"It will likely feel like 2020 all over again"
Deja Vu!
"Here’s a month-by-month look at how 2021 might play out; Off to a slow start, rocky in places and ripe for setbacks, 2021 should nonetheless deliver some semblance of normalcy again" by Tim Logan and Andy Rosen Globe Staff, January 2, 2021
A sense of normalcy, but not normalcy.
All over a damnable lie they have not only promoted, but pushed hard.
So what, exactly, are we in for in 2021? Think ahead to, say, the fall, and imagine heading back to the office. The morning train feels a little crowded for comfort but the sidewalks lack their old bustle, and your favorite lunch spot is long gone.
Most of your pals are working from home today — in houses weirdly quiet since the kids are back in school — so lunch out isn’t the same anyway.
After a one-on-one with the boss and some meetings via video, you head home about 1:30, pick up the kids, and get back on the laptop. After work, you go for a run. Your old gym didn’t survive the shutdown, either. Dinner is takeout from a neighborhood joint, then maybe some shopping: a virtual Target run at 10 p.m.
Welcome to life in 2021 — one version of it, anyway. After the big pile of misery that was 2020, the coming year has to be better for most of us. Right?
It sure should, but it will likely come in fits, with false starts and setbacks that may feel like 2020 all over again, long periods of muddling along broken by sudden bursts of new activity. Think Red Sox at Fenway, dinner out on a summer night, dropping off the kid on that first day of school — at an actual school. It will probably be December before we can all safely look back and exhale, just in time to ring out another year and genuinely look forward to the new.
That's where the turn-in came, during the first sentence.
That’s roughly the picture that emerges from more than 15 experts from various avenues of business and civic life in Boston whom the Globe interviewed about how they see the next 12 months unfolding.
To a person, they hold a fundamentally hopeful outlook for our region, but acknowledge there are huge unknowns. The effectiveness of vaccines, the appeal of cities as hubs for both commerce and culture, the prospect of more aid from Washington — all these and other variables could result in wild, abrupt swings in conditions and mood, and 2021 will look very different for different people. Indeed, the gaps between the rich and poor will likely grow even wider, and countless decisions we all make — where to live, how to commute, whether to close a struggling restaurant — will collectively shape the fabric of Greater Boston, and its recovery, and after the year we’ve just had, even hazarding a guess could be a fool’s game.
“Anybody who tells you they know how 2021 will go is crazy,” said veteran local developer Kirk Sykes, a former board chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. “There are just so many variables.”
Continuing to read this insulting elitist garbage is; however, let's take a look anyway.
January: Dark times, as COVID-19 cases and deaths surge, and business restrictions stay in place. While new vaccines and a new president signal hope ahead, the toll of the pandemic is inescapable.
Restaurants and retailers that hung on for the holidays shut their doors, some forever. Logan Airport is ghostly. A few big-name companies dump their leases on downtown offices. The sidewalks are empty.
Yes, we are being pre-programmed for the "Dark Winter," with the president-elect expressing empathy for families who have struggled through the pandemic and resulting economic uncertainty this year, and he singled out in particular front-line workers, scientists, researchers, clinical trial participants, and those with deployed family members during the holiday season, even as he warned that the nation faces a "dark winter" and end of the road.
Brace yourself for an ungodly false flag event, and you can forget about going out to eat.
February: Signs of life, as the post-holiday COVID surge ebbs and vaccine distribution ramps up, despite some hiccups.
Gyms and museums reopen and restaurants resume more in-person dining. College kids come back to the streets of Allston and Cambridge. Some school districts plan a post-Presidents Day return to in-person learning, and parents rejoice. Traffic on the highways, for once, is seen as a good thing, but for workers who’ve long since lost jobs, a new start is still a mirage, likely months in the future. Yes, the stimulus bill passed by Congress at year’s end is helping, but the expanded unemployment benefits will lapse soon. Spring (and more stimulus money) can’t come soon enough.
They will be welcoming the kids back with open arms.
March: The months are a blur, but March marks one year since everything changed, and while we’re impatient to get back to normal, the machinery of daily life isn’t ready yet. MBTA cuts make it hard for some to get to work. Schools are probably still doing remote learning at least some of the time. Grocery store employees, delivery drivers, hospital janitors, and others still going into work have to dig deeper for child care and transportation.
You might have to wait a while longer, sorry.
April: Hope springs eternal, but it arrives with the warm weather carrying a mixed bag. The economic divide laid bare by the pandemic threatens to widen. Home prices keep surging, thanks to low interest rates and a still-strong economy for white-collar workers, but unemployed hospitality workers, Uber drivers, and others at the mercy of the service economy find themselves pushed from their homes as evictions surge, and the binding rituals of a Boston spring — like the Marathon — are missing again this year.
Say goodbye to the low-cost rides after three were arrested for allegedly hitting a police officer with an ATV. Police forces are now equipped for the future with their new toys so remember to wipe the snow off your car because it will keep our kids safe as they make their way to the arcade.
.
This is also supposed to be the time the vaccines roll out to the general public, but any setback has people on edge, said venture capitalist David Frankel of Founder Collective, and suddenly the promise of spring appears to be fading.
”You could easily see somewhere a real psychological shift,” he said. A slower-than-expected return to normalcy “could wipe out the good will that I think will accrue as you see more people vaccinated.”
May: Finally, a sign: The Red Sox, the season delayed a few weeks, hold Opening Day at Fenway Park — with fans, though at reduced capacity. College graduation ceremonies — outdoors, of course — help to fill hotels desperate for visitors. Warmer temperatures and longer evenings bring a resurgence in outdoor dining. Suddenly it’s hard to get a table.
With all due respect, $ports are the last thing on my mind these days.
There’s also more work for people, at both ends of the job ladder. Big drugmakers announce plans for new buildings, while laid-off wait staff and hotel workers take up retraining opportunities to become electricians and HVAC technicians. Technical schools see a surge in applications.
“That part of the workforce has remained robust,” said Aisha Francis, chief executive of Ben Franklin Institute of Technology. “We need to figure out how to train people faster.”
They need to "reset" you, in more ways than one.
June: Tourist sighting in the North End! As travel restrictions ease, the streets of downtown Boston are dotted with visitors, meandering along the Freedom Trail and queueing for the whale watch boats. Hotels begin to fill, and the stores and bars around Faneuil Hall that managed to survive celebrate the end of a long, cold winter.
For us locals, summer day camps fill fast, and if you thought it was hard to rent a house on the Cape last summer, well, good luck this year. With a year under their belt to plan, public spaces like Boston Common and the Lawn on D spring back to life with vibrant — though still socially distanced — events and concerts.
“It will be a time of great urban celebration,” said Carlo Ratti, professor of urban technologies and planning at MIT.
July: While the streets are livelier, the office towers of downtown Boston and Kendall Square remain quiet; some companies commit to remote work indefinitely, a few have moved to the suburbs. Some have also downsized, retooling their smaller offices to be less the center of company life, and more the occasional hangout.
“It’s going to be collaborative space, with collaborative tech. Screens, new systems for hybrid meetings,” said Arlyn Vogelmann, a principal at design firm Gensler Boston. “People won’t just come in and sit at a desk all day.”
August: One slice of Boston’s economy is growing fast: Life sciences. The same technology that quickly created vaccines for COVID-19 is now tackling a host of difficult diseases, and it’s all happening here.
“There are going to be breathtaking things that will happen in science this year,” said Tim Ritchie, president of the Museum of Science, “and Boston is the life science capital of the world.”
That’s apparent along Fort Point Channel, where politicians and pharmaceutical executives gather to celebrate the start of construction of a tower once planned as the world headquarters for General Electric. Instead, it will be home to a drug company, one of dozens of life science groundbreakings around Boston this year. As the ceremonial dirt flies, everyone wears a mask.
If one were inclined to be "conspiratorial," one can see the entire medical dystopia and tyranny being constructed.
It's AUGUST and the UNHEALTHY MASKS are STILL ON, huh?
September: A duck boat parade celebrating front line workers on Labor Day is nixed. Too risky, but the vaccine is now well into general distribution, and for many people, this is the month life finally starts to feel normal again.
Except it won't. The plan is endless testing, tracing, tracking, inoculations, and so it goes.
These are more FASLE PROMISES from the Globe, holding that carrot of a hope out in front of you forever as they bully you into getting the God-awful jab.
Most crucially, schools are back. There are masks and social distancing and COVID testing for teachers and students alike, but public schools across Greater Boston at last return to in-person classes, but there is so much catching up to do, with districts struggling to resolve the huge disparities exposed, and deepened, by kids who’ve missed so much regular school.
This has become sickening in and of itself!
“I expect different states and even different communities to do this at different paces,” said Will Austin, chief executive of the nonprofit Boston Schools Fund. “Because as much as we want to say this stuff is scientific, a lot of it is political.”
Noooooooo!?!
Trump will be long gone by then.
With kids in school, more parents are back at work in person, part of a broader return-to-the-office that picks up speed in the fall. It’s not the typical post-Labor-Day rush, but downtown feels the busiest it has been in 18 months, with new restaurants and bars starting to open. Jobs come back too, though the biggest help-wanted ads come from Amazon, gearing up for an online-shopping season to dwarf this past year’s. Some new habits die hard.
October: Life back at the office isn’t quite the same. Many white-collar workers are on hybrid schedules, working from home one or two days a week. No one’s jetting in from Chicago for a meeting that can happen on Zoom. Conventions? Maybe next year. So parts of the economy remain down, particularly the hard-hit hospitality sector and downtown restaurants that relied on expense account business dinners, but even in travel, there’s hope, as a few of the city’s signature events — maybe the Marathon, or the Head of the Charles — finally get back on track.
November: Dare we say, life in Boston is starting to feel somewhat . . . normal? The Celtics and Bruins fill TD Garden again. Concert venues come back on line and a wave of pop-up stores open downtown. Logan Airport bustles at Thanksgiving. No one’s skipping the holidays this year.
But NOT normal!!!
By now, some are even able to look back on the pandemic as a missed opportunity, a squandered chance to reset how Boston functions, for the better. There was no big rethinking how we create affordable housing, or use public space, no mass buildout of bus lanes in the quiet, traffic-free months of the pandemic.
“We never made any meaningful changes that would change behavior, and the way people get around the city,” said Stacy Thompson, executive director of transit advocacy group Livable Streets Alliance. “Because of that, the unevenness of our system feels profound.”
I just vomited while riding the subway!
Still, the vaccine has largely done its job. Along with our annual flu shot, we all get a COVID booster, and go about our lives. After the last 18 months, that feels like a win.
Not to be morbid or anything, but I wonder if I will not have departed this mortal coil by then.
December: We’re already looking ahead to next year. If 2020 was a mess, and 2021 was a stop-and-start recovery, we all think 2022 is when things get moving again for real.
With more people coming in to work, holiday parties feel like a just reward. There’s some of the usual Christmas bustle at hotels and event businesses. New restaurants experiment with different formats — though takeout and outdoor seating are here to stay. Neighborhood joints thrive.
While there’s so much left to rebuild — and still 200,000 fewer jobs than before the pandemic — hiring is picking up speed, and finally, COVID feels like a thing of the past. After nearly two years of trying to stay afloat, companies and people are looking forward again. Indeed, ideas we haven’t even thought of yet are starting to bloom.
Oh, COVID will be a "thing of the past," huh?
Maybe they can "build back better," and those ideas have been thought of and planned out so the Globe is once again engaging in deception.
“On the other side of this are some amazing opportunities,” said restaurant industry consultant Ed Doyle. “This is a forest fire. Everything is going to burn down, and out of those ashes are going to come some new sprouts that could never have seen the light of day.”
How many of us are going to get burned down before then?
Good Lord, the analogies he chooses are downright spooky.
So when are we out of lockdown again?
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A Macy's window in Downtown Crossing reflects some of the optimism that is likely to characterize 2021 (Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff).
Talk about subliminal advertising!
Related:
Time to bury the rest of the front page as the Globe asks when is a lie not a lie and tells us that Ayanna Pressley is poised to wield more power in Washington in her second term.
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Turning into the Globe finds them finally concerned about human rights in Gaza, thanks to of the New York Times as a 3rd body was found after landslide in Norway, where its Supreme Court rejected an effort, based on the country’s constitutional right to a clean environment, to invalidate licenses for new oil exploration in the Arctic, allowing drilling to continue and signaling to environmental groups that it would not interfere in climate politics.
At least the water is good, even though the disaster made them a symbol of governmental mismanagement, and I know I read somewhere that managing water is the government’s “most important policy challenge.” I know he ate lead as child and “was 2 years old somewhere eating a paint chip,’’ but the kids ‘‘will be fine . . . as long as we’re looking after them,’’ he said with a chuckle as he encouraged parents to get medical checkups for their children and as Americans are flocking to Mexico City.
Of course, they won't be fine since the damage from lead poisoning is irreversible, but don't you miss him?!!
Here is World Today column (briefly):
"Yemen’s prime minister on Saturday said that a missile attack on the airport in Aden was meant “to eliminate” the country’s new government as it arrived in the key southern city — a daring assault which he blamed on Iran-backed rebels. Prime Minister Maeen Abdulmalik Saeed spoke to The Associated Press in an interview conducted at his office in the Mashiq Palace in Aden. It was the leader’s first interview with international media after he survived Wednesday’s attack that killed at least 25 people and wounded 110 others. “It’s a major terrorist attack that was meant to eliminate the government,” the premier said. “It was a message against peace and stability in Yemen.” Saeed repeated his government’s accusations that Yemen’s Houthi rebels were responsible for the missile attack on the airport and a drone assault on the palace, shortly after the premier and his Cabinet were transferred there (AP)."
Looks like false flag number one as someone is itching to get a war going.
CUI BONO?
"A suicide bombing near the Somali capital, Mogadishu, on Saturday killed five people including two Turks, Turkish and Somali officials said. The al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group claimed responsibility for the attack in a post by its Shahada News Agency. The Somalia-based group often targets Mogadishu with suicide bombings and other attacks, and it has exploded bombs against the Turkish military and other targets there in the past. Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca tweeted that 14 people, including three Turks, were wounded and are being treated in a Mogadishu hospital named after Turkey’s president. “We strongly condemn this heinous attack targeting the employees of a Turkish company that undertook the Mogadishu-Afgoye road construction and contributes to the development and prosperity of Somalia,” a foreign ministry statement said. The three others killed were Somali policemen, police Capt. Ahmed Mohamed said (AP)."
Separately on Saturday, the U.S. military said it had carried out two airstrikes against al-Shabab compounds near Qunya Barrow on Friday, the first such strikes of the year after more than 50 last year and both compounds were destroyed.
What a coincidence regarding the Al-CIA-Duh-linked Al-CIA-Bob, huh, especially when we are allegedly withdrawing from Somalia.
"Iraq’s military on Saturday said explosives experts with its naval forces successfully dismantled a mine that was discovered stuck to an oil tanker in the Persian Gulf. The statement said Iraqi authorities have opened an investigation into the incident. No group has claimed responsibility for placing the mine. The announcement came a day after Iraq confirmed reports by private security firms that a mine had been discovered attached to the side of a tanker rented from Iraq’s Oil Marketing Company, known as SOMO, as it was refueling another vessel. It said that Iraqi teams were working to dismantle the mine. Iraq has not provided further details (AP)."
The discovery came amid heightened tensions between Iran and the U.S. in the final days of President Donald Trump’s administration, and yeah, SOMEONE wants to get another WORLD WAR off the ground so BEWARE of another GULF of TONKIN, America!
Maybe someone will blow the whistle like long ago:
"WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will find out Monday whether he can be extradited from the U.K. to the U.S. to face espionage charges over the publication of secret American military documents. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser is due to deliver her decision at London’s Old Bailey courthouse at 10 a.m. Monday. If she grants the request, then Britain’s home secretary, Priti Patel, would make the final decision. Whichever side loses is expected to appeal, which could lead to years more legal wrangling; however, there’s a possibility that outside forces may come into play that could instantly end the decade-long saga. Stella Moris, Assange’s partner and the mother of his two sons, has appealed to U.S. President Donald Trump via Twitter to grant a pardon to Assange before he leaves office on Jan. 20 (AP)."
That is as the UK hit another daily coronavirus record, and whether he does or not will be telling given the Deep $tate civil war that is occurring behind the scenes (has anyone noticed that Nashville was quickly dispatched down the memory hole?), and even if Trump doesn’t, there’s speculation that his successor, Joe Biden, may take a more lenient approach to Assange’s extradition process as 89-year-old Daniel Ellsberg, the famous U.S. whistleblower widely credited for helping to bring about an end to the Vietnam War through his leaking of the Pentagon Papers, over 7,000 pages of classified documents to the press, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, in 1971, said there are clear echoes between Assange and himself -- except there is a difference: The pre$$ has ignored the 21st-Century Pentagon Papers regarding Afghanistan, and the AP has even apologized for it.
I had the good sense not to read that New York Times piece of shit.
They are allegedly providing oxygen for the sickest coronavirus patients in the Los Angeles area.
The massive exercise came a day after a government-appointed panel of experts held a meeting to review the applications of potential vaccine candidates, including front-runner Covishield, developed by Oxford University and U.K.-based drugmaker AstraZeneca. The government plans to inoculate 300 million people in the first phase of the vaccination program, which will include healthcare and front-line workers, police and military troops and those with underlying medical conditions over age 50.
Do Indians know that Gandhi was against vaccinations?
They want you to take a shot for the emperor.
It's lies and false flags, one after the other, and it's been like this the entire time I have been doing this blog.
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The eventual goal is to chip and tag us like fish:
"The Problem With Problem Sharks" by Jason Nark New York Times, Jan. 1, 2021
The war on sharks has been waged with shock and awe at times. When a shark bit or killed a swimmer, people within the past century might take out hundreds of the marine predators to quell the panic, like executing everyone in a police lineup in order to ensure justice was dispensed on the guilty party.
Eric Clua, a professor of marine biology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, said the rationale behind shark culls in the past was simple: fewer sharks, fewer attacks. That reasoning also drives methods such as shark nets and baited hooks, which are currently in use at a number of Australian and South African beaches that are frequently visited by sharks.
“They are killing sharks that are guilty of nothing,” said Clua, who studies the ocean predators up close in the South Pacific.
First it was the minks, now it's the sharks, that are being used to reintroduce that concept of culling to the public as the vaccinations are rolled out.
Clua said he has found a way to make precision strikes on sharks that have attacked people through a form of DNA profiling he calls “biteprinting.” He believes it’s usually just solo “problem sharks” that attack humans repeatedly, analogizing them to terrestrial predators that have been documented behaving the same way. Instead of culling every bear, tiger or lion when only one has serially attacked people, wildlife managers on land usually focus their ire on the culprit. Clua said that problem sharks could be dispatched the same way.
It's not that large a step to people, is it?
In fact, some people behave as sharks (with all do respect to sharks for they are acting on natural instinct).
This summer, Clua and several colleagues published their latest paper on collecting DNA from the biteprints of large numbers of sharks. Once a database is built, DNA could be collected from the wounds of people who were bitten by sharks, and matched to a known shark. The offending fish would then need to be found and killed.
How do they swab a shark's nose anyway?
Critics have taken issue with every facet of this plan.
“That’s not how fishing works,” said Catherine Macdonald, a lecturer in marine conservation biology at the University of Miami. “Even when you have a satellite-tagged shark and you know where it is, if you turned up at the site and put a hook in the water, there’s no reason to think you would definitely catch that shark.”
Other researchers prefaced critiques by saying they respect Clua, whose academic research on shark ecology and behavior has been cited many times by other shark specialists, but even those who say that his approach would produce useful information on shark behavior, such as Blake Chapman, who studied shark neuroscience at the University of Queensland in Australia and wrote a book on human-shark conflict, said removing these guilty sharks “would be near impossible.”
“I don’t think that the removal of ‘problem individuals’ as a result of this information is a realistic application for the data,” she said, adding that the existence of problem sharks, at best, has never been proven.
David Shiffman, a marine conservation biologist and postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University, said that Clua’s proposal would cost billions of dollars to implement on a meaningful scale in Australia, South Africa or the United States, countries with vast coastlines where sharks and people often mix.
“This idea makes no sense on any level that I’ve been able to find,” said Shiffman.
That is where I stopped reading the print copy as the web version swam on:
The theory of the “problem shark” has its origins in a series of attacks in New Jersey in 1916 that killed four people, shocking Americans at the time. Fishermen captured and killed many sharks in the aftermath, and newspaper accounts said that one, a great white, may have had human remains in its stomach.
Pushing fear even back then, huh?
Of course, shark attacks were the big news just before the champion of all the false flags, 9/11 -- at least until COVID came along.
Still, some experts have theorized that another species, the aggressive bull shark, may have been involved as well, since one of the attacks occurred in a small, brackish creek over a mile from the ocean. Bull sharks are known to enter brackish water. Great whites are not.
What’s more, Christopher Pepin-Neff, a public policy lecturer at the University of Sydney who has studied human perceptions of sharks, said the “rogue shark” theory, popularized by Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” has been debunked. “They are basically saying that the shark from ‘Jaws’ is real,” Dr. Pepin-Neff wrote of Clua and his co-authors.
Oh, if you only knew about Spielberg, but the important takeaway is that Hollywood distorts if not lies about the truth in its mission of mind-manipulating perception management.
While shark attacks are uncommon, so are shark culls. Many beach authorities have embraced more humane methods of prevention over extermination. Drones, blimps and tags connect to apps that warn lifeguards and bathers to steer clear of beaches when sharks are around, and after two fatal attacks occurred in New England in recent years, Cape Cod residents received tourniquet training.
They have already begun tagging free-swimming sharks off Cape Cod using fin-mounted tracking tags after a fatal shark attack in a region where experts say such attacks are extremely rare.
Does it beep if they have COVID?
Clua hopes to pitch his DNA database to Réunion Island, where 10 people have been killed by sharks in the last decade. He thinks he could set up his biteprinting operation for less than $1 million and prove it works.
For now, he’ll practice the technique on tiger sharks, known to eat just about anything, when he gets back to his base of research in French Polynesia.....
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He is going all-in to help Democrats steal two Senate runoffs in Georgia that will determine party control in the critical early years of his administration, a widespread effort that not long ago would have been unthinkable in a Republican-dominated state in the Deep South.
The new session comes during a tumultuous period as a relative handful of Republicans work to overturn Joe Biden’s victory over President Trump.
Time to count the votes:
"The vice presidents who certified their own election losses" by Gillian Brockell The Washington Post, January 2, 2021
WASHINGTON - Two modern vice presidents have overseen the most humbling of certifications - their own election losses.
On Jan. 6, 1961, then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon became the first in a century. Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy had beaten him narrowly; plus, many Republicans suspected voter fraud in 11 states, even filing lawsuits in two. (Judges threw both out.) So even though the result of the certification was supposed to be a foregone conclusion, some wondered whether Nixon would really go through with it.
He did, and according to The Washington Post's coverage at the time, he did so jovially. He declared Kennedy the winner and received a standing ovation.
It was a different time, that's for sure, and it is generally acknowledged in honest historical circles that the Kennedy/Johnson ticket stole Texas and Illinois at the very least.
The awkward moment was handled well, but four decades later, the country found itself in an even bigger electoral drama, when then-Vice President Al Gore had to certify Tex. Gov. George W. Bush's win, despite Gore's having won the popular vote. The month before, Gore had conceded to Bush after a court battle over the Florida count that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Like Nixon in 1960, Gore tried to bring "grace and humor" to the proceedings, according to The Post's coverage at the time. As scripted, the roll of states was called in alphabetical order, and when it reached California, which Gore won, he jokingly pumped a fist in the air.
He had "achieved celebrity status," according to The Post's coverage, signing autographs for the assembled lawmakers, congressional staffers and pages. Like Nixon, when he declared Bush the winner - asking God to bless his opponent - Gore drew a standing ovation.
Watch Fahrenheit 911 to see the racist shame of Democrat senators and the death of moral politics.
Even then-Speaker J. Dennis Hastert asked Gore to autograph the wooden gavel he used that day.
Oh, remember him?
There was an extra awkward cherry on top of the day, though, when the roll reached the state of Florida and a handful of House Democrats raised objections. Most of them, including Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., were members of the Congressional Black Caucus "who share the feeling among black leaders that votes in the largely African American precincts overwhelmingly carried by Gore were not counted because of faulty voting machines, illicit challenges to black voters and other factors," The Post said.
Because no senators signed on to the objections with the House members, Gore was bound by law to refuse to hear the objections, putting him in the position of squelching a last-ditch effort to make him president.
This Jan. 6, things are expected to proceed differently, and not just because President Donald Trump has thus far declined the take the “grace and humor” route. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has signed on to House Republican objections, meaning that even if Vice President Mike Pence acts according to the script, the objections will be heard.....
As they should be, but that doesn't necessarily right the wrong and give Trump a second term and it's being described as the last temptation of Mike Pence (the photo shows him making the Nazi salute) when we all share more common ground than the pre$$ admits.
No one is going to save us from ourselves and preserving our way of life as asylum seekers are caught up in America’s cranked-up deportation machine and are shipped back.
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To the left of that article was this:
My printed copy as New York Times, so....
Good thing the election was a clean as a whistle:
"As understanding of Russian hacking grows, so does alarm" by David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth and Julian E. Barnes New York Times, January 2, 2021
Three weeks after the intrusion came to light, U.S. officials are still trying to understand whether what the Russians pulled off was simply an espionage operation inside the systems of the American bureaucracy or something more sinister, inserting “backdoor” access into government agencies, major corporations, the electric grid and laboratories developing and transporting new generations of nuclear weapons.
What if it wasn't the Russians at all as the deja vu continues?
At a minimum it has set off alarms about the vulnerability of government and private-sector networks in the United States to attack and raised questions about how and why the nation’s cyberdefenses failed so spectacularly.
Those questions have taken on particular urgency given that the breach was not detected by any of the government agencies that share responsibility for cyberdefense — the military’s Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, both of which are run by Gen. Paul Nakasone, the nation’s top cyberwarrior, and the Department of Homeland Security — but by a private cybersecurity company, FireEye.
FireEye is a company that was embroiled in the Steele dossier fiasco so this is obviously a Deep $tate Clinton operation, and here is your confirmation:
“This is looking much, much worse than I first feared,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “The size of it keeps expanding. It’s clear the United States government missed it, and if FireEye had not come forward,” he added, “I’m not sure we would be fully aware of it to this day.”
Where is all that tax loot going?
Interviews with key players investigating what intelligence agencies believe to be an operation by Russia’s SVR intelligence service revealed these points:
— The breach is far broader than first believed. It now appears Russia exploited multiple layers of the supply chain to gain access to as many as 250 networks.
— The hackers managed their intrusion from servers inside the United States, exploiting legal prohibitions on the National Security Agency from engaging in domestic surveillance and eluding cyberdefenses deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.
— “Early warning” sensors placed by Cyber Command and the National Security Agency deep inside foreign networks to detect brewing attacks clearly failed. There is also no indication yet that any human intelligence alerted the United States to the hacking.
— The government’s emphasis on election defense, while critical in 2020, may have diverted resources and attention from long-brewing problems like protecting the “supply chain” of software. In the private sector, too, companies that were focused on election security, like FireEye and Microsoft, are now revealing that they were breached as part of the larger supply chain attack.
PFFFFFFFFFT!!
— SolarWinds, the company that the hackers used as a conduit for their attacks, had a history of lackluster security for its products, making it an easy target, according to current and former employees and government investigators. Its chief executive, Kevin Thompson, who is leaving his job after 11 years, has sidestepped the question of whether his company should have detected the intrusion.
— Some of the compromised SolarWinds software was engineered in Eastern Europe, and American investigators are now examining whether the incursion originated there, where Russian intelligence operatives are deeply rooted.
Looks more like the Jewi$h mafia to me!
The intentions behind the attack remain shrouded, but with a new administration taking office in three weeks, some analysts say the Russians may be trying to shake Washington’s confidence in the security of its communications and to demonstrate their cyberarsenal to gain leverage against President-elect Joe Biden before nuclear arms talks.
I love cover story fiction from the New York Times, don't you?
Government mouthpiece is all they are, much like Pravda was.
“We still don’t know what Russia’s strategic objectives were,” said Suzanne Spaulding, who was the senior cyberofficial at the Homeland Security Department during the Obama administration, “but we should be concerned that part of this may go beyond reconnaissance. Their goal may be to put themselves in a position to have leverage over the new administration, like holding a gun to our head to deter us from acting to counter Putin.”
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!
Then why didn't they fix it for Trump again, huh?
The U.S. government was clearly the main focus of the attack, with the Treasury Department, the State Department, the Commerce Department, the Energy Department and parts of the Defense Department among the agencies confirmed to have been infiltrated (the Pentagon insists the attacks on its systems were unsuccessful, though it has offered no evidence), but the hacking also breached large numbers of corporations, many of which have yet to step forward. SolarWinds is believed to be one of several supply chain vendors Russia used in the hacking. Microsoft, which had tallied 40 victims as of Dec. 17, initially said that it had not been breached, only to discover this week that it had been — and that resellers of its software had been, too. A previously unreported assessment by Amazon’s intelligence team found the number of victims may have been five times greater, though officials warn some of those may be double-counted.
No evidence, double counts, it's like another COVID operation for God's sake!
Publicly, officials have said they do not believe the hackers from Russia’s SVR pierced classified systems containing sensitive communications and plans, but privately, officials say they still do not have a clear picture of what might have been stolen. Some intelligence officials are questioning whether the government was so focused on election interference that it created openings elsewhere.
Anyone going to be fired over this or.... ?????
Nakasone declined to be interviewed, but a spokesperson for the National Security Agency, Charles Stadtlander, said, “We don't consider this as an ‘either/or’ trade-off. The actions, insights and new frameworks constructed during election security efforts have broad positive impacts for the cybersecurity posture of the nation and the U.S. government.”
That's where the print copy ran out of power as the web version kept on the lights:
They said they worried about delicate but unclassified data the hackers might have taken from victims like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, including Black Start, the detailed technical blueprints for how the United States plans to restore power in the event of a cataclysmic blackout.
The globe-kickers from Davos are tipping you off via their media mouthpieces as they scapegoat Russia!
Moscow long ago implanted malware in the U.S. electric grid, and the United States has done the same to Russia as a deterrent.
Oh, I see.
When we fuck with someone it is deterrence, when the deter us it is called an attack.
Billions of dollars in cybersecurity budgets have flowed in recent years to offensive espionage and preemptive action programs, what Nakasone calls the need to “defend forward” by hacking into adversaries’ networks to get an early look at their operations and to counteract them inside their own networks before they can attack, if required, but that approach, while hailed as a long-overdue strategy to preempt attacks, missed the Russian breach.
Then they failed miserably.
By staging their attacks from servers inside the United States, in some cases using computers in the same town or city as their victims, according to FireEye, the Russians took advantage of limits on the National Security Agency’s authority. Congress has not given the agency or homeland security any authority to enter or defend private-sector networks.
They will now, right?
We will soon be like the former Soviet Union, folks!
By inserting themselves into the SolarWinds’ Orion update and using custom tools, they also avoided tripping the alarms of the “Einstein” detection system that homeland security deployed across government agencies to catch known malware.
Intelligence agencies concluded months ago that Russia had determined it could not infiltrate enough election systems to affect the outcome of elections and instead shifted its attention to deflecting ransomware attacks that could disenfranchise voters and influence operations aimed at sowing discord, stoking doubt about the system’s integrity and changing voters’ minds.
They left it to the CIA to do that.
Intelligence officials say it could be months, years even, before they have a full understanding of the hacking.....
Then I won't hold my breath.
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They still don't know the extent of the damage since they have failed to deter the Russians and may never know what was lost as they close consulates in Russia and look to reset relations with the Ukraine while Biden vows that he will retaliate over the Russian hack.
The likely culprits:
"Google’s apps crash in a worldwide outage" by Adam Satariano New York Times Dec. 14, 2020
Internet users worldwide received a jarring reminder on Monday about just how reliant they were on Google, when the Silicon Valley giant suffered a major outage for about an hour, sending many of its most popular services offline.
At a time when more people than ever are working from home because of the pandemic, Google services including Calendar, Gmail, Hangouts, Maps, Meet and YouTube all crashed, halting productivity and sending angry users to Twitter to vent about the loss of services. Students struggled to sign into virtual classrooms.
Has the feel of a test run, doesn't it?
As users scrambled to figure out what was going on, Google disclosed the outages on a status dashboard that shares information about its various services. Downdetector, a website for tracking internet outages, also showed that Google was offline. Google’s search engine continued to work for some people, but about an hour after the outages began, the services started working again.
Google initially provided limited information about what occurred, and it was not immediately clear how many users were affected by the outage. Several of Google’s products have more than a billion global users, including Android, Chrome, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Play, Search and YouTube. Later, the company attributed the problem to an “authentication system outage” that lasted for approximately 45 minutes ending at 7:32 a.m. Eastern time.
It included Blogger, and I thought the blogs had been taken down.
“All services are now restored,” Google said in a statement. “We apologize to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”
Product outages were once fairly common for growing internet companies, but as Google, Facebook and others have become larger, building complex networks of interconnected data centers around the world, the incidents have become less common. Google has privately financed undersea cables to move data between continents and improve performance in the event problems occur in a certain location.
The reliability of the systems have become increasingly important as people and businesses depend on the services, whether to search for information online, find directions, send email or get access to private documents stored on Google’s servers. Some users reported their appliances not working because they were linked to Google’s line of home products.
They were LITERALLY left in the dark.
During lockdowns, schools have leaned on Google services to teach students forced to stay home. “At least we have an excuse for not doing our homework,” one person wrote on Twitter.
Just taking advantage of the opportunity, right?
The incident is likely to provide fodder for those who say the biggest technology companies have grown too powerful and deserve more oversight. In the United States, Google and Facebook are facing antitrust lawsuits. In the European Union, new regulations will be introduced on Tuesday to limit the industry’s power.
William Dixon, a cybersecurity expert at the World Economic Forum, said the outage highlighted the fragility of the world’s digital networks.
I'll bet he did!
First the prophetic Event 201, now this tabletop exercise called Cyber Polygon.
Prepare for the power to go out in the dead of winter so the government that shut you down and confined you to your house can come get you for your own good and send you away to a nice, cozy, temporary shelter.
Yes, it's going to be a Dark Winter indeed!
COVID-21 is ON ITS WAY!
Going to be ONE HELL of a NEW YEAR!
“What you have is an increasingly smaller number of technology providers that are systemically important,” said Mr. Dixon, who used to work on cybersecurity issues for the British government. “If there is one issue, then the cascades of that are quite significant.”
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{@@##$$%%^^&&}
The New York Times says that when the pandemic took hold in March, “it was a wake-up call and really gave an opportunity for small businesses to be seen and appreciated, and as a small business I have a much smaller carbon footprint,” but not all is grim. One Toronto business, Glad Day Bookshop, is offering a variety of L.G.B.T.Q. titles.
That must have made lots of Canadians angry, and speaking of deja vu, I have left comments at several sites in appreciation and they are somehow not getting through. It's the same with my blog. The comments are open but I never see them, and it has been that way since I started back in 2006.
Anyhow, I would like them to know that I appreciate their calm and rational fact-based viewpoint as well as the fiery passion and unparalleled perspective given by others. The triad of truth is invaluable and may God bless each and everyone of them.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Time to prioritize what is important on Sunday:
I'm told it's an amazing feat, and here is how they did it:
"Sunday football notes: What the NFL’s grand football experiment has taught us about COVID-19" by Ben Volin Globe Staff, December 12, 2020
The last time the NFL tried conducting a science experiment, its leaders forgot about the Ideal Gas Law, forgot to record all of the data, and turned in a final paper that lacked in substantive evidence, but the NFL, in partnership with the NFL Players Association, has been conducting a fascinating and much more professional science experiment throughout the 2020 season. Between Aug. 1 and Dec. 5, the NFL ran approximately 757,100 tests for COVID-19, and has had approximately 8,000 people wearing KINEXON contact tracing devices every day. This has provided new information on the virus that has been valuable not only for the NFL in getting through this season, but for the medical community in helping to understand how the virus spreads.
A virus that has never been isolated and for which the tests do not specifically identify.
“I would say we’re learning a great deal from the lack of news, if you will, about outbreaks in the NFL,” said Dr. Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “What it’s showing us is just how narrow the window for transmissibility is, when people are really at risk of transmitting to other people.”
For instance, the NFL has learned through the use of the tracking devices that, even though football is the ultimate contact sport, players haven’t spread the virus to opponents during games. The NFL’s chief medical officer, Dr. Allen Sills, said the highest-risk activities are “meeting, eating, and greeting,” and that the NFL has not had one case of COVID-19 transmitted from one player to another on the opposing team during a game. The Titans played a game in late September in which more than a dozen players were carrying the virus, yet no one on the Vikings got sick.
“During the course of an NFL game there are a number of very brief interactions, that still when summed together actually turn out to be a very short period of time,” Sills said. “That’s an observation we have been able to make that we would not have otherwise had if not for KINEXON.”
What total BS!
They don't need a tracking device to determine that, and it makes you wonder what all this distancing and masks are about when at-risk lineman are huffing and puffing near each other for three hours while tackles are being made.
The doctor fumbles the effort when he admits what the mythical COVID -- seasonal flu and the common cold dressed up as a bogeyman -- is really all about! They want trackers p-laced on all of us, and what better way to install them than a vaccine!
The NFL also has learned that the protocols it has devised are fairly effective in stopping the spread of the virus — and also how quickly things can spiral out of control when the protocols aren’t followed.
The Raiders had a COVID-19 issue because they didn’t wear masks. The Ravens had an outbreak that nearly derailed their season because a trainer didn’t report symptoms or wear a mask. Several teams have been fined six-figure amounts, and the Raiders and Saints have been stripped of late-round draft picks.
“We’ve had those instances where people haven’t complied with the protocols, and that literally leads to problems,” NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith said. “I think the league has been aggressive in holding people accountable, but anything less than 100 percent is a failure model for us because we know how quickly the virus spreads.”
Football players of all people should know nothing is ever 100 percent!
The quick spread is something the NFL has learned, as well as the incubation period. Following outbreaks with the Titans and Patriots in October, the NFL modified its protocols so that anyone deemed a “high risk close contact” of someone who tests positive must sit out for five days. It resulted in a situation two weeks ago where the Broncos were forced to sit all four of their quarterbacks for a game.
The NFL also has consistently tightened travel protocols, to the point that players are barely allowed to leave their hotel rooms on a trip, and the league has developed “intensive protocols” for teams that may be experiencing an outbreak, which include limited crowds in the locker room and gym, and moving all meetings to a virtual setting.
Almost as if they were $laves going to work the fields, huh?
On Nov. 21, in anticipation of Thanksgiving and a massive uptick in the pandemic, the NFL required all 32 teams to adopt the “intensive protocols” for the rest of the season, which includes closing facilities on Monday and Tuesday (except for medical needs). The NFL and NFLPA reported that the league saw 47.7 percent fewer cases of COVID-19 week over week once the new protocols were implemented, and saw the league’s lowest numbers since October.
The positivity rate this past week was .11 percent and the incidence rate was .74 percent. Out of 8,000 (or more) players, coaches, and staffers, only 470 (5.9 percent) have tested positive since Aug. 1 despite living in the community and gathering to play football several days per week.
“Our numbers are probably something that most public officials would dream of in this pandemic,” Smith said.
Oddly enough, the NFL is brought to us by Amazon and Microsft!
Time to PUNT THIS FRAUD, folks!
It’s why the NFL and NFLPA are “completely aligned” in resisting the idea of moving to a “bubble” for the end of the season, Sills said, even though the pandemic is raging and the bubble format worked for the NBA and NHL. A bubble will remain an option, but “everything that we’re going to do is going to be data-driven,” said NFLPA president J.C. Tretter, a center for the Browns.
A hard bubble, like what the other two leagues did, is likely not realistic, even for the playoffs. Football teams are too big to pull it off logistically, and the on-boarding process — ensuring that hundreds of people are all clean of the virus — would be too challenging.
The game is also played outside, so....
A soft bubble, in which teams isolate at a local hotel for a few weeks similar to training camp, is a possibility, but the NFL and NFLPA are wary of separating players and coaches from their families for an extended period.
“It’s been a tough year from a mental health perspective for our players,” Tretter said. “The feeling of isolation, of not being able to see people, to see their friends and family, further asking guys to stay away from their young children and their family potentially for six weeks, that’s a big ask, and that has ramifications outside of the game of football.”
A true bubble also comes with risk — if the virus gets inside, it wrecks the entire bubble swiftly. So in any bubble scenario, the players and coaches would still have to wear masks, keep their distance, and so on.
“Let’s be clear, COVID-19 does not fear a bubble,” Sills said. “The vulnerability inside a bubble is the same, which is full compliance with the protocols at all time — mask wearing, avoidance of sick individuals, rapid reporting of symptoms, good hand hygiene, physical distance, and avoiding high-risk exposures.”
The NFL certainly is not in the clear. There are 63 regular-season and 13 postseason games to be played, but the NFL has learned a lot about COVID-19 since August.
“We’re very cautiously optimistic with the progress we’ve made and particularly the impact of the intensive protocol for everyone,” Sills said.
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It also turns out the fans really don't make difference because there was a lot of talk about how home-field advantage has been eliminated because of a lack of fans in the stands, and it’s true, home teams are only 97-95-1 this season (.505), which would be the lowest home winning percentage in at least two decades, but a closer look reveals that the teams that historically are good at winning at home are still doing so (but not the Patriots).
At least some are calling out signals against the $cience:
"Sunday football notes: A weird 2020 NFL season is about to get weirder with stricter COVID-19 protocols" by Ben Volin Globe Staff, November 21, 2020
The 2020 NFL season certainly has been weird enough thanks to COVID-19. Games played in empty stadiums. Coaches wearing surgical masks on the sideline. Players removed from their teams at a moment’s notice, even when they aren’t experiencing any symptoms of the virus.
Well, brace yourself. The final 2½ months of the season are about to get a whole lot weirder.
The pandemic is raging across the country, and is expected to get even worse this coming week because of Thanksgiving. The NFL has miraculously played all 148 of its scheduled games so far without a cancellation, but commissioner Roger Goodell and his medical experts know that the league’s protocols have to be tightened up to finish the season on time in early February.
Any type of meeting done in person — team meetings, position meetings, coach meetings, film sessions — will have to be done virtually instead. Players will be encouraged to spend as little time in the team facility as possible, even if it means showering at home. These guidelines are part of the initiatives that Goodell announced on Wednesday.
No matter how this gets resolved, changes are coming. Several teams, such as the Broncos, announced this past week they won’t be hosting any more fans at games after this weekend, and the NFL may have to add a week to the season or even create a bubble for the postseason, though it seems unlikely.
The pandemic is only going to get worse, but the NFL’s resolve to finish the season on time remains as strong as ever, and it will do whatever it takes to get it done.
“Reaching this point with no games being missed is a testament to the work that each of you, and so many others at the 32 clubs, have done,” Goodell wrote. “As we continue through the season, it will likely be necessary to take further steps to address broader conditions.”
Goodell’s memo mandated that all teams must adopt the NFL’s “intensive protocols” starting on Saturday and maintain them through the rest of the season, but not everyone is so understanding of the changes. Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers lamented recently that he can’t sit with a teammate in the cafeteria for lunch, that lockers now have plexiglass dividers, and that the players can’t do team-building events outside of football.
“It definitely puts a strain on that locker-room conversation and camaraderie,” Rodgers told SiriusXM NFL. “Obviously the proponents of all that say it’s necessary to get us to the finish line and to the season. I think there’s a lot of questions about — are we doing all this based on science? And it’s all necessary?”
I must confess, I never really like Rodgers because I saw him as a prima donna; however, he is now my favorite quarterback.
GO PACKERS!
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I will be spending the rest of the day watching the last week of regular season football, readers. I'm going to enjoy their skills for one last time.
Related:
He sadly died of brain cancer brain cancer, and his greatest game was when he scored 25 points in Game 5 of the 1976 NBA finals, though the Suns were beaten, 128-126, in triple overtime in what has been called “the greatest game ever played.”
May he R.I.P.
