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“I don’t speak because I have the power to speak; I speak because I don’t have the power to remain silent.” Rav Kook z"l
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The nonprofit exec whose organization sent nearly $600,000 in US taxpayer money to a Chinese lab that may have been the source of COVID-19 masterminded an effort near the start of the pandemic to squelch the notion that the coronavirus was man-made, a new report reveals.
Peter Daszak, president of the New York City-based EcoHealth Alliance, secretly organized a statement issued by the influential British medical journal The Lancet in February 2020, according to Vanity Fair.
A total of 27 scientists — including Daszak, 55, who trained as a zoologist — signed the statement, which expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China.”
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the statement affirmed.
“Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.”
During Daszak’s efforts to arrange the Lancet statement, he reportedly emailed two scientists, including Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, who’d worked with the lead coronavirus researcher at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, located at the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak.
Daszak told the scientists that they “should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way,” Vanity Fair said, citing emails obtained by the group US Right to Know.
“We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice,” Daszak reportedly added.
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Facebook's 'independent fact checkers' relied on a letter spearheaded by a major financial backer of the Wuhan Institute of Virology to 'debunk' articles exploring the possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a leak from the lab, it has emerged.
For nearly a year, Facebook censored articles exploring the lab leak theory, labeling them 'false information' and punishing news publishers by limiting their reach on the platform, before the social media giant sheepishly reversed course last month.
Facebook relies on third-party fact-checkers to 'debunk' false claims, and in the case of the lab leak theory, a February article from Facebook partner Science Feedback played a key role in the social media site's censorship.
The article, which purported to 'debunk' a New York Post opinion column questioning China's denials of a lab leak scenario, prominently cited a letter to The Lancet, a leading medical journal, signed by '27 eminent public health experts'.
It has now emerged that the Lancet letter, which played a key role in suppressing early debate on the pandemic's origins, was not only signed but organized by Peter Daszak, whose group funneled U.S. taxpayer dollars to controversial gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Though no definitive proof has emerged yet to show whether COVID-19 leaked from a lab or crossed over to humans directly from an animal, mounting evidence in support of the lab leak theory has emerged in recent weeks -- after academics dismissed it as impossible for more than a year.
It is now clear that many of the leading experts in emerging coronavirus threats, who rushed to dismiss the lab leak theory early in the pandemic, were potentially conflicted, fearing that confirmation of a leak would shut down virology labs around the world and cut off their precious flow of funding.
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SHOCKING VIDEO shows an Amazon Driver giving a 67 year old Castro Valley woman a beat down after words were exchanged. 21 year old woman arrested by Alco Sherrif…who says suspect claims self defense. @kron4news pic.twitter.com/umTVNityDi
— Maureen Kelly (@KRON4MKelly) June 4, 2021
A 21-year-old Amazon delivery woman viciously beat another woman, 67, who had called her a bi**ch after the San Francisco-area driver told her to 'check her white privilege' when she'd complained about a delayed package.
Itzel Ramirez, the Amazon driver, was arrested after she was filmed assaulting the woman in Alameda County, the sheriff’s office said on Friday.
Video posted to social media shows the unidentified victim from Castro Valley appearing to say something to the driver after she dropped off the packages in front of an entrance to Vista Creek Apartments at around 6pm on Thursday.
Doug Smith, the owner of the apartment complex where the victim lives as a tenant, told KTVU-TV that the victim received an alert that a package she had been waiting for was delivered.
When she went to the lobby of the apartment complex to retrieve the package, it wasn’t there. The Amazon driver, Ramirez, was standing nearby.
According to Smith, the woman asked Ramirez where the package was. Ramirez is said to have replied that the package would be arriving soon.
Smith said that the victim waited for about 15 minutes in the lobby. She then came back outside and once again asked Ramirez about the status of the delivery, according to Smith.
‘I believe the Amazon driver said something about “your white privilege,” and my tenant said, “You don’t need to be a b***h about it,” turned around and walked away,’ Smith told KTVU-TV.
Ramirez was so enraged that she began punching the woman in the head and upper body, landing as many as 10 blows.
She claims she was acting in self-defense.
Surveillance footage filmed by cameras positioned both outside and inside the lobby of the building shows Ramirez push the woman up against the front entrance and continue to strike her.
The woman is seen hunched over with her hands covering her head in an attempt to defend herself.
The victim is believed to have suffered a broken nose and other visible injuries.
Ramirez was seen wearing her Amazon vest as she posed for her booking photo with the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office.
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A New York City-based psychiatrist told an audience at the Yale School of Medicine in April that she had fantasies of “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way.”
Dr. Aruna Khilanani spewed the race-hating virtual remarks — in which she also said she’d walk away from the shooting “with a bounce in my step” and that white people “make my blood boil” and “are out of their minds and have been for a long time” — at the Ivy League institution’s Child Study Center on April 6.
Audio of the talk was posted on the substack online platform of former New York Times opinion writer and editor Bari Weiss on Friday, along with an interview of Khilanani conducted by writer and podcaster Katie Herzog.
A flyer promoting the talk and posted online by Weiss titled the lecture, “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind” and included “learning objectives” such as “Set up white people’s absence of empathy towards black rage as a problem” and “Understand how white people are psychologically dependent on black rage.”
Khilanani opened her remarks by telling the audience, “I’m gonna say a lot of things, and it will probably provoke a lot of responses, and I want you to just maybe observe them in yourself.”
She then added “prayers up for DMX” before discussing what she described as the “intense rage and futility” people of color purportedly feel when talking to white people about racism.
Khilanani launched into an attack of all white people as a monolithically ignorant, delusional, and hateful group. Early on, she offers a telling self-diagnosis: “We are calm, we are giving, too giving, and then when we get angry, they use our responses as confirmation that we’re crazy or have emotional problems.” She insisted “Nothing makes me angrier than a white person who tells me not to be angry, because they have not seen real anger yet.”
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JonathanTurley.org:
This could make for an interesting line up. The San Francisco police posted a videotape of a man lighting the hair of a woman on fire on a bus. They were seeking the help of witnesses but bizarrely blurred out the face of the suspect. When confronted on the curious effort, the police insisted that it was just trying to get people to recognize the victim. Huh?
The young man is shown in the videotape casually moving over to sit behind the woman and then puts a lighter to the back of her head. She was helped by other passengers as the suspect and two friends ran off of the bus. She obviously could have been severely burned or even killed in such an attack if the fire spread.
Police spokesperson Adam Lobsinger later explained that they were trying to find the victim because “without the victim, when we catch the suspects, it’s harder to do anything,. We are still looking for the suspects.”
That is a bit hard to follow. One would think that they are trying to find both the victim and the culprit. The latter is particularly important since he is out in the public after lighting the hair of a woman on fire. Regardless of the eventual prosecution, you should want the public’s assistance in finding this maniac and getting him off the street. You can actually show both faces and achieve both purposes. Moreover, you have a videotape to help with any prosecution regardless of the victim. The police also have the driver as a witness.
Turley: “I just cannot track the logic on this one.”
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No description necessary. The video tells the story.
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According to The Washington Post, it's hunting season for cancel culture and its latest targets are "racist" birds.
The Post ran an expansive report on Thursday, titled "The racist legacy many birds carry," focused on the "birding community," which apparently is having a difficult debate "about the names of species connected to enslavers, supremacists and grave robbers."
"Corina Newsome is a Black ornithologist, as rare as some of the birds she studies," Post environmental justice reporter Darryl Fears began his piece, noting she was hired to "break down barriers" at the Georgia Audubon nature preserve.
"But overcoming those barriers will be daunting. As with the wider field of conservation, racism and colonialism are in ornithology’s DNA, indelibly linked to its origin story. The challenge of how to move forward is roiling White ornithologists as they debate whether to change as many as 150 eponyms, names of birds that honor people with connections to slavery and supremacy."
Fears wrote that birds such as Bachman’s sparrow and Wallace’s fruit dove "bear the names of men who fought for the Southern cause, stole skulls from Indian graves for pseudoscientific studies that were later debunked, and bought and sold Black people."
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Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued Thursday that authorities should stop building prisons and instead focus on underlying public health issues as New York City seeks to address a recent surge in violent crime.
New York Democrats, including Ocasio-Cortez, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, called on Congress to earmark $400,000 toward a program called "Stand Up To Violence," which seeks to address gun violence through counseling and community outreach. Ocasio-Cortez said it was "not acceptable" to use jails as "garbage bins."
"If we want to reduce violent crime, if we want to reduce the number of people in our jails, the answer is to stop building more of them," Ocasio-Cortez said. "The answer is to make sure that we actually build more hospitals, we pay organizers, we get people mental health care and overall health care, employment, etc. It’s to support communities, not throw them away."
Ocasio-Cortez and fellow Democrats are seeking congressional funding through a process called "earmarking," a newly reintroduced method that allows lawmakers to request financial support for causes within their districts. The "Stand Up To Violence" program is based at a hospital located in Ocasio-Cortez’s home district.
The request from Democrats came as New York City contends with a spike in gun violence during the coronavirus pandemic. Shooting incidents were up 86% as of May, according to the New York Police Department.
At least 13 people were shot across the city’s five boroughs over Memorial Day weekend, including a 15-year-old boy who was killed in the Bronx.
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Conservative radio show host Mark Levin went after comments made by New York
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on Real Time with Bill Maher.
During a segment on Maher’s show, Kristof claimed that Israel was guilty of “possible war crimes” during the recent fighting with Hamas.
“That is unbelievable,” Levin said during a LevinTV episode, according to the Washington Examiner.
Levin reiterated that Israel had a right to defend itself. He pointed out that Hamas was the evil-doer in the conflict, not Israel.
“I don’t have to give you chapter and verse about how Hamas slaughters and tortures its own people if they don’t fall in line. They had one election about 15 or so years ago, and they haven’t had one since,” he said.
He added, “This whole thing is so sickening, and (Kristof) knows this. He absolutely knows this. Israel with ‘war crimes,’ seriously? If Israel wanted to wipe Gaza off the face of the earth, it would take them about two and a half days.”
Levin then cut to a clip of Maher responding to Kristof’s accusation of “possible war crimes.”
"Well, Gaza fired 4,000 rockets into Israel. What would you say Israel should have done instead of what they did?" Maher asked Kristof.
Kristof replied, ”I mean, international lawyers are pretty clear that they have a right to defend themselves. They have a right to respond at military targets, but there is a sense that their response was probably a war crime because they did not sufficiently avoid civilian casualties.”
Levin responded to the clip. “The war crime would probably be Hamas firing missiles at population centers and hiding their missiles in population centers — in hospitals and in elementary schools, in the AP office complex, and so forth and so on.”
Kristof later in the Real Time segment claimed that Israel having its defence ministry in a civilian area was akin to Hamas hiding missiles inside civilian infrastructure, alleging “both sides do this.”
“No, no, no, it’s not likewise. Israel’s munitions and military hardware, they're not in population centers. The only hardware that’s in population centers are the missiles from Iron Dome that shoot up into the sky and try to stop the other missiles from hitting their area,” Levin said.
Levin called the type of thinking espoused by Kristof “sickening and dangerous.”
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