Remember to thank the anti-vaxxers for this... New York declares state of emergency over polio to boost low vaccination rates https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/09/new...ncy-over-polio-to-boost-vaccination-rate.html
I don't think a state of emergency should have been declared with only one infection that resulted in the paralysis of an adult man. They should have waited until a non vaccinated child became infected regardless of the outcome. Yet, I do understand the deep concern because Polio is now circulating in the communities after being found in the waste water. As for those vaccinated...children should be OK because Polio vaccination is a requirement to attend school in New York although it's not federal law. Thus, those not vaccinated will most likely be ignorant adults. wrbtrader
This is a reminder not to rent your stuff to fringe nutcases... A Family Rented Their RV to the QAnon Queen. She Won’t Give It Back. The family says the QAnon Queen has voided the rental contract and is not answering their requests to return it. https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zqgm/qanon-romana-didulo-rv-rental The so-called QAnon Queen of Canada won’t return an RV she rented for her convoy, despite the owners asking for it back after she voided the contract and cost them thousands of dollars. The group, led by self-anointed “Queen” Romana Didulo, isn’t answering the owners’ requests to return the vehicle. During the spat, Didulo also posted the couple’s home phone number and information on Telegram for her tens of thousands of followers to see. And when she recently asked followers a vague question about what crime the couple should be charged with, many of her followers said it was treason and that the punishment should be death. “High treason. Deserves a milkshake,” wrote one follower, using the group’s code word for execution. Didulo is a QAnon influencer who’s convinced a sizable number of people that she’s the true queen of Canada, a central figure in an existential fight against an international cabal of globalist pedophiles who control the world, and an extraterrestrial being with healing powers. Some experts even describe the group as a cult. Since late January, Didulo and her closest followers have been driving around Canada in a convoy of rented RVs, holding meet-and-greets in parking lots and spreading conspiracies. Once, they attempted—and failed spectacularly—to conduct a citizen’s arrest on an entire police precinct. They’re currently in Eastern Canada telling followers that Hurricane Ian was a hoax (after first raising money and goods to help those affected). The latest RV that Didulo and her followers rented didn’t come from a business but from a family. The owners, Mike and Vicki LeBlanc, advertise their RV on Facebook and told VICE News that Didulo’s group reached out to them there. Didulo’s convoy picked up the RV in Manitoba in early September and is contractually scheduled to return it in early November. But the “queen” and her followers overloaded their RV and lied about where they’d take it, the couple said. The latter offense voided the contract they signed. Now, they want their RV back. The LeBlancs are both shift workers and don’t get much time off together, so they frequently rent out their RV. They didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary with Didulo’s group until after the agreement was made. While the group was loading up their newly rented RV, Didulo pulled up in a separate RV covered in stickers of her face and her title as queen. Once the group took the RV, the LeBlancs researched them and began to keep tabs on their vehicle through Didulo’s frequent updates on Telegram. "I just started kind of tracking how much traveling they were doing and realized this wasn't just, 'I'm going to drive to a campsite and have a little vacation and maybe tour this landmark or that landmark,” said Vicki LeBlanc. “It was a full-blown 'We're going to drive all day, all night, hit as many places as we can, drive nonstop' kind of tour." The conflict came to a head when the vehicle blew a tire. Didulo and her team were upset that the flat had bumped their schedule and told the couple they needed to replace all six tires. So the LeBlancs said they contacted a nearby store, purchased six new tires, and had them installed for a total of $2,695, according to a receipt the “queen” posted online. But the mechanic told the couple that changing all the tires wasn’t necessary, and they learned the group had left the RV’s good tires behind. So they asked Didulo and her crew to help pay for the unnecessary costs. That didn’t go over well with the queen. “She just started bashing us on their [Telegram] channel,” said Vicki LeBlanc. “So that's kind of where it kind of went all downhill.” Didulo took to Twitter to express her frustration with the owners of the RV. In one of several posts, she added the LeBlancs’ personal information, including their phone number and email. It’s a tactic Didulo frequently uses to incite a deluge of attacks from her followers, but that didn’t seem to occur in this case. "I panicked a little bit when I saw all our personal information posted, and I thought, ‘Oh, God,’ but most of the responses that we've gotten have actually been really positive and encouraging,” LeBlanc said. “There's been very few people that have been angry and hateful." The group hasn’t responded to the owners of the RV since late last week, but they did make their most recent scheduled payment last Friday. The couple said they’ve spoken to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and lawyers about reporting the RV stolen but were told their best bet is to sit tight and wait until the contract ends. If it's not returned, they plan to report it stolen and are prepared to go to small claims court if it’s returned damaged. Didulo has a bit of a checkered past when it comes to RVs. Her group had to relinquish the first set of RVs they rented back in January because they took them to Ottawa, which their contract forbade. Corey, a former member of the convoy who defected with his wife over alleged abuse from Didulo, told VICE News that the queen’s obsession with moving nonstop from town to town put her team at risk before. During one of their trips, the electricity in the motorhome cut out, despite the generator being on, he said. Instead of calling the RV’s owner, as Corey had recommended, he said Didulo called him a “saboteur” and demanded they continue. Upon arriving in Halifax, their destination, Corey did a walk-through and said he found the RV’s panel box had been burnt during the drive. "The wires were sparking and burnt this whole panel and could have burnt the entire bus down along just on the drive,” said Corey. “They're lucky it didn't burn the whole thing down. Once that went, the whole bus would have just come on fire very quickly." “Daisy was in there, right, like in that motorhome. She [Didulo] almost killed my wife, for fuck's sake.”
Mercola gets spanked in court for his stupidity. Sending a clear message to other anti-vax idiots who push disinformation. YouTube under no obligation to host anti-vaccine advocate’s videos, court says YouTube had the discretion to take down content that harmed users, judge said. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...a-loses-lawsuit-over-youtube-channel-removal/ A prominent anti-vaccine activist, Joseph Mercola, yesterday lost a lawsuit attempting to force YouTube to provide access to videos that were removed from the platform after YouTube banned his channels. Mercola had tried to argue that YouTube owed him more than $75,000 in damages for breaching its own user contract and denying him access to his videos. However, in an order dismissing Mercola's complaint, US magistrate judge Laurel Beeler wrote that according to the contract Mercola signed, YouTube was "under no obligation to host" Mercola's content after terminating his channel in 2021 "for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines by posting medical misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines." "The court found no breach because 'there is no provision in the Terms of Service that requires YouTube to maintain particular content' or be a 'storage site for users’ content,'" Beeler wrote. Because Mercola's contract with YouTube was found to be enforceable and "YouTube had the discretion to take down content that harmed its users," Beeler said that Mercola did not plausibly plead claims for breach of contract or unjust enrichment. Mercola's complaint was dismissed without leave to amend. Ars could not immediately reach Google or Mercola for comment. Mercola’s losing arguments against YouTube In his complaint, Mercola described himself as "a board-certified physician and leader in the field of natural health" who "was an early user of YouTube and began sharing video content in or around 2005, the year YouTube was founded." Over time, Mercola amassed 300,000 subscribers to a YouTube channel that "garnered 50 million views" by boosting professionally made videos that linked to his website, "which promotes natural health and provides health articles, optimal wellness products, medical news, and a free newsletter." Researchers and regulators described Mercola's background to The New York Times a little differently. They claimed that he was at one point the "most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation" and profited "from misleading claims about Covid-19 vaccines." But Mercola said that YouTube never sent him any notices that his content was out of line with the video platform's community guidelines. He also claimed that after YouTube updated its policy to prevent COVID-19 misinformation, he "carefully avoided posting any content that mentioned Covid-19 vaccines or discussed the Covid-19 outbreak in a manner that YouTube might determine was out of line with official government positions on Covid-19." Mercola claimed that he first became aware that YouTube was planning to ban his channel when The Washington Post published an article about it. He told the Post that he was being censored. In his complaint, he said that within six minutes of the Post's article publishing, he got a message that his channels were banned, effective immediately, for violating YouTube's new policy on vaccine misinformation. His attempt to appeal YouTube's decision was denied, according to Beeler's order. At that point, YouTube told Mercola that after reviewing his channel "carefully," YouTube "confirmed that it violates our Community Guidelines." "We won’t be putting your channel back up on YouTube," the email said. With no other option to fight back, Mercola sued, alleging that YouTube had failed to provide "advance notice of the vaccine-misinformation policy before terminating the channel and account," warn Mercola of the termination or act fairly and in good faith. He also claimed that YouTube failed to give him access to his content, which he claimed that YouTube's terms of use required. Finally, he said that YouTube had been unjustly enriched for retaining his content and converting it exclusively to YouTube's use. Beeler rejected all these arguments, agreeing with YouTube that there was no breach of contract, no damages should be awarded, and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act barred Mercola's claims. "YouTube had the discretion to terminate channels without warning after a single case of severe abuse," Beeler wrote. "Under the contract, this determination was discretionary: the contract said that 'f we reasonably believe that any Content is in breach of this agreement or may cause harm... we may remove or take down that Content in our discretion.'" Commenting on Mercola's case, legal expert Eric Goldman wrote: "Lawsuits over content removals never succeed."
Let's see the latest with the deranged QAnon 'Queen' in Canada... A QAnon 'queen' and the Canada town that wants her gone https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66930536 She claims to be the Queen of Canada, and now she's holding court in an abandoned school. Romana Didulo, a QAnon-inspired conspiracy theorist, leads a group of supporters who have spent the last few years traveling around Canada in motorhomes and other vehicles. Recently, the group moved into Richmound, a village of around 150 people in south-western Saskatchewan, and settled in at a former school. Ms Didulo and around 15 to 25 of her followers have been at the site for about a week, says Thomas Fougere of Community TV, a local independent news outlet based in nearby Medicine Hat. Soon after their arrival, the neighbours began pushing them to leave. Around 100 local residents drove around the school on Sunday in tractors, semi-trucks and other vehicles, trying to drive out the incomers, according to Mr Fougere. "It's the only place in the village where there's a playground and where kids can safely ride their bikes away from the highway," he said. "It's become a high tension situation. The town doesn't want them." A self-styled 'Queen of Canada' Ms Didulo, 48, emigrated from the Philippines to Canada as a teenager. She set up several businesses before forming a fringe political party in 2020. Following endorsements from QAnon leaders, she built up a band of followers, declared that she had overthrown the legitimate government of Canada, and says her claim to the "Queen of Canada" title is backed by secret, powerful US military interests. On her most popular Telegram channel she has issued "decrees" to absolve her more than 36,000 followers from bills and debts. That has resulted in followers losing their homes, cars and possessions, says Christine Sarteschi, a professor at Chatham University in Pittsburgh and an expert on extremism and the sovereign citizen movement - a broad collection of anti-government groups who dodge taxes and make up their own fake legal systems. Ms Didulo and her followers spread a variety of different beliefs, including sovereign citizen, anti-vaccination conspiracies, and ideas related to QAnon - a wide-ranging, completely unfounded theory that says former US President Donald Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media. While QAnon's spurious narratives revolve around US figures, the theory has taken hold in some parts of Canada and the rest of the world. Ms Didulo's group participated in the "Freedom Convoy" protests in Ottawa in 2022, and last year attempted to arrest police officers in Peterborough, Ontario, accusing them of "crimes against humanity". Six of Ms Didulo's followers were arrested instead. Ms Didulo also frequently calls for violence against those administering Covid vaccines to children, according to the Anti-Defamation League. "She's the ultimate anti-government person," Ms Sarteschi said, noting that Ms Didulo regularly threatens to execute her opponents. "This is not a harmless cult." Mr Fougere, the journalist, says he's received threats since reporting on the group. Messages to Ms Didulo and her supporters went unanswered on Tuesday. Staying put in Richmound The group has been in Saskatchewan for at least several weeks. Earlier this month they were chased out of Kamsack, a small town on the other side of the province, by hundreds of local residents. Now it appears the group is making plans to stay put in Richmound. It is seeking plumbers and tradespeople to come volunteer for building projects, Mr Fougere said. Followers not currently at the school are posting on Telegram about their plans to travel to the area in mid-October. "The last few years they've just been traveling around Canada and stopping at campsites," said the journalist "This is the first time they've been presented with access to a building like this." Richmound may not be able to do much officially about it. The school and surrounding land were sold by the government and are now in the hands of a private owner, complicating efforts to move the group. Brad Miller, the mayor of Richmound, told local news outlets that residents were monitoring the situation, and that it appears the group hasn't done anything illegal in the village. Richmound officials did not respond to interview requests from BBC News. In a statement, Saskatchewan police said an investigation is ongoing into a reported assault at Sunday's protest, but that no injuries or arrests were reported. Ms Sarteschi, the extremism expert, said the group is much more serious than their outlandish beliefs make them appear. "Too often, these kinds of things are ignored until something bad happens," she said. "I don't know how this ends... I don't know if anything horrible will happen, but I pray that it doesn't."
Let's catch up with the latest regarding the Canadian QAnon Queen cult leader, Romana Didulo... 'Shut Her Up, Shut It Down': Town Comes Out to Tell QAnon Queen to Go Away Citizens of a small Canadian town were out in force to protest a cult event in their community. https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg5...town-comes-out-to-tell-qanon-queen-to-go-away