California: Tell Your Senators That Ill-Conceived “Immunity Passports” Won’t Help Us
August 26th, 2020The crazy is coming very fast now.
Via: Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Californians should not be forced to present their smartphones to enter public places. But that’s exactly what A.B. 2004 would do, by directing the state to set up a blockchain-based system for “immunity passports”: a verified health credential that shows the results of someone’s last COVID-19 test, and uses those to grant access to public places.
By claiming that blockchain technology is part of a unique solution to the public health crisis we’re in, AB 2004 is opportunism at its worst. We are proud to stand with Mozilla and the American Civil Liberties Union’s California Center for Advocacy and Policy in opposing this bill. We encourage you to tell your senator to oppose it, too.
SpaceX Veterans Pass Milestone in Self-Flying Plane Race
August 26th, 2020Via: Bloomberg:
Silicon Valley has been hard at work on the vexing challenge of autonomous cars. Now veterans of SpaceX and Tesla Inc. are announcing what they’ve been up to: a new startup working on self-flying planes for cargo.
Reliable Robotics isn’t trying to invent a new kind of aircraft. The idea is to bring autonomous capability to existing planes, starting with smaller aircraft that ferry cargo. In June, with approval from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, Reliable Robotics demonstrated a fully automated remote landing of a Cessna 208 Caravan turboprop owned by FedEx Corp.
Why Does COVID-19 PCR Test Use a Primer That Is a Genetic Sequence Present in All Human DNA [???]
August 26th, 2020I can’t embed the video, but it’s at this link: Dr. Andrew Kaufman on David Icke.
Update: kjod71 wrote:
It’s an internal control. If you get negative results for COVID but positive for RNase P, then it means your extraction worked but the person is negative for COVID. If you get negative for everything including the human internal control, then your extraction was probably poor or you screwed up the PCR itself.
Journalism’s Gates Keepers
August 26th, 2020Via: Columbia Journalism Review:
As philanthropists increasingly fill in the funding gaps at news organizations—a role that is almost certain to expand in the media downturn following the coronavirus pandemic—an underexamined worry is how this will affect the ways newsrooms report on their benefactors. Nowhere does this concern loom larger than with the Gates Foundation, a leading donor to newsrooms and a frequent subject of favorable news coverage.
Hungry New Yorkers Form Quarter-Mile Line for Free Food in Queens
August 26th, 2020Via: New York Post:
The line stretched a quarter-mile before the sun was barely up Saturday, snaking around corners like bread lines in the 1930s. But the hungry in Queens are today’s New Yorkers, left jobless by the coronavirus.
Until the pandemic struck the city, La Jornada food pantry used to hand out groceries to roughly 1,000 families a week. Now, the figure tops 10,000. And volunteers serve lunch every day to 1,000 — many of them kids with growling stomachs. Across the five boroughs, the hungry number in the hundreds of thousands, the Food Bank of New York estimates.
“It reminds me of the picture from the Great Depression where a man in a suit and tie is giving another man in a suit and tie an apple. That’s all he had,” La Jornada’s Pedro Rodriguez told The Post. “We give all we have, but that’s not enough.”
UK Government Scientist Admits Lockdown Was a “Monumental Mistake on a Global Scale”
August 26th, 2020Via: Summit News:
A scientific advisor to the UK government says the coronavirus lockdown was a “panic measure” and a “monumental mistake on a global scale.”
Infectious diseases expert and University of Edinburgh professor Mark Woolhouse acknowledged that the decision to lockdown in March was a “crude measure” that was enacted because “we couldn’t think of anything better to do.”
“Lockdown was a panic measure and I believe history will say trying to control Covid-19 through lockdown was a monumental mistake on a global scale, the cure was worse than the disease,” said Woolhouse, who is now calling on the government to unlock society before more damage is done.
“I never want to see national lockdown again,” he added. “It was always a temporary measure that simply delayed the stage of the epidemic we see now. It was never going to change anything fundamentally.”
The professor asserts that the impact of the response to coronavirus will be worse than the virus itself.
“I believe the harm lockdown is doing to our education, health care access, and broader aspects of our economy and society will turn out to be at least as great as the harm done by COVID-19,” said Woolhouse.
The Fatal Attraction of Techno-Fascism
August 26th, 2020Via: Off Guardian:
Corporate media focuses on those stories they are paid to propagate, i.e., those which support the financial and ideological agendas of their owners, who themselves are all, without exception, central parts of the larger global ruling oligarchy.
A key part of the propagandist’s handbook is to simply leave unexplored stories that they are NOT given approval to manage and control; stories which, we might assume, do not generate sufficient advantage for the owners. Such calculated sins of omission are essential to keeping the mass of believers unperturbed by the vagaries of complexity in the delivery of their daily dogmas.
If an individual were to insist upon learning more about any of these less-discussed stories, they would soon arrive at the realization that while an abundance of relevant facts can easily be found, and often hidden in plain sight, the truth is that most people simply do not WANT to know, think or talk about any such truths that differ from those accepted by their peers, for whom cognitive dissonance causes such literal pain and disorientation, as to keep them docile and compliant to the dictates of the media.
Kenosha: Two Shot Dead, One Injured
August 26th, 2020Via: USA Today:
Police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, said early Wednesday that two people had been shot and killed and a third injured as protests over police brutality and the shooting of Jacob Blake continue to rock the country.
For three nights, violent protests have torn through Kenosha after a police officer shot Blake from behind at close range while he was getting in a vehicle. Since then, buildings have been burned, windows smashed out and stores looted.
Clashes between protesters and law enforcement continued nearly three hours past curfew near Civic Center Park in Kenosha. About 250 law enforcement officers and 250 National Guard members were on hand Tuesday night to quell the recent unrest, Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth said.
Only Sociopaths Reject the New Normal
August 26th, 2020Via: Corbett Report:
Ford Starts Construction on New Factory for Electric F-150 Pickup Truck
August 25th, 2020Via: Electrek:
Ford has started construction on a new factory to build the upcoming electric F-150 pickup truck next to its current pickup factory in Dearborn, Michigan.
You could argue that no one has a bigger stake in electric pickup trucks.
Electrification has disrupted every segment it has touched, and with Ford being the leader in the pickup truck segment with the F-150, it has the most to lose if it doesn’t play a big part in electrifying the segment.
Ford sold about 900,000 F-Series pickup trucks last year, bringing in around $42 billion in revenue. The US automaker has a plan to bring an electric F-150 to market, but not much is known about it.
When confirming plans to launch an all-electric version of the F-150, Ford’s best-selling pickup truck, Darren Palmer, the head of Ford’s Team Edison, said that the automaker was aiming to bring the electric F-150 to market “before 2022.”
