Corruption is Everywhere > Would you believe Nurses? Liberal darling Avenatti - guilty again; Mercedes-Benz fined in So. Korea

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New York nurses arrested after making staggering amount

from fake vaccine cards

The scheme allegedly brought in more than $1.5 million

©  Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Two New York nurses have been arrested for allegedly selling fake Covid-19 vaccination cards, and making more than $1.5 million in the process.

The Suffolk County district attorney’s office announced the two nurses working in Long Island, 49-year-old Julie Devuono and 44-year-old Marissa Urraro, had forged vaccine cards from last November into January of 2022. The pair reportedly charged $220 to $440 for vaccine cards for adults, but offered a discount for children, only charging $85. 

After faking the actual physical vaccine cards, the two would then allegedly add false information to the New York State Immunization Information System (NYSIIS) to list people as vaccinated when they were not. 

Prosecutors also alleged that the nurses forged vaccine cards for undercover detectives. The two worked at Wild Child Pediatric Healthcare in Amityville, an establishment that DeVuono, who is a nurse practitioner, owned. 

Businesses around the pediatric clinic had noticed increased foot traffic recently, according to local media reports. “It’s frightening beyond words,” one neighbor told the New York CBS affiliate. 

In a search of DeVuono’s home, police discovered more than $900,000 in US currency, plus a ledger documenting more than $1.5 million in payments for the alleged vaccine card scheme. 

DeVuono and Urraro have both been charged with forgery. 

Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney added in a statement he hopes the arrests will “send a message” to anyone else “considering gaming the system.”

“We will enforce the law to the fullest extent,” Tierney said.

‘Donald Trump’s worst nightmare’ is his own worst nightmare

Before he was found guilty of defrauding porn star Stormy Daniels,

Michael Avenatti was lauded by liberal media

Michael Avenatti speaks to members of the media after leaving federal court in New York City,

February 4, 2022. ©  AP / John Minchillo

Disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti has been convicted of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft for stealing $300,000 from porn star Stormy Daniels. It’s the second criminal conviction in two years for a man liberal pundits once believed would bring down the presidency of Donald Trump.

Avenatti was found guilty by a jury in Manhattan on Friday and will be sentenced in May. Representing himself, he had argued that Daniels owed him the money in exchange for legal representation in a case against Trump, but the jury sided with federal prosecutors who said Avenatti diverted the cash into his own account and then convinced Daniels that the money hadn’t arrived.

Avenatti took the cash sum from a larger advance for Daniels’ memoir, ‘Full Disclosure,’ which details her alleged affair with Trump.

Prior to his fall from grace, liberal pundits touted Avenatti as “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare,” and a “folk hero” whose legal action against Trump would “save the country.” After attempting to scupper the Supreme Court confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh with unfounded allegations of sexual assault, Avenatti explored a run for the presidency himself in 2018, immediately before his life began to unravel.

Avenatti was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence in late 2018, and less than a year later was found guilty of attempting to extort sportswear company Nike. He has yet to begin serving his 30-month prison sentence for that conviction, and is also facing retrial in California for allegedly stealing almost $10 million from various clients.

Carmaker fined for gas emissions cover-up

Mercedes-Benz to pay millions and fix rigged pollution-mitigation devices

to comply with law in South Korea

© Getty Images / picture alliance

The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) on Sunday demanded that major luxury car maker Mercedes-Benz pay $16.87 million in fines for providing falsified information on gas emissions from its diesel cars, Yonhap news agency reported.

The South Korean antitrust regulator discovered that the vehicle producer had installed illegal software on pollution-mitigation devices in some of its cars. The software allowed the devices to perform at lower levels in driving conditions than during certification tests. The vehicles therefore failed to meet the legally allowed emission levels, but the automaker was found to have covered up related facts in signs attached to its cars between April 2012 and November 2018, according to the KFTC.

The automaker also advertised that the cars’ nitrogen oxide emissions were at a minimum level and they fully met the Euro 6 emission standards. The inadequate ads were on 15 Mercedes-Benz models.

“Though Mercedes-Benz claimed that it only used typical phrases about well-known performances of the emission mitigation devices, concealing the intentional implementation of illegal software and claiming its vehicles perform the best are beyond simple exaggeration and deception,” the regulator stated, adding that “such practices will or are feared to hurt fair market order by preventing consumers from making a reasonable decision” when purchasing a car.

Apart from the fine, the KFTC also ordered the carmaker to fix the devices and install qualified software.

In 2021, the South Korean regulator slapped a number of other carmakers with fines or correction orders, including Audi-Volkswagen Korea, Nissan Motor, Stellantis Korea, and Porsche AG for similar emissions-tampering practices.

US states join Mexico in lawsuit against American gun manufacturers

Gunmakers hit back against allegations of facilitating trafficking

Weapons confiscated or turned in to Mexican authorities © AFP / Bernardo Montoya

Attorneys general for 13 states and Washington DC have backed a Mexican federal lawsuit accusing American gun manufacturers of aiding and abetting the trafficking of weapons to Mexican criminals. The prosecutors – all Democrats – filed a brief last week in Massachusetts federal court seeking to deny the gunmakers the protection of a federal law shielding them from liability.

The targeted companies, including Smith & Wesson, Colt and Glock, have cited the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act in an effort to have the case dismissed. The law protects gunmakers from liability if their products are used in a crime.

However, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey accused the companies of “knowingly market[ing] their products in a way that facilitates the illegal trafficking of weapons into the hands of dangerous individuals.”

Mexican legal adviser Alejandro Celorio clarified to CNN that the lawsuit is not attempting to blame the gunmakers or distributors for the killings or injuries committed with their weapons, but instead to hold them accountable for “negligence in their commercial practices” and a “lack of caution” violating US state and federal laws.

Nevertheless, the suit claims US gun makers’ practices “aid and abet the killing and maiming of children, judges, journalists, police, and ordinary citizens,” reducing Mexican life expectancy and costing the government billions of dollars annually.

Trade industry group the National Shooting Sports Foundation slammed the coalition of prosecutors for what it described as misplaced efforts, arguing the Mexican government should “focus on bringing the Mexican drug cartels to justice in Mexican courtrooms” rather than “filing a baseless lawsuit in an American court to deflect attention from its disgraceful and corrupt failure to protect its citizens.”

While most of the defendants declined to speak to media pending litigation, Glock told CNN on Sunday that it would “vigorously” defend itself against the charges.

The lawsuit, initially filed in August, alleges over 597,000 guns are trafficked from the US into Mexico and claims the companies designed, marketed and distributed “military-style assault weapons” with an eye toward arming drug cartels, thus promoting violent crime of all kinds. A 2020 report by the US Government Accountability Office revealed 70% of guns recovered in Mexico between 2014 and 2018 came from the US, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Thousands of American-bought guns have found their way south of the border in recent years. The infamous Operation Fast and Furious saw the ATF deliberately allow gun dealers to sell over 2,000 weapons to known criminal entities, which would then ‘walk’ them across the border to Mexico. There, ATF agents were supposed to apprehend the criminals and convince them to turn in their bosses, but as often as not the agency ended up losing track of the guns. The scheme, which ran from 2009 to 2011, was wound up only after the firearms had been used in the commission of hundreds of murders and other crimes, including the 2010 killing of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. Some were later used in the 2015 Bataclan massacre in France.

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US Military is World’s ‘Single Largest Producer’ of Greenhouse Gases – Report

© US Army / Ryan Hallock (via Reuters)

The Pentagon is the “single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world,” according to a new study about climate change that accuses the Trump administration of being in “various modes of denial” about it.

The report, from Brown University’s ‘Costs of War’ project, focuses specifically on "post-9/11 wars" and their impact on emissions. It estimates the US military has been responsible for 1,212 million metric tons of greenhouse gases between 2001 and 2017. Emissions from “overseas contingency operations” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Syria accounted for more than 400 million metric tons of CO2. In 2017 alone, the report says, “the Pentagon's emissions were greater than all emissions from Sweden or Denmark.”  

Of course, the Pentagon can fix that problem; they can just obliterate Sweden or Denmark, or both. They will be Muslim countries and consequently, enemies of the USA long before global warming becomes a catastrophe. (I am just kidding).

The effects of climate change will soon be “feeding political tensions and fueling mass migrations and refugee crises,” the report says, noting that the military has already added climate change to its list of national security concerns.

This is a theory that has little or no basis in fact, but is the politically correct position to have.

The researchers criticized the Pentagon for acknowledging the threat of climate change to national security, but failing to acknowledge "that its own fuel use is a major contributor.” They also accused "some elements" within the Trump administration of being "in various modes of climate denial.”

Of course, it would be no different if the Democrats were in the White House. Deep State will protect the military from any attempt to downsize or diminish its capability.

While the military received praise for making some effort to decrease its energy consumption, including by gradually replacing some non-tactical fleet vehicles with hybrid, plug-in or alternative fuel vehicles, reducing idling, and developing solar installations at some bases, the report says there is “room for more reductions.”

The study found seven major sources of greenhouse gas emissions relating to US military activities, including from installations and non-war operations, war-related emissions and emissions from the production of weapons. Emissions caused by the reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure in war zones and the deliberate burning of oil wells and refineries by all parties to war have also been factored in.

The authors also question whether the huge US presence in the Persian Gulf is necessary, since the US itself is less dependent on the region's oil than in the past and does not necessarily need to “protect the global flow” of oil.

One of the recommendations was that the Pentagon should report its fuel consumption to Congress annually, information which is currently “explicitly withheld.”

I just calculated that a 1.5 hour flight by an F-35 uses an amount of fuel equal to all the gasoline I have used in 55 years of driving. Ground one F-35 for an hour and a half and you negate one entire lifetime of pollution.

The researchers also recommended that each military installation should draw up plans to reduce energy consumption by 10 percent by 2022, and advised increased use of alternative fuels, hybrid vehicles and renewable energy. The Pentagon should also identify which military and national guard bases could be closed, whether due to climate change impacts or diminished threats.

The US military must urgently "reduce their role" in creating greenhouse gas emissions as a matter of national security, the report urged, concluding that if it takes bold actions to reduce fossil fuel use, there could be “enormous positive implications” for the climate.

16 Globally Renowned Scientists Say Man-Made Climate Change is BS

This article was published by The Astute Bloggers on Friday, July 18, 2014. Since I apparently missed it then, I include it here now. I know the list has grown considerably in the past two years. 

Here are the names and credits for the deniers:

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; 
J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; 
Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; 
Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; 
William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; 
Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; 
William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; 
Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; 
James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; 
Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; 
Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; 
Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; 
Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; 
Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; 
Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva;
AND: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever.

HERE'S AN EXCERPT: (An excerpt of what, I don't know)

In September, (2013, I assume) Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?" 

In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

I should note that July 2014 was before the beginning of this past year's record El Nino event.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years.

The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word "incontrovertible" from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money."
RTWT!