Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 576
April 17, 2022
Michigan Bomb Plot: FBI Scheme to Create False ‘Domestic Terror’ Cabal Exposed in Court
Photo source: dailymail.co.uk
Jeremy Kuzmarov
Covert Action Magazine
Jury throws out government’s case—finds FBI agents fabricated a kidnapping threat against Michigan governor so they could pretend to be heroes by foiling a “crime” of their own creation.
FBI director’s use of entrapment is part of a strategy designed to sow public fear and render support for draconian anti-terrorist legislation.
For 95 years—from J Edgar Hoover to Christopher Wray—the FBI has lied, cheated, threatened, and even murdered Americans. Is it beyond reform?
Should we replace it with a national police force that protects instead of persecutes those it is supposed to serve?
The Michigan bombing case is just the latest, but it is surely not the first example, of the FBI overstepping legal and ethical boundaries to burnish its public image by creating Bad Guys to scare the public and blackmail Congress into passing ever larger budgets to fight domestic terrorism.
Like the Pentagon and the CIA, the FBI needs Bad Guys to justify its existence—and it’s trampling on civil rights. So if villains do not exist, they will be created. In the case of the Governors bombing plot, the FBI cynically created “dangerous terrorists” out of “credulous weekend warriors, often stoned on marijuana and prone to big, wild talk.”
But the members of the jury didn’t buy itThe jury in the bombing case—six men and six women—believed the defense’s evidence, which showed that “FBI agents and informants had tricked and cajoled the men into targeting the governor.”
Two of the defendants, Daniel Harris and Brendan Caserta, were acquitted in court and a hung jury probably ended the case for the other two, Adam Fox and Barry Croft.
During the trial, one of the defense attorneys said that the FBI’s plan was “utter nonsense,” and pleaded with jurors to be the “firewall” against the government. “I think what the FBI did is unconscionable,” another defense attorney said outside court. “And I think the jury just sent them a message loud and clear that these tactics—we’re not going to condone what they’ve done here.”
Bomb PlotOn October 7, 2020, one month before the presidential election, six men associated with a militia known as the Michigan Wolverines were arrested in a sting outside a warehouse in Ypsilanti, Michigan, a city east of Ann Arbor.
An undercover FBI informant had driven the men to the warehouse, tricking them into thinking they were going to make a down payment on explosives, pick up some military gear, and then head to Buffalo Wild Wings for beer and chicken.
The next day, The New York Times, CNN, The Guardian, and other media published stories detailing a “failed domestic terrorism plot to overthrow the Michigan state government.”
[…]
Big Dan Hosts a Government PartyAt least a dozen confidential informants infiltrated the Wolverine Watchmen, including an undercover bomb maker.
Court testimony shows that the main leader and instigator of the phony plot was an FBI informant named Dan Chapel—an Iraq War veteran and postal worker who went by the nickname “Big Dan.” The former army sergeant and firearms instructor made hundreds of hours of clandestine recordings of the defendants, accompanying them on trips to meetings and training exercises, and often paying for their travel expenses.
Dan told jurors that he was a former Wolverine Watchman who quit the group after hearing the men talk about killing the police. He then became an FBI informant who was paid $54,000 for seven months of work, during which time he carried a secret recording device for the FBI.
On one outing, Big Dan had the others videotape themselves jumping out of Kaleb Franks’ blue PT Cruiser and taking cover behind its doors while they fired rifles.
Big Dan said that his FBI handlers told him to develop a plan whereby teams of men wearing body armor and equipped with explosives kidnap Governor Whitmer and take her on a boat to Wisconsin where they were to hold a kangaroo court and then execute her.
R. Michael Bullotta, a defense lawyer who worked as Assistant U.S. Attorney in Detroit, said that the premature arrests hampered the government’s case. He also said that the use of too many government informants “almost made it look like it was a government party as opposed to having just one informant reporting to the FBI.”
[…]
Another of Big Dan’s FBI handlers—Henrik Impola—sent text messages asking Big Dan to destroy his text messages and to lie to Pete Musico, the founder of the Wolverine Watchmen, and accuse another person named Trent of being an undercover agent rather than him.
Impola—who made hundreds of hours of secret recordings during the probe—had been accused of perjury in a prior case and “had trouble telling the truth under oath.”
Yet another FBI agent involved with the case, Richard Trask, was charged with felony assault in state court for beating his wife after visiting a swingers party together.
Michael Hills, Brendan Caserta’s lawyer, said that Jayson Chambers’ side business sent the strongest “signal” to jurors that something had gone wrong.
Here was a “rogue FBI agent trying to line his own pockets with his own cybersecurity company, pushing a conspiracy that just never was, never was going to be. Our Governor was never in any danger. And I think the jury—they didn’t get all of it—but they smelled enough of it.”
ManipulationThe defendants in the case, to be sure, were not choir boys. Prosecutors said they had cased Governor Whitmer’s vacation house twice, drew maps of the area, built a model of her cottage and practiced using explosives. Brendan Caserta once said that he “wanted to drink the blood from the skulls of Zionist bankers.”
What is disturbing, however, is the clear effort by the FBI to provoke, mobilize and then entrap a group of anti-government zealots for the purpose of manipulating public opinion.
April 16, 2022
The COVID vaccine narrative has taken on so much water, the oligarchy has stopped bailing, and will let these vaccines slowly sink
By Dr Meryl Nass
There has been so much bad news about the vaccines in the last few months, it even leaked into the mainstream media. I think the cabal’s plan, at least in the US but probably everywhere, is to stop propping the ludicrous vaccine claims up and allow them to die a natural death.
There was just too much bad news, too few getting boosted, too much resistance from parents. Getting 8 or 10 doses into everyone was not going to happen. The terrified were fewer and fewer.
[…]
It must be obvious to all that the shots do not prevent spread and therefore there is no logical way you can mandate them. Because if my shot does not protect you (and only with lots of fairy dust will it protect me) why would you have any interest in whether or not I am vaccinated?
[…]
It is important to mention again–because we keep forgetting–that while the vaccines are nominally licensed for adults, in fact you can only find the EUA (unlicensed) product in the US, and legally it is experimental–and therefore forcing someone to be vaccinated is a Nuremberg violation and a violation of federal law.
The imposition of mandates for these experimental gene therapy products is therefore a crime, being committed by states, federal government and certain companies and other institutions. It seems that because US law was not designed for situations in which the government is the criminal, it has been very difficult to use the judicial system to change what is happening. But surely if this persisted much longer an honest judge would rule that the vaccines are experimental and the COVID vaccine house of cards would then collapse.
What else has been happening that undermines the vaccine story? Well, in addition to all the collapsing athletes, there is now a large collection of mayors suddenly dropping dead throughout Germany.
In Australia, Queensland’s health minister just admitted that ambulances are being summoned for a lot more calls for cardiac events and sudden deaths: 40% more to be exact.
[…]
Then there were 3 insurance companies, one each from the US, India and Germany, that admitted there were about 40% more deaths than expected in working-age people in the second half of 2021.
[…]
Three doctor whistleblowers released a large cache of data from the military’s DMED database showing huge increases in servicemember deaths.
[…]
Everybody in the world must have heard the term ‘myocarditis’ by now, and know that it is a vaccine injury. A lot of people also know that CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said it was extremely “rare but mild,” but it isn’t and she lied.
[…]
While no one in a federal health agency has admitted it, many people must be aware that myocarditis is only the tip of the COVID vaccine injury iceberg. Myocarditis got attention because it’s life-threatening and almost always happens within 4 days of the second shot–it can’t be written off as coincidence, the way heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary emboli, sudden deaths and perhaps many other diagnoses have been.
As if there wasn’t enough bad vaccine news, there was information from the Medicare database that FDA posted last July, but only recently got attention. FDA revealed that heart attacks, pulmonary emboli, disseminated intravascular coagulation (a life-threatening bleeding-clotting disorder) and ITP (another bleeding disorder) were related to the Pfizer vaccination in Medicare beneficiaries.
[…]
And there is ivermectin. So many ivermectin stories have been leaking into the popular press. Tennessee’s legislature made ivermectin essentially an over-the-counter drug last week. New Hampshire’s house voted in favor of this as well, while the NH Senate is now taking it up. Kansas and several other states gave healthcare providers an immunity guarantee for the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVID.
[…]
Coupled with stories about lawsuits against hospitals for refusing to supply ivermectin to dying relatives like this one, people are finally realizing there is probably something to this drug, and they have been cheated. They were given a shot that barely works, is unsafe, and they were stopped from getting the good drug. And what if they lost their business to the lockdowns? There must be a lot of anger simmering by now. I imagine the Great Reset cabal must be worried about this, and has decided to loosen its grip for the moment and hopefully let off some citizen steam.
[…]
Here I read the tea leaves:
If there is a new vaccine waiting in the wings, FDA and its briefers were not telling us about it at the VRBPAC meeting, which was the time to do so. For right now, I think the current crop of vaccines and the vaccine passports are going away. I don’t think the authorities anticipate another severe COVID wave in the forseeable future…as most people now have Omicron immunity.
[…]
The original Wuhan strain appeared out of nowhere that was natural. And the original Omicron strain appears to have also originated in a lab. If I was a member of the Great Reset cabal, I would be quite hesitant about releasing yet a third lab-engineered virus on the population.
[…]
On the other hand, I do believe the cabal has bet the farm on their Reset, they can’t go back, and they are simply moving on to another means of accomplishing it besides COVID. The over-the-top WHO Treaty/Constitution and its amendments designed to assume sovereignty over the world in the event of a pandemic is an ambitious Plan B.
But I don’t think it will fly. Too many people know the WHO was wrong about virtually everything regarding management of this pandemic, not to mention the 2009 swine flu.
[…]
Will Russia and China really agree to give up their sovereignty to Tedros? China maybe. Brazil? India? Indonesia? Japan? Can all of their leaders, and their local power centers, have been sufficiently corrupted to turn over their nations to the cabal? I think that could be a stretch.
Via https://merylnass.substack.com/p/covid-persists-but-the-covid-vaccine
Ivermectin Powerful Anti-Cancer Remedy
Ethan Huff
By now, most plandemic skeptics are aware of the fact that ivermectin, a cheap, off-patent anti-malaria drug, is a powerful remedy for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19), hence why the government does not want people to have it. But did you also know that ivermectin treats cancer?
At least nine different peer-reviewed studies demonstrate how safe and effective ivermectin wards off the Big C, threatening the multi-billion dollar cancer industry. There are two industries, in other words, that ivermectin threatens: the covid industry and the cancer industry.
1) In 2017, research published in the journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications found that ivermectin preferentially treats renal cell carcinoma (RCC) while protecting normal kidney cells. RCC tumor growth is also delayed by ivermectin, which induces mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress while increasing mitochondrial biogenesis.
2) A year later, research published in the journal Molecular Medicine Reports found that ivermectin preferentially targets stem cell population in MDA-MB-231 human breast cancer cells.
“Ivermectin has been demonstrated to be safe, following treatment of millions of patients with onchocerciasis and other parasitic diseases, which makes it a strong candidate for further studies investigating its potential use as a repurposed drug for cancer therapy,” reported the National Cancer Institute in Mexico City.
3) Another study published that same year in the American Journal of Cancer Research, also out of Mexico, determined that ivermectin is “a strong candidate for repositioning” as an anti-tumor remedy.
4) An earlier study published in EMBO Molecular Medicine back in 2014 similarly found that ivermectin inhibits the expression of WNT-TCF targets, which are implicated in both intestinal and lung cancers.
Ivermectin selectively inhibits TCF-dependent, but not TCF-independent, xenograft growth without causing any obvious side effects.
“In vivo, Ivermectin selectively inhibits TCF-dependent, but not TCF-independent, xenograft growth without obvious side effects. Given that Ivermectin is a safe anti-parasitic agent used by 200 million people against river blindness, our results suggest its additional use as a therapeutic WNT-TCF pathway response blocker to treat WNT-TCF-dependent diseases including multiple cancers,” researchers wrote.
Ivermectin works wonders against cancers of all types5) In 2020, research published in Pharmacological Research identified ivermectin as a drug that promotes the death of cancer cells by regulating the tumor micro-environment in breast cancer.
Ivermectin also preferentially targets leukemia cells at low concentrations while leaving normal hematopoietic cells alone. The drug also targets various ovarian cancer cells lines and also inhibits the proliferation of five renal cell carcinoma cell lines without affecting normal kidney cells.
6) Also in 2020, a study published in the EPMA Journal found that ivermectin hits specific targets in ovarian cancer, suppressing ovarian cancer cells. The drug worked so well that researchers said it can be used to make personalized drug therapy, also known as predictive, preventive, and personalized medicine (PPPM), for ovarian cancer.
7) Researchers from the Instituto Nacional de Cancerologia in Mexico City discovered that same year that ivermectin reduces both cell viability and colony formation capacity while fighting against tumors.
8) In 2021, research published in the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology concluded that ivermectin increases ROS production and inhibits the cell cycle in the S phase to inhibit colorectal cancer cells.
9) Also in 2021, research published in the journal BMC Cancer found that ivermectin inhibits the proliferation of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) cells by inducing mitochondrial dysfunction, suppressing NF-?B signaling and promoting apoptosis.
[…]
What is Motivating the Shangai Lockdown?
Brownstone Institute
The most frequent question I get about the ongoing lockdown in Shanghai involves the potential motives of the Chinese Communist Party.
As someone who has covered COVID Mania for over two years, and has taken an unconventional approach to the motives and outcomes behind the continuation of the pandemic narrative, I remain undecided on the dominant motive for the situation in Shanghai. However, there are lots of clues available for us to survey the possibilities.
One thing is for sure: the Wuhan lockdown of early 2020 was a lot different. It was certainly a barometer for lockdown extremism, but it occurred on a much smaller scale. And it appeared, in my view, that the government was putting on more of a Hollywood production than a real attempt to quash a virus. I wrote about that extensively in The Dossier.
This time, however, the Shanghai situation appears to be a different animal.
#Gravitas | In Shanghai, residents are screaming for help from their balconies.
Chinese health officials are now admitting the situation in the city is grim. @palkisu tells you more. pic.twitter.com/3MojVIMT2t
— WION (@WIONews) April 13, 2022
There are several possibilities that I think are worth exploring.
Germ FreaksFirst and foremost, consider the possibility that Chinese authorities have become maniacal hypochondriacs, and, like most top-down authoritarian regimes, have engaged in irrational and destructive policymaking.
In the Chinese governmental system, there are very few guardrails to authoritarian behavior, so virtually nothing would be too extreme if the ends justify the means. China’s continuing ideology contends that individual rights are not of a concern. In fact, according to the CCP, this ideal of human freedom should be actively suppressed for the “greater good” of the state.
Yes, the Chinese government is engaged in complete pseudoscientific behavior, but that is the norm for world governments, not the aberration.
This virus may genuinely terrify the ruling class atop the CCP. Similar to the True Believers of COVID Mania in the West, they could be freaked out by the prospect of catching a cold, and are ready to use any and all instruments of power with the hopes that the virus can somehow be stopped in its tracks.
It’s a psyop
The Chinese commercial capital of Shanghai has warned that anyone who violates COVID-19 lockdown rules will be dealt with strictly as new cases rebound to more than 25,000 https://t.co/FHwZujrTOF pic.twitter.com/xZCHHO8Rxf
— Reuters (@Reuters) April 13, 2022
The data on lockdowns are quite clear: they don’t work, and they only cause problems in addition to the virus problem. Everywhere lockdowns were tried, they failed in catastrophic fashion. But that wasn’t the story of Wuhan, the location of the first COVID lockdown, where there was no benefit of hindsight.
The short term hard lockdowns in Wuhan in early 2020 were falsely advertised as an astonishing scientific success, but were most effective as an information operation to shut down the world, while seeding the idea that lockdowns would help to crush the virus.
This left some coming to conclude that China locked down Wuhan as part of an information operation to cripple the societies and economies of its adversaries, using the virus as a kernel of truth to advance their campaign. China, notably, remained almost completely open for years following the Wuhan lockdown, while the West went through an endless series of restrictions and rolling lockdowns.
Is China readying another targeted campaign against the West by locking down Shanghai?
National Hubris/Believing their own pressIt’s possible that at some point down the line, Chinese authorities became convinced that their Wuhan lockdown actually worked, and that an aggressive level of nationalistic superiority was the reason that China justifies its position as the only country in the world to “eliminate” the virus through lockdowns.
CCP armed police pressing an old man against the ground as CCP is carrying out a military campaign against Covid in Shanghai and surrounding areas. #Anonymous #VanguardReport #NeverAgain #Newsnight #WashingtonPost pic.twitter.com/CWdsyUCvBy
— Par 5 (@zuo_zhou) April 7, 2022
China’s lockdown was routinely praised in the corporate press and through academic circles. Every country modeled their lockdowns, a novel concept that did not exist prior to 2020, after the Wuhan lockdown. This level of admiration may have acted to affirm China’s well-known, baked in superiority complex, and convince the Communist Party that it alone has the technocratic authoritarian capacity to wage a successful war on a virus.
Don’t disregard nationailstic hubris as the chief motivating factor behind the madness in Shanghai.
Internal politicsAlthough China is a one-party state, there remains tremendous infighting in the ranks of the Communist Party. Shanghai is perceived as one of the more “liberal” cities in China, and the lockdowns may have been motivated by competing political factions desperate to win over influence and power.
All zero covid lockdown nutters please sit down for a ringside seat to watch this slow motion train crash in the world's most populated country. If you can't achieve zero covid in a military dictatorship, where would it work? https://t.co/W3JQCZrlp3
— Hugh Osmond (@hughosmond) April 8, 2022
[…]
https://brownstone.org/articles/what-is-motivating-the-shanghai-lockdown/Via
Babylonia and the Code of Hammurabi
Episode 15: Justice in the Old Babylonian Period
Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization
Dr Amanda H Podany
Film Review
This lecture concerns the Code of Hammurabi which survives to the present day (in the Paris Louvre) on a seven-foot basalt stele (pillar) in the Louvre. During most of the Old Babylonian period, justice was mostly dispensed by local judges. Serious crimes were rare, with most cases involving contract and inheritance disputes. In one famous murder case, King Lu-Innana referred the hearing to thee Nippur citizens assembly. The four defendants (the wife of a priest and the four hit men she hired to murder him) were found guilty and put to death.*
According to Podany, the main purpose of the Code of Hammurabi was to protect the poor from being exploited and oppressed by the wealthy elite. It consisted of 282 laws. Examples include
Allowable circumstances for a man to obtain a divorceCompensation for lost propertyWho could ransom a captured soldierThe penalty for allowing your ox to gore someoneThe punishment for failing to pollinate a date orchard when hired to do soHow a many could take a second wife if is first was barrenPenalties for broken engagementsLaws related to inheritance and divorceRobberyBearing false witnessMalpractice (surgeons who bungled an operation had one hand cut off)Circumstances in which a man entered a marriage with prior debts.Only nine of the laws address violence. Examples include
Punishment for striking a pregnant woman and causing her to die or miscarryPenalty for striking your father (having your hand cut off)There are five laws addressing rape. If the woman was found to be an unwilling participant, the rapist was put to death. The other four rape laws concerns family sexual assault, including a man having sex with his daughter, mother or son’s fiance (the punishment was expulsion from the city).
The Code itself only addresses murder occurring during the commission of another crime, for example being beaten to death while being detained by a creditor or killing your husband because you’re having an affair.
Most judges decided murder cases based on the future threat the killer posed to the community. Because there were no prisons, dangerous offenders were put to death. Others were fined. Except for the River Ordeal, the death penalty was rare. In cases, where the accused couldn’t produce witnesses to prove their innocence, they were forced to jump in the river. If they were innocent, the gods saved them from drowning. This induced guilty people to confess and pay a fine instead.
*In Babylon, it was virtually impossible for a woman to initiate divorce in a bad marriage. Technically she could get a divorce by stating, “You are not my husband.” However this usually resulted in her being bound and and thrown into a river.
https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/justice-old-babylonian-period
April 15, 2022
Health Officials Reinstate Mask Mandates, But Where’s the Science?
By David Charbonneau, Ph.D. Health officials are reinstating and extending mask mandates, citing a surge in the Omicron BA.2 variant, but data don’t appear to support those decisions.
Philadelphia on Monday became the first major city to reinstate its mask mandate, citing the spread of the COVID-19 Omicron BA.2 variant.
Columbia University, Georgetown, Barnard College and Johns Hopkins University this week reinstated mask mandates for their campuses.
And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) extended the mask mandate for public transportation, which was supposed to expire April 18, until May 3.
Are these decisions supported by science?
That was the question political commentator Kim Iversen asked viewers on Thursday’s segment of The Hill’s “Rising.”
Iversen reviewed case and mortality data from the cities of Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
She also examined nationwide data from the CDC, looking for evidence that would justify the return to masks.
Starting with Philadelphia, Iversen pointed to The New York Times coronavirus tracker for Philadelphia County for April 13.
“The cases are extremely low,” she said. “They’re currently looking at a seven-day average of 176 cases per day, and that’s in a city of 1.5 million.”
“Now compare this to even the little baby wave the city had in September, which had them seeing about 450 cases per day,” Iversen said.
Iversen then compared Philadelphia’s current numbers to the city’s Omicron surge in January, when officials recorded about 5,000 to 6,000 cases per day on average.
Deaths currently are averaging two per day, she noted, which is down 22% during the last two weeks.
“We also don’t know if these people died of COVID or with it, as a lot of places will list a person as a COVID death if they just test positive, despite them dying of other obvious ailments like cancer or injuries,” Iversen said.
The chart was similarly flat for Washington, D.C. — home of Georgetown University — which recorded just a “slight uptick” in cases and “zero deaths.”
Turning to the question of the efficacy of masking in preventing transmission, Iversen cited a tweet from Justin Hart at Rational Ground.
Hart summarized nationwide data from the CDC that compared the average number of cases for 100,000-plus population counties with and without mask mandates.
The blue line represents counties that had mask mandates and the orange line represents the counties that didn’t:
Last week the CDC updated its policy tracker for public mask mandates noting whether or not a county had a mask mandate in place on a given day. From there we can map the "official" COVID-19 cases per 100K. Here's the Omicron wave. Mask mandates do not work. pic.twitter.com/XN79ZsZ6rz
— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) April 12, 2022
Finally, Iversen reviewed data from two Asian countries with mask mandates and high compliance — Japan and South Korea.
She said:
“So, let’s look at Japan. Now you can see that huge spike and then a little dip, and they’re now going back up again. Their seven-day average is currently at 50,000 cases per day. At the height of their big wave, they were seeing 100,000 cases per day, and they all wear masks all the time.
“In South Korea, they’re currently at 150,000 cases per day, and at the recent peak, they were seeing a whopping 400,000 cases per day on average. And again, they wear masks all the time with solid compliance.”
Iversen concluded:
“So we have everything we need for you to choose to stay as safe as possible from a negative COVID outcome. You can decide to socially distance, get the vaccine multiple times, take an early treatment drug and, yes, if you want, you can even mask up.
“But as the world is finding out, preventing transmission seems to be very difficult, and every mandate we’ve tried — besides extreme social distancing and total border lockdowns before a virus gets into the country — has been unsuccessful at accomplishing it.”
Iversen also pointed out that the argument cited by public officials, such as Philadelphia Health Commissioner Dr. Cheryl Bettigole — that we are masking up to prevent a new surge that doesn’t yet exist — creates a scenario in which we would “be masked forever,” since no one now expects us to ever reach “zero COVID.”
[…]
Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/health-officials-reinstate-mandates-wheres-science/
Soaring Gas Prices Forcing Some Uber, Lyft Drivers Off the Road
Uberlyftdrivers.com
When Sergio Avedian, 55, started driving full time for Uber and Lyft in 2016, he used to make $3,000 a week.
“Now, it’s impossible to make that kind of money,” he said.
Coming out of the pandemic, demand for rides is high but inflation and the rising price of gasoline has made it harder for drivers to earn what they once did.
“Gas prices pretty much crippled all drivers,” said Chris Gerace, contributor at The Rideshare Guy, a blog aimed at helping rideshare drivers earn more money.
Nearly half of rideshare workers, including Uber and Lyft drivers, as well as food deliverers for companies like Grubhub, DoorDash and Uber Eats, quit or drive less because of the recent spike in gas prices, according to The Rideshare Guy’s own poll.
“I hope that it’s only a temporary thing but as time goes on, we are going to have another segment of drivers say ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” Gerace said.
The Consumer Price Index, which measures the prices Americans must pay for goods and services, is up 8.5% from a year ago — notching a fresh high in March. However, gas prices jumped 18.3% for the month, boosted by the war in Ukraine and the pressure that is putting on supply.
“Gas prices alone accounted for more than half of the monthly increase in the CPI, and over the past year, gas prices are up 48%,” said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.
Although the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline fell slightly to $4.10 after the White House announced several stopgap measures, it is still significantly higher than the $2.86 seen one year ago, according to data from AAA.
In California, where Avedian works, a gallon of regular gasoline averages $5.75.
To compensate drivers for rising gas prices, Uber introduced a temporary fuel surcharge last month. Consumers must now pay an additional 45 cents or 55 cents on each ride and either 35 cents or 45 cents on each Uber Eats order, depending on the location.
“We know that prices have been going up across the economy, so we’ve done our best to help drivers and couriers without placing too much additional burden on consumers,” Uber said in a statement.
Lyft also added a 55-cent surcharge on each ride to help offset drivers’ fuel costs, while Doordash now has a 10% cashback program on all gas purchases and Grubhub increased per mile distance pay.
“We’ve continued to closely monitor gas prices and their impact on drivers,” a spokesperson for Lyft said.
“We’ve taken several steps to help alleviate pain at the pump, including introducing a 55-cent fuel surcharge for each ride that goes directly from riders to drivers, and will continue to invest in additional ways to help the driver community,” the spokesperson added.
As of April, Lyft drivers are spending 57 cents more on gas per hour, on average, compared to a year ago, according to the company.
Avedian, who is also a contributor at The Rideshare Guy, said the incentives, along with a sudden shortage of drivers due to higher gas prices has helped boost his income.
“With more drivers dropping out, the demand for rides is high,” he said. “That means fares are higher.”
Still, others say it doesn’t make up for the increased cost of driving.
“The problem with the fuel surcharge is that it doesn’t take into account distance,” Gerace said. “You might only have short rides, which is great, but if you have longer rides, that 45 or 55 cents is not going to cover anything at that point.
“It helps on paper, but in practice it’s not enough.”
[…]
Letter to California Legislature About Loss of Freedoms
Margaret Anna Alice
Offguardian
“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
I am writing to urge No votes on AB2098, SB1390, AB1797, SB1464, SB871, SB866, and SB1479, and part of a decalogue of medical tyranny bills (down to seven now that SB1184 passed on April 5 while AB 1993 and the HIPAA-violating SB 920 were pulled).
AB2098 threatens to strip physicians and surgeons of their licenses for “unprofessional conduct,” which it defines as:
disseminat[ing] or promot[ing] misinformation or disinformation related to COVID-19, including false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.”
Similarly, SB1390 criminalizes the “amplification of harmful content” on social media platforms.
Who is to decide what is “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “false,” “misleading,” or “harmful”? To claim the State has the right to override medically trained physicians is to subject medical science to political science, consequently putting not only individual patients but all of humanity at grave risk.
You would be fulfilling Carl Sagan’s darkest fears, which have already become manifest over the past two years of politically-formulated COVID absolutism:
We’ve arranged the society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is gonna blow up in our faces […] Science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan—political or religious—who comes ambling along.”
Passing AB2098 and SB1390 would establish a totalitarian Ministry of Truth, and none but the bravest would dare speak against the authoritarian edicts of political forces, themselves lavishly funded by corporations whose bottom line takes precedent over human rights and patients’ health.
Orwell describes this totalistic hubris as follows:
At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different from what it is now.”
Over the past two years, every single COVID policy championed by tyrants, “experts,” colluders, and Covidians yielded grotesque profits for megacorporations; dictatorial powers for governments; and enormous losses of life, health, and rights for individuals.
The more research and data that has accumulated, the more evident it has become that the physicians who courageously challenged the propaganda machine were correct, while the policymakers were deadly wrong.
Let’s look at a few examples:
Masks: FAILLockdowns: FAILExperimental injectable products (“vaccines”): FAILAnti–early treatment protocols: FAILAnti–natural immunity: FAILDiscrimination against the unvaccinated: FAILCensoring information that contradicts the narrative: FAILAbrogating human rights in the name of the public good: FAILIncentivizing lethal CDC hospitalization protocols: FAILTurning the world into an open-air prison: FAILIndeed, the chiseled commandments issued from on high by the WHO, NIH, CDC, and FDA were so catastrophic, it’s like they were designed to fail.
Even Anthony “The Science” Fauci agreed with the traditional health recommendations these truth-telling doctors advocated before he contorted his decrees to fit political and profiteering aims
[…]
Via https://off-guardian.org/2022/04/15/letter-to-the-california-legislature/
Biden Regime Reacts Angrily to Elon Musk Trying to Buy Twitter, Launching Investigations From Multiple Agencies to Stop Him
NWO Report
Source: J.D. Rucker
Elon Musk hit a nerve in Washington DC as the Biden-Harris regime scrambles to intimidate him following his announced plans to acquire Twitter and make it a private company. Reports are coming in that they’ve suddenly launched several investigations into his dealings, none of which seem to have anything to do with Twitter.
BREAKING: As @elonmusk offers to buy the rest of @Twitter a legal source tells @FoxBusiness @SECGov and @TheJusticeDept have launched what he described as a "joint investigation" into a myriad of Musk regulatory issues primarily involving @Tesla https://t.co/TDFLED1XuI
— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) April 14, 2022
Among the “crimes” Musk allegedly committed pertain to comments about taking Tesla private. He addressed this during a TED talk earlier:
Elon Musk took the Securities and Exchange Commission to task during a TED appearance Thursday, claiming he had the funding to take Tesla private despite the agency concluding that he had not.
“I should say actually… with Tesla back in the day, funding was actually secured,” Musk said. “I want to be clear about that.”
Musk has been trading blows with the SEC over the agency’s order that his tweets be reviewed by a lawyer before being publicly posted. The order is based on Musk’s decision to send the now-notorious “funding secured” tweet on August 7th, 2018, in which he claimed to have the finances to take Tesla private at $420 a share. (Tesla has been a publicly traded company since 2010.)
The SEC immediately launched an investigation, eventually concluding that, while he had held a few meetings with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, Musk “had never discussed a going-private transaction at $420 per share with any potential funding source, had done nothing to investigate whether it would be possible for all current investors to remain with Tesla as a private company via a ‘special purpose fund,’ and had not confirmed support of Tesla’s investors for a potential going-private transaction.”
Musk has refuted this in a litany of court documents over the past few months, and during the TED appearance, he offered more insight into why he believes the SEC is singling him out. Musk’s appearance in Vancouver was mainly a forum for him to discuss his recently announced hostile takeover bid of Twitter, but when TED founder Chris Anderson asked whether he had “funding secured” for the Twitter deal, Musk took that as an opportunity to re-litigate his four-year battle with the SEC.
It is unclear what the Department of Justice wants with him, but one thing is very clear. The Biden-Harris regime desperately wants to take him down before he does something that hurts them such as buying Twitter and opening the door to free speech on what he has described as the “digital public square.”
[…]
April 14, 2022
Farming made our ancestors SHORTER!
Principia Scientific
Written by The Daily Mail
Our ancestors got shorter when they made the switch from foraging to farming 12,000 years ago, a new study shows.
An international team of researchers has analysed DNA and taken measurements from skeletal remains of 167 ancient individuals found around Europe.
The bones had already been dated to either before, after or around the time when farming emerged in Europe 12,000 years ago.
A switch from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to farming crops took an average 1.5 inches off their height, the experts found.
Shorter height is an indicator of poorer health, they say, because it suggests they were not getting enough nutrition to support proper growth.
These first European farmers likely experienced ‘poorer nutrition and increased disease burdens’ that stunted their growth.
Other skeletal ‘stressors’ that the farmers may have experienced include ‘lorotic hyperostosis’, characterised by areas of spongy or porous bone tissue in the skull.
The new study was led by Stephanie Marciniak, assistant research professor at Penn State University’s Department of Anthropology in State College, Pennsylvania.
Periods of human historyTime periods represented by individuals in the study were:
– Upper Paleolithic (38,000 to 12,000 years ago)
– Mesolithic (11,000 to 6,400 years ago)
– Neolithic (7,100 to 3,500 years ago)
– Copper Age (6,300 to 3,400 years ago)
– Bronze Age (4,500 to 2,500 years ago
– Iron Age (2,600 to 2,400 years ago)
12,000 years ago refers to the start of the agricultural revolution in the Fertile Crescent zone (the Near East).
Recent studies have tried to work out the effect of DNA on height, Professor Marciniak said, but her new study also included measuring the bones of ancient individuals, as well as genetic contributions.
‘We started thinking about the longstanding questions around the shift from hunting, gathering and foraging to sedentary farming and decided to look at the health affect with height as a proxy,’ she said. ‘Our approach is unique in that we used height measurements and ancient DNA taken from the same individuals.’
The switch from a hunting, gathering and foraging lifestyle to a settled agricultural lifestyle did not occur across Europe simultaneously, but in different places at different times.
According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, starting around 9,000 years ago in Greece, farming economies were progressively adopted in Europe, though areas farther west, such as Britain, were not affected for another 2,000 years and Scandinavia not until even later.
For their study, the researchers studied 167 deceased individuals whose remains were found around Europe – 67 females and 100 males.
All the individuals lived from 38,000 to 2,400 years ago – so both before and after humans began growing their own crops around 12,000 years ago.
[…]
Via https://principia-scientific.com/farming-made-our-ancestors-shorter/
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