Thursday, August 12, 2021

Is 1984 Becoming a Reality? - George Orwell's Warning to the World

Pope Francis takes an urgent phone call during his weekly general

 audiencePublished: Aug. 11, 2021 at 10:38 a.m. ET

By
Associated Press



Francis chatted animatedly for a couple of minutes with whoever was on the other end


Pope Francis speaks on a cell phone, given to him by his aide Piergiorgio Zanetti, at the end of his weekly general audience in the Paul VI hall at the Vatican on Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2021. AP PHOTO/RICCARDO DE LUCA



VATICAN CITY (AP) — Maybe heaven can wait, but a phone call for the pope could not.

In a decidedly unusual break from protocol, Pope Francis took a cellphone from an aide while standing at center stage in a Vatican auditorium for his weekly Wednesday audience with the public. Francis, who had blessed the attendees near the event’s end, chatted animatedly for a couple of minutes with whoever was on the other end.

The pope gestured with his free hand as if the caller could see him – a common impulse for many people when talking on the phone – while he held the device to his left ear with his other hand. Francis seemed to be explaining something and did most of the talking.

He twice moved his right hand as if he were signing something.

The Vatican declined to comment about the nature of the very public call.

After blessing the members of his audience, the pope typically wades into the crowd to greet many of them affectionately. But in another departure from the routine, Francis on Wednesday abruptly changed direction while chatting with another aide as he was about to descend the stage steps. Instead of greeting the faithful, he headed toward a closed exit door on the stage.

First the aide, then the pope, gestured to the participants that they should wait. The aide opened the door, and the pope walked briskly off the stage. After a few minutes, Francis returned and went down the marble steps to the audience section to mingle with people who wanted to shake his hand or take selfies with him.



Jackson Lee LAYS OUT infrastructure plans for Texas

Friday, August 06, 2021

Vax Everyone NOW, Vax Creating Variant, CDC Tyranny

Wuhan Orders Mass Testing of All 12 Million Residents as Delta Variant C...

Apple Will Scan All iPhones for Illegal Child Abuse Images, Sparking Privacy Debate




Customers queue to get their reserved iPhone 12 mobile phones at an Apple store in Shanghai on Oct. 23, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)



By Jack Phillips
August 5, 2021 Updated: August 6, 2021



Apple announced Thursday is it planning to scan all iPhones in the United States for child abuse imagery, raising alarm among security experts who said the plan could allow the firm to surveil tens of millions of personal devices for unrelated reasons.

In a blog post, the company confirmed reports saying that new scanning technology is part of a suite of child protection programs that would “evolve and expand.” It will be rolled out as part of iOS 15, which is scheduled for release sometime in August.

Apple, which has often touted itself as a company that promises to safeguard users’ right to privacy, appeared to try and preempt privacy concerns by saying that the software will enhance those protections by avoiding the need to carry out widespread image scanning on its cloud servers.

“This innovative new technology allows Apple to provide valuable and actionable information to [the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children] and law enforcement regarding the proliferation of known CSAM,” said the company, referring to an acronym for child sexual abuse material. “And it does so while providing significant privacy benefits over existing techniques since Apple only learns about users’ photos if they have a collection of known CSAM in their iCloud Photos account. Even in these cases, Apple only learns about images that match known CSAM.”

The Cupertino-based tech giant said the system will utilize breakthrough cryptography technology and artificial intelligence to find abuse material when it is stored in iCloud Photos, said the firm in its blog post. The images will be matched to a known database of illegal images, the firm said, adding that if a certain number of those images are uploaded to iCloud Photos, the company will review them.

Those images—if they’re deemed illegal—will be reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The software won’t be applied to videos, Apple added.

“Apple’s expanded protection for children is a game-changer,” John Clark, the president and CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said in a statement on Thursday about the initiative. “The reality is that privacy and child protection can coexist.“

But some security experts and researchers, who stressed they support efforts to combat child abuse, said the program could present significant privacy concerns.

Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge, described Apple’s proposed system as “an absolutely appalling idea,” according to the Financial Times. “It is going to lead to distributed bulk surveillance of … our phones and laptops,” he remarked.

When news of the proposal broke on Wednesday evening, John Hopkins University professor and cryptographer Matthew Green echoed those concerns.

“This sort of tool can be a boon for finding child pornography in people’s phones,” Green wrote on Twitter. “But imagine what it could do in the hands of an authoritarian government?”

Green said that “if you believe Apple won’t allow these tools to be misused [crossed fingers emoji] there’s still a lot to be concerned about,” noting that such “systems rely on a database of ‘problematic media hashes’ that you, as a consumer, can’t review.”

The expert told The Associated Press that he’s concerned Apple could be pressured by other, more authoritarian governments to scan for other types of information.

Microsoft created photoDNA to assist companies in identifying child sexual abuse images on the internet, while Facebook and Google have implemented systems to flag and review possibly illegal content.



Tucker: It's hard to overstate what a momentous change this is

Wednesday, August 04, 2021

Pentagon Identifies Officer Slain in Attack; 3 Disney Employees Arrested in Child Predator Sting

Massive demonstration on the streets of Paris against the newly annoncie...

'You afraid of Gavin Newsom?' Hear Rocklin megachurch pastor urge follow...

Priest and catechist detained by ethnic militia group in Myanmar | SW NE...

New Supreme Knight Patrick Kelly Delivers 1st Report at 139th Supreme Co...

Johnson & Johnson - From the Cradle to the Grave


 

Wild U.S. deer found with coronavirus antibodies





New research suggests white-tailed deer are encountering the coronavirus in the wild, a possible spillover from human infections.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BEN HASTY, MEDIANEWS GROUP/READING EAGLE VIA GETTY IMAGES


A new study detected coronavirus antibodies in 40 percent of deer tested this year. Here’s why that matters.

BY DINA FINE MARON
PUBLISHED AUGUST 2, 2021



White-tailed deer, a species found in every U.S. state except Alaska, appear to be contracting the coronavirus in the wild, according to the first study to search for evidence of an outbreak in wild deer.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) analyzed blood samples from more than 600 deer in Michigan, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania over the past decade, and they discovered that 40 percent of the 152 wild deer tested from January through March 2021 had antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Another three deer from January 2020 also had antibodies.

Their presence means that deer likely had encountered the virus and then fought it off. The animals didn’t appear sick, so they probably had asymptomatic infections, the agency says. Roughly 30 million white-tailed deer live in the U.S.

“The risk of animals spreading SARS-CoV-2 to people is considered low,” the USDA told National Geographic in a statement. Still, the results may suggest that “a secondary reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 has been established in wildlife in the U.S.” says Jüergen Richt, a veterinarian and director of the Center on Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases at Kansas State University who was not involved in the USDA’s work. If the virus is circulating in other species, it could continue to evolve, perhaps in ways that make it more severe or transmissible, undermining efforts to slow the pandemic.

At present there’s no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is having any detrimental effect on deer. And for humans, our infinitely greater problem is spread from other humans.
DANIEL BAUSCHZOONOTIC DISEASES EXPERT

Earlier this year, researchers established that deer are susceptible to the virus when infected in the lab—and that they can pass the virus to each other. But scientists didn’t know until now if infections were occurring in nature. The only species with lab results indicating that they had contracted the virus in the wild had been mink, though cats, dogs, otters, lions, tigers, snow leopards, gorillas, and a cougar have all had outbreaks in captivity or in zoos. (Learn more about efforts to vaccinate some of these animals.)

The new USDA report was posted on a preprint website, which means it hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn’t respond to request for comment.

Human transmission

“At present there’s no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is having any detrimental effect on deer. And for humans, our infinitely greater problem is spread from other humans,” says Daniel Bausch, a Switzerland-based zoonotic diseases expert and the director of emerging threats and global health security at the nonprofit FIND, which works to develop tests for poverty-related diseases.

The USDA says the risk to people who hunt white-tailed deer is not high. Though researchers posit the virus may have originally jumped from animal to human at a wet market in China, where wild animals were slaughtered and sold for food, differences in food preparation procedures matter.

There’s “no evidence that you can get COVID-19 by eating [contaminated] food, including wild hunted game meat,” the USDA says. The department is not issuing new guidance, pointing instead to existing government recommendations on good hygiene when processing animals, which include properly cooking and storing meat, and cleaning and disinfecting all knives, surfaces, and equipment.

Exactly how deer may have been exposed to the virus remains uncertain, though researchers suspect they were infected by humans. “Multiple activities could bring deer into contact with people, including captive cervid operations, field research, conservation work, wildlife tourism, wildlife rehabilitation, supplemental feeding, and hunting,” the USDA researchers wrote. Other possibilities include that they contracted it through contaminated wastewater or from exposure to other infected species like mink.

Researchers also don’t know if the deer are passing the virus among themselves or to other species.

Widening the net

There’s a chance that the deer didn’t have SARS-CoV-2 at all, Bausch says; another explanation is that the USDA’s tests detected antibodies for other coronaviruses, a phenomenon known as cross-reactivity.

The USDA says that’s unlikely. Researchers used a commercially available SARS-CoV-2 antibody screening test that has been highly accurate with other species. The USDA also helped rule out the chances of cross-reactivity by testing a subset of the samples using a second type of antibody test even more specific to SARS-CoV-2. That second test’s results mirrored the earlier findings, suggesting that the tests were truly picking up SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, the USDA told National Geographic in a statement.

Pre-pandemic blood samples from deer also shore up the results: If the tests were just detecting antibodies for other coronaviruses, antibody levels in deer likely would be similar in samples taken both before and during the pandemic. Yet when the researchers tested 239 samples collected before January 2020 from a slightly wider pool that also included deer from New Jersey, they had only one positive test—from 2019. (The USDA says that the single outlier was almost certainly a false positive since it had a very low level of antibodies. Richt says that the USDA’s false-positive conclusion sounds reasonable.)

Bausch says that performing the two types of tests gives him greater confidence in the results. Still, it’s always possible that cross-reactivity is an issue. “There are many coronaviruses that circulate in animals and likely many that we’ve yet to discover,” he says. The most definitive ways to rule out cross-reactivity, he says, would be to isolate a virus on cell culture—perhaps by testing respiratory secretions from deer—but that would require finding a deer when it had an active coronavirus infection.

Exposure to the virus seemed to vary widely by location, the researchers found. Of the four states, Michigan had the largest percentage of deer with SARS-CoV-2 antibodies—67 percent. That was followed by Pennsylvania with 44 percent, New York with 31 percent, and Illinois with 7 percent of samples showing antibodies. The deer with coronavirus antibodies were also concentrated in specific counties, the USDA writes, “with nearly half of the 32 counties sampled showing no evidence” of coronavirus exposure, the study says.

“These results emphasize the need for continued and expanded wildlife surveillance to determine the significance of SARS-CoV-2 in free-ranging deer,” the USDA says. Now, the researchers wrote, it’s also important to look for the virus in predators and scavengers that may eat deer.


Source

'Joe Biden Don't Care': Biden pressed on surging COVID cases from migran...

White House Directs Media on What to Report on COVID and How to Report on It


by C. Mitchell Shaw August 3, 2021


Vichai/iStock/Getty Images Plus

The COVID roller-coaster of sketchy science and on-again, off-again regulations has so many twists, turns, ups, and downs that it is hard for anyone to keep up with what is what from one week to the next. Last weekend, the Biden administration, the CDC, and their accomplices in liberal mainstream media took turns getting lost along the way.

CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported:

The White House is frustrated with what it views as alarmist, and in some instances flat-out misleading, news coverage about the Delta variant. That’s according to two senior Biden administration officials I spoke with Friday, both of whom requested anonymity to candidly offer their opinion on coverage of the CDC data released that suggests vaccinated Americans who become infected with the Delta coronavirus variant can infect others as easily as those who are unvaccinated.

Since no one can accuse CNN of having a conservative editorial slant — the network has been so liberal for so long that it is commonly referred to by many conservatives as the Clinton News Network or the Communist News Network — it is noteworthy that CNN reported on the Biden administration’s reaction to COVID coverage by liberal news outlets. Because even as the White House, the CDC, and the liberal media bounce along the tracks of the COVID-coaster — slamming into one another along the way — CNN is burying the lead in its reporting and trying to do a better job of acting as a propaganda tool of the Biden administration. For instance, CNN reported:

At the heart of the matter is the news media’s focus on breakthrough infections, which the CDC has said are rare. In some instances, poorly framed headlines and cable news chyrons wrongly suggested that vaccinated Americans are just as likely to spread the disease as unvaccinated Americans. But that isn’t quite the case. Vaccinated Americans still have a far lower chance of becoming infected with the coronavirus and, thus, they are responsible for far less spread of the disease.

“The media’s coverage doesn’t match the moment,” one of the Biden officials told me. “It has been hyperbolic and frankly irresponsible in a way that hardens vaccine hesitancy. The biggest problem we have is unvaccinated people getting and spreading the virus.”

As the Biden officials explained to me, the administration is worried that the media’s focus on these instances of breakthrough infections might lead to people being more hesitant to get a vaccine. Think about it: If you’re a young person, and already believe you will be OK if you do get infected, why would you now get a vaccine, given that coverage suggests you can still just as easily become infected and spread the virus after receiving a shot?

The worry about this line of messaging from major media sources worried officials so much, I’m told, that they reached out to several major news organizations with the aim of getting them to dial back the coverage.

Let that sink in. Someone in the Biden administration is telling the media what to report and how to report it. And while this writer is not above making that assertion, in this instance, it is CNN that makes that assertion — backed up by “two senior Biden administration officials.” Granted, that someone is not likely Biden himself — that would require him to string words together into coherent sentences. But whoever it is, they have “reached out to several major news organizations with the aim of getting them to dial back the coverage” that the White House doesn’t like.

Case in point: Darcy explains that occasionally “poorly framed headlines and cable news chyrons wrongly suggested that vaccinated Americans are just as likely to spread the disease as unvaccinated Americans.” Darcy claims, “that isn’t quite the case” since “vaccinated Americans still have a far lower chance of becoming infected with the coronavirus and, thus, they are responsible for far less spread of the disease.”

But the very first headline Darcy cites for this is a Washington Post headline that read, “CDC study shows three-fourths of people infected in Massachusetts coronavirus outbreak were vaccinated.” This headline, which Darcy — having been set straight about his job description by the good folks over at the White House — describes as “poorly framed” was an accurate summation of the CDC’s report on the outbreak in Massachusetts. Here is an excerpt from that CDC report:

In July 2021, following multiple large public events in a Barnstable County, Massachusetts, town, 469 COVID-19 cases were identified among Massachusetts residents who had traveled to the town during July 3–17; 346 (74%) occurred in fully vaccinated persons. Testing identified the Delta variant in 90% of specimens from 133 patients. Cycle threshold values were similar among specimens from patients who were fully vaccinated and those who were not.

Let’s see. The CDC report states that there were “469 COVID-19 cases” in this outbreak and that “346 (74%) occurred in fully vaccinated persons.” The headline says that the CDC study shows that three-fourths of the infected people were vaccinated. The only issue here is that the White House doesn’t like what the CDC report states and doesn’t like that the Post reported on it.

CNN’s Darcy goes on to report on several other instances of the media missing their cues and reporting things that trouble their bosses at the White House. In one instance, the New York Times tweeted an article about the CDC report stating that the Delta variant is as contagious as Chicken Pox. That tweet read, “Breaking News: The Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and may be spread by vaccinated people as easily as the unvaccinated, an internal C.D.C. report said.”

Ben Wakana, a member of the White House’s rapid response team, replied to the tweet, saying, “VACCINATED PEOPLE DO NOT TRANSMIT THE VIRUS AT THE SAME RATE AS UNVACCINATED PEOPLE AND IF YOU FAIL TO INCLUDE THAT CONTEXT YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.”

“Doing it wrong.” Yes, you read that correctly. The White House just told the Times they were “doing it wrong.” It does not matter at all that the CDC report really did say what the Times claimed it said. It is still “doing it wrong” to say that. Because, remember that one of the senior White House officials told Darcy, “The biggest problem we have is unvaccinated people getting and spreading the virus.” That is the message, spreading that would be “doing it right.”

NBC News got in trouble with White House HQ, as well, after publishing a piece with the headline, “Breakthrough Covid cases: At least 125,000 fully vaccinated Americans have tested positive.” Again, it was true, but it was another example of “doing it wrong.”

The Post amended its headline to add, “but few required hospitalization.”

The Times rewrote its tweet to say, “Delta variant infections in vaccinated people are rare, compared with those who are unvaccinated, the internal CDC report said. But vaccinated people with a breakthrough infection may spread the virus just as easily.”

And NBC updated its headline to read, “Breakthrough Covid cases: Data shows how many vaccinated Americans have tested positive.”

The White House has not yet confirmed whether those news organs are “doing it right” now, but this writer is sure of two things: First, truth and journalism are dying as a result of COVID, but it is not the virus that is killing them; someone at the White House is. Secondly, If President Trump had dared to actually pressure the media about what to report and how to report it, there would have been congressional hearings about it.

They were Fake News then, and they are Fake News now. Only now, they have the approval of the administration for whom they serve as lap dogs, rather than monitor as watch dogs.



Tuesday, August 03, 2021

The Tomorrow War: A war against YOU

It’s Official, MANDATORY VACCINATIONS ARE HERE, The “Conspiracy Theorists” WERE RIGHT!!!

New York Democrats Call for Cuomo to Resign Over Sexual Harassment Probe

NYC mayor announces vaccine proof for many indoor settings | LiveNOW fro...

 

NYC mayor announces vaccine proof for many indoor settings | LiveNOW from FOX

Aug 3, 2021



LiveNOW from FOX

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announces a "key to NYC pass" requiring COVID-19 vaccines for workers and customers of indoor dining, fitness, entertainment and performances. The city already issued a mandate requiring all city employees to be vaccinated or be forced to undergo weekly testing.

 Subscribe to LiveNOW from FOX!
 https://www.youtube.com/livenow?sub_c... Where to watch LiveNOW from FOX: https://www.livenowfox.com/ Follow us @LiveNOWFOX on Twitter: https://twitter.com/livenowfox Raw and unfiltered. Watch a non-stop stream of breaking news, live events and stories across the nation. Limited commentary. No opinion. Experience LiveNOW from FOX.


"Next Crisis Bigger than COVID" - Power Grid/Finance Down - WEF Cyber Po...