BEWARE...SOME DAYS ARE NOT VERY PRETTY. I GET CRABBY LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE DO. AND I DO SPEAK MY MIND.
DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE TO TRUE, REAL, EVERYDAY FEELINGS LIKE MINE.(But I think you would enjoy it)
DON'T FORGET...FREEDOM OF SPEECH !
US soldiers 'revealed locations of nuclear weapons in Europe by posting details on online flashcards,' report claims
Jamie Johnson
American
soldiers have mistakenly revealed the exact locations of US nuclear
weapons in Europe by uploading details as part of revision exercises
that were publicly available to view, a report claims.
An investigation by Bellingcat alleges
that soldiers attempting to learn intricate security protocols uploaded
a multitude of sensitive information to the internet, including not
only the bases at which the weapons are held, but in which exact vaults
they are stored.
The US Air Force has launched an investigation into "the suitability of information shared via study flashcards."
Questions
and answers were written on flashcards, which have now disappeared, and
appeared to show the positions of cameras, the frequency of patrols
around the vaults, secret duress words that signal when a guard is being
threatened and the unique identifiers that a restricted area badge
needs to have, Bellingcat said.
The
cards had been uploaded as long ago as 2013 on websites including Cram,
Quizlet and Chegg, and accessed as recently as April this year. Some of
those sites have the visibility of the cards set to be viewed by anyone
by default.
The presence of US nuclear weapons in Europe acted as
a deterrent to the Soviet Union during the Cold War and also meant
European countries would not need to develop their own.
Various leaked documents have indicated that they use six sites across the continent.
“These
bombs are stored at six US and European bases - Kleine Brogel in
Belgium, Büchel in Germany, Aviano and Ghedi-Torre in Italy, Volkel in
The Netherlands, and Incirlik in Turkey,” one line read, according to
the Belgian newspaper De Morgen.
The Bellingcat report features
screenshots of flashcards indicating that soldiers are taught what to
shout to an intruder in the local language.
One card relating to
the 701st Munitions Maintenance Squadron shows a phrase to make someone
surrender weapons in Flemish, indicating that the security details in it
apply to Kleine Brogel air base, Belgium.
The most revealing
information, however, pertained to a “vault status” flashcard that
appeared to note which shelters at Volkel contain nuclear weapons.
Five were listed as “hot” and six as “cold.”
To further corroborate their story, Bellingcat unearthed a photograph on Facebook posted by someone associated with 703rd MUNSS.
It
is a large group photo showing more than 50 individuals wearing US
military uniforms posing beside a Dutch army vehicle and in front of a
nuclear warhead.
Using
geolocating technology and a leaked map of the site, it appears that
the soldiers are standing in front of vault 532 - which on the
flashcard, is listed as “cold.”
Dr Jeffrey Lewis, Director of the
East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Centre for
Nonproliferation Studies said it would be highly unlikely for active
service members to pose with a live bomb.
Dr Lewis said that the flashcard information about the vault being “cold” is likely to be correct.
The information disclosure is a “flagrant breach” of security practices, he told Bellingcat.
“This is yet one more warning that these weapons are not secure.”
The Dutch ministry of Defence told Bellingcat: “This photo should not have been taken, let alone published.”
Hans
Kristenssen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the
Federation of American Scientists, said: “There are so many fingerprints
that give away where the nuclear weapons are that it serves no military
or safety purpose to try to keep it secret. Safety is accomplished by
effective security, not secrecy.”
But some of the details which soldiers were trying to learn included how to authenticate security badges.
In
one screenshot, a flashcard detailed that ‘VOLKEL’ should be spelt
without the first L and that ‘MUNSS’ should be missing an S.
Another card allegedly details where the emblems and flags should appear on the security pass.
A
US Air Force Spokesperson told the Telegraph: “The Department of the
Air Force is investigating the suitability of information shared via
study flashcards."
(here we go...."Treat us equally" is no longer coming out the mouths...now it"s I think i'm superior to you and I DEMAND money,school,pay off my home, pay off my farm)
'You Can Feel the Tension': A Windfall for Minority Farmers Divides Rural America
Jack Healy
·9 min read
LaGRANGE,
Mo. — Shade Lewis had just come in from feeding his cows one sunny
spring afternoon when he opened a letter that could change his life: The
government was offering to pay off his $200,000 farm loan, part of a
new debt relief program created by Democrats to help farmers who have
endured generations of racial discrimination.
It was a windfall
for a 29-year-old who has spent the past decade scratching out a living
as the only Black farmer in his corner of northeastern Missouri, where
signposts quoting Genesis line the soybean fields and traffic signals
warn drivers to go slow because it is planting season.
But the $4
billion fund has angered conservative white farmers who say they are
being unfairly excluded because of their race. And it has plunged Lewis
and other farmers of color into a new culture war over race, money and
power in U.S. farming.
“You can feel the tension,” Lewis said. “We’ve caught a lot of heat from the conservative Caucasian farmers.”
The
debt relief is redress set aside for what the government calls
“socially disadvantaged farmers” — Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and other
nonwhite workers who have endured a long history of discrimination,
from violence and land theft in the Jim Crow South to banks and federal
farm offices that refused them loans or government benefits that went to
white farmers.
The program is part of a broader effort by the
Biden administration and Democrats in Congress to confront how racial
injustice has shaped U.S. farming, which is overwhelmingly white. Black
farm advocacy groups say that nearly all the land, profit and subsidies
go to the biggest, most powerful farm operations, leaving Black farmers
with little. But in large portions of rural America, the payments
threaten to further anger white conservative farmers.
The plans
have drawn thousands of enraged comments on farm forums and are being
fought by banks worried about losing interest income. And some rural
residents have rallied around a new slogan, cribbed from the
conservative response to the Black Lives Matter movement: All Farmers
Matter.
Lewis is part of a new generation of Black farmers
venturing back into urban plots and small rural farms, driven by a
desire to nourish their communities with healthy food and create wealth
rooted in the land.
Growing up in LaGrange, a city of 950 along
the Mississippi River, Lewis would scoot a toy John Deere tractor
through his mother’s apartment and pretend he was farming the carpet. He
joined 4-H, farming and business groups in high school. He started
farming at 19, with a few cows and dreams of ending the day with his own
dirt on the soles of his boots.
“I worried about him,” said his father, Kevin Lewis. “I watch him and shake my head and say, 'Is it worth it?'”
It
can be a tough, lonely life. In 1920, African Americans owned some 14%
of the farms in the United States. But after a century of racial
violence, foreclosures, migration into cities and farm consolidation,
there are fewer than 49,000 left, representing 1.4% of American farmers.
Most are concentrated in the Southeast and Texas.
These days,
Black farmers have forged online networks that function as their own
digital homemade farm bureaus. They celebrate first turnip harvests, ask
whether fertilizer made from fish can revive wilting plants and
commiserate about navigating government programs and the isolation of
being the only Black farmers in their counties.
“You don’t have a
network. You don’t have an infrastructure. There’s nothing,” said Sandy
Thompson, who started an online directory of Black farmers in 2019 after
abandoning a three-year quest to convert a 5-acre plot outside San
Antonio into a vegetable farm.
Thompson spent $20,000 on equipment
only to have her mower get stuck in the sandy soil. She called
university extension offices, a vital source of guidance for farmers,
but said she never got any help.
“We are not competitive with white farmers,” she said. “We need any help we can get.”
Nonwhite
farmers, who make up about 5% of farmers, say they struggle
disproportionately to get loans and government grants. They received
less than 1% of the billions of dollars in subsidies that flowed into
farm country last year under former President Donald Trump to compensate
farmers hurt by the coronavirus pandemic and the trade war with China.
Lewis
said he spent years struggling financially and searching for credit as
he built his cattle herd from a few cows on rented ground to about 200
cows and calves on more than 100 acres of his own land. At first, he
said, farm agents did not return his calls. Banks scoffed at his plans.
Some days, he could not afford to gas up the red pickup truck that would
stall out as he went to fix fences and spread manure in his alfalfa
fields. Like many farmers, he works a second job, on power transmission
lines.
Getting his government loan paid off now could change
everything. He said he could pay down other loans on his livestock,
expand the patchwork of fields he owns to compete against established
farmers, and get financing to build a home so he and his wife can escape
their one-bedroom apartment.
“It’ll open up a whole lot of
doors,” he said. “Maybe these local banks that didn’t have time for
minorities will open up to us.”
But several of his white neighbors in Lewis County, where 77% of voters supported Trump in November, see it differently.
Now,
raw conversations about discrimination in farming are unfolding at
farmers markets and on rural social media channels where race is often
an uncomfortable subject.
“It’s a bunch of crap,” said Jeffrey
Lay, who grows corn and soybeans on 2,000 acres and is president of the
county farm bureau. “They talk about they want to get rid of
discrimination. But they’re not even thinking about the fact that
they’re discriminating against us.”
Even in a county that is 94%
white, Lay said the federal government’s renewed focus on helping
farmers of color made him feel like he was losing ground, a sign to him
of the country’s demographic shifts.
“I can’t afford to go buy
that 5,000-acre piece of ground,” he said. “Shade Lewis, he’d qualify to
get it. And that’s fine. That doesn’t bother me. But I can’t.”
Lewis
senses the tensions when he swings into the gas station to get a
Mountain Dew before feeding his cows in the morning and when he scans
comments on Facebook or the news on RFD-TV, a kind of CNN for rural
America. Conversations with white farmers around LaGrange become
strained when they veer from corn prices to the challenges of being a
Black farmer in a white industry.
“You can sit here and talk about
race and things you’ve been through,” Lewis said. “They don’t
understand. They’ll never understand.”
Many farmers of color have
welcomed the debt relief, which was tucked into the $1.9 trillion
coronavirus relief act, as well as even more ambitious measures proposed
by Democrats to grant plots of up to 160 acres to Black farmers.
The
Agriculture Department has a long-standing series of programs to serve
socially disadvantaged farmers and estimates that nearly 16,000 will
have loans paid off that were made or backed by the government. The
agency has sent thousands of letters to eligible farmers and expects
that money could start flowing by early June.
But rural residents upset with the repayments call them reverse racism.
White
conservative farmers and ranchers from Florida, Texas and the Midwest
quickly sued to block the program, arguing that the promised money
amounts to illegal discrimination. America First Legal, a group run by
former Trump aide Stephen Miller, is backing the Texas lawsuit, whose
plaintiff is the state’s agriculture commissioner.
“It’s
anti-white,” said Jon Stevens, one of five Midwestern farmers who filed a
lawsuit through the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a
conservative legal group. “Since when does Agriculture get into this
kind of race politics?”
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack defended
the debt-repayment program at a White House briefing this month, saying
that earlier coronavirus relief had gone disproportionately to white
farmers. He also said the government had never addressed the cumulative
effects of years of racial discrimination against farmers.
“We
know for a fact that socially disadvantaged producers were discriminated
against by the United States Department of Agriculture,” he said.
“There is a very legitimate reason for doing what we’re doing.”
The
use of race in federal programs has been a subject of litigation for
decades, with a narrow majority of the Supreme Court deciding in 1995
that it is permissible only if the programs are “narrowly tailored” to
accomplish a “compelling governmental interest.” The courts have
generally held that institutions have a compelling interest in remedying
their own past discrimination.
Still, the lawsuits have sowed
concern and anger through networks of Black farmers. Some have spent
decades fighting unsuccessfully to get their share of legal settlements
over past discrimination by the Agriculture Department. Now they are
worried that the money set aside for debt repayment could get delayed
for years in legal challenges.
“We’re getting the short end,” said
John Wesley Boyd Jr., a Virginia bean and grain farmer who is also
founder of the National Black Farmers Association. “Anytime in the
United States if there’s money for Blacks, those groups speak up and say
how unfair it is. But it’s not unfair when they’re spitting on you,
when they’re calling you racial epithets, when they’re tearing up your
application.”
Lewis said he tries to look beyond issues of race
and has a white wife, white in-laws and white family on his mother’s
side. But ignoring race can be impossible in a small town like LaGrange,
he said. He hunts, fishes, holds conservative views and curses by
saying “son of a buck.” He has voted Republican in past elections, but
unlike most of his neighbors, he voted for President Joe Biden.
One
recent afternoon, a friend, Brad Klauser, who runs his family’s large
cattle and grain farm, swung by Lewis’ barn to catch up. As they talked
bills, rising fuel costs and sky-high land prices, the conversation
turned to the debt relief that only one of them was eligible to receive.
“Everybody
should have the same option,” said Klauser, who is white, leaning on
the flatbed of Lewis’ pickup. “Do you think you’re disadvantaged?”
“There’s
definitely disadvantages,” Lewis replied, saying that officials scoffed
when he first tried to get a federal farm loan. “They didn’t take me
serious.”
After Klauser headed home, Lewis thought about how the
two friends were both trying to reap a profit from the land. “Everyone
should have a chance at farming,” he said.
The Centers for Disease Control is now investigating potential heart
problems in young adults and adolescents following Covid-19 vaccination.
The CDC said the mRNA ‘vaccines’ produced by Pfizer-BioNTech are ‘potentially’ causing the problem.
The FDA authorized the Pfizer gene therapy jabs for children as young
as 12 earlier this month and now there are reports of myocarditis
(inflammation of the heart muscle) in teens.
The reports of myocarditis in teens is more common in males and typically occurs after the second dose of the jab.
CDC Director Walensky is pushing back and claiming there is no direct
link between the vaccines and heart inflammation or myocarditis.
Because it’s completely normal for healthy teens to have heart problems.
The Centers for Disease Control is investigating a small number of
young adults and adolescents who may have experienced heart problems
following a COVID-19 vaccine, though the agency stressed that it is
unclear the vaccine is responsible.
There have been “relatively few” reports of myocarditis and “most
cases appear to be mild,” but the COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Work
Group said it felt the potential issue should be communicated to
providers.
The COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Work Group discussed the issue
during a meeting on May 17 and the news was first reported by the New
York Times on Saturday.
The CDC noted that the rates of Myocarditis in young adults following
the COVID-19 vaccine “have not differed from expected baseline rates.”
Some doctors and health experts have also argued that
COVID-19 can cause Myocarditis and other heart damage, but this link is
still being studied.
Dr. Cole recently sounded the alarm on Covid jabs during a radio interview.
“We’ve seen more deaths from this shot than all vaccines in the last
20 years combined — and that’s just in the first 4 to 5 months,” the
Idaho doctor said during an appearance on Rose Unplugged 1320 WJAS.
A 72-year-old good Samaritan was nearly beaten to death after pulling
over to help a black teen who was stranded on the side of the highway
because of a flat tire.
An elderly Missouri man is lucky to be alive after he was violently
attacked when he stopped to help a stranded driver on I-35 in Clay
County.
Jason Jones was driving to Kansas City last week when he saw a couple stranded on the side of the road with a blown out tire.
“He was kind of stand-offish, like kind of wish I hadn’t stopped, but I kept asking and they kept saying yes,” Jones told Fox4.
ones said 19-year-old Choyce Davis and a woman with him got into his van so he could take them to find a spare tire.
The couple began beating Jones as he drove them back to their stranded car.
We got their tire, got back in the van and just barely started off.
All the sudden something hit me on top of the head,” Jones said.
Jones opened his van door and dove out to escape, but the 19-year-old
man grabbed his neck, choked him and repeatedly punched him in the
face.
“In today’s world, nobody does that and that was my thing. I’ve
always stopped to help people. They’ve always appreciated it — until
now. Now at my age, maybe I’ll think twice next time before I do it
again,” Jones said.
Jones was rushed to a local hospital after a passerby dialed 911.
Jones was covered in blood and suffered a brain bleed and a fractured skull.
Doctors weren’t sure he would make it but he miraculously survived
and after spending 11 days in the hospital, Jones was released.
Davis and the young woman were both arrested but Davis was granted bond.
Extended interview: Expert explains how COVID-19 vaccines work and side effects after shots
Dr.
Williams Moss, an epidemiologist and executive director of the
International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins, explains how mRNA
vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna work and why side effects are more likely
after the 2nd dose.
NEW YORK (AP) - Pfizer
announced Thursday that it has begun studying a third dose of its
COVID-19 vaccine, part of a strategy to guard against mutated versions
of the coronavirus.
Health authorities say first-generation
COVID-19 vaccines still protect against variants that are emerging in
different parts of the world. But manufacturers are starting to prepare
now in case a more vaccine-resistant mutation comes along.
Pfizer
said it will offer a third dose to 144 volunteers, drawing from people
who participated in the vaccine’s early-stage U.S. testing last year. It
wants to determine if an additional booster shot given six to 12 months
after the first two doses would rev up the immune system enough to ward
off a mutated virus.
Illustration
picture shows the headquarters of pharmaceutical company Pfizer in
Elsene - Ixelles, Brussels, Thursday 11 Feb. 2021. (Photo by NICOLAS
MAETERLINCK/BELGA MAG/AFP via Getty Images)
Pfizer
and its German partner, BioNTech, also are tweaking their vaccine
recipe. The companies are in discussions with U.S. and European
regulators about a study to evaluate doses updated to better match
variants such as the one first discovered in South Africa.