Oddly, it was racist when Trump said it…
Author: HP McLovincraft
Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.
I’m shocked, I tell ya…
Ex-FBI Agent Indicted For Accepting Bribes Paid by Lawyer Linked to Armenian Organized Crime Figure
A former FBI agent who retired after 20 years as a special agent has been arrested and indicted on a federal criminal charge alleging he conspired to accept more than $200,000 in cash bribes and gifts.
The Department of Justice said Babak Broumand accepted the bribes and gifts in exchange for providing sensitive law enforcement information to a lawyer with ties to Armenian organized crime.
Broumand was charged with filing false financial disclosure forms to cover up bribes he allegedly received from an attorney with ties to organized crime.
The indictment alleges that Sargsyan was a criminal and “associated with a criminal organization” when he bribed Broumand, who was still working at the FBI at the time. He allegedly bought Broumand a $36,000 motorcycle and paid him $30,000 for a down payment on a second home in Lake Tahoe.
WHO Advisory Board Member Says China Still Engaged In ‘Massive Cover-Up’ Involving Destroying Samples, Silencing Scientists
A World Health Organization advisory board member said Monday that China even now continues to operate a “massive cover-up” on the origins and spread of the coronavirus that caused the global pandemic.
“The Chinese have engaged in a massive cover-up that is going on until this day, involving destroying samples, hiding records, placing a universal gag order on Chinese scientists and imprisoning Chinese citizen journalists asking the most basic questions,” Jamie Metzl said Monday on Fox News.
“The more that China stonewalls, the more suspicious that it looks,” Metzl added. “We can’t give China a veto over whether or not we investigate the world’s worst pandemic in a century and then do everything we can to make everybody safe.”
Investigators are probing whether the coronavirus could have been leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. Meanwhile, China is reportedly planning on launching 25 to 30 biosafety level three labs and one biosafety level four lab, the kind operated by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, over the next five years.
The idea that the virus could have escaped from a lab was largely dismissed last year as a conspiracy as the pandemic tightened its grip on the U.S., but the theory has been revived in recent weeks after a U.S. intelligence report found that several researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in November 2019 with symptoms that resembled COVID-19 symptoms. China previously told the World Health Organization that the first person with symptoms similar to COVID-19 appeared in Wuhan the next month on December 8, 2019.
MIT Engineers Have Discovered a Completely New Way of Generating Electricity
A new material made from carbon nanotubes can generate electricity by scavenging energy from its environment.
MIT engineers have discovered a new way of generating electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create a current simply by interacting with liquid surrounding them.
The liquid, an organic solvent, draws electrons out of the particles, generating a current that could be used to drive chemical reactions or to power micro- or nanoscale robots, the researchers say.
“This mechanism is new, and this way of generating energy is completely new,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. “This technology is intriguing because all you have to do is flow a solvent through a bed of these particles. This allows you to do electrochemistry, but with no wires.”
In a new study describing this phenomenon, the researchers showed that they could use this electric current to drive a reaction known as alcohol oxidation — an organic chemical reaction that is important in the chemical industry.
Strano is the senior author of the paper, which appears today (June 7, 2021) in Nature Communications. The lead authors of the study are MIT graduate student Albert Tianxiang Liu and former MIT researcher Yuichiro Kunai. Other authors include former graduate student Anton Cottrill, postdocs Amir Kaplan and Hyunah Kim, graduate student Ge Zhang, and recent MIT graduates Rafid Mollah and Yannick Eatmon.
The Mogul and the Monster: Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Decades-Long Relationship With His Biggest Client
In the fall of 1982, a money manager named Harold Levin got a phone call that would change his life. A lawyer representing Leslie H. Wexner, the founder and CEO of the women’s apparel retailer The Limited, said Wexner was looking for a financial adviser. Would Levin be interested? Levin most certainly was. In Columbus, Ohio, where Levin lived, Wexner was a legend. Wexner grew The Limited from a single Columbus store into a global retail empire that included mall fixtures Abercrombie & Fitch, Victoria’s Secret, and Bath & Body Works.
Levin landed the job after six months of grueling interviews. He wasn’t making Masters of the Universe money—Wexner paid a salary of $250,000 a year—but it was enough for Levin to move his family into a 6,000-square-foot house across the street from Wexner in Bexley, Columbus’s most exclusive suburb. By 1986, Wexner ranked sixth on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, with a net worth estimated at $1.4 billion. “In New York, I had bankers constantly taking me out to dinner,” Levin told me. Once, a banker arranged a private tour of Le Bernardin. “The kitchen was so clean, you could eat off the floor,” Levin remembered. Wexner entrusted Levin with increasingly ambitious projects. Starting in the mid-1980s, Levin purchased thousands of acres of farmland in New Albany (population 414) on the outskirts of Columbus, where Wexner planned to build his very own town modeled on an 18th-century Georgian village. “Les sent me to Richmond, Virginia, to look at architecture he wanted to copy,” Levin said.
Nurse: Houston Hospital Instructs Employees NOT To List Vaccine Adverse Reactions
Houston Methodist Hospital is forbidding its workers from listing any adverse reactions to the Coronavirus vaccine on official records, according to a Houston Methodist nurse. Nurse Jennifer Bridges appeared on The Highwire with Del Bigree to drop the shocking revelation.
“But every time a nurse or another employee comes out with an adverse reaction, they basically tell them in the ER, they’re like, ‘No, it’s not an adverse reaction. This is just an intolerance.’ And they don’t report it properly and they don’t address it properly,” Jennifer Bridges told Del Bigtree. (WATCH A CLIP OF HER INTERVIEW HERE).
“And I’ve actually been in contact with somebody in the hospital system that deals with, like, the charting and the finalization of people’s charts…They have told me that officially Methodist has told them, ‘Do not list any adverse reactions on anybody’s chart related to the vaccine.’ Like, people are being told to not talk about this, not address it, and not label it on charts basically. Like, us ourselves as employees, have to go to the system and document these adverse reactions because Methodist is not doing it,” nurse Jennifer Bridges told Bigtree.
117 Houston Methodist employees are reportedly suing the hospital to fight the institution’s vaccine mandate.
CNN, New York Times, British government, and myriad other websites go dark amid massive worldwide outage
A massive worldwide internet outage has impacted major websites including Amazon, the New York Times, CNN, Reddit, Twitter, and Twitch.
The sites’ content delivery network, U.S.-based Fastly, announced that the issue has been identified and a “fix is being implemented,” and many of the sites initially impacted by the outage appeared to have been restored within an hour’s time.
What are the details?
The company confirmed a “global disruption,” according to Engadget, and began investigating the issue in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
Other affected sites, the outlet reported, included Al Jazeera Media Network, GitHub, Gov.uk, HBO Max, Hulu, PayPal, Shopify, Stack Overflow, Quora, Vimeo, and more.
Down Detector, a website that tracks internet outages, reported that other sites such as Etsy and Reddit were also impacted by the issue.
Reuters reported that Fastly’s website stated that most of its coverage areas faced “Degraded Performance,” and myriad error messages across impacted websites pointed to Fastly’s CDN as the issue.
“News publishers came up with inventive workarounds to report about the widespread outage when their websites failed to load up,” Reuters noted. “Popular tech website The Verge took to Google Docs to report news, while [a] U.K. Technology Editor at The Guardian started a Twitter thread to report on the problems.”
After its website returned to a functioning level, CNN reported that the outage impacted “dozens of countries” across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, as well as South Africa.
Many websites, CNN reported, continued to be unavailable for users as of 7 a.m. ET while the company worked to improve load times for its apps, platforms, and websites.
CIA (Dis)Information Operations Come Home To The US
Reporters joke the easiest job in Washington is CIA spokesman. You need only listen carefully to questions and say “No comment’ before heading to Happy Hour. The joke, however, is on us. The reporters pretend to see only one side of the CIA, the passive hiding of information about itself. They meanwhile choose to profit from the other side of the equation, active information operations designed to influence events in America. It is 2021 and the CIA is running an op against the American people.
Leon Panetta, the Director CIA from 2009 to 2011 explained bluntly his CIA did influence foreign media outlets ahead of elections in order to “change attitudes within the country.” The method, Panetta said, was to “acquire media within a country or within a region that could very well be used for being able to deliver a specific message or work to influence those that may own elements of the media to be able to cooperate, work with you in delivering that message.”
The CIA has been running such information ops to influence foreign elections since the end of WWII. Richard Bissell, who ran the agency’s operations during the Cold War, wrote of “exercising control over a newspaper or broadcasting station, or of securing the desired outcome in an election.” A report on the CIA in Chile boasts the Agency portrayed its favored candidate in one election as a “wise, sincere and high-minded statesman” while painting his leftist opponent as a “calculating schemer.” At one point in the 1980s foreign media insertions ran 80 a day.
The goal is to control information as a tool of influence. Sometimes the control is very direct, simply paying a reporter to run a story, or, as was done in Iraq, simply operating the media outlet yourself (known as the Orwellian Indigenous Media Project.) The problem is such direct action is easily exposed, destroying credibility.
NYT’s Mara Gay: Seeing Trucks with U.S. Flags ‘Disturbing’ — Calls for Separating ‘Americanness, America from Whiteness’
New York Times columnist Mara Gay said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that she noticed trucks with American flags and was “disturbed” by what she saw.
During a conversation about the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Gay said that she also saw trucks with anti-President Joe Biden messages and Trump flags and advised that the message she got from the American flags was: “This is my country. This is not your country.”
“You know, it’s really concerning to me that the Democrats haven’t just gone ahead at this point and said, ‘We’re doing this on our own in terms of getting a commission together to explain to the American people how we allowed the insurrection to take place in the Capitol.’ I think that really needs to move forward swiftly,” Gay stated. “You know, the reality is here that we have a large percentage of the American population — I don’t know how big it is, but we have tens of millions of Trump voters who continue to believe that their rights as citizens are under threat by simple virtue of having to share the democracy with others. I think that as long as they see Americanness as the same as one with whiteness, this is going to continue. We have to figure out how to get every American a place at the table in this democracy but how to separate Americanness, America, from whiteness.”
“Until we can confront that and talk about that, this is really going to continue,” she warned.
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