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“Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich. [...]

"But we have also," continued the management consultant, "run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying on ship's peanut." [...]

"So in order to obviate this problem," he continued, "and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and...er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

When we look at COVID-19 death stats from the U.S. or anywhere else, the immediate object of awareness — the sense-datum, as we called it back in my days as a philosophy professor — is just some very disturbing bookkeeping. And it’s an open question whether that bookkeeping reflects an equally disturbing reality or, instead, is merely an artifact of CDC accounting practices that created the illusion of something momentously awful.

Why would the CDC engage in such deception? //

As RedState reader and statistician, Kurt Schulzke notes in a soon-to-be-released bombshell report of his own:

The CDC’s original 2020 budget of ~$8 billion grew six-fold, to ~$46 billion in 2020, all in response to perceived Covid-19 mortality. //

Back in 1994, AIDS cases actually declined. But any effect this might have had on the CDC’s bottom line was averted by a timely expansion of “the surveillance case definition” of AIDS, which the CDC itself admitted would result in at least a completely bogus 75% increase in cases and others have claimed the CDC’s own data shows wound up, in the event, more than doubling them. //

As an outfit called Children’s Health Defense noted way back in July,

On March 24th, the CDC decided to ignore universal data collection and reporting guidelines for fatalities in favor of adopting new guidelines unique to COVID-19. The guidelines the CDC decided against using have been used successfully since 2003.

The first form calculates the pressure or friction loss along a given length of pipeline with a specified inside diameter. The second form calculates the minimum pipe size to limit pressure loss to a specified value.

Additional friction pressure losses occur due to fittings. These losses in-effect add extra additional length to the total pipeline. Use this calculator to estimate how much additional length needs to be added to the overall pipe length below in order to estimate these additional losses. Learn more about the units used on this page.

The ongoing demolition of the San Onofre nuclear plant has long fueled unease among locals over the periodic release of diluted, radioactive material from the reactor into this iconic surfing spot’s waters.

Such dumping has been going on since the 1960s, for years without public notice.

That was until 2019, when state regulators required the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) parent company — Southern California Edison — to publicly notify surrounding communities of such releases.

Since then, 16 such releases have occurred, with 48-hour notices to the public and nearby communities, according to the company.

Each time, Edison places potentially radioactive wastewater from the company’s decommissioning activities into a tank, circulates it through ion exchangers and filters, “highly” dilutes it, and then samples the liquid for safety before it’s released more than a mile offshore. //

These radioactive liquid releases will continue as SONGS is deconstructed and will vary in size over the years, according to Edison. The size of such releases were initially known to average around 20,000-25,000 gallons of water, and may become larger in the future.

If Democrats want to impeach someone for inciting insurrection, they could start with Harriet Tubman. She was one of the major planners of the attempt to take over and occupy the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859. Seventeen people were killed in that action. The leader, John Brown, was charged with treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, murder, and inciting insurrection. He and six others were convicted and executed for their roles in the attack. Had she not fallen ill shortly before the attack, Harriet Tubman might well have been among those captured and executed.

Employees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world. //

“The world needs products like Signal — but they also need Signal to be thoughtful,” said Gregg Bernstein, a former user researcher who left the organization this month over his concerns. “It’s not only that Signal doesn’t have these policies in place. But they’ve been resistant to even considering what a policy might look like.” //

For years, the company has faced complaints that its requirement that people use real phone numbers to create accounts raises privacy and security concerns. And so Signal has begun working on an alternative: letting people create unique usernames. But usernames (and display names, should the company add those, too) could enable people to impersonate others — a scenario the company has not developed a plan to address, despite completing much of the engineering work necessary for the project to launch. //

Marlinspike said, it was important to him that Signal not become neutered in the pursuit of a false neutrality between good and bad actors. Marginalized groups depend on secure private messaging to safely conduct everything from basic day-to-day communication to organized activism, he told me. Signal exists to improve that experience and make it accessible to more people, even if bad actors might also find it useful.

“I want us as an organization to be really careful about doing things that make Signal less effective for those sort of bad actors if it would also make Signal less effective for the types of actors that we want to support and encourage,” he said. “Because I think that the latter have an outsized risk profile. There’s an asymmetry there, where it could end up affecting them more dramatically.”