Gov Corruption

[GURPS]

New Oregon Wastewater Rules Threaten Portland's Food Cart Culture​

Portland's beloved food carts are largely stationary vending operations that sell food out of spaces they share with other carts. These spaces, known in Portland as "pods," often feature a dizzying array of foods that put most any food court to shame regarding the variety and quality of foods they offer. Visitors to a pod might find a schnitzel cart parked next to other cart vendors selling steamed bao buns, pizzas, empanadas, meats on sticks, and crepes.

"Part of the reason why carts are so popular [in Portland]: there's a low barrier to entry to starting one, with lower upfront costs and less regulation involved than with brick-and-mortar restaurants," the Monthly details in its excellent piece. "But with new regulations regarding food carts and food cart pods taking effect on January 1, 2023, some cart owners are worried about their ability to keep their businesses open, and some have already made the decision to temporarily close, including Meliora Pasta and Papi Sal's."

The new rules made news this fall.

 

[GURPS]

According to Bob Barr, a former federal prosecutor and congressman from Georgia, the infrastructure bill the president signed a little more than a year ago includes “a little-noticed ‘safety’ measure that will take effect in five years.” It “amounts to a ‘vehicle kill switch,’” Barr wrote in the Daily Caller, and every car built after 2026 has to have one.

Of course, the mandate was characterized “as a benign tool to help prevent drunk driving.” But safety is always a pretense for further government intervention and the erosion of liberty. Prime example: The COVID-19 lockdowns we just went through.

Writing in Motorius, automotive journalist Steven Symes notes that, to many, a mandatory kill switch “might sound like a wonderful idea.”

“After all, we’ve seen wanted criminals who have fled from police only to crash into a car with a family inside, killing innocents as they try to avoid capture. Being able to stop the pursuit early and almost instantaneously seems like a wonderful thing, a potential lifesaver any law-abiding citizen would enthusiastically embrace.”

The trouble is, too many in government refuse to abide by the law. Only the naive will believe that vehicle kill switches will be used only for lifesaving purposes. Imagine how a Transportation Department secretary appointed by a Democrat would use such a tool for the purpose of “fighting global warming” – to return to a simpleton’s platitude oft spouted by Al Gore, who’s made a career out of belching mindless drivel. He or she could dictate when and how far people drive.

What makes this threat so real is that driving restrictions are already being suggested and in some cases implemented, from “Car-free Sundays in cities” and “Alternate private car access to roads in large cities,” to fossil fuel suppression schemes, to traffic filtering, limits on automobile ownership, and a paleo road diet.

How About A Kill Switch To Shut Down Washington?

The swamp’s assault on liberty never sleeps.

issuesinsights.com

 

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[GURPS]

You might have missed it, but the CDC published a handy-dandy party-planning checklist, for your New Years’ Eve party planning needs, and for any other socially safe event you might like to host for your friends and loved ones. The important thing is to have fun — and don’t kill grandma!

That’s the CDC’s job.



EDIT: Alert commenters pointed out that this was actually produced by a pro-masking group called the “People’s CDC.” They got me!

The CDC really outdid itself this time. THREE “universals!” Universal pre-event testing, universal masking, and universal post-event testing. Sounds like fun! I think they’re floating “universal” as a possible sporty new replacement for the oppressive and widely-hated old term, “mandatory.”

As you can see, you have a LOT of work to do before you throw any dinner parties. You’ll need to stock up on rapid tests so you can easily enforce universal post-event testing. Nobody leaves without a test! The sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll be all done and ready to party.

You might be thinking that asking for your friends’ vaccine pass at the door, handing out mandatory face masks, testing kits, making them go outside, and requiring sign-ins for contact tracing could be a party downer, but you’re not thinking right. Have fun with it! It could be kind of like a non-anonymous version of Eyes Wide Shut. Of course, that one didn’t turn out too well and somebody died. But you get the idea.

☕️ COLLAPSING STUFF ☙ Monday, January 9, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

ODU guard collapses during play; MMA fighter throws her last punch; Reuters pines for Zero-Covid; SADS deaths; CTV reporter has on-air brain fog; the CDC's handy party-planning tips; and more.

www.coffeeandcovid.com

 

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[GURPS]

Paul Sperry shares DAMNING details about how Adam Schiff tried SILENCING his J6 whistleblower stories​

 

[GURPS]

Biden White House Hounded Facebook To Censor Tucker Carlson, New Emails Show​

But the Biden White House’s habit of using Big Tech to silence dissenting voices on Covid-related information didn’t just stop at Carlson. A separate batch of emails released by the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general reveals a concentrated endeavor between the administration and Facebook to reduce the “virality of vaccine hesitancy content,” even if such posts contained factually accurate information.

“As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation,” a Facebook representative told Slavitt in a March 21, 2021, email. “This is often-true content, which we allow at the post level … but it can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking. We’ll remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content.”

 

[GURPS]

DOJ boosts Biden — but tarnishes itself — by letting his own lawyers search for classified docs​

If true, the decision raises additional questions over the independence of top law enforcement personnel. This follows a litany of controversies involving both Donald Trump and Biden where the FBI and DOJ have been accused of political bias and unequal treatment. While the FBI recently denounced critics as “conspiracy theorists,” the record of inexplicable decisions continues to grow by the day.

There is no plausible reason why, given the chance, the Justice Department would not want to conduct a national security search itself. After Nov. 2, the Justice Department was aware that material at the top secret or higher levels was discovered in a closet in the Penn Biden Center. It was also aware that the material may have been moved over the course of six years and that other material could be in other unsecured locations. Nevertheless, it reportedly opted to allow uncleared attorneys to search for additional classified material under a type of “look but please don’t read” edict.

 

[GURPS]

White House changes tune about Biden’s Delaware residence in head scratching flip​

On Monday, the White House Counsel’s Office explained that the reason why there are no visitor logs is that Biden’s home was his personal residence.

“Like every President across decades of modern history, his personal residence is personal,” the office said in a statement. “But upon taking office, President Biden restored the norm and tradition of keeping White House visitors logs, including publishing them regularly, after the previous administration ended them.”

However, that completely contradicts previous statements from the White House including former spox Jen Psaki’s remarks last year that Biden could work from anywhere.

“I will note that, while every president can work from anywhere they are because that is how presidencies are equipped, he is traveling to Delaware for the memorial service of a family member. And he will be — that is why he’s traveling there this weekend,” Psaki said during her daily press briefing on February 25, 2022,

“The president has the capacity to make a secure call from anywhere he is, yes,” she added.

Biden’s mouthpieces have repeatedly rebutted criticism over the amount of time that he spends outside of Washington, D.C. – he has spent around 40 percent of his time in office away from the White House – by saying that he works from home.




That is not the song Democrats were singing during the Trump Administration,.

 

[GURPS]

 

[GURPS]

Tony Blair Wants National Databases to Track Vaccination Status for a ‘Whole Slew‘ of Future Vaccines​

WEF’s digital ID would essentially be a social credit score, as the ID would be required to access social media and government benefits, vote, open bank accounts, book travel, shop, access healthcare and insurance, own electronic devices, and make online purchases, among many other applications. If you want to know how that turns out, look at Communist China. WEF has already partnered with the Dutch and Canadian governments to roll out a digital ID, and Tony Blair seems to be ready, willing, and eager to assist WEF as well.

Speaking during a Jan. 19 panel ominously titled “100 Days to Outrace the Next Pandemic,” Blair excitedly explained how COVID-19 proved the need for a digital database to track vaccination, and whined that most countries (rightly) believe the worst of COVID-19 is behind us. But the fact that Blair kept insisting there will be many vaccines in the future that everyone needs to take raises the question, does he know something we don’t know?’

“There is an ongoing challenge, an opportunity, and I think is not just about COVID. It’s about the fact that we are going to have a whole slew of new vaccines, injectables, that are going to deal with some of the worst diseases in the world, that give us the opportunity to make big changes in the—in the health of the world. And if you want the politicians to focus, they need to think, look, this is coming down the tracks.”

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But though that ended Blair’s first round of commentary, the former prime minister wasn’t done. He doubled down on his call for a digital vaccination database:

”You need to know who’s been vaccinated and who hasn’t been. Some of the vaccines that will come on down the line will be multiple—they’ll be multiple shots. So you’ve got to have—for reasons to do with healthcare more generally, but certainly for a pandemic or for—for vaccines, you’ve got to have the proper digital infrastructure. And many countries don’t have that, in fact most countries don’t have that.”

The vaccines will be legion! Again, what does Blair know that we don’t know? And why on earth does he think governments or extra-governmental entities like WEF have the ability, let alone the right, to mandate vaccines and track who gets them? Government has no business being involved in medical care, period. It certainly doesn’t have the right to create a database to track who takes a certain treatment — that’s an individual decision, and it shouldn’t involve any national digital infrastructure.

 

[Hijinx]

Today someone wants to monitor everything in our lives.
We are tracked by our phones, by our cars, by speed camera's , by camera's mounted on business's, by Government camera's in our cities the stop lights have camera's that monitor the streets, some of these we can even watch ourselves from our own computers. Everyone has a camera with them now in their cell phone.

Crazy thing: Anyone can walk across our border now, only if we want to go to Canada or Mexico we need a Passport. Something we didn't need before 2001.

 

[GURPS]

How the CDC Became the Speech Police​

There is a word for government officials using the threat of punishment to extort desired behaviors from private actors. It's jawboning.

The term arose from the biblical story of Samson, who is said to have slain a thousand enemies with the jawbone of a donkey. According to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the word's public-policy use began with the World War II–era Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply, which primarily relied on "verbal condemnation" to punish violators. President John F. Kennedy jawboned steel manufacturers in the 1960s when he threatened to have the Department of Justice investigate them if they raised prices; President Jimmy Carter did the same to try to fight inflation in the 1970s. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Republican candidate George W. Bush explicitly stated that he would "jawbone" Saudi Arabia to secure lower energy prices.

While jawboning has generally referred to economic activity—to attempts to intimidate other entities into changing prices or policies—there is a history of speech-related jawboning too. One of the first legal theorists to apply the term this way was Derek Bambauer, a professor of law at the University of Arizona. In a 2015 article for the Minnesota Law Review, he argued that libertarian trends in internet regulation provide unique protection from government actors, who would be likely to resort to threats and demands.

"State regulators wielding seemingly ineffectual weapons—informal enforcement based on murky authority—appear outgunned," he wrote. "Yet like Samson, they achieve surprisingly-effective results once the contest begins."

This has been the case throughout the pandemic. With encouragement from government health advisers, congressional leaders, and White House officials—including Biden—multiple social media companies have suppressed content that clashes with the administration's preferred narratives.

Bambauer says that while Biden clearly has the right to complain about material on social media, the administration's actions are probably blurring the line between counterspeech and jawboning.

"I think all of this is of real concern," he says. "It's also a useful reminder that the government innovates in how it applies information pressures, so researchers need to stay up to date on new tactics."

 

[GURPS]

Biden DOJ Tells House Judiciary Committee: We Likely Won’t Share Info On Probe Into Biden Doc Scandal​

“Consistent with longstanding policy and practice, any oversight requests must be weighed against the Department’s interests in protecting the integrity of its work,” the DOJ said in a letter to Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH). “Longstanding Department policy prevents us from confirming or denying the existence of pending investigations in response to congressional requests or providing non-public information about our investigations.”

“The Department’s mission to independently and impartially uphold the rule of law requires us to maintain the integrity of our investigations, prosecutions, and civil actions, and to avoid even a perception that our efforts are influenced by anything but the law and the facts,” the letter continued. “So does the Department’s obligation to protect witnesses and law enforcement, avoid flight by those implicated in our investigations, and prevent additional crimes and attacks.”

 

[GURPS]

FDA panel to consider annual COVID-19 vaccine shots​

The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) advisory panel on vaccines is set to consider an annual schedule for the coronavirus vaccine, akin to how flu vaccines are administered, when it meets this week.

The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) will meet Thursday to discuss how to simplify and streamline the COVID-19 vaccination process, including the composition of coronavirus vaccines and the recommended scheduling for these shots.

 

[GURPS]

Feds adapting AI used to silence ISIS to combat American dissent on vaccines, elections​

DARPA set four specific goals for the program:

1. "Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.
3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations."

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The new version of this technology, he added, is openly targeting two groups: Those wary of potential adverse effects from the COVID-19 vaccine and those skeptical of recent U.S. election results.

"The terrifying thing is, as all of this played out, it was redirected inward during 2016 — domestic populism was treated as a foreign national security threat," Benz said.

"What you've seen is a grafting on of these concepts of mis- and disinformation that were escalated to such high intensity levels in the news over the past several years being converted into a tangible, formal government program to fund and accelerate the science of censorship," he said.

"You had this project at the National Science Foundation called the Convergence Accelerator," Benz recounted, "which was created by the Trump administration to tackle grand challenges like quantum technology. When the Biden administration came to power, they basically took this infrastructure for multidisciplinary science work to converge on a common science problem and took the problem of what people say on social media as being on the level of, say, quantum technology.

"And so they created a new track called the track F program ... and it's for 'trust and authenticity,' but what that means is, and what it's a code word for is, if trust in the government or trust in the media cannot be earned, it must be installed. And so they are funding artificial intelligence, censorship capacities, to censor people who distrust government or media."

 

[GURPS]

The Department of Defense Has Delivered Another Massive Intelligence Failure​

At a time when California has just been battered in a singular fashion by punishing winds and massive rainstorms delivered by a moisture-laden “atmospheric river” flowing over large parts of the state while much of the rest of the country has suffered from severe, often lethal floods, tornadoes, or snowstorms, it should be self-evident that climate change constitutes a vital threat to our security. But those storms, along with the rapacious wildfires and relentless heat waves experienced in recent summers—not to speak of a 1,200-year record megadrought in the Southwest—represent a mere prelude to what we can expect in the decades to come. By 2042, the nightly news—already saturated with storm-related disasters—could be devoted almost exclusively to such events.

All true, you might say, but what does China have to do with any of this? Why should climate change be included in a Department of Defense report on security developments in relation to the People’s Republic?

There are three reasons why it should not only have been included but given extensive coverage. First, China is now and will remain the world’s leading emitter of climate-altering carbon emissions, with the United States—though historically the greatest emitter—staying in second place. So any effort to slow the pace of global warming and truly enhance this country’s “security” must involve a strong drive by Beijing to reduce its emissions as well as cooperation in energy decarbonization between the two greatest emitters on this planet. Second, China itself will be subjected to extreme climate-change harm in the years to come, which will severely limit the PRC’s ability to carry out ambitious military plans of the sort described in the 2022 Pentagon report. Finally, by 2042, count on one thing: The American and Chinese armed forces will be devoting most of their resources and attention to disaster relief and recovery, diminishing both their motives and their capacity to go to war with one another.

 

[GURPS]

NYPD Officer Sues Over Lost-Pay Punishment for Wearing Pro-Trump Patch, Leaves Judge 'Speechless'​

In this episode of The Double Standards of Liberal Hypocrisy…


A New York Police Department sergeant was suspended for 10 days in February 2021 without pay and also lost 30 days of vacation pay for wearing a pro-Trump patch while on duty while working at a Black Lives Matter protest. A video of the “incident” quickly circulated on social media, prompting the department to swiftly bring the hammer down on the “offending” officer, which is where our story begins.


The “offending” patch read: “Trump Make Enforcement Great Again.” In response to the incident, former Police Commissioner Dermot Shea tweeted:

Members of the NYPD must remain apolitical- It’s essential to public trust & officers’ ability to perform their jobs.

Really? We’ll see about that, a bit later.

NYPD Sgt. Dana Martillo and attorney Joseph W. Murray joined “Fox & Friends First” on Thursday to discuss the lawsuit she’s since filed against the department in response to the punishment, which in part claims the NYPD’s actions against her constitute a double standard, vs. the department’s “official” stance of remaining “apolitical.” Martillo told Fox:

It was funny, because the judge had asked me if he thought — or if I thought, rather — my actions were appropriate. I looked at him and I said, ‘I don’t think they were inappropriate.’ He asked me to elaborate, and I explained if it was an American flag, a Dominican flag, or an LGBT patch, no one would have cared or said anything… I believe it left him speechless.

 

[stgislander]

The Department of Defense Has Delivered Another Massive Intelligence Failure​

First, China is now and will remain the world’s leading emitter of climate-altering carbon emissions, with the United States—though historically the greatest emitter—staying in second place.

And here I thought India was a shoe-in for #2.

 

[GURPS]

Biden cover-up is in full swing​

While in the minority, the White House claimed it couldn’t cooperate with House Republicans because they simply weren’t in the majority. When they won, the top lawyer for the president notified both men in letters that all oversight demands made in the last Congress would have to be renewed — once Messrs. Comer and Jordan were sworn in.

Now that the 118th Congress is up and running, the Biden administration has continued its stonewalling. Mr. Comer sent a request to the Treasury Department to provide information on Biden family financial transactions that may have been marked suspicious, with a deadline for responses last week.

On Jan. 25, the Treasury Department responded, saying it must first determine if Mr. Comer’s request is consistent with “longstanding Executive Branch interests.” It asked Mr. Comer to “specify in writing [his] purpose in seeking to obtain the requested information and the use [he] intends to make of it” in a letter sent to the congressman.

“This coordinated effort by the Biden administration to hide information about President Biden and his family’s shady business schemes is alarming and raises many questions,” Mr. Comer said in a statement after Treasury’s letter was released. “We will continue to press for access to suspicious activity reports generated for the Biden family and their associates and will use the power of the gavel to get them if needed.”