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Signed photograph of Jimmy Carter with Joe Biden, Oval Office: pic.twitter.com/7DlI2NXtNJ
— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) February 18, 2023
Something really wrong with this guy.
Putin's feet during his meeting with Lukashenko.
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) February 17, 2023
Is this Morse code? pic.twitter.com/eRmvSBDQOn
Hard to imagine why the Republican Party is losing Gen-Z pic.twitter.com/LkyInUrYzP
— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) February 16, 2023
I thought so, although it dubious if we ever punish these criminals. Here's another par for the course, whoever speaks the most and biggest lies, wins the prize and votes, and the New GOP have the art of lying won hands down;
🚨NEW: Newly elected Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles (R) allegedly invented his entire past and resume.
— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) February 16, 2023
He allegedly lied about:
1. Being an economist
2. His college major
3. The nature of his work at a think tank
4. Being in law enforcement
5. Being https://t.co/xMaChr8DRL…
DALLAS (AP) — Justice Department officials in Washington have taken over the corruption investigation into Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, removing the case from the hands of the federal prosecutors in Texas who'd long been leading the probe.
— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) February 16, 2023
Didn't realize this one. Fentanyl being brought in by the GOP's base doesn't surprise me though. Supplying guns to the Mexican Cartels through lose gun laws in Texas and then helping the Cartels supply us with drugs and then blaming it on Biden. Works for them.
Charlottesville Tiki Torcher Killed Himself Before Drug Smuggling Trial
https://www.thedailybeast.com/charlottesville-tiki-torcher-teddy-joseph-von-nukem-killed-himself-before-trial
Teddy Joseph Von Nukem, one of the most prominent faces from the 2017 neo-Nazi rally, was set to face trial for smuggling fentanyl across the southern border.
Jose Pagliery
Political Investigations Reporter
Updated Feb. 14, 2023 5:47PM ET / Published Feb. 14, 2023 4:35PM ET
Teddy Joseph Von Nukem, one of the most prominent faces lit by the glow of tiki torches in what became the lasting image of the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, killed himself as he was due to face criminal trial last month.
The 35-year-old skipped out on his first day of trial for a drug trafficking charge in Arizona on the morning of Jan. 30, according to court records. At the very moment a federal judge was issuing a warrant for his arrest, Von Nukem was actually still at his home in Missouri, where he had walked out in the snow behind the hay shed and shot himself.
The details were listed in an autopsy report obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast on Tuesday.
“Suicide notes were found at the scene, left for law enforcement and his children, however handwriting was somewhat inconsistent,” the coroner’s report states.
Von Nukem gained notoriety for attending the Aug. 12, 2017 hate speech rally that aggressively revived a nativist movement in the United States. He glorified the violence, and researchers of domestic extremism suspect he was a key figure in a brutal beating of a black man that day.
Von Nukem’s sudden death was initially reported by Molly Conger, an independent journalist in Charlottesville who has become a key anti-fascism researcher in the years since the rally shook the city. An obituary said Von Nukem left behind a wife and five children aged under nine. “Some people knew Ted and understood he was a different type of fellow and had different views of things,” it noted.
Conger’s research identified Von Nukem as one of the men who attacked Deandre Harris in a parking garage. She also connected the dots to show how Von Nukem gloated about the attack in text messages to another white supremacist rally organizer, who was later prosecuted in a separate case.
Journalists, researchers, and anti-fascist activists spent months carefully examining photos and videos of the violence that day to identify white supremacists and hold them accountable. Von Nukem, who stood front and center during some of the most iconic moments of the hateful procession, was quickly outed by former classmates back in his home state. One former student told the local Springfield News-Leader that in school he was known as a “token goth kid” who had what the newspaper described as “an unsettling interest in Nazi Germany.”
At the time, Von Nukem told the newspaper he supported Donald Trump and had adopted the white supremacist worldview that whites are now “disadvantaged.”
"I don't mind showing solidarity with them," he told the newspaper then. “You have to pick your side. You have to throw your support behind the army that is fighting for you."
Von Nukem, who was born as Teddy Landrum, told the outlet he changed his name in 2012 in a nod to his German heritage and the video-game character Duke Nukem.
At the rally, Neo-Nazis raged against minorities and immigrants—whom racists accuse of harming the country. That made it all the more ironic that Von Nukem was arrested on March 17, 2021 while entering the United States from Mexico. On his way into Arizona, Customs and Border Patrol agents discovered 15 kilograms of fentanyl pills hidden behind the seats and floor compartment of his 2019 Nissan Pathfinder.
According to law enforcement records, Von Nukem quickly admitted that he had been paid 4,000 Mexican pesos (around $215) to smuggle the pills into the country.
He was released pending trial and was scheduled to travel back to Tucson to appear in federal court last month. But on Jan. 30, Von Nukem was a no-show. After waiting for an hour, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Marquez issued a warrant for his arrest.
Unbeknownst to her, at that very moment 1,145 miles away, Von Nukem’s wife had just discovered his body—still warm—lying in the snow behind the shed. He still had “a faint pulse” when a sheriff’s deputy and paramedic arrived, according to the coroner’s report. Marie Lasater, the coroner in Texas County, Missouri, checked with the Department of Justice to confirm his identity.
Last Thursday, federal prosecutors moved to dismiss the case. The judge closed it the very next day.
Who Is Lynn Dee Walker? Hoax About MSU Shooting Suspect Spreads Online
BY CHLOE MAYER ON 2/14/23 AT 6:18 AM EST
https://www.newsweek.com/michigan-shooter-gunman-lynne-dee-walker-wrong-fake-hoax-1781034
As panic and fear spread at the news a shooter was unleashing terror at Michigan State University during an attack spanning hours, misinformation quickly circulated online about the unfolding atrocity.
Three people were killed and five more were left with life-threatening injuries, before the shooter fatally shot himself four hours after the first shot rang out at the campus in east Lansing, at 8:18 p.m. on Monday. Terrified students were forced to hide in the dark, the Associated Press reported, with police issuing a shelter-in-place warning that lasted until early Tuesday morning.
Many turned to social media to share news or find out more information, but—in the chaos of the deadly attack—incorrect claims took hold and spread like wildfire.
One viral claim wrongly identified the shooter as a white man called Lynn Dee Walker; in fact, the suspect was a 43-year-old black man who police haven't yet identified publicly. He was described as a short man who was wearing red shoes, a denim jacket and a baseball cap.
The interim deputy chief of the campus police department, Chris Rozman, told reporters the suspect had died from a "self-inflicted gunshot wound" after being confronted by officers. He was neither a student nor an employee of the university, and had no affiliation with Michigan State, Rozman added. "We have no idea why he came to campus to do this tonight. That is part of our ongoing investigation."
But, by then, a false name was already being circulated online.
One Twitter account, which Newsweek has decided not to name, tweeted a photograph apparently taken from security camera footage, showing what appeared to be a white man dressed in black and holding a gun as he approached a door in a tiled corridor.
Most of his face wasn't visible, but he had brown hair. The caption read: "#BREAKING: Michigan State University SHOOTING SUSPECT is 21 year old 'Lynn Dee Walker' according to dispatch audio. He is still on the loose and considered armed and dangerous. #ActiveShooter #MSU #MassShooting #MichiganStateUniversity #BreakingNews."
Several other Twitter users, including journalists, replied to the post saying it was incorrect. Some tagged Twitter support services in a bid to get the tweet removed from the site. But the photo had been viewed more than 1,200 times.
And it wasn't the only post sharing the false information. Others actually shared photos of Walker, seemingly taken from his social media accounts, and falsely claimed he had been identified as the killer. The post was shared thousands of times.
Several people tweeted that they feared for Walker's safety after he was falsely accused. One wrote: "I've seen people posting this like it's factual information, this is how you get someone killed."
Walker, a prolific tweeter who often shares his views on politics, posted several times on social media throughout the night as it became clear he was being publicly accused of an atrocity he did not commit.
He wrote: "I am at my house in western Massachusetts reading with my wife, if you see literally anybody spreading this s***, please get them to delete it. I don't ask for much & I have to be subjected to this sort of s*** on your behalf. Help me out here... If you see people posting me, report it, thanks...
"I dont want to stay up all night exonerating myself. Im just disgusted, viscerally disgusted... It's pretty f***** up that algorithmically this has brought me more followers than the good work that I do. God have mercy on the innocent people who are victims of this murder machine... Im being told CNN ran my face on tv? Someone get a screencap of that if that happened."
Newsweek has reached out to Walker for further information and comment.
Journalists and misinformation experts also tried to combat the erroneous posts naming Walker as the gunman.
Philip Lewis, senior front page editor of the website HuffPost shared screengrabs of some of the claims, and wrote: "Reports of a 'Lynn Dee Walker' as the active shooter at Michigan State are INCORRECT. I've added another picture of him, check the timestamp." The image dated back to April 2020.
While Caroline Orr Bueno, a postdoctoral behavioral scientist specializing in disinformation, shared an image featuring numerous screengrabs of the false claims regarding Walker. She alleged he was an internet "troll," but reiterated he was innocent of the university shootings.
She wrote: "Here's a small sample of the mis/disinformation on Facebook falsely identifying the Michigan State shooter as 'Lynn Dee Walker.' The name is auto-completing & trending on FB's algorithm, which means FB is amplifying disinfo accusing the wrong person of being the gunman."
Newsweek has reached out to Facebook about the expert's claims it was, in effect, "amplifying" posts naming the wrong man.
One Twitter user who had shared the false information later apologised. A tweeter whose name is given as M Hamilton wrote: "MSUP corrected posts circulating false information - I'm guilty of this. On a live police scanner with +150k listeners, dispatch described Lynn's appearance and a threatening internet post, but this was false information. I deeply regret that and apologize to @Logo_Daedalus."
Meanwhile, news is expected to be released on Tuesday revealing details about the real gunman.
Well they just shot down another over Alaska.
When I saw that yesterday, I had to find the end of the story because the video cut off the part the dog actually got fully out and left showing the dog crying in pain and still stuck. Anyway the dog did get all the way out and doing ok. Here's the full video where the dog gets all the way out.
Missouri republicans are sure doing their part in the New GOPs destruction of democracy and quality of life for most Americans.
Missouri votes against banning children from carrying guns in public
Republican-led legislature rejects measure to prevent minors from carrying firearms in public without adult supervision
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/09/missouri-rejects-ban-children-carrying-guns-in-public
Thu 9 Feb 2023 08.08 EST
The Republican-led Missouri state house on Wednesday voted against banning minors from openly carrying firearms on public land without adult supervision.
The proposal to ban children from carrying guns without adult supervision in public failed by a 104-39 vote. Only one Republican voted in support
A Democrat, Donna Baringer, said police in her district asked for the change to stop “14-year-olds walking down the middle of the street in the city of St Louis carrying AR-15s”.
“Now they have been emboldened, and they are walking around with them,” Baringer said. “Until they actually brandish them, and brandish them with intent, our police officers’ hands are handcuffed.”....... more
Mississippi Republicans pass bill to create separate, unelected court in majority-Black city
Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, calls proposed law ‘some of the most oppressive legislation in our city’s history’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/08/jackson-mississippi-republicans-unelected-court-system
Wed 8 Feb 2023 15.17 EST
The bill was passed by the Mississippi house of representatives and will now go to the state senate, where Republicans also hold a significant majority.
The Republican-dominated Mississippi house of representatives has passed a bill to create a separate, unelected court system in the city of Jackson that would fall outside the purview of the city’s voters, the majority of whom are Black.
The bill, which local leaders have likened to apartheid-era laws and described as unconstitutional, would also expand a separate capitol police force, overseen by state authorities. The force would expand into all of the city’s white-majority neighborhoods, according to Mississippi Today. Jackson’s population is over 80% Black.....more
I always follow the general world shipping business (traded in also with pretty good success) and it has generally been projecting more market downtrend in the near future. How much more can be quite subjective and up for debate but I'm loving the volatility and the pull between bulls and bears. One example and latest news from AP Moller - Maersk;
Maersk warns lower container volumes to hit 2023 profits
in International Shipping News 09/02/2023
https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/maersk-warns-lower-container-volumes-to-hit-2023-profits/
Shipping group A.P. Moller-Maersk warned on Wednesday lower container volumes and freight rates would drive a four-fold plunge in profits this year, even as it reported record earnings for 2022.
The Copenhagen-based company, which transports goods for retailers and consumer companies such as Walmart (NYSE:WMT), Nike (NYSE:NKE) and Unilever (NYSE:UL), raised its profit forecast twice last year as a surge in consumer demand and pandemic-related logjams at ports boosted freight rates.
But freight rates have since tumbled as recession looms and pandemic-fuelled import bubbles deflate in the United States and other major consuming countries.
This year, Maersk expects global demand for shipping containers by sea to fall by as much as 2.5% as a build up in inventories is unwound.
“The shipping market looks difficult right now. Freight rates have stabilized at a lower level that is not catastrophic for us,” Chief Executive Vincent Clerc told journalists.
Clerc, who took over as CEO on Jan. 1, said he would focus on keeping costs down at a time when Maersk has been buying up warehouses and distribution centres to offer an end-to-end transportation service rather than just container shipping.
Maersk, one of the world’s biggest container shippers with a market share of around 17%, said freight rates fell by nearly a quarter in the fourth quarter versus the previous three months.
The company said last month it would end a vessel sharing alliance with Swiss-based MSC in 2025, potentially paving the way for increased competition between the world’s two biggest container shipping companies.
MSC has responded to high freight rates in recent years by increasing the size of its fleet.
“So far we have not seen any price war,” Clerc said. “But we have some clear concerns around the second half of this year, when new ships will come to market,” he said.
Maersk expects underlying earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) of $8-11 billion in 2023, compared with $36.8 billion last year.
The forecast was below the $11.9 billion expected by analysts in a company poll.
The company’s shares have shed more than one-third of their value since peaking in January last year. On Wednesday, they dropped 5% in early trading, but were up 0.6% by 1028 GMT amid a broad stock market rally.
Underlying EBITDA stood at $6.52 billion in the quarter compared with $7.99 billion a year earlier and the $6.95 billion forecast by analysts in the company poll.
Revenues dipped to $17.8 billion as the number of containers it loaded on to ships fell by 14%.
Source: Reuters
https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/MAERSKB:DC
Fact-checking President Biden’s State of the Union speech
By CNN staff
11:15 AM EST, Wed February 8, 2023
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/07/politics/fact-check-president-biden-state-of-the-union/index.html
President Joe Biden delivered his second State of the Union address on Tuesday.
Here is a fact check of some of the claims from Biden and the Republican response by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders:
Cutting the deficit
Biden claimed his administration cut the federal deficit by “more than $1.7 trillion.”
In the last two years, my administration has cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion – the largest deficit reduction in American history.
Facts First: Biden’s boast leaves out important context. It is true that the federal deficit fell by $1.7 trillion under Biden in the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years, including a record $1.4 trillion drop in 2022 – but it is highly questionable how much credit Biden deserves for this reduction. Biden did not mention that the primary reason the deficit fell so substantially was that it had skyrocketed to a record high under then-President Donald Trump in 2020 because of bipartisan emergency pandemic relief spending, then fell as expected when the spending expired as planned. Independent analysts say Biden’s own actions, including his laws and executive orders, have had the overall effect of adding to current and projected future deficits, not reducing those deficits.
Dan White, senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics – an economics firm whose assessments Biden has repeatedly cited during his presidency – told CNN’s Matt Egan in October: “On net, the policies of the administration have increased the deficit, not reduced it.” The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, wrote in September that Biden’s actions will add more than $4.8 trillion to deficits from 2021 through 2031, or $2.5 trillion if you don’t count the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill of 2021.
National Economic Council director Brian Deese wrote on the White House website in January that the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill “facilitated a strong economic recovery and enabled the responsible wind-down of emergency spending programs,” thereby reducing the deficit; David Kelly, chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds, told CNN in October that the Biden administration does deserve credit for the recovery that has pushed the deficit downward. And Deese correctly noted that Biden’s signature legislation, last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, is expected to bring down deficits by more than $200 billion over the next decade.
Still, the deficit-reducing impact of that one bill is expected to be swamped by the deficit-increasing impact of various additional bills and policies Biden has approved.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Small business applications
Biden touted American small business applications.
Additionally, over the last two years, a record 10 million Americans applied to start a new small business.
Facts First: This is true. There were about 5.4 million business applications in 2021, the highest number since 2005 (the first year for which the federal government released this data for a full year), and about 5.1 million business applications in 2022. Not every application turns into a real business, but the number of “high-propensity” business applications – those deemed to have a high likelihood of turning into a business with a payroll – also hit a record in 2021 and saw its second-highest total in 2022.
Former President Donald Trump’s last full year in office, 2020, also set a then-record for total and high propensity applications. There are various reasons for the pandemic-era boom in entrepreneurship, which began after millions of Americans lost their jobs in early 2020. Among them: some newly unemployed workers seized the moment to start their own enterprises; Americans had extra money from stimulus bills signed by Trump and Biden; interest rates were particularly low until a series of rate hikes that began in the spring of 2022.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Unemployment among demographic groups
Biden touted low unemployment rates.
Near record low unemployment for Black and Hispanic workers.
Facts First: Biden’s claims are accurate.
The Black or African American unemployment rate was 5.4% in January 2023, just above the record low of 5.3% set in August 2019. (This data series goes back to 1972.) The rate was 9.2% in January 2021, the month Biden took office.
The Hispanic or Latino unemployment rate was 4.5% in January 2023, not too far from the record low of 4.0% that was set in September 2019 – though the 4.5% rate in January 2023 was a jump from the 4.1% rate in December 2022. (This data series goes back to 1973.) The rate was 8.5% in January 2021.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Trump and the national debt
Biden criticized the fiscal management of former President Donald Trump’s administration.
Nearly 25% of the entire national debt, a debt that took 200 years to accumulate, was added by just one administration alone – the last one.
Facts First: Biden’s claim is correct. The national debt, now more than $31 trillion, increased by just under $8 trillion during Trump’s four years in office, in part because of Trump’s major tax cuts. It’s important to note, though, that some of the increase in the debt during the Trump era was because of the trillions in emergency Covid-19 pandemic relief spending that passed with bipartisan support. The national debt spiked in the first half of 2020 after increasing gradually during Trump’s first three years in office, and because of spending required by safety-net programs that were created by previous presidents. A significant amount of spending under any president is the result of decisions made by their predecessors.
Charles Blahous, a researcher at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University who authored the 2021 paper “Why We Have Federal Deficits,” wrote that the impact of recent legislation on the long-term structural fiscal imbalance is dwarfed by the creation of Medicare and Medicaid and increases to Social Security, all of which occurred between 1965 and 1972.
“Despite all the political rhetoric expended today to cast blame for skyrocketing federal deficits on either the Joseph R. Biden Jr. administration or the Donald J. Trump administration, on either congressional Democrats or congressional Republicans, the largest drivers of the structural federal fiscal imbalance were enacted roughly a half-century ago,” Blahous wrote.
From CNN’s Katie Lobosco and Daniel Dale
Manufacturing investments
Biden claimed that a new law, the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, will produce hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
That’s going to come from companies that have announced more than $300 billion in investment in American manufacturing over the next few years.
Facts First: Biden’s prediction about future job creation is obviously beyond the scope of a fact check. But his claim about companies having announced $300 billion in manufacturing investments during his presidency is accurate; the White House provided CNN with a list of these publicly announced investments. (It’s worth noting that companies sometimes end up investing less than they initially announce.)
The majority of the manufacturing investments that have been publicly announced under Biden to date have been investments in semiconductor facilities. The Biden administration has emphasized the importance of US semiconductor manufacturing, and Biden signed a bill in August that has helped to generate major investment.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
The unemployment rate
Touting economic progress, Biden said:
Unemployment rate is at 3.4%, a 50-year low.
Biden
Facts First: This is true. The unemployment rate was 3.4% in January 2023, the lowest figure since the rate also hit 3.4% in May 1969. The unemployment rate was 6.3% in January 2021, the month Biden took office.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Electric vehicle tax credits
Biden, speaking about the Inflation Reduction Act, said:
Families save more than $1,000 a year with tax credits to purchase electric vehicles and … energy-efficient appliances.
Facts First: This claim needs context. While Inflation Reduction Act tax credits will help save families money on their energy bills, it could take years for EV tax credits to become fully available.
Biden’s claim about energy savings is similar to an estimate from clean electricity nonprofit Rewiring America – which estimated last year that a US household could save $1,800 per year if they installed electric heat pumps to heat their water and heat and cool their air, replaced a gas car with an EV, and installed solar.
Ultimately, new electric vehicles will be eligible for up to $7,500. But there’s a big catch: in order to qualify for these tax credits, the vehicles’ final assembly must happen in North America. At the insistence of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the IRA has strict requirements for how many electric vehicle and EV battery components must be made in the US or countries that have a free trade deal with the US.
The US Treasury Department is expected to issue guidance on critical minerals and batteries in March. But the complex requirements for these tax credits could take years to fully kick in as companies must move their supply chain to North America.
Starting this year, 40% or more of the critical minerals used to create a vehicle’s battery must be extracted or processed in the United States, or a country that has a free trade deal with the US, for the vehicle to qualify for tax credits. That number will gradually rise to 80% of the battery minerals by 2027 and reach 100% by 2029.
This provision passed because Manchin wanted the US to compete with China on electric vehicles, and it will eventually have the impact of bringing more EV and battery jobs to the US or countries it has a free trade agreement with. The measure has already resulted in several companies announcing new factories in the US.
But it’s also a complex provision that will take time to implement, likely meaning vehicle manufacturers won’t be able to offer the credit in the next couple years as they move their supply chains to the US and North America.
From CNN’s Ella Nilsen
Child poverty cut in half
In calling to revive the Democrats’ enhancement of the child tax credit in 2021, Biden pointed to the fact that the provision helped slash the child poverty rate that year.
Let’s restore the full child tax credit, which gave tens of millions of parents some breathing room and cut child poverty in half, to the lowest level in history.
Facts First: This is true. The child poverty rate was cut nearly in half in 2021, and the expanded child tax credit was the major factor. The enhancement accounted for the bulk of the reduction.
The child poverty rate fell from 9.7% in 2020 to 5.2% in 2021, according to the US Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which takes into account certain non-cash government assistance, tax credits and needed expenses.
That’s a reduction of 46%, sending the rate to the lowest level since the supplemental measure began in 2009.
The child tax credit – both the traditional credit and the enhancement – reduced the child poverty rate from 9.2% to 5.2%, or 43%, according to the Census Bureau. Without the beefed-up credit, the rate would have only fallen from 9.2% to 8.1%, or 12%.
As part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act that passed in March 2021, Congress enhanced the child tax credit for one year, beefing up payments to $3,600 for each child up to age 6 and $3,000 for each one ages 6 through 17, for lower- and middle-income families. For the first time, half the credit was paid in monthly installments from July through December, while parents could claim the other half when they filed their 2021 taxes this year.
Also, more low-income parents became eligible for the full amount because lawmakers made it fully refundable.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby
Gas prices down since their peak
Biden touted progress against inflation.
Here at home, gas prices are down $1.50 since their peak.
Facts First: Biden’s claim is correct. He didn’t mention, however, that gas prices are still significantly higher today than they were when he took office. And it’s important to note that presidential policy has a limited impact on gas prices, which are determined by a complex global interplay of supply and demand factors.
As of the day of the State of the Union, the national average for a gallon of regular gas was $3.457, per data from the American Automobile Association. That was indeed down more than $1.50 from a record high of $5.016 in mid-June. But it was still up from a national average of $2.393 on Biden’s Inauguration Day in January 2021.
Biden has taken steps to lower gas prices. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, which contributed to a spike in gas prices, the Biden administration released 180 million barrels of oil from the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The administration also issued an emergency waiver that allowed the sale of E15 gasoline, a blend that contains 15% ethanol, last summer. A White House official noted Wednesday that the price of gas today is lower than it was when the Russian invasion began.
But as we regularly note – whether a president is boasting about a decline in gas prices or his critics are blasting him for an increase in gas prices – presidential policy is not a primary factor in the price of gasoline.
“Similar to why the primary reason for rise in price isn’t due to the President, the same holds true for declines,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told CNN in a message this week. Asked about the role of the president in the decline since the peak of mid-2022, De Haan said: “While the president may have had a minimal role in lowering prices through easing regulation, and occasionally using waivers, the bulk of the decline is simply due to supply and demand changes, and Russian oil and refined products that are still being exported, providing needed supply to the global market.”
De Haan said Biden’s releases of oil from the strategic reserve “put some downward pressure on the price of oil, but I would not call it materially significant.”
The White House official responded Wednesday by pointing to an analysis from the administration’s Treasury Department that estimated that the releases of reserve oil by the US and its allies could have reduced the price of gas by 40 cents a gallon.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Job creation
Biden claimed to have created more jobs “in two years than any president has ever created in four years.”
I stand here tonight after we’ve created, with the help of many people in this room, 12 million new jobs – more jobs created in two years than any president has ever created in four years.
Facts First: Biden’s number is accurate: the US economy added 12.1 million jobs between Biden’s first full month in office, February 2021, and January 2023. That number is indeed higher than the number of jobs added in any previous four-year presidential term. However, it’s important to note that Biden took office in an unusual pandemic context that makes meaningful comparison to other periods very difficult.
Biden became president less than a year after the economy shed nearly 22 million jobs over two months, March and April 2020, because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The jobs recovery then began immediately after that, under then-President Donald Trump, but there was still an unprecedented hole to fill when Biden took office.
Biden is free to argue that his stimulus legislation and other policies have helped the country gain jobs faster than it otherwise would have. (As always, it’s debatable precisely how much credit the president deserves for job-creation.) Nonetheless, it is clear that there could only be such an extraordinary number of jobs added in 2021 and 2022 because there was such an extraordinary number of jobs lost in early 2020.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Biden on democracy spreading
While touting his efforts to stand up to authoritarian leaders in China and Russia, Biden painted himself as a champion of freedom and inaccurately claimed that democracy was spreading under his watch.
In the past two years, democracies have become stronger, not weaker. Autocracies have grown weaker, not stronger.
Facts First: This claim is at odds with data from Freedom House, a leading nonprofit that tracks democracy and human rights around the world. They say democracy has been in global decline over the past few years.
The group’s most recent annual report on the state of global democracy, released in February 2022, was aptly titled, “The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule.” Their 2021 report was called, “Democracy under Siege.”
Getting into the data, Freedom House says 60 countries experienced democratic backsliding in the previous year, while only 25 countries improved their position. The group highlighted backsliding in Sudan, Nicaragua and Afghanistan, where the Taliban reclaimed power when Biden withdrew all American troops from the country.
Freedom House’s most recent report is one year old, with a new report likely coming out soon. And to be fair, Biden could merely be expressing his view that autocratic regimes have lost prestige on the world stage.
But the trends appear to be holding. For instance, after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine last year, he initiated a domestic crackdown that rolled back the few remaining civil liberties that existed in Russia.
Freedom House is largely funded by grants from the US government.
From CNN’s Marshall Cohen
Building electric vehicle charging stations
Biden highlighted his administration’s work to build more electric vehicle charging stations.
We’re going to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations installed across the country by tens of thousands of IBEW workers.
Facts First: This is more of a promise than a fact, but even so, it needs context. For a few reasons, it’s questionable whether the Biden administration will be able to meet its goal of installing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations on US roads.
Installing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations has long been one of Biden’s goals. The president initially proposed Congress spend $15 billion to make it a reality, but just half of that – $7.5 billion – passed as part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Though the administration has said that could be backfilled by private investment, that change in funding could hinder the administration’s ability to meet the goal. States can now unlock more than $900 million in funding for fiscal years 2022 and 2023, which the administration estimated will “help build” chargers across approximately 53,000 miles of US highways. Over the next five years, the full $5 billion will be spent to build out a network of EV chargers on major highways. Another pot of $2.5 billion in grant funding is also available for states to apply to.
There is also a wide range in how much different types of chargers cost, and individual states have a lot of leeway in deciding what kinds of chargers will go on their roads. DC fast chargers can charge a car to mostly full in 20 minutes to an hour and are meant to go on major highways and roads. Another kind of charger known as an L2 charger can take hours to charge a car to full. But DC fast chargers are much more expensive, costing around $100,000 compared to around $6,000 for an L2, Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a senior resident fellow at the think tank Third Way, has told CNN.
In an interview with climate publication Grist last year, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that ultimately the number of EV chargers on the roads “really depends on how the states decide to mix the fast chargers and different types of technology.”
From CNN’s Ella Nilsen
Biden on creating 800,000 ‘good-paying’ manufacturing jobs
In another claim about the economy, Biden claimed to have created “800,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs.”
We’ve already created, with your help, 800,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs, the fastest growth in 40 years.
Facts First: Biden’s figures are correct; however, the “good-paying” qualifier is subjective and can’t be independently verified for each of those 800,000-plus positions.
The US economy added 803,000 manufacturing jobs from Biden’s first full month in office, February 2021, through January 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The job growth rate during Biden’s first two years in office was 6.58%. The last time a comparable growth rate was higher was in 1979.
The average hourly wage in the manufacturing industry was $31.57 for all employees and $25.84 for production and non-supervisory positions in January, preliminary BLS data shows. Nationally, the average hourly wage was a projected $33.03.
From CNN’s Alicia Wallace
Biden on burger chain employees being forced to sign non-compete agreements
Biden said 30 million workers had to sign non-compete agreements, illustrating his point with an example of a cashier at a burger place being unable to cross the street to take a similar job at a restaurant that pays more money.
I should have known this, but I didn’t until two years ago. Thirty million workers had to sign non-compete agreements with the jobs they take. Thirty million. So, a cashier at a burger place can’t walk across town and take the same job at another burger place and make a few bucks more. Well, they just changed it because we exposed it. That was part of the deal, guys, look it up.
Facts First: This is partially true. Millions of rank-and-file employees and independent contractors, in addition to business executives across industries, have signed non-compete agreements that critics say suppress competition, wages and entrepreneurship. The Federal Trade Commission in January proposed a rule to ban employers from imposing those agreements on workers and to rescind all existing noncompete agreements. But are burger chain workers really subject to those noncompete agreements? It’s not likely – not anymore, anyway.
An investigation in Washington state in 2017 revealed that several fast-food chains, including Arby’s, Auntie Anne’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Carl’s Jr., Cinnabon, Jimmy John’s, and McDonald’s, had been enforcing no-poaching rules that prevented employees from moving between franchises within the same chain – not, as Biden suggested, between rival chains. By 2018, all those chains agreed to end their no-poach practices at roughly 25,000 restaurants nationwide.
From CNN’s David Goldman
Inflation fallen every month; food inflation coming down; take home pay up
Biden also addressed inflation.
Food inflation is coming down, not fast enough, but coming down. Inflation has fallen every month for the last six months, while take-home pay has gone up.
Facts First: Biden’s claims are true that inflation has come down, but take home pay has only recently started to see gains over inflation.
Food prices were up 10.4% in December 2022 from the year-before period, according to the latest available Consumer Price Index report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Food price inflation, as measured by the CPI, has slowly declined since hitting a 40-year high of 11.4% in August 2022.
Overall inflation, as measured by the CPI, was 6.5% in December 2022. The headline inflation rate has declined for six consecutive months since hitting a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022.
The CPI, which measures the average change in the prices over time of a basket of consumer goods, is one of several closely watched inflation barometers that also have showed price increases to have moderated in recent months. Within CPI and other indexes, there are various measures to gauge inflation. Most notably, “core” inflation excludes items with more volatile price increases.
Biden’s claim that take-home pay has gone up is true if you start the calculation seven months ago; “real” wages, which take inflation into account, started rising in mid-2022 as inflation slowed. However, real wages are lower today than they were both a full year ago and at the beginning of Biden’s presidency in January 2021. That’s because inflation was so high in 2021 and the beginning of 2022.
There are various ways to measure real wages. Real average hourly earnings declined 1.7% between December 2021 and December 2022, while real average weekly earnings (which factors in the number of hours people worked) declined 3.1% over that period.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Alicia Wallace
Biden on Republicans, Medicare and Social Security
Biden once again took aim at Republicans in Congress over Social Security and Medicare, accusing some of them of wanting to make changes to the programs. His remarks elicited cheers from Democrats but loud jeers from Republicans, including GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who shouted “liar.”
Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. … You know it means – if Congress doesn’t keep the programs the way they are, they would go away.”
Facts First: Biden was referring to Florida GOP Sen. Rick Scott, who last year issued “An 11 Point Plan to Rescue America.” As the president said, Scott’s proposal would sunset all federal legislation – including the two entitlement programs – every five years and require Congress to pass them again. Another GOP senator, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, last year suggested while campaigning for a third term that entitlement programs, like Social Security and Medicare, should be shifted to discretionary spending that Congress has to approve annually.
Scott’s plan didn’t make it far. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell quickly dismissed it, also saying that the GOP will not include in its agenda a bill that sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.
Also, the Republican Study Committee last year put out a budget plan that calls for making several changes to Social Security and Medicare that would amount to cutting the programs’ benefits for future senior citizens.
For instance, the conservative lawmakers proposed raising Medicare’s eligibility age to be in line with the normal retirement age for Social Security, which currently is 67 for anyone born in 1960 or later, and then indexing it to life expectancy. But they would also raise the normal retirement age for Social Security, as well as trim benefits for higher-income earners.
Biden has repeatedly said that GOP lawmakers want to cut Social Security and Medicare. The drama has flared up again in recent weeks amid the debt ceiling debate. House Republicans are demanding that lifting the borrowing cap be tied to spending reductions.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, however, reiterated in remarks on Monday that “cuts to Medicare and Social Security are off the table” in the debt ceiling discussions.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby
Defund the police
In the official Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested the Biden administration and Democrats have largely called to defund the police.
After years of Democratic attacks on law enforcement, and calls to defund the police, violent criminals roam free.
Facts First: While some Democrats have joined calls for a radical shift in police policy, including a reduction in police budgets, Biden and top congressional Democrats have not supported and even rejected calls to “defund the police.”
It’s worth noting that the slogan “defund the police” means different things to different activists – from the dissolution of police forces to partial reductions in funding.
That being said, Biden in particular has explicitly stated his opposition to abolishing or defunding the police several times.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden told CBS, “No, I don’t support defunding the police.” Rather, he said, “I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness. And, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community.”
Attacking Biden and Democrats on police funding is not a new tactic from Republicans. Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, several ads from Republican candidates attempted to create the inaccurate impression that the Democratic candidates they were targeting supported defunding the police. Some of the Republican ads simply made things up. Other ads falsely described bills the Democratic candidates have supported. Still other ads tried guilt by association, noting that the candidates have supporters who have called to defund the police but not mentioning that the candidates themselves rejected defunding the police.
From CNN’s Tara Subramaniam
Sanders on world peace
Sanders claimed that after Trump left office, Biden inherited “a world that was stable and at peace.”
Facts First: It’s obviously ridiculous to claim that there was world peace when Trump’s tenure ended, and calling the world “stable” is a subjective claim.
When Trump left the White House in 2021, there were still plenty of wars ongoing around the world – albeit not as many as under previous presidents, and very few of those conflicts directly involved American armed forces.
For instance, Trump did not end the war in Afghanistan, which was still ongoing when Biden took office. There were thousands of US troops in the country when Biden was sworn in, before he withdrew them all in 2021.
The long-running Yemeni civil war was still happening when Trump left office. (Under Trump and Obama, the US supported Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in the war through arms sales. Biden ended that policy in 2021.)
The Syrian civil war was also ongoing, though at a more isolated level than in past years. And a war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region was in full swing. The drug war in Mexico was still leading to deaths and disappearances.
Additionally, the war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region was still unresolved. The war began in 2014, but had settled into a “frozen conflict,” with Russian proxies occupying a large chunk of the eastern Donbas region, and Ukrainian troops dug into trenches. It escalated into a full-blown war when Russia invaded in February 2022, after Biden had already taken office.
From CNN’s Marshall Cohen
Sanders on the border crisis
Sanders said that the US is experiencing the “worst border crisis in American history.”
Despite Democrats’ trillions in reckless spending and mountains of debt, we now have the worst border crisis in American history.
Facts First: It’s true that the Biden administration is facing record levels of apprehensions along the border, but Democrats and Republicans have defined the crisis on their own terms.
In fiscal year 2022, US Border Patrol encountered migrants more than 2.2 million times attempting to unlawfully cross the US southern border, according to federal data, marking a new record.
Those figures include repeat crossers and reflect shifting migration patterns. For example, there has been an increasing number of Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Haitians journeying to the US-Mexico border amid deteriorating conditions at home exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. That’s posed a unique challenge to the Biden administration because the US is largely limited from removing some of those nationalities.
Republicans and Democrats each define crises differently. Republicans have argued that the increase in migrants at the border is evidence of an “open border” under President Joe Biden despite the administration still using a Trump-era Covid restriction, whereas Democrats have described it as a humanitarian crisis reflective of the poor conditions at home.
From CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez
Sanders claimed Biden inherited the fastest economic recovery
President Biden inherited the fastest economic recovery on record.
Facts First: This is partially true, but it lacks context. The US economy was bouncing back from the steepest job losses America had ever faced from the Covid shutdowns at the beginning of the pandemic.
The economy shrank at an annual adjusted rate just shy of 30% in the second quarter of 2020, the sharpest economic contraction on record.
The economy quickly recovered that summer, growing at an annualized rate of 35.3% in the third quarter of 2020, the fastest pace on record. But the pace of economic growth began to stall in the winter before Biden took office.
America’s gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 3.9% in the fourth quarter of 2020 and America lost jobs in December 2020. Biden’s stimulus bill helped juice the economy in 2021, although that helped stoke an inflation crisis caused in part by pandemic-related supply chain disruptions and exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – a war that continues to impact the global economy to this day.
From CNN’s David Goldman
This story has been updated with additional information.
A little irony anyone.
Judge expands pause of New Jersey gun law that bans firearms in casinos, parks and bars
BY ZACH SCHONFELD - 01/30/23 4:53 PM ET
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3836486-judge-expands-pause-of-new-jersey-gun-law-that-bans-firearms-in-casinos-parks-and-bars/
Florida mass shooting leaves 10 injured
BY KATLYN BRIESKORN AND DYLAN ABAD - 01/30/23 7:58 PM ET
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3836789-florida-mass-shooting-leaves-10-injured/
A little more on the Barr/Durham report.
Senate Judiciary mulls action amid fallout from Durham probe
BY REBECCA BEITSCH - 01/30/23 1:00 PM ET
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/3836162-senate-judiciary-mulls-action-amid-fallout-from-durham-probe/
The Senate Judiciary Committee is pledging to review the actions of former special counsel John Durham following reports of inappropriate handling of his probe into the investigation of former President Trump.
Recent reporting from The New York Times detailed ethical concerns during the probe that prompted numerous staff departures, including concerns over former Attorney General Bill Barr’s involvement in the investigation as well as the decision to proceed to trial with insufficient evidence.
The report also revealed that the Justice Department obscured the nature of the criminal aspect of the probe, failing to disclose that it concerned Trump’s financial dealings rather than misconduct related to the initial investigation into the former president’s ties to Russia.
“These reports about abuses in Special Counsel Durham’s investigation — so outrageous that even his longtime colleagues quit in protest — are but one of many instances where former President Trump and his allies weaponized the Justice Department,” committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a statement.
“The Justice Department should work on behalf of the American people, not for the personal benefit of any president. As we wait for the results of ongoing internal reviews, the Senate Judiciary Committee will do its part and take a hard look at these repeated episodes, and the regulations and policies that enabled them, to ensure such abuses of power cannot happen again,” he added.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to request for comment, and Durham and Barr did not respond to the Times story.
According to the report, after connecting with Italian officials who denied any involvement in relaying information for the Russian investigation, Barr expanded Durham’s authority to include criminal prosecution powers after receiving a credible tip about possible financial crimes related to Trump.
But Barr’s vague commentary left it unclear that the criminal component of the investigation was not focused on those who initiated the probe of the former president.
In other cases, subordinates questioned Durham’s efforts to gain evidence on the leader of a George Soros-connected organization and Barr’s public comments about the investigation.
“The evidence shows that we are not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here,” Barr said in April of 2020.
Staff also bristled as Durham prepared to prosecute Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who represented Democrats as they met with the FBI during the probe into Trump’s Russia dealings. Two employees said Durham didn’t have enough solid evidence to bring charges, and ultimately left the team. Sussmann would later be acquitted in a court defeat for Durham.
Think there's enough holders (longs) to vote down the doubling of shares to a billion and compensate executive officers some more? Probably not.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/886128/000155837023000700/fcel-20230426xpre14a.htm
THURSDAY, APRIL 6, 2023
1:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time
The 2023 Annual Meeting of Stockholders will be a completely “virtual meeting”, conducted via live audio webcast on the Internet. You will be able to attend the Annual Meeting as well as vote and submit your questions and examine our stockholder list during the live audio webcast of the meeting by visiting www.virtualshareholdermeeting.com/FCEL2023 and entering the 16-digit control number included in our notice of internet availability of the proxy materials, on your proxy card or in the instructions that accompanied your proxy materials.
ITEMS OF BUSINESS
1. To elect seven directors to serve until the 2024 Annual Meeting of Stockholders and until their successors are duly elected and qualified;
2. To ratify the selection of KPMG LLP as FuelCell Energy, Inc.’s independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending October 31, 2023;
3. To approve the amendment and restatement of the FuelCell Energy, Inc. 2018 Employee Stock Purchase Plan;
4. To approve the amendment and restatement of the FuelCell Energy, Inc. Second Amended and Restated 2018 Omnibus Incentive Plan;
5. To approve the amendment of the FuelCell Energy, Inc. Certificate of Incorporation, as amended, to increase the number of authorized shares of common stock of FuelCell Energy, Inc. from 500,000,000 shares to 1,000,000,000 shares (the “Increase Authorized Shares Proposal”);
6. To approve, on a non-binding advisory basis, the compensation of FuelCell Energy, Inc.’s named executive officers as set forth in the “Executive Compensation” section of the accompanying Proxy Statement;
7. To vote, on a non-binding advisory basis, on the frequency with which future advisory votes on the compensation of FuelCell Energy, Inc.’s named executive officers will be conducted; and
8. To transact such other business as may properly come before the Annual Meeting or any adjournment thereof.
RECORD DATE
Holders of record of our common stock on February 10, 2023, the record date, are entitled to notice of, and to vote at, the Annual Meeting.
MATERIALS TO REVIEW
This booklet contains our Notice of Annual Meeting and our Proxy Statement, which fully describes the business we will conduct at the Annual Meeting.
PROXY VOTING
It is important that your shares are represented and voted at the Annual Meeting. Please vote your shares according to the instructions under “How to Vote” in the Proxy Summary.
ADMISSION TO THE 2023 ANNUAL MEETING
To attend the 2023 Annual Meeting, please follow the “Meeting Attendance” instructions in the Proxy Summary.
By Order of the Board of Directors,
Graphic
JOSHUA DOLGER
Executive Vice President, General Counsel,
and Corporate Secretary
Profitable it sure is. Including our own businesses and political factions. Their abilities and usage have only been used by others against us.
One of the main reasons for bitcoin survivability and growth in my opinion. Criminal activity is the number one user, and it should be outlawed period, it's only making billions of losses worse. An article from last week, nobody is safe, and it is stated that most people and business has been hacked, the ones who haven't just don't know it. I know I have had frustration over all the security processes having to be done these days, privacy issues and the like, but have to take deep breaths and know it's only going to get worse. There really needs to be more awareness of this issue, way too many have no clue. (No idea why link has future date, maybe it got hacked.)
How Hackers Outwit All Efforts to Stop Them: "It's a Cyber Pandemic."
BY DAVID H. FREEDMAN ON 01/18/23 AT 5:00 AM EST
https://www.newsweek.com/2023/01/27/how-hackers-outwit-all-efforts-stop-them-its-cyber-pandemic-1774458.html
TECH & SCIENCE
CYBERSECURITY
HACKING
On the morning of January 11, the Federal Aviation Administration halted all airline takeoffs in the U.S. because of a glitch in a software system critical to flight safety. "There is no evidence of a cyberattack at this point," said the White House press secretary. But would officials know it if it were? And would they disclose it to the public?
Those are fair questions, given that in 2015 it took the FAA two months to disclose that hackers had planted malware in one of its computer networks. The federal government keeps tight wraps on what it knows about threats to American businesses and individuals.
If hackers did indeed attack the FAA, it would be business as usual in the world of cybersecurity. On the same day, according to research firm Cybersecurity Ventures, hackers posted more than 120,000 records stolen from the San Francisco Bay Area transit system's police department, took down the websites of eight major Danish banks, including the central bank, and broke into military and government agencies in several Southeast Asian and European countries. They also hijacked the cloud-computing platforms of Microsoft and Salesforce, making off with millions of dollars worth of untraceable cryptocurrency.
That's just on January 11. Every day of the year, hackers unleash a stream of major attacks against government agencies, companies and individuals. Last year, they took down emergency services, threatened regional power grids, disrupted patient care at major hospitals, brought trains to a halt, took over radio stations to sow panic among listeners with a fake crisis, set off air-raid alerts and attacked U.S. nuclear scientists. So far this year, hackers broke into the communications firm Slack and stole email addresses of more than 200 million Twitter users.
FAA shutdown is "wake-up call" for cyberattacks: Ex-NATO chiefREAD MOREFAA shutdown is "wake-up call" for cyberattacks: Ex-NATO chief
More than 70 million Americans are hit by cybercrimes every year, according to computer security research firm Purplesec, often leaving people defrauded, spied on or publicly humiliated by having private photos and other information published online. More than two-thirds of small businesses have been victimized by hackers at least once. Some experts believe that just about every large organization and government agency has been breached—that's how enormous and constant cyberattacks have become. Last year, 22 billion personal and business records were exposed in hacks on U.S. companies, according to a study by security consultancy Flashpoint—and that doesn't include breaches that were unidentified or unreported, which may well represent the majority of hacks.
As bad as it's been, it's getting worse. According to security firms that track attacks, the number of breaches, which had been growing by 15 percent a year, jumped by 38 percent in 2022.
There are many reasons why hackers seem to have the upper hand. For one, they've become institutionalized, with backers such as Russia, China and other nations providing shelter and funding to massive ranks of hackers in their countries. The targets are also growing more numerous, as billions of people hook up tens of billions of new gadgets to the internet, each providing an entry point to computer networks. And powerful new hacker tricks and tools—some of them powered by artificial intelligence—are springing up almost daily on the black market.
As a result, hackers now have the ability to flood computers everywhere with an endless stream of potent attacks. "We're talking about trillions of events," says Mark Ostrowski, who heads engineering for major computer security vendor Check Point Software Technologies.
Most people are vaguely aware that computer crime is rife but have no idea how severe the problem has become and how quickly it's expanding. Many attacks are kept under wraps, keeping the problems out of sight. Even CEOs of major companies sometimes lack a clear idea what their industries are facing. Last year, the newly created U.S. Office of the National Cyber Director held a forum to brief CEOs on some classified intelligence on cyber threats. The CEOs' reaction: "Complete shock," says principal deputy national cyber director Kemba Walden.
The U.S. government, with all its cyber warfare prowess, has failed to protect its own citizens and businesses, for whom the prospect of relief is nowhere in sight. "It's a cyber pandemic," Ostrowski says, "and it's going to get worse before it gets better."
Deadly Threats
It wasn't supposed to be like this. Two decades ago, experts wrote off hacking as temporary growing pains of the nascent internet. Security professionals were slowly but surely getting hacking under control with improved tools and practices. "The vast majority of hackers do not have the necessary skills and knowledge" to do much damage, said a 2004 report from the U.S. Institute of Peace, a federal bipartisan think tank, and "the ones who do, generally do not seek to wreak havoc."
Where have these assurances left us today? "We have a saying in the industry," says Marc Rivero, a senior security researcher with cybersecurity software firm Kaspersky Labs. "Ninety-five percent of organizations have been breached, and the other five percent just don't know they were breached." The bottom line, agree most experts, is that no computer, or any device or machine with a computer chip, can today be considered fully safe.
Security professionals, forever playing catch-up, seem helpless to get the problem under control. "The criminals are two steps ahead of us," says David Maimon, director of the Evidence-based Cybersecurity Research Group at Georgia State University as well as a researcher with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "If they want in, they'll be in."
The event that most epitomizes the degree to which hackers can run the table was the 2020 attack on SolarWinds, a software firm. Hackers breached the company's computer networks and planted malware—software that does bad things—in its software products. When clients downloaded SolarWind's product updates, they got the malware, too. "When the software is released, all the computers that use it are immediately compromised," says Kaspersky's Rivero.
The SolarWinds attack gave hackers access to the computers of so many companies and even government agencies that the hack is considered by many experts to be the most damaging ever. (Of course, there may be other damaging attacks that were never made public.) Security experts worry that infiltrating software companies as a way to get at their clients is a new strategy that will spawn copycat crimes. "That's going to be a key target for criminals in 2023, for sure," says Rivero.
The SolarWinds incident is generally attributed to hackers supported by Russian intelligence agencies. Russia has become a bustling center of hackerdom, in part because the Russian government uses hacking extensively for purposes of warfare. That has been the case in its Ukraine invasion, as well as for spying on and otherwise harming the U.S. and other countries it considers hostile. China and North Korea, too, and to a lesser extent Iran, are known to have extensive state-supported hacking capabilities for disrupting enemies, as does the U.S.
In some cases these countries are working with sophisticated cyber criminals as well as cultivating their own hacker armies. Russia has been especially tolerant of its thriving ranks of cyber criminals, as long as they focus on targets in other countries. "I don't think there's evidence of Putin directing criminals to commit ransomware attacks, but there hasn't been much interest there in handing over criminals who do," says Troy Hunt, a security consultant who founded the prominent personal-data-breach-tracking website "Have I Been Pwned?" .
These developments are raising the concerns about potential attacks on power grids, air traffic control systems and food supply chains, among other targets, potentially with severe consequences. "Targets include nuclear power plants, medical devices, autonomous vehicles and industrial control systems," says Mordechai Guri, who heads research and development at Ben Gurion University's Cyber Security Research Center in Israel. "In extreme cases, they could cause deaths. You can imagine the effect of a cyberattack on autonomous vehicles."
Guri is referring to the self-driving cars that are already being tested in several cities and states in the U.S. and elsewhere. Many medical devices, from pacemakers to powerful MRI machines, have some form of network connectivity, as do some traffic lights, elevators and many other devices and machines that could in theory be commandeered to deadly effect. Hacker-inflicted disruptions to the energy grid could kill thousands if they happened during periods of extreme cold or heat.
Computer hacks have already begun to prove deadly. In 2020, hackers shut down computer systems at Düsseldorf University Hospital in Germany, disrupting emergency care, among other functions. In the ensuing chaos a critically ill patient died before the hospital could arrange for a transfer. Many other institutions have had close calls after being hit by hackers, including Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, Canada's largest pediatric hospital, which last year lost its ability to access medical tests and imaging or use its phones in a hacker attack. When Long Island's Suffolk County government offices were hit, the automated 911 system went down, forcing emergency personnel to take information down by hand, and leaving them unable to track callers' locations.
A long list of attacks with potentially deadly consequences have taken place in the past two years. Air-raid sirens went off in Israel last year when hackers breached the nation's public-defense system. A month later hackers took over Ukrainian radio stations to falsely report that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was mortally stricken. In 2021 hackers took over computers at a water-treatment facility in Florida and contaminated the water supply, a life-threatening attack that was barely discovered in time to prevent disaster. A few months later hackers forced the shutdown of the largest oil pipeline in the U.S. for a week until the pipeline operator paid the hackers $4.4 million to back off. Last year more than 100 attacks were launched against various elements of the U.S. power grid.
It's no coincidence the attacks are getting more numerous and scarier. In addition to gaining support from Russia and other hostile nations, hackers worldwide are becoming better organized and equipped, often functioning more like an interconnected global industry than scattered bands of criminals. "There is now an elaborate, deep and sophisticated hacking supply chain," notes Georgia State's Maimon. "Some write malware, some distribute it, some use it, some sell the results."
Most of the transactions happen over the Darknet, the portion of the internet that is encrypted to hide its websites from search engines and anyone without the right passwords. Hacking groups with names like Fancy Bear, Conti and Killnet advertise on the Darknet to sell their ill-gotten data and access, recruit other hackers, buy tools and inside information, and sell their services as cyber mercenaries. "Some hackers will buy affiliation with a group for $50,000 or more, plus a cut of the revenues," says Maimon. Transactions typically happen via Bitcoin, which makes them difficult to trace.
Domestic terrorists could take out U.S. power grid—and attacks have startedREAD MOREDomestic terrorists could take out U.S. power grid—and attacks have started
Business analytics firm Thoughtlab reports that the number of breaches has been increasing at an annual rate of 15 percent, but new data from Check Point indicates the growth rate jumped to 38 percent in 2022. About 200 ransomware attacks are reported each month in the U.S. on average,
according to data from Secureworks, which sells computer security tools. Among the more prominent victims of ransomware hacks reported in December alone: the California Department of Finance; the Little Rock, Arkansas, school system; the British Guardian newspaper; and hospitals in Maryland, Texas and Florida. Many more such attacks likely go unreported because victims choose not to go public.
A Plague of Cybercrime
While the specter of attacks that can kill people and disrupt society may make more ordinary, financially oriented cybercrime seem tame in comparison, the sheer size of the problem is becoming an economic nightmare that's starting to affect lives of people around the world.
Hackers, for instance, are becoming adept at intercepting corporate email and changing invoices so that money is sent to their own accounts. "Those attacks are a fast-growing threat," says Mike McLellan, Secureworks director of intelligence. "It's costing companies billions."
And while attacks on companies are the most potentially lucrative, hackers are also all too happy to pick our individual pockets, one by one, usually by tricking us into giving them the passwords to our bank, credit card and other financial accounts. Their routines are growing increasingly ingenious and convincing, notes Adam Wandt, vice chair for technology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Wandt describes how a friend of his was fooled by a piece of malware into calling a phony customer support number for the financial service he uses; the ensuing "help" drained his life savings. "Even sophisticated people get tripped up all the time by these schemes," says Wandt. "I know people with doctorates in criminal fraud who get taken in."
In the past, computer security experts at least didn't have to worry about hackers getting into some of the world's most potentially dangerous equipment, including nuclear power plants and missile systems. That's because these systems, along with computers critical to national defense, are usually "air-gapped"—that is, they lack any sort of wireless or wired connection to the rest of the world. Only someone standing next to these machines could have access to them.
Guri and colleagues, in a paper published in December in Cornell University's ArXiv, demonstrated how hackers could use electromagnetic waves not unlike radio signals to alter the programming of air-gapped machines. The technique is highly complex, and requires physical access at some earlier point—presumably on the part of a bribed or blackmailed insider—to implant malware simply by briefly inserting a USB thumb drive, for example. But those requirements aren't beyond the capabilities of hostile governments. And as experts at Kaspersky Labs have noted, hackers might be able to direct tiny drones close enough to a target machine to help set up an attack.
To be sure, security experts are continually coming up with new tools and techniques for detecting and stopping cyberattacks. But these advances never stop hackers for long. "People ask if we're winning the war against hackers, but it's like asking if we're winning the war against fingernails," says security expert Hunt. "You can cut them back, but they just keep growing."
Hackers have easy access to software tools with names like Doppelpaymer, CobaltStrike and Ninja that can automatically sniff out weaknesses in computer systems and sneak in to plant "back doors" that let the hackers do their dirty work without being detected. When security experts foil these tools, hackers immediately come up with new types of attack. "No matter how much innovation we see on the security side, the hackers are always racing to figure out ways to compromise it," says John Jay College's Wandt. "We keep seeing new, outside-the-box attacks that catch us by surprise. Today there isn't a single piece of security software that hackers can't get around."
Georgia State's Maimon warns that while cyber criminals are getting better at their tricks, computer users aren't getting better at seeing through them. Maimon ran a study in which a group of users were trained on how to avoid falling for phishing schemes, and then two weeks later he sent them all a phony email note with a suspect link that could have easily led to malware. A quarter of the people in the study clicked on it. Meanwhile, hackers only need to wring a click from one person to infiltrate an organization of thousands.
Part of the problem, says Maimon, is that there is a serious shortage of highly skilled people on the security side. Cybersecurity Ventures reports that the number of unfilled computer security positions rose from one million in 2013 to 3.5 million in 2021, and is expected to stay high through 2025. That leaves badly understaffed security groups facing off against millions of hackers around the world, many of whom are no less than brilliant. One reason for the imbalance is pay. "The good guys can't make as much as the bad guys," says Maimon.
Machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), is starting to lend a hand to the security side, notes Check Point's Ostrowski. "It's our only hope for keeping up with the trillions of attacks we see," he says.
There's just one problem, he adds: Hackers are turning to machine learning tools, too. "We're already seeing an AI arms race in computer security," he says. Check Point recently demonstrated how hackers might already be enlisting "ChatGPT," a popular, publicly accessible AI system that can understand plain-English requests in order to come up with everything from slick-sounding essays to fully functioning software code. Check Point's researchers showed the program can also create multiple types of new hacking attacks such as malware and phishing emails.
The U.S. government is trying to step up its game in foiling hackers by, among other things, creating the Office of the National Cyber Director in the White House in 2021. So far, the office's main activity has been holding the executive forums, such as one recently aimed at the electric vehicle industry. Principal deputy director Walden wouldn't provide details of the threats, exactly how the agency will help bolster defenses against them, or how much money will be spent on the effort. But she noted the agency would be issuing a public report soon, and is planning to develop a safe-computing information campaign. "We want to provide that education piece for everyone from preschoolers to grandmothers," she says.
Follow the Money
Hackers have an enormous incentive to keep at it: Stolen information is valuable. That's why Australia has suffered two major hacking attacks since September, one involving the theft of the drivers-license-related personal data of half the nation's drivers, the other lifting the health records of 40 percent of the population. "That means hackers know about millions of people's drug and alcohol dependence, abortions and sexually-transmitted diseases, among other highly personal information," says Hunt.
The hackers didn't do it out of sheer maliciousness. They did it because they can make an enormous fortune selling it—to other criminals, for example, who can use the personal information to pull off identity theft, blackmail and other crimes. Or they can threaten to publish it as part of a ransomware play. "The basic idea is to get the data first, and then figure out later what it might be worth," says Secureworks' McLellan.
Although the value of stolen data depends on a number of factors, Secureworks has tracked the going prices on the Darknet for some of the data stolen in recent months around the world: a bundle of 2,000 U.S. tax returns goes for $3,000; a batch of credit card data goes for $20 to $100 per card; 487 million WhatsApp phone numbers fetches $16,500; and passwords to the computer systems of a major U.S. corporation go for $2,000. McLellan adds that if stolen information includes proprietary technical details on a high-tech product, then Russia, China and other less-scrupulous national governments are likely to be eager buyers—if they didn't sponsor the hack in the first place.
Pretty much anything that's kept on a computer can be up for grabs to the right buyer. In December two men in New York were arrested on charges of conspiring with Russian hackers to break into the taxi dispatch system at Kennedy Airport, allowing them to sell front-of-the-line access to taxi drivers for $10 a pop. They collected as much as $10,000 before they were nabbed.
Meanwhile, the range of hackable targets is rapidly expanding daily, especially thanks to the growing number of devices that are getting hooked up to wireless networks. As more and more everyday devices from door locks to cars to cameras become internet-connected, they can be weaponized to track, rob or cause physical damage. "We all have an average of seven devices hooked up to the Internet, and it's more all the time," says Maimon. Home security cameras, smart watches, car information systems—all have suffered prominent hacks, and far more hacks of these devices have likely been left undiscovered or unreported.
As the number of connected devices grows, so will the number of hacks, and the types of information that can be stolen. One new vulnerability that came to light in December was the discovery by a researcher that Google Home smart speakers can be taken over by hackers not only to listen into conversations, but also to gain remote access to smart door locks and other home devices that are networked with the speakers. "If it's online, it's vulnerable," says Maiamon.
More interconnected gadgets generates more data that needs to be stored remotely in the cloud—vast forests of computer servers operated by
Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants. While those companies provide access to advanced security tools that can protect that data, the software developers who make use of the cloud don't always properly deploy them, leaving enormous stores of aggregated data less than fully protected and ripe for hackers. "Thanks to the cloud, it's never been easier to quickly build applications and screw them up so they're not safe," says Hunt.
In the end, contends Hunt, the only safe piece of data today is data that isn't kept on any computer, anywhere. "We need to start minimizing our digital footprints," he says. "Every time you sign up for a service, they want your phone number and birthdate. We have to stop giving away that information."
The public is not up in arms over the high risk of hacking because most people aren't aware of how large those risks have become and how little can be done to reduce them. Experts and the government can continue to plug the new security holes that hackers will continue to find, as they have for decades, and to try to track hackers down and bring them to justice. In most cases, this is a lost cause. For one thing, it is difficult to trace attacks back through a vast global forest of internet connections. And Russian, Chinese and millions of other hackers are well protected from international law enforcement. "It's the nature of the internet that the attackers can be anywhere," says Hunt. "The chances of recourse are none."
And the government and experts can and will keep telling people to have better passwords that they never share, to be more careful about what they click on in email notes, and to use extra sign-in precautions such as those that require facial or fingerprint recognition or send a verification note to your phone or a special "authenticator" app. But most people don't want the inconvenience of these precautions. When companies or government agencies try to force people to take them, people often find ways around them. "You end up with 'shadow IT,' like when people use Gmail instead of company email to avoid the inconvenience of the extra protections," says Ostrowski.
The route to full computer security may in the end be less about plugging holes in our defenses, and more about unplugging. But if that's the case, then the picture isn't likely to improve any time soon. How many of us are really ready to swear off the online world and smart devices? Not many, according to analytics firm Statista, which reports that the number of devices connected to the Internet, currently at just under 15 billion, is expected to double over the next eight years. The future is looking more and more chaotic and dangerous.
Lot more serious than that.
Rightwing group pours millions in ‘dark money’ into US voter suppression bid
Tax filings reveal advocacy arm of Heritage Foundation spent $5m on lobbying in 2021 to block voting rights in battleground states
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/13/heritage-foundation-voter-suppression-lobbying-election-action-plan
The fight for democracy is supported by
guardian.org
About this content
Brendan Fischer and Ed Pilkington
Fri 13 Jan 2023 05.00 EST
The advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative thinktank based in Washington, spent more than $5m on lobbying in 2021 as it worked to block federal voting rights legislation and advance an ambitious plan to spread its far-right agenda calling for aggressive voter suppression measures in battleground states.
Previously unreported 2021 tax filings from Heritage Action for America, which operates as the foundation’s activist wing, shows that it spent $5.1m on contracting outside lobbying services. The outlay comes on top of $560,000 the group invested in its own in-house federal lobbying efforts that year, as well as registered lobbying by Heritage Action staffers in at least 24 states.
The 990 tax filing was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with the Guardian. It points to the pivotal role that Heritage Action is increasingly playing in shaping the rules that govern US democracy.
The efforts help explain the unprecedented tidal wave of restrictive voting laws that spread across Republican-controlled states in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. The Brennan Center reported that more voter suppression laws were passed in 2021 than in any year since it began monitoring voting legislation more than a decade ago.
The expenditures also signal a dramatic increase in Heritage Action’s advocacy activities. In 2020, Heritage Action had reported no spending at all on outside lobbying.
An attendee at the Poor People's Campaign march on Washington on 18 June 2022.
Republicans filed record number of anti-voting lawsuits in 2022 – report
Read more
Heritage Action, whose board includes the Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, is set up as a 501(c)4 under the US tax code which exempts it from paying federal taxes. It operates as a “dark money” group, avoiding disclosing the sources of its total annual revenue of over $18m.
In the past two years the organization through its public messaging has echoed Donald Trump’s lie that US elections are marked by rampant fraud. A private plan prepared by Heritage Action last year set out a two-year, $24m “election integrity” strategy.
The plan, obtained by Documented, proposed a two-pronged approach that would work to block moves by Democrats in Congress to bolster voting rights while at the same time pressing Republican-controlled states to impose restrictions on access to the ballot box. It said: “Where Democrats hold power, we must defend against bad policy. Where conservatives and our allies are in power, we must advance changes that protect the lawful votes of Americans.”
The Heritage Action plan, which was first reported by the New York Times, is being published by the Guardian for the first time.
Part of Heritage Action’s two-year strategy is to promote what it calls “model election laws”, focusing initially on eight battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin. In a private meeting with donors in Tucson, Arizona, in 2021, the group’s executive director, Jessica Anderson, boasted about the role Heritage Action had played in pressing Republican-controlled legislatures to impose strict restrictions on voting, including limits on mail-in voting and early voting days.
In a video of that meeting obtained by Documented, Anderson told the donors that the group acted “quickly and quietly”, bragging that “honestly nobody noticed” their behind-the-scenes influence. Heritage Action staff have registered to lobby in at least two dozen states.
The US Capitol building.
Voting rights in 2023: what are the key issues for US democracy?
Read more
The laser-like focus on key swing states like Georgia appears to have had an impact. The New York Times found that one-third of the 68 voting bills filed in Georgia in 2021 contained policy measures and language that aligned closely with proposals from Heritage Action.
The group has publicly claimed that it had a hand in advancing 11 voting bills in at least eight states in 2021, though in some cases legislation was passed in only one chamber or went on to be vetoed by the state’s governor.
Heritage Foundation, under the auspices of its elections supremo Hans von Spakovsky, curates an “election fraud database”. It claims to expose the errors, omissions and mistakes made by election officials, but it presents incomplete and misleading information and underscores how exceptionally rare fraud is within the US system.
Its records stretch back 40 years, a period in which billions of votes have been cast. Yet the database records only 1,402 “proven instances of voter fraud” – a “molecular fraction” of votes cast nationwide, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The newly-disclosed tax filings also show that Heritage Action ramped up its spending on advertising as it sought to influence lawmakers and the public around its controversial voting agenda. In 2021, the organization reported paying $6.1m to outside contractors for “marketing and advertising” – a sharp rise from $1.8m the previous year.
Among the top contractors employed by Heritage Action was CRC Advisors, the consulting firm tied to Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society who is best known for his decades-long campaign to pack federal courts with rightwing judges. CRC Advisors was paid over $797,000 for “marketing and advertising” in 2021.
Some of that ad spending was targeted in Georgia. After that state’s 2021 restrictive voting law caused a backlash from businesses and led Major League Baseball to move the All-Star Game from Georgia to Colorado, Heritage Action spent nearly $1m on TV ads defending the law aired on CNBC and local TV stations.
The supreme court at night with an upside down American flag
Conservative donors pour ‘dark money’ into case that could upend US voting law
Read more
The group also spent nearly $500,000 on Georgia TV and digital ads during the MLB All-Star Game, and spent at least $700,000 more on ads supporting the Georgia bill’s passage.
On the federal level, Heritage Action also ran ads in West Virginia, Arizona, Montana and New Hampshire urging the Democratic senators in those states to oppose reforming the filibuster to pass democracy reform legislation with a simple majority. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Anderson said of potential filibuster changes at the April 2021 donor summit.
Heritage Action was formed in 2010 out of the rightwing policy empire embodied in the Heritage Foundation, which dates back to 1973. The foundation was created by Paul Weyrich, a richly networked conservative who wanted to inculcate small government, anti-regulation ideology at both federal and state level.
From the start, restricting access to voting was a core part of Weyrich’s mission. In 1980 he infamously articulated his thinking by saying: “I don’t want everybody to vote … Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
This article was produced in partnership with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project. Brendan Fischer is a campaign finance specialist with Documented
Happy Jan 6th.
"
My God. https://t.co/0na34om9Wi
— Gen Michael Hayden (@GenMhayden) January 6, 2023
6-year-old boy in police custody after shooting teacher in Virginia in non-accidental shooting, police chief says
By Amanda Musa and Jennifer Feldman, CNN
Published 6:05 PM EST, Fri January 6, 2023
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/us/newport-news-virginia-shooting/index.html
—
A 6-year-old boy is in police custody after he shot a teacher at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia, Friday afternoon, according to Newport News Police Chief Steve Drew.
“The individual is a 6-year-old student. He is right now in police custody,” Drew said. “We have been in contact with our commonwealth attorney and some other entities to help us best get services to this young man.”
Students and police gather outside of Richneck Elementary School after a shooting, Friday, January 6, 2023, in Newport News, Virginia.
Students and police gather outside of Richneck Elementary School after a shooting, Friday, January 6, 2023, in Newport News, Virginia.
Billy Schuerman/The Virginian-Pilot/AP
During a news conference Friday evening, Drew said the female teacher – who is in her 30s – was shot inside a classroom and added that “this was not an accidental shooting.”
Drew says there was an altercation between the teacher and the student before a single round was fired.
The teacher’s injuries are considered life-threatening at this time, Drew said. Earlier Friday, Drew said the teacher was in critical condition.
Richneck Elementary School will be closed Monday, according to Newport News Public Schools Superintendent, Dr. George Parker.
I run Windows 11 Pro and a VPN
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-configure-bitlocker-encryption-windows-11
How to configure BitLocker encryption on Windows 11
By Mauro Huculak published 22 days ago
You can use BitLocker encryption for extra data security. Here's how to enable the feature on Windows 11.
On Windows 11, BitLocker adds an extra layer of security with encryption to protect your device and files from unauthorized access. When using encryption, the feature scrambles the data on the drive to make it unreadable for anyone without the correct decryption key (your account password).
The BitLocker security feature is available on Windows 11 Pro, Enterprise, and Education editions. However, on Windows 11 Home, you can use "device encryption," a limited version of BitLocker. It works identically to the full version but without many advanced management settings and capabilities, such as "BitLocker To Go." Also, when using device encryption, all the drives will encrypt automatically, while the full version of BitLocker allows you to choose the storage using encryption.
This guide will walk you through the steps to set up device encryption with BitLocker on your computer.
We're pretty much in a cyber war with everything and it's getting worse. 2021 saw an increase of 64% with amount of dollars stole.
And this one, with some more examples of "false equivalent" fallacies encouraged and nourished by the political malfeasance. Inflicting death and suffering even upon our children with their positions of influence, all for their own narcissistic power control.
HEALTH
Growing vaccine hesitancy fuels measles, chickenpox resurgence in U.S.
Anti-vaccine sentiment has increased since the pandemic, driven by politicization around the coronavirus vaccine
Image without a caption
By Lena H. Sun
December 26, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EST
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/12/26/vaccine-hesitancy-measles-chickenpox-polio-flu/
This article is free to access.
The Washington Post is providing this news free to all readers as a public service.
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A rapidly growing measles outbreak in Columbus, Ohio — largely involving unvaccinated children — is fueling concerns among health officials that more parent resistance to routine childhood immunizations will intensify a resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases.
Most of the 81 children infected so far are old enough to get the shots, but their parents chose not to do so, officials said, resulting in the country’s largest outbreak of the highly infectious pathogen this year.
“That is what is causing this outbreak to spread like wildfire,” said Mysheika Roberts, director of the Columbus health department.
The Ohio outbreak, which began in November, comes at a time of heightened worry about the public health consequences of anti-vaccine sentiment, a long-standing problem that has led to drops in child immunization rates in pockets across the United States. The pandemic has magnified those concerns because of controversies and politicization around coronavirus vaccines and school vaccine mandates.
More than a third of parents with children under 18 — and 28 percent of all adults — now say parents should be able to decide not to vaccinate their children for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) to attend public schools, even if remaining unvaccinated may create health risks for others, according to new polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-care research nonprofit.
Public sentiments against vaccine mandates have grown significantly since the pandemic, said Jen Kates, a Kaiser senior vice president. A 2019 poll by the Pew Research Center found that less than a quarter of parents — and 16 percent of all adults — opposed school vaccination requirements.
The growing opposition stems largely from shifts among people who identify as or lean Republican, the Kaiser survey found, with 44 percent saying parents should be able to opt out of those childhood vaccines — more than double the 20 percent who felt that way in 2019.
Adam Moore, a father of three in the Detroit suburbs, said none of his children — 9, 12 and 17 and enrolled in private school — have received routine childhood immunizations, let alone vaccines for the coronavirus or flu. He values personal liberty and says the government has no right telling people what to do with their bodies.
“I find it a hard argument when the government says we’re all for individual liberty on abortion rights and all this other stuff, but when it comes to vaccinations, there’s no such thing as ‘my body, my choice,’” said Moore, 43, an account manager for a marketing company.
Moore, who describes himself as Republican-leaning, said he does not view childhood diseases such as measles and polio, which have resurfaced in recent years, as threats. But if the deadly Ebola virus were circulating, he said, he would want his children to get vaccinated.
Other parents who oppose school immunization mandates echo long-standing misinformation about vaccines that continue to spread via anti-vaccine groups.
Bianca Hernandez, a 37-year-old dog breeder in the Albuquerque metropolitan area, described concerns about the link between vaccine ingredients and autism, a view that has been extensively disproved. She said her two youngest children receive religious exemptions from school vaccination requirements.
CDC expands wastewater surveillance for polio to Michigan, Pennsylvania
Support for immunization mandates has held steady among Democrats, with 88 percent saying that children should be vaccinated to attend public schools because of the potential risk for others when they are not.
Overall, 71 percent of all adults still support school immunization requirements, compared with 82 percent in 2019.
“The situation about increasing negative sentiment about childhood vaccination is concerning, but in absolute terms, vaccines remain the social norm,” said Saad Omer, director of Yale’s Institute for Global Health and an infectious-disease expert who has studied vaccine hesitancy.
Anne Zink, chief medical officer for Alaska’s health department, said that even in a state with historically lower vaccination rates, childhood immunization rates have yet to return to their pre-pandemic levels. In the years before the pandemic, about 65 percent of Alaskan children 19 to 35 months old had completed their routine childhood immunizations. By the end of 2021, 46 percent had.
“I think there is more mistrust of the government, there’s more questioning of vaccines, and we’ve been having a harder time getting people vaccinated,” said Zink, who is also president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
A few weeks ago, Zink, an emergency room doctor, saw her first case of chickenpox when a young woman walked into the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center in Palmer covered in large, painful lesions. The woman said she and her family did not believe in vaccinations and told Zink she thought chickenpox no longer existed.
A nurse in Mount Vernon, Ohio, administers the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine in 2019. (Paul Vernon/AP)
“I was like, ‘Well, it really doesn’t when all of us choose to get vaccinated, but you aren’t vaccinated, your family’s not vaccinated, and the people you hang out with are not vaccinated. Chickenpox has been spreading in your community, and now you’re really sick,’” Zink recalled.
In the past, Zink said, herd immunity would have protected the woman against such childhood diseases. But that protection has waned as anti-vaccine sentiment grows, she said.
To distance its push for vaccination from the current political narrative, the Alaska health department recently brought back images and language from a 1960s promotion for polio vaccination. The new social media campaign uses the vintage Wellbee cartoon and rocket — “Get a booster!” — to remind people that immunization has always been part of the country’s history.
It is too early to see the effects of eroding public support for school vaccination requirements on childhood immunization rates because federal data typically lag by about two years. During the pandemic, routine vaccination rates slipped because of school closures and because children were not going to the doctor.
The growing negative attitudes about school immunization requirements are troubling for health workers. Kentucky officials are urging that people get flu shots after six children — none of whom were vaccinated — died after contracting influenza. South Carolina officials had also promoted childhood vaccinations after two chickenpox outbreaks in March — the first since 2020 — affected nearly 70 people.
A case of paralytic polio in a New York man this summer prompted worry that low childhood immunization rates and rising vaccine misinformation could result in the disease’s resurgence, decades after vaccination had eliminated it in the United States.
“There is definitely a group of parents who have shifted their attitudes,” said Jennifer Heath, immunizations program coordinator for Minnesota’s health department who works on vaccine hesitancy and outreach. “Part of it is true attitude shift. But part is a disconnection to the primary care provider, the human being who’s telling you that vaccines are important.”
School vaccination requirements are among the most effective tools to keep children healthy. All states and the District of Columbia require children to be vaccinated against certain diseases, such as measles, polio and whooping cough, to attend public school. All states grant exemptions based on medical reasons; a growing number allow religious or philosophical exemptions.
D.C. also requires students 12 and older to be vaccinated against covid-19 but has delayed enforcing the mandate until the 2023-2024 school year. California has a pending statewide student coronavirus vaccine mandate that will not take effect until after July 2023. Nearly two dozen states have some form of ban against student coronavirus vaccine mandates.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends children get two doses of MMR vaccine, with the first dose at 12 to 15 months, and the second dose between 4 and 6 years old. One dose of the vaccine is about 93 percent effective in preventing measles, one of the most infectious pathogens on the planet that can cause serious complications, including death. Two doses are about 97 percent effective at preventing the disease.
In the Ohio measles outbreak, only three of the 81 children had received a single dose of vaccine, according to state data. None were known to be fully vaccinated.
“I think some of these attitudes were here before the pandemic, and then we probably picked up some additional community members who were accepting of vaccines before but now maybe are more critical about vaccines as a result of what transpired with the coronavirus vaccine,” Roberts said.
Some of the cases occurred in Columbus’s large Somali community, the second-largest Somali population in the United States after the Minneapolis area, Roberts said. Parents have said they “intentionally delayed” giving their children the measles vaccine because of their fear of autism, she said, despite considerable research disproving any relationship between vaccines and autism. Those fears echoed similar concerns of parents in Minnesota’s Somali community during a 2017 measles outbreak that infected 75 children, mostly unvaccinated preschool kids.
Minnesota is also battling a new measles outbreak — 22 cases — as vaccine hesitancy around the MMR vaccine continues to be an issue, said Doug Schultz, spokesman for the Minnesota health department.
Officials are bracing for more cases in the coming weeks as families travel and gather indoors for the holidays. At least 29 of the Ohio children have been hospitalized, some so sick they required intensive care.
Most of the sickened children — 78 percent — are Black, 6 percent are Asian, 6 percent are White, and 4 percent are Hispanic, according to Columbus officials.
Because the measles virus is so contagious, an overall community vaccination rate of about 90 to 94 percent is needed to keep the virus from causing large outbreaks, according to infectious-disease experts. In the United States, nearly 91 percent of children have received at least one dose of the MMR vaccine by age 2. In the Columbus area, Roberts said, the measles vaccination rate is estimated at 80 to 90 percent, but health-care providers are not required to report data to Ohio’s vaccine registry.
Even if overall coverage in a community is high, measles can transmit easily in clusters of under-vaccinated or unvaccinated people. The Columbus outbreak began when one or two unvaccinated people traveled to countries where measles is still common between June and October and infected others in the community, Roberts said.
A sign warns people of measles in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York's Williamsburg neighborhood in 2019. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
In recent years, many of the measles cases reported to the CDC have occurred in underimmunized, close-knit communities, where anti-vaccine misinformation has gained a foothold. In 2019, the United States reported the highest annual number of measles cases — 1,294 — in more than 25 years; three-fourths of those cases occurred among New York’s Orthodox Jewish communities. Outbreaks have also occurred among the Amish in Ohio and Eastern European groups in the Pacific Northwest.
After consulting with counterparts in Minnesota, health officials in Ohio have been working closely with the Somali community to increase vaccination uptake without stigmatizing them. Columbus public health workers have hosted vaccine clinics at a community center and a mosque and are conducting home visits to provide shots. They have also reached out to schools, day-care centers and grocery stores about the importance of vaccination.
The efforts appear to be making a difference.
Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus recently saw a 20 percent increase in the number of parents seeking the MMR vaccine, Roberts said. The health department, too, has seen a small uptick in vaccinations.
“They are trickling in,” she said, “slowly but surely.”
A couple more supplemental articles to;
"Can politics kill you? Research says the answer increasingly is yes."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/can-politics-kill-you-research-says-the-answer-increasingly-is-yes/ar-AA15mXKd
It's not only killing, it is mass killing 100's of thousands, and is detrimentally effecting 100's of thousands more (over time, millions) with their political malfeasance.
DeSantis’s request for COVID vaccine probe denounced by health experts
BY JOSEPH CHOI - 12/26/22 6:17 PM ET
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3786927-desantiss-request-for-covid-vaccine-probe-denounced-by-health-experts/
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) petition for a grand jury investigation into COVID-19 vaccines, in which he decries the ongoing vaccine campaign as “propaganda” by the Biden administration, is drawing fierce criticism from health experts.
Physicians and public health experts say his request betrays decades of established procedure designed to ensure the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, and only serves to stoke further immunization fears.
DeSantis’s petition for a grand jury investigation was approved by the Florida Supreme Court on Thursday, clearing the way for what his office described as a probe into “wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the COVID-19 vaccine.”
The request was first made known during a roundtable discussion the Florida governor held last week, in which he condemned what he viewed as the linking of morality to pandemic mitigation methods such as staying at home in the early parts of the outbreak and getting vaccinated once the shots became available later on, and criticized federal COVID-19 guidance as being a “huge political farce.”
In his petition, DeSantis expressed suspicion over the COVID-19 vaccines’ ability to prevent transmission of the virus, as well as public statements made on the subject by officials like President Biden and outgoing chief White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci. As has been previously stated by physicians and researchers, no vaccine is 100 percent effective, but studies have consistently shown the coronavirus vaccines offer strong enough protection for recipients to prevent severe disease, hospitalization and death.
“It is impossible to imagine that so many influential individuals came to this view on their own. Rather, it is likely that individuals and companies with an incentive to do so created these perceptions for financial gain,” DeSantis suggested in his petition.
Public health experts and physicians, however, said DeSantis’s approach to scrutinizing the vaccines was flawed and counterproductive to promoting public health.
Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of public health group the de Beaumont Foundation, said DeSantis “appears to be focused on creating fear around vaccines that have been shown to be safe and effective,” rather than protecting the lives of Floridians.
“These vaccines have been tested and scrutinized more than any other vaccine, and they continue to save lives. Vaccine safety is not a partisan issue and attempting to make it one puts lives at risk,” Castrucci added.
Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at Johns Hopkins University and former principal deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said in a statement to The Hill that while there are legitimate avenues for evaluating vaccine recommendations, DeSantis’s investigation request was not an example of one.
“This is turning a matter of health and science into a political wedge issue, with the likely consequence that many people will be misled into placing themselves and their families at risk of serious illness and death,” Sharfstein said.
Other public health experts similarly disagreed with the avenue the governor has chosen for reviewing the COVID-19 vaccine guidance.
“His understanding of the facts or at least his articulation of the facts are just wrong,” Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told The Hill. Commenting shortly before the court’s decision, Benjamin said he hoped the petition was denied, as he considered such an investigation “a waste of taxpayer money and time and effort.”
“No one has either inappropriately or purposely either overstated or understated the vaccine in any way,” said Benjamin. “It’s a brand-new technology. Like any brand-new technology, you make some assumptions about what you think’s going to happen. It actually turned out to be a whole lot better than most people thought it would be.”
William Schaffner, professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University’s department of health policy and its division of infectious diseases, said he was “baffled” by DeSantis’s assertion that influential public health officials could not have come to same conclusion when it came to the vaccines.
As Schaffner noted, there are two independent panels composed of voluntary, external experts who advise federal agencies on vaccine policy. These committees are the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee at the FDA and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for which Schaffner is an ex-officio member, usually a nonvoting position within the group.
“That committee has been working for more than 60 years, and it deals with all vaccines. And it establishes the standards of practice as to who ought to receive the vaccines,” Schaffner said of the ACIP, noting committee meetings are entirely open to the public. “So, this is a rigorous, externally vetted, very critical process and it’s transparent … it is a model of open regulatory and recommending processes.”
In addition to expressing suspicion over the vaccine’s ability to prevent transmission, DeSantis further asserted that the risk of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, could possibly outweigh the benefits conferred by immunization.
Myocarditis is a rare side effect of mRNA vaccination that has been observed to be more common among young male patients. Both the ACIP and the CDC have previously determined that the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, an inflammation of the muscles surrounding the heart, is outweighed by the benefits of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
Both Benjamin and Schaffner pushed back against DeSantis’s suggestion, stating that the risk of myocarditis was in fact higher in COVID-19 infections than in coronavirus immunizations. Schaffner referred to myocarditis following vaccination as a “transient phenomenon” from which the vast majority of patients fully recovered, which has also been observed by the CDC in surveys.
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“I’ve worked for governors and mayors and there’s clearly a role for elected officials to provide the appropriate moral leadership in our communities and governance leadership,” Benjamin said. “But I think that they get in trouble when they try to practice medicine.”
“They’re smart and, you know, they can certainly give an appropriate message. But the message is not as credible when they get into the weeds and start arguing really technical details without having the background and training,” he said.
When reached for a response to some of the criticisms relayed to The Hill, DeSantis’s office referred back the roundtable discussion the governor held.
Judges are required, amongst many other things, to have a great amount of impartiality and generally speak in those terms. Even though more and more of them don't. But when they judicate, they decide who's guilty or more guilty or preside over the ones who do. And after the decision the judge has the task of determining the solutions restricted by the legal guidelines already decided and determined.
One of the biggest factors of determining the sentencing (or solutions) is in law called, "acceptance of responsibility", and degree or severity of the crimes. In which every judge uses to determine the degree of solutions and reparations that they impose. They (at least the good ones) don't use the "false equivalencies" so regularly thrown at them.
That "acceptance of responsibility" is instilled and adhered to in many other legal and social forms. Parole, probation, drug and alcohol recovery, even divorce and civil debate. No terms of any agreements or restitutions determined can be made without the elimination of false equivalencies and acceptance of responsibility to the severity of the crimes.
The abuse with false equivalencies and non acceptance of that you continue to be inclined to do are only contributing to the decline of realistic solutions, and definitely not dealing with the reality of it all. "Both sides same" ideal is hogwash and only perpetrating the failures of your argument.
The time of debate over "both sides do it" and determining solutions to the "equal" differences are long gone. Any viable "solutions" of the equal sides problem years gone by have also changed with the times. Many of the previous solutions of civility and workability will only fail and have failed.
Ex: Putin says ready to negotiate, West and Ukraine not. Relates to or implies that "they are both responsible for the division [faced] both perpetuate it...".
Solving problems (coming up with solutions) is accepting the cause and determining the equation from the facts.
https://www.developgoodhabits.com/false-equivalence/#:~:text=False%20equivalencies
In general, drawing comparisons between things can be useful. However, comparisons are not always apt and we sometimes end up drawing comparisons between things that are actually not alike.
A false equivalence is a type of logical fallacy in which a person attempts to draw an equivalence between two things based on the presence of a few shared features when those two things are not alike in the relevant respects. False equivalencies are a type of fallacy because they exaggerate the similarities or downplay the differences between two or more things in order to draw some kind of comparison.
False equivalencies are a broad category of fallacies and can be used to draw comparison between many types of things. False equivalencies are especially common in debates on ethics, where they are used to draw moral equivalences between two things.
What You Will Learn [show]
What Makes an Equivalence “False”?
Let’s take a look at a simple example of a false equivalence.
“Dogs have tails and feet, and cats have tails and feet. Therefore, dogs are equivalent to cats.”
It is obvious to see why this argument falls flat. Simply the fact that two things might have similar properties does not mean they are equivalent in all respects. The fact that both dogs and cats have tails and feet in no way guarantees that they are equivalent or even alike in any other way.
The above argument is intentionally absurd to help identify the fallacy. But it can be hard to spot false equivalencies in the wild. Consider this argument:
“Taxation is morally equivalent to theft because they both involve taking property with the threat of violence.”
Bob is drawing a moral equivalence between theft and taxation because they share some similar features; e.g they both involve someone taking something from you with either an implicit or explicit threat of violence.
However, one could argue that this argument commits a false equivalence because theft and taxation are not similar in the relevant respects. Theft involves taking without agreement or without compensation. Taxation is something decided on by a democratic government and you are compensated by the things that the taxes pay for. The two things are different enough that they are not actually morally equivalent.
In general, an equivalence is “false” when:
The argument exaggerates how similar two things are for the purposes of drawing a comparison: The two things being compared might not actually have as much in common as the arguer asserts.
The similar features being focused on are not relevant to the conclusion being drawn: A common variant is to focus on similar elements that are irrelevant to the larger point being drawn.
The argument focuses on similar features of two things while ignoring relevant differences that make them dissimilar: Very often, false equivalence arguments focus heavily on similar features while conveniently ignoring important differences that may invalidate the comparison.
The argument compares two things that are similar but on completely different orders of magnitude: For example, an argument comparing two things that are conceptually similar but vastly different in scope and context might be a false equivalence.
Whether or not the two things being compared are similar enough in the relevant respects depends on the context of the specific debate. For instance, in a discussion about global slavery in general, it may be appropriate to draw some equivalencies between the experiences of white slaves and black slaves. However, in the context of a discussion about US slavery specifically, drawing such an equivalence may not be justified.
The basic idea behind a false equivalence is captured by the common phrase “you can’t compare apples to oranges.”
Logical Form of False Equivalences
Here is the standard logical form of a false equivalence fallacy.
A and B share properties a, b, and, c
Therefore, A and B also share properties d, e, or, f.
Alternatively, in the case of moral equivalencies, the form looks something like this:
Actions/Persons X and Y share some features
Therefore, X and Y are equally good/equally bad
When put into symbolic form, it is easy to see why this argument pattern is invalid. The mere presence of similarities between two things is in no way a justification to assert that those two things are equivalent. Additionally, the fact that two actions might have superficial similarities does not mean they are morally equivalent, as the context and significance of those actions can differ.
Fallacies of equivalence are not so much fallacies of logic as they are rhetorical fallacies. False equivalences are a common rhetorical trick used to present two viewpoints as equally reasonable when one position is clearly deficient. This kind of “both sides-ism” is particularly pernicious because it trains us to ignore relevant differences between things when convenient.
False equivalencies are often combined with other fallacies. For example, they often come with strawman fallacies by distorting an opponent’s position to draw an erroneous comparison.
5 Examples of False Equivalence Fallacies
1. Gun Control
A very common false equivalence in debates about gun control attempts to equate all kinds of objects that can cause violence as fundamentally the same:
“We can’t ban guns just because they can be used to hurt people. After all, cars can be used to hurt people, so if we ban guns then we would have to ban cars too!”
This argument is fallacious because it draws a false equivalence between guns and cars based simply on the fact that they can be used to hurt people. True, both cars and guns can hurt people. The main difference is that guns are designed specifically to kill whereas cars are not.
Moreover, there is a lot of evidence that a high prevalence of guns is associated with a high incidence of violent crime. The same is not true of cars.
2. Discussions About Racism
False equivalencies are often deployed in discussions about racism as a way to minimize and deflect away from the experiences and suffering of oppressed groups, or to deny that systemic racism against minorities in society exists. Here is an example:
“Affirmative action for college admissions is racist. It is racist because it singles people out and makes a decision based on their skin color, which is just as racist as denying minorities based on race.”
This argument draws a false equivalence between affirmative action policies and denying applicants based on race. The idea is that both actions are based on race, so they both must be racist.
The two cases are not equivalent though. Affirmative action programs are meant to address and correct historical racial inequalities. These sorts of race-conscious decisions are not racist because they are not aimed to exclude anyone but make colleges more inclusive. Conversely, denying admissions based on race sustains and furthers racial inequality.
Additionally, affirmative action admissions are not based on race alone, but also other features like academics and socio-economic status.
3. Climate Change
Being a politically charged topic, false equivalencies abound in discussions about climate change. Here is one that you might have heard:
“Many scientists believe that climate change is happening and is caused by humans, but there are those who disagree and think it’s a hoax. So we don’t really know and it’s reasonable to believe either way.”
This is a clear false equivalence because it implies that those who claim that climate change is a hoax have equally compelling evidence as those that think it is real. This is false though; all available evidence points to the reality of anthropogenic climate change and none of it points to it being a hoax. The two positions are in no way equally reasonable and they do not hold equal weight.
4. Veganism/Vegetarianism
Vegans, unfortunately, get a lot of hate online and many false equivalencies get thrown their way on the regular. Here is a very common one:
“Vegans are hypocrites. They claim they love animals but they still kill and eat plants which are living things.”
This is a blatant false equivalence because it draws a moral equivalence between eating animals and eating plants. The two are not similar at all though. True, plants and animals are both living, but plants cannot feel pain and suffering, or at least not nearly to as great a degree as animals.
moral equivalence fallacy examples | false equivalence synonym | dangers of false equivalence
Many false equivalencies get thrown at vegans on the regular.
Moreover, even if plants did feel pain, eating plants and not animals would still minimize total suffering as the majority of plants grown today are used to feed the animals we eventually eat. Vegans care about minimizing suffering and eating a plant-based diet is one way to do that.
5. Politics
False equivalencies, along with slippery slopes and either-or fallacies, are very common in the realm of politics.
“Both candidates A and B did x, y, and z, so they are exactly the same and there is no difference between their actions.”
This argument might initially seem legitimate, but it fails because 2 people could do the same actions but in radically different contexts and scopes. For example, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump threatened to withhold aid from Ukrainian officials. However, Biden did so because Ukraine was not abiding by previously agreed-upon measures to combat corruption. Trump did so to dig up dirt on his political rivals. The context makes the evaluation of the action different.
Responding to False Equivalencies
There are a couple of ways you could go about responding to a false equivalence fallacy. The general strategy is to show why the equivalence is not an apt comparison.
Point out that the identified similarities are exaggerated or oversimplified.
Point out that, while similarities exist, there are important differences that render the comparison moot.
Highlight any relevant difference between the two cases being presented as equivalent.
Present a counterexample that, according to the fallacious argument, is also equivalent but that also contradicts their main point.
Ask your opponent to justify their assertion that the two things are in fact equivalent.
Keep in mind that sometimes, drawing equivalences between things is a perfectly legitimate form of analogical reasoning. You can draw conclusions by comparing two things, as long as those things share features that are relevant to the conclusion you are trying to demonstrate.
For example, drawing an equivalence between animal suffering and human suffering might be acceptable in a debate about the permissibility of animal testing. Whether or not a specific comparison will be legitimate depends on the context.
Final Thoughts on False Equivalencies
Drawing comparisons between things can be a useful form of reasoning but can lead us into fallacious thought. The human brain has a tendency to simplify complex issues, which is why it is so easy to fall into false equivalence fallacies.
However, you can avoid committing a false equivalence by being conscientious with your arguments. You should ask yourself whether you are equating two things with the proper justification. Try to present a counter-example to your own view. That way you will be able to handle false equivalencies when they appear in the wild.
Learn More About Logical Fallacies
5 Appeal to Nature Fallacy Examples in Media and Life
6 Outcome Bias Examples That Can Negatively Impact Your Decisions
7 Self-Serving Bias Examples You See Throughout Life
7 Omission Bias Examples That Negatively Impact Your Life
6 Authority Bias Examples That Might Impact Your Decisions
5 Burden of Proof Fallacy Examples
5 Appeal to Tradition Fallacy Examples in Life
5 Appeal to Authority Logical Fallacy Examples
7 False Cause Fallacy Examples
7 Appeal to Ignorance Fallacy Examples
7 Appeal to Common Sense Logical Fallacy Examples
5 Post Hoc Fallacy Examples (and How to Respond to This Argument)
Gambler’s Fallacy: 5 Examples and How to Avoid It
5 Appeal to Anger Fallacy Examples Throughout Life
7 Halo Effect Bias Examples in Your Daily Life
7 Poisoning the Well Examples Throughout Your Life
7 Survivorship Bias Examples You See in the Real World
7 Dunning Kruger Effect Examples in Your Life
5 Cui Bono Fallacy Examples to Find Out “Who Will Benefit”
6 Anchoring Bias Examples That Impact Your Decisions
7 Virtue Signaling Examples in Everyday Life
7 Cherry Picking Fallacy Examples for When People Ignore Evidence
9 Circular Reasoning Examples (or “Begging the Question”) in Everyday Life
9 Appeal to Emotion Logical Fallacy Examples
9 Appeal to Pity Fallacy (“Ad Misericordiam”) Examples in Everyday Life
9 Loaded Question Fallacy Examples in Life and Media
9 Confirmation Bias Fallacy Examples In Everyday Life
9 Bandwagon Fallacy Examples to Prevent Poor Decisions
5 Red Herring Fallacy Examples to Fight Irrelevant Information
9 Middle Ground Fallacy Examples to Spot During an Argument
7 Hasty Generalization Fallacy Examples & How to Respond to Them
6 False Dichotomy Examples & How to Counter Them
What is the Planning Fallacy?
How to Overcome the “Sunk Cost Fallacy” Mindset
Finally, if you want a simple process to counter the logical fallacies and cognitive biases you encounter in life, then follow this 7-step process to develop the critical thinking skills habit.
Merry holidays to you too. Savor the cooler 80 degrees of Xmas there, middle of summer extremes coming next. For the rest of the US;
3 minute readDecember 23, 20226:13 PM MSTLast Updated a day ago
Storm cuts U.S. oil, gas, power output, sending prices higher
By Erwin Seba and Scott Disavino
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/storm-cuts-us-oil-gas-power-output-sending-prices-higher-2022-12-23/
Companies
Us Power Generating Company, Llc
Atalian Us Northeast, Llc
Kinder Morgan Inc
TotalEnergies SE
Motiva Enterprises LLC
Dec 23 (Reuters) - Frigid cold and blowing winds on Friday knocked out power and cut energy production across the United States, driving up heating and electricity prices as people prepared for holiday celebrations.
Winter Storm Elliott brought sub-freezing temperatures and extreme weather alerts to about two-thirds of the United States, with cold and snow in some areas to linger through the Christmas holiday.
More than 1.5 million homes and businesses lost power, oil refineries in Texas cut gasoline and diesel production on equipment failures, and heating and power prices surged on the losses. Oil and gas output from North Dakota to Texas suffered freeze-ins, cutting supplies.
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Some 1.5 million barrels of daily refining capacity along the U.S. Gulf Coast was shut due to the bitterly cold temperatures. The production losses are not expected to last, but they have lifted fuel prices.
Knocked out were TotalEnergies (TTEF.PA), Motiva Enterprises (MOTIV.UL) and Marathon Petroleum (MPC.N) facilities outside Houston. Cold weather also disrupted Exxon Mobil (XOM.N), LyondellBasell (LYB.N) and Valero Energy (VLO.N) plants in Texas that produce gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
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Sempra Infrastructure's Cameron LNG plant in Louisiana said weather disrupted its production of liquefied natural gas without providing details. Crews at the 12 million tonne-per-year facility were trying to restore output, it said.
Freeze-ins - in which ice crystals halt oil and gas production - this week trimmed production in North Dakota's oilfields by 300,000 to 350,000 barrels per day, or a third of normal. In Texas's Permian oilfield, the freeze led to more gas being withdrawn than was injected, said El Paso Natural Gas operator Kinder Morgan Inc. (KMI.N).
U.S. benchmark oil prices on Friday jumped 2.4% to $79.56, and next-day gas in west Texas jumped 22% to around $9 per million British thermal units , the highest since the state's 2021 deep freeze.
Power prices on Texas's grid also spiked to $3,700 per megawatt hour, prompting generators to add more power to the grid before prices fell back as thermal and solar supplies came online.
New England's bulk power supplier said it expected to have enough to supply demand, but elsewhere strong winds led to outages largely in the Southeast and Midwest; North Carolina counted more than 187,000 without power.
"Crews are restoring power but high winds are making repairs challenging at most of the 4,600 outage locations," Duke Energy spokesman Jeff Brooks wrote on Twitter.
Heating oil and natural gas futures rose sharply in response to the cold. U.S. heating oil futures gained 4.3% while natural gas futures rose 2.5%.
In New England, gas for Friday at the Algonquin hub soared 361% to a near 11-month high of $30 mmBtu.
About half of the power generated in New England comes from gas-fired plants, but on the coldest days, power generators shift to burn more oil. According to grid operator New England ISO, power companies' generation mix was at 17% from oil-fired plants as of midday Friday.
Gas output dropped about 6.5 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) over the past four days to a preliminary nine-month low of 92.4 bcfd on Friday as wells froze in Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
That is the biggest drop in output since the February 2021 freeze knocked out power for millions in Texas.
One billion cubic feet is enough gas to supply about 5 million U.S. homes for a day.
Here's and interesting take on the accounting of it.
Only about a third of the FY2023 spending bill is for programs unrelated to military and law enforcement
Speaking Security Newsletter | Note n°190 | 23 December 2022
Stephen Semler
Dec 23
Situation
The House just passed the FY2023 omnibus bill, sending it to Biden’s desk for approval. Here’s a breakdown of the 12 regular appropriations bills and two supplemental measures that make up the omnibus legislation. Outside of Department of Defense (DOD) appropriations, the FY2023 bill primarily fattens up on Military Construction/Veterans Affairs funding.
Analysis
Democratic leadership is claiming victory, citing the omnibus’s inclusion of the “highest level for [sic] non-defense funding ever.” The implication is that non-military spending is the same as social spending. It is not.
Consider the military aid programs sponsored by the State Department (DOS), nuclear weapons programs in the Department of Energy (DOE) budget, and recurring post-war expenses that go to veterans care and benefits. Consider also Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) law enforcement and prison operations and grants to state and local police. Outside of the Department of Defense base budget, I counted almost $300 billion in military- and law enforcement-related spending.
What the following tally amounts to is a more nuanced accounting of “security spending” as defined by the Budget Control Act of 2011 (PL 112-25). That categorization includes the same stuff as I do here—the DOD budget, VA funding, DOE nuclear weapons programs, DOS military aid, DHS law enforcement—however, that definition considers the entire DHS budget, whereas I only count its law enforcement provisions (so, for example, I exclude FEMA from my count, except for its grant programs for state and local police). Another point of departure: I factor in some DOJ activities. (See the itemized list of appropriations I considered in this analysis, below.)
All appropriations considered: Department of Defense and Military Construction and Veterans Affairs appropriations bills; Department of Homeland Security Title II provisions (Customs and Border Protection; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Transportation Security Administration; Coast Guard provisions in DHS; Secret Service; FEMA police grants); State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance and COPS Program; Bureau of Prisons; Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; Drug Enforcement Administration; Marshals Service; Parole Commission; Federal Bureau of Investigation; DOJ National Security Division; Interagency Crime and Drug Enforcement; the military aid portion of the Additional Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2023; DOD and BOP facilities in the Disaster Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2023; State Department Title IV, International Security Assistance; National Nuclear Security Administration.
-Stephen (@stephensemler; stephen@securityreform.org)
https://stephensemler.substack.com/p/only-about-a-third-of-the-fy2023
Schiff urges Americans not to forget role of GOP members of Congress in efforts to overturn election
BY JARED GANS - 12/24/22 1:28 PM ET
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3787565-schiff-urges-americans-not-to-forget-role-of-gop-members-of-congress-in-efforts-to-overturn-election/
Schiff said in an op-ed published Thursday in The New York Times that only “scant attention” is given to the number of GOP members of the House and Senate who voted to contest the results of multiple states in the election.
“Even after Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police put down the insurrection at great cost to themselves, the majority of Republicans in the House picked up right where they left off, still voting to overturn the results in important states,” he said.
After Congress reconvened to count the votes of the Electoral College following the attack, 147 Republican members of Congress — eight senators and 139 representatives — objected to the results in Arizona or Pennsylvania, both of which were key states that helped seal President Biden’s victory in the election.
“Even the Constitution cannot protect us if the people sworn to uphold it do not give meaning to their oath of office, if that oath is not informed by ideas of right and wrong, and if people are unwilling to accept the basic truth of things,” Schiff said. “None of it will be enough.”
Schiff’s op-ed came on the same day that the committee released its final report on the insurrection. The committee made four criminal referrals for former President Trump to the Justice Department (DOJ) earlier in the week.
The committee also referred multiple Republican representatives who refused to comply with its subpoenas to the House Ethics Committee. They include House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio), Scott Perry (Pa.) and Andy Biggs (Ariz.).
Schiff said the country’s elected officials should be chosen based on their allegiance to the law and the Constitution and people should be guided by facts, “not factions.”
“It is our hope that this report will make a small contribution to that effort. Our country has never before faced the kind of threat we documented. May it never again,” he said.
Five signs Biden is definitely running for another term
Judge dismisses remainder of Kari Lake’s election lawsuit following two-day trial
Schiff also outlined the next steps following the committee’s report in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on Friday. He said the DOJ should hold itself to the standard it established at the start of its investigation into the attack as it determines what charges to pursue — a standard Schiff described simply as “follow the evidence wherever it leads.”
Among other reforms, he also called for Congress to pass legislation to clarify the House’s authority to enforce its subpoenas and that the vice president only has a ceremonial role in counting the votes of the Electoral College. Congress approved the Electoral Count Reform Act, which makes the latter clarification, as part of the omnibus government funding bill this week, sending the bill to Biden’s desk.
Schiff additionally called on the country to confront the “rising tide” of bigotry and racially motivated violent extremism.
Arizona judge rejects Kari Lake’s election challenge and confirms Hobbs’ victory
Marshall Cohen Eric Bradner
By Gregory Clary, Marshall Cohen, Sonnet Swire and Eric Bradner, CNN
Updated 3:50 PM EST, Sat December 24, 2022
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/24/politics/kari-lake-arizona-lawsuit-governor-election/index.html
An Arizona judge on Saturday rejected Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawsuit attempting to overturn her defeat, concluding that there wasn’t clear or convincing evidence of misconduct, and affirming the victory of Democratic Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs.
Lake, who lost to Hobbs by about 17,000 votes in November, sued in an effort to overturn the election. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson allowed a two-day trial on some of Lake’s claims, which concluded late Thursday afternoon.
The court ruling marks a major defeat for Lake, who built her candidacy on her support for former President Donald Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. She has since falsely claimed to have won last month’s election.
Saturday’s ruling is also the latest blow for election deniers nationwide and harks back to the long stream of legal losses Trump suffered in 2020 as he sought to challenge his election loss.
In a tweet after the ruling, Lake, who sat in the courtroom during the trial but did not testify, said she would appeal the decision “for the sake of restoring faith and honesty in our elections.”
Thompson previously dismissed eight other counts alleged in Lake’s lawsuit prior to trial, ruling that they did not constitute proper grounds for an election contest under Arizona law, even if true. But he permitted Lake an attempt to prove at trial the two remaining counts involving printers and the ballot chain of custody in Maricopa County.
The county, which spans the Phoenix area and houses a majority of Arizona’s population, was a hotbed of unfounded allegations of voter disenfranchisement in the midterms and 2020 election.
Technical experts who testified in support of Lake provided analysis that “does not nearly approach the degree of precision” needed to conclude that the election results were tainted,” Thompson said in his ruling.
After the election, Lake falsely claimed that a mishap with some printers in Maricopa County was part of a deliberate effort to rig the vote against her. But the judge’s ruling noted that Lake’s “own witness testified before this Court that … printer failures were largely the result of unforeseen mechanical failure.”
According to Thompson’s ruling, Lake’s team had to show that someone intentionally caused the county’s ballot-on-demand printers to malfunction – and as a result of that, enough “identifiable” votes were lost to change the outcome of the election.
“Every single witness before the Court disclaimed any personal knowledge of such misconduct. The Court cannot accept speculation or conjecture in place of clear and convincing evidence,” Thompson wrote.
‘That’s political malpractice’
During the two-day trial, Lake’s legal team broadly criticized Maricopa County’s management of the election and claimed that long lines led Republican would-be voters to turn away on Election Day.
Tom Liddy, a lawyer for Maricopa County, faulted Lake’s campaign and the Arizona Republican Party for casting doubt on the validity of early and mail-in votes, which left GOP voters bearing the brunt of minor issues on Election Day.
“That’s political malpractice,” said Liddy, a Republican. “You reap what you sow.”
Kari Lake, who lost the Arizona governor's race, on at a Turning Points USA conference on Sunday, December 18, 2022.
Maricopa County elections officials push back on Lake's fraud claims as trial ends
Maricopa County elections co-director Scott Jarrett detailed the causes of printing problems in some polling places on Election Day that resulted in on-site ballot tabulators being unable to read some ballots.
Jarrett said in some printers, toner wasn’t dark enough – a problem that resulted in voters whose ballots couldn’t be read having to place their ballots in “door 3,” a secure box used for ballots that would need to be counted later at a central location. Jarrett said about 17,000 ballots ended up in “door 3” boxes across the county.
He also said that at three of the county’s 223 sites, “shrink to fit” settings were improperly selected on ballot printers by technicians who were attempting to solve those toner problems. That resulted in about 1,300 ballots being printed slightly too small for on-site tabulators to process.
Those ballots were later duplicated by hand and then counted, he said.
He said he had “no reason to believe” any of the problems were the result of intentional misconduct. All of those votes, he said, were ultimately counted after they were transferred to a bipartisan duplication board.
Lake’s team had also claimed at the trial that employees at Runbeck, a Maricopa County ballot processing contractor, had improperly inserted their own ballots and those of family members into batches to be counted on site, rather than returning those ballots through proper channels.
In response, Rey Valenzuela, the Maricopa County co-director of elections in charge of early voting, said that the county had never authorized Runbeck employees to deliver ballots directly to the Runbeck site and that he was not aware of the contractor’s employees ever having done so.
Lake’s legal team has until Monday to respond. Hobbs is slated to be inaugurated as governor on January 2.
This is story has been updated with additional details.
Here's a supplement to that.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/23/health/senior-wave-covid
A Covid-19 ‘senior wave’ is driving up hospitalizations
By Deidre McPhillips, CNN
Updated 6:28 PM EST, Fri December 23, 2022
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/21/omnibus-millions-at-risk-of-losing-medicaid-in-the-spring-under-1point7-trillion-federal-spending-bill.html
Millions at risk of losing Medicaid in the spring under provision tucked inside $1.7 trillion federal spending bill
PUBLISHED WED, DEC 21 20224:32 PM ESTUPDATED WED, DEC 21 20227:08 PM EST
I really focus on not having conspiratorial theories and try to recognize and not fall into confirmation bias. To search for and only extract factual data and information from all the noise. But alas I am only human, and there is a continued biting of thoughts that the GOP side of the isle is adhering to an executed plan of getting rid of financial burdens of society (ie; seniors, the poor and disabled, and other social economic burdens), all for their financial and power control benefit. They are doing this through Covid and Mitigation Wars, culture wars, and anti-science policies, disbanding science groups and hiding from the public factual science and environmental reports. Controlling media disinformation to millions with Fox networks and the like.
Our health systems one of the worst in the advanced and developed nations. Death, sickness, and individual costs worse in the red controlled areas. Heavy costs and collateral damage to even the "working class" seem to be accepted for an evil goal. Whether or not that is their intent and goal, the results and consequences seem to be the same.
They know the statistics or at least they have access to them. They know the proven science, the history of medical acknowledgment of proven solutions and mitigation methods. Vaccines are comparably new in human history, but definitely proven valid for a very long time. Physical distancing has been used successfully against virus and disease in the earliest days of this country, and as far back as the 5th century with the Plague of Justinian (although that included a lot of racism against societies from Jews to homosexuals neutralizing the effects). For the religious crowd in the earliest of biblical writings from the Book of Leviticus 13:46: "And the leper in whom the plague is... he shall dwell alone; outside the camp shall his habitation be". Masks have evolved from old century plagues where early ppe were used with some success, but evolved from that to proven mitigation that fully works, protecting from and immensely limiting death and disease.
Environmental science over the generations has only been continuously proven and is now costing and effecting our lives to much great degree and will continue to exponentially grow in those economical costs and effects as each year passes.
What did the GOP do and continue to do with all that accumulated proven science (other than reap 100's of millions, maybe billions or trillions over time from big oil, medical industry, and the like)? They attacked and inflicted nation destroying political, culture, and misinformation wars. Making one thing for sure, it has made it increasingly difficult to be a centrist or seeing both sides of any equation.
Ok, this might be a little long, but I felt the need to respond and you didn't give me much to work with.
You need to kick up the quality of your argument and answers a few notches. Not trying to disrespect you or your theories, but you didn't address the two questions I asked.
Your quote;
What exactly or specifically are the facts or evident truths that the left is ridiculously denying that are the added reasons to combat, change, or protect from all the dangers to our society, false conspiracies and lies, and massive disinformation wars from the right? Also, how will those specific ideals that you talk about looking at, solve any of the dangers and damages being perpetrated from the right? Again be more specific in your causes, solutions and reasons why.
You also can't rely on the tribalism factors as any main causes or solutions. Somewhat like the Venn diagram, tribalism has a much smaller part in this problems circle.
I haven't read the link yet, but I will. I might have already read it, definitely things of that nature.
I don't think things are going to be fine with whoever is doing, quite the opposite, things are not going to be fine if things continue the way they are going.
Trump may be dead or dying, but Trumpism is not. Nor are all the GOP that backed, enabled, joined, and encouraged Trump. The New GOP Trumpism is still there, willing and able.
I'm really not sure what your description is that dems are doing. You'll have to be a lot more specific. That's way too general. What are you looking for the Dems to do or stop doing? Listen to the other side and respect their killing of 100's of thousands of citizens? Listen to their side of anti-science that we have learned over 100s of years. Listen to the big oil's side (paid politicians) to keep costing trillions of dollars in climate, health, and property, costing more to the sick, poor, and elderly, but everyone is paying, and will be paying more. How to see another side when that side is killing, maiming, and destroying lives. Not to mention wanting Marshal Law and taking over the government that controls the whole country. What is the side that rejects, ridicules, and instills hate and abuse to groups that had no choice in how or where they were born.
My comparison to the Ukraine and Russia was serious. The New GOP are using the same tactics as Putin with Putin's help in their massive disinformation campaign. What do you want Ukraine to do, listen to Putin and see "his side" while he's in a rampage killing 100's of thousands of people and full bore on a scorched earth policy?
I'm having to go, so I'll have to pick this up at another time, but I would really like to know what the answer is that dems or the one tribe can do. We've had tribalism since beginning of time. That's not reason to not be able to discuss actual policies and work those kind of things out, but that's not what the problem is here. Again what do you suggest, how does one look at the dems to solve?
I understand where your coming from. A worthy goal if it was attainable and all things equal. If everything was equal I'd be right with you, but things aren't equal.
Everyone and every country does bad things that they need to address or work on or stop doing and make things better.
But what your attempting is like trying to get a peace accord between Russia and Ukraine. Both sides are fighting and shooting other people, and nobody or no country is a perfect saint. One side is the much larger threat, one side started and is continuing it, one side is massively the largest perpetrator of destruction and death, one side is trying to take over and change a decent society to their totalitarianism rule and beliefs, one side is killing way more, maiming, threating the existence and way of life of the other.
Now go and ask the victim side to look at their faults, and stop defending their right to life and democratic society. Spend equal time on criticizing the way Ukraine is defending their children, homes, way of life. Ask them not to worry about the massive abductions of their children to the others school of thought and training. Not to worry about the ridicule and abuse if those children happen to be biologically different. Don't worry about hiding the history of what the abusers have done in the past to a society. No reparations needed or true history told.
We just need to be critical to both evenly, give in to massive disinformation war and lies and just let the bullets and bombs continue. That's not what I hear from the teachers I know. It used to be generally both sides needed to knock it off, but in recent years that has changed dramatically. It is overwhelmingly and so heavy handed to one side now and that is going to be impossible to deal with in any of your prescribed terms.
Maybe when Russia or the New GOP stops firing bullets and bombs, stop murdering and abusing, stop trying to play their phony god or phony patriotism over ones they have no business holding that kind of abusive power over, and just stop the attacks and power struggle, get back to where things are equal wrongs on both sides, then we can start critical discussion on ourselves. The teachers and staff would be happy to be part of that discussion as would I. Don't have much faith in all that though. And so it goes....
Teachers are in a crisis right now. They leaving the profession in droves, many asking to be excused from their contracts mid year even, many retiring early or going into another profession. Extreme shortage on finding replacements. I know many, but anyone can look this up.
Pay now, which many make less now than ten years ago figuring inflation (but there has been many actual wage cuts in the last ten years) isn't the only reason. Although, the red states are worse in pay. They have less bargaining rights in those states since the Republicans in about 11 states back in 2011 passed laws reducing teachers bargaining rights in those states, but that isn't even the main factor in their pay. In more liberal states where the bargaining is better, those states put historically more money into the public schools and pay higher. We know the GOP is always trying to funnel the money towards private schools and starve the funds from public schools.
The guns (the inaction on gun violence), violence or threat of violence from parents and students (students violence against the teachers and staff are reaching epidemic levels), the Covid Mitigation Wars, the Culture Wars about race and sex, book banning, constant harassment to teachers and staff from parents and the New GOP antagonistic behaviors has overwhelmingly been created and nurtured by the New GOP. This has just put fuel to the fires that were already burning before the pandemic. All the hate and New GOP culture are the biggest factors in the fact that they are decimating the teaching profession and causing the mass exits. All of this vitriol has trickled down to our young and stressing our teachers in public schools and is a massive problem. "Being hit by both sides", maybe, but one side has a small rubber mallet, the other, automatic weapons and political culture bombs.
On the note of guns and crime, more specifically violent crime and the fact that it is effecting the culture and way of life of our children (or way of death being #1 killer of our kids now) and reasons they act the way they do in school (along with the irresponsibility of the parents and some elected officials). I recommend anyone that doesn't already know to research the violence and harassment that is being perpetrated upon our children and public schools and where it originates from and the reasons for it. Ask yourself, who, what, and where do we address the most? What is really being taught to our future society?
Example articles, but there are many and many more studies, facts and figures backing this up. It really is a crisis.
The Recent Rise in Violent Crime Is Driven by Gun Violence
Violent crime is driven by gun violence, and elected officials must support gun violence prevention measures.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-recent-rise-in-violent-crime-is-driven-by-gun-violence/
AUTHOR
Eugenio Weigend Vargas
Gun Violence Prevention
MEDIA CONTACT
Madia Coleman
Associate Director, Media Relations
mcoleman@americanprogress.org
GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS
Peter Gordon
Director, Federal Affairs
pgordon@americanprogress.org
Jerry Parshall
Senior Director, Safety and Justice Campaign and Director, State and Local Government Affairs
jparshall@americanprogress.org
DOWNLOAD
Fact Sheet
PDF (92 KB)
An AR-15 rifle is displayed during the NRA's annual meeting in Houston.An AR-15 rifle is displayed during the NRA's annual meeting at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston on May 28, 2022 — just days after a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. (Getty/AFP/Patrick T. Fallon)
The rising violent crime rates over the past two years is a major issue that elected officials must address immediately. While many have blamed the criminal justice reform movement for the rise in violent crime, the fact is that these increases in violent crime can largely be attributed to an alarming escalation in gun violence. If elected officials are serious about stopping violent crime, they need to prioritize and support stronger gun laws.
This fact sheet provides telling data on the link between gun violence and rising crime rates.
From 2019 to 2020, homicides increased a staggering 28 percent.1 This sharp increase was driven by a dramatic rise in gun-related homicides:
While nonfirearm homicides increased less than 10 percent from 2019 to 2020, gun homicides rose by 35 percent, the largest annual increase ever recorded.2
In 2020, 8 out of every 10 homicides were perpetrated with a gun, the highest proportion in recent years.3
Unfortunately, the rise in gun homicides continued through 2021: Preliminary data suggest an additional 7 percent increase in gun homicides from 2020 to 2021.4
Because of this increase, gun deaths are now the leading cause of death for children and teenagers:
From 2019 to 2020, the rate of gun homicides among children and teenagers ages 1 to 19 rose by 40 percent.5
In 2019, gun deaths surpassed vehicle-related accidents to become the leading cause of death for children and teens.6
While data are limited, evidence suggests a rise in nonfatal shootings in recent years:
A survey conducted by the Police Executive Research Forum indicates that 70 percent of agencies reported an increase in nonfatal shootings from 2019 to 2020.7
From 2019 to 2020, there were more than 820,000 violent crimes involving firearms—primarily robberies and aggravated assaults.8 This means that every day, more than 1,100 people were threatened with a gun.9
Mass shootings increased 46 percent from 2019 to 2020 and another 13 percent from 2020 to 2021.10
Unfortunately, data suggest that the number of mass shootings in 2022 will surpass 500—more than one shooting per day.11
Assault weapons have been found to be used in 16 percent of mass shootings, which has significantly increased the number of victims and fatalities:12
According to Everytown for Gun Safety, when assault weapons were used in a mass shooting from 2009 to 2020, six times more people were shot compared with shootings that involved other weapons.13
Assault weapons have been the common denominator in the deadliest mass shootings in the past 10 years:
Uvalde, Texas (2022): 21 people killed
El Paso, Texas (2019): 23 people killed
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2018): 11 people killed
Parkland, Florida (2018); 17 people killed
Las Vegas, Nevada (2017): 58 people killed
Sutherland Springs, Texas (2017): 26 people killed
San Bernardino, California (2015): 14 people killed
Orlando, Florida (2016): 49 people killed
Aurora, Colorado (2012): 12 people killed
Newtown, Connecticut (2012): 27 people killed
States that received an “F” grade based on the strength of their gun laws—according to the latest scorecard from the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence—saw the highest homicide rates: 14
States with “F” grades saw 25 percent higher homicide rates than states with “C” or “D” grades.15
States with “F” grades saw 61 percent higher homicide rates than states with “A” or “B” grades—states with the strongest gun laws.16
Children and teenagers are most vulnerable in states with weaker gun laws:
In 2020, the 10 states with the highest rates of gun deaths among children and teenagers ages 1 to 19 were Louisiana, Alaska, Mississippi, South Carolina, Arkansas, Kansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, and Alabama.17 All of these states received an “F” grade for their weak gun laws.
Reports also suggest that rates of nonfatal gunshot injuries sustained during assaults are higher in states with weaker gun laws:
In 2017, the year with available data across states, states that received an “F” grade had a rate of nonfatal gunshot injuries that was 22 percent higher than states with “C” or “D” grades and 59 percent higher than states with “A” or “B” grades.18
Conclusion
Every day, more than 50 people are murdered with a gun and another 1,100 are threatened during a violent crime. As a result, the United States has the highest level of gun violence across developed nations, with mass shootings occurring at a daily rate.19
We cannot continue living like this. Elected officials must stop circumventing gun violence by putting blame on the criminal justice reform movement. If they are serious about stopping crime, gun violence prevention laws must be on the top of their agendas.
https://ussanews.com/2022/12/10/report-50-shell-shocked-teachers-staff-flee-chaotic-florida-school-district/
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/teachers-are-quitting-midyear-its-leaving-some-schools-in-the-lurch/2022/03
TSA intercepted record number of guns at airports in 2022 and 88% were loaded
Agency said it expects to prevent a total of 6,600 from entering secure area of airports by end of year, a nearly 10% jump from 2021
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/19/tsa-intercepted-record-number-of-guns-airports-this-year
Didn't really mean to take you out of context, it is a wedge between parties, but that wedge has been created and formed by the gun lobby and mostly the GOP and right-factions. When I say guns, I include ammo, culture, right-wing extremism, the lies and disinformation, and anything else surrounding them.
What the "criminals are shooting each other over" that you "could care less" about is a very minute part of the problem but a big part of society's misunderstanding of it and only the results of and part of the whole massive misinformation wars that are being waged mainly from one party. Crime and guns go hand in hand and effect not just the criminals, but high costs to more of the innocent and legal.
Also part of those wars is the scam forming many beliefs that each party is at the same level. "They both do it" or similar statements are common. Yes they both lie, manipulate, and politicize. But the degree and magnitude and danger to our democracy (such as it is) and our way of life is where the similarities end. The difference is stark and overwhelming and it shouldn't be ignored. No intelligent or factual debate can elude from it or prove otherwise. Only statements of ignorance and political banter. That was the reason I spoke up I guess, not just from your one post, but overall your succumbing to that reasoning of equal violation of two. It's not, far from it. Just like in drugs, have to admit to the problems in order to just start getting any "house in order".
I should of expanded the description from just fentanyl to all the chemicals and precursors which the bulk of it is made or produced in China. Also included is the environment surrounding it. Yes, there are other overseas areas that it comes from, but even some of those or even most of those areas have the China connection and influence. I agree and know that the cartels make their own product or add to many other drug product out of those chemicals and precursors, I was using one word to include it all. Also, I'm aware that there was, a few years back anyway, a threat to the Cartel's business by those sources of the chemicals bypassing the Mexican cartels and shipping direct into the US (involving other cartels and US players). Maybe more than realized. One of the factors increasing the Cartels own concoctions. Not that it matters whether or not drugs come from China or Africa, but it is where the bulk and beginning of this epidemic originates from.
Not invalidating your experience and perspectives, I've worked with people with similar experience and perspectives and have great amount of respect for those people. Retired from it all with the coming of the Covid and Mitigation Wars which killed 100's of thousands of people needlessly, more than guns or drugs, most all waged from the right-wing party. And it is still killing and effecting 100's every day, more than drugs or guns are doing.
Just letting you know I have some experience in this also, living homeless on the streets in the bowels of societies worst for my entire teen yrs, then a couple degrees later, and over the years working with drug addicts, nonprofit, education and gov institutions, having thousands of tenants in all walks of life and beliefs, all giving not a conflicting story, just giving another unique or different and added perspectives.
The Mexican Cartels have treated everything they do as any big corporation would do for decades now. Suits, ties, and accounting principles. Coyotes are just part of their enterprise. Way back in the day it was weed that was most of their income supplying funds to their other criminal enterprises (some actually legal). Graduating over time to these days of the ease and profits of chemicals.
Having no guns of course is a utopian fantasy. But limit and control is a viable alternative and would go a long way in limiting crime, drugs, human trafficking's, and corruption. Even lessen the amount of deaths and destruction from fentanyl, no matter where it comes from. But it would eliminate some funds from the gun industry and politicians' pockets, mostly the GOP party.
At this point the belief that most gun owners are responsible are another misnomer. Might be how you word it. Most owners or the owners of most guns. Most of guns are held and distributed by criminals and terrorists. This includes the criminal right-wing Proud Boys and the like. Massive quantities are held and illegal gun dealing are common by right-wing terrorist factions (a big part of the GOP base and ones who hold way more quantities than the normal gun owner citizen), then other criminal natures of US gangs and Mexican Cartels and the millions of guns owned by them (legal and illegal).
And even with everyday citizens, too many legal "responsible" gun owners are the cause of an increasingly number of accidental deaths of children. Mostly in states with loose gun laws and without secure storage or child access prevention laws.
At the start of the Pandemic unintentional children's deaths from those "responsible" gun owners rose over 30% in the last half of 2020 over 2019. 2021 beat that. In 2021 the number of children in a home with at least one unlocked and loaded gun increased to over 5 million children. "Responsibility" is not the classification I would use. That's only discussing the "unintentional" accidents, not the culture and intended effects that happen with those millions of the young.
Sorry for rambling on here and going way further and deeper than the original context of your original post. But guns, crime, and drugs, and the havoc they cause on decent society are interconnected as one, debate shouldn't be between counting or recognizing deaths of drugs and deaths of guns. It's one number. And the differences of the damage from the two parties are massive, not the same.
Your disconnecting the two. Fentanyl (along with crime) and guns in the US are closely interconnected. The fentanyl comes from China and trafficked through Mexico with the cartels the middle men over land, sea, and air. A lot of it comes over directly into the US via international mail or shipping into the US ports. Very small amount comparably is through the immigrant problem the New GOP has spent the attention to.
Guns are a main source of cartel power and violence (along with criminal orgs here in the US). It is reported that there are a 100's of thousands deaths in Mexico from that gun violence. 100s of thousands (who knows how many, probably millions) in Mexico has also been terrorized, threatened, and controlled with those same guns. We're not even getting to the terrorizing done here in the US (you can't just count the deaths or the deaths just in the US caused by USA sales of guns). Yeh I hear the "... only criminals will have the guns" spiel, but that just puts the cart before the horse. Doesn't fly, the criminals get the guns from all that legal supply. If supply is limited in any product, it limits that supply all way down the chain. Doesn't matter if your on either side of the subject, those are the numbers of reality.
It has been reported that 150 million guns have been bought by Americans since Sandy Hook. Also reported and estimated that around a half million guns every year gets bought in the US legally by the Cartels network and then go into Mexico. Mexico has maybe one or two places one can buy guns legally for selling to about 150 million Mexican citizens. The US has over 65,000 gun stores. More than supermarkets, McDonalds, and Starbucks put together. 70-80% of all guns confiscated in Mexico has been traced back to the US. A big chunk of that comes from Texas with their loose gun laws.
You can throw in the comparison of fentanyl deaths here and Mexico. You won't get much, the market for those drugs are in the US, not much money in the market in Mexico. But the connection between drugs, crime, the supply of guns, Cartel border violence, and the right wing view of guns and the border, the extreme New GOP's base and party with their connection to crime and terrorism cannot be separated. They are one.
Human trafficking's by the Cartel also needs a market. This market is in the US created over the decades by hiring of those illegal immigrants by large agriculture, construction, casinos, motels, restaurant companies, and the like. A lot of smaller companies also, promising jobs and money to "if you can get here" and working with the Cartels and their subordinates. Making trillions of profit and billions every year of income (net gains) for Texas alone. Large business and corp that plays both sides, but historically been heavy on the GOP side.
This has evolved into too much supply at once now (what does one expect with so many carrots dangling for so many decades), so what better way for the Right-wing to use that for their political purposes, continuing to profit by the dilemma.
Sam Bankman-Fried arrested in the Bahamas as criminal charges loom
Arrest just 24 hours before founder of cryptocurrency exchange was to testify before US Congress
The Bahamas police have arrested former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, the country’s attorney general said in a statement on Monday, adding that the Bahamas has received formal notification from the US of criminal charges against him.
Sam Bankman-Fried
Bankman-Fried ‘would give anything’ to start new business to repay FTX users
Read more
Bankman-Fried is expected to be extradited to the US, the attorney general’s office for the Bahamas told Reuters, but declined to comment on what the charges were.
In a statement released on Twitter, Damian Williams, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, confirmed Bankman-Fried’s arrest and said the related indictment would be unsealed on Tuesday morning. “[We] will have more to say at that time,” he said.
The former CEO had been expected on Tuesday to make his first public appearance since FTX’s collapse before US lawmakers. Bankman-Fried, who has been vocal throughout the collapse of FTX on his Twitter account and in public media appearances, was tweeting just hours before his arrest.
Earlier in the day, he had said he would be “calling in” to the hearing before the House financial services committee from the Bahamas. In a Twitter Spaces event on Monday with Twitter account Unusual Whales, Bankman-Fried said it was difficult for him “to move right now and travel because the paparazzi effect is quite large”.
It is as yet unclear whether his appearance will go ahead following the arrest. The committee will also hear from John Ray III, FTX’s new chief executive.
Ray, a veteran bankruptcy expert who also oversaw the aftermath of the collapsed energy giant Enron, has called FTX an “unprecedented and complete failure of corporate controls” the likes of which he has not witnessed in his 40-year career.
FTX filed for US bankruptcy protection last month and Bankman-Fried resigned as chief executive, triggering a wave of public demands for greater regulation of the cryptocurrency industry.
The distressed crypto trading platform struggled to raise money to stave off collapse as traders rushed to withdraw $6bn from the platform in just 72 hours and rival exchange Binance abandoned a proposed rescue deal.
In recent weeks, US authorities have sought information from investors and potential investors in FTX, two sources with knowledge of the requests told Reuters. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission also opened probes.
Shadow banning was allowing certain people get away with way more policy violations than normal individuals that would of been banned outright and kicked off twitter almost immediately with a lot fewer violations. "Corporate propaganda" is what one ex employee called it. Like Traitor Trump “Between Jan. 6 and Jan. 8, Mr. Trump tweeted 140 separate violations of our policies and procedures before we ended up banning him.” Essentially "shadow banning" was many times just giving special privileges and allowances for violations of policy that the normal person would not get.
Ex-Twitter employee calls release of docs ‘corporate propaganda’
https://www.newsnationnow.com/cuomo-show/ex-twitter-employee-calls-release-of-docs-corporate-propaganda/