New guidance from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) could put millions of Americans in legal jeopardy.
The ATF published a notice Thursday that could require millions of AR-15 pistols and similar firearms—which are designed with braces that strap on to a shooter’s forearm—to be either registered, turned in, destroyed, or dismantled. But the standards laid out for determining the devices’ legality, such as caliber or weight, provide no objective measures, and the agency said it may also use undisclosed factors to judge the legality of the devices.
The agency conceded in the notice that some pistol braces are legal and should not be subject to the registration or destruction requirement. It said, however, that it could not provide a blanket determination for which pistols, or braces with which they’re often equipped, are legal and said it would have to examine each gun "on a case-by-case basis." That means owners of the vast majority of the estimated three to four million AR-15 pistols and similar firearms may have to register with the ATF.
Second Amendment advocates were up in arms over the proposed rule, saying the uncertain legal status could destroy several businesses that make pistol braces and harm the gun industry. Erich Pratt, senior vice president of Gun Owners of America (GOA), said the subjective nature of the guidance shows that the "ATF has gone off into the deep end."
"GOA will rally the grassroots to fight these regulations, and if they eventually go into effect, we will commence immediate legal action to protect gun owners," Pratt said in a statement.
The controversy stems from how federal law distinguishes between short-barrel rifles and shotguns, both of which must be registered and require a $200 tax stamp, and pistols that do not require either. The key component is whether a firearm is designed to be pressed against the shooter’s shoulder. Since 2012, the ATF has classified several guns with braces designed to strap to a shooter’s forearm as pistols. The agency’s Boston field office called that interpretation into question in August after sending a cease and desist letter to one manufacturer. The agency ordered a review in October following intervention from the White House.
Neither the ATF nor the White House responded to a request for comment.
The notice said the agency plans to waive the $200 tax for those registering the affected firearms during a grace period to be announced later. The public has two weeks to offer comment on the ATF notice before it goes into effect.
A pair of gunshot deaths that counted among COVID fatalities have earned the ire of a county coroner in Colorado.
Grand County, in the sparsely-populated (but breathtaking) northwestern quarter of the state, is home to fewer than 15,000 people and has been lucky enough to endure only a handful of deaths related to the Wuhan Virus.
But of those five deaths, County Coroner Brenda Bock says two actually died of gunshot wounds.
Bock sounded furious in her interview with CBS4 News in Denver, and with good reason. Grand County’s economy is heavily reliant on tourism, and as Bock told CBS4, “It’s absurd that they would even put that on there.”
“Would you want to go to a county that has really high death numbers?” she asked, presumably rhetorically.
“Would you want to go visit that county because they are contagious? You know I might get it, and I could die if all of a sudden one county has a high death count. We don’t have it, and we don’t need those numbers inflated.”
Bock told CBS4 that because the victims had tested positive for COVID-19 within 30 days of having been shot by gunfire, the county classified them as “deaths among cases.”
That’s a curious definition, but one required by the national reporting rules created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Deaths among COVID-19 cases” includes people who died with COVID-19, “but COVID-19 may not have been the cause of death listed on the death certificate.”
That’s different from the CDC’s definition of “deaths due to COVID-19.” Those are cases “where COVID-19 is listed as the cause of death or a significant condition contributing to death.”
Let’s put a different spin on those rules and see if we can’t gain a little clarity.
Consider a hypothetical in which your friendly neighborhood VodkaPundit were to get hit by a car while stumbling home from his favorite drinking establishment (heaven forbid!). During my autopsy, it was discovered that I had a small tumor on my liver – because where else would I be likely to get one?
If the CDC were fighting cancer the way it’s fighting the Wuhan Virus, my death would be counted “among” those who died of liver cancer, even though the tumor was small and not yet threatening. Never you mind that what actually killed me was a ’97 Olds Cutlass with that ugly plastic body cladding.
What a terrible way to go, right?
If I’d dodged the Cutlass and gone on to die many years later of liver cancer, my cause of death would be listed as “due” to liver cancer.
The latter is good if you’re trying to keep accurate records. The former is better if you’re trying to keep the public scared and confused about the risk of liver cancer in young people.
But worse than scaring a few tourists away from the lovely Grand Lake Lodge, COVID scaremongering is being used to shutter entire states.
As the official Wuhan Flu death tally rapidly approaches 300,000, we need to pay closer attention to these reporting rules.
The idea that COVID mortality might be overstated – even wildly overstated – is hardly far-fetched. PJ Media’s own Stacey Lennox reported on Wednesday:
One would think in light of these dire predictions and given the horrible toll the response has taken on the economy and young people, the excess deaths due to COVID-19 would be through the roof. But federal data says that does not appear to be the case.
Overall U.S. deaths in 2020 appear to be in line with previous years, according to the CDC’s own data.
Given that people who died “due” to COVID are overwhelmingly either elderly, suffering from an average of 2.6 comorbidities, or both, it isn’t a stretch to conclude that 2020 was the year most were going to die of something.
That’s perhaps a morbid truth, but morbid truths are still truths.
I don’t mean to imply that there’s nothing tragic about this pandemic.
Businesses have shuttered, tens of thousands of them permanently. Educations have been disrupted, jobs lost, and various state governors engaging in acts of tyranny that in saner times would have them driven from office — or worse. My 14-year-old son kind-of/sort-of started his freshman year this autumn but confided in his Mom a couple of weeks ago, “I’ve been in high school for weeks and I haven’t made a single new friend.”
That last item is about the least-damning thing you’ll read about what this shutdown year has done to schoolkids.
And when someone dies of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, taking their own life out of COVID-shutdown despair, the CDC doesn’t list that as even “among” COVID deaths.
The Wuhan pandemic has certainly been “among” the causes of many tragedies, but for the most part, our suffering has been self-inflicted.
This week, the New York Post has come in for intense criticism after publishing an article about a paramedic in the city who was working a side job selling pornographic images of herself on the website OnlyFans. The EMT worker apparently did not want to be profiled by the paper but they published the story […]
An illegal alien, convicted of murdering a child, was released into the United States after serving his prison sentence thanks to California’s sanctuary state law that was again codified by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).
Carlos Morales-Ramirez, a 44-year-old illegal alien from El Salvador, was convicted in January 1998 of second-degree murder, assault on a child causing death, and great bodily injury to a child causing death in Los Angeles County, California.
In August 2013, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a detainer for Morales-Ramirez requesting his transfer to their custody. Instead, the California Department of Corrections released Morales-Ramirez on December 4.
Morales-Ramirez’s release from custody back into the community is in full compliance with the state’s sanctuary law that shields criminal illegal aliens from custody. Newsom codified the policy, again, into state statute last year, making it difficult for ICE agents to have illegal aliens transferred to their custody.
California’s sanctuary policies continue to fail residents by allowing convicted criminals like Morales-Ramirez to walk free — state officials and advocates need to take a hard look at the reality, and potential consequences, of these misguided laws that leave potential victims wildly unprotected from very egregious criminal offenders.
Six days after Morales-Ramirez’s release, ICE agents located the convicted murderer in Los Angeles and arrested him. Morales-Ramirez now faces deportation proceedings and remains in ICE custody.
Newsom has gone out of his way in recent years to protect foreign criminals living in the U.S. from being deported. Last year, Newsom pardoned three foreign nationals convicted of felonies — including arson, robbery, hit-and-run, and theft — so they could avoid deportation back to their native Iran, Cambodia, and El Salvador.
ICE officials have previously said that Los Angeles frees up to 100 criminal illegal aliens every day. Likewise, data finds that 8-in-10 illegal aliens released by sanctuary jurisdictions like Los Angeles go on to commit additional crimes.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
The media keeps telling us there was absolutely no fraud.
But we also know that President Trump was leading Joe Biden in Michigan alone by over 100,000 votes on election night when suddenly Biden received 150,000 votes in less than one minute at 6:31 in the morning.
In Wayne County, the election night counting of absentees was happening at the TCF Center, formerly known as Cobo Hall. This is the site where Detroit City Officials put cardboard over the windows to prevent the GOP from seeing in, where poll workers were militantly hostile to the GOP, and where hundreds of affidavits claim they witnessed voter fraud.
And until now, no one has bothered to review the video footage.
The video can settle for once and for all:
How many people were in the TCF Center and is there any validity to the excuse that they were past “COVID capacity” – the excuse they used to exclude the Republicans from watching vote processing
Why did so many Democrat poll workers bring in suitcases? Did they hide illegal ballots in them like their colleagues in Georgia?
Were the machines networked? Can we see the modem and the wires networking the tabulating machines as described by Patrick Colbeck?
Who brought in what at 3:30/4:00am, were they ballots as the Republicans have said they witnessed, or was it food/camera equipment as the media claimed? Shane Trejo and Jose Aliaga say it was ballots.
Was there any security keeping people out of the building who did not have credentials to get in?
Were there other unexplained ballot dumps past the 8:00PM deadline for ballots as several other witnesses have alleged?
This evidence has the potential to blow up the claims of voter fraud in Michigan.
There has been a substantial period of time to cover their tracks, but since written affidavits make no impact on the media, witness video statements make little to no impact, perhaps the physical video evidence can corroborate the many witnesses and further establish the systemic voter fraud that took place in Detroit.
PLEASE SUPPORT THE GATEWAY PUNDIT’S DOCUMENTATION OF MICHIGAN VOTER FRAUD. Click here: GiveSendGo
What was the basis of panic that led the lights to darken on civilization?
The most important date here might be March 11, 2020. That’s when Congress itself flew into an unwarranted panic, and acquiesced to a lockdown at the urging of the “experts.”
State governors followed one by one, with few exceptions, and the rest of the world joined the lockdown frenzy.
In February, people were aching to know the answer to the following.
Would this “novel virus” have familiar patterns we associate with the flu, seasonal colds, and other predictable and manageable pathogens? Or would this be something entirely different, unprecedented in our lifetimes, terrifying, and universally deadly?
Crucial in this stage was public-health messaging. In previous pandemics from post-1918 throughout the 20th century, the central messaging was to stay calm, go to the doctor if you feel sick, avoid deliberately infecting others, and otherwise trust the systems in place and keep society functioning. This was long considered responsible public-health messaging, and this was pretty much where we stood throughout most of January and February, when publications regardless of their political outlook maintained sobriety and rationality.
Something dramatically changed this time. They pushed panic, tapping into a primal fear of disease. The reality of pandemic, as it turns out, has been familiar. The severity of its impact has been radically disparate across demographics, hitting mainly the elderly and infirm with 40% of deaths tracing to long-term care facilities with an average age of death nearly equal to the average lifespan. It is regionally migratory. It follows a seasonal pattern from pandemic to its endemic equilibrium.
What has been different has been the messaging that has almost universally been structured to create public frenzy, from the New York Times’s February 28 urge to “go medieval” to Salon’s latest demand that we panic even more.
My own sense of impending doom began on March 6 with the cancellation of South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, an action of the mayor alone, and completely without modern precedent. I wrote about it on March 8. Four days later, President Trump gave a nationwide address that ended with a shocking announcement that all flights from Europe would be stopped to keep the coronavirus out even though the virus had been here since January. The next day, on March 13, the administration issued what amounted to a shutdown plan for the nation.
Our author’s thesis was that the wild overreaction and unprecedented lockdowns of life began with what was a terminological mixup that led to a misplacement of a decimal point in a report from the National Institutes of Health.
It was a seemingly small error but it provided the basis on which Anthony Fauci testified at the House Oversight and Reform Committee about the seriousness of novel coronavirus spreading across the globe.
Here is the video in question. As you watch, you will note the seeming precision of data that actually masks a huge problem. He obscures the huge difference between the infection fatality rate, the case fatality rate, and the overall death rate. Nowhere does he mention survival rates. Not one person present pushed back on his claims. In the blizzard of data, he finally summarizes in a way that terrified everyone. Covid, he said, is “10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.”
Even apart from that prediction, his entire demeanor was: this is entirely new, very deadly, and unbearably unmanageable without extreme measures. Fauci’s implicit message to Congress and the American people was that it is time to panic.
Fauci was claiming what in fact he could not know, conflating two distinct data sets, and extrapolating in ways that allowed him to make a completely unsupported claim that very obviously turned out to be false. Two years ago, 61,000 Americans of all ages died of flu, exclusive of other ailments.
If you incorrectly impose on that a “case fatality rate” of 0.1% and extrapolate to Covid infections, you end up with at least 800,000 deaths from Covid alone – not “with” or “involving” Covid as the CDC classifies deaths today (that alone represents a big change). This is a scary prediction at the time; it seemed to add weight to the estimates out of the Imperial College of London that 2.2 million people would die without locking down. This testimony led a whole generation of lawmakers to believe that none of the traditional medical measures could or would work. There is no comparing this with the flu or any respiratory illness. This was the Other that justified a once-in-many-generations national emergency that required an end to our way of life.
The trouble is that the whole claim was based on a terminological misstatement that fed a basic math error. As Brown explains:
Sampling bias in coronavirus mortality calculations led to a 10-fold increased mortality overestimation in March 11, 2020, US Congressional testimony. This bias most likely followed from information bias due to misclassifying a seasonal influenza IFR as a CFR, evident in a NEJM.org editorial. Evidence from the WHO confirmed that the approximate CFR of the coronavirus is generally no higher than that of seasonal influenza. By early May 2020, mortality levels from COVID-19 were considerably below predicted overestimations, a result that the public attributed to successful mitigating measures to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Let’s follow Brown here as he takes the reader through the crucial differences between the IFR and the CFR. IFRs from samples across the population “include undiagnosed, asymptomatic, and mild infections.” To calculate the average IFR across the population, you do randomized samples to judge its prevalence. The results are inclusive of cases – what we used to call actual “sick” people – but extend to people who merely carry traces of the dead virus but are in no substantial danger of passing it onward or experiencing any severe outcomes. Cases, on the other hand, “are based exclusively on relatively smaller groups of moderately to severely ill diagnosed cases at the beginning of an outbreak.” The CFR is a smaller group. Brown provides the following graphic to show how epidemiology has long considered the difference.
Based on this graphic alone, you can see why it becomes crucial to keep these terms straight.
The CFR is higher; IFR is lower; the crude mortality rate is lower still.
The CFR measures severity; the IFR measures prevalence.
Those are the two general issues one needs to know to assess whether and to what extent a virus outbreak is mild, moderate, serious, or severe. This matters due to the long-observed evolved reality of respiratory viruses: there is a trade off between the forces. The more severe the virus, the quicker it burns itself out. The milder (and “smarter”) it is, the more it can spread. To mix up severity and prevalence is to make a mess of all the important categories that infectious disease specialists use to assess the social impact of a new virus.
Moreover, if you are going to compare how severe a pandemic is, you have to compare apples to apples, which means at the very minimum that we must be careful to distinguish apples from oranges from pears. That is precisely what the early messaging surrounding the coronavirus did not do.
Cases are not deaths; even more crucially, cases in a traditional sense mean that people are actually sick, not merely that they have been tested positive by a PCR test. Adding to the confusion, most data sources on Covid today use the term “cases” to identify any positive test, with or without symptoms, when the correct word would be “infections.” Further, the PCR test itself presents its own problems. As Brown notes, “A serious limitation of RT-PCR testing is that nucleic acid detection is not capable of determining the difference between infective and noninfective viruses.” The widespread use of the PCR test has made its own contribution to blurring all these crucial distinctions.
Now consider an extraordinary article from the New England Journal of Medicine that appeared on February 28, with Anthony Fauci as the co-author. The import of the piece was to claim that Covid and flu are quite similar in severity.
“The overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”
What matters here is not the prediction as such but the switching of the word infection with case: the flu has “a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%.” This was incorrect even at the time of writing. You can call it a misprint or sloppy or downright duplicitous. Regardless, even the World Health Organization had identified the 0.1% figure as the flu’s infection fatality rate. If you assume one symptomatic confirmed case for every infection (or what is now confusingly called “cumulative cases”), the error could be a misplace decimal: 0.01% not 0.1%. Regardless, Fauci’s article directly contradicted the WHO, and ran counter to everything that was already then known. But his CFR claim about flu is precisely what led him to claim in front of the Congressional committee that Covid would be deadly in ways that defy all experience of this generation.
Brown further explains:
As the campaign to mitigate coronavirus transmission was implemented from March into May, 2020, expected coronavirus mortality totals in the United States appeared much lower than the overestimation reported in Congressional testimony on March 11. Compared with the most recent season of severe influenza A (H3N2) in 2017-2018,with 80,000 US deaths reported by CDC officials, US coronavirus mortality totals had just reached 80,000 on May 9, 2020. By then, relative to the 2017-2018 influenza, it was clear that the coronavirus mortality total for the season would be nowhere near 800,000 deaths inferred from the 10-fold mortality overestimation reported to Congress. Even after adjusting for the effect of successful mitigation measures that may have slowed down the rate of coronavirus transmission, it seems unlikely that so many deaths were completely eliminated by a nonpharmaceutical intervention such as social distancing, which was only intended to contain infection transmission, not suppress infections and related fatalities. Also in early May, 2020, a New York State survey of 1,269 COVID-19 patients recently admitted to 113 hospitals found that most of the patients had been following shelter-in-place orders for 6 wk, which raised state officials’ suspicions about social distancing effectiveness. Still, polls showed the public credited social distancing and other mitigation measures for reducing predicted COVID-19 deaths, and for keeping people safe from the coronavirus.
As of this writing, however, deaths “involving” or “with” Covid has passed 300,000, which while less than half as high as what Congress heard they would be on March 11, is still quite high, provided these deaths have not been broadly misclassified. However, on March 24, the CDC made an announcement of serious significance. It would now calculate coronavirus mortality by including “probable” and “likely” deaths in the International Classification of Diseases code (ICD).
This became an invitation to misclassification. People who otherwise would have previously been classified as having heart disease or some other comorbidity could now be classified as Covid. This also included a financial incentive to do just that. For this reason, when the CDC announced that “for 6% of the deaths, Covid-19 was the only cause mentioned,” it came as a shock to people. What that means is that 94% of the deaths attributed to Covid were associated with additional comorbidities that prevented the immune system from fighting off the virus.
Following the March 11 Fauci testimony, in which he conflated IFR and CFR, the national media went wild with Covid and flu comparison. The following article, for example, blew up from BusinessInsider in June: “The coronavirus death rate in the US is almost 50 times higher than that of the flu. See how they compare by age bracket.” If you look carefully at the charts, you can see something fishy: they calculated infection fatality rate for flu against the case fatality rate for Covid. That necessarily generates a wild overestimate for Covid deaths. The charts are terrifying – and have nothing to do with reality.
Let’s hop forward from the testimony days to one month later when full-scale panic had already hit the U.S. Speaking at a White House press conference, Fauci then made a claim that strains credulity at every level. He said at a White House press briefing that the stringencies and “social distancing” could not and would not be relaxed until there are no “no new cases, no deaths.” Such a thing has happened only once in the history of viruses: smallpox. From the first experiments with inoculation to the final eradication took some 250 years. And yet here we have Fauci explaining that life could not be normal and functioning again until this widespread virus, relatively mild for 95% of the population, was completely eradicated from the planet!
And now we have the vaccine, and plenty of questions remaining about it, such as why non-vulnerable populations would prefer to take it over gaining the exposure necessary for naturally acquired immunity. Asking such a basic question is very close to being tabooed, even as lawmakers and other institutions are toying with the idea of making it mandatory. Even then, many of the lockdown advocates from earlier this year are saying that it will not enable us to go back to normal, to take off the masks, to go to the movies, or travel again. This is precisely the belief you might expect from a crowd that participated in what John Iaonnidis called a “one-in-a-century evidence fiasco” and are desperately trying to dig themselves out of losing every bit of scientific credibility.
Whether Brown is correct that the whole panic truly does trace to a brain flakeout on the part of Fauci – or even perhaps a deliberate “noble lie” to deceive the public into accepting the unacceptable – it hardly matters. The problem we face now is a huge tangle over terminology such that “infections” that could include as many as 90% false positives (according to the NYT) are called cases, while the once-distinct condition called cases which used to indicate actually being sick no longer has any precise meaning. The cacophony of statistical confusion here truly boggles the mind.
In the midst of all of this, the CDC itself finally updated its own estimates of the infection fatality rate of Covid-19. The CDC wisely took account of the huge demographic stratification of severe outcomes. There is not one rate that applies to the whole population or to any particular individual. There are only backward looking estimates of outcomes. They are all follows:
0.003% for 0-19 years
0.02% for 20-49 years
0.5% for 50-69 years
5.4% for 70+ years
Flipping the data to state it by survival rate by age:
99.997% for 0-19 years
99.98% for 20-49 years
99.5% for 50-69 years
94.6% for 70+ years
John Ioannidis sums up the disparity by age with the following infection fatality rate for people under the age of 70: 0.05%. This conclusion has been peer-reviewed and published by the World Health Organization.
How does this compare with the flu? We do not really know. As science journalist Shin Jie Yong has written, “There seems to be no data on age-specific IFR of the seasonal flu.” What this means is that crucial testimony of Fauci from March 11, in which he casually predicted based on bad numbers, that Covid would be ten times worse than the flu, can neither be confirmed or denied based on age-specific severe outcomes.
However, we can assemble the data based on years of lost life. Consider the long-term view over the future course of existing lifetimes. JusttheFacts reports:
If 500,000 Covid-19 deaths ultimately [in the future] occur in the United States—or more than twice the level of a prominent projection—the disease will rob about 6.8 million years of life from all Americans who were alive at the outset of 2020.
In contrast:
* the flu will rob them of about 35 million years.
* suicides will rob them of 132 million years.
* accidents will rob them of 409 million years.
As testing has expanded dramatically throughout the population, the estimated infection fatality rate of Covid will fall further. Thus can we observe a chart of “cases” (actually positive tests) all over the world and compare it with severe outcomes and see something remarkable that should make every living person fundamentally question why they decided to shut down the world and wreck billions of lives.
Another statistic that bears repeating, Covid – based on infections vs deaths – has close to a 99.9% survival rate. Imagine how the world would have been different had Fauci told that to the Congress on that fateful day of March 11. Or what if Fauci had revealed that the average age of death from Covid would almost equal the average lifespan in the US and exceed it in most parts of the world? People present might have wondered why they were holding hearings at all.
All these categories of data placement carry with them the danger of creating an illusion of control. Viruses do not come with little gears inside them with these rates. Human beings collect data and create them, and not one of them (whether IFR, CFR, infection rates, mortality rates, survival rates) pertains infallibly to any single individual. Our response to a virus is contingent on our own health, age, cross immunities, T cell memory, and a thousand other factors that no politician controls.
What we know is that a terminological confusion, a misplaced decimal point, a one-word error in data description, and a massive amount of arrogant presumptions about how to control a virus set in motion a series of events that turned our great and prosperous country into a disaster of confusion, demoralization, foregone medical services, closed businesses, wrecked arts and education, and long bread lines. The lockdowners who created this appalling disaster, the people who turned our trust into betrayal and a blizzard of statistical baloney, need to look at the science and data as they stand and come clean.
Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida ended socialist Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York after she tried to defend a foul-mouthed insult against Republicans by a Biden administration official.
The feud began after Rubio criticized Jen O’Malley Dillon, picked by President-elect Joe Biden to be his deputy chief of staff, for using an expletive to refer to Republicans.
"Biden talks about unity and healing, but you want to know what they really think? Read how the person he wants as the next WH deputy chief of staff called Republicans in Congress a bunch of f***ers," tweeted Rubio.
Biden talks about unity and healing, but you want to know what they really think? Read how the person he wants as… https://t.co/HT9VAnqpFl
Ocasio-Cortez pounced on Rubio’s tweet to defend Dillon’s statement, and to add her own foul-mouthed insult against Republicans she made in October.
".@marcorubio you stood by in total silence when your GOP colleague called a Congresswoman a ‘f— b—’ on the Capitol steps in front of press. You weren’t big enough to speak then, & you don’t get to sob now. BTW that is the right word for those who fleece & scam working families," she tweeted.
She added a screenshot of her quote To Vanity Fair.
"These are the same people saying that we can’t have tuition-free public colleges because there’s no money when these motherf***ers are only paying $750 a year in taxes," she said in the quote.
Ocasio-Cortez was referring to an incident where a Republican congressional colleague cursed at her on the steps of the Congress for tying crime to poverty.
In a second tweet she scolded Republicans about the stalled coronavirus relief bill.
"Tired of these people encouraging, ignoring, and excusing their own abusive behavior for years to then turn around and act like the biggest coddled babies in the world. People are hungry and this is what you’re mad about. Take that energy to supporting retroactive UI & checks," she added.
Rubio responded simply, "BTW, the right word for those who fleece & scam working families is actually ‘socialist.’"
Here’s more about Biden outreach to Republicans:
‘The Five’ react to Biden aide walking back profane comments about GOPwww.youtube.com
Rhode Island Democratic Governor Gina Raimondo was caught without a mask at a wine bar last week, just one day before beginning her quarantine, following the head of the RI health department testing positive for the coronavirus.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) invited Santa Claus to lecture kids about how his so-called “Elves” are “wearing masks” at the North Pole.
She opened with a message to the kids saying how she knows someone who has been ‘really following the rules’ and making sure how to be safe.
Some children asked the Santa Claus if he has to wear a mask and if there is coronavirus in the North Pole.
The Santa Claus told the kids how he wears a mask in his workshop and everyone has been testing negative near him.
“We’re not going to take any chances. We’re all going to mask up. We’re all going to wash out hands and we’re all going to stay six feet apart,” the Santa said.
A day before the zoom meeting, Whitmer called for legislation that will mandate statewide mask wearing in Michigan.
Whitmer stated, “There is no question COVID-19 has created a lot of hardships in 2020. And it’s not my fault, it’s not the legislature’s fault. The legislature needs to pass legislation to protect public health, including a mandate that we wear masks until the majority of us have had this vaccine. I know that there is bipartisan support for that action. I’d love to see the legislature take action. These are crucial things we can do to protect our people and our businesses here in Michigan.”
As small businesses disappear into the black hole of “pandemic restrictions,” major international corporations devour what is left of the market. Those institutions, which Carroll Quigley referred to as future “corporate overlords,” are rolling out new technologies just in time for the “Great Reset.”
Just when you think technology couldn’t get any more invasive
There’s nothing angelic about Amazon’s new wearable technology.
Halo, Amazon’s new AI health bracelet, offers body composition analysis, tone of voice analysis, sleep & activity tracking. Presumably, this new tech is another convenient application to bring awareness to users of such things as too much body fat or if their tone is a bit too abrasive or “condescending.”
While some individuals may benefit from both of these nudges, a recent review of Halo by the Washington Post (the unabashed purveyor of the loss of civil liberties) forcibly admits that Halo is the “most invasive tech we’ve ever tested.”
Authors Geoffrey Fowler and Heather Kelly wrote:
Hope our tone is clear here: We don’t need this kind of criticism from a computer. The Halo collects the most intimate information we’ve seen from a consumer health gadget – and makes the absolute least use of it. This wearable is much better at helping Amazon gather data than at helping you get healthy and happy.
Incidentally, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.
So, we could reasonably expect the authors of this review, Fowler and Kelly, to soon have to look for other employment avenues. Either that or the review was a cleverly placed advertisement, designed to draw controversy to an app that could use some in house advertisement. And to target those readers who don’t seem to care much about their own privacy.
AI now informs people they are condescending, opinionated, and fat
Halo collects more invasive information than FitBit or Apple Watch. With no screen, sounds, vibrations, or any striking design, Halo uses sensors to monitor physical activity, sleep, skin temperature, and heart rate. The only way to read that data is through a companion phone app.
The wearable device collects new information like body photos (of a scantily clad user) and voice recordings, feeding the data into Amazon’s AI software for analysis.
Amazon says HALO requires users to be nearly naked for the complete body scan to calculate body fat percentage. This scan requires users to stand in front of their phone’s camera in their underwear for a 360-degree scan.
The shots then go to Amazon’s cloud for analysis.
Remember when people scoffed at the phrase, “Big Brother is always listening?”
This new device is. And it tells you when you are being condescending or sound opinionated. Although, supposedly, you can push a button and cut off the microphone. Temporarily…sure you can.
The WaPo writers seemed considerably more concerned with the device’s voice analysis, focused on the fact that it is not as accurate as they would like. No mention of the frightening reality that Halo possibly represents the last vestiges of privacy and personal data.
The Halo’s voice tone analysis is questionable on a whole other level. You train the device to recognize your voice by reading sample phrases, and then it listens out constantly for moments in conversation that go beyond your neutral tone. (There is a button you can press to temporarily turn off the microphone.) The Halo plots these moments as positive vs. negative and high vs. low energy, and then applies more nuanced descriptors to them – for example, a voice that registers as negative and low energy might be classified as “discouraged.” You can review a dozen, or more, of these per day in the Halo app.
“For the most part, people are relatively unaware of how they sound to others and the impact that may have on their personal and professional relationships,” said Amazon’s medical officer Maulik Majumudar.
Do we want another product designed to mine for personal data?
The Halo is designed to mine your data. As with all devices like this one, the privacy policy states Amazon won’t sell or share your data without your explicit permission and that you are in control of it. The writer’s of the WaPo article had this to say:
But that still leaves open plenty of other ways for Amazon to profit from your information. In an anonymized way, it can data mine the heart rate, activity, sleep and tone patterns of Halo owners, using it to tailor its health algorithms and learn about human bodies. Make no mistake: disrupting medicine is the next goal for big tech.
Medical industries are attempting to push digestible microchips to monitor patients’ intake of medicine from afar by their doctor. Halo is just one more step in that direction. First, there were the handhelds. Now we are in the age of wearables. “Ingestibles” are next in line on our way to merging man and machine.
Undoubtedly, those concerned with the direction in which humanity is heading will be labeled as Luddites and conspiracy theorists. We won’t be vindicated when we are proven right, either. It hasn’t happened any other time. One must wonder what kind of person would welcome such invasive technology. And could THEIR wearable technology eventually invade OUR privacy?
