Chip and Commie Sue have a discussion on the future of the United States.

She's not the only one...

Nate Silver says Biden needs to win 5% of the popular vote to consider the Electoral College safe.

Because any test for COVID-19 will produce a certain percentage of positive diagnoses for patients who don’t, in fact, have the virus, mass testing means that alarming numbers of new COVID-19 cases will keep getting reported every day no matter how few are actually occurring.

The FDA says that one test in use has a false positive rate of 3%. That means that testing a million people a day with it would still result in 30,000 positive diagnoses being reported each day even if the real number of new infections dropped all the way down to zero! //

Nick Pineault
@nickpineault1
Recent graphic from @wodarg -- the false-positive rate of PCR tests is equal to the COVID-positive rate % in Germany... Infections they're finding are likely false-positives. //

Interestingly, the CDC and other health authorities were very much concerned about the percentage of false-positive results PCR-testing is bound to produce during every signle one of the previous four viral pandemics this century. But for some reason, they completely forgot about it this time around. //

“PCR” stands for polymerase chain reaction, the biochemical process developed by a researcher named Kary Mullis in 1983 that the test uses.

Though it was important enough to earn Mullis a Nobel Prize, most are unaware that PCR wasn‘t designed to test for viruses at all.

Mullis invented it to synthesize genetic material for research purposes and, in fact, was strongly opposed to the way it wound up being used to test for the HIV virus.

Mullis’s process takes segments of DNA through a “cycle” that doubles the amount. That might not seem like a big deal, but it starts to add up pretty quickly. //

Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron.

PCR can’t detect quantity. At best, it can detect the presence of a virus, not the amount. And without knowing the amount, there’s no way to tell if the person being tested is infected. //

If you run a sample with minute traces of viral remains through enough cycles, you’ll wind up with enough to be detected.

And it turns out that laboratories have been running the samples their testing through so many cycles that ones without nearly enough viral remains to indicate the presence of a live virus are, nonetheless, being amplified enough to produce a positive test result.

Moreover, the CDC has been telling them to do it…

Yesterday, in a stunning development, the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court ruled that the surveillance program revealed by Snowden was illegal and was not justified by any of the supposed cases of terrorist activity that were stopped as a result of the mass surveillance program. Perhaps what is most alarming about this ruling is the numerous government officials that testified in both courts and to Congress, denying the program even existed. //

At this point, it is important we review exactly what happened in the Snowden case. Remember, Snowden attempted to go through the proper channels to make his complaints about the program. Later, after Snowden went to the press to expose the program, US Government officials including Clapper LIED about the existence of the program. //

Edward Snowden
@Snowden
Seven years ago, as the news declared I was being charged as a criminal for speaking the truth, I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA's activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them.

And yet that day has arrived. //

Snowden may not be a saint, but he certainly isn’t a sinner. A sin of omission (lack of options of where he could safely go) versus a sin of commission (intentionally going to Russia to deliver covert information) are two completely different things. Snowden may be guilty of the first, but he certainly is not guilty of the second. It is time we put away the Government’s case against him and allow for us to bring him home, not to a hero’s welcome but to one of apology for Intelligence Officials not heeding his warnings and creating the conditions for the last 7 years of his life. It is time to #PardonSnowden.

Small reactors are seen as a key to reviving a nuclear power industry that's far from thriving now.

Since the pandemic began, more Americans think U.S. health care is below average compared to other nations, and the possibility of moving to a system of universal coverage is up for debate. One potential model is Switzerland, which has achieved universal coverage while preserving the private marketplace. William Brangham reports as part of our series, The Best Health Care? America & the World.

Rep. Jim Jordan
@Jim_Jordan
The last time voters elected a Republican mayor:

Seattle - 1964
Minneapolis - 1957
Portland - 1952
Chicago - 1927
Washington, D.C. - NEVER

But Democrats want to blame President Trump for crime in these cities?

In short, all the available research seems to indicate that positive PCR test results are utterly meaningless.

It turns out that the guy who won a Nobel Prize for inventing the process was right. //

Clearly someone needs to investigate why the CDC recommended that COVID testing labs run samples through 40 amplification cycles.

Why PCR testing is even still being used to generate data that keeps the country in a state of panic when it’s clearly worthless is another thing that obviously needs to be looked into seriously.

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
― Thomas Jefferson

You know those standard PCR tests for the COVID-19 virus that everybody in America has been rushing out to get? Well, according to the Times, they’re “diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus” and “are not likely to be contagious.”

In fact, when they looked at three sets of testing data from Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada, the Times says that, because of faulty procedures used at every single testing site in the country, “up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus” at all.