Month: June 2021

Stanford Law Dean: ‘I Would Never Have Approved’ Investigating a Student for Mocking the Federalist Society


Jenny-Martinez-Stanford-Law-School-Jennifer-Paschal

Stanford Law School Dean Jenny S. Martinez says she did not hear about the university’s two-month investigation of third-year student Nicholas Wallace’s satirical flyer mocking the Federalist Society until June 1. That was the same day the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) sent the university’s Office of Community Standards a letter on Wallace’s behalf, noting that the investigation, which put his diploma on hold two weeks before he was scheduled to graduate, violated Stanford’s commitment to freedom of expression.

“I would never have approved such a thing,” Martinez said in an email to the “Stanford Law Community” that Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern posted on Twitter. “Stanford Law School is strongly committed to free speech, is concerned about actions and climate that have the potential to chill speech, and has shared those concerns with the university.”

An officer of the Stanford Federalist Society filed a complaint against Wallace on March 27, accusing him of violating the university’s code of conduct, known as the “Fundamental Standard,” by emailing a facetious flyer to fellow students on January 25. The flyer implicitly criticized the Federalist Society’s ties to lawyers who participated in former President Donald Trump’s dogged campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It described a made-up Federalist Society event scheduled for January 6, the day that Trump supporters invaded the Capitol in a vain attempt to stop Joe Biden from taking office. The theme: “The Originalist Case for Insurrection.” The speakers: Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), who played a leading role in the challenges to Biden’s electoral votes on January 6, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who filed a quixotic lawsuit seeking to overturn Biden’s victory and addressed Trump’s supporters at the “Save America” rally that preceded the riot.

Although such political satire is clearly protected by the First Amendment, the complaint against Wallace alleged that he had “defamed” the Stanford Federalist Society, its officers, Hawley, and Paxton. University officials took that plainly erroneous claim seriously, notifying Wallace on May 27 that his diploma was on hold pending the outcome of their investigation. They announced that they had removed the hold on January 2, after the case attracted national attention and provoked the letter from FIRE.

“When I became aware of this particular situation,” Martinez wrote, “I strongly urged the University to consider whether it needs procedures that more quickly resolve whether constitutionally protected speech is involved in a Fundamental Standard complaint.” She added that the university should reconsider “the policies and procedures that led to their placing a graduation hold on this student on the eve of final exams.”

As I noted yesterday, it is hard to understand why it took so long for the university’s Office of Community Standards to decide that Wallace’s joke was constitutionally protected. The case law on that point is clear, and the office has publicly acknowledged that Fundamental Standard complaints can conflict with Stanford’s avowed commitment to free expression as well as a California law that bars disciplinary action against private university students for speech protected by the First Amendment.

“We followed our normal procedures and conducted a factual inquiry,” the university said on Wednesday. “Given that this complaint raised issues of protected speech, we also consulted with legal counsel after we obtained the relevant facts. In cases where the complaint is filed in proximity to graduation, our normal procedure includes placing a graduation diploma hold on the respondent.”

Although Stanford said “the complaint was resolved as expeditiously as possible,” that is plainly not true. The “relevant facts”—the contents of Wallace’s satirical flyer—could have been “obtained” readily, and the university’s “legal counsel” should have immediately recognized that Wallace’s faux announcement was not defamatory and that “case law supports that the email is protected speech,” as the university ultimately decided after it received withering criticism for jeopardizing Wallace’s career based on the Stanford Federalist Society’s fallacious complaint.

“I think it is imperative that we take action to ensure that something like this does not happen again,” Martinez said. She noted that the university has said it will “continue to review policies and practices” related to Fundamental Standard complaints that implicate freedom of speech. It said it also is “reviewing procedures for placing holds on student accounts in judicial cases in close proximity to graduation to ensure that holds are limited to cases for which the outcome could be serious enough to affect the timing of degree conferral.”

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Lingering COVID Requirements for NYC Bars and Restaurants Amount to Pointless Hygiene Theater


lrphotos132181

In a city where 62.8 percent of adults have received their first COVID-19 vaccine dose, and 54.4 percent of adults are fully vaccinated, it makes little sense why New York City’s governing bodies continue to exercise heavy-handed control over what private restaurants and bars do to protect their patrons from COVID. It makes even less sense when you consider the specific regulations still in place, and how many of them are relics of a form of shoddy hygiene theater that made some limited amount of sense earlier in the pandemic, before we knew how the virus worked, but are not scientifically justified now.

Current guidance, updated most recently on May 7, requires that temperature checks be conducted upon arrival and that tables remain spaced six feet apart from each other (or have pointless plexiglass barriers, which “must be at least five feet in height,” for some reason, installed between booths). As of May 19, restaurants may finally reopen at full capacity for the first time since March 2020—a welcome opportunity for entrepreneurs whose businesses have been crippled by lockdowns and patchwork reopening guidance—but the regulations placed on them make very little sense. For some New York restaurants, the requirement to keep tables six feet apart from each other will even make it so they cannot truly operate at full capacity if they want to remain in compliance.

Customers are finally allowed to sit at the bar, but only “provided a distance of at least six feet can be maintained between parties (i.e., groups of patrons).” Bar and restaurant proprietors are still expected to “put in place measures to reduce bi-directional foot traffic…by using tape or signs with arrows in narrow aisles, hallways, or spaces,” placing “distance markers denoting spaces of six feet in all commonly used areas.”

Though the nonsensical midnight curfews for indoor and outdoor dining have finally been lifted citywide, many other pointless measures remain in place. Just as they’ve been forced to for the last 15 months, business owners must continue to navigate a maze of state- and city-imposed restrictions that fail to take into account the idea that maybe they’re the ones best suited to decide what works for their own staff and customers.

Some hygiene measures are thankfully beginning to be lifted: The state’s mask mandates are no longer in place indoors if restaurants require proof of vaccination for staff and customers. For those customers, too, distancing requirements are no longer in place, but it’s logistically incredibly difficult for businesses to verify that and to implement different policies for vaccinated and unvaccinated patrons (who might even be in the same party). Midnight curfews, which never made sense since they forced people to convene within a shorter timeframe (and sometimes even shifted revelry indoors to cramped apartments), were lifted for outdoor dining in mid-May, and for indoor dining just a few days ago.

It’s fine for private businesses to take measures to restore a degree of confidence for their more skittish customers so that they will finally venture out into the world. But the measures that many of them have implemented, both those mandated by law and those voluntarily opted into because they’re standard practice expected by anxious customers, are not actually particularly useful for preventing the spread of COVID, a virus we now know a lot about.

Consider temperature checks, which only screen for one COVID symptom, which may or may not be present if someone is contagious; plexiglass barriers, which do not make sense for a virus that spreads via airborne transmission of aerosols; markers on the floor, which direct people through separate entrances and exits and do not make sense for a virus that is spread through longer-duration close contact (not few-second encounters); the theatrical practice of masking up to enter a restaurant, then walking to your table and keeping your mask off for the rest of the evening, the part with talking and laughing, donning it only to use the bathroom (where, for New York’s many single-occupancy facilities, you will not run into a single other soul unless you invite them).

Though these remnants of hygiene theater may seem like trivial inconveniences not worth forcefully opposing, it would be wrong to keep in place measures that make people feel safe but actually spread bad information about how this virus spreads. Getting vaccinated provides the best protection; plexiglass barriers and entrance/exit floor markers won’t do the trick.

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Facebook Confirms Trump Banned From Platform Until At Least January 2023

Facebook Confirms Trump Banned From Platform Until At Least January 2023

One day after announcing that it would no longer publish politicians’ posts by default, Facebook has just confirmed that it will suspend President Trump for at least two years – meaning his suspension from the platform will last at least through the 2022 midterm – and that the former president’s access to the platform will only be reinstated if certain conditions are met.

The suspension will be backdated to the start of his suspension from the platform in January, according to Nick Clegg, Facebook’s head of global affairs, and a former British deputy prime minister.

Clegg added that Trump’s suspension is particularly severe because “his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols we’re announcing today.”

After that date, Facebook will evaluate whether the “risk to public safety” of restoring Trump’s account has abated. If the suspension is then lifted, Trump will still be subject to a “strict” set of sanctions for future policy violations, the company said.

The decision comes roughly one month after Facebook’s independent oversight board upheld the company’s decision to ban Trump, arguing that “Trump’s posts during the Capitol riot severely violated Facebook’s rules and encouraged and legitimized violence.”

Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/04/2021 – 12:57

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3wY4US1 Tyler Durden

Stanford Law Dean: ‘I Would Never Have Approved’ Investigating a Student for Mocking the Federalist Society


Jenny-Martinez-Stanford-Law-School-Jennifer-Paschal

Stanford Law School Dean Jenny S. Martinez says she did not hear about the university’s two-month investigation of third-year student Nicholas Wallace’s satirical flyer mocking the Federalist Society until June 1. That was the same day the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) sent the university’s Office of Community Standards a letter on Wallace’s behalf, noting that the investigation, which put his diploma on hold two weeks before he was scheduled to graduate, violated Stanford’s commitment to freedom of expression.

“I would never have approved such a thing,” Martinez said in an email to the “Stanford Law Community” that Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern posted on Twitter. “Stanford Law School is strongly committed to free speech, is concerned about actions and climate that have the potential to chill speech, and has shared those concerns with the university.”

An officer of the Stanford Federalist Society filed a complaint against Wallace on March 27, accusing him of violating the university’s code of conduct, known as the “Fundamental Standard,” by emailing a facetious flyer to fellow students on January 25. The flyer implicitly criticized the Federalist Society’s ties to lawyers who participated in former President Donald Trump’s dogged campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It described a made-up Federalist Society event scheduled for January 6, the day that Trump supporters invaded the Capitol in a vain attempt to stop Joe Biden from taking office. The theme: “The Originalist Case for Insurrection.” The speakers: Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), who played a leading role in the challenges to Biden’s electoral votes on January 6, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who filed a quixotic lawsuit seeking to overturn Biden’s victory and addressed Trump’s supporters at the “Save America” rally that preceded the riot.

Although such political satire is clearly protected by the First Amendment, the complaint against Wallace alleged that he had “defamed” the Stanford Federalist Society, its officers, Hawley, and Paxton. University officials took that plainly erroneous claim seriously, notifying Wallace on May 27 that his diploma was on hold pending the outcome of their investigation. They announced that they had removed the hold on January 2, after the case attracted national attention and provoked the letter from FIRE.

“When I became aware of this particular situation,” Martinez wrote, “I strongly urged the University to consider whether it needs procedures that more quickly resolve whether constitutionally protected speech is involved in a Fundamental Standard complaint.” She added that the university should reconsider “the policies and procedures that led to their placing a graduation hold on this student on the eve of final exams.”

As I noted yesterday, it is hard to understand why it took so long for the university’s Office of Community Standards to decide that Wallace’s joke was constitutionally protected. The case law on that point is clear, and the office has publicly acknowledged that Fundamental Standard complaints can conflict with Stanford’s avowed commitment to free expression as well as a California law that bars disciplinary action against private university students for speech protected by the First Amendment.

“We followed our normal procedures and conducted a factual inquiry,” the university said on Wednesday. “Given that this complaint raised issues of protected speech, we also consulted with legal counsel after we obtained the relevant facts. In cases where the complaint is filed in proximity to graduation, our normal procedure includes placing a graduation diploma hold on the respondent.”

Although Stanford said “the complaint was resolved as expeditiously as possible,” that is plainly not true. The “relevant facts”—the contents of Wallace’s satirical flyer—could have been “obtained” readily, and the university’s “legal counsel” should have immediately recognized that Wallace’s faux announcement was not defamatory and that “case law supports that the email is protected speech,” as the university ultimately decided after it received withering criticism for jeopardizing Wallace’s career based on the Stanford Federalist Society’s fallacious complaint.

“I think it is imperative that we take action to ensure that something like this does not happen again,” Martinez said. She noted that the university has said it will “continue to review policies and practices” related to Fundamental Standard complaints that implicate freedom of speech. It said it also is “reviewing procedures for placing holds on student accounts in judicial cases in close proximity to graduation to ensure that holds are limited to cases for which the outcome could be serious enough to affect the timing of degree conferral.”

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New IRS Data Reveals Which States Won (And Lost) In The Battle For People & Their Wealth

New IRS Data Reveals Which States Won (And Lost) In The Battle For People & Their Wealth

Authored by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner via Wirepoints.org,

Every year, states across the country compete with each other for people and their wealth as millions of Americans move between states. The stakes are large. A growing population for the winners means an increasing tax base, economic growth and investment. For the biggest losers, it means more difficulties in paying down debts, higher taxes and fewer investments for the future.

The nation’s most-recent winners of migration from other states are Florida and Idaho. Florida, the nation’s perennial winner, gained the most people and income overall in 2019, while Idaho gained the most of both on a percentage basis.

On the other end of the competition are states that have become perennial losers. States like California, New York, Illinois and New Jersey once again experienced some of the nation’s biggest losses of both residents and their money.

Those findings are based on a Wirepoints’ analysis of the latest 2019 domestic migration data provided by the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS reviews tax returns annually to track when and where people move. It also aggregates the ages, income brackets and adjusted gross incomes of filers.

Winners and losers

The Sunshine State attracted over $34.4 billion in Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) from 558,096 new residents (tax filers and their dependents) that moved into Florida in 2019. On the flip side, Florida lost $15.6 billion in AGI from 431,307 people who left. Overall, Florida came out ahead with 126,789 net new people and $17.7 billion in net new taxable income.

That’s a total gain of about 2.7 percent of the state’s total 2018 AGI ($661 billion).

Texas was the runner up with a net income gain of $4.0 billion, followed by Arizona with $3.8 billion. North and South Carolina rounded out the top five with net gains of $2.8 billion and $2.6 billion, respectively.

On the losing side, New York suffered the worst outflow of money of any state in 2019. The Empire State lost a net $9 billion in income, or more than 1.15 percent of its 2018 AGI, while a net of nearly 153,000 residents moved out.

California was next, losing a net $8.8 billion and 165,000 people. Illinois was third with a net loss of $6.0 billion and 82,000 people. New Jersey and Maryland were in 4th and 5th place, with $3.1 and $1.8 billion in income losses, respectively.

Tables with each state’s ranking in migration gains/losses are provided below.

The cumulative impact of income losses and gains

The problem with chronic outflows, like in the case of New York, is that one year’s losses don’t only affect the tax base the year they leave, but they also hurt all subsequent years. The losses pile up on top of each other, year after year. And when a state loses income to other states for 19 straight years, the numbers add up.

In 2019 alone, New York would have had nearly $103 billion more in AGI to tax had it not been for the state’s string of yearly migration losses. 

And when the state’s AGI losses are accumulated from 2000 to 2019, it totals $892 billion in cumulative lost income that could have been taxed over the entire period.

The opposite is true for migration winners like Florida. Gains in people and income pile on top of each other each year, building an ever-growing tax base. In 2019 alone, the state’s tax base was some $173 billion higher due to the 19-year string of positive income gains from net in-migration.

Even though Florida doesn’t tax incomes, Wirepoints also added up Florida’s cumulative AGI to make an apples-to-apples comparison with New York. When the Sunshine State’s AGI gains are accumulated from 2000 to 2019, it totals $1.4 trillion in income that could have been taxed over the entire period.

The competition for people matters

Illinois’ own experience with out-migration shows just how damaging being an “exit” state can be.

Based on a percentage of total income, Illinois ranked worst nationally for income losses in 2019. Illinois lost 1.41 percent of its 2018 AGI. Alaska and New York ranked second and third, with losses of 1.35 percent and 1.15 percent of their total incomes, respectively.

In contrast, Idaho was the nation’s big winner on a percentage basis in 2019, gaining 2.8 percent of its 2018 AGI base. The nation’s top five were rounded out by Florida, Nevada, Arizona and South Carolina.

Illinois’ $6.0 billion AGI loss in 2019 wasn’t just a one-time thing. Wirepoints’ analysis found that, like New York, the state has netted annual losses of both resident and AGI every single year since at least 2000.

Florida’s gains and Illinois’ losses are a clear reminder that states are constantly competing for people, businesses and a growing tax base.

The prize for winning is big, but the price for losing may be even bigger.

Read more about migration and population changes across the nation:

Appendix

Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/04/2021 – 12:41

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3wP5xgK Tyler Durden

Lingering COVID Requirements for NYC Bars and Restaurants Amount to Pointless Hygiene Theater


lrphotos132181

In a city where 62.8 percent of adults have received their first COVID-19 vaccine dose, and 54.4 percent of adults are fully vaccinated, it makes little sense why New York City’s governing bodies continue to exercise heavy-handed control over what private restaurants and bars do to protect their patrons from COVID. It makes even less sense when you consider the specific regulations still in place, and how many of them are relics of a form of shoddy hygiene theater that made some limited amount of sense earlier in the pandemic, before we knew how the virus worked, but are not scientifically justified now.

Current guidance, updated most recently on May 7, requires that temperature checks be conducted upon arrival and that tables remain spaced six feet apart from each other (or have pointless plexiglass barriers, which “must be at least five feet in height,” for some reason, installed between booths). As of May 19, restaurants may finally reopen at full capacity for the first time since March 2020—a welcome opportunity for entrepreneurs whose businesses have been crippled by lockdowns and patchwork reopening guidance—but the regulations placed on them make very little sense. For some New York restaurants, the requirement to keep tables six feet apart from each other will even make it so they cannot truly operate at full capacity if they want to remain in compliance.

Customers are finally allowed to sit at the bar, but only “provided a distance of at least six feet can be maintained between parties (i.e., groups of patrons).” Bar and restaurant proprietors are still expected to “put in place measures to reduce bi-directional foot traffic…by using tape or signs with arrows in narrow aisles, hallways, or spaces,” placing “distance markers denoting spaces of six feet in all commonly used areas.”

Though the nonsensical midnight curfews for indoor and outdoor dining have finally been lifted citywide, many other pointless measures remain in place. Just as they’ve been forced to for the last 15 months, business owners must continue to navigate a maze of state- and city-imposed restrictions that fail to take into account the idea that maybe they’re the ones best suited to decide what works for their own staff and customers.

Some hygiene measures are thankfully beginning to be lifted: The state’s mask mandates are no longer in place indoors if restaurants require proof of vaccination for staff and customers. For those customers, too, distancing requirements are no longer in place, but it’s logistically incredibly difficult for businesses to verify that and to implement different policies for vaccinated and unvaccinated patrons (who might even be in the same party). Midnight curfews, which never made sense since they forced people to convene within a shorter timeframe (and sometimes even shifted revelry indoors to cramped apartments), were lifted for outdoor dining in mid-May, and for indoor dining just a few days ago.

It’s fine for private businesses to take measures to restore a degree of confidence for their more skittish customers so that they will finally venture out into the world. But the measures that many of them have implemented, both those mandated by law and those voluntarily opted into because they’re standard practice expected by anxious customers, are not actually particularly useful for preventing the spread of COVID, a virus we now know a lot about.

Consider temperature checks, which only screen for one COVID symptom, which may or may not be present if someone is contagious; plexiglass barriers, which do not make sense for a virus that spreads via airborne transmission of aerosols; markers on the floor, which direct people through separate entrances and exits and do not make sense for a virus that is spread through longer-duration close contact (not few-second encounters); the theatrical practice of masking up to enter a restaurant, then walking to your table and keeping your mask off for the rest of the evening, the part with talking and laughing, donning it only to use the bathroom (where, for New York’s many single-occupancy facilities, you will not run into a single other soul unless you invite them).

Though these remnants of hygiene theater may seem like trivial inconveniences not worth forcefully opposing, it would be wrong to keep in place measures that make people feel safe but actually spread bad information about how this virus spreads. Getting vaccinated provides the best protection; plexiglass barriers and entrance/exit floor markers won’t do the trick.

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Pompeo Says NIH Tried To Suppress State Dept. COVID Probe; CNBC’s Kernen Grills Gottlieb Over ‘Natural Origin’ Zealots

Pompeo Says NIH Tried To Suppress State Dept. COVID Probe; CNBC’s Kernen Grills Gottlieb Over ‘Natural Origin’ Zealots

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused the National Institutes of Health of trying to suppress a State Department investigation into the true origins of the COVID-19 pandemic – promoting the natural origin theory while peddling CCP talking points.

“[NIH] folks were trying to suppress what we were doing at the State Department as well,” Pompeo told “The Ingraham Angle” on Thursday, adding that NIAID Director Anthony Fauci was spreading Chinese government talking points in daytime interviews earlier in the day.

“To hear Fauci this morning talk about how the Chinese have an interest in us discovering what happened is just crazy talk. The Chinese have a deep interest in covering it up. They have done so pretty darn effectively,” said Pompeo, who added that the 80-year-old Fauci voiced “the exact same theories that the Chinese Communist Party has presented for over a year now.”

“He implies good faith for the Chinese Communist Party: We are on the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square [incident] For Dr. Fauci to go out and think the CCP cared that there were people in Wuhan who were dying… is just naïve beyond all possible imagination,” said Pompeo, who backed up reporting by Vanity Fair which noted that State Department official Miles Yu was actively translating and “mirroring” information provided by the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s website in order to compile a dossier of questions for the secretary, according to Fox News.

“When I received that [dossier] it was in early May [2020]. I was on TV talking about what I could get declassified at that point. We worked diligently to get them to declassify more,” said Pompeo, adding “[Then-DNI Director John Ratcliffe] was a great partner in trying to do that. But there were folks all over the community who did not want to talk about this … who did not want the world to know the Chinese Communist Party was in the process of covering up several million losses of life.“

Yet, while Pompeo says the NIH tried to cover up the lab-leak hypothesis, former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb – who’s got a book to sell – made clear he’s on the other side of the fence – shifting from ‘China is hiding blood samples from sick lab workers!‘  to ‘probably natural origin‘ in the span of four days. Did someone get a tap on the shoulder?

“What do you think the likelihood is that it escaped from the Wuhan lab vs. the wet market? Is it 50%, 80%, how do you handicap that? asked CNBC host Joe Kernen during a Friday morning interview, to which Gottlieb replied: “I’d probably handicap it higher for a natural origin, but that shouldn’t be reassuring – I mean if you were gonna handicap it 60/40, 80/20, that’s by no means reassuring. I think at the end of the day, unless we get lucky and we either find the zoonotic source – the intermediate host that proves it came out of nature, or we have some whistleblowers from people who come forward with information from China that proves it came out of the lab, I think what we’re going to end up with, it’s gonna be unsatisfying because it’s gonna be an assessment that assigns probabilities to each scenario.”

“I don’t think we’re gonna end up with a definitive answer absent something that is a lucky break,” Gottlieb continued.

If this did come out of a lab, someone in the Chinese government knows that. They’ve had ample opportunity to make that admission for the world to provide that evidence and try to engage that global community to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The fact that they haven’t done this now is a pretty strong suggestion that they won’t.”

Kernen then shifted to the way the media covered up the lab-leak hypothesis, along with how US agencies dismissed the lab-leak theory.

“Start with this, doctor, it’s in a city called Wuhan. We know that there’s a bat lab that may have been doing some gain of function research on these viruses. Now we know that three people got sick in November of 2019 and needed to be hospitalized. And to make the leap that it absolutely came from the wet market when it’s quacking, walking, squatting like a duck, and everything looks like a duck – just to arbitrarily demonize anyone or any person or any agency or any media outlet that even intimated that it could come from a lab – something was going on there. Now where was the WHO and are they doing China’s bidding again? And where were our people in this country – we should have at least had our ears up...”

“Why was there pressure to bury this?”

To which Gottlieb replied: “A year ago most people would have said that the probability this came out of a lab was 1% or less. That was based on what we knew at the time…”

Kernen pressed the issue further – turning his attention to Fauci and what he knew, when:

“The three people that we now know that were hospitalized working in the lab – do you think Dr. Fauci, because he did have research relationships with that lab, do you think he was aware a year ago of that situation that three people had been sickened in the lab? Because a lot of the dogma and the dogmatic statements made by him about this – I don’t know how you could have made those if you knew; a) that it was in Wuhan, b) that they were gain of function research, c) that three people got sick and had to be hospitalized in that lab. Would you be as strident as him about the possibility of it coming from the lab at that time that you knew people had gotten sick?“

To which Gottlieb deflects: “Well I don’t know when Tony might have known those facts. He obviously has a security clearance and gets briefed … look, Tony – Dr. Fauci was getting briefed by a lot of the folks in the scientific community who were virologists looking at the sequence.”

What’s Gottlieb’s solution? Get the CIA involved (as he wrote in a February Op-Ed):

Meanwhile…

Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/04/2021 – 12:20

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3g7DVNb Tyler Durden

The One Where Friends Has a Reunion Episode


friends_1161x653

  • Friends: the Reunion. Available now on HBO Max.
  • The Amusement Park. Available June 8 on Shudder.

With the annual summer plague of stupefyingly moronic reality shows and indecipherable Canadian science fiction not yet upon us, television this week turns to archeology to entertain us, and does surprisingly well. No, not an all-Mummy weekend, but an excavation of the entertainment past: a Friends reunion and a lost George Romero movie. As is usually the case when you go digging into tombs, the results are fairly incomprehensible unless you have some context, but if you do, oh my.

Take, for example, Friends: the Reunion. Not a remake or a reboot, Reunion is mostly a panel chat of the show’s six-member cast, interspersed with blooper reels and shots of them poking around the old sets. If you’re not a Friends fan, it will be nearly impossible to imagine why the studio audience is doubled over laughing when Courtney Cox asks a tardy Matthew Perry as he wanders onto the set, “Could you be any later?” Or the roar that greets the question to the cast members, “Were they on a break?”

But before you non-Friends fans go on a rant about self-referential television solipsism, consider some numbers. Over 236 episodes spanning 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004 (and that’s not even counting four seasons of the spinoffs Joey and Episodes), Friends averaged 25 million viewers a week—and more than doubled that for the series finale. It’s estimated to have been watched 100 billion times in all, a mind-boggling number that turns TV icons like I Love Lucy or Gunsmoke or M*A*S*H* or Seinfeld into so much dust in the video wind.

So, yes, even if you’re not part of it, there’s a gargantuan audience out there to laugh in delight as Matt LeBlanc confesses that his audition for the part of stud-muffin actor Joey was an incoherent flop, and he got the role only because he admitted to the producers that he got so wasted the night before that he passed out face-down in a toilet. Or David Schwimmer, who played the nerdy paleontologist Ross, announce that he hated Marcel, his pet monkey on the show, for smearing the intestines of his live grubworm snack on Schwimmer’s  shoulders during takes. By the end of Season 1, declares Schwimmer, “It was time for Marcel to fuck off.”

Lots of visitors stop by, in person or on video, to disclose arcana about their Friends fandom. Soccer star David Beckham says his favorite episode—make of this what you will—was the one in which LeBlanc’s character went commando while wearing the pants of his pal Chandler (Perry).  Members of the South Korean boy band BTS—it’s not clear whether this is a tribute or an indictment—explain that they learned English from watching Friends. And if you ever wanted to hear Lady Gaga sing “Smelly Cat,” this is your chance.

The closest thing to breaking news in the reunion show, at least if you’re part of the E! Entertainment generation, is that Schwimmer and his on-air sweetheart Jennifer Aniston (the coddled daddy’s girl Rachel), despite years of denials of any romance on the Friends set, were “crushing hard” during the first season. But, they insist, they never consummated it, even with a kiss. To which LeBlanc murmurs, “Bullshit.”

Watching, it’s sometimes hard to avoid a wispy sense that it’s premature to be watching a reunion of the cast of a show that’s still on the air, sometimes four or five times a day on various cable networks. The answer is that, syndication aside, there hasn’t been a new episode of Friends in 17 years. One of the startling things about the reunion show is that Ross and Rachel and the gang, who had barely turned 30 when we saw them last night on TBS, are suddenly well into their 50s. Cox has had some work on her face; Perry has packed some pounds onto his. Collectively, they look great for people you haven’t seen in 17 years—if you’ve got a class reunion coming up, see if I’m not right—but time marches on, even for the Jennifer Anistons of the world.

Yet the appeal of Friends still rings clear after all these years, to multiple generations. The show was nominally aimed at Generation X when it debuted in 1994, but I remember at the time a retired 60-something  FBI agent telling me we had to wrap up our interview because Friends was about to start. And last summer, my girlfriend’s great-grandsons astonished me with detailed summaries and funniest moments of their favorite episodes. The show’s concept—that in a mobile America where nobody stays long in the same ZIP code, particularly in their 20s, your family is your friends—still resonates.

The somewhat less tender message of George Romero’s The Amusement Park might be summed up, “Life sucks and then you die.” And the story behind it is much weirder than any of his multitudinous zombie epics.

The Amusement Park was originally commissioned in 1970 as a public-service spot for a be-nice-to-old people committee of the Lutheran Society. Why they approached Romero, whose only completed work at that time was a compendium of slobbering zombies munching on livers and intestines in the original Night of the Living Dead, is a question the Lutherans doubtless asked themselves many times later.

But by then, it was too late. Romero had turned a quickie commercial into an hour-long maze of squalor and necrosis that so horrified the group that they killed it on the spot. The film was locked away for nearly 50 years until archivists stumbled across it and restored it. Three years later, it’s now getting its first real screening on the streaming service Shudder.

If any of those Lutherans are still around, nothing they see in The Amusement Park is likely to make them regret burying it. Like Romero’s zombie films, it’s short on production costs, acting talent (the on-screen announcement that the cast is made up of volunteers is scarcely necessary), plot and just about everything else but ghastliness. The film’s lone professional actor, Lincoln Maazel (who would later star in Romero’s 1977 vampire movie Martin), plays an old man in a white suit who looks a good bit like Colonel Sanders and wanders into a seedy carnival.

Blundering into a line of decrepit and dweebish old people, he’s jostled, spilled upon and cheated by insolent, smirking baby boomer barkers and attendants. The rides all require blood-pressure exams and heart tests, which the old people nearly always flunk. They’re high-hatted by waiters who serve them beans while nearby 1-percenters swill on lobsters; they’re cheated by insurance adjustors, gouged by landlords, strapped to iron-maiden-looking “rehabilitation” machinery by doctors. They’re swindled by Florida real-estate sharpies, and they’re beaten with chains by bikers who steal their ride tickets. (Maybe that scene was a flashback to Altamont?) And at the end, a lot of them get driven into an attraction called “Boot Hill” from which they don’t seem to emerge—except Maazel, who faces the camera and intones: “I’ll see you in the amusement park.”

I’m sure Romero, who reentered Boot Hill for good in 2017 at the age of 77, never imagined The Amusement Park would be getting screenings five decades after he shot it. But if he were still around, he would no doubt be amused by the irony that all the baby boomer villains of the film have by now turned into ancient victims. And I suspect he’d be planning a sequel, Social Security and Medicare, in which the oldsters turn vampire, endlessly draining the lifeblood of their own kids and grandkids while stuffing themselves with AARP-discounted early-bird dinners. You won’t have to tune in Shudder to see that one.

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The One Where Friends Has a Reunion Episode


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  • Friends: the Reunion. Available now on HBO Max.
  • The Amusement Park. Available June 8 on Shudder.

With the annual summer plague of stupefyingly moronic reality shows and indecipherable Canadian science fiction not yet upon us, television this week turns to archeology to entertain us, and does surprisingly well. No, not an all-Mummy weekend, but an excavation of the entertainment past: a Friends reunion and a lost George Romero movie. As is usually the case when you go digging into tombs, the results are fairly incomprehensible unless you have some context, but if you do, oh my.

Take, for example, Friends: the Reunion. Not a remake or a reboot, Reunion is mostly a panel chat of the show’s six-member cast, interspersed with blooper reels and shots of them poking around the old sets. If you’re not a Friends fan, it will be nearly impossible to imagine why the studio audience is doubled over laughing when Courtney Cox asks a tardy Matthew Perry as he wanders onto the set, “Could you be any later?” Or the roar that greets the question to the cast members, “Were they on a break?”

But before you non-Friends fans go on a rant about self-referential television solipsism, consider some numbers. Over 236 episodes spanning 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004 (and that’s not even counting four seasons of the spinoffs Joey and Episodes), Friends averaged 25 million viewers a week—and more than doubled that for the series finale. It’s estimated to have been watched 100 billion times in all, a mind-boggling number that turns TV icons like I Love Lucy or Gunsmoke or M*A*S*H* or Seinfeld into so much dust in the video wind.

So, yes, even if you’re not part of it, there’s a gargantuan audience out there to laugh in delight as Matt LeBlanc confesses that his audition for the part of stud-muffin actor Joey was an incoherent flop, and he got the role only because he admitted to the producers that he got so wasted the night before that he passed out face-down in a toilet. Or David Schwimmer, who played the nerdy paleontologist Ross, announce that he hated Marcel, his pet monkey on the show, for smearing the intestines of his live grubworm snack on Schwimmer’s  shoulders during takes. By the end of Season 1, declares Schwimmer, “It was time for Marcel to fuck off.”

Lots of visitors stop by, in person or on video, to disclose arcana about their Friends fandom. Soccer star David Beckham says his favorite episode—make of this what you will—was the one in which LeBlanc’s character went commando while wearing the pants of his pal Chandler (Perry).  Members of the South Korean boy band BTS—it’s not clear whether this is a tribute or an indictment—explain that they learned English from watching Friends. And if you ever wanted to hear Lady Gaga sing “Smelly Cat,” this is your chance.

The closest thing to breaking news in the reunion show, at least if you’re part of the E! Entertainment generation, is that Schwimmer and his on-air sweetheart Jennifer Aniston (the coddled daddy’s girl Rachel), despite years of denials of any romance on the Friends set, were “crushing hard” during the first season. But, they insist, they never consummated it, even with a kiss. To which LeBlanc murmurs, “Bullshit.”

Watching, it’s sometimes hard to avoid a wispy sense that it’s premature to be watching a reunion of the cast of a show that’s still on the air, sometimes four or five times a day on various cable networks. The answer is that, syndication aside, there hasn’t been a new episode of Friends in 17 years. One of the startling things about the reunion show is that Ross and Rachel and the gang, who had barely turned 30 when we saw them last night on TBS, are suddenly well into their 50s. Cox has had some work on her face; Perry has packed some pounds onto his. Collectively, they look great for people you haven’t seen in 17 years—if you’ve got a class reunion coming up, see if I’m not right—but time marches on, even for the Jennifer Anistons of the world.

Yet the appeal of Friends still rings clear after all these years, to multiple generations. The show was nominally aimed at Generation X when it debuted in 1994, but I remember at the time a retired 60-something  FBI agent telling me we had to wrap up our interview because Friends was about to start. And last summer, my girlfriend’s great-grandsons astonished me with detailed summaries and funniest moments of their favorite episodes. The show’s concept—that in a mobile America where nobody stays long in the same ZIP code, particularly in their 20s, your family is your friends—still resonates.

The somewhat less tender message of George Romero’s The Amusement Park might be summed up, “Life sucks and then you die.” And the story behind it is much weirder than any of his multitudinous zombie epics.

The Amusement Park was originally commissioned in 1970 as a public-service spot for a be-nice-to-old people committee of the Lutheran Society. Why they approached Romero, whose only completed work at that time was a compendium of slobbering zombies munching on livers and intestines in the original Night of the Living Dead, is a question the Lutherans doubtless asked themselves many times later.

But by then, it was too late. Romero had turned a quickie commercial into an hour-long maze of squalor and necrosis that so horrified the group that they killed it on the spot. The film was locked away for nearly 50 years until archivists stumbled across it and restored it. Three years later, it’s now getting its first real screening on the streaming service Shudder.

If any of those Lutherans are still around, nothing they see in The Amusement Park is likely to make them regret burying it. Like Romero’s zombie films, it’s short on production costs, acting talent (the on-screen announcement that the cast is made up of volunteers is scarcely necessary), plot and just about everything else but ghastliness. The film’s lone professional actor, Lincoln Maazel (who would later star in Romero’s 1977 vampire movie Martin), plays an old man in a white suit who looks a good bit like Colonel Sanders and wanders into a seedy carnival.

Blundering into a line of decrepit and dweebish old people, he’s jostled, spilled upon and cheated by insolent, smirking baby boomer barkers and attendants. The rides all require blood-pressure exams and heart tests, which the old people nearly always flunk. They’re high-hatted by waiters who serve them beans while nearby 1-percenters swill on lobsters; they’re cheated by insurance adjustors, gouged by landlords, strapped to iron-maiden-looking “rehabilitation” machinery by doctors. They’re swindled by Florida real-estate sharpies, and they’re beaten with chains by bikers who steal their ride tickets. (Maybe that scene was a flashback to Altamont?) And at the end, a lot of them get driven into an attraction called “Boot Hill” from which they don’t seem to emerge—except Maazel, who faces the camera and intones: “I’ll see you in the amusement park.”

I’m sure Romero, who reentered Boot Hill for good in 2017 at the age of 77, never imagined The Amusement Park would be getting screenings five decades after he shot it. But if he were still around, he would no doubt be amused by the irony that all the baby boomer villains of the film have by now turned into ancient victims. And I suspect he’d be planning a sequel, Social Security and Medicare, in which the oldsters turn vampire, endlessly draining the lifeblood of their own kids and grandkids while stuffing themselves with AARP-discounted early-bird dinners. You won’t have to tune in Shudder to see that one.

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Democratic Showdown: Kamala Versus Manchin

Democratic Showdown: Kamala Versus Manchin

Authored by Pat Buchanan,

Speaking in Tulsa on the 100th anniversary of the racial atrocity there, Joe Biden belatedly turned to the issue of voting rights, to explain why he is having such difficulty winning passage of the party’s priority legislation.

“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’”

“Well, because Biden only has a majority of, effectively, four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.”

Biden was referring to Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

“But we’re not giving up,” Biden hastily added.

“Earlier this year, the House of Representatives passed For the People Act to protect our democracy. The Senate will take it up later this month, and I’m going to fight like heck with every tool at my disposal for its passage.

“To signify the importance of our efforts, today I’m asking Vice President Harris to help … lead them. … With her leadership and your support, we’re going to overcome again, I promise you. But it’s going to take a hell of a lot of work.”

Thus did Biden designate Kamala Harris as his field commander in winning Senate passage of a voting rights bill that would cancel out many GOP victories in state legislatures in enacting voting reforms.

Sunday, Harris, who is also Biden’s point person on the border crisis, will be in Guatemala to learn what causes Latin American peoples of color to leave the land they were born in and travel 1,000 miles for a chance to live, work and raise their families in a nation established by and for white supremacists.

But when she returns, Harris will face a showdown — with Joe Manchin.

For Manchin, who has the decisive Democratic vote in the Senate, not only opposes elements of the Democrats’ voting rights bill. He has declared that ending the Senate filibuster would “be to destroy our government,” and he will never cast a vote to kill it.

In April, Manchin was emphatic in The Washington Post, “There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.”

Yet, as long as that filibuster exists, 60 Senate votes are needed to pass major legislation. And if the filibuster is not eliminated, Democratic voting rights proposals don’t have a snowball’s chance of being enacted.

Hence, if Manchin is telling the truth and holds his ground, Harris is headed for a fruitless and failed assignment this June that will reveal her to be a leader without clout in the Senate whence she came.

Thus, in publicly handing Harris the portfolio on both the Democrats’ voting rights bill and border crisis, Biden may have set up his vice president for a great fall and a major humiliation. Yet, Harris is said to have asked Biden for the assignment.

As for Manchin, he is sitting in the catbird seat in the Democratic Party. He holds the whip hand over both Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Biden. For if the West Virginian refuses to bend or break on the filibuster, then not only will the voting rights bill fail in the Senate, so, too, could gun control, D.C. statehood, climate change, and immigration legislation.

All could suffer the same fate as the Jan. 6 Commission.

The Washington Post reports Senate staffers are saying that there is “panic” in the Democratic caucus that Manchin will stand his ground and refuse to kill the filibuster, no matter the pressure the party puts on him.

Recognition by the White House of the leverage Manchin and Sinema wield was evident in press secretary Jen Psaki’s effort to soften Biden’s crack about “the two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.”

Psaki brushed aside any suggestion that Biden was being caustic about the two senators saying, “I don’t think he was intending to convey anything other than a little bit of commentary on TV punditry.”

But the issues and stakes involved are becoming evident to everyone.

A coalition of progressive groups, on Thursday, called on Schumer to hold a Senate vote to kill the filibuster. More than 100 groups sent a letter to the majority leader arguing that the Republican senators who blocked a bill to create a commission to probe the Jan. 6 Capitol attack showed, “it is clearer than ever that the filibuster needs to be eliminated.”

The groups added: “We call on you and the Senate Democratic caucus to eliminate the filibuster as a weapon that Sen. McConnell can use to block efforts to defend and strengthen our democracy and make our government work for the American people.”

If Joe Manchin holds his ground this June, he will prevail, the filibuster will survive, the For the People Act will die a deserved death, and Joe will become legend in West Virginia.

And if Manchin stands his ground, the big loser is Kamala Harris.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/04/2021 – 12:03

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