Patrick's Notebook

by Mac Slavo, SHTFplan.com

The mainstream media is ignoring the fact that the CDC has admitted the death rate for COVID-19 is actually lower than the flu. This is happening as the media admits that the antibody tests are wrong 50% of the time!

The scamdemic fear-mongering is ongoing and the propaganda is getting worse daily, even as their OWN DATA shows otherwise. Instead of giving the public the facts, the media continues to push for an extended lockdown, freedom trampling regulations, mass surveillance, and our permanent enslavement for their political overlords.

The CDC just came out with a report that should be earth-shattering to the narrative of the political class, yet it will go into the thick pile of vital data and information about the virus that is not getting out to the public. For the first time, the CDC has attempted to offer a real estimate of the overall death rate for COVID-19, and under its most likely scenario, the number is 0.26 percent.

Until now, we have been ridiculed for thinking the death rate was that low, as opposed to the 3.4 percent estimate of the World Health Organization, which helped drive the panic and the lockdowns. Now the CDC is agreeing to the lower rate in plain ink.

Plus, ultimately we might find out that the IFR is even lower because numerous studies and hard counts of confined populations have shown a much higher percentage of asymptomatic cases. Simply adjusting for a 50 percent asymptomatic rate would drop their fatality rate to 0.2 percent – exactly the rate of fatality Dr. John Ionnidis of Stanford University projected.

More importantly, as I mentioned before, the overall death rate is meaningless because the numbers are so lopsided. Given that at least half of the deaths were in nursing homes, a back-of-the-envelope estimate would show that the infection fatality rate for non-nursing home residents would only be 0.1 percent or 1 in 1,000. And that includes people of all ages and all health statuses outside of nursing homes. Since nearly all of the deaths are those with comorbidities. -The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

» Read the rest of this entry «

by Michael Snyder

What is happening in the streets of Minneapolis right now, is what the future is going to look like

What we have been witnessing on the streets of Minneapolis is just the beginning. Our nation is so deeply divided, and a large portion of the population is losing faith in the basic institutions that govern our society. Personally, I don’t know how anyone can watch the video of what happened to George Floyd without having an emotional reaction. Police brutality has been a massive problem in the United States for many years, and it has gotten to the point where most of the country no longer has faith in the police. Of course the rioters are not helping their cause by burning down the communities that they are supposedly defending. And after causing so much chaos on Wednesday night, protesters were back in the streets of Minneapolis on Thursday…

Protests and, in some cases, violence, continued Thursday in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody after a white officer pinned him to the ground under his knee.

Hundreds of protesters flooded Minneapolis streets Thursday evening for a march through downtown. Traffic was halted as a crowd of people stretched for up to four blocks. Protesters shouted “I can’t breathe” and “no justice, no peace; prosecute the police” as volunteer marshals in highlighter-colored vests directed traffic.

Sadly, this is just a small preview of what is coming to major cities all over America.

If you think that these riots about police brutality are intense, just wait until the economic riots start. » Read the rest of this entry «

“They arrested a CNN reporter and camera crew for reporting the news but not Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd on camera.”CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez was arrested live on air while covering Minneapolis protests against the police killing of George Floyd on May 29, 2020.

A CNN journalist and his entire camera crew were arrested by Minnesota state police Friday morning during their live television coverage of the aftermath of Minneapolis protests over the killing of George Floyd.

While standing in the middle of a street in front of police officers in riot gear, CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez cooperatively asked the officers where they would like him to stand before two officers approached him from behind, placed him in handcuffs, and led him away. The officers did not respond as Jimenez asked repeatedly why he was being arrested.

Moments later, Jimenez’s camera crew was also arrested.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said CNN anchor John Berman as he witnessed Minnesota state police detain his colleagues.

“They arrested a CNN reporter and camera crew for reporting the news but not Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd on camera,” tweeted attorney Midwin Charles. “The irony astounds me.”

The FBI and local prosecutors say they need more evidence before they can file charges against officers involved in the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Angry residents claim investigators are dragging their feet.
While Minnesota officials said a “robust and meticulous” probe into Floyd’s death is underway at a press conference on Thursday, they noted the investigation still needed to show that the officers broke any laws, with Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman warning against any hasty indictments.

“I will not rush to justice, I’m going to do this right,” Freeman said, adding that the footage of Floyd’s last moments alive in police custody is “graphic and horrible,” but that investigators must “prove [the officer] violated a criminal statute, and there’s other evidence that does not support a criminal charge.”

The attorney referenced the 2015 police-involved killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, in which charges were brought quickly amid violent riots and resulted in no guilty verdicts for any of the officers implicated.

The special agent in charge of the Minnesota FBI field office, Rainer Drolshagen, also called on anyone present “before, during and after” Floyd’s death to come forward with information, adding that “no tip is too small.” » Read the rest of this entry «

By Dan McCready, Democratic Party nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives from North Carolina’s 9th congressional district in the 2018 election

Republicans look the other way when electoral cheating helps them.

By now most of us have seen the photos from the Wisconsin primary, where voters had to stand for hours in lines that wrapped around city blocks in cold, pouring rain. To exercise what was supposed to be their most sacred democratic right, people had to risk catching the deadly coronavirus — and several did.

To avoid a repeat of the situation and hold a fair election in November, when America may still be in the middle of a pandemic, elections experts and public health officials say we must ramp up voting by mail. Voters on both sides of the aisle agree, as do Democratic and some Republican lawmakers. But mail-in voting has a loud opponent: President Trump. He’s calling for Republicans to fight it, saying it’s a recipe for fraud.

The thing is, fraud isn’t Mr. Trump’s true concern, or the Republican Party’s. I should know. Ballot fraud is extremely rare. But when a case was uncovered in my congressional race in 2018 — orchestrated by my Republican opponent’s campaign — the president and party officials looked the other way. Mr. Trump’s concern is more sinister: Alleging fraud is a cover to rig elections by suppressing Democratic votes.

It’s part of a playbook that Republicans have deployed for years in battleground states like Wisconsin and my home state of North Carolina. If we don’t legislate now to make mail-in voting easier in November, the Republican Party might just steal another election. This time, it won’t be a congressional race at stake. It will be American democracy itself. » Read the rest of this entry «

Excerpted from Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State by Barton Gellman.

Edward Snowden revealed the agency’s phone-record tracking program. But thanks to “precomputed contact chaining,” that database was much more powerful than anyone knew.

IN THE SUMMER of 2013, I spent my days sifting through the most extensive archive of top-secret files that had ever reached the hands of an American journalist. In a spectacular act of transgression against the National Security Agency, where he worked as a contractor, Edward Snowden had transmitted tens of thousands of classified documents to me, the columnist Glenn Greenwald, and the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras.

One of those documents, the first to be made public in June 2013, revealed that the NSA was tracking billions of telephone calls made by Americans inside the US. The program became notorious, but its full story has not been told.

The first accounts revealed only bare bones. If you placed a call, whether local or international, the NSA stored the number you dialed, as well as the date, time and duration of the call. It was domestic surveillance, plain and simple. When the story broke, the NSA discounted the intrusion on privacy. The agency collected “only metadata,” it said, not the content of telephone calls. Only on rare occasions, it said, did it search the records for links among terrorists.

I decided to delve more deeply. The public debate was missing important information. It occurred to me that I did not even know what the records looked like. At first I imagined them in the form of a simple, if gargantuan, list. I assumed that the NSA cleaned up the list—date goes here, call duration there—and converted it to the agency’s preferred “atomic sigint data format.” Otherwise I thought of the records as inert. During a conversation at the Aspen Security Forum that July, six weeks after Snowden’s first disclosure and three months after the Boston Marathon bombing, Admiral Dennis Blair, the former director of national intelligence, assured me that the records were “stored,” untouched, until the next Boston bomber came along. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Andrea Germanos

New comments from the renowned academic come after he accused Trump of wanting “to destroy the prospects for all organized human life… in the near future.”

World-renowned intellectual and author Noam Chomsky called U.S. President Donald Trump a “sociopathic megalomaniac” whose leadership drove the U.S. to become “singularly unprepared” for the coronavirus pandemic.

Chomsky’s fresh criticism of the president came in an interview with Agence France-Presse published Monday.

“The White House,” said Chomsky, “is in the hands of a sociopathic megalomaniac who’s interested in nothing but his own power, electoral prospects.”

Trump “doesn’t care what happens to the country, the world,” though he’s still reliant on “his primary constituency, which is great wealth and corporate power,” Chomsky said.

The administration has “no coordinated plan” for addressing the pandemic, meaning the nation will see “a lot more” deaths from Covid-19 on top of the nearly 100,000 confirmed fatalities that have already occurred, he added.

Setting the stage for the current situation is that Trump kicked off his administration by moving to take apart “the entire pandemic prevention machinery,” including by “canceling programs that were working with Chinese scientists to identify potential viruses,” Chomsky said.

Another contributing factor to the flawed response, said Chomsky, is that the nation is “in the stranglehold of private control,” an example of which is the lack of a national single-payer healthcare system. “It’s the ultimate neoliberal system, actually,” he said. » Read the rest of this entry «