Today's News: May 20, 2019

World News
China’s new ‘social credit system’ is a dystopian nightmare
NY Post – Imagine calling a friend. Only instead of hearing a ring tone you hear a police siren, and then a voice intoning, “Be careful in your dealings with this person.”
Would that put a damper on your relationship? It’s supposed to.
Welcome to life in China’s “Social Credit System,” where a low score can ruin your life in more ways than one.
Say you arrive at the Beijing airport, intending to catch a flight to Canton 1,200 miles south. The clerk at the ticket counter turns you away because — you guessed it — your social credit score is too low.
Not only are you publicly humiliated in the ticket line, you are then forced to travel by slow train. What should have been a three-hour flight becomes a 30-hour, stop-and-go nightmare.
All because the government has declared you untrustworthy. Perhaps you defaulted on a loan, made the mistake of criticizing some government policy online or just spent too much time playing video games on the internet. All of these actions, and many more, can cause your score to plummet, forcing citizens onto the most dreaded rung on China’s deadbeat caste system, the laolai.
And the punishments are shocking. The government algorithm will go as far as to install an “embarrassing” ring tone on the phones of laolai, shaming them every time they get a call in public.
But an embarrassing ring tone, flight bans and slow trains are just the beginning of the dystopian nightmare that is now daily life in China for tens of millions of people.
A low social credit score will exclude you from well-paid jobs, make it impossible for you to get a house or a car loan or even book a hotel room. The government will slow down your internet connection, ban your children from attending private schools and even post your profile on a public blacklist for all to see.
According to Australia’s ABC News, the government has produced a “Deadbeat Map” via an app on WeChat, which shows a radar-style graphic identifying every laolai in the vicinity of the user.
Pope Francis Calls For Global Governance to Fight Climate Change
Infowars – Pope Francis recently called for global governance to fight climate change, asserting, “The nation state cannot be considered as an absolute.”
During an address to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, the Pope condemned “growing nationalism that neglects the common good” and called for more globalism.
“The nation state cannot be considered as an absolute, as an island with respect to the surrounding context,” he said, adding, “The nation state is no longer able to procure the common good of its populations alone.”
Pope Francis said that a “special authority legally and concordantly constituted” was necessary to facilitate the implementation of new climate change policies.
He went on to demand that power be transferred from nation states to “intergovernmental institutions that manage their common interests.”
“This universal common good, in turn, must acquire a more pronounced juridical value at international level,” concluded Francis.
The Pope has made innumerable statements bashing nationalism and populism, particularly in the context of his advocacy of bringing millions of migrants into Europe.
Under his guidance, the Catholic Church has also fully embraced the global warming mantra despite deep skepticism amongst Christians.
Tweet from Trump: ‘If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran’
CBC – Canada ‘concerned by escalating tensions in the region,’ according to Global Affairs
It will be the “official end of Iran” if the country threatens the United States again, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted Sunday, as the increasingly strained relationship between Washington and Tehran raises concerns about a potential U.S.-Iran conflict.
Politicians in Canada and the United States have been expected to turn their attention to Iran next week amid heightened concerns over the Trump administration’s sudden moves in the region.
Trump has tightened economic sanctions against Iran, and his administration says it has built up the U.S. military presence in the region. It accuses Iran of threats to U.S. troops and interests.
Tehran has described U.S. moves as “psychological warfare” and a “political game,” while Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif posted his own message Monday on Twitter, saying Trump had been “goaded” into “genocidal taunts.”
Every baby in the UK could get the chickenpox vaccine: Illness that is relatively harmless to most can still lead to sepsis, pneumonia and brain damage
Daily Mail – Government scientists are considering a national campaign to vaccinate all babies against chickenpox – almost a decade after they last looked at the possibility.
While many consider the childhood illness a rite of passage – and for most it is relatively harmless – for a few it can lead to serious complications, including sepsis, pneumonia and brain damage.
‘France Does Not Belong to The French!’ 400+ African Migrants Storm Airport to Demand Asylum
NewsWars – The group behind the “Black Vests” protest on Facebook said they’re “against deportations and for papers for all” and threatened that other similar demonstrations will follow
U.S. News, Politics & Government
Trump Plans To Invoke Insurrection Act To Boot Illegal Immigrants
Daily Caller – President Donald Trump is planning on using the Insurrection Act to remove illegal immigrants from the United States, The Daily Caller has learned.
According to multiple senior administration officials, the president intends to invoke the “tremendous powers” of the act to remove illegal immigrants from the country.
“We’re doing the Insurrection Act,” one official said.
Under the Insurrection Act of 1807, the president has the authority to use the National Guard and military in order to combat “unlawful obstruction or rebellion” within U.S. borders. The act was last invoked in 1992 by George H.W. Bush to quell the Los Angeles riots, and was also used by Eisenhower in 1957 to enforce school desegregation in the south.
An official expressed concerns that Trump’s use of the act’s powers would face legal challenges, pointing to the lawsuits against the president’s travel ban from majority-Muslim countries. However, as the official noted, the travel ban ultimately prevailed in the Supreme Court.
In addition to the Insurrection Act, the president is also considering declaring the country full and insisting that the U.S. can no longer handle the massive influx of illegal immigrants. 2019 is currently on pace to reach the highest levels of illegal immigration in a decade.
Yes, Trump Can Invoke the Insurrection Act to Deport Immigrants
The Atlantic – One of the most interesting legal phenomena of the Trump administration has been the increased use of—and public focus on—previously obscure federal statutes that delegate surprisingly broad power to the president. From using the National Emergencies Act to build his border wall and the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to control the upper echelons of the executive branch, to using the Trade Expansion Act to raise tariffs against Canada in the dubious name of “national security,” President Donald Trump has pursued an array of actions that at once seem to be both within the letter of these laws and an indictment of the open-endedness of their statutory delegations.
Grievance Proxies – The College Board plans to introduce a new “adversity score” as a backdoor to racial quotas in college admissions
City Journal – Adversity score factors:

Crime rate in neighborhood
Quality of high school
Communities median family income
Parent’s educational level

For decades, the College Board defended the SAT, which it writes and administers, against charges that the test gives an unfair advantage to middle-class white students. No longer. Under relentless pressure from the racial-preferences lobby, the Board has now caved to the anti-meritocratic ideology of “diversity.” The Board will calculate for each SAT-taker an “adversity score” that purports to measure a student’s socioeconomic position, according to the Wall Street Journal. Colleges can use this adversity index to boost the admissions ranking of allegedly disadvantaged students who otherwise would score too poorly to be considered for admission.
Advocates of this change claim that it is not about race. That is a fiction. In fact, the SAT adversity score is simply the latest response on the part of mainstream institutions to the seeming intractability of the racial academic-achievement gap. If that gap did not exist, the entire discourse about “diversity” would evaporate overnight. The average white score on the SAT (1,123 out of a possible 1,600) is 177 points higher than the average black score (946), approximately a standard deviation of difference. This gap has persisted for decades. It is not explained by socioeconomic disparities. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported in 1998 that white students from households with incomes of $10,000 or less score better on the SAT than black students from households with incomes of $80,000 to $100,000. In 2015, students with family incomes of $20,000 or less (a category that includes all racial groups) scored higher on average on the math SAT than the average math score of black students from all income levels. The University of California has calculated that race predicts SAT scores better than class.
Those who rail against “white privilege” as a determinant of academic achievement have a nagging problem: Asians. Asian students outscore white students on the SAT by 100 points; they outscore blacks by 277 points. It is not Asian families’ economic capital that vaults them to the top of the academic totem pole; it is their emphasis on scholarly effort and self-discipline. Every year in New York City, Asian elementary school students vastly outperform every other racial and ethnic group on the admissions test for the city’s competitive public high schools, even though a disproportionate number of them come from poor immigrant families.
Trump breaks silence amid Alabama abortion ban row
BBC – US President Donald Trump has outlined his “strongly pro-life” views on abortion amid controversy over strict new laws passed in several states.
Mr Trump said he was against abortion except in cases of rape, incest or a “serious health risk” to the mother.
His stance on what is a divisive election issue in the US emerged days after Alabama passed a law banning abortion in almost all cases.
Pete Buttigieg wants Thomas Jefferson events and buildings renamed
NY Post – Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg called for everything honoring Thomas Jefferson to be renamed.
“Yeah, we’re doing that in Indiana. I think it’s the right thing to do,” Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said in a Friday radio interview with conservative host Hugh Hewitt.
“There’s a lot, of course, to admire in his thinking and his philosophy,” Buttigieg said of the author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation’s third president.
“But then again, if you plunge into his writings, especially the ‘Notes on the State of Virginia,’ you know that he knew slavery was wrong. And yet he did it,” he explained.
The pol favors removing Jefferson’s name from traditional events, like the Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson dinners, and from buildings — but not from history books.
“Over time, you develop and evolve on the things you choose to honor,” Buttigieg said. “Naming something after someone confers a lot of honor.”
Friend, foe or unknown force flying overhead? Congress should find out
The Hill – Since 2015, dozens of Navy F-18 fighter jets have encountered unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAPs) — once commonly referred to as UFOs — off the East Coast of the United States, some not far from the nation’s capital. Encounters have been reported by other military aircraft and civilian airliners elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad, too, including videos shot by airline passengers.
What these UAPs were and who was flying them — whether friends, foes or unknown forces — remains a mystery. Yet careful examination of the data inevitably leads to one possible, disturbing conclusion: A potential adversary of the United States has mastered technologies we do not yet understand to achieve capabilities we cannot yet match.
It is long past time for Congress to discover the answers to those questions and to share at least some of its conclusions with the public.
The U.S. government came a large step closer to confirming the reality of UAPs when the U.S. Navy acknowledged in late April that “there have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated airspace in recent years.”
U.S. school fails Christian student for refusing Islamic prayer
WND – The declarations could have been made by an imam in a mosque sermon.
“Most Muslims’ faith is stronger than the average Christian.”
“Islam at heart is a peaceful religion.”
Jihad is a “personal struggle in devotion to Islam, especially involving spiritual discipline.”
“To Muslims, Allah is the same God that is worshiped in Christianity and Judaism.”
“Men are the managers of the affairs of women” and “Righteous women are therefore obedient.”
The problem is that those statements were part of the instruction in a public school in Maryland, and one of the students in the classroom now is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to condemn such religious lessons funded by taxpayers.
The Thomas More Law Center has submitted a petition asking the high court to take up the case of student Caleigh Wood.
“As a Christian and 11th-grader at La Plata High School in Maryland, Caleigh Wood was taught that ‘Most Muslims’ faith is stronger than the average Christian.’ She was also required to profess in writing, the Islamic conversion creed, ‘There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.’ Ms. Wood believed that it is a sin to profess by word or in writing, that there is any other god except the Christian God. She stood firm in her Christian beliefs and was punished for it. The school refused her request to opt-out or give her an alternative assignment. She refused to complete her anti-Christian assignment and consequently received a failing grade,” the legal team explained Wednesday.
Lower courts have given a free pass to the school district to teach Islam, and so TMLC filed the request with the Supreme Court to decide “whether any legal basis exists to allow public schools to discriminate against Christianity while at the same time promote Islam.”
“Under the guise of teaching history or social studies, public schools across America are promoting the religion of Islam in ways that would never be tolerated for Christianity or any other religion,” said Richard Thompson, TMLC’s president.
“I’m not aware of any school which has forced a Muslim student to write the Lord’s Prayer or John 3:16: ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life,’” he said.
Economy & Business
Breaking up tech giants would be ‘illegal’ and will harm consumers, says Google’s Eric Schmidt
Telegraph – Calls to break up Google and other tech giants have “no basis in law” and would damage consumers by forcing up prices and cutting transparency, according to Eric Schmidt, the billionaire technology investor and former chairman and chief executive of Google.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Schmidt, who is due to step down from the board of Alphabet, Google’s parent, next month after 18 years at the company, hit back at growing pressure from EU and US regulators to curb the power of big technology companies by forcing them to sell off businesses.
In Middle of Trade War, America’s Busiest Port Gets Ready for Robots
Bloomberg – Pier 400 in Los Angeles is North America’s largest shipping terminal. More than 1,700 trucks pass through, on average per day, even in the middle of the U.S.-China trade war. All that cargo translates into thousands of miles driven within the facility each day, mostly by diesel vehicles, spewing pollutants.
For APM Terminals, the part of global shipping company A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S that runs the Los Angeles terminal, the future of cargo handling looks like the future of driving: electric motors replacing gasoline engines, autonomous software replacing human workers. The company says the changes are necessary to meet California rules requiring shipping yards to reach zero emissions by 2030 and to keep business from leaving for other coasts.
The Los Angeles terminal has already ordered an electric, automated carrier from Finnish manufacturer Kalmar, part of the Cargotec Corp., that can fulfill the functions of three kinds of manned diesel vehicles: a crane, top-loader and truck. With enough of those, APMT could eliminate 65,000 miles driven daily by diesel trucks and cranes.
There would be fallout, though. The move to a robotic, emission-free operation may cut the need for workers such as Anthony Armijo, a part-timer who has spent 15 years picking up leftover dock shifts. “I just don’t understand what we’re going to be doing in the future,” he said. “I’m an American citizen. You would think they would have a way for us to make a living.”
Science & Technology
Something Appears to Have Ripped a Massive Hole in the Milky Way’s Edge
MSN – Something appears to have torn a hole in part of the Milky Way’s halo. The “dark substructure” was found via Gaia observations—a project set out to produce the most detailed 3D map of our galaxy—with Harvard scientist Ana Bonaca noticing a perturbation in a tidal stream.
She presented her findings at the American Physical Society’s April meeting.
As first reported by LiveScience, Bonaca was focusing on tidal streams produced by stars escaping from globular clusters—normally found at the edges of a galaxy. The stellar halo of the Milky Way is full of these tidal streams.
If there is nothing to disturb them, the streams are almost uniform in terms of their density. However, Bonaca noticed there was a hole in one. “The on-sky morphology suggests a recent, close encounter with a massive and dense perturber,” an abstract to her work reported.
What this “perturber” is, however, is unknown. “It’s a dense bullet of something,” Bonaca told LiveScience. Telescopes failed to find the source—so what could it be?
Health
Hundreds Of Scientists Sound Alarm About 5G Health Effects
End of the American Dream – Even though many in the scientific community are loudly warning about the potential health effects that 5G technology could have on the general population, Verizon and AT&T are starting to put up their 5G networks in major cities all across the nation. Today, the total number of cell phones exceeds the entire population of the world, and the big cell phone companies are making a crazy amount of money providing service to all of those phones. And now that the next generation of cell phone technology has arrived, millions of cell phone users are looking forward to better connections and faster speeds than ever before. In fact, President Trump says that 5G networks will be up to 100 times faster than the current 4G networks that we are using right now…
Sounds great, right?
But in order to achieve such vastly superior performance, 5G networks will use technology that is completely different from 4G networks.
5G waves are “ultra high frequency” and “ultra high intensity”, but they are also easily absorbed by objects such as buildings and trees. So although cell towers will be much, much smaller, but they will also have to be much, much closer together than before. According to CBS News, it is estimated that the big cell phone companies will be putting up at least 300,000 of these small towers, and it has been projected that it will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to fully set up the 5G network nationwide.
Needless to say, there is a tremendous amount of money at stake, and the big cell phone companies are trying very hard to assure everyone that 5G technology is completely safe.
But is it?
Today, there is a growing body of scientific evidence that indicates that the electromagnetic radiation that we are constantly being bombarded with is not good for us. Hundreds of scientists that are engaged in research in this area have signed the “International EMF Scientist Appeal”
Fetal DNA Contaminants Found in Merck’s Measles Vaccines
Green Med Info – OPEN LETTER TO LEGISLATORS REGARDING FETAL CELL DNA IN VACCINES…Merck’s MMR II vaccine (as well as the chickenpox, Pentacel, and all Hep-A containing vaccines) is manufactured using human fetal cell lines and is heavily contaminated with human fetal DNA from the production process.
Levels in our children can reach up to 5 ng/ml after vaccination, depending on the age, weight and blood volume of the child. That level is known to activate Toll-like receptor 9 (TLR9), which can cause autoimmune attacks.
To illustrate the autoimmune capability of very small amounts of fetal DNA, consider this: labor is triggered by fetal DNA from the baby that builds up in the mother’s bloodstream, triggering a massive immune rejection of the baby. This is labor.
It works like this: fetal DNA fragments [i] from a baby with about 300 base pairs in length are found in a pregnant mother’s serum. When they reach between 0.46– 5.08 ng/mL in serum, they trigger labor via the TLR9 mechanism [ii]. The corresponding blood levels are 0.22 ng/ml and 3.12 ng/ml.
The fetal DNA levels in a child after being injected with fetal-manufactured vaccines reach the same level that triggers autoimmune rejection of baby by mother.
Anyone who says that the fetal DNA contaminating our vaccines is harmless either does not know anything about immunity and Toll- like receptors or they are not telling the truth.
If fetal DNA can trigger labor (a naturally desired autoimmune reaction), then those same levels in vaccines can trigger autoimmunity in a child.
Fragmented fetal DNA contained in vaccines is of similar size, ~215 base pairs. [iii]
This is direct biological evidence that fetal DNA contaminants in vaccines are not in low innocuous amounts. They are a very strong proinflammatory trigger.
New Study Shows Skullcap Herb Repairs Brain Injury
Mercola – American and Chinese skullcap come from the same family but are used to treat different conditions; researchers found scutellarin, a flavonoid found in both varieties, reduced cell death following traumatic brain injury and improved neurobehavioral function.
Researchers discovered it was the upregulation of Nrf2 from scutellarin, and the increase in downstream proteins that triggered the effect, as Nrf2 is important in the expression of antioxidants and crucial in the initiation of healing.
Other studies demonstrated the protective effect skullcap has on the cardiovascular system, liver and kidneys, and its usefulness in the treatment of allergies, asthma and eczema.
Skullcap may trigger side effects or interact with supplements or medications, and should therefore be used under a physician’s supervision. It is easily grown in the garden and may be steeped to make a delicious and calming tea
Sunscreen chemicals easily absorbed into the bloodstream
Natural Health News – With regular use the chemicals in your sunscreen can be absorbed into the bloodstream at levels high enough to raise concerns about toxic effects.
That’s the conclusion of a small study conducted by researchers at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The 23 volunteers tested four sunscreens, including sprays, lotion and cream, applying the formulations to 75% of the body four times a day over four days. This regimen was chosen because it is in line with standard manufacturers’ instructions to apply sunscreen at least every 2 hours during the day.
The researchers used blood tests to determine the maximum levels of certain chemicals absorbed into the bloodstream.
The results, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found that chemical levels in the blood began to rise on the first day of use and, with continuing use of the sunscreens, the levels of sunscreen chemicals detected in the blood also continued to rise, suggesting that these chemicals may accumulate in the blood over time.
Maximum plasma levels of the chemicals it tested for – avobenzone, oxybenzone, octocrylene and, in one sunscreen, ecamsule – were well above the level of 0.5 nanograms per millilitre (ng/mL) at which FDA guidelines call for further safety testing.
FDA calls for further testing
Commenting on the study on its website, the FDA said: “The fact that an ingredient is absorbed through the skin and into the body does not mean the ingredient is unsafe. Rather, this finding calls for further testing to determine the safety of that ingredient for repeated use. Such testing is part of the standard pre-market safety evaluation of most chronically administered drugs with appreciable systemic absorption.”
The Agency suggested that since it began regulating sunscreens in the 1970s, its understanding of drug absorption through the skin and the ability to measure drug absorption have advanced. It’s not entirely clear if human safety testing has kept up with this evolving understanding, however. In fact, sunscreen creams have largely avoided extensive safety tests because absorption had previously been thought to be minimal.
Entertainment
Season 10 finale of NCIS: Los Angeles, “False Flag.”
…Meanwhile, Kensi, Deeks, and SEAL Chief Wallace (Don Wallace) join Sabatino in a mobile unit in the desert in Iraq, where the CIA officer informs them that he’s trying to stop World War III. He’s tracking a Chechen defector and French journalist. The defector revealed that ISIS has ballistic missiles and plans to use them in a “false flag” operation to make it look like Iran is firing into Israel and Saudi Arabia — and enough fake news may be able to make Israel and Saudi Arabia fire first. It won’t matter that it was all manufactured once the first shot is fired.