Authored by Rudy Blalock via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

After years of missed rental payments, one Oakland property owner was left on her own to recover her losses, despite desperately seeking help from the city, state, and local law enforcement.

Carolyn Silas-Sams, a retired paralegal and an Oakland resident, said she inherited a duplex in the city in 2006 from her late mother and has been maintaining it ever since, although she never imagined that she would face the disaster that she has over the past few years due to the eviction moratorium.

“I’m telling you … any level of education would not allow your brain to accept that something like this could happen, because it’s not rational,” she told The Epoch Times.

After remodeling her three-bedroom unit, she rented it out in December 2019 to a woman on Section 8 housing, a federal program that provides rental assistance for low-income families, the elderly, and the disabled. The woman claimed to have four children who would be moving in.

The mother had said that she’d struggled to find housing that was suitable for four kids.

Unfortunately, her empathy led to thousands of dollars in lost rent and damages that she has now had to cover on her own.

“Initially, she did have Section 8; then, what I didn’t know is that she was in line to have her kids taken. … Fact of the matter is, the kids never even came,” Ms. Silas-Sams said.

She said her tenant lied about the children moving in to get a larger rental allowance from Section 8.

Ms. Silas-Sams asked housing officials for help but was denied.

Because of the moratorium, nothing could be done, she said. Meanwhile, the tenant’s boyfriend moved in. Fighting ensued and it was discovered that the boyfriend was selling drugs from the apartment and hiding stolen goods in it, she said. The tenant was finally evicted in October.

“If you could just see all of the filth that I’ve had to move out,” she said.

Some rental relief was offered by Alameda County, where the apartment is located, for tenants earning less than 80 percent of the county’s median income, which means below $76,000, per 2022 calculations. But in Oakland, the city had its own rental relief program, prioritizing those who were earning less than 30 percent of the area median income, or below $30,000 for the same year.

According to the city’s website, Oakland received $28 million during the pandemic from the federal government for rental assistance, with another $10.4 million from the state. But demand outstripped the funding and landlords were left on the hook for unpaid rents.

While the rental assistance programs ended in March 2022 for Alameda County and Oakland, renters in the county’s unincorporated areas can still receive assistance if they earn less than 80 percent of this year’s median income, or $78,500 and below.

Ms. Silas-Sams said that because there weren’t any repercussions for not paying rent, tenants such as hers didn’t even attempt to apply for the relief provided at the time.

“Even the program that they could have signed up for—that may have paid me something, they were too trifling to even do that. Because they didn’t have to, they didn’t have to do anything,” she said.

From mid-2020 until now, Ms. Silas-Sams hasn’t received any rental payments but has still had to cover her $4,400 mortgage payments in addition to water and garbage expenses, she said.

“I’ve drained everything from my 401(k),” she said. “I’ve even had to borrow from family members, which is stressful. And I had to borrow from my life insurance. … In fact, I was just about to call them again because I don’t have the mortgage for this month.”

According to estimations by Chris Moore, a landlord in Alameda County who led efforts to end the eviction moratoriums in the cities of Oakland and San Leandro and in Alameda County, there’s about $1 billion in unpaid back rent for Alameda County alone. He said evictions are always a last resort.

In the Bay Area, tenants can receive free advice and representation from attorneys, he said, who often fight evictions with various arguments, costing the landlord thousands in attorney fees.

“I can disprove all of them,” Mr. Moore said, “but I have to … pay a lawyer $500 to $600 an hour. It costs $30,000 to $40,000 now to do an eviction, so I can tell you, I’m not interested in evicting the tenant.”

Mr. Moore is also a board member of the East Bay Rental Housing Association—a nonprofit that represents 1600 rental property owners providing about 40,000 rental homes in Alameda and Contra Costa counties and, along with their affiliates, represent 700,000 rental homes in California.

“Most tenants do try to make a payment plan and work with us … the ones [that don’t] are really hurting the mom-and-pop housing providers that only have maybe a couple of units, and they don’t have the capital to survive,” he said.

Ms. Silas-Sams, who said she didn’t have the money to hire a lawyer, was able to prevail in court after the moratorium was lifted in July, and her tenant was evicted in October with the help of the local sheriff’s department.

She said she had to spend more than $3,000 hauling away the junk left behind, including drug pipes, stolen credit cards, driver’s licenses, and lots of trash scattered throughout the apartment.

Initially, the tenant agreed to move out after threats of eviction, but after cleaning crews cleaned out the unit, she reappeared and was legally allowed to stay because of the moratorium.

“She turned around and she came back on the day that we were moving this stuff out, and I was not there. … She told [the junk removal man], ‘What are you doing? This is my place,’” she said.

Police were called and responded, but they sided with the tenant.

“They let her stay,” Ms. Silas-Sams said.

There were an average of 310 eviction filings per month in 2019, but during the moratorium, the monthly average dropped to about 55, according to the Alameda County Superior Court. Since it has been lifted, the average number of evictions has risen to about 580 per month, which some say is because landlords were barred from doing so for years.

“So why is it happening? Basically, the government said, ‘Hey, you don’t have to pay your rent for the last three and a half years,’ which, by the way, our industry is the only one they did that too,” Mr. Moore told The Epoch Times.

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal reported that there could be more than $1 billion in unpaid back rent in the greater Los Angeles area because of its eviction moratorium.

In the city of Los Angeles, landlords who owned 12 or fewer units were eligible to receive through taxpayer dollars up to $30,000 per rental unit for unpaid rents, but they had to apply for the program from Oct. 23 through the end of the month.

According to the county’s Department of Consumer and Business Affairs website, other assistance that’s “coming soon” includes up to $30,000 in total for landlords with four or fewer units whose mortgages went into default, or $30,0000 for landlord expenses outside of their mortgage payments that accrued due to missed rental payments.

According to Daniel Yukelson, executive director of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, such relief for landlords won’t make up for the losses that they incurred during the pandemic.

“When you look at what the city’s providing the landlords and what they’re providing in rent subsidies to renters and compare it to the over $1 billion of COVID rental debt that’s still owed … all this pales in comparison,” Mr. Yukelson told The Epoch Times in a recent interview. “It’s really a drop in the bucket compared to the losses that property owners have suffered these past three-plus years.”

A progressive think tank recently met with President Biden’s top aides at the White House and delivered a stark warning: The economic policies often referred to as “Bidenomics” were not resonating with most Americans.

According to Politico, members of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) visited the West Wing in September and October to brief White House officials about Bidenomics’ branding failure. They presented numerous polling data that showed Americans aren’t convinced about economic policy accomplishments under the president. 

“Democrats can’t just hammer people over the head with an insistence that the economy is great,” Adam Green, co-founder of the PCCC, told Politico.

Green said, “We have to acknowledge pain and pivot, and there are ways that we can optimize that pivot to hit Trump for mismanaging the economy.”

Politico said PCCC supplied White House officials with several surveys that showed Americans weren’t buying into the Bidenomics story:

Just 35 percent of Americans trusted Democrats more on economic issues, according to weeks of private polling presented to the White House in mid-September and recently obtained by POLITICO. The data reinforced broad concerns over the public’s dismal outlook. Despite expressing widespread support for Biden’s policy agenda, few voters were aware he’d made much progress on any of a dozen-plus top priorities, like drug pricing or infrastructure.

Perhaps most alarming, 7 out of 10 people surveyed believed the economy wasn’t getting better — even after they were explicitly told that inflation had eased and unemployment sat near record lows. That preface, designed specifically to persuade voters to brighten their view of the economy, did not seem to move them.

Green continued, “When we intentionally put our finger on the scale, and 100 percent of people hear good economic indicators before saying if the economy’s going well for them, we still get walloped.” 

Headline count data via Bloomberg shows the White House launched the “Bidenomics” media blitz in late June.

Despite the media blitz, Biden’s job approval polling data via Real Clear Politics went down. 

Perhaps the Biden administration fails to admit that two years of negative real wage growth crushed many low/mid-tier households. 

We’ve recently shown consumers have never been in this worse shape, draining personal savings while racking up insurmountable credit card debt in the highest rate environment in a generation. Many folks are struggling with out-of-control food prices, elevated pump prices, and high shelter costs. 

Biden has lost the GenZer vote.

Millennials crying about life, rent, groceries.

“and all we do, we record a video and post it on social media. Then we close up the app and go about our day.”

Do you have sympathy for their situation? Or do you want to tell them, “try voting differently next time.” I sort of… pic.twitter.com/KEZ3rjxdxw

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) October 12, 2023

In other words, the Biden administration has failed to control the narrative. Now it’s time for them to usher in more censorship of ‘free speech’ or label anyone with non-approved gov’t narratives ‘Russian bots’.

Authored by Toby Rogers via the Brownstone Institute,

I. When the commons was Eden 

“The commons” is a foundational idea in left political philosophy. The commons refers to shared spaces — oceans, lakes, rivers, forests, the air — that are not owned by anyone. It can also refer to cultural spaces — the town square for example. I could make a case that the internet is a commons — even though there are millions of individual owners of particular spaces no one owns the whole thing. 

The left loves the idea of the commons because it harkens back to the era of hunter gatherers who were free to hunt, fish, and live off of the abundance of the earth. The commons is also essential to the left imagination because they don’t believe in private property, so on some level they think that the entire world is or could be the commons. And because they see themselves as more empathetic, educated, and wise than everyone else, they believe that they are the best stewards to manage the commons. 

On the left, entire careers are made by writing and teaching about the commons: 

Henry George was an early theorist of the commons in the 19th century. 

Garrett Hardin popularized the idea of the commons with his 1968 article in Science titled, “The Tragedy of the Commons” about managing the individual incentives to overexploit shared resources. 

In 2009, Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work documenting examples of successful management of the commons.

And heaps of additional left public intellectuals have done important work on the commons including feminist theorist Silvia Federici, Marxist geographer David Harvey, and newcomer Raj Patel (with his bestselling book, The Value of Nothing). 

Anyone who wants to remain a member in good standing of the left must be able to speak at length about the commons. This discussion of the commons is almost entirely concerned with protecting the collective space from encroachment by greedy individuals and rapacious corporations. The worst thing that one can do (a sin usually reserved for feudal lords, kings, and corporations) is to “enclose the commons” — make private and exclusive what was formerly open and accessible to all. I’ve long admired the idea of the commons and think it represents the left at its best. 

And then a very strange and terrifying thing happened. Over the last several years, the bougie left, without even a hint of self-awareness or irony, enclosed the global commons — seized it is a better term — in the name of public health, based on false assumptions about how viruses work. 

As I will explain below, this is the mechanism by which the bougie left slid from liberalism into fascism. 

II. The birth of modern Pharma fascism

The battle against SB276 in California in 2019 was one of the most sickening and heartbreaking things I’ve ever witnessed. In 2015, California banned all religious and philosophical exemptions to school vaccination requirements with SB277. But SB276 went further. Sponsored by Richard Pan, a man with no empathy who is controlled by Big Pharma, SB276 revokes the medical license of any doctor who writes more than 5 medical exemptions to school vaccination requirements. In a state with 9,100,000 children, 5 exemptions per doctor is not very many. Fearing the loss of their livelihood, doctors in California stopped writing medical exemptions altogether. 

Disabled by DTaP? Too bad, you still have to take all of the other shots. Your sibling died from a vaccine? Too bad, it wasn’t you that died (yet) so roll up your sleeves. This approach to public health contradicts two centuries of best practices in medicine. Prior to SB276 the entire scientific and medical community acknowledged that some people should not be vaccinated because of underlying medical conditions, previous reactions, or family history. But Pharma was in a hurry to wipe out the unvaccinated control group that would reveal the extent of their crimes so they introduced SB276 in a state they already owned before rolling it out to the entire country. 

As the bill moved through the legislature, Richard Pan stood at the front of the room grinning like the Cheshire Cat, while thousands of parents, mostly mothers, testified about vaccine injuries in their kids. It was like something out of a Holocaust documentary. As the bill sponsor he was allowed to respond to the public testimony prior to the vote by each committee (Health, Education, and Appropriations). At every hearing he made a strange little speech that conveyed the new ideology of the Pharma Fascist Left.

Pan explained that “your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.” But he argued (and this is the sleight of hand) the same principle applies to viruses. Because viruses exist, and because the unvaccinated may be carrying a deadly virus, the act of breathing, by an unvaccinated person, is the legal equivalent of punching him in the face. Thus the unvaccinated, by their very existence break the law because they violate his right to be free from disease. The only way to prevent this grave miscarriage of justice then is to either a.) force children to be vaccinated; or b.) remove the unvaccinated from schools (and the rest of society — Pan wants the unvaccinated banned from all public spaces). 

Let’s just pause for a moment to note that he clearly does not believe that vaccines actually work because if they did, the unvaccinated would pose no threat to the vaccinated. When confronted with this fact he moves the goalposts to claim that his real concern is the “immunocompromised who cannot be vaccinated.” But like everything else he says this is a lie because in California and all blue states they vaccinate the hell out of the immunocompromised as well. 

This is the “logic” of Pharma fascism. 

Pan has never had an original thought in his life so this angle of attack was likely developed by a Pharma PR firm and focus-group tested before sending it out to spokespeople in the Democratic Party. And now it’s the dominant ideology in the Democratic Party and ruling parties throughout the developed world. 

There is a multitude of problems with this flawed ideology. But what I want to point out in this article is that it leads to enclosure of the commons — even before Covid. Democrats would really like to enclose the air itself but that is too difficult. So instead they enclose schools by kicking out some kids (SB276 kicked 56,000 kids out of public school). Vaccine mandates enclose our bodies by allowing corporations to trespass with their toxic products. And Democrats try to enclose the public square (digital and otherwise) by setting up a vast surveillance system to censor, shadowban, demonetize, and deplatform anyone who disagrees with their increasingly zany ideology. 

III. Pan’s “logic” is absolute horsesh*t

Democrats do not understand viruses, vaccines, or the law and it leads them to make catastrophic policy decisions that are destroying the health of the American people. 

Viruses don’t work that way

There are a quadrillion x quadrillion viruses in the world (more viruses on earth than stars in the known universe).

Research on the global virosphere has concluded that, “Trillions Upon Trillions of Viruses Fall From the Sky Each Day.” From the New York Times: 

Scientists have surmised there is a stream of viruses circling the planet, above the planet’s weather systems but below the level of airline travel…. Each day some 800 million viruses cascade onto every square meter of the planet.

“Human cells, GOOD! Bacteria and viruses, BAD!” is how public health officials usually frame the discussion. But that’s not how health actually works. Instead, our bodies are a complex ecosystem of different types of cells. Only 43 percent of the cells in our body are human — the rest are various bacteria and viruses that communicate and exchange with our human cells and DNA in ways that make life possible. 

Human consciousness itself is said to have emerged as a result of the beneficial exchange between viral and human DNA. Between 40 and 80 percent (an admittedly large range) of the human genome came initially from viruses. Viruses (and bacteria) regulate all living systems on earth. 

So we’re never going to get rid of all viruses and bacteria nor would we want to. But what about the small number of viruses (about 200) that can be harmful to humans?

Vaccines are ineffective and dangerous

The large gains in life expectancy and declines in infectious disease in the 20th century happened before the introduction of mass vaccination campaigns. Improved living standards, sewers, water treatment facilities, food safety, organized solid waste disposal, along with “improvements in housing and decreased crowding in US cities” are responsible for “nearly 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality among U.S. children.” That’s not me talking, that’s a review of a century of public health data published in Pediatrics. In an earlier era, when public health focused on large public works projects, health improved. Now that public health focuses almost exclusively on promoting vaccines, health and well-being have plummeted.

An analysis, by Danish researchers, of the best vaccine data set in the world indicates that all of the vaccines on the US schedule cause more harms than benefits. 

None of the vaccines on the US schedule (with the exception of a tiny subtrial of the Gardasil vaccine) were tested against a saline placebo in a true randomized controlled trial. ICAN’s December 31, 2018 letter to the US Department of Health and Human Services proves this fact and it is perhaps the single most important document ever written during the vaccine wars.

Pan’s approach ignores all the rest of medicine. In the current hysteria, it seems that people sometimes forget that there are medical products other than vaccines! We can treat various diseases with antivirals, antibiotics, and a thousand other medicines without forcing one-size-fits all toxic vaccines on the entire population. 

Pan’s approach ignores all of the toxicants that can cause ill health. Zach Bush points out that waste ponds from industrial livestock production are breeding grounds for all sorts of viruses, bacteria, and parasites. Pharmaceuticals introduce toxicants into our bodies. Factories and freeways produce a wide range of toxicants that impair health. We could find common ground on regulating those sources but Pharma controls the political process and so the entire focus of public health is on vaccines. 

Pan’s approach also ignores all the rest of health. Why do two people with similar environmental exposures have different outcomes? Nutrition, exercise, rest, and sunshine (factors now ignored by allopathic medicine) make a significant impact on whether someone will get sick. Furthermore, as Jennifer Giustra-Kozek, LPC, author of Healing Without Hurting points out, most diseases that are usually attributed to viruses and bacteria often have an underlying vitamin deficiency that can be addressed through food, supplements, or intravenously in acute cases. 

For Covid-19, the corresponding deficiencies that need to be addressed are usually zinc and vitamin D.

Individualized medicine will always be superior to one-size-fits-all Pharma-captured medicine. 

The most extreme enclosure of the commons in history

No Pharaoh, no king, no feudal lord, and certainly no political party has ever before claimed that they own the air and that the mere act of breathing by the citizenry was an assault that must be managed by a police state. 

Yet that is the central claim of Pan, Fauci, and the public health bureaucracy and the idea that drives vaccine mandates, masks, lockdowns, social distancing, and the rest of the modern Fascist Pharma State. The cultural enclosure is also cruel and senseless — kicking students out of universities via vaccine mandates, delicensing doctors for helping their patients survive by prescribing ivermectin, and refusing medical care in hospitals to the unvaccinated are just some examples. 

As I’ve written before, the only historical parallels with Pan’s ideology are Jim Crow laws in the US that declared Black Americans unclean (thus requiring separate drinking fountains, bathrooms, and schools) and the Nazis who claimed that Jews were disease carriers and thus must be moved into ghettos and concentration camps. But now this preposterous junk science has returned from the dead and it drives public health policy in the US and throughout the developed world in the Covid era. 

IV. Ideology becomes policy and law

Unfortunately the obscene ideology described above is widespread. Naomi Klein in Doppelganger repeats this same vile notion. In Klein’s view there is no individual “I” — we all breathe the same air thus the Fascist Pharma State has the right and indeed obligation to police the bodies of the unvaccinated, lest they infect her superior over-vaccinated body. Again, it is beyond weird that the Cult of Vaccine does not actually believe in their own product while insisting on injecting it into others.

Indeed this nonsense has become the dominant ideology of ruling parties throughout the developed world. In North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea liberal democracy has been replaced with this Stakeholder Fascism based on junk science that makes Pharma rich.

You can see how it’s a short distance from this twisted supremacist ideology to concentration camps and extermination of the unvaccinated in the name of public health. 

These junk science ideas about public health inevitably make their way into policy and the law. In 2020 the NY Department of Public Health created a regulation (10 NYCRR 2.13) titled “Isolation and Quarantine Procedures” that enabled the state to remove anyone from their home for any reason and detain them indefinitely without due process of law under the guise of public health. Quite literally the NY Department of Public Health decided that concentration camps were the best approach for managing Covid. 

Attorney and Brownstone Institute Fellow Bobbie Anne Flower Cox spent the last two years battling the state of New York to get this regulation struck down. On July 8, 2022, a NY Supreme Court Judge, Ronald Ploetz, ruled that the “Isolation and Quarantine Procedures” regulation is unconstitutional and “violative of New York State law as promulgated and enacted, and therefore null, void and unenforceable as a matter of law.” Astonishingly, Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James appealed the decision and the appeal was heard in court just a few weeks ago. 

If the NY Supreme Court Appellate Division affirms that the law is unconstitutional, it will be a small step toward sanity. If the court somehow decides that indefinite detention for any reason without right to due process is lawful, we will be living in America’s version of National Socialism. 

Of course the national media did not report on the NY “Quarantine Camp” policy — why would they, they believe the same nonsense as Richard Pan. And just like SB276 in California, it appears that Pharma introduced this idea in a captured blue state as a test run before rolling it out nationwide. 

V. Conclusion

It is essential to reframe this entire debate. I should not have to explain any of this but we live in The Upside Down World so let me state the obvious: 

Viruses and bacteria are ubiquitous. They live in us, on us, and all around us and usually contribute to our well-being. Bad health outcomes can be reduced through making healthy lifestyle choices. For acute cases there are a range of medicines and supplements that are effective. Large infrastructure projects (e.g. sewers, treatment plants and pipes to deliver clean water to homes and businesses) are the proven best path to improving public health. 

Public health policy in the US is based on junk science that enriches the largest donors to the Democratic Party. Health has absolutely nothing to do with it. If you follow the advice of the CDC you are putting your life in grave danger. 

Health and medicine must always be tailored to the individual needs of each person. One-size-fits-all medicine is barbarism. 

No one owns the air. It is not a crime to breathe. Anyone who wants to protect the commons must recognize the universal right for people to exist without corporate trespass into our bodies. 

There are no pandemic exceptions to the US Constitution. Totalitarianism is not a recommended treatment for any disease. Concentration camps are never appropriate. 

The best approach to any problem is always the free and open exchange of ideas in a system of free and sovereign citizens.

Republished from the author’s Substack

In a major milestone in the government-coerced push away from gas-powered vehicles, the best-selling sedan in America will only be available with gas-electric hybrid powertrains starting with the 2025 model year, Toyota revealed in Malibu on Tuesday night. 

The 2025 Toyota Camry will feature a 2.5-liter gas engine paired with an electric drive that will deliver more power than the 2024 hybrids. Toyota is already the leading seller of hybrid vehicles, which, depending on the driving scenario, use only electric power, only gasoline, or both. Hybrids recapture energy from the braking system that helps boost the range. 

It could be a very risky move for Toyota, considering that combustion models comprise about 85% of Camry’s 2024 sales volume. The Camry is king of the sedan market. However, as Americans increasingly prefer crossovers and SUVs, total sedan sales have plummeted from 7.2 million a year in 2012 to just 2.9 million in 2022, notes the Wall Street Journal.  

Toyota’s radical shift comes in part because of a government gun held to manufacturers’ heads. Whether consumers want it or not, the federal government is using regulation to force gas vehicles out of the marketplace by tightening average mileage requirements for manufacturers’ fleets. Most recently, the White House proposed a 58 mpg standard for the 2032 model year.  The 2022 average was 27 mpg. 

While Toyota didn’t disclose its 2025 pricing yet, at a time when Americans are reeling from inflation, cutting out gas-only models is likely to make the cheapest Camry more expensive next year. For the 2024 model year, the cheapest gas-only Camry is costs about $2,400 less than the cheapest hybrid.  “We think the value the hybrid powertrain brings is worth that kind of premium,” Toyota’s North America brand chief David Christ told Reuters. 

According to federal fuel economy numbers, the current Camry hybrid saves $650 a year versus the gas version, reflecting the 52mpg vs 32 mpg difference. That implies a 3.7-year break-even on the price differential between the hybrid and gas-only version. Critically, that math does not include:

• Extra interest expense for those financing a more expensive vehicle
• Higher sales and other taxes linked to the sales price
• Higher insurance costs — on average, hybrids cost about 7% more to insure, according to carinsuranceplan.org

The new 2025 Toyota Camry will be hybrid-only but it’s keeping the classic hood strut pic.twitter.com/Gd34Qze9fR

— Edmunds (@edmunds) November 15, 2023

In January, the CDC was forced to reveal the results of its VAERS safety signal monitoring for COVID-19 vaccines (thanks to a FOIA request by Zachary Stieber of the Epoch Times), which painted an alarming picture. The analysis, spanning Dec. 14 2020 through July 29, 2022, revealed:

• There were 770 different types of adverse events that showed safety signals in ages 18+, of which over 500 (or 2/3) had a larger safety signal than myocarditis/pericarditis.

• The CDC analysis shows that the number of serious adverse events reported in less than two years for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines is 5.5 times larger than all serious reports for vaccines given to adults in the US since 2009 (~73,000 vs. ~13,000).

• Twice as many mRNA COVID-19 vaccine reports were classified as serious compared to all other vaccines given to adults (11% vs. 5.5%). This meets the CDC definition of a safety signal.

Read more on that here…

In April, the Biden administration rejected several demands for compensation from people who have been injured by the Covid-19 vaccine, despite the fact that injury reports have been on the rise – as evidenced by a February report by Florida Surgeon General Joseph Lapado over a 4,400% increase in life threatening conditions reported to in the state to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) since the 2021 rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines.

Meanwhile, several lawsuits have been filed against the Biden administration by vaccine-injured individuals over worldwide vaccine contracts that indemnified drugmakers from litigation, as well as for censorship surrounding the big tech crackdown on people sharing their experiences after receiving Covid-19 vaccines.

DOJ Hires Lawyers

In response to the mounting vaccine injuries, the Biden DOJ quietly began hiring more lawyers in October to handle vaccine litigation. In a posting to USAJobs.gov, the Washington DC Office of Office of Constitutional and Specialized Tort Litigation – Vaccine Litigation Staff asks for individuals who can fight “claims of injury as a result of the receipt of vaccines” covered by the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (“Vaccine Act”).

The job pays between $94,199 and $183,500 for whatever soulless Devil’s Advocate acolyte take a job fighting vaccine injured Americans.

The position is a unique trial practice in support of public health, science, and medicine. The legal and medical issues at stake in each case vary. Trial attorneys independently manage heavy caseloads, and while streamlined procedures are utilized, many cases involve complex scientific issues of causation that require expert witnesses in medical fields such as pediatrics, neurology, immunology, and epidemiology. In cases in which petitioners are found entitled to compensation, the litigation occasionally requires use of damages experts to develop an appropriate life care plan for the injured party, including medical treatment and related care needs, and the determination of other compensable damages, such as lost earnings and pain and suffering, often awarded through a structured settlement.

Attorneys with limited experience will focus primarily on litigating cases in a “claims” type posture, typically involving less complicated issues of science and medicine, limited damages, and fewer court appearances, with the possibility of transitioning to handling more complex cases in litigation over time.

Attorneys appear frequently before the Office of Special Masters in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, and also appear before the judges of the Court of Federal Claims, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit when handling appeals. Responsibilities include factual and legal research, medical record review, brief writing, and working with expert witnesses to develop the defense of claims, as well as to address the life care needs of vaccine-injured petitioners in some cases. The majority of cases are resolved informally, and thus attorneys engage regularly in settlement and damages negotiations, including alternative dispute resolution, and drafting settlement memoranda.

Hilariously, while the DOJ came after Elon Musk’s SpaceX (which deals with matters of national security) for not hiring illegal immigrants, the vaccine injury job posting requires applicants to be “a U.S. Citizen or National.”

Other interesting job requirements include:

• Must be able to obtain and maintain a Top Secret security clearance with eligibility for Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) access depending on organizational assignment / duty location.
• Financial Disclosure: If selected, you will be required to disclose financial information in accordance with DOJ and Federal ethics guidelines.
• You will be required to complete a pre-employment security investigation and background check which includes a drug screening.

We think they’re going to need more than eight.

Welcome to the first ever ZeroHedge live debate in which Laura Loomer and Dave Smith will clash over the Israel Palestine conflict. We hope you find it informative. In the replies to this tweet, please submit your questions for the participants. https://t.co/xDKaEkOTjf

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 15, 2023

Modern discourse has devolved into headlines and soundbites. Gone are the great debates of decades past, when luminaries such as Buckley and Vidal, Chomsky and Foucault, or Tucker and Carville spent the better part of an hour hashing out issues on the national stage. These unfiltered, pre-internet debates, untainted by self-serving echo chambers and the biased lens of corporate media, served to actually inform – not manipulate – the public, and shape official policy.

In the same vein, and in hopes of short-circuiting the endless media noise, ZeroHedge is going back to basics with a series of live, spontaneous, unscripted and interactive debates, with no commercial breaks, which we hope will inspire discussion on a wide variety of controversial topics, ranging from war to finance, to unsustainable debt, to crypto, to society and religion, and everything in between.

Why? Because we realize that only free, uncensored debate can crush bad ideas before they evolve and lead to social and economic misery, suffering and death… and because only dialogue can save the world.

Our first debate features Dave Smith and Laura Loomer, who will discuss the Israel-Hamas war. We will also dedicate a portion of the debate to responding directly to questions submitted by our readers on X/Twitter.

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

Reducing methane emissions and addressing methane leaks in operations are immediate actions from which both businesses and the climate will benefit, JP Morgan, one of the world’s top fossil fuel financiers, said in a new report on Wednesday.

JP Morgan’s “The Methane Emissions Opportunity” white paper urges companies to boost efforts to cut methane emissions and says that the Wall Street bank recognizes methane abatement as an opportunity “to support accelerated efforts by our clients to reduce operational emissions.”

“Consistent with that objective, we have set a net zero-aligned emissions intensity reduction target for the Oil & Gas sector’s operational (Scope 1 and 2) emissions in our financing portfolio, including reducing leakage, venting, and flaring of methane as key drivers,” JP Morgan said in the report.

“We recognize that different technologies and solutions will make sense for different types of operators, and we aim to work with industry participants to support the deployment of effective solutions.”

According to the bank, recent events such as the war in Ukraine have highlighted the urgent need to provide energy resources securely, reliably, and affordably while scaling solutions and strategies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

“These objectives are not mutually exclusive. The world can — and must — do both,” JP Morgan said.

A report by environmental groups from earlier this year showed that JP Morgan is no longer the world’s biggest financier of fossil fuels. Last year Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) became the top bank funding oil and gas. For the first time since 2019, US bank JP Morgan Chase dropped from the top spot of the biggest backer of fossil fuels.

Overall, U.S. banks dominated fossil fuel financing, accounting for 28% of all fossil fuel financing in 2022.

JPMorgan Chase remains the world’s biggest funder of fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement, while Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America are still among the top 5 fossil financiers since 2016.

Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren and California Congressman Robert Garcia have recently introduced a bill called the Ammunition Modernization and Monitoring Oversight (AMMO) Act.  If passed, the bill would restrict bulk sales of ammunition, would require businesses who sell ammunition to obtain the same federal license as gun dealers, and would require businesses to conduct a background check on buyers.

Additionally, it would also apply the same prohibition on straw purchases for ammunition that currently exists for firearms.  It would make it illegal for individuals to purchasing ammunition and then give that ammo to others, and it would require data sharing on ammunition sales.

Robert Garcia argues:

“The bottom line is no individual should be buying bulk amounts of ammunition without a federal background check from places like gas stations, pharmacies, and convenience stores – especially without any sort of regulation and no record of the sale.  If we’re ever going to really take on the gun violence epidemic in this country, we need to regulate ammo accessibility. This bill aims to protect the American public from the devastating violence that occurs when individuals have access to unlimited amounts of weaponry.”

The bill prohibits bulk sales of ammunition based on the type of ammo. It specifically limits individuals to 100 rounds for .50 caliber ammo, and 1000 rounds for all other ammunition within a 5-day period. The full text of the bill can be found here.

Records of sales would be required and the data must be held by vendors for at least two years, while anyone buying ammo and transferring it to others without record could be punished with heavy fines and up to five years jail time.

The AMMO Act essentially places ammunition under the same ATF category as firearms while opening the door to subjective ATF rulings on ammo sales.  Anti-gun lawmakers have long sought to undermine 2nd Amendment rights through the backdoor of ammo purchases.  Some past attempts have included “micro-stamping” as not just a way to track each round back to a buyer, but also to make the production process so expensive for manufacturers that ammo prices rise exponentially.

The purpose of restrictions on “bulk ammo” sales is less certain.  The average active shooting incident involves far less than 1000 rounds fired, so the new rule would do nothing to prevent criminals from engaging in such attacks.  Shooting events involving 50 BMG ammo are almost non-existent, yet under the bill this caliber of ammo is the most restricted in terms of bulk sales.   

That said, the restrictions combined with purchase tracking and background checks would be useful in identifying preppers and patriots; people who are much more likely to buy large amounts of ammo at one time.  It should also be noted that few people other than preppers have an interest in spending the exorbitant funds required to shoot 50 BMG, which may explain the special restrictions on the caliber cited in the bill.      

Federal agencies have consistently stated that they believe “domestic extremists” (their term for conservatives) are the greatest threat to the country.  They have shifted their focus away from foreign terrorism and are aiming the bureaucratic apparatus at American citizens with constitutional ideals.  The phrases “patriot rebellion” and “civil war” have been mentioned in the establishment media with increasing regularity as a growing concern for the government.  

Despite the endless arguments that “an AR-15 would be useless against an F-16,” it’s clear that the powers-that-be have decided that civilian firearms access is more dangerous to them than they may have initially assumed.     

Furthermore, making it illegal for the average citizen to share or resell ammo with others creates a pathway to a host of ATF intrusions and prosecutions.  And, as we have seen with gun peripherals such as bump stocks, pistol braces and specialty triggers, once the ATF has their foot in the door on ammo they will exploit their newfound power to the furthest extent possible.  As with most bills like the AMMO Act, the goal is to quietly whittle away at gun rights and frighten law abiding citizens with an ever growing list of potential violations.  Nothing in these bills will save a single life from gun related violence.   

By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com

Kuwait Integrated Petroleum Industries Company (KIPIC), the operator of the large Al-Zour Refinery, is working to gradually restore operations at the facility after the abrupt shutdown on Sunday, Reuters quoted the company as saying on Wednesday. 

The Al-Zour Refinery, one of the largest crude processing facilities in the Middle East, experienced a brief halt on Sunday following a “sudden interruption” in fuel and gas supply, KIPIC said this weekend.

The refinery was “exposed to a sudden interruption of fuel gas supplies due to a malfunction in one of the main valves of Kuwait Oil Co, KIPIC said Sunday in a statement carried by Bloomberg.

The restart has already begun, and it is expected that the refinery with a capacity of 615,000 barrels per day (bpd) would take up to 10 days to return to normal operations, KIPIC said.

The refinery, which KIPIC says is the world’s largest grass-root refinery with 615,000 bpd capacity, began ramping up operations this year and was expected to reach full capacity in October. The refinery has high flexibility as it is designed to process various types of Kuwait crude including the Kuwait Heavy Crude (KHC) oil, which will be produced according to the upstream strategy of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC), the state oil firm of one of the largest crude oil producers in the Middle East.

After the glitch this weekend, technical teams at the Al-Zour Refinery have started work on a gradual restart of the production units. According to operator KIPIC, the process of restarting the mega refinery would take about 10 days to reach the previous production capacity. 

KIPIC is also taking precautionary measures to prevent further disruptions of supply to power and water plants and disruptions of export operations. 

The ramp-up of the 615,000-bpd refinery was expected earlier this year to additionally tighten the global supply of sour crude, as Kuwait would divert more crude to its new large processing facility.  

Starbucks faces its largest strike yet as thousands of nonunionized baristas will walk off the job on Thursday. The baristas are walking out in solidarity with thousands of Starbucks Workers United baristas to protest unfair labor practices at the coffee giant. 

SWU said a one-day work stoppage will occur on Red Cup Day (Thursday), the biggest sales event of the season for the company. They said Red Cup Day is one of the most understaffed and most challenging days for baristas of the year. 

“In addition to our nationwide ULP strike on the 16th, we’re also asking customers and allies to lead actions at Starbucks stores in their communities in solidarity with workers rising up for a fairer workplace,” the union said.

In an emailed statement, Oklahoma City employee Neha Cremin told Bloomberg, “Starbucks has made it clear that they won’t listen to workers, so we’re advocating for ourselves by going on strike.” 

The union called the labor action “Red Cup Rebellion” and said thousands of nonunionized and unionized workers planned to walk out. 

Not only is #RedCupRebellion this week – we have even more workers joining the movement!

Welcome the FIRST Starbucks store to file for a union in Rhode Island – the partners of the One Financial location in Providence, RI! pic.twitter.com/RajPssLu4Z

— Starbucks Workers United (@SBWorkersUnited) November 13, 2023

Bloomberg explains how Starbucks believes the union continues to ‘unfairly negotiate’: 

The two sides have disagreed in many store locations about ground rules for the meetings, including whether workers should be allowed to participate via videoconference. On Monday, the coffee chain alleged that it’s been months since the union agreed to meet for contract talks, while the union claimed Starbucks has refused to meet unless workers agreed to illegal infringements on their rights. 

Starbucks admitted in a statement they’re “aware that Workers United has publicized a day of action at a small subset of our US stores this week,” adding they hope the union’s “priorities will shift to include the shared success of our partners and working to negotiate union contracts for those they represent.” 

Bloomberg noted the union has “prevailed in elections at more than 350 of Starbucks’ roughly 9,000 corporate-run US stores, starting with a landmark win nearly two years ago in Buffalo, New York.”