Promoting a healthy lifestyle for everyone isn’t racist. Asserting that it’s good for women of a given race to be obese, is disinformation and bigotry of low expectations.
Wow, Scientific American was a staple of my youth in wanting to pursue a career and personal philosophy based in science. But now it has reached a new low touting unscientific political narratives.
Same stuff applies for men too, this isn’t just a female problem. Men, women, and children all suffer from obesity, and it’s not racist to point out regardless of the skin color of the overweight person.
They’ll defend these partisan frauds who run the FBI until the end.
FBI *literally* falsified evidence it submitted to a secret FISA court to spy on Trump through Carter Page. FBI *literally* interfered in the 2020 election by suppressing Hunter’s laptop. Yet @nytimes spins it to portray FBI as the victims of “assaults” by “Trump’s supporters”… https://t.co/Iv2bp41d0t
Considering the incestuous nature of FBI and big tech would it be outrageous to assume the same is true at news media and therefore writing stupid stories like this?
Interesting that the FBI needs to cover themselves against oversight by the US House. Why might that be the case? Are they afraid of what might be found? Or is this a defensive move that would delegitimize any inquiry against them.
“The FBI is gaslighting the American people over the stunning—if unsurprising—evidence that it engaged in a conspiracy with Big Tech to silence wrongthinkers in violation of the First Amendment, as the Twitter Files have revealed.
Meanwhile, in attacking those who refuse to be gaslit, the bureau is also telegraphing that it would respond to Congress investigating its hyper-politicization and weaponization with relentless information warfare.
The gaslighting comes in the preeminent law enforcement agency’s “move along, nothing to see here” response to the Twitter Files. It stated that “correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements.” The FBI, it says, “provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.”
Here is the kind of conduct the FBI wants you to believe is completely normal:
Grooming Twitter executives for months in advance of the release of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story to compel them to kill the story.
Referring myriad tweets concerning inherently political matters to Twitter’s censorship team for purging—so many tweets, in fact, that during one such bulk censorship request, a Twitter employee described the review of the “possible violative content” as a “monumental undertaking.”
Flagging specific Twitter accounts for the platform to take action against—up to and including suspension—apparently for engaging in thoughtcrime of promoting “civic misinformation” by making jokes related to the 2020 election.
Paying Twitter $3.4 million for its time and effort censoring Americans.
When a domestic intelligence agency is making repeated contacts with your executives about “content moderation,” lodging specific censorship requests directly and via cutout—amid pressure from federal lawmakers to do the same—those “requests” start to look a lot more like demands.
The flimsy national security pretext used to justify the FBI’s censorship requests, often targeting random, unpopular accounts, is equally outrageous.
The FBI used allegations of “foreign interference” as a cover to pursue domestic wrongthink, as its 80-agent-strong Foreign Interference Task Force coordinated with Twitter. For their part, Twitter executives seemed to find scant evidence of such interference—a throwback to Russiagate, and the targeting of the Trump campaign on the accusation advisor Carter Page was a Russian asset.
Authorities also apparently sought to treat “election misinformation” as a dire threat—a pretext perhaps more disturbing than the security apparatus’ now-familiar crying wolf over Russian interference.
It’s well known by now that the security state has linked skepticism over election integrity to “insurrection,” and sought to cast skeptics as domestic violent extremists.
But that is only the beginning. Consider the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) position on this matter—one that the FBI seemed to embrace as it participated alongside CISA in meetings with Twitter and other Big Tech companies in the run-up to the 2020 election.
CISA has stretched its mandate of protecting election infrastructure to include targeting purported “mis-, dis-, and malinformation” regarding elections—that is, to combatting ideas it claims threaten physical equipment.
The agency’s director, Jen Easterly, has said that “the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important.”
In other words, thought policing is now a national security imperative.”
“Before the pandemic, I suspect that most of you, like me, had never heard of gain-of-function research. What we learned during the pandemic is that scientists around the world routinely tinker with the genome of viruses to see how the induced changes will affect replication of the virus (contagiousness) and the effects it has on its host (lethality). Such research has apparently been going on for decades and is routinely funded by governments, including ours.
Within weeks of the COVID-19 virus emerging in China near the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), many began to question whether the virus had been created by gain-of-function research and somehow escaped from WIV’s labs. Recently analyzed Chinese documents from early in the pandemic seem to suggest the virus might have come from WIV. To many, the proposition that the novel coronavirus just happened to naturally occur a few hundred yards from the WIV facility seemed too much of a coincidence.
But in February 2020, barely three months after the virus’s genome had been sequenced, 27 scientists signed a statement in the medical journal The Lancet, unequivocally declaring that the virus had occurred naturally and that any suggestion to the contrary was quackery and a conspiracy theory. Their statement quickly became the accepted orthodoxy for much of the world’s scientific community and virtually all the mainstream media.
However, as time wore on, circumstances regarding the origin of that statement came under scrutiny. In a 2021 Vanity Fair article, investigative journalist Katherine Eban revealed that the statement was organized by a scientist named Peter Daszak. That statement concluded with a declaration from the scientists who signed it that “we have no competing interests.” However, Eban reported in a follow-up article that Daszak was the director of EcoHealth Alliance, which in 2014 had received a $3.7 million grant from the NIH for gain-of-function research and made a sub-grant for $600,000 – to the WIV.
I wrote to the email address reserved for the statement in the Lancet post, posing a number of questions about the circumstances around the creation of the letter and the “competing interests” statement. I also reached out to two of the scientists who signed the letter asking for an interview regarding the statement. I received no responses.
Questions about gain-of-function research predate COVID. In fact, there has been a robust debate over the potential risks and benefits that dates to, at least, 2011. In 2014, a group of 300 prominent scientists, led by Harvard’s highly regarded epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, signed a statement raising alarms about risks associated with gain-of-function research.
The academic controversy caused the Obama administration to issue a moratorium on gain-of-function research, but it included a general exception for studies “urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.” According to Eban’s reporting, the exception quickly became a glaring loophole that essentially rendered the rule useless: the controversial research mostly continued unabated.
The Trump administration scrapped the moratorium in favor of a complex review process. But that process was mostly conducted outside of the public’s view or even significant peer review, leaving many of the critics, including Lipsitch, still wary.
The debate over the origins of COVID still rages today and unfortunately has become politicized, with Democrats and Republicans generally lining up behind the natural and lab-leak theories, respectively. In August 2021, the National Intelligence Council issued an unclassified report in response to an order from President Biden to review the origin of the virus. The report stated that the intelligence community had not been able to reach a conclusion and that the origin would likely never be known without more cooperation from the Chinese government. Of course, the more time that passes the less likely it is that the mystery will ever be solved.
While we would all like to know how the pandemic started, the mere fact that it might have originated from gain-of-function research gone awry makes it imperative to conduct a detailed investigation of the risks and potential benefits of this kind of research. Of all the things we regulate, surely tinkering with viruses to make them more contagious and more lethal should be right at the top of the list. Congress needs to pass laws closely regulating what Rutgers professor Richard Ebright described to Katherine Eban as “looking for a gas leak with a lighted match” and not leave this up to executive orders.”
Almost no one seems to realize that the head of bioethics at NIH – the person who is supposed to make sure that Fauci behaves ethically – is his wife 🧐 https://t.co/CpWHNCqc8y
“According to the NIH website, Christine Grady is the Chief of the Department of Bioethics for the Section on Human Subjects Research.
Dr. Christine Grady’s contributions are both conceptual and empirical and are primarily in the ethics of clinical research, including informed consent, vulnerability, study design, recruitment, and international research ethics, as well as ethical issues faced by nurses and other health care providers.
Dr. Grady is a nurse-bioethicist and a senior investigator who currently serves as the Chief of the Department of Bioethics.
Dr. Grady has published widely in the biomedical and bioethics literature and authored or edited several books, including The Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics.
She served from 2010-2017 as a Commissioner on the President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Her work is known internationally, and she has lectured widely on ethical issues in clinical research and clinical care, HIV disease, and nursing. She is an elected fellow of the Hastings Center and of the American Academy of Nursing, a senior research fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and is the recipient of multiple awards.
She holds a BS in nursing and biology from Georgetown University, a MSN. in community health nursing from Boston College, and a PhD in philosophy from Georgetown University.
Government watchdog Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain information about Grady’s work and her potential involvement in censorship of pandemic information contrary to Fauci’s narrative. “
“One of the annoying tendencies of our conservative-populist movement is to conflate objective evaluations of individuals in the arena with the approval of those individuals. For years, I have found Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell to be a frustrating and imperious charter member of the GOP establishment while simultaneously being the best parliamentary leader we have had in living memory. He has done important things for the movement. I get a lot of grief for saying, “You must love Mitch!” but that’s fine. We need to be objective instead of emotional – we’re not Democrats. And he was objectively skilled and effective once upon a time. Who else could keep a caucus that ranged from maple syrup-moderate Susan Collins, to based Show-Me State conservative Josh Hawley mostly together? Who else was tough enough to hold out under the pressure of the entire regime media to let Obama appoint the odious Merrick Garland to SCOTUS?
No one. That’s just a fact. As much as his contempt for the base grates – and he has always had nothing but contempt for mere plebes – once upon a time, Senator McConnell got it done. Cocaine Mitch may have caused us cons fits, but he gave the Dems grand mals.
And then came the last two years.
It’s time to face facts. The Mitch McConnell of today is not the savvy and savage killer of yesteryear. The Mitch McConnell of today is hapless and hated, weak and tone deaf, barely competition for the second-rate hack who is Chuck Schumer. He is perhaps the most unpopular major politician in America, a group that includes Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. It’s sad, but at 80 years old, Mitch McConnell is fading, and he is not going quietly. Instead, he is raging at the GOP base for daring to object to his increasingly opaque and bumbling schemes.
It’s getting sad.
He is of a kind with failed RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel – failing, flailing, and unwilling to give up power even when it is crystal clear that it is past time to let go.
Let’s review McConnell’s rise and precipitous downfall. Like so many other establishment notables, Donald Trump broke him. As the consummate insider, the guy who played the long game to get to the pinnacle of parliamentary power, he always resented outsiders and interlopers. He was no friend of the Tea Party. He loved the votes and the energy but not the insistence by those uppity peasants that they get a say in policy. After all, policy is the domain of him and his, not of angry housewives, insurance salesmen, and other citizens who neither know nor appreciate how government business is done. When the Tea Party insurgents attacked business as usual, McConnell correctly read the attack on the institutions like the Senate as an attack on him. Out-of-touch, high-handed, and arrogant were features, not bugs, in his mind.
And Trump was the ultimate outsider. Trump got power without eating a hundred dry chicken breasts at a hundred dry Lincoln dinners across Kentucky. And worse, when Trump got power, he used it to keep his promises when the purpose of promises was obviously to get elected so one could go to Washington and take care of business, ignoring the campaign covenants that everyone in the club understands are merely a necessary evil.
Needless to say, you are not in the club.
McConnell always hated Trump – you could see it, and Mitch was never one to hide his feelings. Of course, Trump now hates him back in stupid and tacky ways, meaning volleys of pointless, counterproductive shots back and forth between two old men whose eras are ending. During 45’s reign, McConnell pursued his priorities rather than the President’s. He was responsible for the great judicial renewal under Trump, including appointing three Supreme Court justices. Holding the Scalia seat open for Gorsuch, shepherding Barrett, and hanging tough for Kavanaugh – McConnell deserves props for saving the Court for a generation. But he did not force through other Trumpian priorities – the border was never resolved, our military was largely weakened due to ill-conceived overseas antics, and the budget ballooned. He decided to wait Trump out, knowing that things would return to normal with the orange interloper gone. Don’t imagine that he cried when Joe Biden allegedly won.
And then, even without a GOP majority, it should have been his time to shine. His guerrilla campaign to obstruct Obama as minority leader a decade ago was legendary. You might have thought he would be the voice of the Republican Party saying “No,” but that is not how it went. Like Justice Roberts, Mitch McConnell places the interests of his institution above all else – he wants to preserve the Senate just like Roberts wants to preserve the Supreme Court. And like Roberts, McConnell is in the process of burning down his village to save it.
He wants a return to the old-time transactional Senate of yesterday and showed it by voting for Merrick Garland for Attorney General. Garland proceeded to persecute Republicans, and McConnell has not uttered a peep. He has also tolerated collaboration with enemy initiatives. Who the hell voted for a Republican to go to Washington and sign onto a Democrat gun control law? No one, yet McConnell 2.0 let his Texas minion John Cornyn do that and give the Schumer/Biden team a big win. Mitch 1.0 would have taken Cornyn out back and slapped him silly. The same was true of the recent marriage law that shafts traditional families – if Previous Mitch had said “No dice,” this attempt to screw over traditional Americans would have been a non-starter. But he let it happen. What was he thinking?
And this Omnibus monstrosity… ugh. You have to believe that McConnell wanted it to go down as it did because he could have stopped it. The Senate had a whole year to pass its appropriations, and it waited until the week before Christmas, dropping the 4100-page turd in the legislative punch bowl just hours before the vote. No real debate, no real amendments – McConnell could have at least had his caucus hold out for a Title 42 extension, but he did not. Some might say he could not have made that amendment happen, but isn’t that even worse? What good is a powerless Mitch McConnell? A powerful one is bad enough.
Then there is Ukraine. Younger Mitch would never have been so insane as to announce that giving money to Ukraine to secure its border when ours is wide open is the Republican Party’s Number One priority. It is not our Number One priority. It is not even in the Top Ten. The base was disgusted and appalled. We just lost the midterms, and then this – anyone shocked that so many Republicans stayed home? But Mitch did not care – that turtle toughness again, yet where it is helpful when aimed at our opponents, it is self-destructive when aimed at our people.”
And now you know why McConnell and his ilk played along. It benefits their buddies, lobbyists, and campaign contributors. They all stand to make tons of money, all nicely laundered from our treasury thru Ukraine’s corruptocrats, and into the hands of Mitch’s pals, who will then use it to donate campaign funds to Mitch’s PACs and his pals. Lather, rinse, repeat.
“Zelenskyy Announces Ukraine Will Participate at WEF in January, Reveals Coordination With Blackrock For Reconstruction”
“The government of Ukraine is preparing to participate in the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in January, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced in an address to the nation on Wednesday.
Zelenskyy also revealed that he has been in talks with BlackRock Inc. CEO Larry Fink to coordinate investments in Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction efforts, The Hill reported. Both the WEF and BlackRock are major purveyors of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) practices that have been described as “fascist.”
“Specialists of this company are already helping Ukraine to structure the fund for the reconstruction of our state,” Zelenskyy revealed. It wasn’t immediately clear whether he would attend the January 16-20 WEF in person or participate virtually.
Multiple Republican states, including Florida, Arizona, Missouri, and Louisiana, have withdrawn billions of dollars worth of assets that BlackRock managed because of the firm’s moves away from its fiduciary duty as an asset manager toward left-wing political activism.”
—
Blackrock buys both sides. Note Mitch’s PACs are on the list, as are several who voted for the Ukraine cash giveaway.
“BlackRock is pouring record amounts of money into U.S. political campaigns this year as the asset-management giant faces mounting scrutiny over its size and advocacy of sustainable investing.
The company’s political action committee contributed some $647,000 to congressional candidates, their leadership PACs and political parties between January 2021 and the middle of October, according to the most recent public records before the midterm elections on Nov. 8.”
Laptopgate transgresses so many constitutional, legal, ethical, and moral lines that it almost requires a new textbook to explain all of its sickening wrongdoing. ”
“Atraditional Turkish saying has it that a fish rots from the head down. While more metaphorically than biologically correct, it summarizes the troubling state of today’s FBI.
The FBI had not exactly covered itself in glory while pursuing the execrable “Russian collusion” canard, meant originally both to help Hillary Clinton and harm Donald Trump in the 2016 election, and then post-election to surveil Trump in hopes of impeaching or discrediting him.
We need not rehash the details of Russiagate, other than to state that it was premised on false submissions to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, diverted from its proper purpose of protecting national security, and was intended instead as an improper criminal (not counterintelligence) investigation designed to bring down Trump.
But as disgustingly dishonest as the Russiagate program was, it has now been overtaken in infamy by the bureau’s subornation of our country’s electoral process during the 2020 presidential election.
The first questionable foray of the FBI was to surveil electronically the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who was investigating the real 2016 election interference which James Comey missed—that of Ukraine. To mention one example, Clinton aide Alexandra Chalupa had importuned the Ukrainian Embassy to produce a false document (the “Black Ledger”) implicating candidate Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort. It was silly to believe that Manafort took millions in cash payments from a Ukrainian politician, per the phony ledger, since he had been paid by traceable wire. But the hoax worked, and bad publicity forced Trump to fire Manafort.
But the FBI in 2019 and 2020 was likely not interested in rehashing this issue. It was, however, still interested in spying on Trump. Soon it learned, through surveilling Giuliani on his Ukraine work, of the pending publication by the New York Post of the Hunter Biden laptop story and implications of Joe Biden’s corruption. The story, if widely disseminated, would have sunk the 2020 Biden campaign.
Even if we give the FBI the benefit of the doubt about the legitimacy of its Giuliani investigation, that presumption cannot be stretched to sanction the use of counterintelligence information for political purposes—which is precisely what the suppression of the Post story was.
And of course, in casting doubt on the origins of the Biden laptop story, the FBI censored the facts without informing the bureau’s ultimate national security superior, President Donald Trump. At the time, Trump was America’s highest national security official under the Constitution. If Giuliani were truly a national security threat, the president should have received a defensive briefing from the FBI. He did not.
Soon, James Comey acolyte and Russiagate purveyor James Baker was installed as general counsel at Twitter, the main organ otherwise destined to propagate any information on the laptop scandal. Was this merely coincidental, or was this hire at the request of the FBI? All that can be noted without further investigation is the inference that there is a reasonable likelihood of coordination.
In any case, soon after learning that it did not possess the only laptop hard drive, and that the Post had a copy of it, the bureau began a campaign to deter social media from publishing “hacked and leaked” disinformation material—even though the bureau knew perfectly well that the material was not hacked, freely provided to the Post by the lawful possessor, and not Russian disinformation.
The FBI’s suppression effort was a fraud perpetrated on social media companies by means of the FBI’s representation of the laptop as Russian disinformation. Since the FBI has jurisdiction to investigate wire fraud, it knew its actions contravened the relevant statute.
In addition to this fraud, the FBI sought to curtail both the rights of the Post to communicate freely and the rights of citizens to receive such communication. Only the government and its co-conspirators can violate the First Amendment and, yes, the bureau did just that by conspiring to deprive citizens of their civil rights. The bureau also interfered with the election by suborning and conveying false information about it—an election crime.
Moreover, as we have noted, Donald Trump, as commander-in-chief, was the FBI’s superior in matters of national security, so that at the least its efforts violated the national security chain of command. The FBI arrogated to itself a presidential decision. Its program of election fraud, by false implication of Russian disinformation, was at the least a shameful breach of duty, and possibly even treason, in essence the unlawful deposing of a duly constituted state authority, the president, as head of the executive branch.
If the tiresome two-year jeremiad against the January 6 incursions demonstrates an “assault on our democracy,” exactly what would one call the FBI’s partisan, fraudulent rigging of an election by falsely citing supposed classified counterintelligence information?
Because the FBI’s efforts were nationally, indeed internationally, coordinated, and because FBI headquarters controls and coordinates national security initiatives, the program had to have had the approval of—if not the initiation by—top FBI officials in Washington, D.C. Additionally, the FBI’s teaming with the Department of Homeland Security could not have been accomplished solely through a field office but would presumably need headquarters’ authorization.”
“Earlier this year, I wrote about the alarming progress in the ideological capture of our scientific institutions, especially as news related to discoveries, research, and theories were coming from journalists and pundits who often had little to no advanced education in physical or life science, statistics, engineering, or other technological areas.
Professor Jacobson recently asserted STEM is “DEIing,” reviewing a report issued by the National Association of Scholars on how DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) identity-group ‘social justice’ ideology is taking over STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math).
Today, I offer some more disturbing examples of how race-based theories and social justice priorities negatively impact real research and hinder science.
James Lee, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Minnesota, says that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) now blocks access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may enter “forbidden” territory. Lee makes an important point that taxpayers paid for the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), which combines genome scans of several million individuals with extensive data about health, education, occupation, and income.
My colleagues at other universities and I have run into problems involving applications to study the relationships among intelligence, education, and health outcomes. Sometimes, NIH denies access to some of the attributes that I have just mentioned, on the grounds that studying their genetic basis is “stigmatizing.” Sometimes, it demands updates about ongoing research, with the implied threat that it could withdraw usage if it doesn’t receive satisfactory answers. In some cases, NIH has retroactively withdrawn access for research it had previously approved.
Note that none of the studies I am referring to include inquiries into race or sex differences. Apparently, NIH is clamping down on a broad range of attempts to explore the relationship between genetics and intelligence.
What is NIH’s justification?
…The federal government was under no obligation to assemble the magnificent database that is the dbGaP. Now that it has done so at taxpayer expense, however, it does have an obligation to provide access to that database evenhandedly—not to allow it for some and deny it to others, based on the content of their research.
The capture isn’t only impacting American science. Across the Atlantic, the British Royal Society of Chemistry claims chemistry is racist, as only one in 575 professors is black.
The RSC report also shows that ethnic minority students are interested in studying chemistry at university, but they are put off by what they perceive to be an unwelcoming atmosphere of academic research. This is especially true of black students and researchers.
Official figures show that at undergraduate level 4.9% of students studying chemistry-related subjects identify as black, significantly higher than the national 3.0% of the UK population. But most choose not to enter research. Those who do fall away at every stage of the career ladder: 1.4% of postgraduate chemistry researchers identify as black, 1% of lecturers and 0% of professors.”
“It now seems certain that the omnibus appropriations bill will not authorize a COVID Commission. For over two years, members of Congress have proposed a national body to draw lessons from the nation’s experience with COVID to inform future decision-makers on how to better handle the next pandemic.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and President Biden never demonstrated enthusiasm for the idea. One reason is that previous national commissions have examined events, e.g., the financial crisis of 2009, that are settled in history. COVID rages on. President Biden may also worry that a credible bipartisan report, like the one proposed by Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.), could be damning to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency to which he’s promised a 21 percent budget increase next year.
Despite being in the spotlight, the CDC has yet to demonstrate any improvement in stopping recurring waves of COVID, nor has it generated confidence that it can prevent either monkeypox or RSV. Worse, there is concern that mRNA vaccines may be tied to fatal adverse effects. If so, the question of why the Food and Drug Administration and CDC did not require randomized clinical trials for the most recent COVID boosters to establish safety will be hard to avoid.
Thankfully, an extraordinary effort by Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who chairs the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, may have provided the nation with the next best thing to a commission report. Last week, committee staff delivered a remarkably comprehensive report, 242 pages long, on the government’s response to COVID-19. Its title gives up the game: “Historically Unprepared.”
Unlike previous reports by The Commonwealth Fund and the National Academies of Science, which studiously avoided criticism of the CDC, Peters’ report offers lawyerly “findings of fact,” that points out that the CDC was not remotely prepared to manage an epidemic that its own experts said was inevitable.
Peters’ report tells that the CDC had no preexisting research relevant to developing a COVID test; no stockpile of PPE supplies or plan for distributing them; was uninformed regarding supply chain issues relating to therapeutic drugs and had no sense of the nation’s hospitals’ capacity to treat COVID victims. Further, it resisted help from private sector laboratories to develop testing. The simplest epidemiological reasoning about Americans at most risk, thinking that guided Britain’s focus on first protecting those over 65 with relevant co-morbidities, was missing in the CDC’s thinking.
Peters, a Democrat, is hard on President Trump. The president’s daily commentary offered little comfort and, more than once, useless, even dangerous, advice. Consider, however, the president was bound to rely on the CDC, an agency that consistently failed to provide him or the public with timely and accurate advice on the nature of the virus or steps that might contain its spread. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s official spokesperson, promoted a constantly changing list of largely ineffective actions. Sanitizing grocery carts did not slow COVID’s spread and some studies say social distancing didn’t help and masking with up to three masks(!) might not have either.
Overall, the committee’s report is a model of what a competent governmental investigation should look like. The staff examined over 70,000 pages of materials recording how the government responded to the crisis. It also conducted 90 interviews, many with professionals who had relevant knowledge of agency operations.
Peters’s committee report settled upon 17 solid recommendations for future responses to pandemics. One recommendation, providing the CDC substantially more money, seems discordant with the report’s other findings. Despite nearly $5 billion in additional funds allocated by Congress for “data modernization” over the last five budgets, the report finds the CDC has yet to standardize data collection among various public agencies.
Without fundamental reform, it is a leap of faith to believe that the CDC can do a better job with more resources. Peters’ report recalls that past heads of the agency failed to take even the basic steps necessary to have checked the spread of COVID, despite explicit recommendations by previous review panels. Political appointees seldom prove equal to the task of reforming their agencies. Tenured underlings know how to wait them out. “
“Being all uber-woke you can be has just about brought the Army to its knees. In this day and age, they’ve fallen so far down the rabbit hole anymore that they can’t get anyone who’s their normal target recruit to sign up to save their lives. Or anyone else’s, for that matter. Their recruiting numbers are dismal.
…The service fell 15,000 recruits short of its fiscal 2022 goal and it cut its goal for total number of soldiers in fiscal year 2023 by an additional 15,000, suggesting that it sees a longer-term problem.
Only 23% of young Americans meet the fitness, health and other standards required to join the military, according to Army statistics, and less than 10% are interested in joining.
WHY aren’t they interested in joining? I’ll give you one clue.”
“How about another?”
All this morale-destroying socialist BS produced – like the massive admin bloat on college campuses – the accompanying rise in employment opportunities not for warfighters, but for Experts™ and Diversity Police™.
…The Biden administration’s politicization of the armed forces has contributed to this disturbing collapse in morale.
Soon after Joe Biden became president, the Pentagon ordered an unprecedented military-wide “stand down” of service members to root out right wing domestic extremists, wasting 5.8 million man hours. The Pentagon then hired Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officers at salaries as high as $200,000. For the past two years, the Department of Defense rigidly enforced vaccine requirements, cutting off tens of thousands of service members from benefits, even when many have legitimate objections and are young, healthy adults.
…In recent years, the academies have also taught radical doctrines like Critical Race Theory under the label of “diversity and inclusion.” The Air Force Academy established a special “Diversity and Inclusion reading room” that it described as a “safe space” for America’s young warriors. It also created an organization of hand-picked cadets – identified by a purple braid on their dress uniform—to spread these controversial ideals in the ranks. At West Point, cadets can now minor in “Diversity and Inclusion Studies” alongside cadets studying serious subjects like Grand Strategy, Aeronautical Engineering, and Nuclear Science.”
“One of the great “mysteries” that has been puzzling lawmakers in the swamp is the fact that the American labor force is still “missing” more than three million workers who were employed before COVID struck and could be working today. Demographically, this group slants strongly toward young males, deflating the idea that a lot of older people who lost their jobs during the shutdowns simply decided to retire early. The labor force participation rate remains 1.3% lower than before the pandemic began and there are roughly six million jobs still unfilled across the country. So where are all of these people and why haven’t they gone out to take new jobs? Fox Business reports this week that one reason may be found in the lucrative benefits from a combination of extended unemployment payments and Obamacare subsidies that dole out enough cash for many people to get by while simply staying home.
The labor force participation rate was 62.1% last month, notably lower than the 63.4% mark it was at before the coronavirus pandemic struck the United States in March 2020.
There are numerous reasons that unemployed Americans aren’t entering the workforce, including ongoing fears of COVID-19, disabilities such as “long COVID,” and other care responsibilities. One factor that is contributing to the relatively low labor force participation rate is the combination of unemployment benefits and recently expanded Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies, according a new study by the nonprofit Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
In 14 states, unemployment benefits and ACA subsidies for a family of four with two people not working amounts to an annualized equivalent of $80,000 a year in wages and benefits, the study found.
The amount of money a family requires to get by varies wildly from state to state, but an annual income of $80K will allow a family of four to make ends meet in many areas. As noted above, 14 states are doling out that much. In three states, Washington, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, those benefits add up to more than $100K per year.
Now, look at the median household income in those states. In Washington, it’s 82K. In both New Jersey and Massachusetts, it’s 89K. In more rural states like Arkansas, the combined benefits may be “only” 80K, but the median household income there is 52K.
Those families have a choice of going back to their full-time jobs or staying home and playing Call of Duty while bringing in ten to twenty thousand dollars more per year. Obviously, a significant number of people have chosen option B.
When you find yourself in a position where you have to rely on welfare or any form of government benefits, the system is supposed to give you enough money to “get by” so you don’t fall through the cracks entirely. It’s not designed to provide you with more money than you would have earned by working. As these figures appear to demonstrate, there are plenty of people who will opt for “free money” over employment, particularly when not working is more lucrative.
This is an ancient debate in our country and it comes up whenever discussions of social service programs arise. America has long attempted to be a compassionate nation where the government will take care of those who can’t make it on their own. But the analogy of society being like a cart with some people pulling it and some riding in it is accurate. When you have too many people riding in the cart and not enough pulling it, the cart grinds to a halt.”
Pretty scary, that video of the Brittish lady, AJ. I know that is the heart’s desire of many here to be able to arrest people simply because they think differently on issues. They never consider how it can backfire and be used against them, too. So.Very.Sad.
Wandering Views 
Can’t wait. The media needs to be exposed too.
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The worst of the woke companies…
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Bye.
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Ummmmmm…..
Hint: It’s obesity.
Same stuff applies for men too, this isn’t just a female problem. Men, women, and children all suffer from obesity, and it’s not racist to point out regardless of the skin color of the overweight person.
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They’ll defend these partisan frauds who run the FBI until the end.
Yep.
Expose it all.
They can’t, because it would expose them as well.
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Biden has taught them well.
https://www.newsweek.com/fbi-gaslights-america-over-twitter-files-opinion-1769352
“The FBI is gaslighting the American people over the stunning—if unsurprising—evidence that it engaged in a conspiracy with Big Tech to silence wrongthinkers in violation of the First Amendment, as the Twitter Files have revealed.
Meanwhile, in attacking those who refuse to be gaslit, the bureau is also telegraphing that it would respond to Congress investigating its hyper-politicization and weaponization with relentless information warfare.
The gaslighting comes in the preeminent law enforcement agency’s “move along, nothing to see here” response to the Twitter Files. It stated that “correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements.” The FBI, it says, “provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.”
Here is the kind of conduct the FBI wants you to believe is completely normal:
Grooming Twitter executives for months in advance of the release of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story to compel them to kill the story.
Referring myriad tweets concerning inherently political matters to Twitter’s censorship team for purging—so many tweets, in fact, that during one such bulk censorship request, a Twitter employee described the review of the “possible violative content” as a “monumental undertaking.”
Flagging specific Twitter accounts for the platform to take action against—up to and including suspension—apparently for engaging in thoughtcrime of promoting “civic misinformation” by making jokes related to the 2020 election.
Paying Twitter $3.4 million for its time and effort censoring Americans.
When a domestic intelligence agency is making repeated contacts with your executives about “content moderation,” lodging specific censorship requests directly and via cutout—amid pressure from federal lawmakers to do the same—those “requests” start to look a lot more like demands.
The flimsy national security pretext used to justify the FBI’s censorship requests, often targeting random, unpopular accounts, is equally outrageous.
The FBI used allegations of “foreign interference” as a cover to pursue domestic wrongthink, as its 80-agent-strong Foreign Interference Task Force coordinated with Twitter. For their part, Twitter executives seemed to find scant evidence of such interference—a throwback to Russiagate, and the targeting of the Trump campaign on the accusation advisor Carter Page was a Russian asset.
Authorities also apparently sought to treat “election misinformation” as a dire threat—a pretext perhaps more disturbing than the security apparatus’ now-familiar crying wolf over Russian interference.
It’s well known by now that the security state has linked skepticism over election integrity to “insurrection,” and sought to cast skeptics as domestic violent extremists.
But that is only the beginning. Consider the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) position on this matter—one that the FBI seemed to embrace as it participated alongside CISA in meetings with Twitter and other Big Tech companies in the run-up to the 2020 election.
CISA has stretched its mandate of protecting election infrastructure to include targeting purported “mis-, dis-, and malinformation” regarding elections—that is, to combatting ideas it claims threaten physical equipment.
The agency’s director, Jen Easterly, has said that “the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important.”
In other words, thought policing is now a national security imperative.”
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Expose Fauci and his Chinese minions. They unleashed Covid on the world.
“Congress Should Investigate ‘Gain-of-Function’ Research”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/12/29/congress_should_investigate_gain-of-function_research_148661.html
“Before the pandemic, I suspect that most of you, like me, had never heard of gain-of-function research. What we learned during the pandemic is that scientists around the world routinely tinker with the genome of viruses to see how the induced changes will affect replication of the virus (contagiousness) and the effects it has on its host (lethality). Such research has apparently been going on for decades and is routinely funded by governments, including ours.
Within weeks of the COVID-19 virus emerging in China near the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), many began to question whether the virus had been created by gain-of-function research and somehow escaped from WIV’s labs. Recently analyzed Chinese documents from early in the pandemic seem to suggest the virus might have come from WIV. To many, the proposition that the novel coronavirus just happened to naturally occur a few hundred yards from the WIV facility seemed too much of a coincidence.
But in February 2020, barely three months after the virus’s genome had been sequenced, 27 scientists signed a statement in the medical journal The Lancet, unequivocally declaring that the virus had occurred naturally and that any suggestion to the contrary was quackery and a conspiracy theory. Their statement quickly became the accepted orthodoxy for much of the world’s scientific community and virtually all the mainstream media.
However, as time wore on, circumstances regarding the origin of that statement came under scrutiny. In a 2021 Vanity Fair article, investigative journalist Katherine Eban revealed that the statement was organized by a scientist named Peter Daszak. That statement concluded with a declaration from the scientists who signed it that “we have no competing interests.” However, Eban reported in a follow-up article that Daszak was the director of EcoHealth Alliance, which in 2014 had received a $3.7 million grant from the NIH for gain-of-function research and made a sub-grant for $600,000 – to the WIV.
I wrote to the email address reserved for the statement in the Lancet post, posing a number of questions about the circumstances around the creation of the letter and the “competing interests” statement. I also reached out to two of the scientists who signed the letter asking for an interview regarding the statement. I received no responses.
Questions about gain-of-function research predate COVID. In fact, there has been a robust debate over the potential risks and benefits that dates to, at least, 2011. In 2014, a group of 300 prominent scientists, led by Harvard’s highly regarded epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, signed a statement raising alarms about risks associated with gain-of-function research.
The academic controversy caused the Obama administration to issue a moratorium on gain-of-function research, but it included a general exception for studies “urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.” According to Eban’s reporting, the exception quickly became a glaring loophole that essentially rendered the rule useless: the controversial research mostly continued unabated.
The Trump administration scrapped the moratorium in favor of a complex review process. But that process was mostly conducted outside of the public’s view or even significant peer review, leaving many of the critics, including Lipsitch, still wary.
The debate over the origins of COVID still rages today and unfortunately has become politicized, with Democrats and Republicans generally lining up behind the natural and lab-leak theories, respectively. In August 2021, the National Intelligence Council issued an unclassified report in response to an order from President Biden to review the origin of the virus. The report stated that the intelligence community had not been able to reach a conclusion and that the origin would likely never be known without more cooperation from the Chinese government. Of course, the more time that passes the less likely it is that the mystery will ever be solved.
While we would all like to know how the pandemic started, the mere fact that it might have originated from gain-of-function research gone awry makes it imperative to conduct a detailed investigation of the risks and potential benefits of this kind of research. Of all the things we regulate, surely tinkering with viruses to make them more contagious and more lethal should be right at the top of the list. Congress needs to pass laws closely regulating what Rutgers professor Richard Ebright described to Katherine Eban as “looking for a gas leak with a lighted match” and not leave this up to executive orders.”
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Expose Fauci.
—-
“Elon Musk Hammers Another Fauci Conflict of Interest”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/12/28/elon-musk-hammers-another-fauci-conflict-of-interest-n2617634
“According to the NIH website, Christine Grady is the Chief of the Department of Bioethics for the Section on Human Subjects Research.
Dr. Christine Grady’s contributions are both conceptual and empirical and are primarily in the ethics of clinical research, including informed consent, vulnerability, study design, recruitment, and international research ethics, as well as ethical issues faced by nurses and other health care providers.
Dr. Grady is a nurse-bioethicist and a senior investigator who currently serves as the Chief of the Department of Bioethics.
Dr. Grady has published widely in the biomedical and bioethics literature and authored or edited several books, including The Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics.
She served from 2010-2017 as a Commissioner on the President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Her work is known internationally, and she has lectured widely on ethical issues in clinical research and clinical care, HIV disease, and nursing. She is an elected fellow of the Hastings Center and of the American Academy of Nursing, a senior research fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and is the recipient of multiple awards.
She holds a BS in nursing and biology from Georgetown University, a MSN. in community health nursing from Boston College, and a PhD in philosophy from Georgetown University.
Government watchdog Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain information about Grady’s work and her potential involvement in censorship of pandemic information contrary to Fauci’s narrative. “
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His best days are long over. Time to move on.
“The Republicans’ Mitch McConnell Problem”
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2022/12/29/the-republicans-mitch-mcconnell-problem-n2617637
“One of the annoying tendencies of our conservative-populist movement is to conflate objective evaluations of individuals in the arena with the approval of those individuals. For years, I have found Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell to be a frustrating and imperious charter member of the GOP establishment while simultaneously being the best parliamentary leader we have had in living memory. He has done important things for the movement. I get a lot of grief for saying, “You must love Mitch!” but that’s fine. We need to be objective instead of emotional – we’re not Democrats. And he was objectively skilled and effective once upon a time. Who else could keep a caucus that ranged from maple syrup-moderate Susan Collins, to based Show-Me State conservative Josh Hawley mostly together? Who else was tough enough to hold out under the pressure of the entire regime media to let Obama appoint the odious Merrick Garland to SCOTUS?
No one. That’s just a fact. As much as his contempt for the base grates – and he has always had nothing but contempt for mere plebes – once upon a time, Senator McConnell got it done. Cocaine Mitch may have caused us cons fits, but he gave the Dems grand mals.
And then came the last two years.
It’s time to face facts. The Mitch McConnell of today is not the savvy and savage killer of yesteryear. The Mitch McConnell of today is hapless and hated, weak and tone deaf, barely competition for the second-rate hack who is Chuck Schumer. He is perhaps the most unpopular major politician in America, a group that includes Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. It’s sad, but at 80 years old, Mitch McConnell is fading, and he is not going quietly. Instead, he is raging at the GOP base for daring to object to his increasingly opaque and bumbling schemes.
It’s getting sad.
He is of a kind with failed RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel – failing, flailing, and unwilling to give up power even when it is crystal clear that it is past time to let go.
Let’s review McConnell’s rise and precipitous downfall. Like so many other establishment notables, Donald Trump broke him. As the consummate insider, the guy who played the long game to get to the pinnacle of parliamentary power, he always resented outsiders and interlopers. He was no friend of the Tea Party. He loved the votes and the energy but not the insistence by those uppity peasants that they get a say in policy. After all, policy is the domain of him and his, not of angry housewives, insurance salesmen, and other citizens who neither know nor appreciate how government business is done. When the Tea Party insurgents attacked business as usual, McConnell correctly read the attack on the institutions like the Senate as an attack on him. Out-of-touch, high-handed, and arrogant were features, not bugs, in his mind.
And Trump was the ultimate outsider. Trump got power without eating a hundred dry chicken breasts at a hundred dry Lincoln dinners across Kentucky. And worse, when Trump got power, he used it to keep his promises when the purpose of promises was obviously to get elected so one could go to Washington and take care of business, ignoring the campaign covenants that everyone in the club understands are merely a necessary evil.
Needless to say, you are not in the club.
McConnell always hated Trump – you could see it, and Mitch was never one to hide his feelings. Of course, Trump now hates him back in stupid and tacky ways, meaning volleys of pointless, counterproductive shots back and forth between two old men whose eras are ending. During 45’s reign, McConnell pursued his priorities rather than the President’s. He was responsible for the great judicial renewal under Trump, including appointing three Supreme Court justices. Holding the Scalia seat open for Gorsuch, shepherding Barrett, and hanging tough for Kavanaugh – McConnell deserves props for saving the Court for a generation. But he did not force through other Trumpian priorities – the border was never resolved, our military was largely weakened due to ill-conceived overseas antics, and the budget ballooned. He decided to wait Trump out, knowing that things would return to normal with the orange interloper gone. Don’t imagine that he cried when Joe Biden allegedly won.
And then, even without a GOP majority, it should have been his time to shine. His guerrilla campaign to obstruct Obama as minority leader a decade ago was legendary. You might have thought he would be the voice of the Republican Party saying “No,” but that is not how it went. Like Justice Roberts, Mitch McConnell places the interests of his institution above all else – he wants to preserve the Senate just like Roberts wants to preserve the Supreme Court. And like Roberts, McConnell is in the process of burning down his village to save it.
He wants a return to the old-time transactional Senate of yesterday and showed it by voting for Merrick Garland for Attorney General. Garland proceeded to persecute Republicans, and McConnell has not uttered a peep. He has also tolerated collaboration with enemy initiatives. Who the hell voted for a Republican to go to Washington and sign onto a Democrat gun control law? No one, yet McConnell 2.0 let his Texas minion John Cornyn do that and give the Schumer/Biden team a big win. Mitch 1.0 would have taken Cornyn out back and slapped him silly. The same was true of the recent marriage law that shafts traditional families – if Previous Mitch had said “No dice,” this attempt to screw over traditional Americans would have been a non-starter. But he let it happen. What was he thinking?
And this Omnibus monstrosity… ugh. You have to believe that McConnell wanted it to go down as it did because he could have stopped it. The Senate had a whole year to pass its appropriations, and it waited until the week before Christmas, dropping the 4100-page turd in the legislative punch bowl just hours before the vote. No real debate, no real amendments – McConnell could have at least had his caucus hold out for a Title 42 extension, but he did not. Some might say he could not have made that amendment happen, but isn’t that even worse? What good is a powerless Mitch McConnell? A powerful one is bad enough.
Then there is Ukraine. Younger Mitch would never have been so insane as to announce that giving money to Ukraine to secure its border when ours is wide open is the Republican Party’s Number One priority. It is not our Number One priority. It is not even in the Top Ten. The base was disgusted and appalled. We just lost the midterms, and then this – anyone shocked that so many Republicans stayed home? But Mitch did not care – that turtle toughness again, yet where it is helpful when aimed at our opponents, it is self-destructive when aimed at our people.”
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And now you know why McConnell and his ilk played along. It benefits their buddies, lobbyists, and campaign contributors. They all stand to make tons of money, all nicely laundered from our treasury thru Ukraine’s corruptocrats, and into the hands of Mitch’s pals, who will then use it to donate campaign funds to Mitch’s PACs and his pals. Lather, rinse, repeat.
“Zelenskyy Announces Ukraine Will Participate at WEF in January, Reveals Coordination With Blackrock For Reconstruction”
https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/28/zelensky-announces-ukraine-will-participate-at-wef-in-january-reveals-coordination-with-blackrock-for-reconstruction/
“The government of Ukraine is preparing to participate in the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in January, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced in an address to the nation on Wednesday.
Zelenskyy also revealed that he has been in talks with BlackRock Inc. CEO Larry Fink to coordinate investments in Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction efforts, The Hill reported. Both the WEF and BlackRock are major purveyors of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) practices that have been described as “fascist.”
“Specialists of this company are already helping Ukraine to structure the fund for the reconstruction of our state,” Zelenskyy revealed. It wasn’t immediately clear whether he would attend the January 16-20 WEF in person or participate virtually.
Multiple Republican states, including Florida, Arizona, Missouri, and Louisiana, have withdrawn billions of dollars worth of assets that BlackRock managed because of the firm’s moves away from its fiduciary duty as an asset manager toward left-wing political activism.”
—
Blackrock buys both sides. Note Mitch’s PACs are on the list, as are several who voted for the Ukraine cash giveaway.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/blackrock-inc/recipients?id=D000021872
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Incestuous as all get up.
https://www.pionline.com/washington/blackrock-donates-record-amount-us-political-campaigns-esg-fight-heats
“BlackRock is pouring record amounts of money into U.S. political campaigns this year as the asset-management giant faces mounting scrutiny over its size and advocacy of sustainable investing.
The company’s political action committee contributed some $647,000 to congressional candidates, their leadership PACs and political parties between January 2021 and the middle of October, according to the most recent public records before the midterm elections on Nov. 8.”
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“Wray’s FBI Is Rotting from the Head Down
Laptopgate transgresses so many constitutional, legal, ethical, and moral lines that it almost requires a new textbook to explain all of its sickening wrongdoing. ”
https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/26/wrays-fbi-is-rotting-from-the-head-down/
“Atraditional Turkish saying has it that a fish rots from the head down. While more metaphorically than biologically correct, it summarizes the troubling state of today’s FBI.
The FBI had not exactly covered itself in glory while pursuing the execrable “Russian collusion” canard, meant originally both to help Hillary Clinton and harm Donald Trump in the 2016 election, and then post-election to surveil Trump in hopes of impeaching or discrediting him.
We need not rehash the details of Russiagate, other than to state that it was premised on false submissions to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, diverted from its proper purpose of protecting national security, and was intended instead as an improper criminal (not counterintelligence) investigation designed to bring down Trump.
But as disgustingly dishonest as the Russiagate program was, it has now been overtaken in infamy by the bureau’s subornation of our country’s electoral process during the 2020 presidential election.
The first questionable foray of the FBI was to surveil electronically the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who was investigating the real 2016 election interference which James Comey missed—that of Ukraine. To mention one example, Clinton aide Alexandra Chalupa had importuned the Ukrainian Embassy to produce a false document (the “Black Ledger”) implicating candidate Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort. It was silly to believe that Manafort took millions in cash payments from a Ukrainian politician, per the phony ledger, since he had been paid by traceable wire. But the hoax worked, and bad publicity forced Trump to fire Manafort.
But the FBI in 2019 and 2020 was likely not interested in rehashing this issue. It was, however, still interested in spying on Trump. Soon it learned, through surveilling Giuliani on his Ukraine work, of the pending publication by the New York Post of the Hunter Biden laptop story and implications of Joe Biden’s corruption. The story, if widely disseminated, would have sunk the 2020 Biden campaign.
Even if we give the FBI the benefit of the doubt about the legitimacy of its Giuliani investigation, that presumption cannot be stretched to sanction the use of counterintelligence information for political purposes—which is precisely what the suppression of the Post story was.
And of course, in casting doubt on the origins of the Biden laptop story, the FBI censored the facts without informing the bureau’s ultimate national security superior, President Donald Trump. At the time, Trump was America’s highest national security official under the Constitution. If Giuliani were truly a national security threat, the president should have received a defensive briefing from the FBI. He did not.
Soon, James Comey acolyte and Russiagate purveyor James Baker was installed as general counsel at Twitter, the main organ otherwise destined to propagate any information on the laptop scandal. Was this merely coincidental, or was this hire at the request of the FBI? All that can be noted without further investigation is the inference that there is a reasonable likelihood of coordination.
In any case, soon after learning that it did not possess the only laptop hard drive, and that the Post had a copy of it, the bureau began a campaign to deter social media from publishing “hacked and leaked” disinformation material—even though the bureau knew perfectly well that the material was not hacked, freely provided to the Post by the lawful possessor, and not Russian disinformation.
The FBI’s suppression effort was a fraud perpetrated on social media companies by means of the FBI’s representation of the laptop as Russian disinformation. Since the FBI has jurisdiction to investigate wire fraud, it knew its actions contravened the relevant statute.
In addition to this fraud, the FBI sought to curtail both the rights of the Post to communicate freely and the rights of citizens to receive such communication. Only the government and its co-conspirators can violate the First Amendment and, yes, the bureau did just that by conspiring to deprive citizens of their civil rights. The bureau also interfered with the election by suborning and conveying false information about it—an election crime.
Moreover, as we have noted, Donald Trump, as commander-in-chief, was the FBI’s superior in matters of national security, so that at the least its efforts violated the national security chain of command. The FBI arrogated to itself a presidential decision. Its program of election fraud, by false implication of Russian disinformation, was at the least a shameful breach of duty, and possibly even treason, in essence the unlawful deposing of a duly constituted state authority, the president, as head of the executive branch.
If the tiresome two-year jeremiad against the January 6 incursions demonstrates an “assault on our democracy,” exactly what would one call the FBI’s partisan, fraudulent rigging of an election by falsely citing supposed classified counterintelligence information?
Because the FBI’s efforts were nationally, indeed internationally, coordinated, and because FBI headquarters controls and coordinates national security initiatives, the program had to have had the approval of—if not the initiation by—top FBI officials in Washington, D.C. Additionally, the FBI’s teaming with the Department of Homeland Security could not have been accomplished solely through a field office but would presumably need headquarters’ authorization.”
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So what they’re saying is Trump was right.
Again.
“Feds Ban TikTok On All US Government Devices…”
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Fauci’s and the NIH’s grubby little fingers are all over this.
“The Ideological Capture of Our Scientific Institutions Accelerates
Denying research opportunities because they do not align with an agenda is inane and potentially destructive.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/12/the-ideological-capture-of-our-scientific-institutions-accelerates/
“Earlier this year, I wrote about the alarming progress in the ideological capture of our scientific institutions, especially as news related to discoveries, research, and theories were coming from journalists and pundits who often had little to no advanced education in physical or life science, statistics, engineering, or other technological areas.
Professor Jacobson recently asserted STEM is “DEIing,” reviewing a report issued by the National Association of Scholars on how DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) identity-group ‘social justice’ ideology is taking over STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math).
Today, I offer some more disturbing examples of how race-based theories and social justice priorities negatively impact real research and hinder science.
James Lee, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Minnesota, says that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) now blocks access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may enter “forbidden” territory. Lee makes an important point that taxpayers paid for the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), which combines genome scans of several million individuals with extensive data about health, education, occupation, and income.
My colleagues at other universities and I have run into problems involving applications to study the relationships among intelligence, education, and health outcomes. Sometimes, NIH denies access to some of the attributes that I have just mentioned, on the grounds that studying their genetic basis is “stigmatizing.” Sometimes, it demands updates about ongoing research, with the implied threat that it could withdraw usage if it doesn’t receive satisfactory answers. In some cases, NIH has retroactively withdrawn access for research it had previously approved.
Note that none of the studies I am referring to include inquiries into race or sex differences. Apparently, NIH is clamping down on a broad range of attempts to explore the relationship between genetics and intelligence.
What is NIH’s justification?
…The federal government was under no obligation to assemble the magnificent database that is the dbGaP. Now that it has done so at taxpayer expense, however, it does have an obligation to provide access to that database evenhandedly—not to allow it for some and deny it to others, based on the content of their research.
The capture isn’t only impacting American science. Across the Atlantic, the British Royal Society of Chemistry claims chemistry is racist, as only one in 575 professors is black.
The RSC report also shows that ethnic minority students are interested in studying chemistry at university, but they are put off by what they perceive to be an unwelcoming atmosphere of academic research. This is especially true of black students and researchers.
Official figures show that at undergraduate level 4.9% of students studying chemistry-related subjects identify as black, significantly higher than the national 3.0% of the UK population. But most choose not to enter research. Those who do fall away at every stage of the career ladder: 1.4% of postgraduate chemistry researchers identify as black, 1% of lecturers and 0% of professors.”
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This is why the govt doesn’t really want a Covid Commission. Too much would be exposed about their roll in the numerous failures.
“In lieu of a COVID Commission, a new report exposes CDC failures”
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/3786398-in-lieu-of-a-covid-commission-a-new-report-exposes-cdc-failures/
“It now seems certain that the omnibus appropriations bill will not authorize a COVID Commission. For over two years, members of Congress have proposed a national body to draw lessons from the nation’s experience with COVID to inform future decision-makers on how to better handle the next pandemic.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and President Biden never demonstrated enthusiasm for the idea. One reason is that previous national commissions have examined events, e.g., the financial crisis of 2009, that are settled in history. COVID rages on. President Biden may also worry that a credible bipartisan report, like the one proposed by Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.), could be damning to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency to which he’s promised a 21 percent budget increase next year.
Despite being in the spotlight, the CDC has yet to demonstrate any improvement in stopping recurring waves of COVID, nor has it generated confidence that it can prevent either monkeypox or RSV. Worse, there is concern that mRNA vaccines may be tied to fatal adverse effects. If so, the question of why the Food and Drug Administration and CDC did not require randomized clinical trials for the most recent COVID boosters to establish safety will be hard to avoid.
Thankfully, an extraordinary effort by Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who chairs the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, may have provided the nation with the next best thing to a commission report. Last week, committee staff delivered a remarkably comprehensive report, 242 pages long, on the government’s response to COVID-19. Its title gives up the game: “Historically Unprepared.”
Unlike previous reports by The Commonwealth Fund and the National Academies of Science, which studiously avoided criticism of the CDC, Peters’ report offers lawyerly “findings of fact,” that points out that the CDC was not remotely prepared to manage an epidemic that its own experts said was inevitable.
Peters’ report tells that the CDC had no preexisting research relevant to developing a COVID test; no stockpile of PPE supplies or plan for distributing them; was uninformed regarding supply chain issues relating to therapeutic drugs and had no sense of the nation’s hospitals’ capacity to treat COVID victims. Further, it resisted help from private sector laboratories to develop testing. The simplest epidemiological reasoning about Americans at most risk, thinking that guided Britain’s focus on first protecting those over 65 with relevant co-morbidities, was missing in the CDC’s thinking.
Peters, a Democrat, is hard on President Trump. The president’s daily commentary offered little comfort and, more than once, useless, even dangerous, advice. Consider, however, the president was bound to rely on the CDC, an agency that consistently failed to provide him or the public with timely and accurate advice on the nature of the virus or steps that might contain its spread. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s official spokesperson, promoted a constantly changing list of largely ineffective actions. Sanitizing grocery carts did not slow COVID’s spread and some studies say social distancing didn’t help and masking with up to three masks(!) might not have either.
Overall, the committee’s report is a model of what a competent governmental investigation should look like. The staff examined over 70,000 pages of materials recording how the government responded to the crisis. It also conducted 90 interviews, many with professionals who had relevant knowledge of agency operations.
Peters’s committee report settled upon 17 solid recommendations for future responses to pandemics. One recommendation, providing the CDC substantially more money, seems discordant with the report’s other findings. Despite nearly $5 billion in additional funds allocated by Congress for “data modernization” over the last five budgets, the report finds the CDC has yet to standardize data collection among various public agencies.
Without fundamental reform, it is a leap of faith to believe that the CDC can do a better job with more resources. Peters’ report recalls that past heads of the agency failed to take even the basic steps necessary to have checked the spread of COVID, despite explicit recommendations by previous review panels. Political appointees seldom prove equal to the task of reforming their agencies. Tenured underlings know how to wait them out. “
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Sure, why not?
I mean what could go wrong?
“Woke and broke U.S. Army now accepting recruits with ADHD, other “behavioral challenges”
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2022/12/28/woke-and-broke-u-s-army-now-accepting-recruits-with-adhd-other-behavioral-challenges-n520398
“Being all uber-woke you can be has just about brought the Army to its knees. In this day and age, they’ve fallen so far down the rabbit hole anymore that they can’t get anyone who’s their normal target recruit to sign up to save their lives. Or anyone else’s, for that matter. Their recruiting numbers are dismal.
…The service fell 15,000 recruits short of its fiscal 2022 goal and it cut its goal for total number of soldiers in fiscal year 2023 by an additional 15,000, suggesting that it sees a longer-term problem.
Only 23% of young Americans meet the fitness, health and other standards required to join the military, according to Army statistics, and less than 10% are interested in joining.
WHY aren’t they interested in joining? I’ll give you one clue.”
“How about another?”
All this morale-destroying socialist BS produced – like the massive admin bloat on college campuses – the accompanying rise in employment opportunities not for warfighters, but for Experts™ and Diversity Police™.
…The Biden administration’s politicization of the armed forces has contributed to this disturbing collapse in morale.
Soon after Joe Biden became president, the Pentagon ordered an unprecedented military-wide “stand down” of service members to root out right wing domestic extremists, wasting 5.8 million man hours. The Pentagon then hired Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officers at salaries as high as $200,000. For the past two years, the Department of Defense rigidly enforced vaccine requirements, cutting off tens of thousands of service members from benefits, even when many have legitimate objections and are young, healthy adults.
…In recent years, the academies have also taught radical doctrines like Critical Race Theory under the label of “diversity and inclusion.” The Air Force Academy established a special “Diversity and Inclusion reading room” that it described as a “safe space” for America’s young warriors. It also created an organization of hand-picked cadets – identified by a purple braid on their dress uniform—to spread these controversial ideals in the ranks. At West Point, cadets can now minor in “Diversity and Inclusion Studies” alongside cadets studying serious subjects like Grand Strategy, Aeronautical Engineering, and Nuclear Science.”
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With incentives like these, why work?
And Dems know they’ll always vote for the party of handouts.
“In many states, welfare and benefits pay more than median income”
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2022/12/27/in-many-states-welfare-and-benefits-pay-more-than-median-income-n520167
“One of the great “mysteries” that has been puzzling lawmakers in the swamp is the fact that the American labor force is still “missing” more than three million workers who were employed before COVID struck and could be working today. Demographically, this group slants strongly toward young males, deflating the idea that a lot of older people who lost their jobs during the shutdowns simply decided to retire early. The labor force participation rate remains 1.3% lower than before the pandemic began and there are roughly six million jobs still unfilled across the country. So where are all of these people and why haven’t they gone out to take new jobs? Fox Business reports this week that one reason may be found in the lucrative benefits from a combination of extended unemployment payments and Obamacare subsidies that dole out enough cash for many people to get by while simply staying home.
The labor force participation rate was 62.1% last month, notably lower than the 63.4% mark it was at before the coronavirus pandemic struck the United States in March 2020.
There are numerous reasons that unemployed Americans aren’t entering the workforce, including ongoing fears of COVID-19, disabilities such as “long COVID,” and other care responsibilities. One factor that is contributing to the relatively low labor force participation rate is the combination of unemployment benefits and recently expanded Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies, according a new study by the nonprofit Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
In 14 states, unemployment benefits and ACA subsidies for a family of four with two people not working amounts to an annualized equivalent of $80,000 a year in wages and benefits, the study found.
The amount of money a family requires to get by varies wildly from state to state, but an annual income of $80K will allow a family of four to make ends meet in many areas. As noted above, 14 states are doling out that much. In three states, Washington, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, those benefits add up to more than $100K per year.
Now, look at the median household income in those states. In Washington, it’s 82K. In both New Jersey and Massachusetts, it’s 89K. In more rural states like Arkansas, the combined benefits may be “only” 80K, but the median household income there is 52K.
Those families have a choice of going back to their full-time jobs or staying home and playing Call of Duty while bringing in ten to twenty thousand dollars more per year. Obviously, a significant number of people have chosen option B.
When you find yourself in a position where you have to rely on welfare or any form of government benefits, the system is supposed to give you enough money to “get by” so you don’t fall through the cracks entirely. It’s not designed to provide you with more money than you would have earned by working. As these figures appear to demonstrate, there are plenty of people who will opt for “free money” over employment, particularly when not working is more lucrative.
This is an ancient debate in our country and it comes up whenever discussions of social service programs arise. America has long attempted to be a compassionate nation where the government will take care of those who can’t make it on their own. But the analogy of society being like a cart with some people pulling it and some riding in it is accurate. When you have too many people riding in the cart and not enough pulling it, the cart grinds to a halt.”
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Dems would love to do this to pro-lifers here too.
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Pretty scary, that video of the Brittish lady, AJ. I know that is the heart’s desire of many here to be able to arrest people simply because they think differently on issues. They never consider how it can backfire and be used against them, too. So.Very.Sad.
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