#Coronavirus White House News

[sreegs]

I reblogged it earlier but I'm glad the Something Awful Forums 9/11 thread was archived because it's an incredibly important slice of internet history. For the record I think 9/11 was thousands of personal tragedies for the direct victims of the attacks but one big national farce that led to America's ongoing slide into fascism, and the nationalism and remembrance around it is a joke especially in the wake of the same amount of deaths every fucking day in the US during the height of coronavirus.

Nevertheless I think it's important that if you do not remember because you were too young or just didn't exist on Sept 11, 2001 to read the Something Awful 9/11 forums to get an idea of what the internet was like at the moment when America changed to 24 hour news cycles and renewed hyper-nationalism not seen since WWII.

This all happened before Twitter, Facebook, before Discord. Before smart phones. Before most people had cell phones. When a lot of people still had dial-up internet, even. Some people in the thread were relying on radio because internet and TV weren't keeping up.

It was a live event of internet denizens reacting to the biggest national event (and among the biggest international events) of the past 25 years. It was also a slice of what the internet was like at the turn of the millennium. Not only that, but people accurately calling out who was responsible, and what would result before the attacks even finished.

Keep in mind that the links that follow contain images of the event, lots of Islamophobia, people calling for the Middle East to be nuked, people blaming Palestine, casual racist and homophobic language (this was Something Awful after all), etc etc. They preserved the first 17 pages which spanned about 24 hours during the events. It's the origin of the "WATCH BUSH START A FUCKING WAR" screenshot.

Links under the fold. I've also annotated the pages with notes regarding the timeline and any posts of interest. Note the thread was preserved in Pacific Time even though the page says times are Eastern. That's incorrect. Post timestamps are 3 hours behind Eastern Time, which is the time zone where the attacks occurred:

Page 1 - Note the first post was edited to include images of the second attack. The thread started after the first plane hit. Second plane hitting the WTC happens here too.

Page 2 - Poster accurately calling out Bin Laden was responsible at 9:14 AM EST

Page 3 - "WATCH BUSH START A FUCKING WAR"

Page 4

Page 5 - First official acknowledgement it was a terrorist attack.

Page 6 - Pentagon hit

Page 7

Page 8

Page 9 - Commercial flights grounded by FAA (Federal Aviation Administration)

Page 10 - First mention of towers collapsing at end of page

Page 11 - More reactions to collapse of first tower. People thinking it was a bomb or yet another plane. Rumors about a fourth plane just missing the White House (these are false and predate the actual 4th plane crash by minutes)

Page 12

Page 13 - By this point there's just rampant speculation about more bombs at the WTC, the US Capitol building being hit, etc (all false). Remember this is all just people reacting to TV news and radio and the rumor mill via phone, AIM, IRC, and maybe text messages.

Page 14 - By this point internet news sites are overwhelmed

Page 15 - Second tower collapses. First acknowledgement of the fourth plane that crashed in PA.

Page 16 - There's an abrupt time jump in the threads, I think it was the result of admins pruning the activity or the SA forums going down. This page starts on 9/12 even though it is page 16. American flag signatures and ribbons start appearing.

Page 17

[blog4todaycom]

Dr. Anthony Fauci to give likely final Covid briefing as top White House health official

Dr. Anthony Fauci to give likely final Covid briefing as top White House health official

NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci addresses the daily press briefing at the White House in Washington, January 21, 2021. Jonathan Ernst | Reuters Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday will give what is expected to be his last public briefing on the Covid-19 pandemic as the White House chief medical advisor. Fauci announced earlier this year that he will step…

[bitchesgetriches]

{ MASTERPOST } Everything You Need to Know about Repairing Our Busted-Ass World

On poverty:

Starting from nothing

How To Start at Rock Bottom: Welfare Programs and the Social Safety Net 

How to Save for Retirement When You Make Less Than $30,000 a Year

Ask the Bitches: “Is It Too Late to Get My Financial Shit Together?“

Understanding why people are poor

It’s More Expensive to Be Poor Than to Be Rich

Why Are Poor People Poor and Rich People Rich?

On Financial Discipline, Generational Poverty, and Marshmallows

Bitchtastic Book Review: Hand to Mouth by Linda Tirado

Is Gentrification Just Artisanal, Small-Batch Displacement of the Poor?

Coronavirus Reveals America’s Pre-existing Conditions, Part 1: Healthcare, Housing, and Labor Rights

Developing compassion for poor people

The Latte Factor, Poor Shaming, and Economic Compassion

Ask the Bitches: “How Do I Stop Myself from Judging Homeless People?“

The Subjectivity of Wealth, Or: Don’t Tell Me What’s Expensive

A Little Princess: Intersectional Feminist Masterpiece?

If You Can’t Afford to Tip 20%, You Can’t Afford to Dine Out

Correcting income inequality

1 Easy Way All Allies Can Help Close the Gender and Racial Pay Gap

One Reason Women Make Less Money? They’re Afraid of Being Raped and Killed.

Raising the Minimum Wage Would Make All Our Lives Better

Are Unions Good or Bad?

On intersectional social issues:

Reproductive rights

On Pulling Weeds and Fighting Back: How (and Why) to Protect Abortion Rights

How To Get an Abortion 

Blood Money: Menstrual Products for Surviving Your Period While Poor

You Don’t Have to Have Kids

Gender equality

1 Easy Way All Allies Can Help Close the Gender and Racial Pay Gap 

The Pink Tax, Or: How I Learned to Love Smelling Like “Bearglove”

Our Single Best Piece of Advice for Women (and Men) on International Women’s Day

Bitchtastic Book Review: The Feminist Financial Handbook by Brynne Conroy

Sexual Harassment: How to Identify and Fight It in the Workplace 

Queer issues

Queer Finance 101: Ten Ways That Sexual and Gender Identity Affect Finances

Leaving Home before 18: A Practical Guide for Cast-Offs, Runaways, and Everybody in Between

Racial justice

The Financial Advantages of Being White

Woke at Work: How to Inject Your Values into Your Boring, Lame-Ass Job

The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander: A Bitchtastic Book Review

Something Is Wrong in Personal Finance. Here’s How To Make It More Inclusive.

The Biggest Threat to Black Wealth Is White Terrorism

Coronavirus Reveals America’s Pre-existing Conditions, Part 2: Racial and Gender Inequality 

10 Rad Black Money Experts to Follow Right the Hell Now 

Youth issues

What We Talk About When We Talk About Student Loans

The Ugly Truth About Unpaid Internships

Ask the Bitches: “I Just Turned 18 and My Parents Are Kicking Me Out. How Do I Brace Myself?”

Identifying and combatting abuse

When Money is the Weapon: Understanding Intimate Partner Financial Abuse

Are You Working on the Next Fyre Festival?: Identifying a Toxic Workplace

Ask the Bitches: “How Do I Say ‘No’ When a Loved One Asks for Money… Again?”

Ask the Bitches: I Was Guilted Into Caring for a Sick, Abusive Parent. Now What?

On mental health:

Understanding mental health issues

How Mental Health Affects Your Finances

Stop Recommending Therapy Like It’s a Magic Bean That’ll Grow Me a Beanstalk to Neurotypicaltown

Bitchtastic Book Review: Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos and Your Big Brain

Ask the Bitches: “How Do I Protect My Own Mental Health While Still Helping Others?”

Coping with mental health issues

{ MASTERPOST } Everything You Need to Know about Self-Care

My 25 Secrets to Successfully Working from Home with ADHD 

Our Master List of 100% Free Mental Health Self-Care Tactics 

On saving the planet:

Changing the system

Don’t Boo, Vote: If You Don’t Vote, No One Can Hear You Scream

Ethical Consumption: How to Pollute the Planet and Exploit Labor Slightly Less

The Anti-Consumerist Gift Guide: I Have No Gift to Bring, Pa Rum Pa Pum Pum

Season 1, Episode 4: “Capitalism Is Working for Me. So How Could I Hate It?”

Coronavirus Reveals America’s Pre-existing Conditions, Part 1: Healthcare, Housing, and Labor Rights 

Coronavirus Reveals America’s Pre-existing Conditions, Part 2: Racial and Gender Inequality 

Shopping smarter

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[tomorrowusa]

Four years ago today (March 13th), then President Donald Trump got around to declaring a national state of emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic. The administration had been downplaying the danger to the United States for 51 days since the first US infection was confirmed on January 22nd.

From an ABC News article dated 25 February 2020...

CDC warns Americans of 'significant disruption' from coronavirus

Until now, health officials said they'd hoped to prevent community spread in the United States. But following community transmissions in Italy, Iran and South Korea, health officials believe the virus may not be able to be contained at the border and that Americans should prepare for a "significant disruption." This comes in contrast to statements from the Trump administration. Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said Tuesday the threat to the United States from coronavirus "remains low," despite the White House seeking $1.25 billion in emergency funding to combat the virus. Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, told CNBC’s Kelly Evans on “The Exchange” Tuesday evening, "We have contained the virus very well here in the U.S." [ ... ] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the request "long overdue and completely inadequate to the scale of this emergency." She also accused President Trump of leaving "critical positions in charge of managing pandemics at the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security vacant." "The president's most recent budget called for slashing funding for the Centers for Disease Control, which is on the front lines of this emergency. And now, he is compounding our vulnerabilities by seeking to ransack funds still needed to keep Ebola in check," Pelosi said in a statement Tuesday morning. "Our state and local governments need serious funding to be ready to respond effectively to any outbreak in the United States. The president should not be raiding money that Congress has appropriated for other life-or-death public health priorities." She added that lawmakers in the House of Representatives "will swiftly advance a strong, strategic funding package that fully addresses the scale and seriousness of this public health crisis." Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also called the Trump administration's request "too little too late." "That President Trump is trying to steal funds dedicated to fight Ebola -- which is still considered an epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- is indicative of his towering incompetence and further proof that he and his administration aren't taking the coronavirus crisis as seriously as they need to be," Schumer said in a statement.

A reminder that Trump had been leaving many positions vacant – part of a Republican strategy to undermine the federal government.

Here's a picture from that ABC piece from a nearly empty restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown. The screen displays a Trump tweet still downplaying COVID-19 with him seeming more concerned about the effect of the Dow Jones on his re-election bid.

People were not buying Trump's claims but they were buying PPE.

I took this picture at CVS on February 26th that year.

The stock market which Trump in his February tweet claimed looked "very good" was tanking on March 12th – the day before his state of emergency declaration.

Trump succeeded in sending the US economy into recession much faster than George W. Bush did at the end of his term – quite a feat!. (As an aside, every recession in the US since 1981 has been triggered by Republican presidents.)

Of course Trump never stopped trying to downplay the pandemic nor did he ever take responsibility for it. The US ended up with the highest per capita death rate of any technologically advanced country.

Precious time was lost while Trump dawdled. Orange on this map indicates COVID infections while red indicates COVID deaths. At the time Trump declared a state of emergency, the virus had already spread to 49 states.

The United States could have done far better and it certainly had the tools to do so.

The Obama administration had limited the number of US cases of Ebola to under one dozen during that pandemic in the 2010s. Based on their success, they compiled a guide on how the federal government could limit future pandemics.

Obama team left pandemic playbook for Trump administration, officials confirm

Of course Trump ignored it.

Unlike those boxes of nuclear secrets in Trump's bathroom, the Obama pandemic limitation document is not classified. Anybody can read it – even if Trump didn't. This copy comes from the Stanford University Libraries.

TOWARDS EPIDEMIC PREDICTION: FEDERAL EFFORTS AND OPPORTUNITIES IN OUTBREAK MODELING

Feel free to share this post with anybody who still feels nostalgic about the Trump White House years!

[covid-safer-hotties]

How covid conspiracy theories led to an alarming resurgence in AIDS denialism - Published Aug 7, 2024

Widespread distrust of our public health system is reviving long-debunked ideas on HIV and AIDS—and energizing a broad movement that questions the foundations of disease prevention.

Several million people were listening in February when Joe Rogan falsely declared that “party drugs” were an “important factor in AIDS.” His guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, the former evolutionary biology professor turned contrarian podcaster Bret Weinstein, agreed with him: The “evidence” that AIDS is not caused by HIV is, he said, “surprisingly compelling.”

During the show, Rogan also asserted that AZT, the earliest drug used in the treatment of AIDS, killed people “quicker” than the disease itself—another claim that’s been widely repeated even though it is just as untrue.

Speaking to the biggest podcast audience in the world, the two men were promoting dangerous and false ideas—ideas that were in fact debunked and thoroughly disproved decades ago.

But it wasn’t just them. A few months later, the New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, four-time winner of the NFL’s MVP award, alleged that Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, had orchestrated the government's response to the AIDS crisis for personal gain and to promote AZT, which Rodgers also depicted as “killing people.” Though he was speaking to a much smaller audience, on a podcast hosted by a jujitsu fighter turned conspiracy theorist, a clip of the interview was re-shared on X, where it’s been viewed more than 13 million times.

Rodgers was repeating claims that appear in The Real Anthony Fauci, a 2021 book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a work that has renewed relevance as the anti-vaccine activist makes a long-shot but far-from-inconsequential run for the White House. The book, which depicts the elderly immunologist as a Machiavellian figure who used both the AIDS and covid pandemics for his own ends, has reportedly sold 1.3 million copies across all formats.

“When I hear [misinformation] like that, I just hope it doesn’t get traction,” says Seth Kalichman, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut and the author of Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy.

But it already has. These comments and others like them add up to a small but unmistakable resurgence in AIDS denialism—a false collection of theories arguing either that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS or that there’s no such thing as HIV at all.

The ideas here were initially promoted by a cadre of scientists from unrelated fields, as well as many science-adjacent figures and self-proclaimed investigative journalists, back in the 1980s and ’90s. But as more and more evidence stacked up against them, and as more people with HIV and AIDS started living longer lives thanks to effective new treatments, their claims largely fell out of favor.

At least until the coronavirus arrived.

Read the full article at either link! (the covidsafehotties archive is always free of annoying in-line ads, jsky!)

[orangerosebush]

[Link to the Reuters article. From June 14th, 2024]

"At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.

“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.

The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review, Reuters found.

The U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda, and Reuters found no evidence the Pentagon’s influence operation did so.

Spokespeople for Trump and Biden did not respond to requests for comment about the clandestine program.

A senior Defense Department official acknowledged the U.S. military engaged in secret propaganda to disparage China’s vaccine in the developing world, but the official declined to provide details.

A Pentagon spokeswoman said the U.S. military “uses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the U.S., allies, and partners.” She also noted that China had started a “disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.”

In an email, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it has long maintained the U.S. government manipulates social media and spreads misinformation.

Manila’s embassy in Washington did not respond to Reuters inquiries, including whether it had been aware of the Pentagon operation. A spokesperson for the Philippines Department of Health, however, said the “findings by Reuters deserve to be investigated and heard by the appropriate authorities of the involved countries.” Some aid workers in the Philippines, when told of the U.S. military propaganda effort by Reuters, expressed outrage.

Briefed on the Pentagon’s secret anti-vax campaign by Reuters, some American public health experts also condemned the program, saying it put civilians in jeopardy for potential geopolitical gain. An operation meant to win hearts and minds endangered lives, they said.

“I don’t think it’s defensible,” said Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. “I’m extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that,” said Lucey, a former military physician who assisted in the response to the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The effort to stoke fear about Chinese inoculations risked undermining overall public trust in government health initiatives, including U.S.-made vaccines that became available later, Lucey and others said. Although the Chinese vaccines were found to be less effective than the American-led shots by Pfizer and Moderna, all were approved by the World Health Organization. Sinovac did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Academic research published recently has shown that, when individuals develop skepticism toward a single vaccine, those doubts often lead to uncertainty about other inoculations. Lucey and other health experts say they saw such a scenario play out in Pakistan, where the Central Intelligence Agency used a fake hepatitis vaccination program in Abbottabad as cover to hunt for Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. Discovery of the ruse led to a backlash against an unrelated polio vaccination campaign, including attacks on healthcare workers, contributing to the reemergence of the deadly disease in the country.

“It should have been in our interest to get as much vaccine in people’s arms as possible,” said Greg Treverton, former chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, which coordinates the analysis and strategy of Washington’s many spy agencies. What the Pentagon did, Treverton said, “crosses a line.”

Together, the phony accounts used by the military had tens of thousands of followers during the program. Reuters could not determine how widely the anti-vax material and other Pentagon-planted disinformation was viewed, or to what extent the posts may have caused COVID deaths by dissuading people from getting vaccinated.

In the wake of the U.S. propaganda efforts, however, then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte had grown so dismayed by how few Filipinos were willing to be inoculated that he threatened to arrest people who refused vaccinations.

“You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,” a masked Duterte said in a televised address in June 2021. “There is a crisis in this country … I’m just exasperated by Filipinos not heeding the government.”

When he addressed the vaccination issue, the Philippines had among the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia. Only 2.1 million of its 114 million citizens were fully vaccinated – far short of the government’s target of 70 million. By the time Duterte spoke, COVID cases exceeded 1.3 million, and almost 24,000 Filipinos had died from the virus. The difficulty in vaccinating the population contributed to the worst death rate in the region.

A spokesperson for Duterte did not make the former president available for an interview.

Some Filipino healthcare professionals and former officials contacted by Reuters were shocked by the U.S. anti-vax effort, which they say exploited an already vulnerable citizenry. Public concerns about a Dengue fever vaccine, rolled out in the Philippines in 2016, had led to broad skepticism toward inoculations overall, said Lulu Bravo, executive director of the Philippine Foundation for Vaccination. The Pentagon campaign preyed on those fears.

“Why did you do it when people were dying? We were desperate,” said Dr. Nina Castillo-Carandang, a former adviser to the World Health Organization and Philippines government during the pandemic. “We don’t have our own vaccine capacity,” she noted, and the U.S. propaganda effort “contributed even more salt into the wound.”

The campaign also reinforced what one former health secretary called a longstanding suspicion of China, most recently because of aggressive behavior by Beijing in disputed areas of the South China Sea. Filipinos were unwilling to trust China’s Sinovac, which first became available in the country in March 2021, said Esperanza Cabral, who served as health secretary under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Cabral said she had been unaware of the U.S. military’s secret operation.

“I’m sure that there are lots of people who died from COVID who did not need to die from COVID,” she said.

To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.

“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”

In uncovering the secret U.S. military operation, Reuters interviewed more than two dozen current and former U.S officials, military contractors, social media analysts and academic researchers. Reporters also reviewed Facebook, X and Instagram posts, technical data and documents about a set of fake social media accounts used by the U.S. military. Some were active for more than five years.

Clandestine psychological operations are among the government’s most highly sensitive programs. Knowledge of their existence is limited to a small group of people within U.S. intelligence and military agencies. Such programs are treated with special caution because their exposure could damage foreign alliances or escalate conflict with rivals.

Over the last decade, some U.S. national security officials have pushed for a return to the kind of aggressive clandestine propaganda operations against rivals that the United States’ wielded during the Cold War. Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, in which Russia used a combination of hacks and leaks to influence voters, the calls to fight back grew louder inside Washington.

In 2019, Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, Reuters reported in March. As part of that effort, a small group of operatives used bogus online identities to spread disparaging narratives about Xi Jinping’s government.

COVID-19 galvanized the drive to wage psychological operations against China. One former senior Pentagon leader described the pandemic as a “bolt of energy” that finally ignited the long delayed counteroffensive against China’s influence war.

The Pentagon’s anti-vax propaganda came in response to China’s own efforts to spread false information about the origins of COVID. The virus first emerged in China in late 2019. But in March 2020, Chinese government officials claimed without evidence that the virus may have been first brought to China by an American service member who participated in an international military sports competition in Wuhan the previous year. Chinese officials also suggested that the virus may have originated in a U.S. Army research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland. There’s no evidence for that assertion.

Mirroring Beijing’s public statements, Chinese intelligence operatives set up networks of fake social media accounts to promote the Fort Detrick conspiracy, according to a U.S. Justice Department complaint.

China’s messaging got Washington’s attention. Trump subsequently coined the term “China virus” as a response to Beijing’s accusation that the U.S. military exported COVID to Wuhan.

“That was false. And rather than having an argument, I said, ‘I have to call it where it came from,’” Trump said in a March 2020 news conference. “It did come from China.”

China’s Foreign Ministry said in an email that it opposed “actions to politicize the origins question and stigmatize China.” The ministry had no comment about the Justice Department’s complaint.

Beijing didn’t limit its global influence efforts to propaganda. It announced an ambitious COVID assistance program, which included sending masks, ventilators and its own vaccines – still being tested at the time – to struggling countries. In May 2020, Xi announced that the vaccine China was developing would be made available as a “global public good,” and would ensure “vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries.” Sinovac was the primary vaccine available in the Philippines for about a year until U.S.-made vaccines became more widely available there in early 2022.

Washington’s plan, called Operation Warp Speed, was different. It favored inoculating Americans first, and it placed no restrictions on what pharmaceutical companies could charge developing countries for the remaining vaccines not used by the United States. The deal allowed the companies to “play hardball” with developing countries, forcing them to accept high prices, said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of medicine at Georgetown University who has worked with the World Health Organization.

The deal “sucked most of the supply out of the global market,” Gostin said. “The United States took a very determined America First approach.”

To Washington’s alarm, China’s offers of assistance were tilting the geopolitical playing field across the developing world, including in the Philippines, where the government faced upwards of 100,000 infections in the early months of the pandemic.

The U.S. relationship with Manila had grown tense after the 2016 election of the bombastic Duterte. A staunch critic of the United States, he had threatened to cancel a key pact that allows the U.S. military to maintain legal jurisdiction over American troops stationed in the country.

Duterte said in a July 2020 speech he had made “a plea” to Xi that the Philippines be at the front of the line as China rolled out vaccines. He vowed in the same speech that the Philippines would no longer challenge Beijing’s aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, upending a key security understanding Manila had long held with Washington.

“China is claiming it. We are claiming it. China has the arms, we do not have it.” Duterte said. “So, it is simple as that.”

Days later, China’s foreign minister announced Beijing would grant Duterte’s plea for priority access to the vaccine, as part of a “new highlight in bilateral relations.”

China’s growing influence fueled efforts by U.S. military leaders to launch the secret propaganda operation Reuters uncovered.

“We didn’t do a good job sharing vaccines with partners,” a senior U.S. military officer directly involved in the campaign in Southeast Asia told Reuters. “So what was left to us was to throw shade on China’s.”

U.S. military leaders feared that China’s COVID diplomacy and propaganda could draw other Southeast Asian countries, such as Cambodia and Malaysia, closer to Beijing, furthering its regional ambitions.

A senior U.S. military commander responsible for Southeast Asia, Special Operations Command Pacific General Jonathan Braga, pressed his bosses in Washington to fight back in the so-called information space, according to three former Pentagon officials.

The commander initially wanted to punch back at Beijing in Southeast Asia. The goal: to ensure the region understood the origin of COVID while promoting skepticism toward what were then still-untested vaccines offered by a country that they said had lied continually since the start of the pandemic.

A spokesperson for Special Operations Command declined to comment.

At least six senior State Department officials responsible for the region objected to this approach. A health crisis was the wrong time to instill fear or anger through a psychological operation, or psyop, they argued during Zoom calls with the Pentagon.

“We’re stooping lower than the Chinese and we should not be doing that,” said a former senior State Department official for the region who fought against the military operation.

While the Pentagon saw Washington’s rapidly diminishing influence in the Philippines as a call to action, the withering partnership led American diplomats to plead for caution.

“The relationship is hanging from a thread,” another former senior U.S. diplomat recounted. “Is this the moment you want to do a psyop in the Philippines? Is it worth the risk?”

In the past, such opposition from the State Department might have proved fatal to the program. Previously in peacetime, the Pentagon needed approval of embassy officials before conducting psychological operations in a country, often hamstringing commanders seeking to quickly respond to Beijing’s messaging, three former Pentagon officials told Reuters.

But in 2019, before COVID surfaced in full force, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper signed a secret order that later paved the way for the launch of the U.S. military propaganda campaign. The order elevated the Pentagon’s competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops against those adversaries. The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, even “outside of areas of active hostilities.”

Esper, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. A State Department spokesperson referred questions to the Pentagon.

In spring 2020, special-ops commander Braga turned to a cadre of psychological-warfare soldiers and contractors in Tampa to counter Beijing’s COVID efforts. Colleagues say Braga was a longtime advocate of increasing the use of propaganda operations in global competition. In trailers and squat buildings at a facility on Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base, U.S. military personnel and contractors would use anonymous accounts on X, Facebook and other social media to spread what became an anti-vax message. The facility remains the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda factory.

Psychological warfare has played a role in U.S. military operations for more than a hundred years, although it has changed in style and substance over time. So-called psyopers were best known following World War II for their supporting role in combat missions across Vietnam, Korea and Kuwait, often dropping leaflets to confuse the enemy or encourage their surrender.

After the al Qaeda attacks of 2001, the United States was fighting a borderless, shadowy enemy, and the Pentagon began to wage a more ambitious kind of psychological combat previously associated only with the CIA. The Pentagon set up front news outlets, paid off prominent local figures, and sometimes funded television soap operas in order to turn local populations against militant groups or Iranian-backed militias, former national security officials told Reuters.

Unlike earlier psyop missions, which sought specific tactical advantage on the battlefield, the post-9/11 operations hoped to create broader change in public opinion across entire regions.

By 2010, the military began using social media tools, leveraging phony accounts to spread messages of sympathetic local voices – themselves often secretly paid by the United States government. As time passed, a growing web of military and intelligence contractors built online news websites to pump U.S.-approved narratives into foreign countries. Today, the military employs a sprawling ecosystem of social media influencers, front groups and covertly placed digital advertisements to influence overseas audiences, according to current and former military officials.

China’s efforts to gain geopolitical clout from the pandemic gave Braga justification to launch the propaganda campaign that Reuters uncovered, sources said.

By summer 2020, the military’s propaganda campaign moved into new territory and darker messaging, ultimately drawing the attention of social media executives.

In regions beyond Southeast Asia, senior officers in the U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations across the Middle East and Central Asia, launched their own version of the COVID psyop, three former military officials told Reuters.

Although the Chinese vaccines were still months from release, controversy roiled the Muslim world over whether the vaccines contained pork gelatin and could be considered “haram,” or forbidden under Islamic law. Sinovac has said that the vaccine was “manufactured free of porcine materials.” Many Islamic religious authorities maintained that even if the vaccines did contain pork gelatin, they were still permissible since the treatments were being used to save human life.

The Pentagon campaign sought to intensify fears about injecting a pig derivative. As part of an internal investigation at X, the social media company used IP addresses and browser data to identify more than 150 phony accounts that were operated from Tampa by U.S. Central Command and its contractors, according to an internal X document reviewed by Reuters.

“Can you trust China, which tries to hide that its vaccine contains pork gelatin and distributes it in Central Asia and other Muslim countries where many people consider such a drug haram?” read an April 2021 tweet sent from a military-controlled account identified by X.

The Pentagon also covertly spread its messages on Facebook and Instagram, alarming executives at parent company Meta who had long been tracking the military accounts, according to former military officials.

One military-created meme targeting Central Asia showed a pig made out of syringes, according to two people who viewed the image. Reuters found similar posts that traced back to U.S. Central Command. One shows a Chinese flag as a curtain separating Muslim women in hijabs and pigs stuck with vaccine syringes. In the center is a man with syringes; on his back is the word “China.” It targeted Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, a country that distributed tens of millions of doses of China’s vaccines and participated in human trials. Translated into English, the X post reads: “China distributes a vaccine made of pork gelatin.”

Facebook executives had first approached the Pentagon in the summer of 2020, warning the military that Facebook workers had easily identified the military’s phony accounts, according to three former U.S. officials and another person familiar with the matter. The government, Facebook argued, was violating Facebook’s policies by operating the bogus accounts and by spreading COVID misinformation.

The military argued that many of its fake accounts were being used for counterterrorism and asked Facebook not to take down the content, according to two people familiar with the exchange. The Pentagon pledged to stop spreading COVID-related propaganda, and some of the accounts continued to remain active on Facebook.

Nonetheless, the anti-vax campaign continued into 2021 as Biden took office.

Angered that military officials had ignored their warning, Facebook officials arranged a Zoom meeting with Biden’s new National Security Council shortly after the inauguration, Reuters learned. The discussion quickly became tense.

“It was terrible,” said a senior administration official describing the reaction after learning of the campaign’s pig-related posts. “I was shocked. The administration was pro-vaccine and our concern was this could affect vaccine hesitancy, especially in developing countries.”

By spring 2021, the National Security Council ordered the military to stop all anti-vaccine messaging. “We were told we needed to be pro-vaccine, pro all vaccines,” said a former senior military officer who helped oversee the program. Even so, Reuters found some anti-vax posts that continued through April and other deceptive COVID-related messaging that extended into that summer. Reuters could not determine why the campaign didn’t end immediately with the NSC’s order. In response to questions from Reuters, the NSC declined to comment.

The senior Defense Department official said that those complaints led to an internal review in late 2021, which uncovered the anti-vaccine operation. The probe also turned up other social and political messaging that was “many, many leagues away” from any acceptable military objective. The official would not elaborate.

The review intensified the following year, the official said, after a group of academic researchers at Stanford University flagged some of the same accounts as pro-Western bots in a public report. The high-level Pentagon review was first reported by the Washington Post. which also reported that the military used fake social media accounts to counter China’s message that COVID came from the United States. But the Post report did not reveal that the program evolved into the anti-vax propaganda campaign uncovered by Reuters.

The senior defense official said the Pentagon has rescinded parts of Esper’s 2019 order that allowed military commanders to bypass the approval of U.S. ambassadors when waging psychological operations. The rules now mandate that military commanders work closely with U.S. diplomats in the country where they seek to have an impact. The policy also restricts psychological operations aimed at “broad population messaging,” such as those used to promote vaccine hesitancy during COVID.

The Pentagon’s audit concluded that the military’s primary contractor handling the campaign, General Dynamics IT, had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts, said a person with direct knowledge of the review. The review also found that military leaders didn’t maintain enough control over its psyop contractors, the person said.

A spokesperson for General Dynamics IT declined to comment.

Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue. In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using “disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.”

And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign – General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military."

[justinspoliticalcorner]

David Badash at NCRM:

Independent presidential candidate, anti-vaxxer, AIDS denialist, and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has suspended his campaign and is backing the Republican Party’s nominee for President, Donald Trump, despite RFK Jr.’s vice presidential running mate saying the ex-president must first apologize for the COVID vaccines developed when he was in the White House. More than 1.2 million Americans have died of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Trump’s Operation Warp Speed led to fast development COVID vaccines that saved more than one million lives in the U.S. alone, past his presidency, according to a December 2021 estimate. “The hesitation we have right now in joining forces with Trump is that he has not apologized or publicly come out and said ‘Operation Warp Speed was my fault, a failure, and I let it happen,’ ” Nicole Shanahan told right wing podcaster Adam Carolla.

But in a Pennsylvania court filing Kennedy announced he planned to drop his presidential run and endorse the convicted ex-president’s re-election bid, NBC News reported.

In a late and lengthy Friday afternoon press conference, Kennedy blasted the Democratic Party, noting his father, the late U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy, had been a Democrat. Kennedy also complained about the process to get on the ballot, despite numerous candidates having done it during every presidential cycle. During his remarks Kennedy declared he is suspending his campaign and is endorsing Trump, claiming he “has asked to enlist me in his administration.” Critics panned RFK Jr.’s move.

“The fact that RFk Jr sold his endorsement to the highest bidder is going to dramatically undermine his ability to convince his supporters to follow him to Trump,” former Obama senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer wrote. Kennedy reportedly had reached out to both campaigns, but the Harris-Walz Democratic ticket did not respond. The Washington Post reported Kennedy was seeking a Cabinet position from Harris. The Harris-Walz campaign mocked RFK Jr., posting a CNN video from Friday during which the reporter says, “Now, you might be wondering exactly why Trump’s team would want RFK’s endorsement, given the fact that his campaign has been really plagued by scandal after scandal.” “He admitted that a parasitic rain worm had entered into his brain and died there,” the reporter added, “and caused brain fog. In a Vanity Fair article he essentially evaded questions about allegations of sexual assault, but from a former nanny, and then obviously we saw what happened when he admitted that he left a [dead] bear cub in Central Park.”

As expected, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sold out the Kennedy name by endorsing Donald Trump today, furthering proof that RFK Jr.’s run for the Presidency was just a MAGA grift.

See Also:

The Guardian: Robert F Kennedy Jr suspends US presidential campaign and endorses Trump

[mariacallous]

Today’s newsletter is about a recent report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

But it’s also about a major policy initiative that helped lots of Americans even though almost nobody seems to have noticed — and how that lack of attention has made it more difficult to renew the program now that it has expired.

The subject of the report is child care. As you may know firsthand ― or if you’ve read HuffPost’s coverage of the issue ― finding quality, affordable child care providers in the U.S. is difficult. A big reason is that it costs a lot of money to run a high-performing child care center, and the fees to sustain that kind of operation are more than many families can afford.

These problems have existed for years but got even worse during the coronavirus pandemic, when public health closures and illness-related absences reduced revenue for providers, putting some into debt while forcing others to reduce capacity or close. Those that survived struggled to hire (or rehire) workers once demand returned, in part because they were increasingly competing with retail and hospitality industries that could raise wages more easily.

The federal government stepped in by providing $24 billion in emergency assistance as part of the American Rescue Plan, which Democrats in Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed in early 2021. The money went directly to state governments, which, in turn, gave it to providers. Some used it for workers, while others used it to maintain equipment or acquire equipment. Others paid off debts.

All of this made a big difference, according to that new Council of Economic Advisers report I mentioned.

In particular, the council’s economists determined, emergency child care money:

“Saved families with young children who rely on paid child care,”

“Helped hundreds of thousands of women with young children enter or reenter the workforce more quickly,” and

“Boosted the child care workforce and helped raise the real wages of child care workers.”

These conclusions make intuitive sense. And although the council is part of the White House, its staff is composed of well-credentialed economists who have a legal mandate to provide objective analysis ― and these conclusions make intuitive sense. In other words, there’s good reason to think this Biden-Democratic initiative propped up child care at a moment of crisis, preserving access for a significant number of families.

That’s a big deal. Just ask any working parent — or any employer, for that matter. But few Americans even realize Biden and the Democrats in Congress took this action, let alone that it had such an impact.

So what happened? And what does that tell us about how politics works nowadays? I have a few ideas about that...

Why Nobody Noticed The Child Care Money

For one thing, the child care assistance was part of a larger bill that never generated much of a substantive debate, except when it came to its overall size. And it went through Congress at a time when other news stories, such as the distribution of (still new) COVID vaccines, were getting a lot more attention.

What’s more, the assistance wasn’t in the form of checks with Biden’s name on them that went to families. It was money that went through states directly to providers.

Then there’s the fact that the program’s effects consisted primarily of things that didn’t happen rather than things that did. Child care costs didn’t rise as fast as they would otherwise. Providers that would have closed stayed open. Workers who might have left child care for positions in retail or hospitality didn’t. Working parents, especially women, didn’t cut back hours or leave the workforce.

You’re not going to recognize this kind of effect unless you contemplate the counterfactual ― in other words, what might have happened without the assistance in place. And that’s just not how most people think.

What’s Happening To Child Care Now

As it happens, a version of that counterfactual may be starting to play out now, because the temporary assistance program has expired. On Oct. 1, the federal government stopped writing new assistance checks.

That might not seem significant, given that the pandemic emergency is effectively over. But the system’s pre-existing problems are still there ― and now appear to be compounded by other, newer factors, like those tight labor markets that make it even harder for providers to hire and retain qualified workers.

It takes a while for money to work its way through government bureaucracies, so it’s going to take time to see just how big a deal the end of federal emergency funds will be. Many experts (including several quoted in this October Vox article) have raised questions about the most dire predictions, which suggest 3 million child care slots could vanish nationwide.

But it’s hard to imagine there won’t be some fallout. Already there are reports of sporadic closures around the country. That includes in rural communities of western North Carolina, where a nonprofit agency called the Southwestern Child Development Commission announced in late October that seven centers were shutting down.

Sheila Hoyle, the commission’s executive director, confirmed to me by phone that the end of federal emergency funds was the catalyst that led to the closings, which in turn reduced available slots for children by more than 300. And while many of the kids ended up with other providers, Hoyle said, the new arrangements for families — at least, the ones that were able to find them — are generally less well-suited to parent working hours, came with higher expenses for parents, or both.

“We’re asking our parents to patch together programs that weren’t designed to fulfill the needs of working parents, and we need to ask what happens to that child,” Hoyle said. “There’s Grandma or Grandpa on Tuesday, and Daddy gets off early on Fridays, and Mama tries to do Monday and Wednesday, and then you take them to a relative’s house or a next-door neighbor’s house.”

“It’s all just getting by,” Hoyle added, “and just getting by is not what we intend for young children who need a good solid early childhood learning experience while their families work, so that they can succeed in school and eventually become successful young adults.”

How ‘Invisible’ Policy Creates Political Problems

The Biden administration and Democratic leaders in Congress want to do something about that, by restoring at least some of the funding, starting with $16 billion for the coming year. The hope is to attach something to a must-pass spending bill whenever an opportunity presents itself.

But it will take political pressure to round up the votes, especially given Republican skepticism of federal spending and conservative doubts about the structure of federal child care assistance. And it’s hard to generate pressure to restore a program most Americans never knew existed.

Of course, this is not exactly a new problem for Biden, or for Democrats more generally.

Programs nowadays frequently operate invisibly through indirect grants to states or via the tax code, in what political scientist Susan Mettler has called “the submerged state.” Other initiatives are more visible but, like the pandemic child care finding, have primarily prevented bad outcomes rather than creating good ones.

Those problems help explain why, for example, Democrats weren’t able to extend another pandemic measure, a tax credit for children, even though its existence had caused child poverty to plummet. It expired at the end of 2021. Now child poverty is back up, and virtually nobody seems to recognize what it accomplished or Biden’s role in initially reducing it ― making it even harder to get such a program going again. It’s even possible that the expiration of these programs is contributing to voter frustration with Biden, saddling him with blame for the end of assistance that he’s been trying to save.

Politics is like that sometimes, with credit or blame for policy falling in ways that align poorly with what elected officials have actually done. But if Biden and the Democrats lose next November, the chances of meaningful new investments in child care — and plenty of other, similar needs — will be even lower than they are now.

[beardedmrbean]

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) didn't report a staggering $7 billion in award-level obligations and outlays during fiscal year 2022, according to an inspector general audit released this week.

The EPA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) determined that the agency underreported its award-level outlays by $5.8 billion, or 99.9%, and its award-level obligations by $1.2 billion, or 12.9% during FY22, the period between October 2021 and September 2022. The agency further failed to report any of its Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act outlays and under-reported its coronavirus pandemic-related outlays.

"The lack of complete and accurate reporting also led to taxpayers being initially misinformed about the EPA’s spending, and policy-makers who relied on the data may not have been able to effectively track federal spending," the OIG report concluded.

In response to the audit, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., blasted the EPA and called for increased transparency into its activities. 

"It’s outrageous and unacceptable that the EPA cannot keep track of its spending or inform Congress — and the American people — of how it is using taxpayer dollars," McMorris Rodgers said in a statement Thursday. "This eye-opening report only further highlights the need for more transparency at the EPA."

"It also raises questions about whether the agency is incapable of managing its record-high budget or if the agency is attempting to hide the amount of taxpayer dollars it is spending to advance the administration’s radical rush-to-green agenda," she added. "The Energy and Commerce Committee will continue holding this administration accountable for its actions that are driving up costs across the board and hurting Americans."

MICHIGAN DEMOCRAT SIGNED NDA INVOLVING CCP-TIED COMPANY, DOCUMENTS SHOW, CONTRADICTING HER PAST CLAIMS

The EPA ultimately corrected its FY22 figures in May 2023 as a result of the OIG audit while making configuration changes a month later. Overall, the inspector general made five recommendations which it said the agency agreed to make.

The report, meanwhile, comes as the EPA both manages a massive green energy fund and continues to request a larger budget. The Inflation Reduction, Democrats' massive climate and tax bill passed in 2022, created the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which in turn establishes a national green bank to fund green projects nationwide.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS OPEN PROBE INTO BIDEN ADMIN FOR OPENING PUBLIC LANDS TO FOREIGN OWNERSHIP

And the White House is requesting that Congress approve a FY24 EPA budget of more than $12 billion, a record level. Republicans have aimed to reduce the EPA budget to about $6 billion, which would be the agency's smallest budget since the early 1990s.

"The Biden administration is using EPA as a pass through for taxpayer dollars to fund left-wing groups that aim to get Democrats elected, not improve the environment," Mandy Gunasekara, a Heritage Foundation visiting fellow who served as the EPA's chief of staff during the Trump administration, told Fox News Digital.

"A failure to report $7 billion is absurd and unacceptable, but also symbolic of how Team Biden operates: prioritizing their political goals over the needs of the American people," she continued. "I’m glad Chair Rodgers is monitoring this and hope the committee brings forth the agency’s Chief Financial Officer to account for this serious oversight."

The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

The day after Rand Paul, MD took legal action against Dr Fauci, his office is destroyed in a fire.

Rand Paul: We Have Referred Fauci to DOJ for Prosecution for Lying to Congress

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told Breitbart News Daily he has referred Dr. Anthony Fauci for prosecution, explaining that the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief lied during his testimony before Congress.

Paul initially said he gave Fauci the benefit of the doubt in 2020, deeming Fauci a “disinterested public health figure.” But as he had further interactions with him, he concluded the former White House medical adviser was a “dishonest” individual, determined to cover up his initial response to the coronavirus pandemic.

He pointed to further evidence this week–the emergence of an email featuring Fauci summarizing a phone call in early 2020.

“This is when they’re just beginning to look into the pandemic. And in that email, he basically says, ‘Yes, we’re suspicious that this could be a manipulated virus because it came from a lab in Wuhan, where they do gain of function research,’ and he describes the research,” Paul said.

“Well, this directly contradicts everything he said in committee hearing to me, denying absolutely that they funded any gain of function, and it’s absolutely a lie,” he said.

“That’s why we ended up referring him again this week to the Department of Justice, for prosecution for lying to Congress,” Paul revealed.Breitbart · Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) – July 20, 2023

The Kentucky senator continued, pointing to an “exchange of emails between Anthony Fauci and half a dozen prominent international virologists, and these emails go back and forth.”

“These virologists from around the world are saying, they’re looking at the genetic sequence of COVID-19, and they find that there are some striking, strikingly unusual characteristics of it that make it look like it’s been manipulated in the lab. And this band of close virologists that are his close buddies–and these are all people who have been proponents previously of gain of function research, creating viruses that don’t occur in nature to experimentation — they all tell him it looks manipulative,” he said, explaining that they then had a phone call discussing it on February 1, 2020.

“So he [Fauci] summarizes the phone call, about a day later, and it’s in an email that they have never released to us, but then finally was obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and through the House involvement through threat of subpoena,” Paul explained, adding that these are things he has been trying to get out for two years.

In the email, Fauci summarizes the call and “describes the worry among all these virologists, himself included — he’s not a virologist, but he also has worries and is worried that it looks like it’s been manipulated,” Paul said.

“And this is especially suspicious because we know they do gain of function research in Wuhan, and he describes the research,” the senator continued.

So essentially, lawmakers have proof Fauci funded this research and proof he acknowledged it. Before Congress, however, Fauci said unequivocally that they had never funded gain of function research, which Paul said is a “lie.”

Paul also said Fauci has attempted to cover his lie by essentially changing the definition of gain of function — something that Paul questioned him about during a November 2021 hearing in which the senator accused the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of changing the definition to cover Fauci’s “ass.”

“They have tried to define away the problem. The other thing they’ve tried to say is that it only counts as gain of function research if it’s a human virus,” Paul said, describing it as problematic because they take these bat viruses and test them on mice with humanized cells.

FLASHBACK — Rand Paul Grills Fauci on Gain of Function: You Changed the Definition to “Cover Your Ass”

[bitchesgetriches]

On poverty:

Starting from nothing

How To Start at Rock Bottom: Welfare Programs and the Social Safety Net

How to Save for Retirement When You Make Less Than $30,000 a Year

Ask the Bitches: “Is It Too Late to Get My Financial Shit Together?“

Understanding why people are poor

It’s More Expensive to Be Poor Than to Be Rich

Why Are Poor People Poor and Rich People Rich?

On Financial Discipline, Generational Poverty, and Marshmallows

Bitchtastic Book Review: Hand to Mouth by Linda Tirado

Is Gentrification Just Artisanal, Small-Batch Displacement of the Poor?

Coronavirus Reveals America’s Pre-existing Conditions, Part 1: Healthcare, Housing, and Labor Rights

Developing compassion for poor people

The Latte Factor, Poor Shaming, and Economic Compassion

Ask the Bitches: “How Do I Stop Myself from Judging Homeless People?“

The Subjectivity of Wealth, Or: Don’t Tell Me What’s Expensive

A Little Princess: Intersectional Feminist Masterpiece?

If You Can’t Afford to Tip 20%, You Can’t Afford to Dine Out

Correcting income inequality

1 Easy Way All Allies Can Help Close the Gender and Racial Pay Gap

One Reason Women Make Less Money? They’re Afraid of Being Raped and Killed.

Raising the Minimum Wage Would Make All Our Lives Better

Are Unions Good or Bad?

On intersectional social issues:

Reproductive rights

On Pulling Weeds and Fighting Back: How (and Why) to Protect Abortion Rights

How To Get an Abortion

Blood Money: Menstrual Products for Surviving Your Period While Poor

You Don’t Have to Have Kids

Gender equality

1 Easy Way All Allies Can Help Close the Gender and Racial Pay Gap

The Pink Tax, Or: How I Learned to Love Smelling Like “Bearglove”

Our Single Best Piece of Advice for Women (and Men) on International Women’s Day

Bitchtastic Book Review: The Feminist Financial Handbook by Brynne Conroy

Sexual Harassment: How to Identify and Fight It in the Workplace

Queer issues

Queer Finance 101: Ten Ways That Sexual and Gender Identity Affect Finances

Leaving Home before 18: A Practical Guide for Cast-Offs, Runaways, and Everybody in Between

Racial justice

The Financial Advantages of Being White

Woke at Work: How to Inject Your Values into Your Boring, Lame-Ass Job

The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander: A Bitchtastic Book Review

Something Is Wrong in Personal Finance. Here’s How To Make It More Inclusive.

The Biggest Threat to Black Wealth Is White Terrorism

Coronavirus Reveals America’s Pre-existing Conditions, Part 2: Racial and Gender Inequality

10 Rad Black Money Experts to Follow Right the Hell Now

Youth issues

What We Talk About When We Talk About Student Loans

The Ugly Truth About Unpaid Internships

Ask the Bitches: “I Just Turned 18 and My Parents Are Kicking Me Out. How Do I Brace Myself?”

Identifying and combatting abuse

When Money is the Weapon: Understanding Intimate Partner Financial Abuse

Are You Working on the Next Fyre Festival?: Identifying a Toxic Workplace

Ask the Bitches: “How Do I Say ‘No’ When a Loved One Asks for Money… Again?”

Ask the Bitches: I Was Guilted Into Caring for a Sick, Abusive Parent. Now What?

On mental health:

Understanding mental health issues

How Mental Health Affects Your Finances

Stop Recommending Therapy Like It’s a Magic Bean That’ll Grow Me a Beanstalk to Neurotypicaltown

Bitchtastic Book Review: Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos and Your Big Brain

Ask the Bitches: “How Do I Protect My Own Mental Health While Still Helping Others?”

Coping with mental health issues

{ MASTERPOST } Everything You Need to Know about Self-Care

My 25 Secrets to Successfully Working from Home with ADHD

Our Master List of 100% Free Mental Health Self-Care Tactics

On saving the planet:

Changing the system

Don’t Boo, Vote: If You Don’t Vote, No One Can Hear You Scream

Ethical Consumption: How to Pollute the Planet and Exploit Labor Slightly Less

The Anti-Consumerist Gift Guide: I Have No Gift to Bring, Pa Rum Pa Pum Pum

Season 1, Episode 4: “Capitalism Is Working for Me. So How Could I Hate It?”

Coronavirus Reveals America’s Pre-existing Conditions, Part 1: Healthcare, Housing, and Labor Rights

Coronavirus Reveals America’s Pre-existing Conditions, Part 2: Racial and Gender Inequality

Shopping smarter

You Deserve Cheap Toilet Paper, You Beautiful Fucking Moon Goddess

You Are above Bottled Water, You Elegant Land Mermaid

Fast Fashion: Why It’s Fucking up the World and How To Avoid It

You Deserve Cheap, Fake Jewelry… Just Like Coco Chanel

6 Proven Tactics for Avoiding Emotional Impulse Spending

[tomorrowusa]

Just so nobody can say this is out of context, here's a vid of the entire interview.

The Obama administration successfully contained the Ebola outbreak in the United States. The death toll for Ebola in the US was under a dozen. So before leaving office, the Obama National Security Council created a 69-page handbook on how to deal with a pandemic. Trump and his flunkies ignored it with disastrous results.

Trump team failed to follow NSC’s pandemic playbook

The US death toll from COVID-19 is in seven digits. Other industrialized countries with advanced technological infrastructure such as Canada, Taiwan, Germany, and New Zealand had lower fatality rates per capita.

Trump largely ignored the virus until well into March when it had a chance to spread across the US.

The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life The president was aware of the danger from the coronavirus – but a lack of leadership has created an emergency of epic proportions

The Trump administration, at best, was in denial; at worst, it sabotaged the pandemic response.

Trump White House made 'deliberate efforts' to undermine Covid response, report says

Trump zombies who claim the economy was marvelous under Trump conveniently forget about everything that happened after February of 2020. Trump's early bungling of the pandemic plunged the economy into recession. The COVID supply chain problems and the economic stimulus required to prevent a depression led to the spurt in inflation which is finally receding.

People who are nostalgic about taking hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, drinking bleach, and sticking UV lights up their butts must be excited about the opportunity to vote for Trump again.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

By Gregg Gonsalves

Why are places like Stanford and Johns Hopkins hosting gatherings of well-known coronavirus cranks?

Today, Stanford University is holding an all-day gathering on the Covid pandemic, with its new president making opening remarks. It’s the second such meeting at a prestigious university in recent months, after Johns Hopkins hosted a “symposium on health policy” in September. They may seem fine on the surface, but both events should be a source of embarrassment for the institutions involved. (I have a personal stake in the former gathering: I’m spending my time this fall at Stanford with a group of wonderful, truly talented researchers, who I hope do not get sprayed with the stink of this misbegotten affair.)

While the organization and funding for these two meetings isn’t explicitly linked, the cast of characters at both are eerily similar. They each feature a collection of well-known Covid contrarians: those who, in the early days of the pandemic thought we should “let ’er rip” and get as many people infected as possible, with a performative nod to protecting the vulnerable; suggested that vaccine and mask mandates were somehow akin to Nazi totalitarianism; told us not to worry about variants (“variants, schmariants,” as one of them remarked months before Delta and Omicron blasted their way through the US); and said we’d have herd immunity by April 2021.

If you want just one piece of evidence about the kind of cranks we’re talking about, consider this: A late addition to the Stanford meeting is a senior editor of the Epoch Times, a far-right publication that not only dabbles in Covid conspiracies but is a frequent purveyor of climate change denialism.

While the organizers have tried to add a few reasonable voices to the meeting, it doesn’t change the overall thrust of these gatherings. As former Texas governor Ann Richards said, “You can put lipstick and earrings on a hog and call it Monique, but it’s still a pig.”

Health reporters like Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times blew the whistle on the Stanford conference in mid-September, and others who have focused on debunking the pseudoscience of this crew have written about the meetings on both coasts. The faculty at both institutions who are pushed for and are behind these convocations have defended them on the grounds of academic freedom—a defense that, in our current era of freakouts over “cancel culture,” neither Stanford or Hopkins would have had an easy time overcoming. Chalk one up to the contrarians for putting these schools in an impossible situation—though that still does not explain why Stanford’s president feels the need to personally show up today.

The architects of these meetings come with bags and bags of right-wing funding, some of it laundered through think tanks and other institutions. They have met with Trump officials in the White House and guided Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Covid-19 policy. Some of them even got a shout-out from Bret Stephens at The New York Times last week.

They whine on and on about how terribly they’ve been treated, but, far from being persecuted, they are celebrated on the right, even if the mainstream members of their professions have, time and time again, considered their ideas and roundly rejected them on their merits.

My question is: Why host these meetings now and in these venues?

Some have suggested this is about “auditioning” for the next Trump administration as much as it is trying to rewrite the history of the pandemic. Both are in part probably true. But if you zoom out and think about these meetings in the context of the right’s war on higher education, I believe the purpose becomes clearer.

These Covid contrarians—who have found little support for their views among their peers—have decided that the science has been turned into “a dogmatic tool of oppression” for rejecting them. In their minds they are Galileos against the church, and now they are tilting their fury against the institutions themselves. This tack is of course reminiscent of the right’s attacks on the universities as bastions of woke, left-wing ideology, which either need to be reformed (by hiring more conservative faculty) or gutted and rebuilt to their liking (e.g., New College of Florida).

In this light, these two meetings are about establishing a beachhead—building credibility in what many of the organizers would consider the liberal bastions of academia. If you cannot convince your colleagues of the worth of your arguments, then you can cry out that you’re being discriminated against for simply having “differing views.” But things don’t work like that in science: we don’t teach intelligent design alongside evolution, or alternative theories of the cause of AIDS. Supporters of those discredited ideas would say we need to “teach the controversy” and not be dogmatic, but there is no controversy to be had: the preponderance of the evidence supports evolution and HIV as the cause of AIDS. Similarly, many of the Covid contrarians’ favorite claims have withered in the sunlight of scientific scrutiny.

But just as the Federalist Society has established influence over law schools and the judiciary, the Covid contrarians and their supporters would like to do the same for medicine and public health, by mainstreaming their views—both in academic settings and then in public policy—by sheer brute force. They won’t give up, and they have the money and resources to continue their campaigns. Should former president Trump regain the White House, their fortunes will rise and these threats to academic integrity, and to the public health itself (through adoption of their views in practice) will go into overdrive.

And for anyone who thinks this is all academic, in mid-September, the surgeon general of Florida recommended against the use of mRNA Covid vaccines, just as we’re heading into respiratory virus season, endangering the lives of the residents of the state with quackery and pseudoscience. Of course, it’s the same Covid contrarians who have organized these meetings, who have been advising the DeSantis administration for several years now on pandemic policy. Shame on them.

[bopinion]

2024 / 29

Aperçu of the week

“This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.”

(Elmer Holmes Davis, US-American news reporter, author, Director of the United States Office of War Information during World War II and winner of the Peabody Award, the Alfred I. duPont Award and many more)

Bad News of the Week

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has often been called “Trump with a brain”. The same could be said of James David “J. D.” Vance. And that's what makes him so dangerous. And his selection as Trump's running mate a clever move from the Republican perspective. Vance stands for the American Dream like no other. From nothing, as a working-class child with a drug-addicted mother, he has worked his way up through military service and law school to become a successful businessman, a bestselling author and US senator.

That sells well. As does his “age” - if you can call it that at 39. And that he comes from the Rust Belt. And, of course, that he owes his success to America and the Almighty God. His political views are arch-conservative. Migration? No. Abortion rights? No. Ukraine support? No. Climate protection? No. Understanding of democracy? No. Welfare state? No. Creepy. Where Trump is vague, Vance is clear. He doesn't just play the tough guy, but seems to really believe in his wet reactionary dreams.

And he knows how to sell his political ideas eloquently. Presumably even to those for whom Trump's populism is too crude. And he also knows how to coherently explain his original blanket rejection of his current idol (“Never-Trumper”). After all, he has proven in office that he was and will be the best president of all time.

We will probably only find out in his memoirs whether Vance donned the Make America Great Again cap out of a calculation for power or out of real conviction. Either way, he will be able to score points with the electorate, which is clearly not immune to racism, sexism, homophobia, protectionism, conspiracy theories, exclusion, predatory capitalism or xenophobia and seems to have a second planet in the trunk.

Good News of the Week

I've been waiting all weekend for the breaking news. Finally it went “pling” and I read: Tadej Pogacar from Slovenia wins the Tour de France for the third time. And I said to myself that it was probably due to the coronavirus isolation at the beach house in Delaware that Joe Biden still hasn't realized that he's up against the wall in the presidential election. Or the announced visit by Benjamin Netanyahu, to whom he does not want to show any weakness. And then came the long-awaited news on Sunday evening Central European Time: Joe Biden is withdrawing his candidacy for re-election.

Unfortunately, contrary to general expectations, Biden has failed to put in place a solid succession plan during his term of office. Now, due to a lack of alternatives, he is also making an automatic case for his Vice President Kamal Harris. Her nomination before the 2020 election was “the best decision of his life”. There are disadvantages associated with the probable nomination of Harris: her approval ratings are hardly any better than those of Joe Biden recently. She lacks a profile of her own. Her track record as Vice President is rather poor.

On the other hand, Harris also has her (marketable) advantages: She is only 59 years “young”. She is known nationwide. She should be able to reach the female electorate and those with a (relatively recent) migration background. As the running mate so far, she probably has direct access to the donated campaign funds (war chest) and structures. She's already been vetted - and I don't mean the mandatory security checks for White House positions, but the search for “dirt” by Republicans.

With Harris' endorsement and initial support from notable Democrats, the likelihood of an open contest by the convention in late August has diminished significantly - even if that would have been the more democratic way to go. Biden's withdrawal comes late, but hopefully not too late. The US electorate can still be told that there is an alternative to Donald Trump that may even be more than just the lesser of two evils. Harris just needs to credibly step out of Biden's shadow. And sell her achievements better than Biden, whose political performance is not at all reflected in his approval ratings.

Personal happy moment of the week

There are people who have obviously done everything right in their lives. After a solid working life, they take a well-paid early retirement and celebrate this change with lots of friends at a nice party in their own garden. We were allowed to be there and enjoyed draught beer and a sumptuous buffet. And I ate a lamb skewer from the grill for the first time. Thank you very much, Stefan!

I couldn't care less...

...that Friday saw the biggest IT outage in history, with worldwide repercussions for air travel, retail, critical infrastructure such as hospitals, public administration and countless companies and private individuals. The error triggered by Crowdstrike paralyzed Windows. This may be by far the most widely used operating system globally, but in our household it reaches exactly 0.0%.

It's fine with me...

...that Ursula von der Leyen was elected by the European Parliament for a second term as President of the EU Commission. She has already successfully managed to keep the reins in her hands, even though the 27 heads of government of the member states like to run in different directions. With a strengthened right-wing, fairly reactionary conservatives, the migration issue condemned to eternal insolubility and a host of vested interests, it will not be easy to keep central projects such as the Green Deal on track. But Von der Leyen can be trusted to do so. Good luck.

As I write this...

...I'm listening to a brand new album by Deep Purple. The musicians are well into their 70s, but they still let it rip. The songs sound almost like leftovers from 50 years ago that a sound engineer found while sweeping up a well-known studio in Montreux. Nice.

Post Scriptum

We Germans know what it's like to (have to) be a divided country. And we were very lucky to be able to leave this behind us. Unfortunately, other peoples, such as the Koreans, cannot claim this for themselves. And there is still a divided country in Europe too: Cyprus.

The small island in the easternmost part of the Mediterranean has been suffering from an ethnic conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots for 50 years now. The conflict has a belligerent character, which the two protecting powers Greece and Türkiye - both of which are members of NATO - are virtually cheering on. The demarcation line with a buffer zone that divides the island is still monitored by UN blue helmets. Sad.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic

CHRIS BING and JOEL SCHECTMAN at Reuters:

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus. The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation. Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.

“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law. The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review, Reuters found.

The U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda, and Reuters found no evidence the Pentagon’s influence operation did so. Spokespeople for Trump and Biden did not respond to requests for comment about the clandestine program. A senior Defense Department official acknowledged the U.S. military engaged in secret propaganda to disparage China’s vaccine in the developing world, but the official declined to provide details. A Pentagon spokeswoman said the U.S. military “uses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the U.S., allies, and partners.” She also noted that China had started a “disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.”

[...] The effort to stoke fear about Chinese inoculations risked undermining overall public trust in government health initiatives, including U.S.-made vaccines that became available later, Lucey and others said. Although the Chinese vaccines were found to be less effective than the American-led shots by Pfizer and Moderna, all were approved by the World Health Organization. Sinovac did not respond to a Reuters request for comment. Academic research published recently has shown that, when individuals develop skepticism toward a single vaccine, those doubts often lead to uncertainty about other inoculations. Lucey and other health experts say they saw such a scenario play out in Pakistan, where the Central Intelligence Agency used a fake hepatitis vaccination program in Abbottabad as cover to hunt for Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. Discovery of the ruse led to a backlash against an unrelated polio vaccination campaign, including attacks on healthcare workers, contributing to the reemergence of the deadly disease in the country.

[...] By summer 2020, the military’s propaganda campaign moved into new territory and darker messaging, ultimately drawing the attention of social media executives. In regions beyond Southeast Asia, senior officers in the U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations across the Middle East and Central Asia, launched their own version of the COVID psyop, three former military officials told Reuters.

Although the Chinese vaccines were still months from release, controversy roiled the Muslim world over whether the vaccines contained pork gelatin and could be considered “haram,” or forbidden under Islamic law. Sinovac has said that the vaccine was “manufactured free of porcine materials.” Many Islamic religious authorities maintained that even if the vaccines did contain pork gelatin, they were still permissible since the treatments were being used to save human life. The Pentagon campaign sought to intensify fears about injecting a pig derivative. As part of an internal investigation at X, the social media company used IP addresses and browser data to identify more than 150 phony accounts that were operated from Tampa by U.S. Central Command and its contractors, according to an internal X document reviewed by Reuters. “Can you trust China, which tries to hide that its vaccine contains pork gelatin and distributes it in Central Asia and other Muslim countries where many people consider such a drug haram?” read an April 2021 tweet sent from a military-controlled account identified by X.

The Pentagon also covertly spread its messages on Facebook and Instagram, alarming executives at parent company Meta who had long been tracking the military accounts, according to former military officials. One military-created meme targeting Central Asia showed a pig made out of syringes, according to two people who viewed the image. Reuters found similar posts that traced back to U.S. Central Command. One shows a Chinese flag as a curtain separating Muslim women in hijabs and pigs stuck with vaccine syringes. In the center is a man with syringes; on his back is the word “China.” It targeted Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, a country that distributed tens of millions of doses of China’s vaccines and participated in human trials. Translated into English, the X post reads: “China distributes a vaccine made of pork gelatin.”

Reuters reports that The Pentagon launched an anti-vaxx campaign in the Philippines and Central Asia to foment anti-Chinese sentiments against their Sinovac vaccine.

[head-post]

Harris slowly gaining support, social media lost Biden

While the US president’s prolonged absence from office is provoking various theories in the American society, Kamala Harris is well on her way to becoming a candidate for the presidency, American media reported.

Kamala Harris has enough votes to be nominated for the election

US Vice President Kamala Harris has secured enough delegate votes to clinch the nomination for the Democratic presidential nomination, AP News reports.

Harris has the support of at least 2,579 delegates, with 1,976 single-party votes required to approve her nomination in the first round. The official Republican Party nominee for the presidential election is Donald Trump, who will run with J.D. Vance for vice president.

Harris plans to be the Democratic nominee by August 7

The Democratic Party plans to nominate a new candidate for the upcoming US presidential election by August 7, The New York Times reported quoting Democratic National Committee Chairman Jamie Harrison and Rules Committee Co-Chair Mignon Moore as saying on Monday.

Harrison said:

The Democratic Party will select its presidential nominee in an online vote by August 7.

A date for the vote has not yet been named. Moore stressed that the nomination process will be as quick and transparent as possible despite the tight deadline.

The party’s convention will be held on August 19 and the candidate selection process should be completed two weeks before that date.

Nancy Pelosi endorsed the candidacy of Kamala Harris

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president Monday afternoon almost 24 hours after President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid and endorsed Harris.

Pelosi said in a statement:

Today, it is with immense pride and limitless optimism for our country’s future that I endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for President of the United States. My enthusiastic support for Kamala Harris is official, personal and political.

Biden delegated his authority on the Ukraine Support Act

US President Joe Biden has delegated some of the functions and powers within the framework of the implementation of the Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity for Ukrainians Act to the heads of the US Treasury Department and the State Department, according to a document on the White House website.

Biden held virtual meetings with national security officials

US President Joe Biden held online meetings with national security officials, the White House said, amid speculation about the death of the head of state.

The report said:

Biden received a briefing on homeland security topics from Liz Sherwood-Randal, assistant to the president and homeland security adviser. The president also heard a briefing on the topic of homeland security from his adviser, Jake Sullivan. Both briefings were conducted virtually.

Biden tested positive for a coronavirus on July 18, after which he cancelled a speech at the Unidos US conference in Las Vegas and went into self-isolation. The White House reported that the US president continues to perform his duties remotely. Representatives of the Republican Party amid speculation about Biden’s death demanded proof that he was alive.

Biden promises not leave his post before the deadline

US President Joe Biden has no plans to step down from his post early after his decision to withdraw from the presidential race, POLITICO reports, citing sources in the Democratic Party.

The party member stressed:

There is not the slightest chance that Joe Biden plans to resign.

The White House announced Biden’s return

According to the president’s schedule released on Tuesday, the White House chief of staff will leave his self-imposed isolation at his home at the Rehoboth Beach resort in Delaware on July 23 and two hours later hold a regular briefing at his workplace.

Read more HERE