Sunday, April 25, 2021

Sunday Globe Bait and Switch

"Abbey Quinn regrets the Easter dinner. The 29-year-old celebrated the holiday with her roommate’s family five days after nabbing her first Moderna vaccine shot. Later that week Quinn, a restaurant worker in Asheville, N.C., woke up feeling her shirt hurt against her skin and knew it wasn’t a typical cold. Everyone at the meal tested positive for coronavirus, she said. Quinn falls into an unlucky group of Americans exposed to the virus before their vaccine doses could offer them full protection. Their stories offer a reminder of the danger of people letting their guard down while highly transmissible virus variants circulate and a spring wave drives up hospitalizations across the country. There’s no clear data on how many people contracted coronavirus before their vaccinations could take full effect. Based on a Washington Post analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, The Post estimates about 21,000 of 470,000 people who tested positive for coronavirus for the week ended Sunday already had their first dose. Michigan, where cases have been rising sharply with the rise of highly transmissible variants, accounts for about a tenth of that estimate. Experts warn these cases should not be interpreted as evidence vaccines don’t work. The immune system needs several weeks to provide robust protection as the body learns the blueprint for stopping the virus before it can cause serious disease. They are not the same as “breakthrough infections” happening at least two weeks after the final dose – which are overwhelmingly mild and extreme outliers. With every American adult eligible for a vaccine this week, public health authorities and experts are pleading for vigilance and social distancing for a few more weeks to deliver a finishing blow to the pandemic in time for summer....."

Two more weeks to flatten the curve and it the infections are coming after the kill shots as the pre$$ again turns truth on its head and I regret purcha$ing and reading the piece of crap as this front-page, above-the-fold, lead story of the day picks up below what is above.

"As hopes rise for pandemic’s close, some are preparing for never-ending COVID; Scores of companies, many in Massachusetts, gear up to fight the virus ‘in perpetuity’" by Robert Weisman and Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff, April 24, 2021

A pandemic-weary public is dreaming of Memorial Day barbecues, summer nights at Fenway Park, and putting the long-running curse of COVID-19 behind us, but in the medical and biopharma worlds, many are eyeing a more daunting prospect: coronavirus as a never-ending threat.

What, no few more weeks to deal a finishing blow?

Governments and private investors who once shunned vaccines as an unprofitable pharmaceutical backwater are pouring billions into venerable drug giants and upstart biotechs, including some in Massachusetts, seeking to develop longer-lasting vaccines.

Oh, a whole new indu$try based on a lie that will allow a medical $urveillance tyranny is being invested in, huh?

The makers of three US-authorized vaccines — Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson — are testing COVID-19 booster shots to protect against more-contagious variants first detected in the United Kingdom, Brazil, and South Africa, and hundreds of potential treatments and diagnostics are in the works as public health leaders brace for testing and tracing regimens far into the future.

That was the plan all along as the devious devils in government and pre$$ led us on for more than a year now.

“We believe [COVID-19] and its variants will be circulating through the human population in perpetuity,” said Tillman Gerngross, chief executive of Adagio Therapeutics, a Waltham biotech startup that last week said it raised $336 million to develop antibody drugs for coronavirus infections. “It may become less deadly, but it’s going to be around.”

Just like they always have, and we never needed their poisons before. 

This is a ma$$ive $cam, and the Globe is criminal to abet it.

The growing conviction that scientists will be waging a permanent war on the virus, its variants, and similar pathogens yet to emerge stems partly from a recognition that bats and other animals harbor viruses that can be transmitted to humans and spread quickly around the planet. COVID-19 is widely believed to be such a “zoonotic disease,” and there’s no reason to think that the pattern won’t repeat itself; meanwhile, the glacial pace of COVID-19 vaccinations in much of the world, the likelihood that immunity wanes over time, and the rise of more-resistant variants may leave millions vulnerable. Although makers of the three vaccines deployed in the United States hope they protect against the variants that have emerged so far, other mutations to the shape-shifting virus could produce more threatening forms.

“Did I expect [variants] would become a problem so quickly?” said Andrea Carfi, head of infectious disease research at Cambridge-based Moderna. “Maybe not,” but, he said, “we are very well positioned” with groundbreaking messenger RNA molecules that can easily be reprogrammed to disarm new strains.

Some epidemiologists have begun talking about a post-pandemic landscape in which the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, called SARS-CoV-2, is “endemic,” meaning it continues to circulate in pockets of the world, but not cause the deaths, illnesses, and lockdowns endured for more than a year. Think of the measles, flu, and HIV. In that scenario, vaccinated people in Massachusetts and nationwide would coexist with outbreaks but likely be able to return to relatively normal lives.

In a roundabout way, they are admitting the entire thing is a criminal fraud and sham. 

It was seasonal flu with a fancy name and you have to love the weasel-wording: "likely be able to return to relatively normal lives." 

In other words, there will be nothing normal about it as they pursue their genocidal and tyrannical goals with mouthpiece media bull horning it.

If the US vaccine campaign proceeds at the current rate — lately about 3 million doses a day — the country will achieve “some element of normalcy” this summer, suggested Dr. Dan Barouch, head of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which licensed technology for the one-shot J&J vaccine, but, he warned, the global pandemic will not be over because most countries lag behind the United States. Only about 10 nations — prosperous countries such as Israel, United Arab Emirates, and Chile — have vaccinated substantial shares of their populations against COVID-19, and the emergence of variants underscores that a wildfire in one part of the globe is a threat to the entire world.

Of course, 99.7% will survive the fictional disease.

The Globe should be ashamed of themselves for pushing this fear porn any further.

There’s also the risk that something can go wrong with the US vaccination program, as Barouch knows all too well. The rollout of J&J’s vaccine, which provided robust protection against severe disease and death in clinical trials, was temporarily halted in the United States this month so health officials could investigate extremely rare but potentially lethal blood clots reported in a small number of recipients. US health officials lifted the pause Friday shortly after an expert panel recommended that vaccinations resume for all adults and that the label warn people to get medical attention if they develop worrisome symptoms.

More than 218 million doses of the Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J vaccines have been administered in the United States so far, creating a kind of split screen America between the vaccinated and those who are not: Infections have plunged for older folks, the majority of whom are vaccinated, while cases are exploding in the unvaccinated young, allowing more-transmissible variants to gain traction. Because the variants travel quickly, the virus poses an ongoing risk of reinfection and fresh outbreaks if vaccine immunity wanes.

“It’s going to continue at some level,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who sits on the Food and Drug Administration advisory committee that recommended clearing the Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J vaccines for emergency use. “I can’t imagine this virus won’t be with us for decades.”

We won't be, and this flies in the face of the clip I linked from the article that started this all off, -- your classic bait-and-switch tactic.

That prospect is keeping scientists busy in labs from Cambridge’s Kendall Square to the San Francisco Bay Area, from Zurich to Jerusalem. Researchers are working on more than 850 treatments and vaccines targeting COVID-19, according to a data tracker at the Washington, D.C.-based Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a trade group.

About 100 companies and hospitals with operations in Massachusetts were developing vaccines, drugs, and diagnostic tests, according to a survey last summer by the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. Some of those efforts have likely fizzled out, while new ones have started, said the trade group, which plans to update the list soon.

Who would want to kill that golden goo$e, huh?

Many companies are still developing COVID-19 vaccines even though the front-runners have already reached the market. Translate Bio in Lexington, in partnership with Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of the French pharma giant Sanofi, is working on a vaccine based on the same messenger RNA technology as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

“We believe there’s room for a third, and maybe a fourth or a fifth,” said chief executive Ron Renaud. “You’ve got these variants popping up pretty frequently now.”

Renaud said he envisions coronavirus vaccines or boosters being administered yearly, like flu vaccines. That likely health necessity could also yield a healthy business.

Not like it's entirely evil and $elf-$erving.

Oh, God, this disgusts me and I post it only as a public service to my readers and the world at large that this is the driveling propaganda I am exposed to on a daily basis.

Companies are also experimenting with new vaccine approaches. California biotech Gritstone is working on a vaccine that employs “broadly neutralizing antibodies” to defeat multiple variants. About 60 of its researchers, based in Cambridge, are also trying another strategy, developing a model for deploying T cells to stop the virus.

Really rubbing our noses in it now.

Andrew Allen, the cofounder and president of Gritstone, calls COVID “a foe that we’re going to have to contend with for the foreseeable future.”

You can check the time capsule if you survive.

Makers of the three authorized vaccines in the United States are pressing ahead as well. J&J is testing whether a second dose of its vaccine boosts immunity at clinical trial sites located where variants are widespread, including South Africa, Brazil, and the United Kingdom, Barouch said. Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech are also testing a third dose of their first-to-market vaccine against B.1.351 and other strains.

Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla told CNBC recently that people will likely need the booster six to 12 months after their COVID-19 vaccination shots “and then from there, there will be an annual revaccination.”

These fuckers are not only evil, they are ill.

Alongside the “preemptive” strategies pursued by drug makers, systems engineers envision a new infrastructure that can rapidly deliver tests for pathogens, store test processing instrumentation in bunkers near population centers, and efficiently distribute vaccines and treatments globally.

“We need to have these systems ready to go in the same way we do for missiles or aircraft carriers,” said Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who’s developing a global immune observatory using blood samples to track pathogens.

With relatively few people immunized in South America, Africa, and even large swaths of Europe and Asia, the potential for them to spawn virulent variants that could quickly spread worldwide is being closely watched.

“If we let the virus run wild in Brazil, in India, in other parts of the world, we’re tempting fate,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “We may see a variant emerge that could defeat the vaccine.”

Then there is no need to take their poison for a non-existent virus that 99.7% of people survive if official statistics are to be believed, and likely more as they holler undiagnosed cases and deaths after over inflating them for more than a year.

Vast amounts of resources are pouring into the field to make sure that doesn’t happen. Earlier this month the Biden administration said it would allocate $1.7 billion from its COVID-19 relief package to track “new and potentially dangerous strains” of coronavirus. An international coalition of governments, businesses, and philanthropies has raised $8 billion to hasten new treatments, vaccines, and diagnostics and make sure they are available throughout the world.

An $8 billion dollar extortion $cheme cooked upon by Big Pharma and paid by taxpayers.

Biotech investors are ponying up billions more, some of it aimed at creating what Noubar Afeyan, founder of Flagship Pioneering in Cambridge, has called a “global pathogen shield” — a vaccine manufacturing and distribution infrastructure that can mobilize rapidly against emerging threats.

This isn't about a virus anymore, it's a genocide project by these evil a$$holes and it's disgusting.

Afeyan, whose firm created and bankrolled high-flying Moderna, said the campaign against the new COVID-19 strains may be the first proving ground for that strategy. “Going after variants is something we have to get a lot better at,” he said. 

Did he work with DARPA and Gates because they were also big players in its formation. 

Why would the Globe hide that?

Not everyone agrees a permanent war against COVID-19 is inevitable. Some scientists say that will depend on several unanswered questions: How long will it take to vaccinate enough of the world’s nearly 8 billion people to curb the virus’s spread? How long will vaccines protect fully inoculated people? And can the race to vaccinate the world be completed before even more troublesome variants emerge?

Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said much of the planet could by immunized by the end of next year.

His optimism stems, he said, from the fact that the virus mutations cropping up so far have remained within a range where vaccinations can still be effective. “That says you can design a booster shot that can cover these variants so we can vaccinate our way out of this,” but set against that optimism, most nations are now battling widespread hesitancy that threatens to leave pockets of their populations unvaccinated. Even if large-scale vaccination occurs, scientists fear protection could wane over time.

These "$cienti$ts" are fucking sick, as is the Globe.

Tellingly, some who once suggested that vaccinating 70 to 90 percent of the population could carry us to “herd immunity” — where COVID-19 disappears because the virus can find few hosts — now are backing away from any predictions.

“Rather than concentrating on an elusive number, let’s get as many people vaccinated as quickly as we possibly can,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease specialist, said at a recent White House coronavirus briefing.

WHY?

99.7% survi8ve and don't even know they had it and have to be told so by a fraudulent process that doesn't diagnose the alleged illness or infectiousness. 

It's a massive scam, folks, with Fraudci one of the ringleaders who should be burned at the stake.


Took a step forward before taking two steps back:

"France and other countries in Europe are preparing to relax coronavirus restrictions while still pouring medical, financial and technological resources into keeping thousands of COVID-19 patients alive. Inside one of Paris’ biggest hospitals, state-of-the-art artificial lungs are giving the most critical patients a last-ditch shot at survival. Outside, healthy people are planning getaways and drinks with friends as the country embarks on the perilous process of easing out of its latest lockdown. French President Emmanuel Macron is reopening elementary schools on Monday and allowing people to move about more freely again in May. Some frontline caregivers in hospitals see the easing as premature. Intensive care unit admissions at French hospitals remain stubbornly higher than at any point since the pandemic’s first deadly surge. In France, Greece and elsewhere, governments are using ramped-up vaccinations to bolster arguments to ease restrictions; however, just one-quarter of adults in Europe have received a first dose....." 

No one wants there crap and the 50% figure over here is a lie -- which is good. 

Declare victory and leave the filed with your booty, a$$holes.

Meanwhile, next door in Germany:

"Chancellor Angela Merkel has urged Germans to accept nationwide pandemic restrictions that took effect at midnight, resulting in a 10 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew and further limits on personal contacts and access to nonessential stores in regions with high infections. In her weekly video address Saturday, Merkel acknowledged that the new rules are “tough” but insisted they are needed to curb the spread of the virus in the country. Germany’s disease control agency on Friday reported 23,392 newly confirmed cases and 286 more deaths from COVID-19. Since the start of the pandemic, Germany has recorded almost 3.3 million cases and 81,444 deaths. Merkel said the new measures, which automatically take effect in regions with more than 100 new cases a week per 100,000 inhabitants, are “urgently needed.” Citing other countries such as Britain, Portugal and Ireland that saw infection rates sharply reduced during strict lockdowns, she defended Germany’s new restrictions against critics who have called them excessive....."

Tyranny seems to come easy in Germany, does it not?

"Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has suggested that the army might be called into the streets to restore order if lockdown measures against COVID-19 that he opposes lead to chaos. In a television interview Friday night with TV Criticia in the Amazon city of Manaus, Bolsonaro repeated his frequent criticism of restrictions imposed by local governments to curb infections -- measures he claims do more harm than good. “That lockdown policy, of quarantine, is absurd. If we have problems ... we have a plan of how to act. I am the supreme head of the armed forces,” Bolsonaro said. Health experts urged Bolsonaro this month to impose a national lockdown after the nation’s daily toll of COVID-19 deaths reached new peaks. The Ministry of Health says there’s been more than 386,000 confirmed coronavirus deaths in Brazil....." 

He's hanging on, but for how long?


"As COVID-19 devastates India, deaths go undercounted" by Jeffrey Gettleman, Sameer Yasir, Hari Kumar and Suhasini Raj New York Times, April 24, 2021

NEW DELHI — India’s coronavirus second wave is rapidly sliding into a devastating crisis, with hospitals unbearably full, oxygen supplies running low, desperate people dying in line waiting to see doctors — and mounting evidence that the actual death toll is far higher than officially reported.

No disrespect intended, but we have been hearing those lies since the beginning of all this as the nurses dance away in empty corridors, and whatever the New York Times claims you can be sure the opposite is the truth.

What is even worse is after the one in one-hundred times they print the truth, they act as if they never did and go right back to flacking lies.

Each day, the government reports more than 300,000 new infections, a world record, and India is now seeing more new infections than any other country by far, almost half of all new cases in a global surge, but experts say those numbers, however staggering, represent just a fraction of the real reach of the virus’ spread, which has thrown this country into emergency mode. Millions of people refuse to even step outside — their fear of catching the virus is that extreme. Accounts from around the country tell of the sick being left to gasp for air as they wait at chaotic hospitals that are running out of lifesaving oxygen.

The sudden surge in recent weeks, with an insidious newer variant possibly playing a role, is casting increasing doubt on India’s official COVID-19 death toll of nearly 200,000, with more than 2,000 people dying every day.

Possibly playing a role?

That casts doubt on the New York Times' veracity, sorry.

Interviews from cremation grounds across the country, where the fires never stop, portray an extensive pattern of deaths far exceeding the official figures. Nervous politicians and hospital administrators may be undercounting or overlooking large numbers of dead, analysts say, and grieving families may be hiding COVID connections as well, adding to the confusion in this enormous nation of 1.4 billion.

What imagery does that bring to mind, 'eh?

This whole $cam is a budding holocaust for humanity but we will prevail. 

Evil always destroys itself, and it will again.

“It’s a complete massacre of data,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has been following India closely. “From all the modeling we’ve done, we believe the true number of deaths is two to five times what is being reported.”

OMFG, the "sudden surge" is based on ANOTHER FAULTY MODEL, the kind that kicked off lockdowns to begin with courtesy of Gate's pawn Ferguson!

At one of the large cremation grounds in Ahmadabad, a city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, bright orange fires light up the night sky, burning 24 hours a day, like an industrial plant that never shuts down. Suresh Bhai, a worker there, said he had never seen such a never-ending assembly line of death, but he has not been writing down the cause of death as COVID-19 on the thin paper slips that he hands over to the mournful families, even though the number of dead is surging along with the virus.

Like standing in line for the shot!

At the same time, India’s COVID vaccine campaign is struggling: Less than 10% of Indians have gotten even one dose, despite India being the world’s leading vaccine manufacturer. India’s dire needs are already having ripple effects across the world, especially for poorer countries. It had planned to ship out millions of doses; now, given the country’s stark vaccination shortfall, exports have essentially been shut down, leaving other nations with far fewer doses than they had expected.  

Ooooooooooh! 

Now we know why India is the worst and there is an explosion of all this garbage! 

The Indians are SMART ENOUGH to AVIOD the poisonous va¢¢ines and heeded Gandhi's words (he said vaccinations were the worst assault on human being than anything else).

Doctors worry that the runaway surge is being at least partly driven by the emergence of a virus variant known as the “double mutant,” B.1.617, because it contains genetic mutations found in two other difficult-to-control versions of the coronavirus. One of the mutations is present in the highly contagious variant that ripped through California earlier this year. The other mutation is similar to one found in the South African variant and believed to make the virus more resistant to vaccines.

Is there no limit to the amount of crap they expect us to believe?

Still, scientists caution it is too early to know for sure how pernicious the new variant emerging in India really is.

(SIGH)

The result could be the worst of both worlds, faster-spreading and less controllable. This is worrying scientists around the globe, who see people starting to relax their guard in well-inoculated countries even as huge setbacks in India, Brazil and other places raise the likelihood that the coronavirus will mutate in ways that could outflank the current vaccines.

In Bhopal, a large city in central India that was the site of a catastrophic gas leak in the 1980s that killed thousands, residents say the cremation grounds haven’t been as busy since that disaster.

Over 13 days in mid-April, Bhopal officials reported 41 deaths related to COVID-19, but a survey by The New York Times of the city’s main COVID-19 cremation and burial grounds, where bodies were being handled under strict protocols, revealed a total of more than 1,000 deaths during the same period.

Like I'm going to believe any New York Times survey. 

F**k them!

“Many deaths are not getting recorded and they are increasing every day,” said Dr. G.C. Gautam, a cardiologist based in Bhopal. He said that officials were doing this because “they don’t want to create panic.”

According to excess mortality studies, COVID-19 deaths have been underestimated in many countries, including in the United States and Britain, but India is a much bigger and poorer country, and its people are spread across 28 states and several federal territories in a highly decentralized system of governance, with different states counting deaths in different ways.

Time to smell the tulips, and why do they $mell like cow dung?

Even in a good year, experts say, only about one-fifth of deaths are medically investigated, meaning that the vast number of Indians die without a cause of death being certified.

According to the World Health Organization, a death should be recorded as COVID-19-related if the disease is assumed to have caused or contributed to it, even if the person had a preexisting medical condition, such as cancer.

Look at that! 

The Times admits the criminal WHO jacked up the death rates!

In many places in India, that doesn’t seem to be happening.

Some families don’t want the truth to come out, said Mukherjee of the University of Michigan. Some want to cremate loved ones outside strict COVID-19 government protocols, and so they hide the fact that their family member died from the coronavirus. Others may feel ashamed about losing a loved one, as if it were their fault.

Try reading a new$paper based on those values.

A political agenda may also be at play, experts said. States controlled by India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, may face pressure to underreport, according to some analysts. Mukherjee cited the very public scandal in 2019 when Modi’s government tried to suppress data showing a rise in the unemployment rate.

When it comes to COVID data, she said, “there is tremendous pressure from the central government on the state governments for projecting progress.”

Like in Afghanistan, which they lied about since the very start regarding "progress."



"As US moves from scarcity to abundance of COVID-19 vaccine, other nations are calling for help" by Marlon González and Zeke Miller The Associated Press, April 24, 2021

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — The lack of U.S. vaccine assistance around the world has created an opportunity for China and Russia, which have promised millions of doses of domestically produced shots to other countries, though there have been production delays that have hampered the delivery of some supplies. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said this month that China opposes “vaccine nationalism” and that vaccines should become a global public good.

It's the new diplomacy, and I trust their vaccines more than ours, sorry. The feeling here is China doesn't want to kill all its people since they will be running the world, and the globalist plan is half of Asia is to survive so their troops can police the planet under U.N. cover.

Professor Willem Hanekom, director of the Africa Health Research Institute and a vaccinologist, said wealthy countries have a stake in the success of vaccination efforts in other corners of the world.

“Beyond the moral obligation, the problem is that if there is not going to be control of the epidemic globally, this may ultimately backfire for these rich countries, if in areas where vaccines are not available variants emerge against which the vaccines might not work," Hanekom said.

The U.S. has also faced criticism that it is not only hoarding its own stockpiles, but also blocking other countries from accessing vaccines.

Adar Poonawalla, chief executive of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest maker of vaccines and a critical supplier of the U.N.-backed COVAX facility, asked Biden on Twitter on April 16 to lift the U.S. embargo on exporting raw materials needed to make the jabs.

India is battling the world’s fastest pace of spreading infections. Its government has blocked vaccine exports for several months to better meet needs at home, exacerbating the difficulty of poor countries to access vaccine.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ 2020 annual report also raised eyebrows for a section titled “Combatting malign influences in the Americas," which said the U.S. had convinced Brazil to not buy the Russian shot.

The U.S. Embassy denied exerting any pressure regarding vaccines approved by Brazil’s health regulator, which has not yet signed off on Sputnik V. Since March 13, Brazil has been trying to negotiate supply of U.S. surplus vaccines for itself, according to the foreign ministry.

There are also concerns that the U.S. might link vaccine sharing to other diplomatic efforts. Washington's loan of 2.7 million doses of AstraZeneca's shots to Mexico last month came on the same day Mexico announced it was restricting crossings at its southern border, an effort that could help decrease the number of migrants seeking entry into the United States.


Those sort of parallel tracks of diplomacy will be closely watched as the Biden administration decides with whom to share its surplus vaccine, particularly in Central America, home to many countries where migrant families and unaccompanied children are trying to make their way to the U.S.

“What we would hope to avoid is any perception that increased access to lifesaving vaccines in Central America is in exchange for increased tightening of border security,” said Maureen Meyer, vice president for programs at the Washington Office on Latin America.

As the wait for vaccines continues in Honduras, desperation is growing.....

Honduras is ruled by a U.S.-backed junta, btw.


Their journey will end in Vermont, although “if it wasn’t for COVID, we would still be living in New York.”

Get ready for the welcoming committee (The Globe will help translate as they show of their bilingual skills):

"‘Mobile Vax’ effort launched Saturday in hard-hit communities, starting with East Boston" by John Hilliard Globe Staff, April 24, 2021

Hundreds lined up in East Boston Saturday at the first of a series of mobile vaccination clinics planned for several hard-hit communities by a coalition of community and health care groups.

The “Mobile Vax” program — intended to make it easier for high-risk communities to secure vaccine doses — was launched in the city’s Central Square Park under a collaboration among Tufts Health Plan and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, which completed a merger earlier this year, the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center, Latino Equity Fund, along with other organizations.

“It’s important to bring the vaccine to the local community, especially the Black and brown community,” said Adam Scott, senior vice president of health care services at Tufts Health Plan and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, in a phone interview.

Those groups have faced barriers to accessing the life-saving doses, including transportation issues and vaccine hesitancy, he said. The program’s goal is to provide 25,000 vaccinations to residents of East Boston, Chelsea, Chicopee, and Holyoke over the next two months.

“This is about getting shots into arms,” Scott said.

Whether you need it or not, hmm.

On Saturday afternoon in the park, people lined up outside a coach bus that had been converted to serve as a mobile vaccination clinic.

Dovetails right in with the lack of travel, hmmm.

The vaccination program administered Pfizer/BioNTech doses to about 500 people, according to organizers. People were encouraged to make an appointment, but the program also accepted people who had not booked a time for a shot.

Patients who received doses left written thank you messages on a banner at the vaccination site. A slogan printed on the side of the bus read, “My reason: protect my community.”


Also see:

"Boston College will require students, faculty, and staff who return to campus for the fall semester to be fully vaccinated, school officials announced Friday. All must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 before participating in any on-campus activity, with exceptions granted for legitimate religious and medical reasons, BC’s President William P. Leahy said in a statement. “Promoting the health and safety of our campus community and surrounding neighborhood is essential and a priority for everyone,” he said. There will be 4,500 doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine available on campus this week. The vaccine will be administered in Conte Forum on April 26, 27, and 28. Corresponding second doses will be provided on May 17, 18, and 19 for those still on campus or who live within driving distance. Students who cannot return to campus are eligible to receive their second shot at CVS and Walgreens, or through a state or local vaccination site where they live, the letter said. Several other Massachusetts colleges have already announced vaccination requirements, including Emerson College, Boston University, Northeastern University, and UMass Amherst."

Time to transfer, kids.

{@@##$$%%^^&&}

Another front-page bait-and-switch:

"They say reimagine the police. What would that look like?" by Milton J. Valencia Globe Staff, April 24, 2021

Picture a public safety system where social workers — not armed police officers — respond to 911 calls for substance abuse or mental health emergencies. Most low-level offenses would be resolved outside of court, including driving infractions, which would be handled by unarmed traffic monitors, not police.

The military-style, heavily armed police tactical teams that are more prevalent these days would recede from view, deployed in only the most dangerous scenarios. High-speed pursuits would be relics of action movies, and pretty much any police interaction with the public would be completely captured by cameras on every officer and vehicle.

Okay, no cops needed because of total $urveillance as they send out the social workers(?!) and let the crooks get away!

All after you have been disarmed, of course.

Such sweeping changes would form the contours of a reimagined policing system, a potential sea change in law enforcement that has gained support in Boston and across the country after the trial and conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd — what many critics see as an indictment of a failed policing system steeped in racism.

It's the old saying: conservatives are liberals who have been mugged. 

Good luck!

A proposed federal law — the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021 — would set new national standards for police training and accountability in seeking to “change the culture of law enforcement and empower our communities to reimagine public safety in an equitable and just way,” according to a legislative summary.

That sounds good in theory, but what would it look like in practice?

Everything the Globe and Democrats promotes sounds good in theory, and can you smell the communist totalitarianism yet?

“We need to reimagine, and I just think it’s really important that humanity has to be at the center of all this,” said Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins, who was elected two years ago on a pledge to stop prosecuting certain low-level, nonviolent offenses such as drug possession — a strategy that was partially validated in a recent independent study. “If we can look at public safety starting with public health, we start shifting our mind-set,” she said.

Says the $oros-backed destroyer of justice.

Shootings and murders have skyrocketed in Boston since she took over.

That means police would still respond to emergency incidents, but not in all cases, especially not when safety is not an issue. Boston police would devote more of its time and attention to the city’s many unsolved murders than to misdemeanors, and officers would no longer be involved in schools unless a serious incident occurs. More counselors would be hired in their place.

That last part I agree with. The schools are enough of a prison as it is.

Police officers would still patrol high crime or problem areas, such as the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, where open-air illicit drug use has long been a blight, but they would target drug traffickers, not users. Instead, public health counselors would reach out to those most in need of social services, such as drug abuse treatment or mental health counseling.

Officers would be recognized for how many incidents they helped avert, rather than how many arrests they made.

“It’s not a zero sum game. We can have both of those things, but I don’t think arresting people is always the right answer,” Rollins said. “We have just not done a really good job looking at a societal or community response to a lot of issues here.”

They are not entirely new ideas, and some have been tried before. Communities in Oregon have claimed success in diverting 911 calls for mental health and substance abuse programs to counselors rather than police. Last week, the Manhattan district attorney’s office announced it would no longer prosecute street-level prostitution, scaling back a practice that has focused heavily on low-income areas. Those who engage in sex for money, for instance, to feed a drug habit, would be offered social services, but the patrons or operators behind an organized sexual trafficking operation would still be prosecuted, but many reform advocates are calling for a more complete philosophical overhaul, a cultural shift that views — and more important, trains — police officers as peacekeepers rather than warriors.

The VAST MAJORITY of the PUBLIC DOES SEE THEM THAT WAY, so why is the Globe and Democrats trying to destroy them?

“We need to have a complete transformation of our system of criminal justice, particularly our system of policing,” said Will Jawando, who pushed for national police standards as a former associate director of President Barack Obama’s Office of Public Engagement. “There has to be a dramatic shift, because that’s not happening in most departments,” he said. “This moment provides us opportunity to change the system. It will take years to break that system down. I think we can. We must, it’s the only way.”

He isn't referring to the ju$tu$ $y$tem, and our systems are fine: it's the people administering and staffing them that are ruining them. 

How is Pat Rose, btw?

The effort includes a rebranding of the Defund the Police strategy and sloganeering that split voters last year, even among those that supported reform, largely because it sent the message that police would no longer exist — a view with little popular support.

Everything is a goddamn focus group as they try to deceive you!

In its place, advocates support enforcing laws while abandoning crime-fighting strategies that have affected disenfranchised communities disproportionally, and creating and funding programs that target sources of crime, such as social and economic inequities.

“I think the balance is we need to focus on the most serious crimes, and then make the investments on the social services side,” Jawando said. “You’re not going to fix the social problems like income inequality with just policing, so you have to do both.”

The balancing act could be critical as reform advocates look to sway an engrained law enforcement system cemented by the “tough-on-crime” mentality of the 1990s, including the “broken windows” theory that the aggressive prosecution of even low-level offenses would set a “law and order” culture that could help deter more serious offenses. Other district attorneys in Massachusetts oppose some of Rollins’s proposals, saying a prosecutor’s duty is above all to enforce laws.

Alfred S. Titus, a retired New York Police Department detective and an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said he supports a problem-oriented style of policing that relies heavily on social-service programming, but Titus decried the idea of replacing police officers, saying they play an indispensable role in deterring crime. It was that same “broken windows” strategy, with officers targeting disorderly conduct, vandalism, and street-level robberies that helped make New York City safer in the 1980s and 1990s, said Titus, who spent 23 years in that department.

They don't deter anything; they are reactive in all instances, but still needed!

Police work, he said, has to have an element of deterrence to it; by not enforcing some minor infractions or pursuing suspects in crimes or traffic violations, he said, “we’re going to create a very dangerous world.” .

Titus said the onus is on the system that grooms police and the officers themselves to acknowledge the crying need for change: more thorough training, including sensitivity and anti-bias courses, and better recognition of the needs and demands of a community.

My name is Al and I'm a brutal policeman.

Hi, Al.

“When it comes to crime fighting, there is no better tool than a trained, proactive police officer. You’re showing the community that we’re not just enforcers of the law, we’re trying to fix the problems that exist,” he said. “Some of the changes are going to be difficult, but they are necessary, and we have to understand that change means the policing we have known for the last couple hundreds of years can no longer exist.”

I believe they call that throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Larry Calderone, head of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, which represents about 1,600 officers, said his union will work with city officials, adding “we have ideas on how to work better” with mental health professionals, school officials, and Boston EMS. The union is in the middle of negotiating a contract with the city, where new police strategies could be hammered out.

“If we could just sit down together like professionals and stop the ‘blame game,’ we could make our city and schools a better place to live and learn,” said Calderone, who has steadfastly defended the work police do amid calls for reform.

If you guys won't fight to save yourselves, why should I fight for you?

In Massachusetts, the Legislature last year passed a landmark police reform bill that requires police to receive enhanced instruction, including training on implicit bias, and to undergo a new statewide certification system that monitors their conduct. In Boston, political leaders have enacted similar reforms, including the establishment of the city’s first independent watchdog office.

Reform advocates say the push for greater accountability has already had an impact. In the past year, police departments across the country have been more willing to release body camera footage of police shootings. Two weeks ago, a police officer in a Minneapolis suburb was swiftly charged with manslaughter for shooting and killing an unarmed man, Daunte Wright, during a traffic stop, but many noted the incident itself was of a minor level that should not have involved police in the first place. The 20-year-old Wright was pulled over for driving with expired registration tags and the officers then tried to arrest him on a warrant for failing to appear in court.


Several proposed reforms on Beacon Hill would address systemic issues involving types of low-level charges that advocates say effectively punish poverty, not criminal acts.

One would decriminalize the offense of driving with a license that was suspended for financial reasons, such as failure to pay a fine. These too often lead to encounters with police.

Then why even bother with licenses?

WTF?

“It can be too easy to think of it as a police problem, rather than an institutional issue,” said state Representative Nika C. Elugardo, a Democrat from Jamaica Plain who submitted the proposal. “We’re ready to reimagine, but we have to do that together with a very large microscope, with the details of what’s going on and the nooks and crannies of the law that legalizes abuses. It’s not just punishing abuses but dismantling inequities.”

Boston City Councilor Ricardo Arroyo pointed to similar efforts at the city level to reimagine policing, by changing the culture involved in training, but by also dismantling policies that target certain communities — such as the proposed abolition of a police gang database that stereotypes young Black and brown people.

Arroyo said the conviction of Chauvin in Minneapolis and the national conversation it has sparked could serve as a catalyst for change in Boston during a mayoral race featuring several city councilors who have proposed similar reforms themselves.

They will have a say, he said, in how the city wants to reimagine policing, and what that would include. More officers on the street? More arrests? More social service programs, more counselors?

“When I think about reimagining policing, I think about public safety. It’s redefining what public safety means, that’s the goal,” he said. “More police doesn’t do that, the current method of policing hasn’t done that. Policing doesn’t solve the ills that cause crimes.”


Maybe the Globe could reimagine itself and start telling the truth for a change.

Time to get MOVEing:

"Decades after police bombing, Philadelphians ‘sickened’ by handling of victim’s bones" by Michael Levenson New York Times, April 24, 2021

In the early evening of May 13, 1985, the police flew a helicopter over a crowded West Philadelphia neighborhood and dropped a bomb on the row house where members of the communal, anti-government group MOVE lived.

The bomb started a fire, and the police ordered firefighters to let it burn. Eleven people, including five children, were killed, and more than 60 nearby homes were destroyed.

We have been a police state since WWII, and it's worse than ever now.

The pain of that day never left for many Philadelphians, a scarring memory of how the police caused a middle-class, mostly Black neighborhood to burn.

This past week, the anguish came surging back when officials at two Ivy League universities acknowledged that anthropologists had been passing the bones of a young bombing victim between them for the last 36 years. The bones were also featured in a video for an online course, “Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology,” taught by a University of Pennsylvania professor and offered by Princeton.

“I was sickened and almost in shock,” said Jamie Gauthier, a member of the Philadelphia City Council, which apologized for the bombing last year. “It’s just an unbelievable amount of disrespect for Black life and an unbelievable amount of disrespect for a child who suffered trauma, a child who was killed by her own government.”

Mike Africa Jr., an activist, writer and member of MOVE who was 6 when the bomb was dropped, said he and others in the group did not know that the bones — parts of a burned femur and a pelvis — had been used in the video and kept for decades by anthropologists.

He said he learned about the bones only days ago from an activist, Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, who wrote an opinion piece published Wednesday by The Philadelphia Inquirer calling for the bones to be returned to MOVE. The same day, the news site Billy Penn reported that the remains had been kept in a cardboard box on a shelf.

“Anger, fury, disappointment, sadness,” Africa said, describing his reaction. “It’s like this never ends, and no matter how much time passes, and you hope that things can get to a place where you can begin to heal some, it’s right back up in your face.”

The bombing has for decades been held up as an example of the city’s mistreatment of Black people....


Related:

"A routine day in a quiet Columbus neighborhood was shattered instantly Tuesday when a police officer fired four shots at 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant as she swung a knife at a young woman. Less than 30 minutes before the man charged with killing George Floyd was pronounced guilty, yet another Black person was dead at the hands of police in the U.S., and a city facing immense pressure to change its law enforcement patterns was once again on the defensive. While the events leading up to the fateful 911 call that set the shooting in motion remain unclear, hours of official police footage and bystander videos detail how one of the country’s latest deadly police shootings unfolded. It remains unclear who called 911, but officer Nicholas Reardon, who has been on the force since December 2019, was dispatched. Almost every single witness that day stopped to film the aftermath of an incident they are now all too familiar with: the killing of another Black person in America at the hands of law enforcement. While Reardon faced recrimination at the scene, his split-second decision to shoot was commended by the national Fraternal Order of Police, which called it “an act of heroism, but one with tragic results.” Meanwhile, Serge Akpalo, the only Black officer who responded, began to gather and separate the various witnesses and placed them in police vehicles. The exact source of the audio wasn’t clear, but a live reading of the guilty verdict in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed Floyd, is heard streaming through the cruiser....."

The pre$$ is trying to tie them together because the cop squeak box was tuned to the verdict when they had nothing to do with each other at all. 

How offensive!

"Maryland officials said they will review all in-custody death reports during the tenure of the state’s former chief medical examiner after he testified that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was not responsible for George Floyd’s death. Dr. David Fowler, Maryland's chief medical examiner from 2002 to 2019, was a key defense witness for Chauvin, who was convicted Tuesday of murder and manslaughter for kneeling on Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes. The announcement of the investigation came from Attorney General Brian Frosh and Gov. Larry Hogan on Friday, less than 24 hours after the attorney general’s office received a letter from D.C.’s former chief medical examiner Roger Mitchell, and signed by 431 doctors from around the country, saying Fowler’s conclusions were so far outside the bounds of accepted forensic practice that all his previous work could come into question......"

Imho, no further examination necessary. 

The autopsy of the doctor stinks of Soviet-style communism!

Better testify the right way, even if it's a testilie.

Others who want to be members of the Party:

"A group that represents Public Health Service officers who have assisted during natural disasters, in overseas fights against Ebola, and recently on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic is seeking recognition on a veterans memorial at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, arguing its members were unfairly left out. The Commissioned Officers Association of the U.S. Public Health Service alleges that when the design was completed years ago for the National Native American Veterans Memorial, the USPHS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Officer Corps should have been included. The memorial, which opened in November, includes plaques with the seals of the Navy, Army, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marine Corps. The lawsuit, filed in March in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., seeks to have the seals of the commissioned officers' groups added. "We may not carry weapons, but we fight," said Rear Adm. Brandon Taylor, who has served in the USPHS for more than 23 years and is a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation in Oklahoma. "We are public health warriors. We fight in the silent war against disease, and we fight every day to promote, protect and advance the health and safety of our nation."

They then went and made a dance video!

At least our police are better than any of those in the world:

"General who led Myanmar’s coup arrives for regional talks on the crisis" by Richard C. Paddock New York Times, April 24, 2021

The army general who has ruled Myanmar since leading the overthrow of its civilian government met Saturday in Indonesia with leaders of other Southeast Asian nations who expressed concern about the army’s killing of hundreds of pro-democracy protesters.

It was the first time since the Feb. 1 coup that the army’s commander in chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, had ventured outside Myanmar. Critics feared that his presence with heads of state at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting would give him the appearance of legitimacy.

Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, said the assembled leaders had conveyed to the general that his regime must halt violence by the military, release political prisoners, open the country to humanitarian aid and commit to continuing dialogue.

“The situation in Myanmar is something that is unacceptable and must not continue,” Joko said in a video statement after the meeting. He added that his view reflected a consensus of the 10-nation association known as ASEAN, which had invited Min Aung Hlaing to the summit of the region’s leaders.

Since seizing power, Myanmar’s military has crushed nationwide protests by arresting elected leaders, shooting civilians in the streets, beating people, and raiding and looting homes. As of Saturday, soldiers and the police had killed at least 745 people and detained more than 3,300, according to a rights group that has been tracking the mayhem.

Myanmar politicians who have formed what they call a National Unity Government called on Interpol and the Indonesian police this past week to arrest Min Aung Hlaing upon his arrival in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, for crimes against humanity, including the ethnic cleansing campaign that drove more than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims out of the country in 2017.

The National Unity Government, which asserts that it is the legitimate government of Myanmar, also had urged ASEAN to give it a seat at the summit meeting and refuse to meet with Min Aung Hlaing until he halted the killing of civilians.

Many members of the National Unity Government were elected to Parliament in November and would have taken office on the day of the coup. On Thursday, the junta announced that all 24 of the group’s cabinet ministers and deputy ministers had been charged with treason and unlawful association.

The United States and the European Union have imposed targeted sanctions on regime leaders and military-owned businesses, but diplomatic efforts to stop the killing have been unsuccessful.....



Speaking of brutally illegitimate regimes, look what else surfaced:

"Jerusalem tension triggers Gaza-Israel fire exchange" by FARES AKRAM and JOSEF FEDERMAN The Associated Press, April 24, 2021

JERUSALEM — Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired some three dozen rockets into Israel overnight Saturday, while the Israeli military struck back at targets operated by the ruling Hamas group. The exchange came as tensions in Jerusalem spilled over into the worst round of cross-border violence in months.

The barrage of rocket fire came as hundreds of Palestinians clashed with Israeli police in east Jerusalem. The clashes, in which at least four police and six protesters were injured, have become a nightly occurrence throughout the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and show no signs of stopping.

Cui bono?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he held talks with top security officials about Gaza and Jerusalem. He said he instructed officials to be ready for ‘every scenario’ in Gaza. In Jerusalem, he said Israel would guarantee ‘freedom of worship’ for everyone, and he appealed for calm. “We ask now for people to obey the law and I call for a calming of tempers on all sides.”

Right.

The U.N. envoy to the region, Tor Wennesland, condemned the violence and said the United Nations was working with all sides to restore calm.

“The provocative acts across Jerusalem must cease. The indiscriminate launching of rockets towards Israeli population centers violates international law and must stop immediately,” he said. “I reiterate my call upon all sides to exercise maximum restraint and avoid further escalation, particularly during the Holy month of Ramadan and this politically charged time for all.”

Israel's treatment of Palestinians also violates international law and no one even bleats about it (as the attacks on Iran and Syria are dispatched down the pre$$ memory hole).

Meanwhile, Israeli chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, is weighing “a series of steps for possible responses,” and preparations if the situation continued to escalate, the military said in a statement. He also postponed a trip to the United States that was scheduled for Sunday. The U.S. also appealed for calm, while neighboring Jordan, which serves as the custodian for Jerusalem's Muslim holy sites, condemned Israel’s actions.

The king turned back a coup just a couple of weeks ago!

The Israeli military said a total of 36 rockets were fired into Israel throughout the night. It said six rockets were intercepted, while most of the others landed in open areas. There were no reports of injuries or serious damage, but the incoming rocket fire set off air-raid sirens throughout southern Israel. In response, the army said fighter jets and helicopters struck a number of Hamas targets in Gaza, including an underground facility and rocket launchers. Hamas did not claim responsibility for the rocket fire, but Israel considers the group responsible for all fire emanating from the territory.

By that reasoning, Netanyahu is responsible for all crimes by Israeli citizens and Israel turning Gaza into rubble of some bottle rockets is nothing new.

The military imposed limits on outdoor gatherings in southern Israel early Saturday but lifted the restrictions several hours later and allowed people to resume their normal routines. Israel and Hamas, an Islamic group sworn to Israel’s destruction, are bitter enemies that have fought three wars and numerous skirmishes since Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007.

Hamas didn't seize anything, they won an election, and nothing ever changes.

Although neither side appears to have an interest in escalating tensions, Hamas sees itself as the defender of Jerusalem and may feel obligated to act, or at least tacitly encourage rocket attacks by other groups, ahead of upcoming Palestinian parliamentary elections. Hamas’ armed wing has warned Israel “not to test” its patience. At dawn, hundreds of people in Gaza challenged nightly curfews imposed by Hamas to curb the coronavirus outbreak and took to the streets in an act of solidarity with fellow Palestinians in Jerusalem, burning tires.

The Palestinians want east Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state. Its fate has been one of the most divisive issues in the peace process, which ground to a halt more than a decade ago. Palestinians have clashed with Israeli police on a nightly basis since the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan nearly two weeks agoThe tensions began when police placed barricades outside the Old City’s Damascus Gate, where Muslims traditionally gather to enjoy the evening after the daytime fast. The clashes intensified Thursday evening when hundreds of Palestinians hurled stones and bottles at police, who fired a water cannon and stun grenades to disperse them. Dozens of Palestinians were wounded in the melee. 

An Israeli provocation, of course, and that who trained our cops!

At the same time, a far-right Jewish group known as Lahava led a march of hundreds of protesters chanting “Arabs get out!” toward the Damascus Gate. The group, led by a disciple of the late racist rabbi Meir Kahane, is allied with elements of a far-right party elected to Israel’s parliament last month. The show of force came in response to videos circulated on TikTok showing Palestinians slapping religious Jews at random. Other videos made in response to them appear to show Jews assaulting Arabs. After keeping them a few hundred yards away from Damascus Gate, police used water cannon, stun grenades and mounted police to push far-right protesters back toward mostly Jewish west Jerusalem. In all, police said 44 people were arrested and 20 officers were injured.....

Those guys are pricks; however, Max Igan is right. Not all Jews are in on it, and Israelis are suffering along with the rest of us. 

It's a small sliver of psychopathic mon$ters, Jewi$h and non-Jewi$h, who are running the world for us all -- including the blessed tribe members who are rowing more furiously than anyone.


Don't dare call how the Israelis treat Palestinians genocide, either, after they bought up the land and burned down Palestinian homes.

That moniker is for long dead empires and you have to wait over 100 years for truth to win out.

Also see:

"Human remains found near a recreational trail do not appear to be linked to a suspicious death, police said Saturday evening. The remains were found on the Rockingham Rail Trail about 1,000 feet from the Proctor Road gate off Candia Road shortly after 5 p.m. Friday, police said. A person who saw them called police in Auburn to notify them, said Heather Hamel, a Manchester police spokeswoman. Police in Auburn determined the remains were actually located in Manchester and notified the department, she said.  On Saturday, Manchester detectives and representatives of the state medical examiner’s office were at the scene, the department said. “Through their investigation it has been determined that the death is not recent and it does not appear suspicious,” Manchester Police said in a statement on Facebook Saturday about 5:20 p.m. No identification has been made and a cause of death has not been determined, the statement said." 

A suspect is in custody so everyone can now feel safe, and it serves as a bridge to the next section.

{@@##$$%%^^&&}

Now for the political bait-and-switch:

"In rapidly changing Georgia, many Republicans remain obsessed with the last election; As the once red state diversifies, the GOP remains fixated on Trump election lies" by Jess Bidgood Globe Staff, April 24, 2021

ATLANTA — It’s been over five months since once ruby red Georgia rejected Donald Trump’s reelection bid, and more than three since voters here booted two Republican senators in a stunning runoff election that gave Democrats control of the Senate, but in an upmarket sports bar across from the city’s baseball stadium, one of those failed candidates was being greeted like a superstar by the party’s faithful.

“We just went through a very tough 2020, not even talking about politics,” said Kelly Loeffler, as the crowd whooped, the beer flowed, and she promised to do her best to help Republicans win going forward. “We know this is still a red state.”

The warm welcome — and the fact that she has left the door open to running again — seems to defy the laws of politics, where losing candidates like her or Trump are often gently escorted offstage as a failing strategy is replaced with something new. But that would require people to believe they actually lost it all, fair and square.

In Georgia, many Republican activists still don’t.

“I’m not convinced that Georgia turned blue, and most of us feel the same way,” said Jan Appling, 66, a sales representative recently elected to be secretary of the Republican Party in DeKalb County. “I’m not convinced the November election is over.”

This denial, ignited by Trump’s lies about massive voter fraud and stoked by the candidates and party leaders who embraced them, is animating much of what Georgia Republicans are doing now and giving the party’s political events the feel of Groundhog Day.

“No one can tell me that voter fraud didn’t happen,” said Holly Ortiz, 50, the chair of the GOP in rural Pike County, who was attending Loeffler’s launch of a new group meant to bolster Republicans.

Georgia offers the country a window into the id of the Republican Party, and it is a place that is obsessed with the last election while at the same time deeply divided about what the election meant.

“The quicker Republicans take their medicine, the quicker we’re going to start winning, but I’m not certain we’re taking it quick enough,” Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, a Republican who has emerged as a critic of Trump and his party, said in an interview. “There’s chaos on the battlefield right now.”

Establishment Republicans such as Duncan are warning that a failure to reckon with what really happened in 2020 will cause them to repeat the same mistakes and keep the GOP out of power for years, but the grass roots is energized about election fraud, and the power of the state’s new voting law to help Republicans should not be discounted.....


The party is disconnected from its voters and serves the charade as controlled opposition -- which is why I don't pay much attention to politics anymore. 

You are either for freedom or tyranny now.

"Young people are politically engaged, pro-Biden, and depressed, study finds" by Zoe Greenberg Globe Staff, April 24, 2021

Young millennials and members of Gen Z are strongly supportive of President Biden, hopeful about the state of the country, and far more likely to be politically engaged than their predecessors, according to a new youth poll conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. They are also facing serious mental health challenges: more than a quarter said they have had thoughts that they would be better off dead or of hurting themselves in the past two weeks.

The national poll of 2,500 18-to-29 year olds conducted between March 9 and March 22 surveyed young people at a historic moment, after a year of pandemic-induced lockdown and a few months after the inauguration of a new president. Perhaps one of the most striking findings from the poll was that the vast majority of young people expressed hope in the future of the country, with particularly dramatic increases in that metric among young Black and Hispanic respondents. 

It was at this point that I realized this was another in a long line of bull$hit polls by the pre$$. 

In this case, it is to provide a narrative to cover the theft of the Senate and presidency in 2020.

“We see essentially a 180-degree pivot, politically as well as in fear and hopefulness,” said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Kennedy School Institute of Politics. The poll designers, who are Harvard undergraduates, said that may be because Black and Hispanic Americans were much more likely to be Biden supporters and felt a renewed sense of optimism after his election.

OMG!

Previous research showed that young people voted at historic levels in the 2020 election, undermining the notion that they are unreliable or apathetic politically. In fact, the strong support for Biden from Black and Latino young people may have made states like Georgia and Arizona competitive, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. Their support for progressive policies like police accountability, reducing reliance on fossil fuels, and an assault weapons ban pushed Biden to the left.

PFFFFFFFFFT!

Even so, Biden, long a moderate Democrat, got the highest approval ratings among voters in college in the 21-year history of the youth poll.

Even so!

Young activists in Boston said the past year had rallied them politically, both because of the pandemic and because of mass protests in the wake George Floyd’s killing by police, yet while young people expressed optimism about the state of the country, many in the poll also said they were struggling with depression and anxiety. A full 51 percent said they had felt down, depressed, or hopeless several times in the last two weeks — more than double the percentage that said so in a 2019 Centers for Disease Control study of the same age group.

“These are very disturbing numbers, suggesting that truly millions of young Americans are experiencing unprecedented levels of psychological distress and unhappiness,” said Ellen Burstein, a Harvard undergraduate who helped design the poll. (Other new data backs that up — a recent global study of workplaces by Microsoft found that 60 percent of Gen Z workers said they are merely surviving or flat out struggling right now.)

F**king Microsoft is benefiting from the torture of the children and is now crying crocodile tears (with all due respect and apologies to crocodiles).

The stress on young people this year has been widespread, touching nearly every aspect of life and affecting those even under the age of 18.

“Everything we tried putting aside, we’re no longer able to escape,” said Emily Menjivar, a 15-year-old on the Chelsea Youth Commission. Menjivar said the effect of staying home and being isolated from friends, without the distractions of classes or activities, took a heavy toll on her and her peers. “It’s very overwhelming,” she said.....


The Globe also talked to Toiell Washington, the 23-year-old founder of Black Boston, an activist group, who said she hadn’t attended protests in the past week after the Derek Chauvin verdict because she was thinking through next steps and what comes after mass protests.

The Globe provides the answer after the funerals:



After the deaths of Aaron, Hagler, and the two women yesterday, one is only left top wonder if he got a kill shot as he was found dead by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office on Thursday at a hotel in Tampa, Florida.

Time to go live in a CAVE, kids(?!!?):

"Out of the cave: French isolation study ends after 40 days" by RENATA BRITO The Associated Press, April 24, 2021

LOMBRIVES CAVE, France — Ever wonder what it would feel like to unplug from a hyperconnected world and hide away in a dark cave for 40 days?

Fifteen people in France did just that, emerging Saturday from a scientific experiment to say that time seemed to pass more slowly in their cavernous underground abode in southwestern France, where they were deprived of clocks and light.

With big smiles on their pale faces, the 15 left their voluntary isolation in the Lombrives cave to a round of applause and basked in the light while wearing special glasses to protect their eyes after so long in the dark.

Although 33-year-old Marina Lançon, one of the seven female members in the experiment, wished she could have stayed in the cave a few days longer, she said she was happy to feel the wind blowing on her face again and hear the birds sing in the trees, and she doesn't plan to open her smartphone for a few more days, hoping to avoid a “too brutal” return to real life.

For 40 days and 40 nights, the group lived in and explored the cave as part of the Deep Time project. There was no sunlight inside, the temperature was 10 degrees Celsius (50 F) and the relative humidity stood at 100%. The cave dwellers had no contact with the outside world, no updates on the pandemic nor any communications with friends or family.

Scientists at the Human Adaption Institute leading the 1.2 million-euro $1.5 million) “Deep Time” project say the experiment will help them better understand how people adapt to drastic changes in living conditions and environments.

As expected, those in the cave lost their sense of time. 

With no daily obligations and no children around, the challenge was “to profit from the present moment without ever thinking about what will happen in one hour, in two hours,” said Johan Francois, 37, a math teacher and sailing instructor, ran 10-kilometer circles in the cave to stay fit and who sometimes had “visceral urges” to leave.

In partnership with labs in France and Switzerland, scientists monitored the 15 member's sleep patterns, social interactions and behavioral reactions via sensors. One sensor was a tiny thermometer inside a capsule that participants swallowed like a pill. It measured body temperatures and transmitted data to a computer until it was expelled naturally.

The team members followed their biological clocks to know when to wake up, go to sleep and eat. They counted their days not in hours but in sleep cycles.

On Friday, scientists monitoring the participants entered the cave to let the research subjects know they would be coming out soon.

“It’s really interesting to observe how this group synchronizes themselves,” project director Christian Clot said earlier in a recording from inside the cave. Working together on projects and organizing tasks without being able to set a time to meet was especially challenging, he said.

Although the participants looked visibly tired Saturday, two-thirds expressed a desire to remain underground a bit longer.

“Our future as humans on this planet will evolve,” Clot said after emerging. “We must learn to better understand how our brains are capable of finding new solutions, whatever the situation.”

WHAT NIGHTMARE DO THEY HAVE PLANNED FOR US SURFACE DWELLERS, readers?


Oh my, how time has flown:

"To celebrate Earth Day, a group of students and lecturers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled a so-called climate clock, a visual projection of key data in the fight against climate change, on the tallest building on campus. The clock shows “vital information about the state of our planet — and the pathway to saving it” on the south side of theaptly-named Green Building, a 21-story academic and research facility....."


The Globe left a love letter on the table as they headed out for a drink and I go silent. The