“What The F**k Is That” – Video Of Secret Stealth Aircraft Goes Viral
A mysterious stealth aircraft was spotted at Lockheed Martin’s Helendale radar-cross section measurement facility in the Mojave Desert, not far from the company’s Skunk Works headquarters at Plant 42 in Palmdale, California.
Skunk Works has played a significant role in the development of stealth aircraft in the last four decades and could be in the process of developing yet another one.
A video, first spotted by Twitter handle “Ruben Hofs,” said he first “stumbled upon a very interesting TikTok video of an unknown shape on a flatbed trailer.”
Hofs was able to geolocate the TikTok video to “the Helendale Radar Cross Section Facility,” which tests and evaluates aircraft designs’ radar signatures.
The video itself is short and shows the aircraft being transported on a flatbed trailer, while a voice asks: “What the f**k is that?”
The Drive’s Joseph Trevithick spoke with Jeff Babione, the head of Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, about the video that has gone viral on social media. Babione declined to comment on the stealthy, advanced fighter aircraft at the Helendale radar-cross section facility. He also said he wasn’t aware of the video.
By now, we’re sure the Chinese have taken all seven seconds of the clip and are trying to replicate the design.
Using accusations of ‘disinformation’ to suppress scientific criticism, steer media coverage, and silence political opponents is not part of the operating system of a free society…
First Amendment principles permit the government to punish false speech when it directly and immediately causes specific and serious harm. But unlike defamation, fraud, perjury, and other examples of punishable false speech, the term “disinformation” (or “misinformation”) has no specific legal meaning. “Disinformation” is widely used to designate false or misleading speech that cannot constitutionally be punished precisely because its potential harms are indirect and speculative—what the U.S. Supreme Court has called “an undifferentiated fear or apprehension” of negative consequences.
To be sure, even though the harmful potential of disinformation is more inchoate than that of false speech that is constitutionally punishable, the potential for harm is still real. The many current advocates of restricting disinformation stress that it can cause serious harm, including to individual and public health, and even to democratic self-government itself. Yet expanding government power to punish such expression would also cause harm that is at least as serious—including to the very same values of health and democratic governance.
The negative impact of censoring disinformation comes from its inherent vagueness and subjectivity. The authorities tasked with censorship invariably enforce this malleable concept in ways that reinforce dominant political and societal interest groups, and disadvantage minority groups and perspectives. This predictable dynamic is illustrated by recent experience in a number of other countries, from Russia to South Africa, and also in the United States before the Supreme Court enforced strict limits on punishing false speech.
While the relevant legal analysis focuses on government censorship of disinformation, many of the same concerns also apply to censorship implemented by dominant technology firms. Although these private sector entities are usually not constrained by the First Amendment, their enormous power and influence over public discourse means that their restrictions on disinformation have adverse consequences similar to government restrictions. Moreover, in recent months, mounting evidence suggests that the dominant platforms’ content restrictions on disinformation (and other controversial speech) may have been sufficiently induced by or coordinated with government officials that we should seriously consider treating such restrictions as tantamount to government action and hence subject to First Amendment limits.
Arguments for restricting disinformation consistently focus on the harm that such speech can potentially cause, without analyzing other issues that should be considered before concluding that censorship is justified. First, it is important to underscore the important fact noted above: The harmful potential of disinformation—unlike constitutionally punishable forms of false speech—is indirect and speculative. While the old nursery rhyme is wrong in declaring that “words will never hurt me,” it is equally untrue that “words will always hurt me.” The impact of speech on a single human mind, let alone an entire community or society, results from the complex interplay of multiple factors, and hence cannot be confidently predicted, or even clearly assessed after the fact. For example, what has been the net impact of disinformation about the 2020 election? Surely disinformation spurred some negative outcomes, including motivating participants in the events of Jan. 6. Just as plausibly, though, disinformation about the election spurred some positive outcomes too, including increased efforts to promote healthy skepticism, media literacy, fact-checking, and other measures that would remain necessary even if disinformation were censored. Because we can never completely eliminate the supply of disinformation, the most effective response is to curb the demand for it.
Even if we made the purely hypothetical assumption that certain disinformation has a significant negative impact on balance, it still would not follow that government should restrict it. Logically, one could justify restrictions only by analyzing three additional questions:
(1) Does the restriction materially reduce either the prevalence of such speech or its potential adverse impact?
(2) Does the restriction have any adverse consequences (including unintended ones), such as increasing the prevalence or potential adverse impact of the targeted speech, or suppressing other speech that even censorship advocates agree should be protected?
(3) Are there other steps we could pursue to reduce the prevalence or potential adverse impact of the targeted speech that would be at least as effective, but would not entail as many adverse consequences?
This additional line of questioning makes common sense. We might well be willing to give up some free speech rights for the sake of advancing some other important goal—such as, in the case of disinformation, preserving our democratic form of government. But we shouldn’t be willing to forfeit free speech if the sacrifice does not actually have the desired impact, or worse yet, if it actually makes the problem worse—in this case, by undermining democracy. Indeed, government punishment of disinformation is fundamentally antithetical to democracy. As the Supreme Court declared in United States v. Alvarez (2012), which struck down a federal law criminalizing certain false statements, “Our constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.”
As current debates illustrate, one person’s cherished truth is another’s despised “fake news.” Speech that critics seek to suppress as disinformation almost never consists of objectively verifiable facts alone, but also involves subjective matters of interpretation and analysis. After all, speakers who intentionally or recklessly utter false statements of fact that directly cause specific harm may constitutionally be punished under existing laws, such as those that ban fraud, defamation, and perjury. In contrast, our legal system scrupulously avoids punishing statements that go beyond straightforward facts and incorporate matters of interpretation or opinion. As the Supreme Court declared in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. (1974): ‘’Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas.”
While some may bristle at the notion that government is prohibited from silencing “false ideas,” surely the alternative is far worse. If government were permitted to determine which ideas should be deemed “false” and hence punishable, any ideas that depart from prevailing orthodoxy—including those critiquing government policy—would be jeopardized. Such a course could not be more inimical to the most fundamental precepts that undergird our democratic republic. As the Supreme Court eloquently declared in its landmark 1943 decision in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion …”
Until the Supreme Court reined in the concept of defamation in its groundbreaking 1964 ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan, Southern officials systematically persecuted civil rights leaders and organizations, as well as the national media that covered them, for even slight misstatements of fact. Those officials pursued multiple defamation lawsuits with the specific goal of imposing ruinously large damages judgments in order to stifle both the civil rights activists themselves and the national media that disseminated information about their efforts across the country. Without that national audience, and the resulting political and financial support for the civil rights movement, it likely would have foundered; that was precisely the point of the libel lawsuit strategy. In a nutshell, the pre-Sullivan libel laws, which gave government undue discretion to punish disinformation, were unsurprisingly weaponized against the government’s critics.
To this day, advocates for racial justice, including supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement, have seen their own speech assailed—and even suppressed on social media—as disinformation. For instance, a May 25, 2021, National Public Radio story quoted Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, as stating: “I feel that Black Lives Matter is one of the greatest sources of disinformation … They have manipulated the good nature of many people.” The story also quoted Gonzales, Rudolph Giuliani, and other BLM critics charging that the movement falsely portrays itself as a racial justice group, whereas its actual goal is “to advance a Marxist agenda.” While the NPR story quoted critics charging BLM with purveying disinformation, it also quoted BLM leaders who returned the very same charge, complaining that the disinformation accusations themselves constituted disinformation.
The unavoidable problems with censoring disinformation have predictably plagued recent laws, including those touted as restricting pandemic-related disinformation in order to protect public health. As the Economist reported in February 2021, “Censorious governments are abusing ‘fake news’ laws,” invoking the pandemic as “an excuse to gag reporters” and to silence critics of pandemic-era policies. In February 2020, Amnesty International noted that Singapore’s 2019 law against “online falsehoods and manipulation” was “repeatedly used to target critics and political opponents.” The Singaporean government could not deny this, but instead claimed that the law’s consistent enforcement against opposition party members was a “coincidence.” To the contrary, these patterns necessarily result from restrictions on such a vague, broad category of speech, even in democratic regimes.
That is why the American Civil Liberties Union brought a 2020 lawsuit challenging disinformation laws that the government of Puerto Rico had recently passed for the asserted purpose of protecting public health and safety. One such law makes it a crime to share “false information” about the government’s post-pandemic emergency and curfew orders with the intent to cause “confusion, panic, or public hysteria.” Shortly after the law went into effect, the Puerto Rican government charged a prominent clergyman with allegedly disseminating false information on WhatsApp about a rumored executive order to close all businesses. In fact, only a short time later, the governor did issue such an order.
Even beyond the speech that disinformation laws directly stifle, these laws also suppress incalculable amounts of important expression, including information about the pandemic that could literally be a matter of life or death. That’s because the laws deter scientists and other experts from providing information to journalists, and journalists are in turn deterred from conveying information to the public, for fear of transgressing—or being charged with transgressing—the laws’ blurry boundaries. The ACLU’s complaint in the Puerto Rico case was filed on behalf of two prominent investigative journalists, who explained that “developing stories on matters of immense public concern are often complex, contentious, and murky,” and thus “inadvertent inaccuracies are inevitable even in the most thoroughly vetted reporting.”
Throughout the pandemic, we have witnessed constantly evolving and shifting views among expert individuals and agencies, as they steadily gather and analyze additional data. Yesterday’s life-endangering “disinformation” can and has become today’s life-protecting gospel. Recall, to cite only the most obvious example, the CDC’s changing edicts about mask-wearing.
Inherently subjective disinformation restrictions can easily be wielded for ulterior purposes, including to promote partisan interests. Consider, for instance, recent evidence that the Biden administration has been pressuring social media companies to restrict content that purportedly purveys disinformation about COVID, in light of allegations that the actual concerns may well involve politics at least as much as public health. Republican members of Congress have claimed that platforms have restricted “conservative” posts on issues related to the pandemic in response to pressure from administration officials, even though the posts contained no factual misrepresentations and simply conveyed perspectives with which the administration disagreed. Whether or not these claims are factually correct, it is true that the concept of disinformation is so open-ended that it could be deployed against particular communications for partisan reasons.
The inevitable manipulability of restrictions on disinformation is well illustrated by YouTube’s recent removal of a video for violating its “medical misinformation policy.” The video, which had been posted by New York Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, was of an August 2021 news conference in which she announced a lawsuit challenging New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “vaccine passport” as an invasion of privacy and an unreasonable mandate on small businesses. Although Malliotakis supports vaccination, she believes that the mandate constitutes government overreach—a position that the Supreme Court might well end up sharing. After Malliotakis appealed YouTube’s removal, the company said that it was “taking another look” and ultimately reinstated the video, thus underscoring the inherent elasticity of the misinformation concept. Whether or not YouTube actually had a good-faith health reason for its initial removal of the video, the fact remains that the vague policy can easily be invoked as a pretext, masking other motives.
All the more reason, then, to be suspicious of even sincere attempts by public and private authorities to prevent the harm that disinformation can cause. Recall that Southern officials based their libel lawsuits against activists and journalists during the civil rights movement on the dissemination of inaccurate information. What we learned in that era is that disinformation is unavoidable in any vigorous discussion of fast-breaking public issues, and that making it punishable by law can only inhibit democratic debate. It’s time we relearn that lesson.
“Take The Money And Run” – Artist Goes Dark After Punking Museum Into Giving Him $84K For Blank Canvas
We love to squawk whenever some ridiculous piece of modern art or pixelated NFT sells for a ridiculous sum that this is just another obvious symptom of the asset bubble blown by the global monetary gusher (either that, or somebody’s trying to launder $60MM and spotted a cost-effective opportunity to do so).
But this latest example of art-world excess is heavy on the meta-commentary. It’s also extremely Scandinavian.
Here’s what happened: Danish artist Jens Haaning was given $84K by a museum – the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark – and promised to use the money to create a work of art that would be featured as part of an exhibit. After receiving the money – $84K in US dollars – Haaning emailed the exhibit’s curator, saying he had changed his mind about the project, and had changed the title to “Take the Money and Run”. He then delivered the project – but kept the cash, which was supposed to be used as part of the project (the new piece was supposed to be part of a series where the artist used actual euros to depict the average annual income of different European countries).
“Take the money and Run”
The Museum says it will wait to see if the artist returns the money by Jan 16 as he is contractually obligated to do. If he doesn’t, the museum’s director told CBS News that “we will of course take the necessary steps to ensure that Jens Haaning complies with his contract.”
But in the mean time, the museum is trying to spin the incident as a kind of double-win (although there’s no guarantee that they will get the money back).
Indeed, the frames meant to be filled with cash were empty.
“The staff was very surprised when they opened the crates. I was abroad when the crates were opened, but suddenly received a lot of mails,” Andersson said.
When he finally saw “Take the Money and Run,” Andersson said he actually laughed. “Jens is known for his conceptual and activistic art with a humoristic touch. And he gave us that – but also a bit of a wake up call as everyone know wonders were did the money go,”he said.
According to Haaning’s press release, “the idea behind was to show how salaries can be used to measure the value of work and to show national differences within the European Union. But by changing the title of the work to “Take the Money and Run” Haaning “questions artists’ rights and their working conditions in order to establish more equitable norms within the art industry.”
“Everyone would like to have more money and, in our society, work industries are valued differently,” Haaning said in a statement. “The artwork is essentially about the working conditions of artists. It is a statement saying that we also have the responsibility of questioning the structures that we are part of.
And if these structures are completely unreasonable, we must break with them. It can be your marriage, your work – it can be any type of societal structure”.
While the artist technically violated the spirit of the deal, he does contractually have until Jan. 16 to deliver on the project – or return the money.
“…while it wasn’t what they had agreed on in the contract, the museum got new and interesting art. “When it comes to the amount of $84,000, he hasn’t broke any contract yet as the initial contract says we will have the money back on January 16th 2022.”
Now, as for whether the artist will return the money, we’re curious as to whether maybe there might be a “Part II” to the this exhibit involving the spending of $84K in US dollars.
They should probably check all the strip clubs near the guy’s house.
“Unfortunately, Jan. 6 was not an isolated event,” warned FBI Director Christopher Wray last winter:
“The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now, and it’s not going away anytime soon.”
Since he became director in 2017, said Wray, FBI domestic terrorism investigations had doubled in number to more than 2,000, and FBI investigations of white supremacists had tripled.
Listening to Wray, one came away with the impression that right-wing terrorism was our foremost internal security issue, that the Jan. 6 riot was a manifestation of that terrorism, and that white supremacists top the list of dangerous enemies inside our own country.
The vast turnout of police and press for the Sept. 18 protest on the Mall to demand fairness for the Jan. 6 “patriots” suggested that our elites shared Wray’s alarm.
All seemed disappointed when the brownshirts failed to show up.
Yet, with this week’s release of FBI statistics on violent crime in America, showing a record 30% surge in homicides in 2020 over 2019, questions arise.
What caused the number of U.S. victims of murder and manslaughter to explode by almost 5,000 last year to reach a total of 21,500? Why are homicides rising another 10% this year? Why are murders and manslaughters rising so dramatically in the USA?
For that number of killings, 21,500 in 2021, is three times the number of U.S. soldiers dead in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The New York Times and Washington Post both made the FBI figures front-page news. And the Times gave some insight as to who the victims of homicide in this country were and are.
Here is the relevant passage in the Times story:
“The (FBI) report … breaks down last year’s homicide victims by race, ethnicity and sex, although not all law enforcement agencies provided such data. Of the people killed in 2020, at least 9,913 were Black, 7,029 were white, 497 were from other races and 315 were of unknown race. There were at least 14,146 men killed and 3,573 women.”
The startling number here: There were nearly 3,000 more Black victims who wound up dead in America from criminal violence than there were white victims, though Blacks, at 12-13% of the U.S. population, are only one-fifth the size of the white population.
Translation: Black Americans are being shot, stabbed and beaten to death at a rate six to seven times that of whites. And by the end of this year, well over 10,000 Blacks will have been made the victims of homicide in America.
That figure breaks down to roughly 200 Black folks dead every single week in this country from gunshot wounds and other criminal violence — a weekly death toll that rivals U.S. losses in Vietnam at the height of the war.
The question unanswered and unasked in the Times’ and Post’s stories is: Who is doing this? Who is killing all these Black people?
If, as the slogan proclaims, “Black lives matter,” why is there not greater public alarm at BLM in who is killing so many Black people?
About the number of dead in the infamous Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, histories and historians differ. Some say the number of Black victims was no more than 30. Others say it was as high as 300.
But, again, in one year, the number of Blacks killed in violent crimes in America, 3-in-4 by gunshots, will exceed 10,000.
Who is doing this? How many of these Black folks are victims of the right-wing extremists and white supremacists that Wray sees as our greatest domestic security threat?
How many Blacks in 2021 and this year were victims of the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers or 3 Percenters or neo-Nazis or the Klan?
If rogue white cops are the scourge of Black America, as we have been instructed to believe, how many killings of unarmed Blacks were done by white cops this year and last?
In 2020, homicides in Washington, D.C., rose for the third straight year, reaching almost 200, the deadliest year in the city since 2004. More than 920 people were shot in 2020, a 64% increase from three years ago. Again, how many of these Washington shootings, averaging three a day, were the lethal work of Washington white supremacists?
Within the Post and Times there were explanations offered for the 30% surge in homicides. Among them were the proliferation of guns and gun ownership, and the “police legitimacy crisis.”
In the wake of George Floyd’s death, “Defund the Police!” became the chant of 100 leftist protests.
Police funds were cut. Elites turned hostile to cops they once hailed as “first responders.” Demoralized, many police ceased to be proactive. Police resignations and retirements came in record numbers.
When the peace forces in our society were morally disarmed, their natural enemies, the criminal element, seized the opportunity.
Russia Becomes First Country To Ban Scientology As A “Threat To National Security”
Russia’s Justice Ministry is waging a war on Scientology, this week banning the organization from operating on Russian soil. It’s not the first time Moscow has moved legally against the group, however, in an updated list released Friday two key Church of Scientology entities have now been blacklisted as “undesirable” – the most severe designation ever taken by the Russian government.
Calling the group a “threat to the security of the Russian Federation” a media statement described that that “On October 1, the World Institute of Scientology Enterprises International, L. Ron Hubbard Library as well as the ENEMO were added to the list of organizations whose activity is deemed undesirable in Russia by the Prosecutor General’s Office.”
The two entities named are California-based holdings and are said to be vital to Scientology operations in foreign countries. Being added to the “undesirable” list means all local offices are closed down by the state and assets frozen.
Moscow has long argued it’s a “business masquerading as a religion” – similar to arguments made by detractors in the West, who have also long lobbied Washington to revoke Scientology’s tax exempt status.
In most countries across the globe, the group is officially considered a religion and thus enjoys tax exempt status, with the major exception of Russia. In the US, where it was born over a half-century ago when American science fiction novelist L. Ron Hubbard wrote its foundational texts (numbering thousands upon thousands of pages), it’s attracted huge controversy.
The controversy and media spotlight has grown especially over the last decade in the US. After a number of high profile Scientologists, including celebrities like Tom Cruise and John Travolta (though there are rumors the latter has moved away from it), became outspoken public advocates – which included defending some bizarre practices like forcing women to “stay silent” during child birth – but which resulted in backlash as more and more documentaries emerged delving into the strange belief system.
The Prosecutor General’s Office in Russie said the World Institute of Scientology Enterprises International and the Church of Spiritual Technology “pose a threat to the security of the Russian Federation.”https://t.co/nOvgeXKgGF
According to Russia’s RT News, the Kremlin has long eyed Scientology going back to its presence just after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s:
The decision follows a decades-long campaign to ban Scientology from illegally profiting on Russian territory, with the first major effort to restrict the group dating back to 1996, back in the Boris Yeltsin-era and some twelve years after the organization gained a foothold in what was then the Soviet Union.
However, it was not until the 2010s when authorities really cracked down on Scientology groups, investigating major branches in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as their leaders, on charges of illegal business activities and extremism.
Scientology is known to employ an army of lawyers, often making it extremely difficult for local, state, or central governments to go after the group – which often wins court cases based on presenting itself as a valid religion.
Tom Cruise Worried About John Travolta Distancing Himself From Scientology? https://t.co/gxjQrjoGdW
Other European countries like Belgium and France have recently seen high profile cases thrust Scientology into the media spotlight, with some European officials labeling it a “cult”. However, Russia now stands out as the country with by far the most restrictive laws against the organization.
On May 7, 2021, during the peak of India’s Delta Surge, The World Health Organization reported, “Uttar Pradesh (is) going the last mile to stop COVID-19.”
The WHO noted, “Government teams are moving across 97,941 villages in 75 districts over five days in this activity which began May 5 in India’s most populous state with a population of 230 million.”
The activity involved an aggressive house-to-house test and treat program with medicine kits.
The WHO explained, “Each monitoring team has two members who visit homes in villages and remote hamlets to test everyone with symptoms of COVID-19 using Rapid Antigen Test kits. Those who test positive are quickly isolated and given a medicine kit with advice on disease management.“
The medicines comprising the kit were not identified as part of the Western media blackout at the time. As a result, the contents were as secret as the sauce at McDonald’s.
The WHO continued, “On the inaugural day, WHO field officers monitored over 2,000 government teams and visited at least 10,000 households.”
Such teams are the very government teams discussed above assigned to conduct the house-to-house test and treat program in Uttar Pradesh. In discussing the role of the Rapid Response Team (RRT), the WHO site reports,
“RRTs are a key component of a larger emergency response strategy that is essential for an efficient and effective response…WHO has produced and published this course for RRTs working at the national, sub-national, district, and sub-district levels to strengthen the pandemic response with support from the National Center for Disease Control, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
The Rapid Response Teams derive support from the United States CDC under the umbrella of the WHO. This fact further validates the Uttar Pradesh test and treat program and solidifies this as a joint effort by the WHO and CDC.
Just five short weeks later, on June 14, 2021, new cases had dropped a staggering 97.1 percent, and the Uttar Pradesh program was hailed as a resounding success.
According to ZeeNews of India, “The strategy of trace, test & treat yields results.”
“The Yogi-led state has also been registering a steep decline in the number of Active COVID Cases as the figure has dropped from a high of 310,783 in April to 8,986 now, a remarkable reduction by 97.10 percent.”
On August 6, 2021, India’s Ivermectin media blackout ended with MSM reporting. Western media, including MSN, finally acknowledged what was contained in those Uttar Pradesh medicine kits. Among the medicines were Doxycycline and Ivermectin.
On August 25, 2021, the Indian media noticed the discrepancy between Uttar Pradesh’s massive success and other states, like Kerala’s, comparative failure. Although Uttar Pradesh was only 5% vaccinated to Kerala’s 20%, Uttar Pradesh had (only) 22 new COVID cases, while Kerala was overwhelmed with 31,445 in one day. So it became apparent that whatever was contained in those treatment kits must have been pretty effective.
News18 reported, “Let’s look at the contrasting picture. Kerala, with its 3.5 crore population – or 35 million, on August 25 reported 31,445 new cases, a bulk of the total cases reported in the country. Uttar Pradesh, the biggest state with a population of nearly 24 crore – or 240 million – meanwhile reported just 22 cases in the same period.
Two days ago, just seven fresh positive cases were reported from Uttar Pradesh. Kerala reported 215 deaths on August 25, while Uttar Pradesh only reported two deaths. In fact, no deaths have been reported from Uttar Pradesh in recent days. There are only 345 active cases in Uttar Pradesh now while Kerala’s figure is at 1.7 lakh – or 170,000.”
“Kerala has done a much better job in vaccination coverage with 56% of its population being vaccinated with one dose and 20% of the population being fully vaccinated with a total of 2.66 crore – or 26.6 million – doses being administered.
Uttar Pradesh had given over 6.5 crore – or 65 million – doses, the maximum in the country, but only 25% of people have got their first dose while less than 5% of people are fully vaccinated. Given the present COVID numbers, Uttar Pradesh seems to be trumping Kerala for the tag of the most successful model against COVID.”
By September 12, 2021, Livemint reported that 34 districts were declared COVID-free or had no active cases. Only 14 new cases were recorded in the entire state of Uttar Pradesh.
On September 22, 2021, YouTube hosted a video by popular science blogger Dr. John Campbell detailing the Uttar Pradesh success story. He gave a breakdown of the ingredients and dosages of the magical medicine home treatment kit responsible for eradicating COVID in Uttar Pradesh. The same kit was also used in the state of Goa.
Dr. John Campbell broke India’s Ivermectin Blackout wide open on YouTube by revealing the formula of the secret sauce, much to the dismay of Big Pharma, the WHO, and the CDC. Readers will want to watch this before it is taken down. See mark 2:22.
Each home kit contained the following: Paracetamol tablets [tylenol], Vitamin C, Multivitamin, Zinc, Vitamin D3, Ivermectin 12 mg [quantity #10 tablets], Doxycycline 100 mg [quantity #10 tablets]. Other non-medication components included face masks, sanitizer, gloves and alcohol wipes, a digital thermometer, and a pulse oximeter. See mark 2:33.
Campbell reports that the exciting things in the kit that grabbed his attention were: Zinc, Vitamin D3, Ivermectin, and secondary antibiotic treatment. “Interesting, that’s what the government decided to give.” See mark 3:40
John Campbell has reviewed repurposed drugs for COVID before. He has interviewed both Dr. Tess Lawrie and Dr. Pierre Kory. Repurposed drugs hold the potential for benefitting many conditions, not the least of which include viruses and cancers.
Dr. Campbell noted that there had been no recent cases in 59 Uttar Pradesh districts. In addition, out of 191,446 tests completed in the previous 24 hours, only 33 samples were positive for a test positivity rate of only 0.01%. Dr. Campbell called this low number “staggering.” See mark 5:05.
By September, cases had fallen dramatically. Out of the entire state of 200 million plus inhabitants, only 187 active cases were left compared to the peak in April of 310,783 cases. See mark 5:41.
Dr. Campbell attributes their success to many factors, including early detection and early treatment with kits costing a mere $ 2.65 per person. See mark 6:20.
Notice that Dr. Campbell does not mention a single person who had any toxicity from those ten 12 mg pills of Ivermectin – in the entire state of over 200 million. Not one poisoning was reported. No Indian poison control articles or telephone calls were reported. Out of millions of distributed medicine kits, each containing 120 mg of Ivermectin, not one person in Uttar Pradesh was reported to have had a problem with the drug.
Contrary to what little we receive – at great expense – from the government in the United States, these kits are efficient and contain gloves, a thermometer, and an oximeter. The last time I purchased an oximeter some ten years ago, it cost some $200.00. This entire kit – including the oximeter – costs only $2.65.
And notice that a government can purchase over one thousand home treatment Ivermectin containing kits for the price of one course of Remdesivir. Remdesivir runs $3,100, and it is an impractical drug as it must be given late in the disease during hospitalization. Moreover, it is a drug that does not save lives.
Now is the right moment to notice the onslaught of United States poison control articles attempting to smear Ivermectin, a drug proven safe and effective in the Uttar Pradesh test-and-treat program administered under the auspices of both the WHO and CDC.
It is appropriate to remind the reader that the WHO and CDC possess direct and recent knowledge of Ivermectin use for COVID-19 in India. Moreover, they know better than anyone the colossal effectiveness and overwhelming safety of Ivermectin used in those millions of Uttar Pradesh test and treat kits.
Perhaps it is also time to ask why exactly Dr. Tess Lawrie’s peer-reviewed meta-analysis was given an Altimetric score of 26,697, making it number eight out of some 18 million publications.
This rank is far better than the top 1%, which would only need a ranking of 180,000 for it to rank in the top 1%. It would only need 18,000 for it to rank in the top .1%. Ranking in the top .001% would mean #180. Therefore, at number eight, it is 8/180 of the top .001% or roughly the top 4.4% of the top .001%. This article ranks in the top 5% of the top .001%!
In other words, only seven articles in the world out of those 18 million are ranked higher.
This peer-reviewed paper is one of the most cited of medical references of all time – period. That should alert any reader – immediately – to its historical significance. Dr. Tess Lawrie is a 30-year veteran WHO evidence synthesis expert. Her conclusion is every bit as meaningful as the article’s rank. Here are those words,
If Dr. Lawrie’s paper is ranked in the top 5% of the top .001% of all such published medical articles of all time, then Dr. Kory’s is not far behind. His is 38/180 of the top .001% or the top 21% of the top .001%
Thus, both articles would rank in the rarified atmosphere of nearly one in a million.
Therefore, the reader must now ask why two magnificent independent reviews from two different continents, coming to the same conclusion, are both ignored by our world’s medical leaders?
Uttar Pradesh is one such population that experienced a considerable drop in COVID-19 morbidity and mortality months AFTER Dr. Kory’s article was published on April 22, 2021. Therefore, one must ask that if Ivermectin so predictably and safely eradicates COVID-19, then why is it not being systematically deployed over all the world, as Dr. Kory and Dr. Lawrie suggest?
Interest in Ivermectin and India is only increasing and has now reached an all-time high.
India’s conquest of COVID-19 is concealed no longer. The secret is out.
And perhaps, at long last, that much-anticipated WHO Final Report detailing the most successful Pandemic campaign of any place on earth will be published.
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Justus R. Hope, M.D. is the author of the book “Ivermectin for the World”, released as a call to action for the use of Ivermectin to end the humanitarian crisis in India with the COVID-19 Pandemic
“People Are Moving Back” – NYC Rentals Become Scarce As City Life Returns
The number of available apartment rentals in New York City has fallen back to pre-pandemic levels as people return to city life for urban work and schooling.
According to Bloomberg, citing data from real estate firm StreetEasy, in the week ending Sept. 26, inventory of apartments for rent stood at 15,541, compared with 16,649 at the start of March 2020. This is a considerable decline from the 48,753 rentals available in September 2020.
The borough of Manhattan is one of the hottest rental markets in all of the city, said Nancy Wu, an economist at StreetEasy.
“Manhattan residents were more mobile and had the ability to move. That’s where we saw the biggest drops in rents [during the pandemic], and the biggest gains back up in the city,” Wu said.
She said it’s a “sign we’re getting to a recovery in the rentals market, which means people are moving back.”
Prices have yet to rebound back to pre-COVID levels, and there are still plenty of good deals, allowing renters room to negotiate.
The median rent for an apartment in New York has risen since May and hit $2,700 in August. According to Wu, it’s still lower than the median of $2,995 in April 2020. Prices are expected to edge higher.
“I do expect this winter to be busier than what we usually see because people will be moving back the city and adding to the pool of demand,” she said.
Wall Street firms such as Deutch Bank, among others, are returning their employees to offices in the financial district over the next six months, which has boosted demand for rentals. If inventories get low enough, a rental bidding war could be seen.
… and while residential real estate is making a comeback, commercial real estate still remains in a great deal of stress.
Russia has warned that the new military pact between the US, the UK, and Australia threatens global nuclear non-proliferation. The pact, known as AUKUS, is a military technology-sharing deal that is meant to counter China. Under the agreement, Australia will get access to technology to build nuclear-powered submarines, which would make Canberra the first non-nuclear armed state to have them.
“It’s a great challenge to the international non-proliferation regime,” said Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, according to the Russian news agency TASS.
Ryabkov said Russia is “concerned” about the “partnership that will allow Australia, after 18 months of consultations and several years of attempts, to obtain nuclear-powered submarines in sufficient numbers to become one of the top five countries for this type of armaments.”
Ryabkov also said Russia is concerned over the UK’s plans to expand its nuclear arsenal that was announced earlier in the year. “We are concerned especially by the statements produced earlier in the year in London on future prospects for expansion of its nuclear capabilities,” he said.
In March, the British announced that they are increasing their nuclear stockpile for the first time since the Cold War. London will set its cap of nuclear warheads at 260, up from the current limit of 180.
Last month after the AUKUS pact was first unveiled, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian had condemned the partnership as it “greatly undermines regional peace and stability, aggravates the arms race and hurts the international non-proliferation efforts.”
A Dip In Shipping Rates: The End Of The Nightmare, Or Just The Eye Of The Hurricane
This year, spot ocean container rates have reached record highs and could be at a crucial inflection point this week. News of 40-foot container rates on the world’s most important shipping lane, that is, China and the U.S., plunged amid a power crunch shutting down factories across multiple Chinese provinces leading speculators to sell their shipping spots, according to Chinese media outlet Caixin Global.
Caixin spoke with an executive at a Shanghai freight company Thursday who said 40-foot container rates from China to the U.S. West Coast sank this week, plummeting from $15,000 to just $8,000. For the same container, the spot rate for China to the U.S. East Coast dropped from $20,000 to around $15,000.
The decline in international shipping costs is primarily due to at least 20 Chinese provinces and regions making up more than 66% of the country’s GDP have announced some form of power cuts in recent weeks, which has shuttered energy-intensive manufacturing industries and so their need for containerized shipping has diminished.
We have noted Foxconn, the world’s biggest iPhone assembler and a key supplier of Apple and Tesla, halted production earlier this week. Another Apple supplier, Unimicron Technologies, suspended operations. There are countless reports of other energy-intensive companies that suspended operations.
An analyst at Tianfeng Securities Co. Ltd. said the decline in shipping rates was primarily caused by the imminent off-season and a reduction in manufacturing due to China’s power crunch. The analyst said rates should decline as export growth in China will decrease in the fourth quarter, and seasonally ocean freight slows down.
A report by CSC Financial Co. Ltd. outlined rates will stay stubbornly high for the next two weeks as port congestion remains a problem in China and the U.S. But after that, rates may stall on slow growth from China.
We so far understand China’s power crunch is having a sizeable impact on economic growth and has resulted in a slump for containerized shipping demand. What comes next is either shipping rates continue a downward spiral or bounce back as China will ultimately restart its manufacturing base near term.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued a report (pdf) on Sept. 30 on the FBI’s applications to surveil U.S. citizens, finding “widespread” failure that “raises serious questions” and criticizing agents for not fixing flaws spotted in previous audits.
The inspector general (IG) reviewed about 7,000 applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants—the same used to surveil former Trump campaign aide Carter Page in 2016—and found that the agency had failed to follow key rules, the Woods Procedures, in the program. In December 2019 review, Horowitz discovered 17 significant errors and omissions in the FISA surveillance application targeting Page.
The most recent audit of the agency’s Woods Procedures—rules that the FBI follows to ensure that FISA applications are “scrupulously accurate”—found sweeping “non-compliance” that “raises serious questions about the adequacy and execution of the supervisory review process in place at the time of the applications we reviewed,” Horowitz said, stating that the FBI’s quality-control officials apparently missed these problems.
His office also identified 183 FISA applications that had a missing or incomplete Woods file, which is a document meant to ensure the accuracy of statements made to the secretive FISA court. The report also found hundreds of other cases where there were instances of noncompliance with the agency’s Woods procedures.
“A failure to adhere to the Woods Procedures … could easily lead to errors that do impact probable cause—and therefore potentially call into question the legal basis for the government’s use of highly intrusive FISA warrants,” Horowitz wrote.
Horowitz recommended that the FBI attempt to make “additional efforts to communicate and emphasize to its workforce the importance” of the bureau’s own standards when applying for FISA warrants.
In a statement released after Horowitz’s report, the FBI told media outlets on Sept. 30 that it appreciated the IG’s “determined focus on the FBI’s FISA process, especially given the significant changes and policy enhancements that we have worked to make in concert with, and in many instances, prior to the issuance of this most recent OIG Audit Report.”
The federal law enforcement bureau will accept Horowitz’s recommendations detailed in the report and has adopted about half of them already, according to the statement. FBI officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The audit report is an extension of a report that was issued by Horowitz in March 2020, when he reviewed 29 FISA applications. According to that report, the inspector general couldn’t review four of the applications because the FBI wasn’t able to locate them. Of the 25 he could review, all of them had flaws—209 errors in total, Horowitz said.
“Our testing of FISA applications … identified apparent errors or inadequately supported facts in all of the 25 applications we reviewed, and interviews to date with available agents or supervisors in field offices generally have confirmed the issues we identified,” he said in his March report.
Horowitz lamented in the Sept. 30 audit that the FBI hasn’t taken his earlier report seriously.
“In response to the findings in our December 2019 FISA report and March 2020 [report], the FBI Director publicly acknowledged the seriousness of the identified problems and announced numerous steps the FBI was undertaking to address them,” he said.
“However, we believe certain public statements from the FBI and NSD in 2020 failed to recognize the significant risks posed by systemic non-compliance with the Woods Procedures, and during our audit, some FBI field personnel minimized the significance of Woods Procedures non-compliance.”
The IG report was likely referencing statements FBI Director Christopher Wray made to Congress in February, when he told representatives that they shouldn’t “lose any sleep” over the December 2019 IG report.
“The vast majority of the FISAs we do, both the initial applications and the renewals, are the kinds of applications that I am quite confident—we don’t know each other, but you wouldn’t lose any sleep over, and we wouldn’t want to grind to a halt,” Wray told Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) at the time.
Following the release of the latest report, Jordan took to Twitter to blast Wray for downplaying earlier concerns.
“Feb. 5, 2020: FBI Director Christopher Wray dismisses concerns about the FISA process. Says Americans shouldn’t ‘lose any sleep’ over it.
Today: IG Horowitz releases damning report about the FBI’s broken FISA process,” Jordan wrote.
“It was worse than we ever thought.”
The FBI’s failure to adhere to surveillance rules has led to criminal charges in some instances.
After Horowitz’s findings were released in 2019, special counsel John Durham later filed charges against former FBI Attorney Kevin Clinesmith for falsifying a document used in a FISA application to surveil Page. He pleaded guilty in August 2020.
In August, Durham’s office indicted Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who represented the Democratic National Committee, for allegedly lying to the FBI when he spoke to a top bureau official, James Baker, in 2016. On Sept. 17, Sussmann pleaded not guilty to the charge.
According to the indictment, Sussmann had passed along a claim alleging that there was a secret communications channel between a Russian bank and the Trump Organization. Durham alleged that Sussmann told Baker that he wasn’t representing a specific client, but was actually secretly representing Democrats, Clinton’s campaign, and an unnamed technology company executive.
The FISA Court is a secret court where the government is present but the accused is not. As IG Horowitz explains:
“Unlike the use of other intrusive investigative techniques (such as wiretaps under Title III and traditional criminal search warrants) that are granted in ex parte hearings but can potentially be subject to later court challenge, FISA orders generally have not been subject to scrutiny through subsequent adversarial proceedings.”
Because this is an ex parte hearing, the DOJ/FBI have heightened duties of candor. According to the FISA Court’s local rules, the government is required to disclose all material facts and correct any misstatements of material facts:
This latest audit by IG Horowitz focused on the FBI’s compliance with the Woods procedures. This is how the process works:
Last year, IG Horowitz reviewed 29 random FISA applications. He found “that the FBI was not meeting the expectations of its own protocols.” As he reported in March 2020:
“We identified numerous instances of non-compliance with the Woods Procedures in the 25 Woods Files that were made available to us to review; and we reported that the FBI was unable to produce the original version of the remaining 4 Woods Files we requested.”
More concerning are the latest discoveries after an audit of more FISA applications. These include:
“over 400 instances of non-compliance with the Woods Procedures in connection with those 29 FISA applications”
“over 7,000 FISA applications authorized between January 2015 and March 2020, there were at least 179 instances in which the Woods File required by FBI policy was missing in whole or in part”
The more material errors (aside from losing their own files) included:
To put this into context, in December 2019, after IG Horowitz detailed substantial issues with the Carter Page FISA applications, the FISA Court noted that the misconduct was serious and ordered the FBI to conduct remedial measures to fix the problems of the FBI’s own creation. The FBI promised to take corrective action.
One can’t help but speculate that the FISA Court won’t do much about these latest issues, aside from ordering the FBI to conduct more training. After all, the then-presiding judge of the FISA Court, Judge Boasberg, refused jail time for FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith after he altered an e-mail and lied about Carter Page’s relationship with the CIA.
Knowing the history of the FISA Court excusing government misconduct, we present the same question now that we did after the Clinesmith sentencing: What does it say about the FISA Court’s “heightened duty of candor” if there aren’t heightened punishments for violating that duty?
And we have one final question – one that has applied to Director Wray for the last few years: how could the FBI Director allow these abuses to continue?
