by Gilbert Doctorow
One of the first questions put to me by a reader via the Comments function with respect to Monday’s report of my initial impressions after arriving in St Petersburg was: and what is the general mood of people? I begged off answering, saying that I would have to speak to a lot more people before I could confidently answer that question.
Feet on the Ground in St. Petersburg: The Public Mood
Sanctions don’t seem to be effecting the wealthy or the middle class, in Russia, much.
CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders
The documents reveal the expansive plan the CDC had last year to use location data from a highly controversial data broker. SafeGraph, the company the CDC paid $420,000 for access to one year of data, includes Peter Thiel and the former head of Saudi intelligence [Turki bin Faisal Al Saud] among its investors. Google banned the company from the Play Store in June.
The CDC used the data for monitoring curfews, with the documents saying that SafeGraph’s data “has been critical for ongoing response efforts, such as hourly monitoring of activity in curfew zones or detailed counts of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine monitoring.” The documents date from 2021.
Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher who closely follows the data marketplace, told Motherboard in an online chat after reviewing the documents: “The CDC seems to have purposefully created an open-ended list of use cases, which included monitoring curfews, neighbor-to-neighbor visits, visits to churches, schools and pharmacies, and also a variety of analysis with this data specifically focused on ‘violence.’” (The document doesn’t stop at churches; it mentions “places of worship.”)
Related:
Data Broker Is Selling Location Data of People Who Visit Abortion Clinics
Location data broker SafeGraph stops selling information on visits to abortion providers
SafeGraph Provides CDC and 1000+ Organizations With Data to Fight the COVID-19 Crisis
Google Bans Location Data Firm Funded by Former Saudi Intelligence Head:
On its website SafeGraph says “We believe places data should be open for all.” In April 2017, Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, the former head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, invested in SafeGraph as part of a $16 million Series A funding round. SafeGraph said it had “assembled the deepest policy thinkers.” Beyond Faisal Al Saud, SafeGraph said it had enlisted the help of former U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, author Sam Harris, Meghan O’Sullivan who ran Iraq and Afghanistan policy under President George Bush, former Deputy Chief of Staff to President Obama Mona Sutphen, and former German Minister of Defense Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, among others. Peter Thiel is also an investor in the company.
More investors: SafeGraph Raises $16 Million Series A
By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead, April 11, 2022
This is financial tyranny.
The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones who must foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.
‘We the People’ Are the New, Permanent Underclass in America
If this is what he now thinks, then rescind OSHA’s vaccine mandate.
Biden on Covid: ‘No Federal Solution’
Related:
More Americans have died of the virus in 2021 than in all of 2020.
President Biden may not recall what he said during a 2020 campaign debate last fall, but Americans should: “Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America.” At the time the U.S. had recorded 220,000 Covid deaths.
Covid deaths this year have now surpassed the toll in 2020 with 350,000 since Inauguration Day. It would seem that Mr. Biden has done no better than Donald Trump in defeating Covid despite the benefit of vaccines, better therapies, and more clinical experience. The left politicized Covid by holding Mr. Trump responsible for a disease that was always going to be hard to defeat.
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • DECEMBER 28, 2021
Those Americans who dare to challenge the strangle-hold that Israel and its friends have over US foreign policy will likely find themselves targeted even more aggressively in the upcoming year. Two weeks ago the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), widely reckoned to be the largest and most powerful component of the Jewish state’s lobby, declared that it will now begin directly funding political candidates who are perceived as pro-Israel. Up until now, AIPAC has preferred to operate somewhat in the shadows, representing itself as a organization that is in part “educational” to justify its 501(c)3 tax exempt status which it uses to send all new congressmen on propaganda trips to Israel.
A More Aggressive Israel Lobby Is Coming in 2022
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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