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ROGER SIMON: Michigan Legislators Blow It Big Time Questioning Dominion CEO.

We live in a complicated time for democracy, to say the least.

As the world becomes increasingly technological, the less knowledge most of our legislators have with which to make their judgements.

In many cases, they are essentially flying blind.

When it comes to understanding the computer-based voting systems dominating our elections this can be perilous indeed.

This was painfully and, I regret to say, tragically in evidence Tuesday when John Poulos, the elusive CEO of Dominion Voting Systems, finally appeared in front of a panel of Michigan Republican state senators to answer questions about the Nov. 3 election.

It was in Michigan’s Antrim County where, because of a supposed computer “glitch,” a forensic audit of Dominion equipment was undertaken last week by Allied Security Operations and its co-founder Russell Ramsland.

Ramsland found the Dominion machines rejected an unheard of 68 percent of the ballots, making them subject to the manual process of “adjudication,” easily subject to fudging.

He deemed the situation a “national security issue.”

Ramsland was not at Tuesday’s hearing, nor were, astonishingly, any information technology professionals at all to ask questions of the Dominion CEO.

The legislators were, as noted above, flying blind—and it sure sounded that way as they read questions fumblingly off cards (from staffers?) and didn’t seem to know how or what to ask in follow-ups.

Given this unprepared performance (I will give my explanation for this later) I reached out to an actual qualified professional—Garland Favorito of VoterGA who has been deeply involved with the situation in Georgia—to see what he thought about the Michigan proceedings (viewable here).

Mr. Favorito took a look and replied via email:

“The opening statement by CEO John Poulos claiming it is technologically impossible for a voting system like Dominion to flip votes in real time has already been proven to be BLATANTLY FALSE by many American computer scientists. I can state categorically based on my career IT experience and 16 years of non-partisan voting system research that any voting system can be programmed in advance to flip votes in real time. Mr. Polous may be able to fool members of a legislature or the media but he cannot fool Election Integrity advocates who are IT professionals.”

So, I ask again, why wasn’t a computer scientist or scientists there at the hearing to interrogate Poulos? This may have been their only chance.

Favorito continued:

“Mr. Poulos further claimed that vote switches have not occurred on Dominion systems. It is fact that hand count audits proved Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5 voting systems swapped votes from President Trump to former Vice President Biden in both Michigan and Georgia. We don’t know what component of the system caused this to occur in Georgia because the Secretary of State [Raffensperger] is blocking forensic system exams in multiple counties. However, we now do know that for the 2020 Presidential election to be considered legitimate, properly conducted hand count audits must be completed by any counties running the Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5 system.”

Now I will respond to the question I just raised as to why this crucial hearing was conducted in such a perfunctory manner.

Earlier William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection on Where things stand at this hour.

END TEACHERS’ UNIONS. END THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION. GIVE LOCAL AREAS CONTROL OF SCHOOLS. WHAT’S THE WORST THEY CAN DO? HOW CAN THEY BE WORSE THAN OUR INFERNAL SYSTEM?  Chicago Schools Hiring People to Supervise Kids in Class While Teachers Work Remotely.

DAMMIT, WHO TYPED A QUESTION MARK ON THE TELEPROMPTER? HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU? ANYTHING YOU TYPE, RON BURGUNDY WILL READ! Hot Mic: Ontario top doc caught saying health information she delivers is ‘whatever they write down for me.’

The post Nearly 700 Students Missing in Mass Kidnapping in Nigeria appeared first on The Bongino Report.

GOOD:  Michigan Judge Orders Release of Damning Forensics Report of Dominion Vote Tabulation System, Full Forensics Report.

The post Instagram Threatened to Delete Account of Woman Who Was Kicked Off Flight Because Her Two-Year-Old Didn’t Wear Mask appeared first on The Bongino Report.

CANCEL CULTURE CLAIMS ANOTHER SCALP: NY Times Assistant Who Edited Cotton’s ‘Send in the Troops’ Column Resigns.

The New York Times staffer who edited Sen. Tom Cotton’s infamous “Send in the Troops” column has resigned from the paper more than six months after its publication.

Adam Rubenstein, a young editorial assistant who previously worked at The Weekly Standard, was thrust into the media spotlight last summer after the Times itself reported that he edited the notorious June submission in which Cotton called for the feds to deploy American troops into cities to suppress protests against police brutality. The column sparked a staff-wide revolt and prompted the resignation of opinions editor James Bennet.

Rubenstein left the newspaper this week, The Daily Beast has confirmed. His exit was announced—with little fanfare—in an internal Slack channel for Times staffers on Thursday. Neither Rubenstein nor the newspaper immediately responded to a request for comment.

I don’t know if Rubenstein considers himself a conservative, or merely worked at the Standard as a stepping-stone to the DNC-MSM, in the same way that Jennifer Rubin, Megyn Kelly, Dave Weigel, and Oliver Darcy all got their start at right-leaning outlets. But merely having the Standard on his resume and publishing an editorial with a viewpoint that 58 percent of Americans agree with made him a man with an enormous target on his back at the Times. Once again, the amount of acceptable opinion shrinks ever-tightly at the far left, and safetyism-obsessed Gray Lady, as Bari Weiss noted before she too departed:

Some thoughts from the Times’ new owner:

All is happening in accordance with the prophecy:

PAUL GIGOT: The Biden Team Strikes Back: Its strategists promote an identity politics campaign against an op-ed on Jill Biden’s use of ‘Dr.’ “Why go to such lengths to highlight a single op-ed on a relatively minor issue? My guess is that the Biden team concluded it was a chance to use the big gun of identity politics to send a message to critics as it prepares to take power. There’s nothing like playing the race or gender card to stifle criticism.”

Well, and doing it in defense of a wealthy white woman with a less-than-stellar advanced degree is spot-on for today’s Democrats. Degreed Karens of the world, unite!

BELIEVE IN SCIENCE! SCIENCE IS REAL! FOLLOW THE SCIENCE! Also: Ohio allows high schoolers to wrestle, but forbids shaking hands before, after matches.

STRIKE A POSE, THERE’S NOTHING TO IT:

HE RAN A WEBSITE THE IRANIAN REGIME DIDN’T LIKE. HE WAS EXECUTED FOR IT:

For years, Ruhollah Zam ran one of Iran’s most popular online news outlets, AmadNews, a website and channel on the messaging app Telegram that amassed millions of followers inside the Islamic Republic and in the Diaspora.

Its content was an amalgam of wildly hyperbolic claims, genuine news and leaks of information, as well as video footage showing anti-government protests, including those that erupted in the final days of 2017, drawing the attention of regime officials.

On Saturday morning, after he was lured from France, brought before a secretive security court in Iran and sentenced to die, Zam was abruptly executed after being convicted of the Islamic crime of “spreading corruption earth.”

He was 42.

The incoming Biden administration, eager to get back in bed with Iran, nods with pride.

NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Seattle is considering making it legal to steal, as long as you’re poor and plan on selling the items. Wait, what?

The post Defiant N.J. Gym That Has Paid $1.2 Million in Fines for Staying Open Has Not Had a Single Coronavirus Case appeared first on The Bongino Report.

The post Time Names Biden and Harris as its Person of the Year in Gushing Tribute appeared first on The Bongino Report.

SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: YouTube Says It Will Start Deleting Content Alleging 2020 Election Voter Fraud.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Nothing says, “relax, everything is aboveboard” like censoring claims of fraud while they’re still being litigated.

DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH CHYRONS PROTECTING THEIR BOSS. Cover-Up: ABC, CBS Barely Cover Hunter Biden Probe, Ignore Business Deals in China.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey spots the Daily Beast’s Sam Stein “doing an awful lot of heavy lifting” with the word “unnoticed:” Daily Beast: Isn’t it odd that the Hunter Biden money-laundering probe went “largely unnoticed” until now?

Related: Bombshell: Hunter Biden Email Names Kamala Harris, Others as Key Contacts for ‘Joint Venture’ With China Energy Co.

UPDATE:

The post Former Chinese State Secrecy Bureau and Military Engineers Now Work for YouTube appeared first on The Bongino Report.

One of the fears of many people in relation to covid has been that the immunity that develops after infection is so short lived that the infection will just keep going around and around and re-infecting everyone (until everyone is dead, I assume).

Two pieces of evidence have been presented to support this belief. The first concerns a few cases of “re-infection” that have been broadcast widely in media, even though virtually all of these cases have been either completely asymptomatic or only very mildly symptomatic the second time around – a sure sign the the immune system still remembers covid and is doing its thing to stop it.

The second concerns the fact that antibodies fade after infection. This builds on a fundamental lack of understanding of how the immune system works. Although the actively antibody producing cells diminish after an infection, these cells (so called “plasma cells”) are not responsible for immune memory. That role is filled by special “memory B-cells”, that lie dormant in the body, waiting for the infection to reappear. When it does, they quickly spring in to action and produce massive numbers of new antibody producing clones.

Now, however, covid has been around for a while, and we’re starting to get some pretty good data on how long immunity lasts after infection. There is a pre-print up on MedRxiv about a study that sought to gain a deeper understanding of what sort of immune memory is produced after a covid infection.

Before we get in to the details of the article, let’s talk a little bit about immune memory, so everyone is on the same page. Immune memory is the ability of the immune system to remember a pathogen after a first infection (or vaccination), and thereby respond much more quickly and effectively upon re-infection. It is mediated by three main types of cell. The first is the already mentioned memory B-cell, which is basically a dormant version of the antibody producing plasma cells. The second is the “memory killer T-cell”, which is a dormant version of the regular killer T cell (a.k.a CD8+ T-cell). Killer T-cells specialize in finding virus infected cells and getting them to commit suicide in a way that prevents the virus from spreading further.

The third is the “memory helper T-cell”, which among many other functions regulates the function of the other types of immune cell. Both killer T-cells and B-cells cannot become fully activated until helper T-cells have become activated. The central function of T-helper cells is shown by AIDS (Aquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), a disease caused by the destruction of the T-helper cells by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) – without the T-helper cells, other parts of the immune system cannot become fully activated, and the immune system is not able to function effectively.

In case you’re curious, the reason B-cells are called B-cells is because they mature in the bone marrow, so the B is for Bone marrow. T-cells mature in the thymus, so the T is for Thymus.

Ok, now you know enough to understand the results of the study. 185 people with confirmed covid-19 were recruited and had blood samples drawn. 92% had not required hospitalization, so only a minority had had severe disease. The ages of the participants varied from 19 to 81. The blood samples were collected from several different sites across the United States.

The results of the study were based on analysis of the participants blood. 79% of participants only provided blood at a single time point, which varied from six days post-infection to more than six months post-infection, while the remainder (21%) provided blood at multiple time points. In other words, this was not really a longitudinal study, since most participants only had their blood analyzed at a single point in time, although there was some longitudinal data. 41 participants provided blood samples at six months or longer after infection, and this is really the group we’re most interested in, since this is the group that can tell us if there is still a good level of immune memory six months after infection.

Let’s look at the results.

Among the 54 individuals measured at one month post infection, 98% had antibodies. Among the 41 individuals measured at six to eight months post infection, 90% had antibodies. As mentioned before, antibodies are produced by plasma cells, and although antibodies in the blood stream decline with time as the plasma cells start to disappear, there should still be memory B-cells present for much longer, which can quickly be activated upon re-infection. That’s why it’s actually more important to look at what’s happening with memory B-cells than with antibodies, if you want to know how long your body maintains the ability to mount an antibody response to an infection. So, what did happen with the memory B-cells?

The prevalence of memory B-cells increased at each time point measured up to five months post infection, at which point they reached a stable level. There was no sign of a decline in memory B-cells after the five month mark.

Next we have the killer T-cells. At one month post infection, 61% had detectable memory killer T-cells. At six to eight months, 50% had measurable killer T-cells. it was however only possible to test for these cells in 18 individuals at the six month mark, so the confidence interval is wide, and thus it’s really impossible to say exactly what the trajectory was between the one month and six month marks. What can be said though is that a large proportion of participants still had measurable killer T-cells at six months.

Finally we have the memory helper T-cells. 94% of those measured at one month had measurable helper T-cells. Among those measured at six to eight months, that number was 89% (again, this data is based on only 18 individuals).

So, what can we conclude?

First, it’s important to note that this study had some weaknesses. The first is that, with the exception of a minority of participants, the study was cross-sectional, not longitudinal. This means that we’re not comparing people with themselves over time, we’re comparing them with other people who happen to be at a different point in the time line. It would have been better to have longitudinal data for all participants. The second is that some of the groups studied were pretty small, which creates wide margins of error. Some of the data was based on less than twenty individuals, which is really a tiny number.

A third weakness is that this study isn’t looking at how many people get reinfected with covid after a certain amount of time, it is looking at biomarkers – in other words, it is using proxy data, which is clearly a less reliable type of information than seeing what is actually happening to people in the real world. It’s kind of like doing a statin study and looking at what happens to cholesterol levels instead of looking at how many people have died after certain time point.

Having said all that, it is clear from this study that there is significant immune memory at the six to eight month time point after infection. At six to eight months after infection, 90% of measured samples still had antibodies and T-helper cells specific for covid-19, and 50% still had measurable T-killer cells. If the decline continues linearly over time from what was seen in this study, then it is reasonable to assume that most people continue to be immune to covid after infection for at least a couple of years.

You might also be interested in my article about the number of years of life lost, on average, when someone dies of covid, or my article about whether face masks are effective against covid.

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The post How long does immunity to covid last? appeared first on Sebastian Rushworth M.D..

THE TAKE AWAY FROM THIS?   Audit of Dominion machine found it routinely shifted votes to Biden.

It’s quite likely there’s a lot more of us than there is of them.

One of the arguments that has been used in support of strict lockdown is that Sweden has had significantly more covid deaths than its nordic neighbours. On the 19th of November, Sweden had registered 637 covid deaths per million people. For comparison, Denmark had registered 140, Norway had registered 57, and Finland had registered 69.

But, as I wrote about recently, the studies that have been done have not been able to find any correlation between severity of lockdown and the number of covid deaths. Which must logically mean that Sweden’s higher death rate was not due to the fact that it didn’t institute a severe lockdown. So, if that is the case, why did Sweden have more covid deaths than its closest neighbors?

A paper written by three economists at the end of August sought to answer that question. The research didn’t receive any specific funding, and the authors reported no conflicts of interest. The authors provided 15 different factors that could potentially explain the difference. I’m going to focus on the few that I think are likely the most important.

The first hypothesis is that Sweden, and in particular Stockholm, imported many more cases of covid-19 from abroad before measures were put in place to stop the spread between countries. The main reason for this is that Stockholm has a half-term holiday (“sportlovet”) in late February, when many people go skiing in the alps. The other nordic countries have similar holidays, but they have them earlier. So any Norwegians, Danes, or Finns who went skiing in the alps, would have gone there before the pandemic exploded in that region, while the people from Stockholm were there when infections were spreading at their worst.

The two other large-ish cities in Sweden, Malmö and Gothenburg, provide a useful control for this hypothesis. Both cities have their half-term holiday a week or two before Stockholm, and both were hit far less severely than Stockholm in the first wave. Stockholm experienced 40% of Swedish covid deaths, despite having only 24% of Sweden’s population.

Apart from this, Swedes travel internationally far more than their nordic neighbors (80% more per million people), which would have resulted in significantly more cases of covid being brought in to the country at the beginning of the pandemic.

The second hypothesis concerns the fact that Sweden has a much bigger population of immigrants than its nordic neighbors. 19% of Sweden’s population is foreign born, as opposed to 14% for Denmark and Norway, and only 8% for Finland. What this means in practice is that Sweden has a bigger population of people with darker skin, and it has been clear since early in the pandemic that darker skinned people in western countries are much more likely to develop severe covid than lighter skinned people.

As an aside, Much of the media debate around this phenomenon has centred around the idea that darker skinned people generally have lower status, higher rates of poverty, worse access to health care and so on – basically, that the difference is due to institutional racism.

But there is one big problem with that idea. It doesn’t fit all the facts. An article in the Washington Post on May 20th reported that 27 of 29 doctors who had died of covid in the UK up to that point belonged to ethnic minorities. In other words, 93% of doctors who had died at that point came from ethnic minorities, even though they only constitute 44% of all doctors in the country. Why is this important? Because doctors with darker skin are still doctors, which means that they are members of a high status, well paid, well-off segment of society.

Note, I’m not saying that institutional racism doesn’t exist. I’m just saying that it can’t explain why darker skinned people in western countries are hit much harder by covid than lighter skinned people.

Vitamin D deficiency could though. Darker skinned people in northern Europe are more likely to be vitamin D deficient for the simple reason that their skin isn’t as good at producing vitamin D from the feeble sunlight we get in this part of the world. A number of observational studies have shown that people with low vitamin D levels do worse when infected with covid, and there is even a randomized trial in which patients treated with high dose vitamin D did much better than the control group, which I’ve written about in a separate article (funnily enough, that study gained pretty much zero media attention, while remdesivir, a highly expensive drug that is almost completely useless against covid, has been talked about endlessly).

Anyway, what the authors are saying is that Sweden has a larger ethnic minority population than its nordic neighbours, and people from ethnic minorities do worse when they get covid.

The third hypothesis, and from my perspective the most important, concerns the fact that Sweden had a much larger vulnerable population at the beginning of 2020 than its nordic neighbours. This can be seen in multiple different ways in the statistics.

The first is that Sweden has a large nursing home population. Relative to population size, Sweden’s nursing home population is 50% larger than Denmark’s. And as I’ve mentioned previously, in Sweden, people don’t go to nursing homes until they are near the end of life.

The second way this can be seen in the statistics is by looking at overall mortality for the immediately preceding year, 2019. If unusually few people die in one year, then unusually many will die in the following year, since there is a carry forward effect (due to the fact that humans are not immortal). 2019 was an unusually un-deadly year in Sweden, and the early part of 2020 (pre-covid), was also unusually un-deadly, which means that there was an unusually large number of very frail old people in the country when covid struck. This same effect was not seen in Sweden’s nordic neighbours – for them 2019 was normal in terms of overall mortality.

To clarify exactly how big this difference is, let’s look at the numbers. In Sweden, overall mortality in 2019 was 2,5% lower than the average for the preceding five years. In Norway, mortality was exactly in line with the average. Denmark and Finland both had mortality rates that were 1% above the average. Denmark, Finland, and Norway were in a much better position in relation to covid from the start. Sweden was always going to have more deaths, regardless of the actions it took.

As I think this article shows, there were a number of big differences between Sweden and its nordic neighbors at the beginning of the pandemic, which are altogether certainly sufficient to explain the big difference in covid mortality.

Correlation is not causation. Many people have chosen to see a causative relationship between Sweden’s lack of severe lockdown and relatively high number of deaths, because it supports their prior beliefs about the effectiveness of lockdowns. Those beliefs are, however, not supported by the evidence.

You might also be interested in my article about how deadly covid really is, or my article about how effective lockdowns are.

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The post Why did Sweden have more covid deaths than its neighbors? appeared first on Sebastian Rushworth M.D..

THIS IS HUGE: Study Finds Asymptomatic Spread Not a Significant Source of the CCP Virus Pandemic.

The most recent study from China on the prevalence of infection after a lockdown found no transmission of the CCP virus among people who were in close contact with asymptomatic patients, contradicting the current narrative that asymptomatic transmission plays a major role in the pandemic.

An asymptomatic carrier is someone who has not displayed symptoms after being infected, but may spread the virus to others. This is different from someone who is presymptomatic, meaning the person doesn’t feel or look sick, but eventually shows symptoms later, and does transmit the virus during that presymptomatic phase.

The study, published in Nature, identified 300 asymptomatic positive cases through a massive screening program of more than nine million Chinese citizens post-lockdown in Wuhan—where the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus originated—from May 4 to June 1, using PCR tests.

Samples of all the asymptomatic cases were also cultured in the lab and “no viable virus” was found, meaning it cannot transmit a virus.

Much of our current containment approach is called into question by this result.

“I’m losing everything. Everything I own is being taken away from me and they set up a movie company right next to my outdoor patio"

The post Heartbreaking Viral VIDEO: CA Restaurant Owner Near Tears Over Outdoor Dining Double-Standard first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

IT’S GOOD TO BE IN THE NOMENKLATURA:

Watch this video of an LA bar owner that perfectly crystallizes the absurdity of California’s absurd and ridiculous shutdown rules. pic.twitter.com/EHPw38OijN

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) December 5, 2020

“Same thing in NYC, where studio audiences are allowed for SNL but Broadway and restaurants suffer,” Joe Concha of The Hill adds.

Related: ‘Time to Cancel Everything:’ LA Mayor’s New Lockdown Order Plagued by Absurd Inconsistency and Overreach.

More: Gov. Gavin Newsom sidesteps questions on whether data supports new business closures.

CALIFORNIA IS FINALLY REACHING PROGRESSIVE NIRVANA, WHERE EVERYTHING NOT COMPULSORY IS FORBIDDEN: Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti bans non-essential walking, and no we didn’t think he could do that either.

SEEN ON FACEBOOK:

NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” COLLECTS DIVIDENDS: Democratic socialist AOC gets destroyed for selling $58 ‘Tax The Rich’ shirts.

AGAIN, THE BEE, TOMORROW’S NEWS TODAY:  Kamala Harris Proposes Housing Plan Where Everybody Gets Free 10’x10′ Room And Three Meals A Day.

FASTER, PLEASE: Drug reverses age-related cognitive decline within days.