When protestors took over federal buildings: a little thing called history

CBS News, October 4, 2018: “Protesters opposed to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh took over a Senate office building on Thursday, with actresses Amy Schumer and Emily Ratajkowski among the demonstrators detained.

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COVID Gone Crazy - An Epidemic Of 'Positive' Tests

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COVID Gone Crazy - An Epidemic Of 'Positive' Tests

Authored by John Hunt, M.D. via InternationalMan.com,

In the setting of COVID-19, almost every country in the world closed its borders, locked down its citizens, and forced businesses to close. Today, most governments still restrict travel, economic activity, and social gatherings.

The justification for these unprecedented measures has been a growing number of COVID-19 cases. This has unleashed an epidemic of COVID testing - with PCR and rapid antigen tests as the means of identifying positive COVID cases. Our very own Dr. John Hunt examines the science behind COVID testing, whether the testing paradigms are effective, and the rationality behind government response to the virus.

What COVID tests mean and don’t mean

RT-PCR tests can be designed to be highly sensitive to the presence of the original viral RNA in a clinical sample. But a highly sensitive test risks poor specificity for actual infectious disease.

Rapid antigen tests are different. They measure viral protein. They do so by reacting a clinical sample with one or two lab-created antibodies that are labeled with a measurable marker. These antigen tests are often poorly specific, meaning they can show as positive in the absence of any actual viral protein or any COVID disease.

For a lab test, what does it mean to be sensitive? What does it mean to be specific?

I’ll use COVID to help explain these terms. In order to do this correctly, we need to avoid using the language of the media and government because those institutions tend to mislead us via language manipulation. For example, they’ve wrongly taught us that a COVID-positive test is synonymous with COVID- disease. It isn’t, as you will soon see.

So for this article, I will use the term “Relevant Infectious COVID Disease” to mean a condition, caused by COVID-19, in which a patient is sickened by the virus or has (in their airways) living replicating virus capable of being transmitted to others. This seems a fair definition of what we should be caring about in this disease. If the patient isn’t sick and isn’t capable of transmitting the disease, then any COVID RNA or protein that may appear in a test is not relevant, nor infectious, and therefore of little to no consequence.

You can think of a test’s sensitivity like this: In a group of 100 people who absolutely have Relevant Infectious COVID Disease, how many people does the test actually report as “positive?” For a test that is 95% sensitive, 95 of these 100 patients with the true disease will be reported by the test as COVID positive and 5 will be missed.

Specificity: In a group of 100 people who absolutely do not have Relevant Infectious COVID Disease, how many will be reported by the test as “negative?” For a test that is 95% specific, 95 of these healthy people will be reported as COVID-negative and 5 will be incorrectly reported as COVID-positive

Sensitivity and Specificity are inherent characteristics of a test, not of a patient, not of a disease, and not of a population. These terms are very different than Positive Predictive Value (PPV) and Negative Predictive Value (NPV). PPV and NPV are affected not only by the test’s sensitivity and specificity but also by the characteristics of the people chosen to be tested and, particularly, the patients’ underlying likelihood of actually having true Relevant Infectious COVID Disease. The Positive Predictive Value—the chance a positive test actually indicates a true disease—is greatly improved if you test people who are likely to have COVID, and, importantly, avoid testing people unlikely to have COVID.

If you do a COVID test with 95% sensitivity and 95% specificity in 1,000 patients who are feverish, have snot pouring out of their noses, are coughing profusely, and are short of breath, then you are using that test as a diagnostic test in people who currently have a reasonable up-front chance of having Relevant Infectious COVID Disease. Let’s say 500 of them do actually have Relevant Infectious COVID Disease, and the others have a common cold. This 95% sensitive test will correctly identify 475 of these people who are truly ill with COVID as being COVID-positive, and it will miss 25 of them. This same test is also 95% specific, which means it will falsely label 25 of the 500 non-COVID patients as COVID-positive. Although the test isn’t perfect it has a Positive Predictive Value of 95% in this group of people, and is a pretty good test overall.

But what if you run this very same COVID test on everyone in the population? Let’s guesstimate that the up-front chance of having Relevant Infectious COVID in the US at this moment is about 0.5% (suggesting that 5 out of 1000 people currently have the actual transmittable disease right now, which is a high estimate). How does this same 95% sensitive/95% specific test work in this screening setting? The good news is that this test will likely identify the 5 people out of every 1000 with Relevant Infectious COVID! Yay! The bad news is that, out of every 1000 people, it will also falsely label 50 people as COVID-positive who don’t have Relevant Infectious COVID. Out of 55 people with positive tests in each group of 1000 people, 5 actually have the disease. 50 of the tests are false positives. With a Positive Predictive Value of only 9%, one could say that’s a pretty lousy test. It’s far lousier if you test only people with no symptoms (such as screening a school, jobsite, or college), in whom the up-front likelihood of having Relevant Infectious COVID Disease is substantially lower.

The very same test that is pretty good when testing people who are actually ill or at risk is lousy when screening people who aren’t.

In the first scenario (with symptoms), the test is being used correctly for diagnosis. In the second scenario (no symptoms), the test is being used wrongly for screening.

A diagnostic test is used to diagnose a patient the doctor thinks has a reasonable chance of having the disease (having symptoms like fever, cough, a snotty nose, and shortness of breath during a viral season).

A screening test is used to check for the presence of a disease in a person without symptoms and no heightened risk of having the disease.

A screening test may be appropriate to use when it has very high specificity (99% or more), when the prevalence of the disease in the population is pretty high, and when there is something we can do about the disease if we identify it. However, if the prevalence of a disease is low (as is the case for Relevant Infectious COVID) and the test isn’t adequately specific (as is the case with PCR and rapid antigen tests for the COVID virus), then using such a test as a screening measure in healthy people is forcing the test to be lousy. The more it is used wrongly, the more misinformation ensues.

Our health authorities are recommending more testing of asymptomatic people. In other words, they are encouraging the wrong and lousy application of these tests. Our health officials are doing what a first-year medical student should know better than to do. It’s enough of a concerning error that it leaves two likely conclusions:

1) that our leading government health officials are truly incompetent and/or

2) that we, as a nation, are being intentionally gaslighted/manipulated. Or it could be both.

(Another conclusion you should consider is that my analysis of these tests is incorrect. I’m open to a challenge.)

So what if you, as an individual, get a positive PCR test result (one that has 95% specificity) without having symptoms of COVID-19 or recent exposure to a true Relevant Infectious COVID Disease patient? What do you do? Well, with that positive test, your risk of having COVID has just increased from less than 5 in 1,000 (the general population risk) to about somewhere perhaps 5 in 55 (the risk of actual Relevant Infectious COVID Disease in asymptomatic people with a COVID-19-positive test). That’s an 18-fold increase in risk, amounting to a 9% risk of you having Relevant Infectious COVID Disease (or a 91% chance of you being totally healthy). That may be a relevant increase in risk in your mind, enough that you choose to avoid exposing your friends and family to your higher risk compared to the general population. But if the government spends resources to contact-trace you, then they are contact-tracing 91% of people uselessly. And they are deciding whether to lock us down based on the wrong notion that COVID-positive tests in healthy people are epidemiologically accurate when indeed they are mostly wrong.

For the 50 asymptomatic low-risk people falsely popping positive out of each group of 1,000, what makes them pop positive? For a rapid antigen test, it is because the test is never meant for use as a screening test in healthy asymptomatic people because it’s not specific enough. For a PCR test, positivity confidently means that there was COVID RNA in that sample, sure, but your nose or mouth very likely just filtered some dead bits of viral debris from the dust particles in the air as you walked through CVS to get the test before you learned you were supposed to use the drive-through. PCR can be way too sensitive.

A few strands of RNA are irrelevant. Even a few hundred fully intact viral particles are not likely to infect or cause disease. Humans aren’t that wimpy. But keep in mind that there is a very small chance that the test popped positive because you are about to get sick with COVID-19, and the test caught you, by pure luck, just before you are to become sick.

On top of this wrong use of diagnostic tests as screening tests, the government has been subsidizing hospitals for taking care of COVID-19-positive patients. Let’s say a hospital performs a COVID test 4 times during a hospital stay as a screening test in a patient who has no symptoms of COVID. If that test pops positive once and negative three times, the hospital will report that patient as having COVID-19, even though the one positive result is highly likely to have been a false positive. Why do hospitals do this testing so much? In part, because they’ll get $14,000 more from the government for each patient they declare has COVID-19.

When we see statistics of COVID-19 deaths, we should recognize that some substantial percentage of them should be called “Deaths with a COVID-19-positive test.” When we see reports of case numbers rising, we should know that they are defining “case” as anyone with a COVID-19-positive test, which, as you might now realize, is really a garbage number.

Summary:

1. We have an epidemic of COVID-positive tests that is substantially larger than the epidemic of identified Relevant Infectious COVID Disease. In contrast, people with actual, mild cases of COVID-disease aren’t all getting tested. So the data, on which lockdowns are supposedly justified, are lousy.

2. The data on COVID hospitalizations and deaths in the US are exaggerated by a government subsidization scheme that incentivizes the improper use of tests in people without particular risk of the disease.

3. Avoid getting tested for COVID unless you are symptomatic yourself, have had exposure to someone who was both symptomatic and tested positive for COVID, or have some other personal reason that makes sense.

4. Know that getting tested before traveling abroad puts you at a modest risk of getting a false-positive test result, which will assuredly screw up your trip. It’s a new political risk of travel.

5. There is a lot more to this viral testing game, and there are a lot of weird incentives. There are gray areas and room for debate.

6. Yes, the COVID disease can kill people. But a positive test won’t kill anybody. Sadly, every COVID-positive test empowers those politicians and bureaucrats who have a natural bent to control people—the sociopaths and their ilk.

*  *  *

John Hunt, MD is a pediatric pulmonologist/allergist/immunologist, a former tenured Associate Professor and academic medical researcher, who has extensive experience and publications involving PCR, antigen testing, and analysis of respiratory fluid. He is internationally recognized as an expert in aerosol/respiratory droplet collection and analysis. He’s also Doug Casey’s coauthor for the High Ground novels Speculator, Drug Lord, and the just-released Assassin, and he is a founding member of the LLC that owns International Man.

*  *  *

Unfortunately, most people have no idea what really happens when a government goes out of control, let alone how to prepare… How will you protect yourself in the event of an economic crisis? New York Times best-selling author Doug Casey and his team just released a guide that will show you exactly how. Click here to download the PDF now.

Tyler Durden Mon, 01/11/2021 - 06:10

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School district cans teacher who attended Washington, D.C. protest

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(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- A school district in Pennsylvania has “temporarily relieved” a teacher after a photo revealed he was among those present at Wednesday’s protest in Washington, DC.

But the Allentown School District will not say if the teacher merely was among those marching in protest of the Electoral College vote, or if he participated in the storming of the Capitol Building.

In a Thursday message posted to the district website, Superintendent Thomas Parker wrote “We understand that many members of our community are upset by the image. At the same time, the district has an obligation to respect the First Amendment rights of our staff and students.

Read the full story ›

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President Trump’s Approval Ratings Have Gone Up Since the ‘Stop the Steal’ Protests Last Week In Washington DC

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The Democrats and many of the Republicans might hate President Trump more since his speech last Wednesday but polling shows President Trump’s approval has actually gone up amongst Americans.

Thomas Lifson at the American Thinker writes:

If you believe the media and most Beltway politicians, the entire country is appalled at President Trump and wants him erased from history.  A moral panic is being pushed by the media and other Democrats in the wake of the incursion into the United States Capitol.  It has been persuasive to the media, including many nominal conservatives.  And it may have convinced many Republican politicians that President Trump is now a marginal figure, at best, and should be shunned.

But unless the Rasmussen polling organization suddenly has become inaccurate after being far more accurate than most presidential polls, the mainstream of conservative America, roughly half the country, isn’t buying it, and Trump’s approval has actually risen.

President Trump’s approval at Rasmussen was as follows last week:

No matter what the Democrats and their media do, Americans aren’t buying their BS. 

The post President Trump’s Approval Ratings Have Gone Up Since the ‘Stop the Steal’ Protests Last Week In Washington DC appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

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U.S. media's 'baseless' claims about election integrity exposed

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David Muir anchors ABC's "World News Tonight"

Establishment media, who have attacked President Trump since before his election with bogus claims such as Russia collusion, have insisted his charge of election fraud is "baseless."

But there's a reason more than 100 state legislators from the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia sent a last-minute letter Tuesday to Vice President Mike Pence asking for 10 days to investigate further because they don't have confidence that Joe Biden won their state.

Just the News reported their letter "includes a massive index of evidence of irregularities, some of which have been validated by court rulings, official government documents or sworn affidavits."

The news outlet said it worked with more than three dozen journalists across the country for eight weeks investigating claims of irregularities

Just the News worked with more than three dozen journalists across the country for eight weeks trying to investigate claims of irregularities.

Among the findings:

• Wisconsin illegally permitted large numbers of residents to evade voter ID requirements.
• Fulton County, Georgia, officials "prematurely moved data cards from 36 voting machines" before voting ended, meaning the "chain of custody" is no longer clear.
• Career Detroit employee Jessy Jacob testified she and other election workers were told to "manipulate" and alter ballots and voter rolls, including falsely backdating ballot requests and actual ballots.
• GOP election observers in many states were isolated, preventing them from providing bipartisan election oversight.
• Wisconsin refused to follow state law and purge up to 200,000 outdated voter registrations.
• Georgia officials admitted they have 250 open cases of alleged vote fraud.
• State officials in at least three states let clerks fix invalid ballots and count them.

Former Gov. Mike Huckabee said Wednesday that there will be a "cloud" over Joe Biden and his administration absent a full investigation of the election fraud.

"If they [Democrats] truly believe this election was absolutely done with integrity, then they ought to be the ones standing up and insisting that there be a full audit," he said, according to Fox News.

"I think too many of our politicians take the easy way out. They don't want to rock the boat. They don't want to be controversial, but they were elected to make tough decisions and a tough decision would be to call for a full accounting and absolute transparency."

Solomon explained there are two trains of thought: either the 2020 election was hijacked by fraud, or it was so clean that claims of fraud are "baseless."

"But if we've learned one lesson in the era of incessant cable TV and social media, it's that the truth can't be hurried — and the sensationalized early headlines are often deceiving. Remember, Trump colluded with Russia … until he didn't. And Jacob Blake was declared shot unarmed … when in fact he was armed with a knife. And let's not forget that Hunter Biden's business scandal was Russian disinformation … until he admitted he was under criminal investigation," he wrote.

"We know laws were broken," Wisconsin State Rep. Joe Sanfelippo told Just the News. "That's indisputable. What we don't know is whether the breaking of those laws affected the outcome of the election."

Lawmakers in Pennsylvania introduced a resolution that calls the state's certification of a Biden win "premature" and urges state officials to "vacate" the results.

Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@wndnewscenter.org.

 

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Pentagon Study: Flu Shot Raises Risk of Coronavirus by 36% (and Other Supporting Studies)

On March 12th, 2020, Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta held a global town hall on “Corona Facts and Fears.” During the discussion, Anderson said to the viewing audience, “And, again, if you are concerned about coronavirus, and you haven’t gotten a flu shot…you should get a flu shot.

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Scientists Explain How The Growth of A Baby’s Brain “Literally Requires Positive Interaction”

Loving your child will physically translate into a larger, healthier brain than children who suffer from extreme neglect, abuse and trauma.

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Dems to block conservatives from even using the internet?

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By Mary Margaret Olohan
Daily Caller News Foundation

• President-elect Joe Biden is being urged to create a post overseeing ideologically driven extremism — including the supporters of President Donald Trump who stormed the United States Capitol on Wednesday, who Biden has called “domestic terrorists.”
• “Don’t dare call them protesters,” Biden said of President Donald Trump’s supporters who stormed the United States Capitol. “They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It’s that basic. It’s that simple.”
• Liberal media figures and outlets have previously suggested that Biden should take an aggressive approach to conservative media when he becomes President of the United States.

President-elect Joe Biden is being urged to create a post overseeing ideologically driven extremism — including the supporters of President Donald Trump who stormed the United States Capitol on Wednesday, who Biden has called “domestic terrorists.”

The president elect has promised to prioritize passing a law against domestic terrorism, according to the Wall Street Journal. His advisors are also pushing him to create a post in the White House specifically to target and combat “ideologically inspired violent extremists,” the publication reported.

“Don’t dare call them protesters,” Biden said of President Donald Trump’s supporters who stormed the United States Capitol. “They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It’s that basic. It’s that simple.”

Biden made his position known: ‘Don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionist. Domestic terrorists’ pic.twitter.com/BZsOA5qcMl

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) January 8, 2021

The Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, Democratic Mississippi Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, urged the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the FBI Thursday to add “the violent perpetrators involved in the domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol” to the No Fly List.

“This should include all individuals identified as having entered the Capitol building—an intrusion which threatened the safety of Members of Congress and staff and served as an attack on our Nation,” Thompson said in a statement.

“We already saw reports of ‘unruly mobs’ in air on the way to Washington, D.C.,” the congressman continued. “It does not take much imagination to envision how they might act out on their way out of D.C. if allowed to fly unfettered. This is an action that TSA and the FBI, by law, are able to take but, to my knowledge, have not yet taken. Alleged perpetrators of a domestic terrorist attack who have been identified by the FBI should be held accountable.”

The Biden transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Cracking Down On Conservative Media

Liberal media figures and outlets have previously suggested that Biden should also take an aggressive approach in combatting conservative media when he becomes President of the United States.

Journalist Glen Greenwald predicted in October that media will target Trump supporters even if Biden won the election, warning that Trump’s presidency enabled media “to elevate everybody’s fear level” and portray Trump as “a grave threat to everything that’s good” in modern society.

“There is no question that Democrats are gearing up to use their new power to apply far more pressure than ever on Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. to censor any views they deem ‘threatening,’” Greenwald tweeted in November, referencing comments made by former President Barack Obama about controlling the internet with “a combination of government regulations and corporate practices.”

“Please look at what is going here,” Greenwald continued. “Democrats are defining whoever opposes them not as adversaries but as national security threats, fascist terrorists, etc. — all to justify blocking them from the internet using their influence with Silicon Valley.”

The Intercept co-founder added that CNN, NBC, and The Atlantic are the outlets that are “most loudly” demanding that “disinformation” be suppressed, though these outlets are “the ones who not only sold the bullshit of the Iraq War but also the last 4 years of deranged Russia-took-over! conspiratorial insanity.”

“They want their discourse monopoly back,” Greenwald said.

The same day Greenwald made these comments, Crooked Media Founder Tommy Vietor published a piece titled, “Why Joe Biden Must Sideline Fox.” Vietor lamented that Fox News is treated as a “legitimate news organization” and says that Biden’s team should “Approach Fox News with eyes, not arms, wide open.”

“Call Fox what it is: an extension of the Republican Party,” Vietor wrote. “Say it often. Repetitive messaging works—just ask Lyin’ Ted and Low-Energy Jeb. Reject the absurd insistence that the network has a ‘real news’ division.”

The Crooked Media Founder argued that Biden’s team should give his own publication, and other outlets like The Nation, “scoops and access” to help grow their audiences and “influence the way Trump’s team has nurtured fringe rags like Newsmax and OAN.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter also sparked a backlash in November for compiling a list of conservative media that he claimed is spreading “disinformation” on the election.

“There is an entire constellation of websites and talk shows that are in denial just like Trump,” Stelter said, showing a list of conservative media outlets that included Fox News, the Daily Caller, Newsmax, OAN, and more. “They are supplying disinformation about the election results, and wherever there’s a huge supply, there is a high demand.”

The Lists

Other media figures and Democrats have called for lists to be made of Trump’s supporters, suggesting that these lists will be used in the future to hold the president’s supporters accountable.

“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future,” Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Cortez asked the day before media outlets called the presidential race for Biden. “I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future.”

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin warned that Republicans “now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not to follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into ‘polite’ society.”

“We have a list,” the Washington Post writer said.

Only days after Election Day, former Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan highlighted the start of a “Trump Accountability Project” intended to “make sure anyone who took a paycheck to help Trump undermine America is held responsible for what they did.”

Sevugan, who also served as national press secretary for the Democratic National Committee and as deputy campaign manager for former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, tweeted Friday that White House staff had begun looking for jobs, adding, “Employers considering them should know there are consequences for hiring anyone who helped Trump attack American values. Find out how at the Trump Accountability Project.”

“We must never forget those who furthered the Trump agenda,” the Trump Accountability Project website said. “We should welcome in our fellow Americans with whom we differ politically. But those who took a paycheck from the Trump Administration should not profit from their efforts to tear our democracy apart.”

This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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An Unlikely Nation Is Kicking This Pandemic. Guess Which. Then Why.

She is a gynecologist. He is a surgeon. They are married and both 77 years old.  In mid-November, they were diagnosed with COVID-19, first her, then him. Their paths diverge at this point, but not to worry. 

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America’s Color Revolution

The Establishment has imposed a color revolution on the American people. Ekaterina Blinova is a journalist who reognized that a color revolution has occurred in America under the guise of a presidential election. https://sputniknews.

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