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NetHappenings Newsletter

Health

“… Even if a vaccine candidate gets through the testing process and is successful by the end of the year, it will be several months before vaccination is widespread across the US.” ~ Dr. Fauci

Fauci Says He And His Family Have Been Assigned Security Detail Due To ‘Serious Threats’.

Staffer for Florida congressman dies of COVID-19. “Congressman Vern Buchanan announced that longtime staffer, Gary Tibbetts, died of COVID-19 on Friday. Buchanan is a Republican congressman from Florida, which has seen a recent surge in coronavirus cases.”

78% of COVID-19 patients show signs of heart damage after recovery

Daily Beast: Trump’s New Favorite COVID Doctor Believes in Alien DNA, Demon Sperm, and Hydroxychloroquine. “A Houston doctor who praises hydroxychloroquine and says that face masks aren’t necessary to stop transmission of the highly contagious coronavirus has become a star on the right-wing internet, garnering tens of millions of views on Facebook on Monday alone. Donald Trump Jr. declared the video of Stella Immanuel a ‘must watch,’ while Donald Trump himself retweeted the video. Before Trump and his supporters embrace Immanuel’s medical expertise, though, they should consider other medical claims Immanuel has made—including those about alien DNA and the physical effects of having sex with witches and demons in your dreams.”

Particle sizes of infectious aerosols: implications for infection control – The Lancet Respiratory Medicine

Florida lawyers offering free living wills to teachers returning to school during the pandemic. “Since advertising the free living wills, a document that provides legal instructions for a person’s choice of medical care should they be unable to communicate them directly to a doctor themselves, [Charles Gallagher] has received inquiries from some 600 teachers and others school employees.”

Lexington Herald-Leader: 38 people test positive for COVID-19 following Ky. high school football team outbreak.

Andrea Bocelli is an idiot.
BBC: Andrea Bocelli ‘humiliated’ by Italy’s Covid rules. “Italian opera singer Andrea Bocelli has said he felt “humiliated and offended” by lockdown measures imposed in the country due to coronavirus. ‘I could not leave the house even though I had committed no crime,’ Bocelli said. He also admitted to disobeying lockdown rules and believing the severity of the pandemic had been overblown. His comments will surprise many as he had become a symbol of national unity at the height of the lockdown.”

Take Coronavirus More Seriously, Say Olympic Rowers Who Got It.
“Emily Regan, an Olympic gold medalist from Williamsville, N.Y., who was among those infected, wrote a post on Facebook this month highlighting how debilitating the disease could be, even for some of the world’s best athletes who have incredibly powerful and efficient lungs….

Federal judge rejects legal challenges to Inslee’s emergency orders to curb spread of COVID-19. “A federal judge Friday denied a request for a preliminary injunction against Gov. Jay Inslee’s emergency coronavirus orders that had been brought by some Republican state lawmakers.”

Medicinal Cannabis Kills Cancer Cells
VIDEO The research comes after a three-year collaboration between cancer researcher Dr. Matt Dun and biotech company Australian Natural Therapeutics Group (ANTG). Throughout the period, Dun and his team tested the company’s cannabis strain with less than 1% tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive compound in cannabis, against cancer. During their research, Dun and his colleagues tested THC-rich cannabis against varieties with higher levels of cannabidiol (CBD). In the end, they found that those rich in CBD tended to be more effective in killing cancer cells from leukemia and pediatric brainstem glioma than high-THC varieties. More than this, they found that low-THC and high-CBD varieties did not kill normal bone marrow cells or healthy white blood cells.

Scientists Get Closer to Blood Test for Alzheimer’s Disease
An experimental blood test was highly accurate at distinguishing people with Alzheimer’s disease from those without it in several studies, boosting hopes that there soon may be a simple way to help diagnose this most common form of dementia.

ANIMALS

MarineTraffic: Global Ship Tracking Intelligence
CHINA KILLING fishing vessels are currently forming a line below the Galapagos Islands. We are watching the destruction of the ocean in real time.

Progress Vietnam bans wildlife trade to curb risk of pandemics.
“Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has issued a directive to ban the Southeast Asian country’s wildlife trade with immediate effect in order to reduce the risk of new pandemics, a government statement said. The directive bans imports of live wild animals and wildlife products, eliminates wildlife markets, and enforce prohibitions on illegal hunting and trading of wild animals, including online sales, according to the statement issued late on Thursday.”

Why indigenous folklore can save animals’ lives
A belief system born of indigenous communities in the Philippines could help protect the country’s endangered species, from leopard cats to cloud rats. “Why did you hoot the horn?” I ask him. “And why are we slowing down?” “We are passing by the mariit tree,” he replies in Kinaray-a, one of the local languages. Part of indigenous wisdom, the “mariit” belief system (pronounced mar-ee-it) is deeply rooted in the relationship of the Filipinos with the environment. It can be traced back to the pre-colonial Filipino practice of animism, or the belief that everything possesses a soul. Mariit stretches back more than 500 years, affecting everything from where buildings are constructed, to how a driver negotiates a stretch of road. Increasingly, it is also being integrated into nature conservation.

ELECTION

YALE STUDY 600 unemployment bonuses did not lead to less work
The Confederate Southerner hates those Northern Intellectuals cause you know  they are still fighting those Yankees to keep those “women, brown, and black people in their place”

TRUMP FILLED OUT AND MAILED IN HIS BALLOT.

Trump seen voting by mail in newly re-surfaced Access Hollywood video
Back in 2004, Billy Bush followed Donald Trump as he was going to vote in New York City, but things turned sour very quickly when a mix-up occurred with The Donald’s polling location.

A bipartisan group secretly gathered to game out a contested Trump-Biden election. It wasn’t pretty
A close election this fall is likely to be contested, and there are few guardrails to stop a constitutional crisis, particularly if Trump flexes the considerable tools at his disposal to give himself an advantage. “He doesn’t have to win the election,” said Nils Gilman, a historian who leads research at a think tank called the Berggruen Institute and was an organizer of the exercise. “He just has to create a plausible narrative that he didn’t lose.”

Steven Mnuchin and the Tax-Haven Divide

THE RICH PRICK complains about the poor people subsisting on unemployment

BLACK LIVES MATTER

What ‘Dixie’ Really Means Atlantic
Jonathan Lighter, the editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, pieced together evidence that connects the Mason-Dixon line to Dixie via an unexpected intermediary: a children’s game played in New York City. In Lighter’s dictionary entry for Dixie, he had previously noted a claim from 1872 in the New York Weekly: “During any time within the last eighty years the term ‘Dixie’s Land’ has been in use with the New York boys while engaged in the game of ‘tag.’” In 2007, Lighter made some discoveries bolstering this claim. An 1861 letter to the editor of San Francisco’s Daily Evening Bulletin explained the New York game in more detail: “Imaginary lines would form the boundaries on the North and South, and the opposite party would attempt crossing the sacred domain, shouting as they entered upon it, ‘I am on Dixie’s land, and Dixie isn’t home.’” (The Bulletin editor noted its similarity to an old Scottish game using “Toddy’s ground” rather than “Dixie’s land.”)
A historical marker in New Orleans commemorates the supposed “Birthplace of ‘Dixie’” where the Citizens State Bank stood from 1835 to 1924. “In its early days, the bank issued its own $10 bank note, with the French word ‘Dix’ for ‘ten’ printed on the note’s face,” the marker reads. “As this currency became widespread, people referred to its place of origin as ‘the land of the Dix,’ which eventually shortened to ‘Dixieland.’” The only problem is, as Popik concluded by scouring newspaper databases, not a single contemporary account from New Orleans backs up this notion. more

‘What’s royalty got to do with folk music?’ the amazing story of Cecil Sharp House
Britain’s first folk arts centre is 90 years old this year. It has survived bombs, class struggles and changing times but its influence on music has been vast.
Helen Brown traces its remarkable history and talks to Shirley Collins, Peggy Seeger and Rachel Unthank about its enduring legacy. On its 90th birthday, CSH’s chief executive, Katy Spicer, reminds me that we can trace those tensions right back to 1898, when the middle-class Folk-Song Society was founded to collect and preserve folk songs and tunes primarily from Britain and Ireland. They found and filed songs for the nation’s cabinet of curiosities just as other Victorians collected shells, ferns and fossils. Prominent members included Lucy Broadwood, Frank Kidson and Anglican priest Sabine Baring-Gould. Letters stored at CSH reveal the fierce rivalry between many of the collectors as they competed to discover the best, oldest or most obscure “peasant” tunes.

TECH

Trump tries to regulate people who write mean things about him  on the net

HAHHAHH AHHAHAAA AAHHAA HHAH AHHH AHHAAAAAA
“It was the Fairness Doctrine removal that largely allowed conservative talk radio to emerge as a force.”  Impeach Trump again and this time the Rethuglicans better remove him. The say nothing,  lying, cheating, power hungry, money grubbing trashy, disgusting roger stone corrupted  Republicans who stayed with their imperial confederate president are the ones to blame.

QAnon Has Gone Global “QAnon Army Finland.”
“Armies” like this can be found in Germany, France, and the U.K., as well as in Canada, Japan, and Iran. All of them support QAnon, a vast conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is waging a war against the “deep state” made up of elite families, politicians, and celebrities, which also just happens to connected a massive child sex trafficking ring and is currently using COVID-19 to entrench its power.

Energy Unveils Blueprint for Nationwide, ‘Unhackable’ Quantum Internet
Energy’s 17 national laboratories will serve as the backbone of the system, according to the agency, which confirmed that the desired outcome could be fully realized within the next decade.

Homeland Security Was Destined to Become a Secret Police Force
James Traub traced the appearance and evolution of the word “homeland” in American language. “The rise of ‘homeland’ … tracks the rise of the national sense of vulnerability,” Traub wrote. “As we use it now, ‘homeland’ means ‘the country insofar as it is endangered.’” Gessen notes that “homeland” is also a nativist term: it refers to the country where you were born, or else it comes with the qualifier “adopted,” which suggests that your claim to the homeland is contingent.

“The use of personality assessments in hiring, which dates back to the 1930s in the US, in fact began as a mechanism to weed out people most likely to become labor organizers.” An AI-hiring startup that already offers companies a tool to analyze a candidate’s traits, like “drive,” “initiative,” and “resilience,” is now trying to use machine learning to predict your likelihood of job-hopping. This is troubling.

MSCHF drops an ultrasonic jamming device add-on for your Amazon Echo
Smart assistants are sensitive to their wake words but who among us doesn’t trigger the smart speakers in their house with alarming frequency? Add in some heavily detailed privacy mishaps and a general feeling of distrust and there’s plenty of reason you might want to silence your smart speaker, occasionally. A new device promises to do just that, placing a check on your Amazon Echo’s always-on microphones through ultrasonic jamming. The gadget, dubbed Alexagate, is the latest drop from hype-as-a-service startup MSCHF. Last month, the startup announced a partnership with YouTuber MrBeast and an app where users could win bug bucks as long as they kept their finger on their phone. The contest ended with multiple winners as the competition  stretched from hours into days.

Cloudflare denies data leak after 3M customer IP addresses found on the dark web

Internal source code from 50 high-profile companies including Microsoft, Disney, and Nintendo has been leaked and posted online.

Election Officials Are Vulnerable to Email Attacks, Report Shows 
Cybersecurity vendor Area 1 Security Inc. tracked more than 12,000 local officials and determined that over 1,600 used free or nonstandard email software that often lacks the configuration and management protection found with large cloud-service providers. More than half of the officials used email systems with limited protection from phishing attacks, Area 1 said. The findings underscore problems with the country’s diverse, locally administered election system that attracted the attention of state-sponsored hackers four years ago.

Despite Trump claim, 13 states say some orders for coronavirus supplies still unfilled. “During his first coronavirus press briefing in nearly three months, President Donald Trump said his administration had filled every single request it has received from the nation’s governors for supplies to battle the coronavirus. But contrary to Trump’s claim, officials in 13 states told ABC News they still have requests pending for critical equipment as the virus spreads through much of the country.”

Mistake by Florida on child COVID-19 rate raises question: Can Florida’s numbers be trusted?. “An error by the Florida Department of Health produced a COVID-19 positivity rate for children of nearly one-third, a stunning figure that played into the debate over whether schools should reopen. A week after issuing that statistic, the department took it back without explanation. The next weekly report on children and COVID-19 showed the rate had plunged to 13.4%.”

BANKS

The $5.3 Trillion Question Behind America’s COVID-19 Failure

New York Times Rewrites the Timeline of the Fed’s Wall Street Bailouts
Last Friday, the New York Times officially embarked on what we have been
expecting – an attempt to rewrite the current, ongoing Wall Street bank
bailout.