Month: June 2021

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

The mothers of several people whose names have been invoked by Black Lives Matter activists panned the group’s co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, for benefitting “off the blood” of their family members.

Cullors last week announced last week that she would be departing the organization, coming after reports disclosed her finances and real estate holdings.

“They are benefiting off the blood of our loved ones, and they won’t even talk to us,” Samaria Rice, the mother of a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, who was shot by police in Cleveland, told the New York Post.

Rice added that she contacted Black Lives Matter to help in re-opening a federal investigation into her son’s death in 2014, exchanging several emails with Cullors years ago before nothing came of it.

“I don’t believe she is going anywhere,” Rice said of the BLM co-founder.

 “It’s all a facade,” she continued. “She’s only saying that to get the heat off her right now.”

Lisa Simpson, whose son was also killed in a Los Angeles Police Department officer-involved incident in 2016, also criticized the organization’s co-founder.

“Now she doesn’t have to show her accountability,” Simpson, 52, told the newspaper in reference to Cullors’ move to leave the organization.

“She can just take the money and run.”

In an interview with The Associated Press, Cullors said that recent criticism and reports about her finances were not the reason why she’s leaving Black Lives Matter, saying she wants to focus on other endeavors including a book and a TV deal with Warner Bros.

What’s more, Cullors—who previously called herself a “trained Marxist” and has praised Chinese Communist Party founder Mao Zedong—alleged that the articles about the multiple homes she owns that are reportedly worth millions of dollars are part of a “right-wing” smear campaign. The Epoch Times has contacted Black Lives Matter for comment.

Black Lives Matter revealed to AP that the group took in $90 million after George Floyd’s death, which sparked nationwide Black Lives Matter demonstrations, riots, and related violence last year.

But, according to Simpson, Black Lives Matter raised $5,000 for her son’s funeral and she never received any of the money.

In March, both Rice and Simpson panned Black Lives Matters’ leadership.

“We never hired them to be the representatives in the fight for justice for our dead loved ones murdered by the police,” their statement said, the Post reported.

“The ‘activists’ have events in our cities and have not given us anything substantial for using our loved ones’ images and names on their flyers. We don’t want or need y’all parading in the streets accumulating donations, platforms, movie deals, etc. off the death of our loved ones, while the families and communities are left clueless and broken.”

The mother of Breonna Taylor, meanwhile, criticized local Louisville Black Lives Matter activists earlier this year for using her daughter’s death for their benefit.

“I could walk in a room full of people who claim to be here for Breonna’s family who don’t even know who I am,” Tamika Palmer said in the since-deleted Facebook post.

“I’ve watched y’all raise money on behalf of Breonna’s family who has never done a damn thing for us nor have we needed it or asked so talk about fraud. It’s amazing how many people have lost focus.”

Real Vision senior editor Ash Bennington welcomes back Tony Greer of TG Macro to revisit his thoughts on commodities as Brent and WTI futures reach new relative highs. With OPEC+ announcing their plans to steadily increase oil production in July, Tony will be fleshing out his thinking around the bullish run in energy, how this could spill over into other commodities, and how this may or may not confirm investors’ fears of ongoing inflation.

In previously undisclosed documents, obtained by The Wall Street Journal, securities regulators told Tesla last year that CEO Elon Musk’s use of Twitter had twice violated a court-ordered policy requiring his tweets to be preapproved by company lawyers.

In letters sent to Tesla in 2019 and 2020, the SEC reportedly said tweets that Musk wrote about Tesla’s solar roof production volumes and its stock price hadn’t undergone the required preapproval by Tesla’s lawyers.

As a reminder, Musk had publicly mocked the SEC even after settling the previous fraud claims with the agency.

Specifically, The Wall Street Journal reports that the SEC told Tesla in May 2020 that:

the company had failed “to enforce these procedures and controls despite repeated violations by Mr. Musk.”

The letter, signed by a senior SEC official in its San Francisco office, added:

“Tesla has abdicated the duties required of it by the court’s order.”

This perhaps explains why Musk himself was quick to admit in May 2020 that “no”, his twitter remarks were not vetted.

Given the fact that we are just discovering these details now – at least 13 months after they occurred – as far as we can see, nothing at all has been done to either re-enforce the SEC-ordered oversight by Tesla lawyers, or to slow Musk’s roll in tweeting frequency and absurdity (cough Dogecoin cough)…

Is the SEC going to – wait for it – tell Tesla to preclear Musk’s tweets (again)?

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 25, 2021

…we can only imagine how long it will be before some actual actions are taken… or enforcements hardened over the carmaker’s incessant need to ‘share’.

By now, even the shoeshine boy knows that central banks are one-print trick pony farcical joke, one which is exposed not just by cryptos which have emerged as a clear alternative to fiat currencies, but by central banks themselves who are adopting their own digital currencies knowing well that the days of traditional paper money are numbered.

And yet within the giant Venn Diagram of the “big farce”, there is a smaller Venn Diagram, which is basically everything and anything Turkey-related, and whose farcical content is exponentially more concentrated because while central banks have become the laughing stock of the financial world in its twilight days before the upcoming great reset, nothing is as funny as Turkey’s despotic ruler and one-man government-cum-central bank, Erdogan, inverting central bank orthodoxy on its head without a trace of sarcasm.

That’s precisely what happened moments ago when the Turkish despot president, who just two months ago fired his central bank governor – the second such sacking in 3 months – for hiking rates too much, announced that he had spoken with the new Turkish central bank governor, and said that “we most lower rates” – read Erdogan’s puppet at the CBRT now has a clear order – to, get this, slow inflation:

• *ERDOGAN: `I SPOKE WITH CENBANK GOVERNOR, WE MUST LOWER RATES’
• *ERDOGAN CALLS FOR LOWER INTEREST RATES TO SLOW INFLATION
• *ERDOGAN SAYS RATES CAN FALL, CITING `JULY-AUGUST’ PERIOD

That’s right: Erdogan will fight Turkey’s soaring inflation with… lower rates.

And no, he was not joking much to the shock of all those long-suffering lira longs who saw all of their hard-earned “carry” gains vaporized in milliseconds as the Turkish currency crashed to a new all time low.

And while we wait for Turkey to finally implode into a smoldering pile of hyperinflation rubble as foreign investors finally decide they have had enough with Erdogan’s surreal circus, we now know why one month ago Turkey was among the first nations to crackdown on bitcoin when it banned cryptocurrency payments. Considering the coordinated campaign against crypto by all other central banks, we can only imagine the level of monetary insanity that is about to be unleashed by all other clown in charge.

Amazon Sidewalk, the company’s new shared mesh network that helps devices like Amazon Echo devices, Ring Security Cams, outdoor lights, motion sensors, and Tile trackers work better around the house and beyond, will be switched on next week. Tens of millions of Americans own Amazon devices, and the experimental network will turn users into guinea pigs next week, according to ArsTechnica.

On June 8, users who don’t opt-out will be automatically enrolled in “Sidewalk.” The mesh network, created by Echoes, cameras, and other smart devices under the Amazon brand, will use a small amount of bandwidth and broadcast to nearby neighbors and or city streets. 

“Amazon Sidewalk creates a low-bandwidth network with the help of Sidewalk Bridge devices, including select Echo and Ring devices. These Bridge devices share a small portion of your internet bandwidth which is pooled together to provide these services to you and your neighbors. And when more neighbors participate, the network becomes even stronger,” Amazon’s website said. 

While Amazon does provide a white paper detailing the technical foundations of the shared mesh network, it’s likely many users won’t be too excited. Some might find it helpful as others don’t want their networks exposed to possible security flaws. 

 ArsTechnica wrote a cautionary note: 

There are enough theoretical risks to give users pause. Wireless technologies like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have a history of being insecure. Remember WEP, the encryption scheme that protected Wi-Fi traffic from being monitored by nearby parties? It was widely used for four years before researchers exposed flaws that made decrypting data relatively easy for attackers. WPA, the technology that replaced WEP, is much more robust, but it also has a checkered history… 

Consider the wealth of intimate details Amazon devices are privy to. They see who knocks on our doors, and in some homes they peer into our living rooms. They hear the conversations we’re having with friends and family. They control locks and other security systems in our home. Extending the reach of all this encrypted data to the sidewalk and living rooms of neighbors requires a level of confidence that’s not warranted for a technology that’s never seen widespread testing.

There is no doubt, the benefits of Sidewalk for some, but users will be guinea pigs. To protect the network security of your home network and even your family, you may want to opt-out of the program before next week.

“Amazon Sidewalk opt-out” is the first on this web search query. 

Google Search Trends shows rising search trends for people trying to figure out how to disable Sidewalk.

Turning off Sidewalk is easy: 

1. Opening the Alexa app
2. Opening More and selecting Settings
3. Selecting Account Settings
4. Selecting Amazon Sidewalk
5. Turning Amazon Sidewalk Off

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

More than 100 employees at Houston Methodist Hospital filed a lawsuit against their employer for requiring all staff members to receive a COVID-19 vaccine in order to keep their jobs.

Saying the COVID-19 vaccines are experimental and they don’t want to be “guinea pigs,” the 117 employees argued in court that it’s unlawful for their employers to require them to take the shots.

“Methodist Hospital is forcing its employees to be human ‘guinea pigs’ as a condition for continued employment,” their lawsuit (pdf) states. They wrote that the hospital’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate “requires the employee to subject themselves to medical experimentation as a prerequisite to feeding their families.”

They took issue receiving “experimental COVID-19 mRNA” vaccines such as ones made by Pfizer and Moderna.

“For the first time in the history of the United States, an employer is forcing an employee to participate in an experimental vaccine trial as a condition for continued employment,” the lawsuit states.

The plaintiffs cited a letter—included in the lawsuit—from the CEO and president of Houston Methodist, Marc Boom, who allegedly directed employees to “please see the HR policy that outlines the consequences of not being compliant by June 7, which include suspension and eventually termination.”

Meanwhile, at the top of the lawsuit, an alleged quote from David Bernard, a CEO of a Houston Methodist branch, was included. Bernard purportedly told an employee that “100 percent vaccination is more important than your individual freedom. … Everyone [sic] of you is replaceable. If you don’t like what your [sic] doing you can leave and we will replace your spot.”

A spokesperson for Houston Methodist disputed the quote in a statement to The Epoch Times, saying on May 30 that Bernard “did NOT say that to this disgruntled employee,” and he “has respect for all his employees—we are a values-based organization with respect as one of our core values.” The spokesperson did not comment on the letter from Boom.

The lawsuit also asserted that employers’ mandating COVID-19 vaccines is problematic because “there is much” the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “does not know about these products even as it authorizes them for emergency use, including their effectiveness against infection, death, and transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that is allegedly the cause of the COVID disease.” The FDA approved an emergency use authorization for the vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer in December 2020 and gave the emergency authorization for Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine in early 2021.

The lawsuit was filed by Jared Woodfill, a Houston-area attorney, who told ABC News that the Houston Methodist mandate violates the Nuremberg Code of 1947, written after the fall of the Nazi regime in Germany.

“To promote its business and increase profits at the expense of other health care providers and their employees’ health, defendants advertise to the public that they ‘require all employees and employed physicians to get a COVID-19 vaccine.’ More clearly, defendants’ employees are being forced to serve as human ‘guinea pigs’ to increase defendants’ profits,” Woodfill said, adding that it is a “severe and blatant” violation of Texas law and the Nuremberg Code—a set of research ethics principles relating to human experimentation.

Houston Methodist, the attorney claimed, forced employees to get the shot to “promote its business” over its “employees’ health.” He noted that most of the plaintiffs in the suit aren’t health care providers.

Boom issued a statement after the lawsuit was filed, saying that 99 percent of the hospital’s nearly 30,000 employees have received a COVID-19 vaccine.

“We proudly stand by our employees and our mission to protect our patients.

“It is unfortunate that the few remaining employees who refuse to get vaccinated and put our patients first are responding in this way,” Boom said, according to a spokesperson for the hospital system. “It is legal for health care institutions to mandate vaccines, as we have done with the flu vaccine since 2009.”

A full legal response from Houston Methodist has yet to be filed.

The Houston Methodist spokesperson also included a link to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) on May 28 having posted updated guidelines that suggest employers can make employees be vaccinated.

According to the agency’s guidance issued on May 28, EEOC laws “do not prevent an employer from requiring all employees physically entering the workplace to be vaccinated for COVID-19, so long as employers comply with the reasonable accommodation provisions of the ADA and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other EEO considerations.

“Other laws, not in EEOC’s jurisdiction, may place additional restrictions on employers.”

The lawsuit was filed in a state court in Montgomery County, Texas, and alleges wrongful discharge as well as a violation of the at-will employment doctrine’s public policy exception.