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Serious violations but it didn’t matter. But what is the point of process or falsifying the application at all?

Ex-FBI lawyer gets probation for falsifying Carter Page surveillance application

Kevin Clinesmith’s actions were serious, but the warrant probably would have been approved anyway, a judge rules..

Kevin Clinesmith’s actions were serious, but the warrant probably would have been approved anyway, a judge rules..

If mail in voting was good then more is better. But if it’s bad then more is worse since its defects will be proportionately magnified. The migration from in-person to mail-in voting implies an improvement in the chain of proof of identity. The demand for more identity security may run counter to the political promise to expand voter access. Done right it can assist voter choice. Done wrong it can institutionalize voter fraud.

Lawmakers introduce legislation to massively expand mail-in voting

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) on Thursday introduced legislation to allow all registered voters to have the option to vote from home.

They are not deterred by the formidable reputation of the new administration. Doesn’t China know the only adults in the room are watching them?

Chinese H-6 Bombers Heard On Radio Confirming Orders For Simulated Attack On U.S. Aircraft Carrier Near Taiwan

Unsurprisingly, the package of 13 Chinese combat aircraft, (including eight H-6 bombers) entering Taiwan’s ADIZ last Saturday were carrying out a mock attack on USS Theodore Roosevelt. As alr…

A confirmation that the mission flown on Jan. 23 was simulating an air strike on the U.S. aircraft carrier comes from the Financial Times, that on Jan. 29, 2020 reported: “People familiar with intelligence collected by the US and its allies said the bombers and some of the fighter aircraft involved were conducting an exercise that used a group of US Navy vessels led by the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in the same area as a simulated target. Pilots of H-6 bombers could be heard in cockpit conversations confirming orders for the simulated targeting and release of anti-ship missiles against the carrier, the people said.”

Why Taiwan might be the next global flashpoint

Why does China have Taiwan in its sights? What does Taiwan want? And, as tensions rise, how are the US and Australia likely to respond?”

If Elon ever gets to Mars he’ll declare independence from Earth.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX violated its launch license in explosive Starship test, triggering an FAA probe

SpaceX’s next test Starship test launches are getting a close look from the FAA.

The December test launch of the “Serial Number 8” Starship prototype at SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas, facilities was hailed by Musk as a success: “Mars, here we come!!” the chief executive tweeted moments after the rocket exploded on its landing, celebrating SN8’s successful 8-mile-high ascent with his followers. The FAA, which oversees ground safety and issues licenses for private launches, was not so happy.

Elon Musk blasted the FAA for canceling a Starship test launch, but the agency said ‘outstanding safety issues’ were at play

SpaceX was unable to launch its newest Starship prototype on Thursday after the Federal Aviation Administration canceled the flight attempt.

• SpaceX was ready to attempt a Starship rocket test flight on Thursday, but it couldn’t get clearance from the FAA.
• Elon Musk criticized the agency on Twitter, saying that with its rules “humanity will never get to Mars.”
• However, the FAA told Insider it was working with SpaceX to “resolve outstanding safety issues.”

The quick answer is that there is more bandwidth, more nodes, more complexity and more emergence for David to exploit against Goliath. The status quo has been repeatedly blindsided by events that seemingly came out of nowhere. It responds by creating ever denser and interlinked connections which never quite behave as they’ve modeled. 9/11, Brexit, Trump, the coronavirus were all bolt out of the blue.

Prediction: Wall Street will block up the attack routes the Gamestop insurgency used — and completely miss the next challenge from a direction they least expect. They will be surprised again and these surprises will occur with increasing frequency.

I wouldn’t worry too much about Gamestop. It’s the next David nobody has even heard of but implicitly out there that you’ve got to watch out for.

In a world of rapid, disruptive innovation establishment power and addiction to monopoly rents have become a trap. The ladder leading up to an unknown future consists of collapsing rungs upon which it is unwise to tread for too long. Rebel or die.

GameStop insurgency is just the latest rebellion against ‘the Big Guys’

Joe Biden is president. Democrats control the House and Senate. Tech overlords are quashing dissent. We’re in the middle of what our betters call the “Great Reset,” when the power of…

This display of spontaneous group power by a bunch of previous unknowns has frightened the Really Smart People™ and led to reactions that will make things worse, not better. Some discount brokers started displaying warnings and limiting trades. Discord, a popular online chat service used by the r/wallstreetbets group, shut down the group’s service, offering the usual contemporary excuse that the group was engaged in “hate speech” and “spreading disinformation.” Uh-huh. …

Prediction: We will see more Big Tech censorship, maybe even government regulators, set against the Robinhood crowd. But it won’t work the way the censors and regulators hope.

We’re in a slow motion biowar against something — nature, human agency, a combination of both. The name of that something is unimportant for now. The only thing that matters is that it’s chronic. What the experts are telling the public is that vaccines are now a permanent part of 21st century life. The air raid siren will never sound all clear. This shadow war is never going to end.

Even public health bureaucracies are fallib.e. Crises are stress tests. They invite scrutiny in places that might otherwise go unexamined. For decades money meant for pandemic preparation was used “the removal of office furniture, administrative expenses, news subscriptions, legal services and the salaries of other department employees.” Nobody ever really saw the pandemic coming. Institutions spend years preparing for a surprise attack that catches them unawares.

Millions Meant for Public Health Threats Were Diverted Elsewhere, Watchdog Says

The money went to unrelated government activities like the removal of office furniture, news subscriptions and legal expenses.

A federal watchdog has found that the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which drew national attention last year when the Trump administration fired its director, has been used for the past 10 years as a “slush fund” to cover expenses unrelated to its core mission of fighting health threats like Ebola, Zika and the coronavirus. …

The practice of diverting funds was so common, investigators found, that employees had a name for it: the “Bank of BARDA.”

The report focuses on the actions of the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, the health department official who oversees BARDA and is responsible for its budget. The assistant secretary is responsible for leading the federal response to pandemic threats like the novel coronavirus. Its most recent occupant was Dr. Robert Kadlec; President Biden has not named a successor.

Do those who dismiss the lab accident origin theory of Covid 19 have a problem with the alternative pushed by the Chinese government itself? That theory is that the virus was imported into China.

Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, said on Monday (Jan. 18) at a press conference that the US should open Fort Detrick, a military medical research base in Maryland, for further investigation as a possible origin of Covid-19. “I’d like to stress that if the United States truly respects facts, it should open the biological lab at Fort Detrick, give more transparency to issues like its 200-plus overseas bio-labs, invite WHO [the World Health Organization] experts to conduct origin-tracing in the United States, and respond to the concerns from the international community with real actions,” she said.

China’s gift for the Biden inauguration is a conspiracy theory about Covid-19’s US origins

The trending of the theory, which occurred shortly before the US president-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, could indicate the future uphill battle the new administration faces when it comes to US-China relationship.

This ‘fact’ is driving Chinese consumers to shun imported frozen food as a source of contagion.

At an upscale supermarket west of Beijing, a box of disposable gloves stands in front of a glass counter selling Australian beef. Next to it is a sign saying: “Please buy this with peace of mind.”

“All the imported meats here have undergone nucleic acid testing. Consumers need not worry,” promises Li Xingzhen, a manager at Ole supermarket, which imports about 70% of its groceries. Her pledge offers a look at the new challenges facing retailers as many Chinese shoppers grow reluctant to buy overseas food products after Covid-19 infections were reported among people handling such items. …

China has gone even further with its frozen food theory, with state media suggesting the virus could have entered the country via frozen products or packaging. This comes as the hunt for the origins of the coronavirus becomes highly politicized, with a WHO team currently in Wuhan to probe further, and the U.S. pushing the idea it could have escaped from a lab in the city — a claim China has denied.

For some months it was settled science that the virus could not have originated in a lab. But even the Chinese don’t believe the wildlife market theory of the origin of the virus any more. “Almost a year has passed since the Huanan wholesale market in Wuhan, China – the suspected source of the Covid-19 pandemic – closed down. Anti-coronavirus measures in place here and at other markets have allowed business to continue, but Chinese authorities now say that imported frozen food, rather than trade in live animals, caused the virus outbreak.”

All of this leaves those who maintain the virus couldn’t have originated in a laboratory in a quandary. Where did it come from then? And how did the previous certitude vanish so suddenly? It is almost as if everyone now realizes that the old story can’t hold up much longer and that some human agency will eventually be blamed, the only question is which.

The “gain of function” research to engineer nightmare viruses may have been the other half of the quest to create flexible vaccine platforms that could create “24 hour bug to drug” preventives as powerful defenses against pandemics. But it was not exempt from the risk of lab accidents.

The vaccines are in some sense the redemption for the sin of engineering target monsters. The good news is we have powerful drugs; bad news is science needed pathogens to test them against.

Expect not only a debate into China and the US government’s role into brewing up lab monsters for public health causes but into the larger issue of moral and transcendental choice in technology. If as Ernst Mayr observed, “intelligence is a lethal mutation”, could the key to long term species survival be a sense of transcendental moral limits rather than mere cleverness? Did our biotechnicians, AI developers and climate engineers learn anything from our brush with nuclear extinction during the Cold War? Or do we have to take the test again?

Steve Hilton investigates origins of COVID-19, links to US commissioned research

‘The Next Revolution’ host breaks down the evidence surrounding the origins of COVID-19.

WHO advisor: COVID-19 pandemic likely started via lab leak

WHO advisor: COVID-19 pandemic likely started via lab leak

Now it can be told because “because President Biden is very smart and strategic and he understands that American power and American strength doesn’t rest on bluster, it rests on principles, it rests on partnerships, and alliances and accountability.”

WHO advisor: COVID-19 pandemic likely started via lab leak

WHO advisor: COVID-19 pandemic likely started via lab leak

One year after the pandemic started, World Health Organization advisor Jamie Metzl wants China to come clean about the origins of the COVID-19 virus.

The Kansas City-born, New York-based Metzl, who served as Deputy Staff Director of the Foreign Relations Committee under then Senator Joe Biden (2001-2003) and before that on the National Security Council (1997-99) and the State Department (1999-01) under President Bill Clinton), theorizes it was most likely an accidental lab leak in Wuhan.

https://torontosun.com/news/world/who-advisor-covid-19-pandemic-started-via-a-lab-leak/wcm/39d55a21-b1b2-45e6-a0fb-6f652c98c53f/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Navigating on falsified position reports. The stars are where we want them to be.

New at the Belmont Club

An Ever-Changing Past

The perils of editing history

The world order would have been in real trouble without vaccines to fight over. For decades politics has been premised on the theory that scarcity was a thing of the past; that the only problems left to solve involved redistribution. The pandemic showed real scarcity can still exist and demonstrated how dependent the world is on the technology and enterprise generated by scarce human capital.

Most of us are cavemen with technological devices we don’t understand. The real wealth of the 21st century civilization is in the heads of a few million people without whom we would rapidly regress to the 19th century.

Culturally we live in a world of found magical objects where the stash and innovation just are. Most of the world was content to wait for the “rich countries” to develop pharmaceuticals. The truth is no one was sure in the beginning that it could be done at all. Now without skipping a beat politicians are talking about vaccine equity without inquiring how the stash came to be at all.

Comparisons between the Covid pandemic and WW2 fail in one glaring respect. WW2 saw countries mobilize their industries to produce weapons of war. By contrast the global vaccine shortages show how lacking our efforts still are.

Politicians know how to give things away and that is about the extent of their knowledge.

‘Solidarity Is Failing’: E.U. and U.K. Fight Over Scarce Vaccines

As vaccine production falls behind schedule, and the European Union lags in inoculating people, Brussels and London are lobbing threats and accusations at each other.

The vaccine wars have come to Europe.

For months now, wealthy countries have been clearing the world’s shelves of coronavirus vaccines, leaving poorer nations with little hope of exiting the pandemic in 2021. But a fresh skirmish this week has pitted the rich against the rich — Britain versus the European Union — in the scramble for vials, opening a new and unabashedly nationalist competition that could poison relations and set back collective efforts to end the pandemic.

No this is not about journalists learning how to code. It’s about whether half of America has been taken over by cult. In the words of a Bob Hope movie: “It’s worse than horrible because a zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.”

Meghan McCain responds to Katie Couric: ‘I don’t need to be deprogrammed’

“The View” co-host Meghan McCain took a shot Monday at veteran journalist Katie Couric over recent comments Couric made about how the country should view former President Trump’s supporters moving forward.

“I also think some of them are believing the garbage that they are being fed 24/7 on the internet, by their constituents, and they bought into this big lie,” Couric told Bill Maher earlier this month. “And the question is how are we going to really almost deprogram these people who have signed up for the cult of Trump.”

The EU was months late in reaching an agreement with vaccine manufacturers because of procedural reasons. Now faced with embarrassing shortfalls the search for a fall guy begins.

Head of AstraZeneca rejects calls for UK vaccine to be diverted to EU

Chief executive of pharmaceutical giant says the firm will honour UK’s earlier contract despite EU anger over shortfall

Analysis by Airfinity, a UK-based analytics company working for the life sciences industry, suggests the UK will have achieved effective “herd immunity” by vaccinating 75% of the adult population by 14 July while the EU will have to wait until 21 October based on supply deals and the latest delays.

Soriot said his company had little choice but to cut supply to the EU because of “reduced yields” at a manufacturing plant in Belgium, where the vaccine is initially cultivated.

The company has created separate supply chains in every major market the vaccine will be available – but unlike in the EU, the UK operation is already established.

Vaccine nationalism, economic woes build a perfect storm

Italy threatens legal action against Pfizer over vaccine supply; Israel to close all airports to most flights

Journalists Mobilize Against Free Speech

A new generation of media crusaders clamors for government control over what you see, hear, and read—and for banning their competition

Public discourse is now a “conflict space” with social media serving as an “information warzone,” the public intellectual Peter W. Singer declared in an essay published a few days after the alternately scary and farcical Trump riot on Capitol Hill, seamlessly adapting a framework of state-level physical violence to a discussion of constitutionally protected speech. …

Media skepticism toward free expression actually began long before the Capitol riot – and before Trump was elected. The New Yorker’s Kalefa Sanneh anticipated the rising ambivalence toward the existing First Amendment regime when he likened “speech nuts” to “gun nuts” in a 2015 essay. Today, support for the mainstream American free speech norms of earlier, less-Trump-addled times is increasingly cast as a kind of sinister eccentricity, as when Slate declared in the days after the Capitol assault that “We have come to a moment in which one half of the country is fighting to be free of crippling, life-ending acts of stochastic terror, while another half of the same country is chillingly preoccupied with their right to just talk shit.”

Perhaps the best example of the new attitude toward free speech is George Stephanopoulos’ argument that Senator Rand Paul cannot disagree with his belief that the 2020 election was fair and honest.

In every war there is a constant contest of upgrades between the combatants. Nature is a tenacious and resourceful adversary. It isn’t two weeks to anything.

AstraZeneca denies report vaccine less effective in elderly

AstraZeneca denied on Monday its COVID-19 vaccine is not very effective for people over 65, after German media reports said officials fear the vaccine may not be approved in the European Union for use in the elderly.

(Reuters) – AstraZeneca denied on Monday its COVID-19 vaccine is not very effective for people over 65, after German media reports said officials fear the vaccine may not be approved in the European Union for use in the elderly.

German daily papers Handelsblatt and Bild said in separate reports the vaccine – co-developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University – had an efficacy of 8% or less than 10%, respectively, in those over 65. …

In a written response, AstraZeneca described the German media reports saying its COVID-19 vaccine was shown to have a very low efficacy in the elderly as “completely incorrect”.

Moderna Developing Vaccine Booster Shot for Virus Strain Identified in South Africa

Moderna said its Covid-19 vaccine appeared to protect against emerging strains in lab tests, but due to a weaker immune response, the company will develop a booster shot targeting the variant first identified in South Africa.

Moderna Inc. MRNA 12.20% said its Covid-19 vaccine appeared to protect against emerging variants of the coronavirus in laboratory tests, but as a precaution it would test whether a booster shot improves immune responses and develop a new vaccine targeting the strain first identified in South Africa.

Joe Biden has only been in the Oval Office for days, but China is making it clear if he doesn’t change Trump’s course, there will be consequences.

Beijing’s ominous ‘signal’ to Joe Biden

Beijing has sent a none too subtle “signal” to the new Biden administration to take a step back from former President Donald Trump’s hard ball tactics against China.

China flies warplanes close to Taiwan in early test of Biden

China dispatched two large formations of warplanes close to the self-governing island of Taiwan over the weekend, presenting a significant foreign policy challenge to new United States President Joe Biden just days into his administration.

Maybe China’s a bigger problem than Parler.

Looks like the status quo is having a rough time of it all over the world. “Chatsworth, there’s something wrong with our bloody global world to-day!” In retrospect the pandemic turned out to be a poisoned pawn for political opportunists. What they greedily pounced on as an opportunity to grab power has unleashed furies.

Prior to the protests, the US Embassy in Moscow had issued a “Demonstration Alert”, warning US citizens to avoid the protests and naming the venues in Russian cities where protesters planned to gather.

“Of course, those publications are inappropriate,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Rossiya 1 TV on Sunday, according to Interfax news agency.

“And of course, indirectly, they are absolute interference in our internal affairs. So, this is a direct support of the breach in the Russian Federation’s law.”

Russia accuses US of meddling in its domestic affairs as thousands arrested at pro-Navalny rallies

The Kremlin has accused the United States of interfering in Russia’s domestic affairs and downplayed the scale of the weekend’s protests, when tens of thousands rallied in support of jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

The European Union’s Health Commissioner, Stella Kyriakides, tonight slammed the cut, warning it was ‘not acceptable’.

It comes after Eindhoven in the Netherlands saw its worst riots in nearly 40 years over the weekend, with Mayor John Jorritsma warning the country was ‘on our way to civil war,’ amid outcry over a new nationwide curfew.

Politicians pushed to tighten lockdown measures across the continent even after a weekend of rioting brought scenes of chaos to the Netherlands and Denmark.

Fury as AstraZeneca say they cannot meet EU’s Covid-19 vaccine demands

The EU’s Health commissioner, Stella Kyriakides, has warned AstraZeneca’s plan to cut the number of jabs it can supply by the end of March by 60 per cent is ‘not acceptable’.

‘Criminal violence’: Anti-lockdown riots roil the Netherlands

Rioters clashed with police across the Netherlands over coronavirus lockdown measures in what was the worst violence to hit the country since the pandemic began. Politicians condemned the riots, with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte calling it “unacceptable.”

It was the worst violence to hit the Netherlands since the pandemic began and the second straight Sunday that police clashed with protesters in Amsterdam. The country has been in a tough lockdown since mid-December that is due to continue at least until Feb. 9. The government beefed up the lockdown with a 9 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. curfew that went into force on Saturday. …

“My city is crying, and so am I,” Eindhoven Mayor John Jorritsma told media Sunday night. In an emotional impromptu press conference, he called the rioters “the scum of the earth” and added, “I am afraid that if we continue down this path, we’re on our way to civil war.”