Black Lives Matter protesters demanded that white people move to the front of a protest to form a human shield while rioters attempted to break down a fence protecting a Brooklyn Center police station.

"Get the white people to the front!" a protester can be heard screaming in a video shared by independent journalist Andy Ngo on Twitter. "BLM protesters demand that whites be used as human shields as they gather outside the Brooklyn Center police station. They've been trying to break down the fence & are throwing projectiles."

The US Capitol Police officer who shot and killed rioter Ashli Babbitt on Jan. 6 will not face charges for her death — and an investigation into the shooting has been closed, the Department of Justice said Wednesday.

In a news release, the DOJ said the unidentified officer who fired a single shot at Babbitt near the Speaker's Lobby inside the Capitol did so in self-defense and to protect members of Congress.

Investigators also determined Babbitt's civil rights were not violated in the shooting, according to the statement.

I really believe COVID-19 has created a window of political opportunity and maybe an epiphany ... on the importance of early learning and childcare.

— Chrystia Freeland, Finance Minister.

Beware of politicians having epiphanies.

It's quite enough to deal with them when their inspirations are earth-bound, but when they start receiving prompts from the celestial world it's time to really start worrying.

UPDATE: In a new statement, O'Keefe has announced plans to sue Twitter:

Original story follows:

Many people still struggle to accept the idea that lockdowns don't have any appreciable impact on Covid cases and deaths. After all, it's obvious, isn't it, that keeping people apart will stop the virus spreading?

Tom Harwood, formerly of Guido Fawkes now of GB News, tweeted a typically incredulous response to the idea: "Cannot understand how some can claim 'lockdowns don't work' with a straight face. As if stopping people from mixing wouldn't hit transmission? Sure argue the cost is too high, imposition on liberty too extreme, just don't invent a fairytale denying the basics of germ theory."


Even some die-hard lockdown sceptics will say that lockdowns work, in the sense of suppressing transmission for a time, but they just delay the inevitable so are pointlessly costly.

The models churned out by university academics and relied on by the Government to set policy all assume lockdown restrictions work, and even claim to quantify how much impact each intervention makes.

But what does the data say? What do the studies show that actually look at the evidence rather than just making a priori assumptions about how things "must surely" be?

Don't want to live under a facial-recognition Panopticon? One may have no choice if the EU's wokest Woke Brigades win, as a researcher is hoping to sway all of Europe's police-state programming in favor of gender fluidity.

Living under the thumb of the metastasizing array of genders that demand to be taken seriously, those who want a return to a tech-lite world where the government doesn't care what's in your pants seem to be fighting a losing battle.

But in their quixotic struggle, they have found themselves allied with former nemeses, those ones who don't want the government poking around through their medical records or learning the history of their transition so that authorities can give them free event tickets or something equally banal yet intrusive.

Os Keyes, a researcher who has spent the last several years writing academic papers about the need for facial recognition to treat gender non-binary individuals with kid gloves, seems unconcerned about the negative possibilities for where such a complex system might go, appearing to believe that they can just jump into bed with the EU government, get what they need in terms of 'fixing' the AI, leave and be done with it.

A new study found that technological advancements and the cost of batteries could support all vehicles being sold in the United States to be electric-powered by 2035.

Currently, only 1.8 percent of people in the U.S. have electric vehicles, with cost being a major factor, as well as the availability of charging ports. However, the study states the initial cost of electric vehicles should be on par with gasoline vehicles in approximately five years.

According to the University of California, Berkeley study's estimates, this will be driven by a drop in the cost of batteries and advancements in efficiency. In relation to the availability and cost of charging ports, it found that "the plummeting cost of wind and solar power have enabled a rapid and cost-effective expansion of a clean electricity grid, a cost-effective pathway" to expanding and establishing a public network of said stations.

"The upfront price of electric vehicles is coming down rapidly, which is very exciting. Because of battery technology improvements, most models now have a range of 250 miles, higher than the daily driving distance of most people, and now come with pretty astonishing fast-charging capabilities," said Amol Phadke, co-author of the report and a senior scientist at University of California, Berkeley.

For at least three or four years now, I have, together with my closest colleagues, been recognized as something of an authority of the ideology most of us just refer to now as "Wokeness." Spanning that time, certainly at least as far back as early 2018, I have frequently faced the challenging question of "how did this Woke stuff escape the university and go mainstream?" While we were doing the Grievance Studies Affair, in fact, we ended up in an epic argument about the issue that led to us giving a kind of quirky name to the difficulty we had in answering this question. We called it "crossing the Tim Pool Gap."

This challenge in communications gained this name for us in February of 2018, when Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, Mike Nayna, Tim Pool, and I all met at Peter's house, rather by chance, to have a discussion about this exact topic. In a heated discussion that went on for hours, we hit a major impasse in which we could not satisfactorily convince Tim of our thesis, and neither could Tim convince us of his. Tim argued that activists, especially in media, were the primary agents of change in Wokifying everything. We insisted that, while this may be, there was a significant university component as well and, further, that it was the root of the activist mentality. "Ideas like 'hegemonic masculinity' didn't come out of the sky! They came out of academia!" I still remember Peter yelling in frustration. The thing is, Tim wasn't wrong, and neither were we (there's something like a revolving door of bad ideas between these groups, who all fancy themselves activists in the same causes). We were so alarmed and frustrated by our inability to communicate the university-to-culture pipeline (or lab leak, as it might better be understood) that we referred to this challenging comms problem ever after as a search for a way to bridge the Tim Pool Gap, or "TPGap," in our private communications.

This is a question that deserves an answer though, because when something this pernicious takes hold of the core of a culture, we have a duty to understand how it was able to do so, so that, whether our culture stands or falls by it, future societies will not so easily be threatened. As indicated by the existence of the Tim Pool Gap, though, the answer to that question is complex and probably deserves a book's length to get anything better than a very cursory treatment. Certainly, the roles played by the Internet (thus democratization of information), social media (thus decentralization of publishing and broadcasting), and other infrastructural changes are significant. They are also beyond my scope, and I recommend the reader consult Martin Gurri's admirable book The Revolt of the Public, if not works by Marshall McLuhan and even the postmodernist Jean Baudrillard, for insights in that regard. So too have intentional agents who funded or promoted Wokeness as a tool for facilitating their own agendas or for waging political warfare by turning the West simultaneously stupid and wholly against itself. That said, media and academia also both played a role, as we argued, and I would refer readers to Tim Pool's analysis of the former and Helen Pluckrose's analysis of the latter — though until someone (I know, I'm someone...) takes on the bear of Critical Pedagogy in sufficient detail, that latter domain will remain a bit mysterious. I will touch on that aspect here, but I will only touch.

In August last year, Russia became the first country in the world to register a vaccine against Covid-19. But eight months later, despite Sputnik V's International success, there's been a slow uptake domestically for inoculation.

That's according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who revealed that the current logistics are coping well, but too few people want to receive the jab.

This is despite internationally respected medical journal the Lancet publishing research in February showing that Sputnik V has an efficacy of around 91.6%, among the highest in the world. Russia also has two other registered vaccines, EpiVacCorona, produced by Siberia's Vector Center, and a third jab, named CoviVac.

New NYPD technology has some people doing a double-take and asking questions.

It's a robot shaped like a dog.

Monday afternoon at 344 East 28th Street, cops responded to a man barricaded after a domestic dispute.

Sadly, it's an all-too-common situation, but it drew attention.

It was one of the first times the public has seen the new NYPD digidog, bristling with cameras and microphones. It's able to approach danger and feed back live pictures and sound.