Are U.S. Special Forces Quietly Using Armed Robots?
March 12th, 2021Via: Forbes:
It seems Special Forces had an urgent need for an armed robot and bypassed the existing Army projects. An R&D budget document from the Office of the Secretary of Defense reveals that Special Operation Command developed a Lightweight Remote Weapons System (LRWS), a miniature version of the CROWS turret:
“Description: LRWS rapidly developed and evaluated a remote weapon station with significant size weight and power reduction to enable operations on remotely operated small ground vehicles.”
The LRWS cuts the weight from 350 pounds to just 70, making it small enough to be mounted on vehicles like the Talon. It may be adapted from the commercial Super Lite version of CROWS which also weighs 70 pounds. It includes a daytime zoom camera and thermal imager plus laser range finder. It supports 5.56mm, 7.62mm, and .50 caliber ammunition – either a machinegun or a sniper rifle. Such weapons can be extremely accurate, as shown by the remote assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist.
The document specifies LRWS is a ‘man-in-the-loop’ system controlled by a human operator rather than being an autonomous weapon.
New Book Confirms Fauci’s NIH Funded Wuhan Bat-COVID Experiments At Understaffed Chinese Lab
March 11th, 2021This is old news to you and me, but it’s worth repeating.
Via: ZeroHedge:
Now, Rogin is out with a new book; “Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century,” where he offers a 10,000-foot view of the evidence implicating the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, while also confirming that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) – headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, “had funded a number of projects that involved WIV scientists, including much of the Wuhan lab’s work with bat coronaviruses.”
The punchline hasn’t changed; if one simply connects the dots and applies a modicum of logic, the fact that COVID-19 emerged “on the doorstep of the lab that possessed one of the world’s largest collections of bat coronaviruses and that possessed the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2,” after years of performing so-called “gain-of-function” research modifying animal viruses to better infect humans (and which the Obama administration banned in October 2014 in the United States), and you have American diplomats reporting that they were “shocked” that Chinese researchers “didn’t have enough properly trained technicians to safely operate their BSL-4 lab,” and the likelihood of COVID-19 having escaped from WIV seems like a foregone conclusion.
Related: Fauci and the Communists
Stanford Medical Professor Insists COVID Lockdowns “Worst Public Health Mistake In Last 100 Years”
March 11th, 2021Via: ZeroHedge:
Dr. Scott Atlas isn’t the only Stanfordite to embrace the principles of the Great Barrington Declaration. The former advisor to President Trump delivered a final address yesterday that summed up his criticisms of the US COVID-19 response, particularly the draconian lockdowns that destroyed millions of jobs and hundreds of thousands of small businesses.
In his speech, Dr. Atlas warned that the response to COVID-19 in the US has underscored a lack of diverse viewpoints on American college campuses and in the American mainstream press.
First, I have been shocked at the enormous power of the government, to unilaterally decree, to simply close businesses and schools by edict, restrict personal movement, mandate behavior, and eliminate our most basic freedoms, without any end and little accountability.
Second, I remain surprised at the acceptance by the American people of draconian rules, restrictions, and unprecedented mandates, even those that are arbitrary, destructive, and wholly unscientific.
This crisis has also exposed what we all have known existed, but we have tolerated for years: the overt bias of the media, the lack of diverse viewpoints on campuses, the absence of neutrality in big tech controlling social media, and now more visibly than ever, the intrusion of politics into science. Ultimately, the freedom to seek and state the truth is at risk here in the United States.
Well, as it turns out, Dr. Atlas isn’t alone. In a recent email interview with Newsweek, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at the medical school, warned that the lockdowns would be remembered as the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made…the harm to people is catastrophic.” Bhattacharya was one of the co-authors, along with Dr. Atlas, of the Great Barrington Declaration.
I stand behind my comment that the lockdowns are the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years. We will be counting the catastrophic health and psychological harms, imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth, for a generation.
At the same time, they have not served to control the epidemic in the places where they have been most vigorously imposed. In the US, they have – at best – protected the “non-essential” class from COVID, while exposing the essential working class to the disease. The lockdowns are trickle down epidemiology.
Number of Migrant Children in U.S. Border Facilities Soars Amid Growing Crisis
March 11th, 2021Via: Reuters:
More than 3,600 migrant children were being held in U.S. border facilities as of Thursday morning, a U.S. official told Reuters, more than four times the number in late February, a sign of a growing humanitarian and political crisis for President Joe Biden’s new administration.
The number of mostly Central American unaccompanied children arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border has risen rapidly in recent weeks, with more children stuck in border patrol stations while they await transfers to increasingly crowded federal shelters and eventual release to parents or other sponsors.
DENMARK, NORWAY AND ICELAND SUSPEND ASTRAZENECA COVID SHOTS AFTER BLOOD CLOT REPORTS
March 11th, 2021Via: Reuters:
Health authorities in Denmark, Norway and Iceland on Thursday suspended the use of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine shots following reports of the formation of blood clots in some people who had been vaccinated.
Austria earlier stopped using a batch of AstraZeneca shots while investigating a death from coagulation disorders and an illness from a pulmonary embolism.
Still, the European medicine regulator EMA said the vaccine’s benefits outweighed its risks and could continue to be administered.
Federal Taxes, Spending and Deficit All Set Records Through February
March 11th, 2021
Via: CNS News:
Federal taxes, federal spending and the federal deficit all set records in the first five months of fiscal 2021 (October through February), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.
This is the first time that the federal deficit has ever exceeded a trillion dollars in the first five months of the fiscal year.
Ghost Towns of Fukushima Remain Empty After Decade-Long Rebuild
March 11th, 2021Via: Bloomberg:
Laid waste by a nuclear disaster a decade ago, Japan’s Fukushima is still struggling to recover, even as the government tries to bring people and jobs back to former ghost towns by pouring in billions of dollars to decontaminate and rebuild.
But reconstruction efforts from the mundane — supermarkets and transport infrastructure — to a cutting-edge hydrogen energy plant have yet to entice more than a small fraction of the former population to return.
As the country marks the 10th anniversary of the March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown, parts of Fukushima are still off limits and the prefecture remains a laggard in recovery. Its future is clouded by the 30 to 40 years it may take to decommission the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, near which millions of gallons of treated radioactive water are in storage.
First AI System for Contactless Monitoring of Heart Rhythm Using Smart Speakers
March 11th, 2021Via: University of Washington:
UW researchers have developed a new skill for a smart speaker that for the first time monitors both regular and irregular heartbeats without physical contact. The system sends inaudible sounds from the speaker out into a room and, based on the way the sounds are reflected back to the speaker, it can identify and monitor individual heartbeats. Because the heartbeat is such a tiny motion on the chest surface, the team’s system uses machine learning to help the smart speaker locate signals from both regular and irregular heartbeats.
When the researchers tested this system on healthy participants and hospitalized cardiac patients, the smart speaker detected heartbeats that closely matched the beats detected by standard heartbeat monitors. The team published these findings March 9 in Communications Biology.
Japanese Experience Higher Rate of Anaphylaxis After Taking Pfizer COVID Vaccine Than in U.S. and Europe
March 11th, 2021Via: Mainichi:
People in Japan who received Pfizer Inc.’s COVID-19 vaccine seem to have suffered anaphylaxis at a higher rate than in the United States and Europe, the minister in charge of vaccination efforts said Wednesday.
“It’s true, this seems to be more than in the United States and Europe,” Taro Kono told a parliamentary committee.
The health ministry later said an additional eight cases of anaphylaxis, a severe and potentially fatal allergic reaction, were reported, bringing the total to 25 among around 148,000 health care workers who have been inoculated as of Wednesday.
China, Russia Announce Plan To Build Moon Research Station
March 10th, 2021Via: NPR:
China and Russia have announced plans to work together to construct a lunar research station, an ambitious first-ever such space project between the two countries.
Russia’s Roscosmos and China’s National Space Administration – the two countries’ respective equivalents of NASA – announced a preliminary agreement on Tuesday to jointly develop the research facility, known as the International Lunar Research Station, or ILRS. The heads of the two space agencies signed a memorandum of understanding in a ceremony conducted via teleconference.
