The Digger

  As the Insurrection Narrative Crumbles, Democrats Cling to it More Desperately Than Ever If the threat of "armed insurrectionists" and "domestic terrorists" is as great as some claim, why do they have to keep lying and peddling crude media fictions about it? Glenn Greenwald 2 hr ago 267 178 Assistant Director of FBI Counterterrorism Division Jill Sanborn takes her seat prior to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs/Rules and Administration hearing to examine the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol on Capitol Hill on March 3, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by SHAWN THEW/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) Twice in the last  six weeks, warnings were issued about imminent, grave threats to public safety posed by the same type of right-wing extremists who rioted at the Capitol on January 6. And both times, these warnings ushered in severe security measures only to prove utterly baseless. First we had the hysteria over the violence we were told was likely t...

‘Shooting Yourself in the Foot’ Citing budget issues, John Carroll University fundamentally alters tenure -- to the  point that professors say it and academic freedom no longer exist. March 5, 2021 Numerous institutions have laid off tenured faculty members for budgetary reasons in the last year without declaring financial exigency, as their internal policies would typically require. The temporary workaround is COVID-19 and the financial precarity it presents. John Carroll University, a small Jesuit institution in Ohio, already delivered terminal contracts to two tenured professors of art history and eliminated the department without declaring financial exigency. Now it’s going further, permanently lowering the bar for what constitutes the kind of budget problems that allow for tenured faculty layoffs. ‘ Budgetary Hardship’ Whereas financial exigency means a budget crisis that threatens an institution’s survival, John Carroll now says it can fire individ...

  The CDC’s Mask Mandate Study: Debunked The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently published a  February 2021 MMWR report  entitled “Decline in COVID-19 Hospitalization Growth Rates Associated with Statewide Mask Mandates — 10 States, March–October 2020.” This report focused on 10 sites that had been included in the Covid-19 Associated Hospitalization Surveillance Network.  This CDC report described a decrease in hospitalization rates of growth of up to 5.6% in adults (18-65 years old) and attributed this to the use of masking and/or the introduction of mask mandates in the various sites. These rates were compared to those obtained from a 4-week period of time prior to the introduction of mask mandates. In so doing, and by way of regression analysis, the reduced rates of hospitalization were attributed to the introduction of statewide mask mandates.  Firstly, the initial publication by the CDC (February 5/February 12 th , 2021) was plagued...