Saturday, September 12, 2020

How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled



Note: An audio version of this story aired on NPR's Planet Money. Listen to the episode here.

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MSM’s attempts to spin Trump’s attacks on senseless wars as disrespect for military at large are a dismal distortion of reality



By , a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers. Someone should tell the New York Times, CNN and other mainstream media outlets that soldiers don’t actually like getting killed or maimed for no good reason.

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Nobel Peace Prize Committee Informs Trump He Has Not Launched Enough Drone Strikes To Qualify



OSLO, NORWAY—The Norwegian Nobel Committee was reportedly considering President Trump as a recipient of its prestigious Nobel Peace Prize, as the president had submitted his name for consideration to them over 67 times.

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Hospitals May Be Slow To Add Vitamin D To Covid-19 Treatment Regimens Because of Loss of Income

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A growing body of published studies indicate vitamin D supplementation may allay the symptoms and severity of COVID-19 infections, enough to keep hospitalized patients out of the intensive care unit.  The most recent of these studies, published in The Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (Aug 29,2020) is more than convincing.

But this remarkable study is not likely to change the practices of modern medicine, even though it completely abolished COVID-19-related deaths in the intensive care unit (ICU) and reduced admission from a standard COVID-19 care ward to the ICU from 50% to 2%.

The study involved 76 hospitalized patients who were COVID-19-positive and had symptoms of coronavirus infection such as dry cough, shortness of breath, fever and diarrhea who were on a standard-care COVID-19 hospital ward.

Critics say the study is not large enough, co-morbid conditions such as obesity, diabetes and autoimmunity were grouped rather than identified specifically, and there were no vitamin D blood levels taken before and after treatment.  Yet there were no adverse reactions.  So, what harm could come from a hospital giving vitamin D to all patients on its COVID-19 ward?

THE CONVINCING DATA

The following chart reveals just 2% of COVID-19 COVID-19-infected patients given VITAMIN D25 (as prescription-only calcifediol (cal-siff-i-die-ol), needed to be transferred to the ICU (intensive care unit) from a standard care ward whereas 50% of those COVID-19 infected patients NOT given vitamin D worsened to the point where intensive care and ventilator support was required.

Non-prescription vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) is converted to vitamin D25 calcifediol in the liver.  Therefore Rx-only calcifediol works faster than non-Rx vitamin D3.

Vitamin D inhibits newly recognized cause of COVID-19 death

Vitamin D is known to inhibit the buildup of bradykinin (bray-dih-kî-nin), a natural internally-produced blood vessel dilator which helps control blood pressure.  Excessive bradykinin can induce contraction of the bronchus, an airway to the lungs, thus impairing breathing.

For ethical reasons, vitamin D could not be compared against an inactive placebo pill.  (However, there is no such thing as placebo effect, another myth of modern medicine.)

Vitamin D is also be talked about by physicians as an injectable 300,000 unit mega-dose for wintertime protection from COVID-19 coronavirus infections altogether.

Scientific validity

Patients were selected to receive vitamin D randomly. For ethical reasons, vitamin D could not be compared against an inactive placebo pill.  (However, there is no such thing as placebo effect, another myth of modern medicine.)

Financial Incentives For Treatment Not Prevention

The 49 of 50 COVID-19 patients who did not require admission to the ICU would have saved Medicare $1,274,000.

The story going around is that hospitals face a steep decline in income-generating surgical procedures in the COVID-19 era as sick patients are delaying care or even avoiding the hospital altogether.  So COVID-19-generated income has to make up for lost revenues.

Hospitals have financial incentives to classify all of their acute pneumonia, sepsis, tuberculosis and other viral lung infections that require admission to the intensive care unit as COVID-19 cases because hospitals have financial incentives to do so.

A report posted at the Kaiser Family Foundation website indicates ~15% of uninsured (and presumably younger) hospitalized COVID-19 cases require hospitalization with mild cases being billed at $13,297 and severe cases (requiring ventilator support for greater than 96 hours) at $40,218Other sources generally confirm these numbers.

According to a report in USA TODAY, for a typical case of pneumonia hospitals are reimbursed $5000; COVID-19 cases $13,000; and COVID-19 cases on ventilators at $39,000.  That gives plenty of incentive for hospitals to up-code their garden-variety pneumonia cases as COVID-19.

Hopefully a Medicare audit would rectify any overbilling.  But that doesn’t keep patients out of the ICU which is frankly a death arena nowadays.

Patients May Not Have Covid-19 At All

A confounding problem is that hospitalized patients with lung infections may coincidentally test positive for COVID-19 coronavirus but that may be due to prior bouts with coronaviruses or an outright false-positive blood test.  For example, hospitalized patients with HIV may falsely test positive for COVID-19 coronavirusPrior “common cold” coronavirus infections may also test positive for COVID-19.  So, some patients admitted as COVID-19 positive patients may not have COVID-19 infection at all, but the hospital collects extra reimbursement over a flawed test.

Sun Deprivation

To make matters worse, ICU patients are completely deprived of sun exposure which is the primary source of vitamin D.  The very reason why coronavirus infections spike upwards from January to April in the northern hemisphere is because solar radiation is dimmed by the tilting of the earth away from the sun during winter months.

The post Hospitals May Be Slow To Add Vitamin D To Covid-19 Treatment Regimens Because of Loss of Income appeared first on LewRockwell.



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Friday, September 11, 2020

A Tale Of Two Housing Markets: Mortgage Delinquencies Spike 450%, Yet Refis Boom With Low-Principal Loans

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A Tale Of Two Housing Markets: Mortgage Delinquencies Spike 450%, Yet Refis Boom With Low-Principal Loans Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2020 - 12:41

As we noted last month, the US housing market is reflecting the extremes of the economy right now - between those who can't make ends meet due to the pandemic, and those who are either still employed, are sitting on a pile of equity, or both.

One one end of the spectrum you've got affluent borrowers locking in record-low rates, while mortgage originations reached a record $1.1 trillion in the second quarter as rates on 30-year mortgages dipped below 3% for the first time in history in July, according to Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, refis may just be getting started.

There are still nearly 18 million homeowners with good credit and at least 20% equity who stand to cut at least 0.75% off their current rate by refinancing, according to Ben Graboske, president of Black Knight data and analytics.

We would expect near-record-low interest rates to continue to buoy the market,” he said in a statement Tuesday. -Bloomberg

What's impressive is that the quarterly spike in new mortgage originations occurred while under nationwide public health measures that restricted home showings, appraisals, and in-person document signings, according to the report. That said, refis accounted for around 70% of home loans issued during the period.

Also notable is that the average loan-to-value ratio is above 90%, as borrowers are having no trouble securing loans with just 10% or less down.

At the other end of the spectrum, mortgage delinquencies are up 450% from pre-pandemic levels, with around 2.25 million mortgages at least 90 days late in July - the most since the credit crisis, according to Black Knight, Inc.

"The money is in the homes and people with college education are still working, but the pain is being felt where people are unemployed," said Wharton real estate professor, Susan Wachter, adding "Covid-19 will drive an increase in the already high income-inequality gap, and wealth inequality, actually, which is much more extreme."

While the unemployment rate fell to 8.4% in August, more than 11 million jobs were still lost in the pandemic, the Labor Department reported last week. Supplemental benefits for the unemployed of $600 a week expired in July and Congress has been at an impasse over a follow-up aid package. -Bloomberg

More findings from Black Knight (via Bloomberg):

  • More borrowers with ability to refinance are using their equity to get cash. About $44.5 billion in equity was tapped through cash-out refinancing in the second quarter, the most in more than a decade.
  • Markets with the biggest delinquency increases in July were Miami, Las Vegas, Orlando, New York and New Orleans.
  • The number of homeowners in forbearance continued to fall last week and is down by 1 million from its May peak. But the July 31 expiration of extra unemployment benefits means this month “may provide the true test,” Black Knight said in a Sept. 4 report.
  • Homeowners with less equity and lower credit quality were more than twice as likely to have entered forbearance plans. About 11.5% of loans by the Federal Housing Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs were in forbearance last week, compared with 5.1% for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac borrowers, who have better credit and more equity in their houses.


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Chinese virologist vows to publish proof COVID-19 man-made

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A virologist who specialized in immunology at the Hong Kong School of Public Health says she has evidence COVID-19 is man-made and plans to publish it soon.

Dr. Li-Meng Yan appeared Friday on the British television program "Loose Women" from a secret location. She said she fled Hong Kong and is now in the United States because her life was threatened. The Chinese government, the doctor said, already has "removed all her information" from government files.

Claims that the virus came from a wet market in Wuhan are a "smoke screen," she told Britain's ITV, DailyMail.com reported.

The interview:

"This virus is not from nature," Yan said. "The genome sequence is like a human finger print. And based on this you can identify these things. I will [use this] evidence to tell people why this has come from the lab in China, why they are the ones who made it.

"Anyone, even if you have no biology knowledge, will be able to read it, and check and identify and verify it yourself."

Yan said the Chinese government, besides removing her information, also has started a campaign to undermine her.

"They deleted all my information and also they told people to spread rumors about me, that I'm a liar, I don't know anything, I just killed a hamster in the lab. They will try to control my family and friends and then suddenly I don't exist," she warned.

She said she was "one of the first scientists to study the coronavirus that would become known as COVID-19, and claims at the end of December 2019 she was asked by her supervisor at the university to look into an odd cluster of SARS-like cases that had erupted in mainland China."

"I was a medical doctor and Ph.D.," said Yan, "I work with a bunch of the top experts in the world, and because I had my two degrees from mainland China, I was the one assigned to do the secret investigation about new pneumonia in Wuhan."

She said she reported her concerns to her supervisor but got no response.

"I never thought this would happen when I did the secret investigation, I [thought] I would speak to my supervisor and they would do the right thing on behalf of the government," she said. "But what I saw was nobody responding to that. People are scared of the government but this was something urgent, and Chinese New Year time, [I knew] this was a dangerous virus and all these things meant I could not keep silent, there are human beings and global health [at risk]."

Chinese officials insist there's no evidence the virus was created in a lab.

A spokesman told ITV: "The fact is there is no delay or cover up  whatsoever from the Chinese government, it reported virus data and relayed information as soon as possible to the international community.

"As soon as cases were identified in Wuhan city China acted immediately to conduct investigations to stop the spread of the disease."

wnd-donation-graphic-2-2019

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QAnon website shuts down after N.J. man ID'd as operator

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(BLOOMBERG) A popular website for posts about the conspiracy group QAnon abruptly shut down after a fact-checking group identified the developer as a New Jersey man.

Qmap.pub is among the largest websites promoting the QAnon conspiracy, with over 10 million visitors in July, according to web analytics firm SimilarWeb Ltd., and served as the primary archive of QAnon’s posts. The website aggregates posts by Q, the anonymous figure behind the QAnon theory, and the creator of the Qmap.pub website is known online only as “QAppAnon.”

The fact-checking site Logically.ai identified Jason Gelinas of New Jersey on Sept. 10 as the “developer and mouthpiece” for the site. New Jersey state records connect QAppAnon to Gelinas’s home address, Bloomberg found.

Read the full story ›

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AG Barr rips national media as 'collection of liars' over riot coverage

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(TOWNHALL) Wrapping up a three-day tour in Chicago, Phoenix and Cleveland Friday, Attorney General Bill Barr took on the media during an exclusive interview with Townhall.

"They're basically a collection of liars. Most of the mainstream media. They're a collection of liars and they know exactly what they're doing. A perfect example of that were the riots. Right on the street it was clear as day what was going on, anyone observing it, reporters observing it, it could not have escaped their attention that this was orchestrated violence by a hardened group of street fighting radicals and they kept on excluding from their coverage all the video of this and reporting otherwise and they were doing that for partisan reasons, and they were lying to the American people.

Read the full story ›

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COVID Financial Pain 'Much, Much Worse' Than Expected, Warns Harvard Study

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COVID Financial Pain 'Much, Much Worse' Than Expected, Warns Harvard Study Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2020 - 21:40

New findings from a survey by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, published by NPR News on Wednesday, reveal low-income minority households have experienced the most financial hardships in the virus-induced recession.  

The pandemic heavily impacted Black and Latino households across America's four largest cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston) with massive job loss or reduction in hourly wages or a decline in working hours. 

The survey, conducted from July 1 through Aug. 3, found Latino households (77%) and Black households (81%) in the Greater Houston area incurred "serious" financial problems. 

Houston

As for the three other major cities, the survey showed 73% of Latinos in New York City experienced severe financial hardships, 71% of Latinos in Los Angeles, and 63% in Chicago. Black households in New York City (62%), Los Angeles (52%), and Chicago (69%) also reported severe financial distress because of the downturn. 

New York City

Los Angeles

Chicago

The survey found a majority of low-income minority households had their savings wiped out, which is similar to our recent report detailing how tens of millions of Americans depleted emergency savings this year.

Nationally, white households and ones that have incomes over $100,000 escaped much of the financial distress. But for low-income minorities, which mostly survived on direct transfer payments from the government (i.e., Trump stimulus checks), the exhaustion of the checks has caused more financial stress ahead of the presidential election in November. 

"Before federal coronavirus support programs even expired, we find millions of people with severe problems with their finances," said Robert Blendon, a poll co-director and executive director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program at the Harvard Chan School. "And it's going to get worse because there is nothing for the people we surveyed who earn under $100,000 a year to fall back on."

Blendon said the downturn has produced substantial economic damage among low-income minority households. 

He warned: "This is much, much, much worse than I would've predicted." 

"This is what I would expect without a national emergency relief bill," Blendon said. "We had a $2 trillion relief bill to lift people up and put a pillow under them. But it is not helping nearly as many people as we had expected."

If readers have been counting, the dangerous fiscal cliff has been underway in the US for 39 days, one where tens of millions of Americans are no longer receiving weekly stimulus checks of $600. 

With the economic recovery stalling and the labor market deteriorating, much of the financial distress, due to the virus pandemic, has been exerted onto the working poor. 

This is just more bad news for an economy that is 70% based on consumption... 



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Out Of The Memory Hole: The Dystopian Thread From 9/11 To The COVID Hysteria

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Out Of The Memory Hole: The Dystopian Thread From 9/11 To The COVID Hysteria Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2020 - 23:20

Authored by Edward Curtin via EdwardCurtin.com,

For anyone old enough to have been alive and aware of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and of so-called COVID-19 in 2020, memory may serve to remind one of an eerie parallel between the two operations. 

However, if memory has been expunged by the work of one’s forgettery or deleted by the corporate media’s flushing it down the memory hole, or if knowledge is lacking, or maybe fear or cognitive dissonance is blocking awareness, I would like to point out some similarities that might perk one up to consider some parallels and connections between these two operations.

The fundamental tie that binds them is that both events aroused the human fear of death.

Underlying all fears is the fear of death.  A  fear that has both biological and cultural roots. On the biological level, we all react to death threats in a fight or flight manner. Culturally, there are multiple ways that fear can be allayed or exacerbated, purposely or not. Usually, culture serves to ease the fear of death, which can traumatize people, through its symbols and myths. Religion has for a long time served that purpose, but when religion loses its hold on people’s imaginations, especially in regard to the belief in immortality, as Orwell pointed out in the mid-1940s, a huge void is left.  Without that consolation, fear is usually tranquilized by trivial pursuits.

In the cases of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the current corona virus operation, the fear of death has been used by the power elites in order to control populations and institute long-planned agendas.  There is a red thread that connects the two events.

Both events were clearly anticipated and planned.

In the case of September 11, 2001, as I have argued before, linguistic mind-control was carefully crafted in advance to conjure fear at the deepest levels with the use of such repeated terms as Pearl Harbor, Homeland, Ground Zero, the Unthinkable, and 9/11.  Each in its turns served to raise the fear level dramatically. Each drew on past meetings, documents, events, speeches, and deep associations of dread. This language was conjured from the chief sorcerer’s playbook, not from that of an apprentice out of control.

And as David Ray Griffin, the seminal 9/11 researcher (and others), has pointed out in a dozen meticulously argued and documented books, the events of that day had to be carefully planned in advance, and the post hoc official explanations can only be described as scientific miracles, not scientific explanations. These miracles include: massive steel-framed high-rise buildings for the first time in history coming down without explosives or incendiaries in free fall speed; one of them being WTC-7 that was not even hit by a plane; an alleged hijacker pilot, Hani Hanjour, who could barely fly a Piper Cub, flying a massive Boeing 757 in a most difficult maneuver into the Pentagon; airport security at four airports failing at the same moment on the same day; all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies failing; air traffic control failing, etc.  The list goes on and on.  And all this controlled by Osama bin Laden. It’s a fairy tale.

Then we had the crucially important anthrax attacks that are linked to 9/11. Graeme MacQueen, in The 2001 Anthrax Deception, brilliantly shows that these too were a domestic conspiracy.

These planned events led to the invasion of Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, the invasion of Iraq , the ongoing war on terror, etc.

Let us not forget years of those fraudulent color-coded warnings of the terrorist levels and the government admonition to use duct tape around your windows to protect against a massive chemical and biological attack.

Jump to 2020

Let me start in reverse while color-coded designs are fresh in our minds. As the COVID-19 lockdowns were under way, a funny thing happened as people were wishing that life could return to normal and they could be let out of their cages. Similar color-coded designs popped up everywhere at the same time.  They showed the step-by-step schedule of possible loosening of government controls if things went according to plan. Red to yellow to green. Eye catching. Red orange yellow blue green.  As with the terrorist warnings following September 11, 2001.  In Massachusetts, a so-called blue state where I live, it’s color chart ends in blue, not green, with Phase 4 blue termed “the new normal: Development of vaccines and/or treatments enable the resumption of ‘the new normal.’” Interesting wording.  A resumption that takes us back to the future.

As with the duct tape admonitions after 9/11, now everyone is advised to wear a mask. It’s interesting to note that the 3 M Company, a major seller of duct tape, is also one of the world’s major sellers of face masks.  The company was expected to be producing 50 million N95 respirator masks per month by June 2020 and 2 billion globally within the coming year.  Then there is 3 M’s masking tape…but this is a sticky topic.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, we were told repeatedly that the world was changed forever. Now we are told that after COVID 19, life will never be the same.  This is the “new normal,” while the post-9/11-pre-Covid-19 world must have been the old new normal. So everything is different but normal also.  So as the Massachusetts government website puts it, in the days to come we may be enabled to enact “the resumption of ‘the new normal.’”  This new old normal will no doubt be a form of techno-fascist transhumanism enacted for our own good.

As with 9/11, there is ample evidence that the corona virus outbreak was expected and planned; that people have been the victims of a propaganda campaign to use an invisible virus to scare us into submission and shut down the world’s economy for the global elites.  It is a clear case, as Peter Koenig tells Michel Chossudovsky in this must-see interview, that is not a conspiracy theory but a blatant factual plan spelled out in the 2010 Rockefeller Report, the October 18, 2019 Event 201, and Agenda 21, among other places.

Like amorphous terrorists and a war against “terrorism,” which is a tactic and therefore not something you can fight, a virus is invisible except when the media presents it as a pale, orange-spiked bunch of floating weird balls that are everywhere and nowhere.  Watch your back, watch your face, mask up, wash your hands, keep your distance – you never know when those orange spiked balls may get you.

As with 9/11, whenever anyone questions the official narrative of Covid-19, the official statistics, the validity of the tests, the effectiveness of masks, the powers behind the heralded vaccine to come, and the horrible consequences of the lockdowns that are destroying economies, killing people, forcing people to despair and to commit suicide, creating traumatized children, bankrupting small and middle-sized businesses for the sake of enriching the richest, etc., the corporate media mock the dissidents as conspiracy nuts, aiding the viral enemy. 

This is so even when the dissenters are highly respected doctors, scientists, intellectuals, et al., who are regularly disappeared from the internet. With September 11, there were initially far fewer dissenters than now, and so the censorship of opposing viewpoints didn’t need the blatant censorship that is now growing daily.

This censorship happens all across the internet now, quickly and stealthily, the same internet that is being forced on everyone as the new normal as presented in the Great Global Reset, the digital lie, where, as Anthony Fauci put it, no one should  ever shake hands again.

A world of abstract images and beings in which, as Arthur Jensen tells Howard Beal in the film, Network, “All necessities [will be] provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.”  A digital dystopia that is fast approaching as perhaps the end of that red thread that runs from 9/11 to today.

Heidi Evens and Thomas Hackett write in the New York Daily News:

With the nation’s illusion of safety and security in ruins, Americans begin the slow and fitful process of healing from a trauma that feels deeply, cruelly personal…leaving citizens throughout the country with the frightening knowledge of their vulnerability.

That was written on September 12, 2001.



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Media unwilling to explore Hunter Biden business dealings, author Peter Schweizer says

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Schweizer explained that "what stands out with the Bidens is the intensity and the depth to which they were prepared to go for the deals when Joe Biden was vice president."

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Unprecedented Stimulus Is Fueling An Explosion Of Fraud, Governments Begin To Admit

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Unprecedented Stimulus Is Fueling An Explosion Of Fraud, Governments Begin To Admit Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2020 - 03:30

Authored by Nick Corbishley via WolfStreet.com,

“If you discover at a later stage that there was Mafia involvement, how do you undo what you’ve already done?”

The British government acknowledged on Tuesday that it may end up paying out as much as £3.5 billion of taxpayer funds in fraudulent or wrong claims for its job retention scheme, which covers up to 80% of an employee’s salary while they are on furlough. That’s the equivalent of 10% of all the money disbursed by the furlough program by mid-August.

“We have made an assumption for the purposes of our planning that the error and fraud rate in this scheme could be between 5% and 10%,” Jim Harra, the top civil servant at HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), told members of parliaments on the Public Accounts Committee, adding that an academic study had estimated that the level of fraud and error could be even higher than 10%.

The jobs retention program is not the only British stimulus program that’s proven to be susceptible to fraud. The Bounce Back Loan program, which was launched to help small businesses survive the lockdown and its lingering aftermath, has been exploited by a minority of applicants to buy luxury cars, property or even premium bonds.

One of the reasons this is happening is that the loans are self-certified, so that they can be granted within 24 hours. They are also fully guaranteed by the State, meaning that banks are not liable for any unpaid debts and are therefore quite happy to release the funds with little in the way of background checks. Much of the debt — 40%-50% according to the Financial Times — will never be repaid, since many of the businesses will collapse.

The program has so far disbursed £31 billion to 1 million small businesses — roughly a fifth of the estimated 5 million registered businesses. The vast majority of these businesses had perfectly legitimate claims to the loans. With the economy brought to a virtual standstill by the government-imposed lockdown, they needed money as quickly as possible. But in all the haste to get credit flowing, juicy opportunities were created for fraudsters to fill the pockets along the way for fraudsters to also fill their pockets.

In July, the Policy Exchange think tank warned that fraud and error could set the government back between £1.3 billion and £7.9 billion. The think tank said the government’s financial rescue scheme was prone to abuse and scams due to the sheer scale of the loan program as well as the speed at which measures were rushed through.

Governments all over the world are beginning to admit that a considerable part of their unprecedented stimulus programs has been dished out on fraudulent or incorrect claims.

In the U.S., a report authored by House Democrats last week warned that $3 billion of the funds rolled out in the taxpayer-funded Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) program went to businesses that had been flagged as potentially problematic by the government. Some applicants received multiple loans — in violation of the program’s rules.

Three billion dollars may seem like a drop in the ocean compared to the $525 billion thus far disbursed by the program, but it could be just the tip of the iceberg. For the moment, there’s little way of knowing, since the Small Business Administration (SBA) and the Treasury Department only manually audit PPP loans of more than $2 million, which account for less than 1% of all the loans approved.

Court records for the fraud schemes uncovered thus far outline how some opportunistic individuals wired money ostensibly intended to fund their payrolls to their personal accounts or those of friends and family. Others splashed out on luxury jewelry, cars and property, while some hoarded bundles of cash or frittered away thousands in PPP funds on strip clubs or in gambling joints.

Questions are now being asked about private banks’ apparent failure to administer the loans. The PPP loans are 100% guaranteed by the State. As such, the banks themselves have zero liability and as such little incentive in ensuring that the loan recipient is credit worthy or even whether their claim appears to be legitimate.

No one has played a bigger role in dishing out PPP loans than America’s biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase, which has issued around 280,000 loans totaling more than $29 billion. In a memo to staff, senior management said they had uncovered “instances of customers misusing PPP Loans, unemployment benefits and other government programs” and that some “employees have fallen short, too.” The firm said the incidents “may even be illegal.”

Another country where concerns have been voiced about stimulus-related fraud is Switzerland, where over 400 criminal proceedings have so far been launched against company executives, often for overstating their company’s turnover in order to receive a bigger loan. Roughly one out of every 300 loans issued is currently suspected of fraud, though that number could rise in the coming months.

In Italy fears are rising that the mafia is finding new innovative ways of tapping the government’s stimulus funds. Given that an estimated 40% of businesses were considered to be at risk of bankruptcy due to the coronavirus crisis, according to the National Institute of Statistics, money had to be injected into the economy as quickly as possible. That meant that the normal anti-mafia checks were jettisoned.

The onus is now on stepping up control efforts after the funds are released. But recovering funds after they’ve been disbursed is a lot harder than checking for fraud before releasing them, says Anna Sergi, a professor at the University of Essex who specializes in organized crime: “If you discover at a later stage that there was Mafia involvement, how do you undo what you’ve already done?”

Back in the UK, a big problem is opacity. The government refuses to disclose the recipients of £52 billion of state-funded coronavirus business loans, including the 516 large companies that received £3.5 billion between them. Without full disclosure, says the editor of The Guardian, the public has no idea whether the money, which is essentially theirs, went to “politically connected insiders”, “firms with thin trading histories or directors previously convicted of fraud”, or whether it ended up in a tax haven.

The Bank of England has been a little more forthcoming about the identity of the 63 companies it has lent more than £17 billion to as part of its Coronavirus Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF). Close to 30% of the money disbursed went to firms that are owned by a tax haven company or a tax exile, or are themselves incorporated in a tax haven, according to the investigative thinktank Taxwatch UK.

The recipients also include American oil giant Schlumberger, which was fined $237 million in 2015 for knowingly violating sanctions against Iran and Sudan, and Chemring, a UK arms company that is under criminal investigation by the Serious Fraud Office for bribery, corruption and money laundering. As confirmed by the SFO website, this is still an ongoing investigation. But Chemring was able to pick up a £50-million loan from the BoE.

In this “new normal” pandemic economy, fraud is exploding at all levels. With central banks and governments creating new money in unprecedented volumes and then releasing it into the economy as fast as they can, with little in the way of checks and balances and, in some cases, virtually no transparency, it’s hardly any surprise.

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America's Post 9/11 Wars Have Forced 37 Million People From Their Homes: New Study

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America's Post 9/11 Wars Have Forced 37 Million People From Their Homes: New Study Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2020 - 04:15

Just ahead of the 19th anniversary commemorating the tragic events of September 11, 2001 when America came under attack, the anti-interventionist thinktank The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft has featured a study detailing the millions of people displaced across the globe by US foreign combat operations in the wake of 9/11.

"The wars the U.S. government has fought since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have forced 37 million people — and perhaps as many as 59 million — from their homes, according to a newly released report from American University and Brown University’s Costs of War Project," the report introduces.

It's being called "the first calculation of its kind" given neither the Pentagon, nor State Department or any other federal agency has kept track of the mass displacements.

The study identifies that out of this 39 million total, eight of the most violent wars and 'counter-insurgency campaigns' are responsible for the vast majority of displacements. They are Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. 

These wars were executed or overseen either by the Bush, Obama, or spanning into the Trump administration. 

To drive home the magnitude, The Quincy Institute underscores that "Displacing 37 million people is equivalent to removing nearly all the residents of the state of California or all the people in Texas and Virginia combined."

And further, "The figure is almost as large as the population of Canada." 

Wesley Clark's famous 2007 'Foreign Policy Coup' speech: "We’re going to take out seven countries in five years" after 9/11:

American military bases have also rapidly expanded across the globe in the wake of 9/11, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, as the following map produced by the Investigative Reporting Workshop (IRW) demonstrates.

"Until now, no one has known how many people the wars have displaced," the report emphasizes. "Indeed, most Americans are likely unaware that U.S. combat operations have taken place not only in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, but also in 21 other nations since President George W. Bush announced a global war on terror."

* * *

Here are the breakdown of post 9/11 mass displacements by country according to the Public Anthropology Clinic:

  • 5.3 million Afghans (representing 26% of the pre-war population) since the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan in 2001;
  • 3.7 million Pakistanis (3% of the pre-war population) since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 quickly became a single war crossing the border into northwest Pakistan;
  • 1.7 million Filipinos (2%) since the U.S. military joined the Philippine government in its decades-old war with Abu Sayyaf and other insurgent groups in 2002;
  • 4.2 million Somalis (46%) since U.S. forces began supporting a UN-recognized Somali government fighting the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) in 2002 and, after 2006, the ICU’s breakaway militia wing Al Shabaab;
  • 4.4 million Yemenis (24%) since the U.S. government began drone assassinations of alleged terrorists in 2002 and backed a Saudi Arabia-led war against the Houthi movement since 2015;
  • 9.2 million Iraqis (37%) since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation and the post-2014 war against the Islamic State group;
  • 1.2 million Libyans (19%) since the U.S. and European governments intervened in the 2011 uprising against Moammar Gadhafi fueling an ongoing civil war;
  • 7.1 million Syrians (37%) since the U.S. government began waging war against the Islamic State in 2014.


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California Directed Energy Weapon (DEW) – Color-Enhanced View

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Longtime YouTuber DutchSinse, whose channel looks for anomalies in weather, space weather, earthquakes and natural disasters was livestreaming about the fires now raging across the West Coast.

While exploring the satellite imaging on the College of DuPage website, he spotted a faint but perfectly straight line that terminated at one of the fires near Dolan, California. The other end of the line looked like it ended at the Malheur National Forest, of all places.It remained fixed for several hours.

The image in this video was produced by increasing the brightness and saturation, nothing else. This is what the beam looked like in 2D. However, it’s possible that in 3D, it might have been coming from a satellite overhead.

The beam first appeared on September 7th and has reappeared every night since. On the second night, he said, “Another beam has been detected in a different location coming down from outer space … out above the ocean off the coast of California tonight! The beam going directly into a new fire that just started in Oregon (early Sept. 9, 2020).”

Just after 1AM Central Time September 9th, the beam shut off and a red flash was seen next to it down below. He wondered if maybe the satellite was taken out.

In 2018 and 2019, people posted images of giant lasers in areas where there were major fires, which was covered extensively on this site. Once again, rumors are now swirling among local residents that this is Agenda 21 in action, that these fires are the intentional destruction of California, the 5th largest economy in the world, with the goal of clearing people off of these lands – and seizing the real estate for pennies on the dollar.

Interestingly, Q posted about the fires last night, suggesting that they were artificially set in order to declare a State of Emergency and thereby obtain the federal bailout funds recently denied to California.

My point is not to declare that these rumors are true or not but to say that, if nothing else, we are living in a political environment, where many people are actively entertaining such ideas as possible.

Alexandra Bruce

Contributed by Alexandra Bruce

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5G Opponents Are Not Luddites

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As a science and technology aficionado who believes in using science to promote human health and prosperity, I was startled to find myself classified as a Luddite by Frontier Centre research associate Paz Gomez in her article “Luddites Stand in the Way of 5G Prosperity: Fears Overblown, Ignore Benefits of Communications Connectivity” published on July 29, 2020.

The one thing I can agree with Ms. Gomez on is that faster communications would provide many benefits to humankind. However, choices have to be made about how to deliver faster communications to households, offices, farms and manufacturing buildings. Not all choices are good ones. And you can’t do a proper cost/benefit analysis without thoroughly exploring all of the costs.

The expression “5G” refers to the fifth generation of wireless technology, which will carry more data, at higher speeds, than previous cellular networks. But wireless 5G is not the only game in town when it comes to delivering high-speed internet. It faces stiff competition from fibre optic systems.

Fibre optic cables consist of extremely thin interior strands of glass or plastic which carry signals in the form of light, surrounded by multiple layers of cladding, coating and jacketing which prevent the light signals from escaping.

Fibre optic cables are already in use for most of the world’s internet transmissions. This 2010 article estimated that “ninety-nine percent of the Internet’s physical distance has been strung with fiber already.”

This means there’s a good chance that the street where your home or workplace is located already has fibre optic cable running along its length, even though it may not yet be in use (this is known as “dark fibre”.) I’ve been told that’s the case in the municipality where I live.

The problem stems from what’s called “the last mile”: the distance between the street’s central fibre optic cable and the customer’s wifi router or receiving devices. Until recently, this last mile (which might be only 20 feet in some cases) has ordinarily been wired with coaxial cable or DSL (Digital Subscriber Lines). Such cables transmit data reliably over shielded wires, but the transmission speed is relatively slow compared to fibre optics.

It’s the last mile that the two competing new technologies propose to speed up. This can be done in two ways: either by replacing the coaxial or DSL cable running from the street to your home with additional fibre optic cable, or by simply beaming signals wirelessly to your devices using antennae referred to as “small cells”.

Wireless 5G in North America would require the installation of millions of small cellular antennae in order to ensure continuous coverage[1]. That’s because the wavelengths they use have a very short range, so antennae have to be placed close together. For indoor use, small cells might need to be located as little as 10 meters apart. Outdoors, small cells have a range varying from 500 meters to 2.5 kilometers.[2] Some neighbourhoods might end up with small cells located on almost every telephone pole.

Different companies use different frequency bands for their 5G, but the most important thing to note is that none of the wireless 5G technologies have undergone any safety testing whatsoever with respect to the impact of these waves on human health. None. This was admitted by industry representatives at a U.S. Senate hearing held on February 7, 2019, an excerpt of which can be seen in this YouTube video.

Yes, there are government guidelines for electromagnetic energy. Here in Canada, they’re called Safety Code 6. Critics such as Canadians for Safe Technology (“C4ST”) allege that the code is severely obsolete[3]. It was created by Health Canada in the 1970s (long before the development of smart phones) to evaluate the technology existing at that time. It has not had any major revisions made to it in the last 30 years—but it has nevertheless has been extended to constitute the guidelines for a host of later-developed technologies including smart phones and cell phone antennae. Health Canada is apparently content to let it serve as the safety guideline for the untested 5G wireless radiation.

An international appeal signed by 398 scientists and doctors has recommended a moratorium on the roll-out of wireless 5G. They say new scientific evidence demonstrates that living organisms (both plants and animals) are adversely affected by EMFs (that is, existing electromagnetic frequencies emitted by 2G, 3G and 4G technologies—let alone 5G) at levels well below current national and international guidelines. The problem would simply be exacerbated by 5G.  The National Toxicology Program in the U.S. has published a study showing “a statistically significant increase in the incidence of brain and heart cancer in animals exposed to EMF below the… guidelines followed by most countries.”

The Bioinitiative Report (published in 2012 and recently updated to cover the period up to 2020) was authored by 29 people from 10 countries. Among them, they held 10 medical degrees (MD), 21 PhDs, and a few other degrees. This group doesn’t seem to fit the description of Luddites. Among the health problems they identified from EMFs, as indicated in scientific studies, are:

  • Increased oxidative stress and free radical production (associated with numerous conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, heart disease, arthritis and diabetes—all of which have increased dramatically since the 1990s)
  • Neurological effects (changes in memory, learning or perception)
  • Disrupted immune function (an especially important problem in these days of COVID-19).

Dr. Martin Pall, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Basic Medical Sciences at Washington State University. He has studied extensively the biological effects of electromagnetic fields, and summarized his findings in a letter to California legislators three years ago. His list of 14 different adverse health effects include life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias, lower sperm counts, cataract formation and sleep disruption.

In short, it is absurd to dismiss the health concerns about EMFs that have been brought forward by hundreds of scientists as the grumpy rumblings of Luddites who just can’t get their heads around the potential benefits of science.

Opponents of 5G have additional concerns besides human health. They point to studies showing adverse effects of EMFs on plants, insects, and animals. Even the microbes in our soil and in our intestines might be affected. The importance of healthy microbes to human health is only just beginning to be understood. Of particular concern is the possibility that insect pollinators such as bees and butterflies might be prevented from performing their crucial function of ensuring that the world has enough to eat.

Many 5G critics are concerned about possible data leaks, especially to China, the home country of Huawei, a major manufacturer of wireless 5G technology.

According to C4ST, the competing fibre optic technology can provide even faster connectivity speeds than wireless 5G, without emitting radiation. These cables are also less vulnerable to natural disaster or attack, and more protective of privacy. It may cost more to run fibre optics across the last mile to individual homes than it would to install a street’s worth of 5G small cells, but that’s a cost that can be borne by the individual who purchases the technological upgrade.

And this raises the problem that should be of concern to all who call themselves economists. The installation of 5G is not—unlike the installation of fibre optics—a private concern. Once the small cells start broadcasting, their radiation impacts everyone within range, whether they are 5G customers are not. In economists’ terminology, 5G imposes negative externalities on people who just happen to live in or meander through the territory where 5G customers and their suppliers are causing radiation to be emitted.

In a densely populated city, your neighbour may want 5G while you don’t. The result may be that a small cell sits on a telephone pole 20 feet away from your bedroom window and bathes you in unwanted electromagnetic radiation all night.

Ms. Gomez’s article placed speculative values on the anticipated benefits of wireless 5G, but dismissed as “unsupported” any claims of harm. Consequently, her cost/benefit analysis of 5G failed to take into account the following possible costs:

  • Health care costs of treating individuals who might be adversely affected by wireless 5G
  • Lost productivity of individuals who might be rendered unable to work due to 5G
  • The loss of crops that might ensue if insect pollinators or important soil microbes are killed off or incapacitated.

There is also one certain, non-speculative cost that she has failed to take into account: namely, the cost of protective gear that many people are already acquiring to protect themselves from 5G as it expands relentlessly into Canada. Since becoming aware of the adverse impacts of earlier generations of EMFs, I myself have purchased a device that I hope will reduce the impact of EMFs, and I’m investigating other devices to shield my windows, my bed and my work area in case 5G comes to my town. New companies in this field are springing up all over the place, selling everything from metallic-lined clothing to pendants to Faraday cages for your bedroom.

At common law, the case of Rylands v. Fletcher (1868) established that a person is liable for damages if he allows something harmful to escape from his land onto neighbouring property. Here’s the most famous passage from the British House of Lords:

“If a person brings, or accumulates, on his land anything which, if it should escape, may cause damage to his neighbour, he does so at his peril. If it does escape, and cause damage, he is responsible, however careful he may have been, and whatever precautions he may have taken to prevent the damage.”

It has not yet been tested whether a court would apply this rule to 5G electromagnetic waves (or even 4G, for that matter) but a UK group called Action Against 5G has retained a team of lawyers to commence legal proceedings. Like the Canadian group C4ST, the UK group does not oppose technology. Rather, it opposes untested and suspected unsafe technology. It advocates the use of fibre optics instead of wireless 5G to achieve speedier communications.

Likewise, a group called Stop5GNetherlands applied for an injunction on February 25, 2020 to invoke an emergency procedure to stop the installation of 5G in the Netherlands.

In the US, the Children’s Health Defense organization headed up by lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is suing the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) for refusing to update its safety guidelines which (like Canada’s) are more than 25 years old.

In 2019, an appellate court in Turin, Italy confirmed the trial court’s decision that the plaintiff’s acoustic neuroma (a tumor affecting the inner ear) was caused by the use of his mobile phone.

The city of Brussels and several parts of Switzerland have proactively imposed moratoriums on the rollout of 5G. Many other municipalities around the world have followed suit, or are considering doing so. Even some entire countries are on the list of places where 5G moratoriums are under consideration.

It would be the height of folly to close our eyes to the risks of wireless 5G when a huge percentage of our population is already suffering from chronic illnesses that have become increasingly more commonplace with every new generation of EMFs already deployed. I hope more Canadians will wake up to the risks and join with concerned individuals around the world to prevent this untested and probably harmful technology from being inflicted upon non-consenting victims.

Notes:

[1] David Zarnett, in this recent article for Macleans magazine, says 273,000 small cells will probably have to be installed for Canada alone. The US has nine times the population, so they might well need over 2,457,000 antennae.

[2] What are small cells in 5G technology, https://www.rfpage.com/what-are-small-cells-in-5g-technology/ accessed 18 August 2020.

[3] See, for instance, this page from C4ST (a volunteer organization founded by Frank Clegg, the retired former president of Microsoft Canada): http://c4st.org/safety-code-6/

Reprinted with permission of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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Thursday, September 10, 2020

Toggle Terms continue in September’s 2nd week; one student death

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toggle switch by Alan LevineWay back in April – and doesn’t that seem like a long time ago? – I first offered the Toggle Term scenario.  Here’s some of what I wrote then:

Colleges and universities are now in perpetual crisis mode.  Their leadership teams scan pandemic news minutely, aided by their medical faculty, looking for signs of when they can welcome their community back on site, and when to send them away and flip the switch to entirely online work.

And so here we are in September’s second week.

Confirmed Toggle examples from this fall include: Colorado CollegeGettysburg CollegeJames Madison UniversityLock Haven UniversityNorth Carolina State UniversityNotre DameSUNY OneontaTemple Universitythe University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the University of Wyoming.  Additionally, Temple University expanded its remote instruction period to cover the rest of fall 2020.  Leading public health figures are opposed to sending students home.

Over the past few days more instances have cropped up across the United States:

The University of West Virginia announced it would suspend in-person classes for several weeks.

Beginning Wednesday, Sept. 9, all undergraduate courses in Morgantown, with the exception of those Health Sciences courses with students already engaged in clinical rotation, will move online through Friday, Sept. 25. Graduate and professional courses will continue to be offered in person.

Winona State University quarantined students for two weeks:

The self-imposed quarantine will reduce the number of people physically present on campus for the next two weeks. Courses with face-to-face instruction will either shift entirely online, or if absolutely necessary, require increased precautions in order to continue in-person instruction. All employees who do not need to be physically present on campus will shift to remote work, and individual campus facilities and other areas may impose additional restrictions as needed.

Bradley University‘s president announced a two week quarantine, with students confined to housing and taking classes online.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison announced a two-week pause: on-campus quarantine plus online instruction.  Infection rates are rising, including in a couple of residence halls.  (Also see below)

After three weeks of classes Gettysburg College has announced most of a Toggle.  All students are sent home, except first-years, and also

All transfer students. All international students. Student teachers with placements in local schools. Residential & First-Year Programs (RAs and CAs) student leader staff. Student leaders charged with supporting a robust in-person co-curricular experience. Students who need access to campus facilities to complete their senior requirements for graduation, including capstones, laboratory research, and/or creative requirements. Students with a demonstrated need to stay on campus.

So that’s, what, 1/3rd of the student population remaining on campus?  1/4th?

At the same time as these college and university decisions there have also been cases of county health authorities urging campuses to suspend in-person education.  Inside Higher Ed reports on two.  In one instance the public authority negotiated with the private college to issue a joint statement which includes reducing town-gown in-person interaction.  In the other a country published recommendations, rather than orders, once COVID cases among the 18-24-year-old population (i.e., traditional undergrads) shot up.

Such situations can encourage campuses to follow Toggle Terms.  For example, the county where the University of Wisconsin-Madison is located asked the school to send dorm-dwelling students home.  More,

“If you live or work in the (Downtown) area, you should assume you were exposed to COVID-19 and monitor yourself for symptoms,” the agency said on Wednesday.

As of today Madison is quarantined, but hasn’t sent students home.

Just to check on my April forecast, here’s what I speculated about this angle:

Town-gown relations are actually quite close in this scenario, as both entities experience the same toggle process.  Universities and local authorities cooperate in this ongoing disaster management process.

That’s optimistic for some of these cases, but may describe accurately what’s gone on elsewhere.

Meanwhile, I’m also watching some campuses with rising infections numbers.  The University of Tennessee, for example:

“We now have 2,112 people in quarantine or self-isolation. Of these, 1,939 are students, split nearly equally between on-campus and off-campus residence,” [Chancellor Donde Plowman] said.
“Our case counts are going up way too fast, and we will need more drastic measures to stop the upward trajectory.”

Cases are rising in some of Pennsylvania’s public universities, eliciting student and faculty criticism.

We may also have experienced the first student death caused by COVID caught by being on campus.  Jamain Stephens was enrolled at California University of Pennsylvania, where he played football.  It’s not certain that the coronavirus killed him:

The high school had said that he died of coronavirus complications, but later said they heard that information from his close friends and they do not have an official confirmation on his cause of death.

If COVID is responsible, fall 2020 has experienced its first student pandemic death.

Will this death, if COVID-caused, spur more campuses to short-term or full semester Toggle decisions?

(thanks to Tony Moretti, Todd Bryant, this Chronicle article, and Thomas Tobin)



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1 in 10 Americans struggling to afford enough food amid pandemic

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(CNBC) – Over the last seven months, the coronavirus pandemic has dramatically affected millions of Americans’ ability to afford the basics, including food.

About 10% of Americans, 22.3 million, reported they sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat within the past week, according to the latest Household Pulse Survey fielded between August 19 and 31, 2020 and released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

he current rate of food insecurity, which is when you don’t have reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable food, is several times higher than reported last year. Only about 3.7% of Americans reported they sometimes or often did not have enough to eat throughout 2019, according to a new USDA report also released Wednesday.

While the comparison is not quite “apples to apples” because the USDA is asking about the last year and the Pulse Survey is asking about the past seven days, it is worth noting the increase in overall food insecurity, says Joseph Llobrera, director of research for the food assistance team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Read the full story ›

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How to prevent pandemic-police intrusion of gov't schools

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Maryland mom Courtney Lancaster Sperry answered her front door. A police officer asked to search for weapons in her home.

"I consented to let him in," says the Navy veteran. "And then I, unfortunately, stood there and watched police officers enter my 11-year-old son's bedroom."

Her son's school had asked for this search, the officers explained. Her fifth-grader son, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, attended classes via computer from his home bedroom through a Google classroom.

This was a two-way Zoom link allowing his socialist public school to search and record inside his private home. This warrantless search of their son's bedroom walls image-captured two BB guns. The school principal reported the guns to police and asked that their home be searched last June.

Principal Jason Feiler reportedly justified this by a rule that students may not bring guns to school. Feiler claimed – incorrectly – that this rule included virtual classes, said Sperry.

Her son "did not bring anything to this meeting, and he is in his own home," said Sperry. These guns, she added, "were simply in the background in our home, safely stowed in a room behind a closed door, with no ammunition."

Sperry discovered that school rules do not address virtual learning. And why should they? "Firearms" on the home wall of a student miles away from school pose no threat to anyone at the school.

Sperry's advice to other parents whose children are taking classes via computer: "DO NOT allow your children to be on video! I found out that screenshots of my minor child's bedroom [were] taken," but that the school "is refusing to provide me with those pictures because [they are] not 'part of the student's record.'"

According to Sperry, the police officers were "disgusted" that the school had called them, and they found nothing improper in the behavior of her son, who is working to become an Eagle Scout and has gone through Scouting gun and archery training. But would other families fare as well if their privacy were similarly invaded by school bureaucrats?

School teachers act en loco parentis, "in place of the parents." Sometimes this helps students. But many liberal teachers are simply loco, "crazy" with power to impose their own leftist values.

Some teachers have already used computers to search for student home "firearms," Confederate flags, books, or other politically incorrect things.

Welcome to the Orwellian dystopia "1984," which arrived with COVID-19 in 2020. Big Brother watches you via a screen in your own home. Such all-seeing spies come disguised as a school digital classroom, or sometimes as "Alexa."

Leftists who applaud abortion legalization via a Supreme Court-conjured "right of privacy" are now eager to steal your children's privacy.

But many teachers object to parents watching over their children's shoulders what is being taught. Schools from California to Tennessee prohibit parents from recording teachers, who demand "privacy for me, but not for thee."

Why this double standard? Philadelphia public school teacher Matthew Kay reportedly is concerned that "conservative parents" might cause "damage … if they overhear lessons on topics such as gender and sexuality."

Kay, reported the Daily Wire, fears that conservative parents might interfere when teachers are engaged "in the messy work of destabilizing a kid's racism, homophobia or transphobia."

Parents, in other words, might oppose taxpayer-paid teachers indoctrinating their children with leftist values.

This is why President Donald Trump wants to defund schools that teach the racist, anti-white "1619 Project," an Orwellian rewriting of American history.

As soon-to-be-Democratic-President Woodrow Wilson said in 1909, "the purpose of a university should be to make a man as unlike his father as possible."

Progressive socialist education aims to undermine and replace parental conservative values.

Decades ago in California, teachers were encouraged to ask young students if their families had guns: What kind? How many? Where do Mom and Dad hide their guns? Voters were outraged, and government promised to stop using children to spy on their parents.

California public schools are about to launch a new mandatory curriculum teaching that capitalism is bad, Jews have unfair privilege and wealth, African Americans deserve slavery reparations, and racial, ethnic and sexual minorities should wage "transformative resistance" to take political power.

On November's ballot, California Democrats aim via Proposition 16 to amend the state Constitution to allow racial discrimination, the redistribution of government preferences to racial groups that tend to vote for Democrats.

America needs separation of school and state, to prohibit government surveillance of private homes via student computers and to fund parental choice of their children's education.

Lowell Ponte is a former Reader's Digest Roving Editor. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and other major publications. His latest paper co-authored with Craig R. Smith, "The Secret War," shows how to rethink several areas of investment to protect and grow your savings against little-known economic threats. For a free, postpaid copy, call toll-free 800-630-1492.

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