Pennsylvania mother Beth Ann Rosica told “Fox and Friends” that she believes parents are “fed up” with inflation and gas prices.
Note: This story has been reported by multiple outlets. including: NY POST, Fox News, Western Journal, MSN, bixpacreview, and others. She has been active in West Chester, PA as a current school board member and previous Mayoral candidate. Previous news accounts describe her as a Libertarian.
A Pennsylvania woman registered as a Democrat for 34 years is making a party switch, citing many of the objections that are fueling middle-class voters to turn against the party.
Beth Ann Rosica broke down her transformation in a Thursday Fox News interview.
“As a former Democrat for 34 years prior to the pandemic, I too thought that the Democratic Party was really focused on the people that they pretend to support,” the Pennsylvania mother told “Fox & Friends” host Carley Shimkus.
“What I saw through the pandemic was that the Democratic Party basically abandoned all of those people.”
Rosica cited the Democratic Party’s mismanagement of the economy and sky-high inflation. The mother also cited big government’s failure to meet the educational needs of students, closing schools during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I think the economy is huge, and I also think a lot of the school issues for parents across the state of Pennsylvania, it’s just been horrific watching what’s happened to our kids academically, socially, emotionally.”
“What I saw through the pandemic was that the Democratic Party basically abandoned all of those people,” Rosica explained.
“And so that was why I left the party, or as I like to say, the party really left me, and I think that a lot more people are really starting to see that.”
The Democratic Party has endured institutional decline in Pennsylvania and other Rust Belt states.
More than 8,000 registered Democrats in six western Pennsylvania counties have changed their party affiliation this year alone, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, while fewer than a third as many ex-Republicans have signed up as Democrats in the same counties.
Democrats have lost even more voters on a statewide basis, with 38,000 ex-Democrats joining the GOP.
In 2016, Donald Trump became the first Republican candidate to win the Keystone State since George H.W. Bush’s 1988 victory.
Republicans eye victories in Rust Belt states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan as key to potential “red waves” in 2022 and 2024.
The Democratic Party has historically painted itself as affiliated with the American middle class, but now longtime residents of Rust Belt states are questioning whether the party has abandoned that constituency in favor of large corporations and left-leaning billionaires on the coasts. [The answer to that is obvious — TPR]
Pennsylvania is slated to host hotly contested U.S. Senate and gubernatorial elections in November.
Republican Surgeon and television personality Mehmet Oz will face Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, and Army veteran Doug Mastriano will face the state’s Democratic Attorney General, Josh Shapiro.
Pennsylvania has been one of the most stubbornly purple states in the union for the better part of a century: Since the close of World War II, Republican governors have served 10 terms in office in the state; Democrats have also held that office for 10 terms
Crew members from a Seattle-based fishing boat that experienced an explosive outbreak of the novel coronavirus have serendipitously provided what could be the first direct evidence that antibodies can protect people from reinfection.
Blood samples collected before the vessel sailed in May showed that three of the 122 people aboard had robust levels of neutralizing antibodies — the type that block the virus from entering human cells — indicating they had been previously infected and recovered. All three were spared during the shipboard outbreak, which quickly spread to more than 85% of the crew.
“It’s a strong indication that the presence of neutralizing antibodies is associated with protection from the virus,” said Dr. Alex Greninger, assistant director of the UW Medicine Clinical Virology Laboratory and co-author of a report posted on the preprint server MedRxiv that has not yet been peer-reviewed. “It’s hopeful news.”
However, it’s not really surprising, Greninger added. Researchers are generally confident that prior infection will provide some level of immunity. But what constitutes a protective immune response and how long immunity lasts is still unknown and of vital importance to the race for vaccines and other treatments.
Early vaccine trials, including one in Seattle, have induced strong antibody responses in volunteers. But the only direct evidence so far that neutralizing antibodies can protect against infection has come from monkeys and other laboratory animals.
It wouldn’t be ethical to deliberately expose humans to the virus — even people who have recovered from infection. But in this case, researchers from the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center were able to analyze results from a natural experiment that played out in the close quarters and isolation of a vessel at sea.
“While this is a small study, it offers a remarkable, real-life, human experiment,” Danny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London, wrote in a commentary on the report. “Who knew immunology research on fishing boats could be so informative?”
The report does not identify the vessel, but Greninger confirmed it is the factory trawler FV American Dynasty, which was fishing for hake off the Washington coast when the outbreak struck. A statement from American Seafoods, which owns the ship and several others, says the company has partnered with the UW on its testing program and shares the data.
“We hope that their study will be beneficial to the broader scientific community in learning more about COVID-19,” said Valentina Zackrone, chief human resources officer at American Seafoods.
Mark Slifka, an immunologist and vaccine developer at Oregon Health & Science University who was not involved in the work, described it as “very, very interesting.”
The keys were the pre-departure blood testing of nearly the entire crew
The keys were the pre-departure blood testing of nearly the entire crew, and the stunning rate of infection — which means it’s unlikely that the three crew members with neutralizing antibodies were simply not exposed to the virus during the outbreak, Slifka said.
As part of ongoing efforts to protect fishing fleets, 120 of the 122 crew members were tested both for active infection, via nasal swabs, and previous exposure, via antibody blood testing, in the two days before the ship left port.
None of the nasal swabs was positive. But 18 days into its voyage, the ship returned to shore after a crew member became sick and needed hospitalization. Monitoring over the next 50 days showed that 104 crew members had been infected.
After learning of the outbreak, Greninger and his colleagues reexamined the results from the earlier blood tests and conducted additional tests on leftover specimens. Before departing, six crew members tested positive for antibodies that bind to the capsule of the novel coronavirus, but only three of those also had neutralizing antibodies.
While none of the crew members with neutralizing antibodies reported symptoms or became infected, the other three all got the virus — suggesting their initial results might have been false positives, Greninger said.
That adds to growing concern about the accuracy of many antibody tests and their ability to indicate immunity, Slifka pointed out.
Statistical analysis suggests it’s highly unlikely to be a random coincidence that all three people with neutralizing antibodies escaped infection. But the study doesn’t offer an explanation for the 15 other crew members who also apparently never became infected. It’s possible their jobs or actions on the boat shielded them from exposure, Greninger said.
Genomic analysis of virus from 39 crew members suggests that all the strains are closely related, but it doesn’t prove they all originated from a single infection, Greninger said.
The analysis doesn’t rule out the possibility that people can catch COVID-19 more than once, Slifka said, though it strongly suggests those who develop neutralizing antibodies may be protected. But the number of cases is too small to draw sweeping conclusions, he added.
Not the first insight to come from studying ships
This isn’t the first insight about the novel coronavirus to come from studying ships. Analysis of the outbreak early in the pandemic on the Diamond Princess cruise ship helped establish the importance of asymptomatic people in spreading the virus. Federal researchers who examined sailors on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, where nearly 1,000 people were infected, documented a robust, neutralizing antibody response in more than half of those tested.
One of the largest counties in Arizona parted ways with its elections director after the office failed to print enough ballots for voters in its Tuesday primary.
Pinal County’s government announced Thursday that David Frisk was no longer employed after “recent issues” with the primary election.
It’s not clear whether Frisk was fired or resigned. However, County Supervisor Jeffrey McClure said in a Wednesday news conference that the county would be “taking action” in response to the debacle, according to Arizona KVOA.
County officials are explaining the ballot shortage as a human error, having underestimated the turnout in the primary election.
The shortage disproportionately impacted registered independents who wanted to vote in the Republican primary at a polling place. County officials didn’t anticipate the turnout of independents who wanted to vote in the contest.
“Quite frankly, we underestimated, that’s what happened,” said county attorney Kent Volkmer.
“There were more people that showed up than we thought were going to show up.”
Volkmer admitted that some Pinal County voters were unable to vote at a polling place due to a lack of ballots.
Lengthy lines deterred some citizens from voting.
He says everyone who waited in line had the opportunity, but people still felt disenfranchised. "Some people chose to leave and not come back." - County Attorney Kent Volkmer
It was the second big mistake for the Pinal elections office in a month. In early July, the county mailed 60,000 misprinted early ballots to voters.
Thursday’s announcement said Pinal County Recorder Virginia Ross would be filling the role of elections director, resigning from her position as an elected county official to do so.
McClure, the chairman of Pinal County’s Board of Supervisors, expressed his remorse for the county’s mismanaged election in the news release announcing Frisk’s replacement.
“As a Board, we are deeply embarrassed and frustrated by the mistakes that have been made in this primary election, and as such, we are taking immediate steps to ensure the November election runs smoothly, as elections in Pinal County have historically done prior to this primary,” said McClure.
The county officials rejected claims that the ballot shortage was intentionally manufactured, describing the situation as a mistake.
[Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and senate candidate Blake Masters triumphed in Arizona’s Republican primary.]
The Biden administration has declared monkeypox a public health emergency as cases of the disease continue to spread in the U.S., according to various news reports that said the announcement came during a briefing with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
As of August 3, there were a total of 6,617 confirmed monkeypox cases in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A CDC map of the outbreak showed that at least one case had been detected in all U.S. states apart from Montana and Wyoming as of Wednesday.
“We are prepared to take our response to the next level in addressing this virus, and we urge every American to take monkeypox seriously,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra told reporters, according to NPR.
As the U.S. continues to contend with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, though data shows that COVID cases are significantly lower now than they were during the Omicron-driven surge in late 2021 and early 2022, many details on what monkeypox is, its symptoms and how it spreads may remain unclear.
According to the CDC, it is a rare disease resulting from infection with the monkeypox virus, which is part of the same family of viruses as the one that causes smallpox. The symptoms of monkeypox—which can include fever, headache, exhaustion and a rash—are similar to those of smallpox, but monkeypox is milder and rarely fatal, the CDC said.
‘Winter of Death’ 2.0? Dr. Fauci Just Threatened 70% of Americans
Dr. Anthony Fauci has once again sounded the warning bell over COVID-19, saying in an interview on Tuesday that those who are not up to date on vaccines will “get into trouble” this fall and winter.
“If they don’t get vaccinated or they don’t get boosted, they’re going to get into trouble,” Fauci told Los Angeles radio station KNX-AM.
A large part of the U.S. population is not up to date on the COVID-19 vaccines.
The Kaiser Family Foundation found that as of July 21, 227.8 million Americans either had not received a primary series of shots or had not gotten a booster dose. That is about 70 percent of the population.
“In each state, at least half the population is not up to date on COVID-19 vaccines. In Alabama, North Carolina, and Virginia, over 80% of people are not yet up to date on COVID-19 vaccines,” KFF noted.
The number of Americans who have received the second booster shot is even lower.
The CDC recommends that people over the age of 50 receive the second booster. Only 19,935,913 members of that demographic — about 31 percent — have done so.
In the Tuesday radio interview, Fauci called the overall vaccination and booster rates “quite discouraging.”
“If you want to get your arms around — metaphorically, as it were — the outbreak, you want to get as many people in our community — and by community I mean our nation and the world — vaccinated and boosted so you don’t give this virus such ample opportunity to freely circulate,” Fauci said.
He insisted that the only way to get the virus under control and to keep it from continually mutating is to get everyone vaccinated.
Fauci called getting vaccinated and boosted a “communal responsibility.”
“People say, ‘Well, the risk to me is low, so why get it?’ It is about you as an individual, but it’s also about the communal responsibility to get this outbreak under control.”
Ella Kietlinska and Joshua Philipp for EPOCH TIMES August 2, 2022
A study out of the United Kingdom has shown that health care workers who received multiple COVID-19 vaccine boosters after initially being infected with the original virus strain from Wuhan are more prone to chronic reinfection from the Omicron variant.
This may help explain why the people who have received several COVID-19 vaccine boosters are increasingly the ones who end up in the hospital with severe COVID-19 symptoms, sometimes resulting in death, said scientist and physician Dr. Robert Malone.
In a July 21 interview for EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program, Malone, an inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, said this phenomenon is the result of a process called “immune imprinting,” whereby initial exposure to a virus strain may prevent the body from producing enough neutralizing antibodies against a newer strain.
He added that this process is reinforced by multiple inoculations.
“Allovertheworld, weareseeingthesedatasetsthatshowthat,unfortunately,thepeoplethataredyingandbeinghospitalizedareoverwhelminglythehighlyvaccinated,” he said. “Itisnotthosethathavenaturalimmunity.”
Vaccines Based on Old Strains
The COVID-19 vaccines currently in circulation are based on the Wuhan strain of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, which causes the illness now identified as COVID-19.
A number of strains have emerged and become dominant since the Wuhan strain was prevalent, including the currently dominant Omicron variant.
The problem is that COVID-19 vaccines use only one of the components of the whole virus, which is a spike protein, so the immune system of a person who received an mRNA vaccine becomes trained to respond to only that component, Malone explained.
“Ifthatantigenhaschangedslightly, if that virus has changed slightly, [the immune system] still reacts as if it’s the old one,” he said.
The COVID-19 vaccines are based on the spike protein of the original virus identified in Wuhan. That strain of the virus no longer exists and is not circulating in the population anymore, Malone said.
If a vaccine based on a now-defunct viral strain is repeatedly administered, it trains the immune system to focus more and more on the antigen delivered through the vaccine and to disregard anything else that’s slightly different, Malone explained, calling this phenomenon immune imprinting.
“The literature on immune imprinting is bombproof,” Malone said. “Paper after paper after paper now, in the top peer-reviewed journals from the top laboratories all across the world, are documenting it.”
The phenomenon has long been known in the field of vaccinology, said Malone, but the topic is verboten, and people who work in the field prefer not to discuss it, he said.
Vaccine Immunity Versus Natural Immunity
A registered nurse cares for COVID-19 patients in an intensive care unit at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, Calif., on Jan. 21, 2021. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Health care workers in the UK—many of whom were infected with the Wuhan variant of the virus and also received three or four COVID-19 vaccine doses—have been developing chronic repeated infections from the Omicron variant, Malone said, citing a paper published in the academic journal Science.
Another paper published in Nature shows that the evolution of the virus is not coming from the general population, but rather from immunocompromised people who have received multiple vaccine doses, Malone said, and about 30 percent of the highly vaccinated population are having repeated infections.
This is contrary to the promoted narrative that the unvaccinated are putting the wider population at risk, Malone noted.
Natural immunity from a COVID-19 infection lasts for at least 14 months, including immunity against the Omicron strains, Malone said, citing a scientific paper from Qatar which has not yet been peer reviewed (pdf).
The paradox is that most of the countries with emerging economies and low vaccination rates also have the lowest COVID-19 mortality rates in the world.
Vaccine-induced immunity, however, lasts only a couple of months, he added.
When someone gets infected with the original virus, that person will generate an immune response that includes “all kinds of proteins from the virus,” provided he or she hasn’t experienced too much immune imprinting, Malone explained.
“The problem with these monovalent vaccines, or the single-antigen vaccines, is they’re driving all your immune response against one thing as opposed to the whole virus. So all the virus has to do is genetically, through evolution, tweak a few knobs to escape that,” he said. “And that is exactly what’s happened with Omicron.”
The paradox is that most of the countries with emerging economies and low vaccination rates also have the lowest COVID-19 mortality rates in the world, Malone said.
“It’s likely that we’re going to continue to see this trend,” he said.
According to Our World in Data, only 1.4 percent of Haiti’s population has been vaccinated, and the country has recorded 838 COVID-19 deaths, a rate of 73 deaths per 1 million people.
In South Africa, where 32 percent of the population is vaccinated, there have been nearly 102,000 deaths, a rate of 1,717 deaths per 1 million people.
In the UK, 75 percent of the population is vaccinated, and more than 184,000 people have died, which is a rate of 2,736 deaths per 1 million.
And in the United States, 67 percent of the population is vaccinated, and 1.03 million people have died from the virus, a rate of 3,058 deaths per 1 million people.
Other Problems with Vaccines
A health care worker prepares to administer a monkeypox vaccine at the Pride Center in Wilton Manors, Fla., on July 12, 2022. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Malone pointed out a problem with the current mRNA vaccines.
When a vaccine is injected into a patient’s arm, the RNA from the vaccine, which is a modified RNA, is supposed to last for only a couple of hours, but a study from Stanford University shows that “the RNA sticks around for at least 60 days,” Malone said.
However, the government only accounts for vaccine reactions and illnesses that are recorded on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) within the first couple of weeks after vaccination, even though the drug is still in the body two months later, Malone said.
“The RNA from the vaccine produces more spike protein than the natural infection does,” he said. “Now that makes sense about why we see more adverse events with the vaccines than we see with the infection itself, because spike is a toxin.”
VAERS was established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration to collect and analyze data about the adverse effects of vaccination.
The system relies on individuals to send in reports and is not intended to determine if a reported health problem was caused by a vaccine, but it is “especially useful for detecting unusual or unexpected patterns of adverse event reporting that might indicate a possible safety problem with a vaccine,” according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Malone, president and co-founder of the International Alliance of Physicians and Medical Scientists, said over 17,000 doctors and scientists have signed a declaration stating unequivocally that genetic vaccines need to be withdrawn.
“These genetic vaccines are not working,” he said.
Meiling Lee and Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
Epoch TV has the complete interview with Dr. Malone. Unable to provide a link at the time of this writing.
US Postal Service Makes Announcement on Mail-In Ballots Ahead of Midterm Elections
JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) confirmed it has created a division that will oversee mail-in ballots in future elections.
Adrienne Marshall, executive director of the newly created Election and Government Mail Services, said that it will oversee “election mail strike teams” in local communities to deal with possible problems.
“We are fully committed to the secure and timely delivery of the nation’s election mail,” she told media outlets on July 27.
Several months ago, the Biden administration requested $5 billion to support the USPS’s mail-in voting operations over the next 10 years.
“This proposal expands on the essential public services that the Postal Service provides to the American people and will also help to relieve budget strain on local election offices across the country,” the administration wrote in March.
It also includes policies to make “official ballot materials free to mail and reducing the cost of other election-related mail for jurisdictions and voters” while “enhancing the Postal Service’s ability to securely and expeditiously deliver and receive mail in underserved areas,” the White House said at the time.
The USPS claimed it delivered 97.9 percent of ballots from voters to election officials within three days, and 99.89 percent of ballots were delivered within seven days, during the 2020 election.
The Postal Service is sending guidance letters to election officials in each state and territory this week. So far, nearly 40 million ballots have been mailed to and from voters during primary elections.
Reliability and Fraud
Former President Donald Trump and some Republicans have said that mail-in ballots invite fraud and are unreliable. Numerous lawsuits were filed in the wake of the 2020 election over the ballots, drop boxes, and related policies, while some GOP-controlled legislatures have tightened rules around absentee voting since then.
Jimmy Carter 2005: “vote-buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.”
In 2005, former Democrat President Jimmy Carter and former White House chief of staff James Baker released a report (pdf) that found mail-in and “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” while adding that “vote-buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.”
Carter Center 2020: The Carter Center urges federal and state governments to expand access to vote-by-mail…”
But years later, Carter in May 2020—months before the election—released a statement that called on states to expand mail-in voting due to COVID-19.
“To address this threat,” the statement said, “The Carter Center urges federal and state governments to expand access to vote-by-mail options and to provide adequate funding as quickly as possible to allow for the additional planning, preparation, equipment, and public messaging that will be required.”
Earlier this year, USPS officials confirmed they were investigating two separate incidents where mail-in ballots were found in Southern California. A woman allegedly found a box of ballots on a sidewalk in Hollywood in May, while a man in San Diego found ballots discarded near an interstate.
The USPS has not responded to a request for comment from Epoch Times.
MSNBC guest Elie Mystal: 'I want pitchforks and torches outside trump donors house in the Hamptons
I guess this moron didn’t realize that he admitted he only believed in Hell so he (!) could consign Trump there. Does this mean he’s an atheist as well as a far-left loon? No truly religious person would say something like that.
Elie Mystal pontificating on Trump’s final destination.
This is totally normal.
A toxic, far-left MSNBC guest suffering from a severe case of TDS said he would be willing to “believe in hell” so that Trump “has some place to go in the next life.”
Elie Mystal appeared on MSNBC’s “The Cross Connection” Saturday morning with host Tiffany Cross and obsessed over Trump.
The lefty media is still obsessing over Trump.
They just can’t quit President Trump.
Elie Mystal and Tiffany Cross discussed the January 6 hearings even though nobody outside of the beltway cares about the J6 Committee.
“Will we ever see Trump held accountable for all the things that have come out in the January 6 hearings?” Tiffany Cross queried.
“Look, I’m willing to believe in Hell just so that Trump has some place to go in the next life to be held accountable,” Elie Mystal said as Tiffany Cross smiled.
He continued, “In this life it’s still up in the air.”
.@ElieNYC: "I’m willing to believe in Hell just so that Trump has some place to go in the next life to be held accountable" pic.twitter.com/OqJF14BrNJ
While the Biden administration continues ignoring the border crisis in southwestern states, the nation’s capital is starting to understand how illegal immigration can affect a city’s resources and infrastructure.
Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser recently requested the activation of the D.C. National Guard to handle the growing number of migrants traveling to the capital each day. The request also asked permission for re-purposing the D.C. Armory as a processing center until the influx considerably declines.
Since April, over 150 buses from Texas and Arizona have transported 4,000 migrants to the nation’s capital, turning it into a sanctuary city, the Washington Examiner reported.
BREAKING: DC @MayorBowser requests @DCNationalGuard activated indefinitely to help migrant busses arriving in DC. Calling it a “humanitarian crisis” that has reached a “tipping point” with 4,000 migrants so far. Requesting DC Armory be used as processing center. @nbcwashington
Bowser and the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management first wrote a letter to the Office of the Secretary of Defense on July 19, and the mayor sent another to President Joe Biden on July 22 requesting help. Neither has sent a reply.
“The pace of arriving buses and the volume of arrivals have reached tipping points,” the first letter read. “Our collective response and service efforts have now become overwhelmed. … Tragically, many families arrive in Washington, DC with nowhere to go, or they remain in limbo seeking onward destinations across the United States.”
Bowser rightfully requested help for the city’s “prolonged humanitarian crisis,” which first began in mid-April.
However, the “humanitarian crisis” at the southern border has continued for several years, which is why Texas and Arizona decided to give D.C. politicians a taste of their own medicine.
In the past three months, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey pledged to transport illegal migrants to the nation’s capital in order to force Biden’s hand in securing the border.
“Washington, D.C. finally understands what Texans have been dealing with every single day, as our communities are overrun and overwhelmed by thousands of illegal immigrants thanks to President Biden’s open border policies,” Abbott spokeswoman Renae Eze wrote to the Examiner.
“If the mayor wants a solution to this crisis, she should call on President Biden to take immediate action to secure the border — something he has failed to do.”
Bowser was not amused with the Republicans’ “cruel political gamesmanship.”
“Instead of rolling up their sleeves and working with the Biden/Harris administration on a real solution, Governors Abbott and Ducey have decided to use desperate people to score political points,” Bowser wrote in the second letter to the White House.
The mayor asked for 150 National Guard personnel to help immigrants by facilitating “eventual movement to their final destinations,” claiming that D.C. is not where they intended to travel or stay.
Bowser called immigration a federal issue.
“This mission would begin as soon as possible and continue indefinitely until the city relieves them,” she wrote.
“To be clear, I recognize the magnitude of this request. But the Governors of Texas and Arizona are making a political statement to the federal government, and instead, their actions are having direct impacts on city and regional resources in ways that are unsustainable.”
Bowser also called immigration a federal issue, admitting that the federal government must provide “immediate federal assistance” to both the capital and the border.
But why did it take her so long to ask for help if D.C.’s “humanitarian crisis” continued for the past three months? Maybe she was handling the situation on her own with her city’s resources, or maybe it was ego. Whatever it was, she needed to take immediate action in either solving it or requesting the National Guard.
The fact Bowser waited this long showed she refused to admit defeat to Abbott and Ducey for being right about the immigration crisis — and that the Biden administration needs to act in protecting the American border.
The partisan differences proved to be more concerning for her than providing support for the capital in a time of crisis.
Data on the Murder Accountability Project’s website. Photos by Cait Oppermann for Bloomberg Businessweek.
Thomas Hargrove is building software to identify trends in unsolved murders using data nobody’s bothered with before.
On Aug. 18, 2010, a police lieutenant in Gary, Ind., received an e-mail, the subject line of which would be right at home in the first few scenes of a David Fincher movie:
“Could there be a serial killer active in the Gary area?”
It isn’t clear what the lieutenant did with that e-mail; it would be understandable if he waved it off as a prank. But the author could not have been more serious. He’d attached source material—spreadsheets created from FBI files showing that over several years the city of Gary had recorded 14 unsolved murders of women between the ages of 20 and 50. The cause of each death was the same: strangulation. Compared with statistics from around the country, he wrote, the number of similar killings in Gary was far greater than the norm. So many people dying the same way in the same city—wouldn’t that suggest that at least a few of them, maybe more, might be connected? And that the killer might still be at large?
The police lieutenant never replied. Twelve days later, the police chief, Gary Carter, received a similar e-mail from the same person. This message added a few details. Several of the women were strangled in their homes. In at least two cases, a fire was set after the murder. In more recent cases, several women were found strangled in or around abandoned buildings. Wasn’t all of this, the writer asked, at least worth a look?
The Gary police never responded to that e-mail, either, or to two follow-up letters sent via registered mail. No one from the department has commented publicly about what was sent to them—nor would anyone comment for this story. “It was the most frustrating experience of my professional life,” says the author of those messages, a 61-year-old retired news reporter from Virginia named Thomas Hargrove.
Hargrove spent his career as a data guy. He analyzed his first set of polling data as a journalism major at the University of Missouri, where he became a student director of the university’s polling organization. He joined an E.W. Scripps newspaper right out of college and expanded his repertoire from political polling data to practically any subject that required statistical analysis. “In the newsroom,” he remembers, “they would say, ‘Give that to Hargrove. That’s a numbers problem.’ ”
In 2004, Hargrove’s editors asked him to look into statistics surrounding prostitution. The only way to study that was to get a copy of the nation’s most comprehensive repository of criminal statistics: the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, or UCR. When Hargrove called up a copy of the report from the database library at the University of Missouri, attached to it was something he didn’t expect: the Supplementary Homicide Report. “I opened it up, and it was a record I’d never seen before,” he says. “Line by line, every murder that was reported to the FBI.”
This report, covering the year 2002, contained about 16,000 murders, broken down by the victims’ age, race, and sex, as well as the method of killing, the police department that made the report, the circumstances known about the case, and information about the offender, if the offender was known. “I don’t know where these thoughts come from,” Hargrove says, “but the second I saw that thing, I asked myself, ‘Do you suppose it’s possible to teach a computer how to spot serial killers?’ ”
“linkage blindness”
Like a lot of people, Hargrove was aware of criticisms of police being afflicted by tunnel vision when investigating difficult cases. He’d heard the term “linkage blindness,” used to describe the tendency of law-enforcement jurisdictions to fail to connect the dots between similar cases occurring right across the county or state line from one another. Somewhere in this report, Hargrove thought, could be the antidote to linkage blindness. The right person, looking at the information in the right way, might be able to identify any number of at-large serial killers.
Every year he downloaded and crunched the most recent data set. What really shocked him was the number of murder cases that had never been cleared. (In law enforcement, a case is cleared when a suspect is arrested, whatever the eventual outcome.) Hargrove counted 211,487, more than a third of the homicides recorded from 1980 to 2010. Why, he wondered, wasn’t the public up in arms about such a large number of unsolved murders?
To make matters worse, Hargrove saw that despite a generation’s worth of innovation in the science of crime fighting, including DNA analysis, the rate of cleared cases wasn’t increasing but decreasing—plummeting, even. The average homicide clearance rate in the 1960s was close to 90 percent; by 2010 it was solidly in the mid-’60s. It has fallen further since.
These troubling trends were what moved Hargrove to write to the Gary police. He failed to get any traction there. Sure enough, four years later, in October 2014, in Hammond, Ind.—the town next door to Gary—police found the body of 19-year-old Afrikka Hardy in a room at a Motel 6. Using her phone records, they tracked down a suspect, 43-year-old Darren Deon Vann. Once arrested, Vann took police to the abandoned buildings where he’d stowed six more bodies, all of them in and around Gary. Anith Jones had last been seen alive on Oct. 8; Tracy Martin went missing in June; Kristine Williams and Sonya Billingsley disappeared in February; and Teaira Batey and Tanya Gatlin had vanished in January.
Before invoking his right to remain silent, Vann offhandedly mentioned that he’d been killing people for years—since the 1990s. Hargrove went to Gary, reporting for Scripps, to investigate whether any of the cases he’d identified back in 2010 might possibly be attributed to Vann. He remembers getting just one helpful response, from an assistant coroner in Lake County who promised to follow up, but that too went nowhere. Now, as the Vann prosecution slogs its way through the courts, everyone involved in the case is under a gag order, prevented from speculating publicly about whether any of the victims Hargrove noted in 2010 might also have been killed by Vann. “There are at least seven women who died after I tried to convince the Gary police that they had a serial killer,” Hargrove says. “He was a pretty bad one.”
Hargrove has his eye on other possible killers, too. “I think there are a great many uncaught serial killers out there,” he declares. “I think most cities have at least a few.”
The police have never been great at leveraging the power of their own statistics. Police culture is notably paper-based, scattered, and siloed, and departments aren’t always receptive to technological innovation. The National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database gives police access to information such as fugitive warrants, stolen property, and missing persons, but it’s not searchable for unsolved killings. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Violent Death Reporting System compiles death-certificate-based information for homicide victims in 32 states, but, again, can’t be searched for uncleared cases. Some states have their own homicide databases, but they can’t see the data from other states, so linkage blindness persists.
Pfizer’s Q2 earnings numbers parallel that of a top 5 global energy company. Of course, the slight difference here is that energy companies actually provide essential services for human flourishing, while Pfizer provides, well, government-backed snake oil.
Reuters @Reuters
Pfizer profit surges, reaffirms sales forecast for COVID-19 products reut.rs/3cLNDGS
This quarter, the drug company posted a total revenue of $27.7 billion, up 46.5% from $18.9 billion the same period of last year.
Net income is up 78% to $9.9 billion this quarter, from $5.5 billion in Q2 of 2021.
While many Americans are struggling to put food on the table, Pfizer’s taxpayer-supplied profits almost doubled year over year.
Notably, none of Pfizer’s profits come from free market activity.
More than half of all Pfizer sales, and all of its profits, come from its expired mRNA gene therapy injections and Paxlovid. The outfit has fully transformed into a COVID-19 company. Without COVID Mania, the rest of Pfizer’s product line would see the pharma giant without any income this year.
The Dossier
Moderna and Pfizer’s infant and toddler COVID shots were designed for a strain that no longer exists.
Designed in January of 2020, Moderna and Pfizer’s COVID shots are long past their variant expiration date, but that hasn’t stopped the mRNA cartel from encourage their use in our most vulnerable populations. Comparable to a continuously deployed flu shot from several years ago, these shots do not seem to work whatsoever, and new data continues to showcase that striking reality…
a month ago · 51 likes · 2 comments · Jordan Schachtel
Business is booming for the taxpayer-funded, liability-free drug company. Just last month, the Biden Administration signed a deal with Pfizer that hiked the price of more than 50% extra per dose for Pfizer’s next batch of mRNA shots.
The Dossier
Drug Cartel: Biden Admin agrees to pay Pfizer 56% more for their COVID shots
a month ago · 163 likes · 63 comments · Jordan Schachtel
It’s a truly stunning outcome for a company that once claimed to have produced the cure for the coronavirus, but has in reality supplied an ineffective gene therapy with a massive side effect profile.
