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L.A. sheriff says indoor mask mandate is 'not backed by science' and his 'defunded' department won't enforce it

Villanueva
© Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva
Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva says deputies will not enforce the health department's modified order reinstating a mask mandate for indoor public settings that takes effect at 11:59 pm on Saturday, regardless of vaccination status.

On Friday afternoon, Villanueva released a statement indicating that the Sheriff's Department would remain focused on other public safety matters:
"Forcing the vaccinated and those who already contracted COVID-19 to wear masks indoors is not backed by science and contradicts the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (DPH) has authority to enforce the order, but the underfunded/defunded Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department will not expend our limited resources and instead ask for voluntary compliance. We encourage the DPH to work collaboratively with the Board of Supervisors and law enforcement to establish mandates that are both achievable and supported by science."

X

Federal judge blocks new applications to DACA

Hanen/Protesters
© Twitter/Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Judge Andrew Hanen • DACA protesters
A federal judge in Texas blocked new applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in a ruling Friday, increasing pressure on Congress to find a legislative solution for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as minors.

Immigration advocates had been expecting the ruling for weeks, fearing Judge Andrew Hanen — a George W. Bush appointee who is known for his tough stance on immigration matters — could rule against the legality of the Obama-era program as a whole.

Hanen ruled that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) "with the creation of DACA and its continued operation." However, the judge recognized that current DACA enrollees are dependent on the program's benefits — deferral from deportation, advance parole to travel internationally and a work permit — in order to go about their daily lives. "That reliance has not diminished and may, in fact, have increased over time," wrote Hanen.

On those grounds, Hanen allowed current recipients to maintain and renew their benefits pending a future order from himself, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court.

Comment: Dems want new voters to be permanently locked into the system and that means citizenship. Who cares what it costs or from whose pocket the price is paid.

See also:


Footprints

Biden administration sees highest number of illegal immigrants attempt to cross US southern border for 2 decades

immigrants/Fence
© Getty Images/David McNew.jpg
On the fence
Nearly 190,000 people tried to illegally enter the United States from its southern border with Mexico in June - the highest number in more than 20 years, and as much as ten times the total recorded during some months under Trump.

According to data from US Customs and Border Protection, June saw 188,829 illegal immigrants attempt to cross the border. The highest number of attempts in 21 years, June's statistics were also over 8,000 people more than May, nearly 10,000 more than April, and over 80,000 more than February.

The statistics show that the number of illegal border crossing attempts shot up considerably following the inauguration of President Joe Biden. 101,095 attempts were made in February compared to 78,442 in January, when Biden took over the White House from President Donald Trump - who was notoriously tough in his policies on illegal immigration.

The number of illegal border crossings is now as much as ten times higher than during Trump's presidency, where the number of attempted crossings was as low as 17,106 in April 2020.

Attention

Poll: 2 In 3 Southern Republicans want to secede from the Union; nearly half of Pacific NW Democrats

succession us states 2016

The secessionist movement as of 2016. Many Americans want out from under the Federal Government.
Two in three Republicans in the South and almost half of Democrats in Pacific states want to secede from the Union, according to a new poll.

Conducted in June by YouGov in conjunction with BrightLineWatch, the survey asked participants in each region of the United States: "Would you support or oppose [your state] seceding from the United States to join a new union with [list of states in new union]?"

The regions of the country were divided into the following states:

Comment: Less dramatic but still important, some counties are petitioning to be added to more congenial states, such as portions of conservative Oregon wishing to join Idaho.


Eye 2

Movie producer Dillon Jordan accused of running 'extensive' prostitution ring

hollywood dillon jordan prostitution ring
© AFP via Getty Images
Hollywood producer Dillon Jordan allegedly managed a prostitution ring under his movie production company.
A Hollywood producer was arrested Thursday for allegedly running "an extensive and far-reaching" prostitution ring — which he hid for years using his moviemaking company, federal prosecutors said.

Dillon Jordan — who backed the 2018 Maggie Gyllenhaal drama The Kindergarten Teacher — is accused of pimping women to Johns across the US for at least seven years, between 2010 and 2017, according to an indictment filed in the Southern District of New York.

Jordan, 49, allegedly used his movie production company and a supposed California-based event-planning firm to hide the proceeds from the sex-sales, according to the court papers unsealed Thursday.

Comment: Unfortunately, this story is almost tame when placed next to the scourge of pedophilia that infests the Hollywood film industry. Where are the raids and arrests for that?


Fire

Fire risks prompt GM to warn electric car owners to not park them inside or charge unattended

electric car fire

The Vermont State Police released this photo of the 2019 Chevrolet Bolt EV that caught fire on July 1, 2021 in the driveway of state Rep. Timothy Briglin, a Democrat.
Vermont State Police
General Motors is telling owners of 2017-2019 Bolt EVs that were part of a recent recall not to park their vehicles inside or charge them unattended overnight after two of the vehicles caught fire.

The two Bolt EVs were repaired as part of a recall of nearly 69,000 of the vehicles that were flagged for fire risks. The recall was initially announced in November by GM and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

One of the fires occurred while the vehicle was charging at the home of a Vermont state lawmaker earlier this month. The other fire happened in New Jersey, a spokesman for GM said, adding that it was notified about it earlier this week.

Comment: Despite the endless problems and inefficiencies involved in these 'green' technologies, Western governments appear to be rather determined to force their citizens to adopt them:


Mail

A response to Scott Alexander on lockdowns

business closed lockdown
The prolific blogger Scott Alexander has written a long post about lockdowns. It's not too objectionable from a lockdown sceptic's point of view. For example, he concedes that "lockdowns weren't necessary to prevent uncontrolled spread" and says that it's "harder to justify strict lockdowns in terms of the non-economic suffering produced".

Nonetheless, I do disagree with him on several points, which I will highlight here.

First, he ignores most of the academic studies that have found little or no effect of lockdowns on mortality. For example, he doesn't mention Simon Wood's studies finding that infections were in decline before all three U.K. lockdowns. Nor does he mention the paper by Christopher Berry and colleagues which observed "no detectable health benefits" of shelter-in-place orders in the United States.

Despite ignoring these studies, he dedicates a whole section of his post to something called CoronaGame, which he oddly classifies as "Actual Evidence".

Document

Top Biden officials now believe COVID lab-leak theory: report

Biden
© AP
A number of Biden administration officials are now reportedly backing the lab leak theory.
The Biden administration took one giant step closer to admitting that the coronavirus was leaked from a Chinese lab, a theory once derided as fanciful fiction.

An increasing number of senior administration officials engaged in a probe of the virus are now backing the theory that the virus could have emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a CNN report.

Although officials still remain divided on whether the virus emerged from nature, passing from animals to humans, the acknowledgment marks a shift from the scorn that was heaped on former President Trump and a group of European scientists who first brought up the lab-leak theory during the height of the pandemic last year.

The virus has infected nearly 190 million people around the world and resulted in more than 3.5 million deaths, according to statistics compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

Comment: See also:


Propaganda

Belarus security services raid homes of journalists involved in anti-government protests

belarus police

Belarusian police have raided NGOs and independent journalists' homes several times in recent days
Security officials in Belarus have raided the homes of several independent journalists as part of an ongoing crackdown. University students have been imprisoned for protests.

Belarusian police on Friday carried out a third successive day of raids across the country against journalists and human rights activists.

The raids follow searches by the country's notorious KGB earlier this week of offices of a dozen human rights, news and opposition groups.

Comment: We can expect the West's smear campaign against Belarus to accelerate now that it has declared its alliance with Russia: Belarus ends partnership with EU, plans to merge tax system with Russia & establish common markets for energy, transport


Attention

Arizona auditors report 'potentially thousands' of duplicated ballots without serial numbers

The Arizona Senate Hearing on the Maricopa County forensic audit
© ACTV
The Arizona Senate Hearing on the Maricopa County forensic audit, July 15, 2021
A state official in Arizona on Thursday said the state Senate's audit of Maricopa County's 2020 election results revealed "potentially thousands" of missing serial numbers on ballot copies that had been duplicated from damaged originals.

In the state Senate hearing on Thursday, Senate Liaison Ken Bennett described the process by which election workers duplicate a ballot. "If a ballot gets damaged and has to be sent to duplication, there is a very specific process in the [state] elections procedure manual," he said. That process involves applying matching serial numbers to both original and duplicated ballots.

"We found, I would have to say, thousands of duplicate ballots where those serial numbers are not on them," he said. "And so it has created great difficulty to try to match up a duplicated ballot to its duplicate."

Comment: Gateway Pundit gives a nice rundown of the day's proceedings:
Here is a summary of the items shared today by the Arizona Senate in regards to their audit of the 2020 Election results in Maricopa County.

Senator Karen Fann led the meeting.

She started by noting that some people are not able to get to the site because of high traffic and offered alternatives to watch the meeting.

The meeting is an update and a briefing of the results.

The guests were as follows:
  • Doug Logan from Cyber Ninjas
  • Ken Bennett - former Arizona Secretary of State
  • Ben Cotton - cyber expert
Logan started and shared what will be presented then shared a video about the audit.
An audit expert reported on the audit and shared it is the most transparent and efficient and best chain of control in an audit ever. A number of individuals participated in completing the audit. They insured no issues with COVID and people were required to wear masks when on the floor. They had first aid stations available. Training was essential and everyone was trained in their position. There were microscopes and camera technology in examining audits.

The culture was excellent. The chain of custody was excellent. The ballots in ballot boxes were examined and put back in the same order in which they were reviewed. The team attempted to design the audit so that it was beyond reproach.

Many volunteers gave up hours. Over 1,500 were involved in the process. Over 80,000 hours were given to get to this point.

Have tallied all the ballots. Now working through evaluation to ensure results are perfect.
Then Fann shared that the entire audit was voted on by the Republicans in the Senate to ensure the electoral process is working. A number of people believed there were problems with the election and so the Senate listened so they could go back to polls in the future and know the election is free and fair. Fann explained how the audit was the senate's responsibility to prove to the Arizona public that their ballot is sacred.

Next Ken Bennett spoke and thanked those who helped him. He spoke to the chain of custody. There was continuous and complete chain of custody while everything was in their possession. Every box was signed for when taken out and when returned to 'the corral. There were over 1,600 boxes that were reviewed. Boxes will be resealed before being returned and in the same order, they were found.

One of the items subpoenaed and has not been provided. Chain of custody reports were requested from the County related to the ballots in their custody. The documents of the chain of custody were not provided from the County. The County will not provide any more.

Bennett noted that in the boxes ballot batch sheets were to be provided in each box of ballots but some batches were only for one ballot and others had multiple. Seals were cut in some boxes. Ballots handled at the central office from the mail were over 1 million ballots were processed through the mail. Some sheets were not provided from the County but one entity requested some info via an FOIA request and they used that data (sheets).

We discovered that more effort and training are necessary to address process issues that could be improved. There was almost one whole pallet with duplicate ballots. They found thousands of duplicate ballots missing serial numbers. Thousands of ballots where a serial number was on, the numbering was difficult to read making it difficult to match with an existing ballot. All the ballots have been filmed. If anyone tries to open these boxes they can tell because the ballots were filmed when being resealed.

Cotton was next. He walked through his process and standard of care. There were zero changes to any of the machines. They completed forms when auditing machines and used a write block device was used to prevent any modification of original evidence on the machines. They then copied each digital device. If anyone changes the evidence file they will now know. They then created examination copies and the original copies are in safekeeping. Not a single bit of data was tampered with or damaged on any machines that were examined. They did not modify or change any chips. Any changes to the machines would have been done by the County.

Senator Fann noted Secretary of State Katie Hobbs claimed a few weeks ago that the machines used were tampered with and could no longer be used.

Cotton reiterated that there were cameras over their work 24 hours a day. Anything would have been caught on video. Nothing they did would have impacted the machines at all. The position that the County must replace all voting machines is at odds with the audits performed earlier this year - that they could determine that nothing was changed.

The IT team received over 300 tabulators, the county EMS server, physical devices correlating to EMS adjudication function, 11 hard drives with cloned data (which was provided but altered by their cloning process). They created a forensic copy of all the items received. They looked for any Internet connections.

The auditors have not received the router config files and router data, they had talks and negotiations but still not provided. They know an element of the election system was breached during the election. The registration center database was breached because the County or state sent letters to individuals with data on the files noting there was a breach.

There are severe problems with how the voter information was maintained. The system is not patched regularly. The last time an antivirus was updated on the systems was August 2019. This creates a tremendous vulnerability to the systems. The auditors still need to see the routers. The County's concerns with the auditors receiving the routers are not valid. There is no personal information included with the router data.

Cotton talked about 'splunk logs' and tokens. He noted that there were 37,000 queries done on March 11 alone. But they didn't receive data before this date which didn't allow them to see data back on Election day.

Dominion has access to Admin of the machines but the County does not. How can the County know if the systems are eligible to record votes? The County officials do not have the ability to verify the functionality of the systems without Dominion. They are dependent on Dominion. The state should have functionality that is greater than Dominion, not less than.

Fann asked why the County's audits performed by Pro V&V and SLI didn't capture this issue.

Cotton replied that those auditors possibly did not address the items found in this audit. Then he mentioned some additional data needed.

Logan then answered about the hand count of ballots. The County has not been helpful in working with the auditors. Next, he went over the duplicates reviewed. It took so long because the County refused to help explain how the ballots were duplicated and reported.

Next Logan discussed paper examination review using kinematic tools to review. Some ballots were out of calibration by 1900%. The ballots were as far off-center as more than 2000%. This still needs to be reviewed and finalized. The paper stock was also out of compliance leading to bleed-threw of ballots. This is related to 'sharpy gate'. This may have caused the votes to be miscounted by tabulators. This is likely caused by printer calibration. Roughly 168,000 ballots were from primarily election day ballots.

The ballot paper is to be safeguarded. The auditors can request info.

Voter data analysis was next discussed. This included canvassing. 74,000 ballots had no record of ballots being sent to individuals but were received.

Logan again noted how unhelpful Maricopa County personnel were with the audit team. Even policies and procedures were not provided.

Next Logan started closing statements. The County is not helpful at all. They need the chain of custody and router data. They also need the tokens to the machines to see how they were configured. Right now administration resides with a third party. The auditors also need envelopes for the mail-in ballots.

Fann then shared they will request the additional information and adjourned the meeting.

Finally, as shared by a reader - 1) 3,900 votes received from unregistered voters (needed to be registered by 10/15 and weren't) and 2) 18,000 votes counted in the election but voters were removed from the voter role by 12/4.
Watch the full live stream of the hearing here.

Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers was fed up enough to demand Biden's electors be recalled to the state:
Following the explosive hearing on Thursday Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers called on the state to recall the Biden electors and conduct a new election.

Senator Rogers has seen enough!



It was STOLEN!