Humans owe a huge debt of gratitude to lab rodents, but only now are we discovering just how many thanks are in order.

In a first for laboratory science, a new report has attempted to quantify how many rats and mice are sacrificed for the sake of research annually — and it’s staggering.

In terms of biomedical research alone, US labs rely on over 111 million mice and rats annually, according to the study by veterinary researcher and author Larry Carbone, now appearing in Scientific Reports. The two vermin make up 99% of the whole of common lab mammals.

Animal activists and science advocates are at odds over the new statistic, Science Mag reported Friday.

“If the numbers are anywhere near correct, the amount of pain and suffering that’s occurring in these animals is completely unacceptable,” said Sue Leary, president of Alternatives Research & Development Foundation (ARDF), who works toward reducing the number of animals in labs. Their own estimate was much less: about 23 million.

Rats and mice are not explicitly covered by the Animal Welfare Act (1966), Leary pointed out, which is enforced by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Prior to 2002, when Congress formally excluded certain animals from protection, the USDA declined to track most birds, rats and mice — meaning there has never been a US agency in charge of tracking lab rats and mice.

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2021/01/18/more-than-100-million-rats-mice-used-in-us-labs-report/

And cockroaches. Let's not forget the cokroaches and other insects used in labs as well to make sure our crops are "Genetically Modified certified" (Yippie!) and starve our spiders to death by inventing wholesale poisons... Our rats and mice breeders are rich...

The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election

A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”

In a way, Trump was right.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election. The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.” His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy of suppressive tactics. Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.

The democracy campaigners watched with alarm. “Every week, we felt like we were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling,” says former GOP Representative Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan election-protection council. “We can look back and say this thing went pretty well, but it was not at all clear in September and October that that was going to be the case.”

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.

Read more:

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

See toon at top.

As US Election Day nears on November 5, millions of Americans have already cast early ballots, either in person or by mail. This has sparked alarm among some experts about the potential for manipulating the election results. In 2020, Trump argued that the vote had been “stolen” from him through the use of mail-in ballots and rigged voting machines.

The Democrats are playing the “long game” with their immigration policies, wagering on dividends from changing the makeup of the US population, Dr. Nicholas Waddy, associate professor of history at SUNY Alfred and Trump supporter, told Sputnik.

“Immigration in general, whether it's legal or illegal, changes the fabric of America. For example, the percentage of the electorate that is white, non-Hispanic white, has declined from about 90% down to less than 70% in the last election. That's a huge advantage for Democrats,” Waddy noted.

DEMOCRATS PLAYING ‘LONG GAME’ TO TURN MIGRANTS INTO THEIR VOTERS

Dr. Nicholas Waddy, associate professor of history at SUNY Alfred and Trump supporter:

”[Democrats] know that they win more votes among immigrants, among people of color,” and believe that “if they can… pic.twitter.com/SSnyc9eeMi

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) November 1, 2024

States like Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada, which used to be “red” states, have become “purple," or "swing" states, the pundit explained, “because their populations have changed over time.”

“[Democrats] know that they win more votes among immigrants, among people of color,” and believe that “if they can bend the curve demographically and change the population of the United States, that's going to pay dividends for them,” Waddy maintained.

Early in the 2024 election campaign, Republicans started to sound the alarm over various tricks the Democrats might be up to in an attempt to commit possible election fraud. The GOP, which blamed the raging migrant crisis on President Joe Biden’s decision to liberalize border entries, has argued that Democrats have been rushing to fast-track the process of migrants obtaining citizenship. As new US citizens, they could then, conceivably, cast their vote for the Harris/Walz ticket in the presidential elections.

Some exit polls during the 2020 election showed that 65% of migrants voted for Biden, while 32% voted for Trump.

“A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in, practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country,” said Trump in September.

SpaceX CEO and X owner Elon Musk, who threw his weight behind Trump in the summer, similarly warned on social media that and “the Biden/Harris administration has been flying ‘asylum seekers’, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona. It is a surefire way to win every election.”

Trump vowed to “end this border nightmare” in his Republican National Committee (RNC) 2024 acceptance speech in July.

“The Democrats are playing a long game. I think Republicans have not adequately supported the charge that there are a large number of non-citizens voting. But from the Democratic perspective, eventually they'll become citizens and eventually they will vote,” said Nicholas Waddy.

Furthermore, Democratic lawmakers have been actively campaigning to pass voting rights legislation in Congress aimed at reducing or eliminating election restrictions. They argue that strict identification requirements and in-person voting, often championed by Republicans, hinder low-income individuals, African Americans, and other minority groups from exercising their right to vote.

WHY IS VOTER ID CONTROVERSIAL IN THE US?

As of April 2024, only 36 states required voters to present some form of identification in order to vote in the US presidential election on November 5. Of these states, 24 require identification containing a photograph. In the… pic.twitter.com/1WYihYSDpT

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) September 28, 2024

Republicans are understandably concerned about Democrats employing tricks such as a “fraudulent turnout of people who are not eligible to vote, or people that don't exist using somebody else's identity, for example, a dead person's identity," American political analyst Don Debar told Sputnik.

"This is not so uncommon,” he said.

The Dems present the GOP's attempts to “tamp down incidents of fraud by requiring people to present legal ID or any other extra step that has to be taken” as an effort "to chill turnout," the pundit said.

He referenced an opinion, ostensibly backed by historical data, that “the larger the turnout in a presidential election, the better the Democratic Party does and the lower the turnout, the better the Republican Party does.”

As for the Democrat-advocated watering down or abolishment of strict ID rules, the pundit noted that “most people in the world are required to produce some sort of proof of who they are when they go to vote, for the obvious reasons. But that is not the case here.”

https://sputnikglobe.com/20241101/democrats-playing-long-game-to-convert-migrants-into-their-future-voters---experts-1120747355.html

READ FROM TOP.

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

“It’s hard to do cartoons without ballots…”

         Gus Leonisky