study, we conclude that The Dominion Voting System should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that the results of Antrim County should not have been certified.

,,, 4. The Antrim County Clerk and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson have stated that the election night error (detailed above by the vote "flip" from Trump to Biden, was the result of human error caused by the failure to update the Mancelona Township tabulator prior to election night for a down ballot race. We disagree and conclude that the vote flip occurred because of machine error built into the voting software designed to create error.

5. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson's statement on November 6, 2020 that "[t]the correct results always were and continue to be reflected on the tabulator totals tape . . . ." was false.

6. The allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines is of 1 in 250,000 ballots (.0008%). We observed an error rate of 68.05%. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity.

7. The results of the Antrim County 2020 election are not certifiable. This is a result of machine and/or software error, not human error.

8. The tabulation log for the forensic examination of the server for Antrim County from December 6, 2020 consists of 15,676 individual events, of which 10,667 or 68.05% of the events were recorded errors. These errors resulted in overall tabulation errors or ballots being sent to adjudication. This high error rates proves the Dominion Voting System is flawed and does not meet state or federal election laws.

9. These errors occurred after The Antrim County Clerk provided a re-provisioned CF card with uploaded software for the Central Lake Precinct on November 6, 2020. This means the statement by Secretary Benson was false. The Dominion Voting System produced systemic errors and high error rates both prior to the update and after the update; meaning the update (or lack of update) is not the cause of errors.

10. In Central Lake Township there were 1,222 ballots reversed out of 1,491 total ballots cast, resulting in an 81.96% rejection rate. All reversed ballots are sent to adjudication for a decision by election personnel.

11. It is critical to understand that the Dominion system classifies ballots into two categories, 1) normal ballots and 2) adjudicated ballots. Ballots sent to adjudication can be altered by administrators, and adjudication files can be moved between different Results Tally and Reporting (RTR) terminals with no audit trail of which administrator actually adjudicates (i.e. votes) the ballot batch. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity because it provides no meaningful observation of the adjudication process or audit trail of which administrator actually adjudicated the ballots.

12. A staggering number of votes required adjudication. This was a 2020 issue not seen in previous election cycles still stored on the server. This is caused by intentional errors in the system. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency or audit trail. Our examination of the server logs indicates that this high error rate was incongruent with patterns from previous years. The statement attributing these issues to human error is not consistent with the forensic evaluation, which points more correctly to systemic machine and/or software errors. The systemic errors are intentionally designed to create errors in order to push a high volume of ballots to bulk adjudication.

13. The linked video demonstrates how to cheat at adjudication:

https://mobile.twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1336888454538428418

14. Antrim County failed to properly update its system. A purposeful lack of providing basic computer security updates in the system software and hardware demonstrates incompetence, gross negligence, bad faith, and/or willful non-compliance in providing the fundamental system security required by federal and state law. There is no way this election management system could have passed tests or have been legally certified to conduct the 2020 elections in Michigan under the current laws. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures – Michigan requires full compliance with federal standards as determined by a federally accredited voting system laboratory.

15. Significantly, the computer system shows vote adjudication logs for prior years; but all adjudication log entries for the 2020 election cycle are missing. The adjudication process is the simplest way to manually manipulate votes. The lack of records prevents any form of audit accountability, and their conspicuous absence is extremely suspicious since the files exist for previous years using the same software. Removal of these files violates state law and prevents a meaningful audit, even if the Secretary wanted to conduct an audit. We must conclude that the 2020 election cycle records have been manually removed.

16. Likewise, all server security logs prior to 11:03 pm on November 4, 2020 are missing. This means that all security logs for the day after the election, on election day, and prior to election day are gone. Security logs are very important to an audit trail, forensics, and for detecting advanced persistent threats and outside attacks, especially on systems with outdated system files. These logs would contain domain controls, authentication failures, error codes, times users logged on and off, network connections to file servers between file accesses, internet connections, times, and data transfers. Other server logs before November 4, 2020 are present; therefore, there is no reasonable explanation for the security logs to be missing.

17. On November 21, 2020, an unauthorized user unsuccessfully attempted to zero out election results. This demonstrates additional tampering with data.

18. The Election Event Designer Log shows that Dominion ImageCast Precinct Cards were programmed with new ballot programming on 10/23/2020 and then again after the election on 11/05/2020. These system changes affect how ballots are read and tabulated, and our examination demonstrated a significant change in voter results using the two different programs. In accordance with the Help America Vote Act, this violates the 90-day Safe Harbor Period which prohibits changes to election systems, registries, hardware/software updates without undergoing re-certification. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures – Michigan requires full compliance with federal standards as determined by a federally accredited voting system laboratory.

19. The only reason to change software after the election would be to obfuscate evidence of fraud and/or to correct program errors that would de-certify the election. Our findings show that the Central Lake Township tabulator tape totals were significantly altered by utilizing two different program versions (10/23/2020 and 11/05/2020), both of which were software changes during an election which violates election law, and not just human error associated with the Dominion Election Management System. This is clear evidence of software generated movement of votes. The claims made on the Office of the Secretary of State website are false.

20. The Dominion ImageCast Precinct (ICP) machines have the ability to be connected to the internet (see Image 11). By connecting a network scanner to the ethernet port on the ICP machine and creating Packet Capture logs from the machines we examined show the ability to connect to the network, Application Programming Interface (API) (a data exchange between two different systems) calls and web (http) connections to the Election Management System server. Best practice is to disable the network interface card to avoid connection to the internet. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity. Because certain files have been deleted, we have not yet found origin or destination; but our research continues.

21. Because the intentional high error rate generates large numbers of ballots to be adjudicated by election personnel, we must deduce that bulk adjudication occurred. However, because files and adjudication logs are missing, we have not yet determined where the bulk adjudication occurred or who was responsible for it. Our research continues.

22. Research is ongoing. However, based on the preliminary results, we conclude that the errors are so significant that they call into question the integrity and legitimacy of the results in the Antrim County 2020 election to the point that the results are not certifiable. Because the same machines and software are used in 48 other counties in Michigan, this casts doubt on the integrity of the entire election in the state of Michigan.

23. DNI Responsibilities: President Obama signed Executive Order on National Critical Infrastructure on 6 January 2017, stating in Section 1. Cybersecurity of Federal Networks, "The Executive Branch operates its information technology (IT) on behalf of the American people. The President will hold heads of executive departments and agencies (agency heads) accountable for managing cybersecurity risk to their enterprises. In addition, because risk management decisions made by agency heads can affect the risk to the executive branch as a whole, and to national security, it is also the policy of the United States to manage cybersecurity risk as an executive branch enterprise." President Obama's EO further stated, effective immediately, each agency head shall use The Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (the Framework) developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology." Support to Critical Infrastructure at Greatest Risk. The Secretary of Homeland Security, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the heads of appropriate sector-specific agencies, as defined in Presidential Policy Directive 21 of February 12, 2013 (Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience) (sector-specific agencies), and all other appropriate agency heads, as identified by the Secretary of Homeland Security, shall: (i) identify authorities and capabilities that agencies could employ to support the cybersecurity efforts of critical infrastructure entities identified pursuant to section 9 of Executive Order 13636 of February 12, 2013 (Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity), to be at greatest risk of attacks that could reasonably result in catastrophic regional or national effects on public health or safety, economic security, or national security (section 9 entities);

This is a national security imperative. In July 2018, President Trump strengthened President Obama’s Executive Order to include requirements to ensure US election systems, processes, and its people were not manipulated by foreign meddling, either through electronic or systemic manipulation, social media, or physical changes made in hardware, software, or supporting systems. The 2018 Executive Order. Accordingly, I hereby order: ... (read more)

2020-12-14 c
NYET, IT'S NOT THE RUSSIANS

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

WASHINGTON – The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) tonight issued Emergency Directive 21-01, in response to a known compromise involving SolarWinds Orion products that are currently being exploited by malicious actors. This Emergency Directive calls on all federal civilian agencies to review their networks for indicators of compromise and disconnect or power down SolarWinds Orion products immediately.

The compromise of SolarWinds’ Orion Network Management Products poses unacceptable risks to the security of federal networks,” said CISA Acting Director Brandon Wales. “Tonight’s directive is intended to mitigate potential compromises within federal civilian networks, and we urge all our partners—in the public and private sectors—to assess their exposure to this compromise and to secure their networks against any exploitation.

This is the fifth Emergency Directive issued by CISA under the authorities granted by Congress in the Cybersecurity Act of 2015. All agencies operating SolarWinds products should provide a complete report to CISA by 12 pm Eastern Standard Time on Monday, December 14, 2020. (read more)

P. S. Dominion Voting System also uses SolarWind products.

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LIN WOOD TWEETS - @LLinWood

“Events will unfold quickly over the next several days.”

There should be NO Electoral College vote in any state today.

Fraud is rampant in all state elections. If U.S. Supreme Court does not have
courage to act, I believe our President @realDonaldTrump has the courage.
He loves America & freedom.@SidneyPowell1 @GenFlynn pic.twitter.com/xfkCjwNDJ1

— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) December 14, 2020

TRUTH. https://t.co/izijRmB1tv

— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) December 14, 2020

2020-12-14 a
TRUMP TWEETS - @realDonaldTrump

“Massive Voter Fraud”

…..and many others voted illegally. Also, machine “glitches” (another word for FRAUD),
ballot harvesting, non-resident voters, fake ballots, “stuffing the ballot box”, votes for pay,
roughed up Republican Poll Watchers, and sometimes even more votes than people voting, took….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2020

….place in Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere. In all Swing
State cases, there are far more votes than are necessary to win the State, and the Election itself.
Therefore, VOTES CANNOT BE CERTIFIED. THIS ELECTION IS UNDER PROTEST!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2020

2020-12-13 j
WHEN "SCIENCE" GETS IT WRONG IX

Coca-Cola Tests Positive for Coronavirus

An Austrian MP uses a lateral flow test on a glass of coke
and it comes back positive. pic.twitter.com/EdHZYC22wA

— Anshul (@Anshul__K) December 11, 2020

2020-12-13 i
WHEN "SCIENCE" GETS IT WRONG VIII
"As the critical authors point out, were the health authorities to specify 35 cycles maximum, the number of corona positive would be only less than 3% the present number!"

Coronavirus Scandal Breaking in Merkel’s Germany. False Positives and the Drosten PCR Test

The widely-praised German model of the Angela Merkel regime to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic is now engulfed in a series of potentially devastating scandals going to the very heart of the testing and medical advice being used to declare draconian economic shutdowns and next, de facto mandatory vaccinations. The scandals involve a professor at the heart of Merkel’s corona advisory group. The implications go far beyond German borders to the very WHO itself and their global recommendations.

The entire case for WHO-mandated emergency lockdown of businesses, schools, churches and other social arenas worldwide is based on a test introduced, amazingly early on, in the Wuhan, China coronavirus saga.

On January 23, 2020, in the scientific journal Eurosurveillance, of the EU Center for Disease Prevention and Control, Dr. Christian Drosten, along with several colleagues from the Berlin Virology Institute at Charite Hospital, along with the head of a small Berlin biotech company, TIB Molbiol Syntheselabor GmbH, published a study claiming to have developed the first effective test for detecting whether someone is infected with the novel coronavirus identified first only days before in Wuhan. The Drosten article was titled, “Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR” (Eurosurveillance 25(8) 2020).

The news was greeted with immediate endorsement by the corrupt Director General of WHO, Tedros Adhanom, the first non-medical doctor to head WHO. Since then the Drosten-backed test for the virus, called a real-time or RT-PCR test, has spread via WHO worldwide, as the most used test protocol to determine if a person might have COVID-19, the illness.

On November 27 a highly-respected group of 23 international virologists, microbiologists and related scientists published a call for Eurosurveillance to retract the January 23, 2020 Drosten article. Their careful analysis of the original piece is damning. Theirs is a genuine “peer review.”

They accuse Drosten and cohorts of “fatal” scientific incompetence and flaws in promoting their test.

To begin with, as the critical scientists reveal, the paper that established the Drosten PCR test for the Wuhan strain of coronavirus that has subsequently been adopted with indecent haste by the Merkel government along with WHO for worldwide use–resulting in severe lockdowns globally and an economic and social catastrophe–was never peer-reviewed before its publication by Eurosurveillance journal.

... Amplification Cycles

But even more damning for Drosten is the fact that he mentioned nowhere of a test being positive or negative, or indeed what defines a positive or negative result! The Borger report notes, “These types of virological diagnostic tests must be based on a SOP (Standard Operational Protocol), including a validated and fixed number of PCR cycles (Ct value) after which a sample is deemed positive or negative. The maximum reasonably reliable Ct value is 30 cycles. Above a Ct of 35 cycles, rapidly increasing numbers of false positives must be expected… scientific studies show that only non-infectious (dead) viruses are detected with Ct values of 35.” (emphasis added).

The WHO and Drosten recommend a Ct of 45 cycles and, reportedly, presently the German health officials do as well. Little wonder that as the number of tests is ramped up in the onset of winter flu season, PCR “positives” in Germany and elsewhere explode. As the critical authors point out, were the health authorities to specify 35 cycles maximum, the number of corona positive would be only less than 3% the present number! They note, “an analytical result with a Ct value of 45 is scientifically and diagnostically absolutely meaningless (a reasonable Ct-value should not exceed 30). All this should be communicated very clearly.

It is a significant mistake that the Corman-Drosten paper does not mention the maximum Ct value at which a sample can be unambiguously considered as a positive or a negative test-result. This important cycle threshold limit is also not specified in any follow-up submissions to date.”

... The Merkel government uses the Drosten PCR test and Drosten as an “all-wise” expert to impose the most draconian economic consequences outside wartime. Her Health Minister, Jens Spahn, is a former banker who has no medical degree, only a stint as a lobbyist for Big Pharma. The head of the German CDC, called the Robert Koch Institute, Lothar Wieler, is not a virologist but an animal doctor, Tierarzt. With this crew, Germans are seeing their lives destroyed by lockdowns and social measures never before imagined. There is science and then there is science. Not all “science” is valid however. (read more)

READ EVEN MORE::External Peer Review of the RT-PCR Test to Detect SARS-CoV-2 Reveals 10 Major Scientific Flaws at the Molecular and Methodological Level: Consequences for False Positive Results

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WHEN "SCIENCE" GETS IT WRONG VII
"Yet our research has established that these PCR tests are routinely inaccurate. And, in particular, they are telling people they have Covid-19 when they do not."

DR TOM JEFFERSON: As people test positive WEEKS after they stop being infectious, why I fear this mania for mass Covid testing is a hugely expensive blunder

For the past few weeks I have received a stream of unsettling letters and emails from members of the public. They are all complete strangers, people I’ve never met. They decided to get in touch out of what I can only describe as desperation, having read about the research I’m conducting with my colleague, Professor Carl Heneghan.

They are at their wits’ end because they are testing positive for Covid-19 despite having recovered from their symptoms. Some never had symptoms in the first place but are still being told they have the virus long after any possible infection. They are anxious and confused. Their lives are on hold.

One family tells me how their mother caught Covid-19 in hospital in October but continues to test positive. ‘This is starting to cause problems with her receiving treatment for cancer,’ they write, ‘so we’re trying to prove she’s not still infectious.’

Another man complains of losing his sense of smell two months ago – his only symptom. Yet his test results continue to be positive. When will he eventually be negative, he wants to know.

Last week I received an email from someone whose results have flip-flopped from positive to negative four times over two months, and another from a man who has been unable to see his elderly mother, isolated in a care home, because she continues to test positive week after week.

These individuals are trapped, prisoners of the testing regime.

Something is going badly wrong, yet there has been no acknowledgment from politicians or from the scientists advising them. These, remember, are real people – lots of them.

What we are seeing, I believe, is a major flaw in the rollout of mass swab tests – the ones that involve wiping the throat or inside the nose. And the consequences are serious, not just for the individuals concerned, but for our whole national strategy – even with a vaccine. (read more)

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WHEN "SCIENCE" GETS IT WRONG X

The COVID-19 Inversion of Reason

... We are forced to wear masks – we are told - not to protect ourselves but to protect others. It is an inherent symbol that – similar to a religious face covering - one cannot trust either oneself or others. Surely it is in itself extremely divisive in this age of seeking to create safe spaces. The silent killer is amongst us and anyone can be the facilitator – “how would you feel if you gave the virus to someone who then died” is now the perverse moral blackmail being used.

When an unseen threat is widely thought to be endemic in society it can pull the strings that bind us apart. The symbol of the mask or panicked avoidance of other individuals compounds this sense of mistrust. The inevitable consequence is that people who have a medical condition and are not forced to wear a mask and others who simply choose not to, become tacitly accused of a lack of solidarity (or encounter a much worse reaction). Demonising people as “the other” has had catastrophic results throughout history, as we all know.

Thus have we been terrified and bullied by Governments and the press into seeing our fellow citizens as a threat. We have also been coerced into seeing ourselves as a threat to others. In reality since time began this has always been true with viruses, bacteria and general life and we have never been in control of these things. It is also depressingly familiar. When virulent disease often did become a moral issue it inevitably ended up in scapegoating (see Sontag). The response to the plague in the middle ages and witch hanging or burning is a rather prescient case in point. The hysteria surrounding HIV in the 80s is just a continuation of such moral turpitude. The absence of a face mask, a walk in the park, seeing your grand children “against the rules” is putting “lives at risk”. It is no wonder that the inevitable puritan streak has burst through to the surface with alcohol and in some places cigarette bans. The religious orthodoxy must be maintained. Casual sex? Forget it, you’re endangering lives! (read more)

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WHEN "SCIENCE" GETS IT WRONG VI
(this report was published on the WHO website 13 May 2020 but was taken down the next day)

An unprecedented challenge: Italy’s first response to COVID-19

ABSTRACT
This report tells the story of the first phase of Italy’s response to the COVID-19 virus, which in many people transformed into the dreaded illness known as COVID-19, leading to unprecedented death tolls across the world. Readers should note that the report is an unfinished story. It was written in the midst of the initial phase of the pandemic in a climate of constant and daily change as the country responded to this unprecedented challenge. While early lessons will surely need to be revisited, this report is a first account of Italy’s immediate experience with COVID-19, dealing with different aspects of the response as the first country that experienced widescale community transmission in Europe.

Foreword
Italy’s first response to COVID-19 occurred at a time of unprecedented challenge, but the country quickly stepped up to the plate. The response called for solidarity and a quick exchange of experiences – something that is at the heart of the European programme of work “United Action for Better Health.”

This unprecedented challenge is now being faced by countries across the WHO European Region and countries in all WHO regions. Our lives have changed since COVID-19 entered our world, and things will never be the same. We have had to shift our work modalities during lockdown mode, and learn how to greet our friends and dear ones while keeping a safe distance. We have understood that despite physical distancing, we need to stay connected not just for social purposes, but also to be able to learn from one another. This “connection” has been a critical part of Italy’s response.

Italy was among the first countries in Europe to identify the virus in its midst and was for months the hardest-hit country in Europe in terms of deaths and cases. Italy was also the first country that the world looked at, and is still looking at, in its search for what works in terms of a country response. Evidence is still scarce in this area, but clearly needs to be accumulated.

Italy has one of the strongest health systems, but when COVID-19 came to its doorstep, it brought this system to near collapse. And this made the world panic.

At the end of the first phase and while entering a transition to so-called normality, it is time to reflect on how Italy responded...

1. Introduction
In early January 2020, Italy watched as a newly identified coronavirus (COVID-19) spread in China. It seemed a slightly worrying, yet distant, phenomenon. On 30 January, the WHO Director-General declared COVID-19 as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). That same day, two Chinese tourists from Wuhan tested positive for the virus in Rome. Soon after, on 6 February, a third case was detected in an Italian repatriated from Wuhan. COVID-19 was at the country’s doorstep. Cases1 began to be detected in other parts of Italy. Less than two months later, Italy was seeing up to 1000 COVID-19-related deaths per day.

Italy had become the European epicentre of one of the most significant pandemics of our time. It crept up while the world was looking at their smartphones or other devices. COVID-19 personifies globalization...

This report tells the story of Italy’s initial response to the epidemic. It takes stock of lessons learnt from managing the country’s response with a primary focus on public health but also taking into account economic, legislative and social issues. It provides the reader with the when – the chronology of the virus’s arrival in Italy and actions taken – and the how – Italy’s response and efforts to get the epidemic under control. At the time of writing, Italy was barely emerging from the first phase of the epidemic and starting to consider the second, transition phase. The lessons from this first phase are still being accrued, day by day. As the spread of COVID-19 has happened at different moments in time throughout the world, it is hoped that what can be learnt from the events in Italy can be of interest to countries where the epidemic took hold at a later date. The potential of this type of experience, captured during the course of the pandemic, is instrumental in informing early recovery efforts.

The report also presents profiles from all of Italy’s regions that summarize data and activity in areas such as epidemiological profiles, hospital capacities and communication. The Annex cites the data sources from which the regional profiles were compiled.

page 28
Italy had apparently covered all the bases with regard to primary health care and hospitals. People and systems had been repurposed, proving that the health system was flexible. While the ride was still bumpy and the death count remained staggering, there was a glimmer of hope that all these changes and all the sacrifice would soon bear fruit. Long-term-care facilities (in this case, homes for older people) soon emerged as a big blind spot. The risk of COVID-19 for residents and caregivers was most underestimated in the first weeks of the epidemic. While the epidemic had been raging in the community and stressing hospitals to breaking point, silent clusters started to appear in these closed communities.

page 37
The first phase of the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy and the measures put in place to control it had a profound impact on the Italian economy. Physical distancing and movement restrictions affected one third of Italy’s productive sectors, responsible for 27% of the total yearly value added (54). Half of Italy’s active workforce and businesses came to a standstill (55). This included the tourism industry, which in 2018 employed 1.6 million people, 25% on temporary or seasonal contracts. Some 200 000 of the 750 000 small- and medium-sized enterprises were at risk of bankruptcy (56). The National Institute of Statistics projected a 4.5% contraction of the value added in the national economy should lockdown measures be kept in place until June, with a 24% reduction for the restaurant and hospitality industries alone (57). (read more)