“The Non-Covid Spending Blowout” by Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, reports that “Most of the $1.9 trillion House bill has little to do with the virus.”

Certainly, the coronavirus stimulus bill does provide $473 billion in payments to individuals, $75 billion in cash for vaccines, $26 billion to restaurants, $15 billion to help fund airline payrolls, and another $7.2 billion in Paycheck Protection Program funding for small businesses.

However, The Wall Street Journal editorial board estimated that only $825 billion was directly related to COVID-relief and $1 trillion was “expansions of progressive programs, pork, and unrelated policy changes.” [ Source ]

We are heading into a DEBT storm … setting the stage for a massive global economic reset! In the United States, the nation’s debt $10 trillion in 2008. By 2016, it increased to $19.6 trillion. In 2020, it had gone to $23.6 trillion. And today …. $28 trillion!

Throughout the world, the debt had reached $272 trillion by the 3rd quarter of 2020.

Nothing to see here folks … it’s just printing money without any ramifications … do you really believe that?

In preparation of the Biden administration passing potential anti-gun legislation, a county in Missouri passed an ordinance which would invalidate the federal government from infringing on the Second Amendment rights of its citizens.

The ordinance grants the county sheriff “full authority to make an arrest of any and all federal agents that violate state laws and enforce regulations.”

The Second Amendment Preservation Act of Newton County Missouri cites the state’s own constitution for justifying the legislation. “All federal acts, laws, orders, rules, and regulations passed by the federal government and specifically any Presidential Administration whether past, present, or future, which infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 23 of the Missouri Constitution shall be invalid in the county,” the act reads.  [ continue reading … Source: Post-Millennial ]

This is just the beginning as Conservative municipalities, cities, and states will implement similar laws. While Democrats pass “sanctuary” law protecting illegal aliens, Conservatives will pass similar laws protecting its citizens … which do you believe will be vilified by the press?

Elections are “of the most fundamental significance under our constitutional structure.”

…. Through them, we exercise self-government. But elections enable self-governance only when they include processes that “giv[e] citizens (including the losing candidates and their supporters) confidence in the fairness of the election.”

… (“Confidence in the integrity of our electoral processes is essential to the functioning of our participatory democracy”). Unclear rules threaten to undermine this system. They sow confusion and ultimately dampen confidence in the integrity and fairness of elections. To prevent confusion, we have thus repeatedly—although not as consistently as we should—blocked rule changes made by courts close to an election.

… An election system lacks clear rules when, as here, different officials dispute who has authority to set or change those rules. This kind of dispute brews confusion because voters may not know which rules to follow. Even worse, with more than one system of rules in place, competing candidates might each declare victory under different sets of rules. We are fortunate that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to change the receipt deadline for mail-in ballots does not appear to have changed the outcome in any federal election.

… Changing the rules in the middle of the game is bad enough. Such rule changes by officials who may lack authority to do so is even worse. When those changes alter election results, they can severely damage the electoral system on which our self-dissenting governance so heavily depends. If state officials have the authority they have claimed, we need to make it clear. If not, we need to put an end to this practice now before the consequences become catastrophic.

… One wonders what this Court waits for. We failed to settle this dispute before the election, and thus provide clear rules. Now we again fail to provide clear rules for future elections. The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling. By doing nothing, we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence. Our fellow citizens deserve better and expect more of us. I respectfully dissent.

Read Justice Thomas Dissenting Opinion in Full.

Technology and media entities join forces to create standards group aimed at building trust in online content

A group of influential technology and media companies has partnered to form the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a Joint Development Foundation project established to address the prevalence of disinformation, misinformation and online content fraud through developing technical standards for certifying the source and history or provenance of media content. Founding members Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic seek to establish a standardized provenance solution with the goal of combating misleading content.

C2PA member organizations will work together to develop content provenance specifications for common asset types and formats to enable publishers, creators and consumers to trace the origin and evolution of a piece of media, including images, videos, audio and documents. These technical specifications will include defining what information is associated with each type of asset, how that information is presented and stored, and how evidence of tampering can be identified.

The C2PA’s open standard will give platforms a method to preserve and read provenance-based digital content. Because an open standard can be adopted by any online platform, it is critical to scaling trust across the internet. In addition to the inclusion of varied media types at scale, C2PA is driving an end-to-end provenance experience from the capturing device to the information consumer. Collaboration with chipmakers, news organizations, and software and platform companies is critical to facilitate a comprehensive provenance standard and drive broad adoption across the content ecosystem. — Source: Microsoft

A new report suggests that China is considering the idea of banning the export of rare-earth minerals to countries it deems a threat. If only someone could have warned us.

Of course, some may remember that just a few short months ago, a prominent political figure did warn of this problem. That figure was former President Donald Trump.

In October, Trump declared a national emergency in the mining industry in an executive order “aimed at boosting domestic production of rare earth minerals critical for military technologies while reducing the country’s dependence on China,” according to Defense News.

For those who are not familiar with rare-earth minerals, Defense News defined them as “a group of 17 minerals critical to the defense industry’s manufacturing of missiles and munitions, hypersonic weapons, and radiation-hardened electronics — as well as consumer electronics like cellphones.” — Source: Western Journal

Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?

In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast. Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.

There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection. As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life. [Read the entire Op-Ed at the Wall Street Journal]