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A new study commissioned by WeVibe, a sex toy company, found loneliness and anxiety during the virus-induced lockdowns has likely resulted in the emergence of “technosexuals.” 

Readers must be confused about what exactly the term means. Well, it turns out that anyone who is sexually attracted to machinery, robots, and or, in this case, smart-speakers, is a technosexual. 

WeVibe surveyed 1,000 men and discovered 14% of respondents confessed their Amazon smart-speaker sexually aroused them. 

Also known as “Alexa,” Amazon’s smart-speaker is no longer just fulfilling questions about the daily weather or telling lame jokes, but rather the Chinese-made device is fueling men’s sexual fantasies. 

U.K.-based psychologist, Lucy Beresford, wrote in The Telegraph that the number of technosexuals is increasing as their “primary source of arousal are through interacting with their tech,” indicating that society is “sleepwalking into a different kind of epidemic – one of loneliness and fear of intimacy” driven partially by the lockdowns. 

Beresford said, “their [technosexuals] favorite gadgets. Whether it’s the ‘ping’ of a message, swiping right, or the seductive, authoritative tones of cloud-based voice service, their tech fulfills them by mobilizing the reward system in the brain and releasing dopamine – the ‘happiness hormone.'” 

“The instant activity of using their tech – likes and comments – is like a sexual turn on. This ‘dopamine hit’ happens in all of us, but, in technosexuals, something else is at play,” she said. 

Beresford said, “In all my years of practicing, technosexuals are perhaps the most troubling cohort of mental health sufferers I have seen, because the source of their distress appears, on the face of it, to be so innocuous. Where most of us just use tech when we need it — and, as Zoom-fatigue has shown, can get quickly turned off by it — the technosexual is hit by the double whammy of intensified use, which arises from (and is subsequently inflamed by) an existing fear of closeness to other human beings.”

She warned, “If we’re not careful, mindful even, tech has the power to tempt all of us to invest too much time in a ‘virtual’ life at the expense of our real one.”

Besides fantasising about Alexa, some technosexuals have been buying futuristic AI-driven sex dolls. 

One sex doll company has announced the best of both worlds for technosexuals – embedding Alexa or Siri into dolls. 

What a crazy world we live in. So will remote-working lifestyles drive a new era of technosexuals? 

Submitted by SouthFront,

Late on September 10, the Saudi capital of Riyadh came under a missile and drone attack from the Ansar Allah movement (more widely known as the Houthis).

The Yemeni missile and air forces, loyal to the Houthi government, announced that they struck a “high-value target” in Riyadh with a Zulfiqar ballistic missile and three Samad-3 suicide drones.

“The attacks are a response to the enemy’s permanent escalation and its continuing blockade against our country,” Brig. Gen. Yahya Sari, a spokesman for the Armed Forces of the Houthi government, said in a statement promising more attacks on Saudi Arabia if the Kingdom “continues its aggression and siege” on Yemen.

The Houthis revealed the Samad-3 combat drone, which also can be used as a loitering munition, in 2019. At that time, they claimed that it has a range of up to 1,500km. As to the Zulfiqar ballistic missile, it is one of a variety of ballistic and even cruise missiles widely employed by the Houthis against Saudi-affiliated targets.

Commenting on the September 10 attack, a spokesperson for the Saudi-led coalition said that Houthi forces launched the missiles and drones at civilian targets in Saudi Arabia, without giving more details.

Every Houthi strike on a target inside Saudi Arabia is a painful blow to the Kingdom. Even without the almost lost war in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has been passing through an economic and political crisis. So, it prefers to deny any damage or casualties as a result of such attacks, simultaneously censoring and silencing reports in social media.

Earlier this week, the Houthis already conducted a series of drone strikes on Abha International Airport in the southwestern Saudi region of Asir. Strikes were delivered on the target for a three days in a row and caused material damage to the installation even according to Saudi reports. The coalition also claimed that it downed at least 2 Houthi drones.

Meanwhile, in Yemen itself, Saudi proxies continue retreating under the pressure of the Houthis and their allies in the province of Marib. Recently, Houthi forces cut off the highway between the provincial capital and an important stronghold of Saudi-backed forces, the Maas base. The expected fall of the Maas base will mark the collapse of the defense of Saudi forces in this part of the province.

For a long time, the conflict in Yemen has been a swamp for pro-Saudi forces and the Kingdom-led coalition, which even de-facto collapsed under the pressure of various obstacles and internal contradictions. So, the Saudis have been suffering from the consequences of their own actions.

As Americans pause to remember the tragic events of September 11, 2001 which saw almost 3,000 innocents killed in the worst terror attack in United States history, it might also be worth contemplating the horrific wars and foreign quagmires unleashed during the subsequent ‘war on terror’. 

Bush’s so-called Global War on Terror targeted ‘rogue states’ like Saddam’s Iraq, but also consistently had a focus on uprooting and destroying al-Qaeda and other armed Islamist terror organizations (this led to the falsehood that Baathist Saddam and AQ were in cahoots). But the idea that Washington from the start saw al-Qaeda and its affiliates as some kind of eternal enemy is largely a myth. 

Recall that the US covertly supported the Afghan mujahideen and other international jihadists throughout the 1980’s Afghan-Soviet War, the very campaign in which hardened al-Qaeda terrorists got their start. In 1999 The Guardian in a rare moment of honest mainstream journalism warned of the Frankenstein the CIA created — among their ranks a terror mastermind named Osama bin Laden.

But it was all the way back in 1993 that a then classified intelligence memo warned that the very fighters the CIA previously trained would soon turn their weapons on the US and its allies. The ‘secret’ document was declassified in 2009, but has remained largely obscure in mainstream media reporting, despite being the first to contain a bombshell admission.

A terrorism analyst at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research named Gina Bennett wrote in the 1993 memo “The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous,” that—

“support network that funneled money, supplies, and manpower to supplement the Afghan mujahidin” in the war against the Soviets, “is now contributing experienced fighters to militant Islamic groups worldwide.”

The concluding section contains the most revelatory statements, again remembering these words were written nearly a decade before the 9/11 attacks:

US support of the mujahidin during the Afghan war will not necessarily protect US interests from attack.

…Americans will become the targets of radical Muslims’ wrath. Afghan war veterans, scattered throughout the world, could surprise the US with violence in unexpected locales.

There it is in black and white print: the United States government knew and bluntly acknowledged that the very militants it armed and trained to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars would eventually turn that very training and those very weapons back on the American people. 

And this was not at all a “small” or insignificant group, instead as The Guardian wrote a mere two years before 9/11:

American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up.

But don’t think for a moment that there was ever a “lesson learned” by Washington. 

Instead the CIA and other US agencies repeated the 1980s policy of arming jihadists to overthrow US enemy regimes in places like Libya and Syria even long after the “lesson” of 9/11. As War on The Rocks recounted: 

Despite the passage of time, the issues Ms. Bennett raised in her 1993 work continue to be relevant today.  This fact is a sign of the persistence of the problem of Sunni jihadism and the “wandering mujahidin.” Today, of course, the problem isn’t Afghanistan but Syria. While the war there is far from over, there is already widespread nervousness, particularly in Europe, about what will happen when the foreign fighters return from that conflict.

Good morning #America, your children in Syria،#September11#11septembre2001 # pic.twitter.com/6zqzgruD9x

— maytham (@maytham956) September 11, 2020

On 9/11 we should never forget the innocent lives lost, but we should also never forget the Frankenstein of jihad the CIA created. 

* * *

The U.S. State Dept.’s own numbers at the height of the war in Syria: access the full report at STATE.GOV

Authored by Andrea Widburg via AmericanThinker.com,

A Democrat bureaucrat finally said what we all have known to be the truth: The Wuhan virus limitations that Democrat politicians and bureaucrats have imposed on Americans will go away after the election because that was the plan all along.

As 2019 ended, the Democrats knew that Trump was cruising to reelection. He’d kept his base because he kept his promises about the wall, trade deals, the military, abortion, and our Second Amendment rights. Best of all, he’d supercharged the economy with tax and regulation cuts. The surging economy enticed other Americans who had not voted for Trump in 2016 to contemplating voting for him in 2020.

The Democrats’ troubles continued in 2020. In January, their impeachment imploded. Worst of all, the Democrat primary candidates did not excite the base. The only passion was for a spittle-flecked, wild-haired old communist, and the Democrats knew that, even in 2020, nominating a communist was a bridge too far. The Wuhan virus was an extraordinary and unlooked-for blessing for the Democrats because they used it to destroy Trump’s economy.

Right now, some might say, “That’s harsh. The Democrats have been trying to save lives. It’s worked out well for them that their efforts wrecked the economy, but that doesn’t mean that they deliberately manipulated the economy, destroying thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands, even millions, of lives, only to win the election.”

Sorry, but it’s true.

Rather than recite the history of America’s politics before the Wuhan virus struck, we’ll have Saturday Night Live do it. Some of you may recall that, in early 2017, SNL did a funny sketch about a team of scientists, led by Scarlett Johansson, who hooked up a dog to a contraption that translated its thoughts. To everyone’s horror, the dog was a Trump supporter:

The sketch was popular amongst conservatives. What passed almost unnoticed, though, perhaps because of all the impeachment craziness, was that SNL did a follow-up sketch in December 2019. Once again, Max, the Trump-supporting dog, had his say. The second sketch wasn’t as well written as the first one and, as someone commented to me, the actors seemed deflated. However, the sketch’s value lies in the fact that the points Max made reflect what Democrats feared most heading into 2020:

Although Democrats initially played down the Wuhan virus, denouncing Trump as a xenophobe for closing down most traffic to the U.S. from China and Europe, they soon realized that the virus had the potential to damage the economy. The 15-day lockdown to bend the curve was probably legitimate, but it didn’t take long to realize that extending the lockdown was where the real power lay. The lockdown also showed Democrats how remarkably compliant people are when fear is used to take away their liberty.

As the lockdown continued, and Democrats always gave passes to Black Lives Matter and Antifa, people began to suspect that politics drove the Democrats’ insistence that Americans must live abnormally constrained lives until the virus ends or there is a vaccination. Trump, therefore, terrified the Democrats by promising a vaccination before the election. Kamala Harris responded by saying preemptively that the vaccination would be dangerous.

Much of the above was and is supposition. But now we have something different and concrete.

Los Angeles County is America’s most populous county, the largest government entity in America that is not a state or the federal government, and the third-largest metropolitan economy in the world. It’s also entirely Democrat-run, as evidenced by poverty, drugs, and homelessness, as well as its vast wealth inequality.

Los Angeles students still cannot go to school but must, instead, do online learning. We already know that part of the problem is that the teachers’ union had some pretty stringent demands, few related to the students’ physical and mental well-being.

However, it turns out the continued school closures are also because of politics. We know this because LA County’s Public Health Director, Barbara Ferrer, admitted as much when speaking to a gathering of school nurses and other school administrators:

So we don’t realistically anticipate we will be moving to tier 2 or to reopening K-12 schools at least until after the election, after, you know, in early November. When we just look at the timing of everything it seems to us the more realistic approach to this would be to think that we’re going to be where we are now until we get, until after we are done with the election.

There is no scientific connection between the election and the Wuhan virus. There is, however, a cynical connection between the lockdown and the election. The Democrats know that, and Ferrer finally said it out loud. If you’ve suffered from the lockdown, be sure to remember that the Democrats did it on purpose.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

If this is “the recovery”, what are things going to look like once economic conditions start to deteriorate again? 

As you will see below, more than half of all households in some of our largest cities “are facing serious financial problems”, and Americans continue to file for unemployment benefits at a rate that the United States had never seen before prior to 2020.  When 695,000 workers filed for unemployment benefits during a single week in 1982, it established a record which stood for nearly 38 years.  But now we have been way above that old record for 25 weeks in a row.  On Thursday, we learned that another 884,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week…

Weekly jobless claims were worse than expected last week amid a plodding climb for the U.S. labor market from the damage inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.

The Labor Department on Thursday reported 884,000 first-time filings for unemployment insurance, compared with 850,000 expected by economists surveyed by Dow Jones. The total was unchanged from the previous week.

Of course it is always important to look at the non-adjusted numbers, and according to those numbers we actually saw an increase over the previous week…

The Labor Department changed its methodology in how it seasonally adjusts the numbers, so the past two weeks’ totals are not directly comparable to the reports from earlier in the pandemic. Claims not adjusted for seasonal factors totaled 857,148, an increase of 20,140 from the previous week.

This is the second week in a row that the non-seasonally adjusted initial claims have risen.

That definitely wasn’t supposed to happen.

We are supposedly in a “recovery” right now, and things are supposed to be getting better.

But instead they appear to be getting worse.  According to Wolf Richter, continuing claims under all state and federal programs were way up last week…

Total continued claims for unemployment insurance (UI) under all state and federal programs rose by 380,000, to 29.6 million people (not seasonally adjusted), the highest since August 1, according to the Department of Labor this morning. This was the second weekly increase in a row, after the 2.2-million jump last week.

At any other time in American history, the numbers that were just reported would be considered “catastrophic”, but we have been getting these sorts of catastrophic numbers for so long that we have become desensitized to them.

But at least the unemployment numbers are not as bad as they were earlier this year, and other economic figures seem to have hit a bit of a plateau as well.

So for the moment there is relative calm, but it won’t last for very long.

If you feel like something really, really bad is about to happen, you are definitely not alone.  There are countless others that are also waiting for “the other shoe to drop”, and I believe that it could literally happen at any time.

But for now we wait.

I would encourage you to enjoy these remaining days of summer while you still can.  This weekend, put some burgers on the grill and enjoy some time with your family.  Unfortunately, there are many Americans that are under such financial stress that it is hard to enjoy much of anything right now.  In fact, one recent survey found that 50 percent or more of the households in some of our largest cities are currently facing “serious financial problems”…

There’s no question the coronavirus pandemic has forced many Americans into financial hardship, but a new NPR/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation survey provided a clearer picture of the extent of the struggles in the United States’ four largest cities.

At least half of all households in those cities — 53 percent in New York City, 56 percent in Los Angeles, 50 percent in Chicago, and 63 percent in Houston — reported facing serious financial problems, including depleted savings, problems paying credit card bills, and affording medical bills.

How can that be possible if we are in the midst of a tremendous “recovery”?

Of course the truth is that we aren’t in any sort of a recovery, but at least things are a whole lot better than they will be after the upcoming election.

I had such an ominous feeling coming into 2020, and I shared this repeatedly with my readers, and now I have such an ominous feeling about the rest of 2020 and beyond.

In particular, I am extremely concerned about what will happen in November.  No matter who is ultimately declared the winner, the other side is going to be convinced that the election was stolen from them and that is likely to throw our nation into a state of chaos.

And we are already being told that we probably will not know the winner until long after election day.  That period of uncertainty is almost certainly going to spark more civil unrest, and I believe that faith in the integrity of our elections will be greatly shaken.

Before I end this article, there is one more thing that I wanted to mention that I found to be extremely interesting.  This year the Federal Reserve has been buying up mortgage bonds worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and according to Mish Shedlock the Fed now owns nearly a third of that entire market…

• The Fed has snapped up $1 trillion of mortgage bonds since March. It bought around $300 billion of the bonds in each of March and April, and since then has been buying about $100 billion a month.

• The Fed now owns almost a third of bonds backed by home loans in the U.S.

• Buying the securities has pushed mortgage rates lower, with the average 30-year rate falling to 2.91% as of last week from 3.3% in early February.

• Morgan Stanley analysts pointed out in late March that the buying was running at eight times the pace seen in prior episodes of Fed purchasing under programs known as quantitative easing.

No matter who wins the election, the direction of the Fed is not going to change.  They are going to continue to engage in exceedingly reckless manipulation of the markets, and that is going to have very serious long-term implications.

All around us, we can see our society being thrown into convulsions as all of our systems begin to fail.

I know that so many of you out there are feeling the exact same way that I am.

A sense of anticipation hangs in the air, and millions of people are waiting for the next big crisis to erupt.

The suicide rate among Americans ages 10 to 24 increased by 57% between 2007 and 2018, data published Thursday from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) shows. New concerns are mounting that social media could be contributing to the wave of suicides among younger generations.

Between 2007 and 2018, the national suicide rate among persons aged 10–24 increased by 57.4%. The increase was broad, as it was experienced by the majority of states. -NCHS

On a state-by-state basis, the percentage change between 3-year averages of suicide rates for 2007–2009 and 2016–2018 increased down to 47%. The largest increases were seen in New Hampshire, Oregon, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Michigan.

Forty-two states had significant increases in their suicide rates between 2007–2009 and 2016–2018, and eight states had nonsignificant increases. Most states had increases of between 30%–60%. Suicide rates in 2016–2018 were highest in Alaska and lowest in New Jersey. – NCHS

Courtesy of Bloomberg, here’s a complete visualization of the youth suicide crisis that has unfolded across the country.

NCHS’s data only covered suicides between 2007-2018, but there’s reason to believe the trend is continuing, due mostly to the virus pandemic-related stress. 

“There are many reasons to suspect that suicide rates will increase this year too, not just because of Covid-19 but because stress and anxiety seem to be permeating every aspect of our lives,” Shannon Monnat, co-director of the Policy, Place, and Population Health Lab at Syracuse University, told Bloomberg.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among youngsters. Readers may recall we covered the troubling trend developing in youth suicides in late 2019. A significant influencer behind the trend could be the proliferation of social media in the last decade. 

“There is an independent association between problematic use of social media/internet and suicide attempts in young people,” a study recently published in the LWW Journals titled “Social media, internet use and suicide attempts in adolescents” said. 

Making matters worse, teen and youth anxiety/depression have sharply risen this year as the virus pandemic, depressionary unemployment, and social unrest, have resulted in a pessimistic outlook for the country. 

“At the end of June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed almost 10,000 Americans on their mental health. They found symptoms of anxiety and depression were up sharply across the board between March and June, compared with the same time the previous year. And young people seemed to be the hardest-hit of any group.

“Almost 11 percent of all respondents to that survey said they had “seriously considered” suicide in the past 30 days. For those ages 18 to 24, the number was 1 in 4 — more than twice as high.” –NPR News 

The UK’s Royal Society for Public recently ranked the top five social media platforms that impact mental health. It found Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter had the most negative effect on the psychological health of youngsters. 

Source: Statista

In a separate report, the use of social media was directly linked to an increase in depressive symptoms in teenagers. 

Days ago, we noted how an older millennial, aged 33, also an Army veteran, killed himself with a shotgun on Facebook Live. The chilling footage circulated across the internet and went viral on TikTok. 

Long and short term trends suggest the American youth are slipping into the abyss as a suicide crisis is worsening. 

Authored by Sean Trende via RealClearPolitics.com,

In 2016, as I was preparing to write my “Why Hillary Will Win” piece, I decided to have my able then-assistant, David Byler (now of Washington Post fame), do a bit of research. His job was to look up the share of the electorate that pollsters were anticipating for whites without college degrees and for African Americans.

What he found put an end to the piece.

It seemed a big bet was being placed on 2012 levels of black turnout occurring in 2016 and, more importantly, that pollsters were badly underestimating turnout for whites without college degrees. In previous years, that hadn’t really mattered – whites with and without college degrees voted Republican at roughly the same levels. Underestimating the share of whites without college degrees and overestimating whites with college degrees wouldn’t have mattered in 2012 or 2008, because their votes were fungible.

On a hunch, I went back and looked at the poll errors for 2013-15, and it became apparent that the errors for 2016 followed much the same pattern: They were concentrated in areas with large numbers of whites without college degrees. Indeed, the size of the poll error correlated heavily with whites-without-college-degree share (p<.001); you could explain about one-third of the difference in the size of poll miss just from knowing the share of the electorate that was whites without a college degree.

We all know what happened next. Trump surprised observers by winning states that Republican presidential candidates hadn’t carried since Debbie Gibson and Tiffany fought it out for top placement in the Top 40 charts. The misses were particularly pronounced in the Midwest.

Most pollsters attributed the misses to the failure to weight by education, and when one brings up the errors from 2016 with respect to the 2020 election, the answer typically is “pollsters now weight by education, so they’ve fixed it.”

But have they? We actually have a pretty nice sample from 2018 to draw upon. If pollsters have really figured out where they went wrong in key states in 2016, we should see a marked improvement over 2016 and 2014.

So, I went back and looked at the Democratic bias in the polls for swing states in 2014, 2016, and 2018. I could not use North Carolina, since there was no statewide race there in 2018. One problem I encountered is that in 2018 many states were under-polled, so RCP didn’t create an average. I’ve gone back and averaged the October polls for those states, if available (note that we don’t have three polls in October for Minnesota in 2016, hence the asterisk there). As a check on this approach, I’ve also included the error from the 538 “polls-only” model for 2018.

The results are something of a mixed bag, but overall it isn’t clear that the pollsters have really fixed the problem at all. While the bias toward Democrats was smaller in 2018 than in 2016, the bias overall was similar to what we saw in 2014, especially in the Midwest. If people remember, the polls in 2018 suggested that we should today have Democratic governors in Ohio, Iowa and Florida, and new Democratic senators in Indiana, Missouri and Florida. Obviously this did not come to pass.

Moreover, almost all of the errors pointed the same way: Republicans overperformed the polls in every Midwestern state except for Minnesota Senate/governor and Wisconsin Senate (none of which were particularly competitive). This is true, incidentally, across the time period: We see marginal Democratic overperformances in the Michigan and Minnesota Senate races in 2014, but otherwise pollsters have consistently underestimated Republican strength. Note that if we had added the competitive Senate race in North Dakota and the governor race in South Dakota in 2018, we’d also see Republican overperformances of a couple of points.

Outside of the Midwest the polling improvements were a mixed bag; Florida was worse than it had been in 2014 or 2016, Arizona was much better, and the uncompetitive races in Pennsylvania were something of a wash (people forget that the Pennsylvania polling in 2016 really did suggest a tight race).

At the same time, we should keep in mind that predicting poll errors is something of a mug’s game; pollsters change techniques from year to year, and they do learn. In 2014 there was something of a fight among elections analysts regarding whether we should expect an error in the Republicans’ direction in that year, given the results in 2012 and 2010. As I said in then:

The bottom line, I think, is that it is difficult to translate these observations into a prediction. It is one thing to say, “There may have been skew in the previous two cycles.” It is quite another to say, “On the basis of this, we can predict what will happen in the following cycle.” … After all, the claim here is not simply that the polls may be skewed. The claim is that the polls may be skewed in a Democratic direction in this year.

In other words, to take this seriously, you have to take it as a prediction. The problem arises when you ask the question: How can we make this prediction reliably, e.g., with some sort of methodology and based upon actual evidence?

So, the point here is not that we should expect that polls in the Midwest or Florida will be biased against Republicans in 2020. They may well not be. We should also keep in mind that the Upper Midwest was under-polled in 2016, and that will not be the case this year. Instead, the point is that we should remain open to the possibility that this can still happen, and not take at face value assurances that pollsters have fixed this problem.

Markets were already heading lower earlier this month when AstraZeneca announced that the vaccine it had been developing in partnership with Oxford University had hit an unexpected snag: a patient showed an unexpected “adverse reaction” resembling a form of meningitis. Suddenly, all the skeptics’ warnings about a vaccine not being available for months, perhaps even years, are ringing in professionals’ heads again.

But in China, regulators within the CCP have allowed vaccine maker Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy to launch “Phase 1” human trials of a nasal spray vaccine, which is being co-developed by researchers at Xiamen University and Hong Kong University.

Intranasal spray has previously been developed as a vaccine for the flu and is recommended for use among children and adults who want to avoid the more common needle injection. While it is not the most frequent choice for delivery, scientists around the world are working to develop sprays as an alternative to muscle jabs for all sorts of vaccines.

It’s China’s tenth vaccine candidate to proceed to human testing, though Beijing has much more sway to “relax” certain standards than the FDA, as the world recently learned. And with the AZ-Oxford vaccine now on hold, Beijing now has a chance to close the gap.

The new spray contains weakened copies of the virus implanted with the genetic segments of the coronavirus’s spike protein that will allow it to take hold inside the patient’s nasal passage.

Once administered, the vaccine mimics the natural infection of respiratory viruses to stimulate the body’s immune response against the pathogen that causes COVID-19, according to Science and Technology Daily, a paper affiliated with China’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

Some scientists hope a vaccine that gets sprayed through the nose may have a better chance of stopping the spread of the virus because, as we continue to learn, the virus appears to primarily spread through the air via aerosol infection.

Intranasal spray has previously been developed as a vaccine for the flu and is recommended for use among children and adults who want to avoid the more common needle injection. While it is not the most frequent choice for delivery, scientists around the world are working to develop sprays.

China’s new nasal spray vax project joins about 35 other candidates currently in human testing, as the global race to be first with an effective vaccine intensifies, with the candidate from Russia so far holding its own alongside a battery of projects developed in the West. In the wake of AstraZeneca’s setback, China’s most advanced vaccine developers, including CanSino Biologics Inc. and state-owned China National Biotec Group Co., have emphasized the safety of their own shots.

CNBG said the two shots it is testing are effective in staving off infection. None of the Chinese diplomats and workers traveling to virus hot spots overseas has reported infections several months after receiving the vaccines, Zhou Song, CNBG’s general counsel, said.

Authored by Heather Lalley via RestaurantBusinessOnline.com,

Danny Abrams opened a restaurant six blocks from the World Trade Center site six weeks after 9/11.

Even during that difficult time, the restaurant was welcomed by the city with more than 100 covers a night for the first year.

“But this is very different,” Abrams said. “It’s hard to compare.”

This, of course, is the pandemic.

Abrams and his partner, Cindy Smith, run seven restaurants in New York. They recently made the difficult decision to close The Mermaid Inn in the East Village after more than 17 years.

“I think there’s a restaurant-closing tsunami on the way,” Abrams said. “It’s going to happen after September. They’re not seeing a wave of closings yet because people are still trying to hang on and people are still playing with some of the PPP they might’ve gotten.”

The Mermaid Inn, which was known by locals for its happy hour deals, had about 80 seats inside, 20 in the garden, and 16 on the sidewalk. Abrams said it typically did strong business in the spring and summer, before quieting in the winter.

“We really needed May, June, July, August, September,” he said. “If we miss that window and then get to do 50% in October, 50% in November? Forget about it.”

Abrams and Smith wrote a detailed letter, explaining the closure and detailing the current pressures on independent restaurant operators, and shared it on their Facebook page.

The two are currently doing everything they can to reduce expenses at their existing concepts, to try to stay afloat until this crisis passes.

“It’s all about survival right now,” he said. “I want to be the last man standing.”

This letter, written by Mermaid Inn co-owners Danny Abrams and Cindy Smith and shared on social media, has been edited slightly from its original and shared here with their permission.

The Mermaid Inn at 96 Second Ave. Farewell Letter

To All Our Valued Guests and Friends

It is with great sadness that we announce the closing of The Mermaid Inn at 96 Second Ave. Our lease expired on August 31st and we were not able to come to an agreement with the landlord on how to move forward both during and after the pandemic. We want to thank all of our wonderful guests and employees for supporting us over these past years. What began as a little 29 seat restaurant on a sleepy stretch of Second Ave. grew into a place that had welcomed hundreds of thousands of guests and employed thousands of people over the years. We are extremely humbled that so many embraced our restaurant and that we were able to succeed as long as we had. For a restaurant to survive and thrive in New York City for 17.5 years is an accomplishment of which we can all be proud. And we could not have done it without all of you.

We all mourn the loss of our favorite restaurants for they provide us with so much more than food. They provide nourishment for our soul and when they are gone, much of the soul of the neighborhoods in which they resided will be gone as well: missing out on seeing our favorite bartender who remembers what we drink, saying “hi” to our favorite server and sitting at the table that makes us most comfortable, talking to the owner about life in general, seeing the hardworking support staff take extra care to provide us with a dropped napkin or a missing fork. All of these small gestures that make us feel at home in our neighborhood will be missing. And that will make our neighborhoods feel lacking as well–less interesting, less familiar, less inviting. These are one of the things that defines BEING AT HOME in our community. They are a gathering place to share accounts of our days, to celebrate big events in our lives or just share a table with our friends.

Mermaid By the Numbers

We are sharing this information to illustrate what ONE SINGLE RESTAURANT adds to its community and to the city. Many restaurants have closed since COVID and many more will close as the pandemic continues. The ripple effect will be incalculable.

Over the years, The Mermaid Inn on Second Ave has:

• Welcomed over 850,000 guests

• Paid over $15 million in wages to our more than 2,000 employees who have spent time with us

• Contributed more than $2.1 million in taxes to the city, the state, Medicare, SS, UI, etc

• Sent in excess of $4 million in sales tax to New York state

• Paid over $ 15 million to our hundreds of hard-working vendors

• Given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the city and state for permits, licenses, etc

We are providing these numbers to show the effect that the closing of a SINGLE restaurant has. Now multiply that by THOUSANDS of NYC restaurants closing. The loss of opportunity for employees, the loss of income for city, state and local governments, the loss of sales to our fish companies, our vegetable company, the linen company, even the company that comes to take our used oyster shells or our discarded grease. If we don’t pay them, they do not pay their employees and so on and so on. The chain is never ending.

The restaurant and hospitality industry has been woefully neglected during this pandemic. Actually, all small businesses have. The Payroll Protection Program has given us eight weeks of funds for what will be a 52-week problem. And look at who that money was allowed to pay: we were only allowed to pay for payroll (which is good) but also to the landlords, the insurance companies and the utility companies. Think about that for a second. Real estate owners, insurance conglomerates and large utility providers. Not one cent could go to the hundreds of small businesses that had provided us with goods and services. NOT ONE PENNY. Having lived in NYC since 1984, it seems that during every crisis, the big companies get bailed out and taken care of—the banks, the airlines, the insurance companies, etc. During the Great Recession, the banks and insurance providers played fast and loose with their money and brought the world economy to the brink of failure. They got bailed out with OUR TAX DOLLARS. Where is the reciprocity? Why do the small businesses always give and never get? It seems immeasurably unfair.

Our restaurants were MANDATED by the government to close down on March 16. Some of us had closed in advance of that date for fear that our employees and guests could get sick. We did so willingly so we could do our part in helping to contain the virus. But here we are, five and half months later, still closed, with no clear indication of what our future holds. There is no clear communication from the City or State that we can point to.

As for business in the meantime, we have few options. Delivery, while keeping a few people employed, does not provide any profit for the restaurant. The outdoor seating has helped some restaurants but it is weather-dependent, which leads to much uncertainty. And re-opening at 50% for many restaurants is a non-starter. How can a 75-seat restaurant, that only makes money in the best of times given the cost of doing business in NYC, reopen with 40 seats and no bar? Seriously? We would not even be able to make enough money to pay the employees, let alone our purveyors or rent.

We cannot continue to pay our key employees. The federal supplemental insurance has ended. Servers, bartenders, managers, bussers, food runners, etc. who had been making a decent living by New York standards are now left with only NYS Unemployment which pays out $504 a week AT THE MOST. How is anyone supposed to be able to provide for their families on $504? And that is for the top earners. Most of the recipients are getting far less than that. This is a slow-rolling humanitarian disaster and financial disaster in the making.

What hope do we have? The PPP money has run out. There is no more money to pay the rent. We are at the mercy of our landlords to give us some relief. We go to them like beggars, hoping they will find it in their hearts to allow us to survive. And if they don’t, then we are out of business. Just like that. How is that fair? Is that how an industry that provides so much in terms of employment and contributions to the economy should be treated?

When a restaurant is forced to close suddenly, as NYC restaurants were, there is no time to prepare for “the end.” Not only do we lose our income from that business but now we are saddled with debt to our vendors, utilities, insurance, etc. If someone said to us that you have to close your business in six months, we could plan and walk away. But the suddenness has left us all unprepared. Restaurants operate owing vendors 30 to 40 days’ worth of bills. As long as the business continues, everyone gets paid. This is like some cruel game of musical chairs and when the music stopped, small businesses were the ones left without a chair. The larger companies can tap credit lines, take out loans or avail themselves of other solutions that small businesses don’t have. Sure, some have been lucky to get Economic Injury Disaster Loans from the SBA but to what end? Why should we take on debt only to be opening to an uncertain future, not knowing if we can pay it back?

The Hospitality Industry needs a bail out just like every other large business. Not loans, but grants for us to pay our employees, vendors, to keep the lights on and be ready when the pandemic ends. We have earned it. We deserve it. Everyone knows that opening and running a restaurant in NYC is a herculean task. But we do it because we love it and we deserve to get some love back from our government. There are several bills floating around— a new round of PPP (helpful but not the best solution) and another bi-partisan bill called the RESTAURANTS ACT. This bill actually addresses our needs. I encourage all of you to call your representatives to express support for this legislation. We also need rent relief and a unified way for restaurants to negotiate with landlords. We need the insurance companies to honor the business interruption insurance that we’ve been paying for years. We need the loans we have received to be converted into grants. We need the street seating to continue each year. We need a way to use the street seating during the cold weather so we can at least keep some people employed. We simply need the basic relief and assistance that every other big business has received when faced with similar economic circumstances.

We have dealt with NYC adversity before. We opened a restaurant six blocks north of Ground Zero, just weeks after September 11th, 2001. It was the first business to open in Tribeca after that tragedy. We have felt the outpouring of love and resources available when the government has the will. We got through the Sandy Blackouts. We survived (barely) the Great Recession. We may not survive this if there is not some action at the state and federal level.

Lastly, I do not believe all the predictions that New York City is “over.” It will be back. It may take longer than it has in the past, but it will come back. New York will continue to be the beacon for theater, dance, food, music, nightlife, tourism and financial services. It will always draw young people, eager to express themselves in a place that allows for that. It will continue to encourage talented young chefs to open their own restaurants. It will always beckon people to come here to open a new business or just be in a place that has the energy that New York has. I believe the Jerry Seinfeld op-ed that said you won’t feel that energy over a ZOOM call. And if that becomes the norm and somehow replaces the energy that we have come to love and expect from NYC, then maybe, just maybe, we will have to move out as well. And your beloved NYC restaurant will disappear as well.

Former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly says that New York City will take much longer to bounce back from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ‘radical policies’ than from the destruction of the 9/11 attacks, according to Fox Business.

In a Friday interview with Fox Business Network‘s Neil Cavuto, Kelly – who took up the mantle as police commissioner for the second time following the 2001 terrorist attacks – remembered how “north of Canal Street [after the attacks], restaurants were open, people were living their lives in the other boroughs of New York City.”

“Now the problems of the city are all over the five boroughs,” Kelly continued. “People are moving out in significant numbers. De Blasio has lost the police department. They are reluctant to take proactive measures such as they were doing just or six or eight months ago, so it’s different.“

The former top cop is also “pessimistic” that New York will see a short-term comeback, saying that the pandemic and racial unrest gripping the city “has a feel or sense of being much more long-lasting.”

“[De Blasio] has been a disaster,” Kelly said, adding “I don’t see anything changing significantly, unfortunately, until he leaves office and even then it’s gonna be a bit of a crapshoot.”

“We see virtually nobody on the streets … you do see traffic, there’s automobile traffic, but there’s virtually no pedestrian traffic,” the former commissioner added. “The city has a very different feel than six months ago. People are anxious. People are worried about their own safety.” -Ray Kelly

Of course, according to the Wall Street Journal‘s Jimmy Vielkind, NY Governor Andrew Cuomo shares much of the blame.

In Worst-Hit Covid State, New York’s Cuomo Called All the Shots

As part of the @WSJ’s COVID Storm series, I spent months with @joe_palazzolo & @jacobgershman looking at how @NYGovCuomo managed the early days of the pandemic.

Here’s what we found —>https://t.co/O55zCvc8PY

— Jimmy Vielkind (@JimmyVielkind) September 11, 2020

(continued via Thread reader, emphasis ours)…

Cuomo and his small team took command of the Health Dept and overrode local govs that wanted to go beyond the state’s social distancing restrictions. That delayed the New ork City shutdown and slowed the reaction time as the virus spread in nursing homes.

Cuomo’s aides said the state shut down as soon as possible, and that a few days delay didn’t make much difference.

“It’s because it was here for five weeks and nobody knew it,” Melissa DeRosa, the governor’s top aide, said.

Now, the rate of positive coronavirus tests statewide—which topped 40% in April—has been under 1% for more than a month.

Mr. Cuomo and his aides have attributed those results to his tight control over the state’s reopening.

From the beginning, @NYGovCuomo was focused on communicating with the public. While flying with him on the state plane on Feb. 9, he said panic can sometimes be worse than the underlying disaster.

“When the governor got on the phone, he said, ‘Guys, don’t think this isn’t going to happen or that we’re being hysterical or foolhardy. This is what I want, and I want it by tomorrow.’”

.@BilldeBlasio was so concerned by the governor’s reaction that he asked a city lawyer whether the governor had the power to remove him from office, city officials said.

After GNYHA President Ken Raske complained nursing homes were refusing to accept patients, Mr. Cuomo’s team approved an order from the NYSDOH which said nursing homes couldn’t refuse to admit patients simply because they had tested positive.

On March 18, Cuomo issued an executive order mandating state approval of local orders.

“I found a hot spot, and they did nothing,” said Ed Day, the Republican county executive. “Guidance from Albany is a good idea. But ruling from Albany is not.”

Cuomo was concerned about the ripple effects of closing the world’s financial capital. On Sunday March 15, the governor’s aides had helped the New York Stock Exchange keep its trading floor open by arranging for doctors to screen workers.

While the rates of infection were starting to rise in Southern and Western states, the virus had loosened its grip on New York. The number of New Yorkers hospitalized had remained flat since the middle of May.

In an Aug. 19 radio interview, Mr. Cuomo acknowledged making a litany of mistakes.

“We were late in finding the virus here,” said Mr. Cuomo, adding that he believed the federal government shared some blame. “The collective ‘we’ made many mistakes.”