McCarthy VS Jefferies. McCarthy Elected and Jefferies selected. We are seeing two different styles. McCarthy who had to negotiate vs Jefferies, the affirmative action pick who does what he’s ordered.
McCarthy has been moving legislation that’s been getting positive reviews and even has had bi partisan support. VS Jefferies who’s doing the bidding of the MSM, Race Baiters, and White Plantationists. Being a good boy.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, said Trump was speaking more generally about regulatory changes being falsely blamed for the derailment of 38 train cars, including 11 carrying hazardous materials, in East Palestine on Feb. 3. Biden administration officials have strongly suggested that the Trump administration buckled under pressure from rail industry lobbyists, laying the groundwork for an accident.
We decided to examine every possible regulatory change made under Trump that could be related to the accident and assess whether it could have made an impact. A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the incident, said the Norfolk Southern crew received an alert about an overheated wheel bearing and was trying to slow the train before it came off the tracks.
From our analysis, none of the regulatory changes made during the Trump administration at this point can be cited as contributing to the accident.
On long trains, these “ECP” brakes, which use electronic signals along the length of a train, are considered superior to an older braking system that uses compressed air to individually stop each car. The Trump administration in 2017 repealed an Obama-era rule that would have required ECP brakes on “high hazard” trains that carry flammable hazardous materials. A Government Accountability Office report had cast doubt on the Transportation Department’s estimates of the benefits from the requirement.
The GAO study was a requirement included, at the behest of industry, in a 2015 law signed by Obama, the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, after dozens of trains hauling oil and ethanol crashed. The accidents included one in 2013 in Quebec that killed 47 people and destroyed the town of Lac-Mégantic. The Trump DOT determined that revised estimates found the costs outweighed the benefits. The Associated Press later discovered that the DOT estimate had miscalculated the potential benefits — what officials claimed at the time was an “unintentional error.” Even with a correction, the department still said the costs outweighed the benefits.
The Biden administration has not acted to reinstate the rule, which would have gone into effect starting in 2021 if Trump had not shelved it.
Relevance to derailment: Minimal. The train was not equipped with ECP brakes; instead its locomotive used dynamic braking — electric traction motors acting as generators, which slow the train and dissipate mechanical energy as heat. When the crew received the alert about the overheated wheel bearing and engaged the dynamic brake, an automatic emergency brake application kicked in to stop the train, the NTSB said. That’s a full application of a train’s main air brakes that takes place when the train senses that air-brake hoses between rail cars have been disconnected — indicating the train had already derailed.
NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said on Twitter that the repealed rule was not relevant to the accident. “The ECP braking rule would’ve applied ONLY to HIGH HAZARD FLAMMABLE TRAINS. The train that derailed in East Palestine was a MIXED FREIGHT TRAIN containing only 3 placarded Class 3 flammable liquids cars,” she wrote. “This means even if the rule had gone into effect, this train wouldn’t have had ECP brakes.”
But Cynthia Quarterman, who helped write the rule as administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration during the Obama administration, told The Fact Checker that if the rule had not been delayed and then shelved, she believes ECP brakes might have been widely adopted by industry and could have ended up on this train.
The Trump administration in 2020 issued a rule that extended how much time a freight rail train could be parked with its air brake system depressurized before requiring a new brake inspection. The rule permitted U.S. trains to be off air for as long as 24 hours, similar to the rule in place in Canada since 2008; before the rule change, the limit was four hours. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) estimated the change would result in 110,000 fewer brake inspections, saving the industry $500 million over 10 years.
Relevance to derailment: Unclear. There is no determination yet that the braking system played a role in the accident.
After the Lac-Mégantic crash, which had only one crew member on the train, the Obama administration in 2016 proposed a rule to require two-person crews on all trains. The Trump administration withdrew the proposal in 2019, saying “no direct conclusions could be drawn about train crew staffing’s safety impact” on Lac-Mégantic or other accidents. The Biden administration has said it will seek to revive the rule.
Relevance to derailment: None. The 149-car train that derailed had two crew members plus a trainee on board.
The Trump administration in 2020 revised minimum safety requirements for railroad track, which among other measures allowed for quicker inspections.
Relevance to derailment: None. The NTSB inspected the tracks, and the preliminary report makes no mention of any problem.
The FRA regulates the safety of railroad tracks, and railroad companies are responsible for maintaining and inspecting tracks. Under the Obama administration, the FRA in 2015 began audits known as the Crude Oil Route Track Examination (CORTEx) program, which sent dozens of additional inspectors to specific regions to conduct track inspections along crude oil routes. The last audit was in 2018, and the program was not renewed for the rest of the Trump administration.
In 2021, the Biden administration launched a different audit program that focused on railroad companies, beginning with Union Pacific Railroad.
Relevance to derailment: None. In 2022, FRA conducted an audit of Norfolk Southern, the company involved in the Ohio incident, and made a number of recommendations for improvement. “FRA observed inconsistencies in NS’s operational testing and inspection program, ranging from access to and accuracy of records, to the methods and processes used to prioritize the testing of rules that prevent accidents,” the audit said. “The failure to properly administer and implement the program of operational testing can diminish the capacity to correct accident/incident and injury trends.”
The Trump administration, bowing to industry pressure, ignored federal scientists and adopted weaker standards for regulating emissions of ethylene oxide, a hazardous air pollutant that could pose a risk of lymphoid and breast cancer. The Biden administration has said it would reconsider the rule.
Ethylene oxide is used to manufacture ethylene glycol, a toxic chemical used in hydraulic brake fluids, antifreeze, inks and paints. Ethylene glycol, generally a clear, syrupy liquid, was found near the derailment site.
Relevance to derailment: None. The rule concerned emissions by chemical plants, not the synthetic chemical released in the accident.
This is a CBS News report. But why did this come out now? The Report says the Capitol Police knew, so Schumer, the DC Mayor, and Pelosi Knew ahead of time. I’m guessing that if the FBI knew and did tell Trump, that’s why he wanted to send in the National Guard.
Government watchdog report finds FBI, Capitol Police identified but didn’t share “credible threats” before Jan. 6.
Federal agencies responsible for protecting the U.S. Capitol did not “fully process” or share critical information — including about militia groups arming themselves ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — a failure that stymied the response that day, according to a new 122-page report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.
The FBI and the U.S. Capitol Police had seen “threats that were true or credible” days ahead of the assault on the Capitol building, the report said. But much as with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a failure by multiple agencies to share information and connect dots left those securing the Capitol unprepared for the onslaught.
“Some agencies did not fully process information or share it, preventing critical information from reaching key federal entities responsible for securing the National Capital Region against threats,” the report said.
The GAO report also revealed specific tips that were obtained by some federal agencies ahead of the attack. For example, the Capitol Police obtained information “regarding a tip that a member of the Proud Boys had recently obtained ballistic helmets, armored gloves, vests, and purchased weapons, including a sniper rifle and suppressors for the weapons.”
The tip, which the Secret Service also obtained from its Denver Field Office, revealed the individual flew with others to Washington D.C. “on January 5, 2021” to incite violence. According to the report, the Secret Service interviewed the individual and his son when they arrived in Washington, D.C., and investigated whether they were traveling with “loaded weapons.” Capitol Police also attempted to locate the individual using “cell phone pings.”
According to the report, investigators from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reviewed a tip a day before the Jan. 6 attacks about an individual who had “staked out parking lots of federal buildings to determine how to bring firearms into D.C. at January 6th events.”
The report also indicates there was a threat against the D.C. water system between Dec. 16, 2020 – Jan. 4, 2021. Information about the threat was obtained by the Architect of the Capitol and was shared with the Capitol Police.
In addition to the Capitol Police and the FBI, five other federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, United States Secret Service, Park Police, Senate Sergeant at Arms and Postal Inspection Service “developed a total of 27 threat products specific to the planned events of January 6 prior to the attack on the Capitol,” according to the obtained report. The GAO found that “14 products included an assessment of the likelihood that violence could occur.”
A tip shared by intelligence officials from New York State with their counterparts in Washington D.C., included a social media post where the user “described intent to conduct an attack in Washington D.C. on January 6 — targeting Democratic members of Congress.”
The report singled out the FBI, concluding the agency “did not consistently follow policies for processing tips.”
“FBI officials we spoke with said that from December 29, 2020 through January 6, 2021, they tracked domestic terrorism subjects that were traveling to Washington, D.C. and developed reports related to January 6 events,” said the report. “As of January 6, 2021, FBI officials noted that the Washington Field Office was tracking 18 domestic terrorism subjects as potential travelers to the D.C. area.”
In response to the GAO’s findings, the Justice Department said that the FBI would be working “diligently to address the recommendations in the GAO’s report,” and at the same time, the department would “incorporate GAO’s conclusion that, despite collecting and sharing significant pieces of threat reporting, the FBI did not process all relevant information related to potential violence on January 6.”
“The FBI continues to be introspective regarding its roles in sharing intelligence regarding the event of January 6,” Justice Department official Larissa Knapp said in a letter to the GAO.
U.S. Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger told the GAO his department is “currently drafting policy that will provide guidance for sharing threat-related information agency-wide” and said this policy is “currently under executive review.”
The U.S. Park Police concurred with GAO’s findings, and an Interior Department official stated that the agency is working to update policy by March 2023, regarding the “collection, analysis, and distribution of intelligence information.”
Former President Donald Trump hands out Make America Great Again hats to McDonalds employees in East Palestine, Ohio. (Jabin Botsford via Getty Images)
TGIF: Dignity for Oompa Loompas
Robots replace academics. Another Dolezal. The censors come for Roald Dahl. Buttigieg blows it in Ohio. Plus: David Mamet on cowboys.
By Nellie Bowles
February 24, 2023
→ Home sales fall for 12 straight months: It’s the longest streak since 1999. Mortgage rates are still too high. See I only care about politics that directly impact me financially, and this does because it means when I look at my house on Zillow I see the number going down. Not allowed! Meanwhile, office landlords are beginning to default as those 10-year leases end.
→ Georgia grand jury foreperson gone wild: The head juror for the special grand jury looking into Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results has gone rogue. She is Emily Kohrs, 30, a private citizen, a grand jury foreperson tasked with protecting elections, and as of this week a chatty new media darling.
To MSNBC: “I kind of wanted to subpoena the former president because I got to swear everybody in. And so I thought it’d be really cool to get 60 seconds with President Trump, of me looking at him and being like, ‘Do you solemnly swear?’ And me getting to swear him in.”
To CNN: “There may be some names on that list that you wouldn’t expect. But the big name that everyone keeps asking me about—I don’t think you will be shocked.”
Emily’s having fun! (And of course she’s into witchcraft.) Honestly, the grand jury foreperson’s main bias seems to be toward drama and chaos, and in that we salute her.
As an aside, you know why Trump hasn’t been caught for anything big? The man never writes anything down. Not an email, not a text. The resistance, run by chaos Wiccans like Emily, will simply never catch him.
→ Roald Dahl meets 2023: The long-dead British children’s books author—Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, and, who could forget, The Witches—has not escaped our moment, and now his books are getting a modern makeover to remove offensive bits. I forget, were those books racist? Sexist? Not exactly, no, but lots of people might be offended, for example, by the fact that Dahl describes witches as bald. And so now there is a new line in the book right after his description of a witch’s hairless head: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.” (I’m dead serious.)
Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was described as “fat.” That’s gone (now he’s just “enormous”). And did anyone ask the Oompa-Loompas whether they self-identified as “small men?” Now they are “small people,” which of course gives these characters, who are called Oompa. Loompas. All their dignity back. In one story, a character Dahl described as “ugly and beastly” is now just “beastly,” a concession, I guess, to sensitive ugly people. But what about the beastly?!
Now the next lines from James and the Giant Peach are so offensive, I want you to be very careful who sees your screen. These were traditionally sung by the Centipede: “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that.” And: “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.”
Those are gone now, replaced with new and worse rhymes coughed up by the very nice censors at Inclusive Minds.
Now, Dahl was also famously an antisemite, which he occasionally cloaked as simple anti-Zionism. Actually, that didn’t need a modern progressive update at all. Now excuse me while I go track down my original copy of The Twits before a sensitivity reader with red pens shows up at my door.
→ Ancestry is complex: One-time Black Panther Angela Davis went onto the PBS show Finding Your Roots, where Henry Louis Gates Jr. does a deep dive into your ancestry. But then something strange happened: It turns out her ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. Now the gotcha here from the right is something like “Oh she’s a descendant of the Mayflower! Not so victimized, eh?” But actually it’s sort of a vindication of the 1619-mindset, in that the history of America and slavery is entwined from the start. It’s worth watching the clip just to see Davis’s face and the gravity of being tied genetically back to that ship. “No, my ancestors did not come here on the Mayflower. No, no no. That’s a little bit too much to deal with right now.”
→ Selling unused Covid gear on the cheap: New York City is auctioning off $200 million in Covid supplies for just $500,000. This comes from local news blog The City, who got the scoop. Among some of the details from the story: A junk dealer from Long Island picked up $12 million in ventilators for just $24,600. “It took the dealer 28 truckloads to cart the stuff away, auction records state.” It’s a great story that also includes emails showing city officials fretting that people might find out how much they overspent. It’s like Storage Wars but so, so sad.
Congratulations to the junk dealer who got 500,000 pounds of ventilators.
→ Jimmy Carter, 98, in hospice: The former president is now in hospice in his Plains, Georgia, home. I recommend this 2018 feature about his sweet and simple life in retirement with Rosalynn, where every Sunday he taught a lesson at the Maranatha Baptist Church. TGIF salutes Jimmy Carter, a model of decency.
Speaking of gentle souls with good intentions, humble dreams, and devoted marriages, let’s see what Bill Clinton and Donald Trump are up to this week. . .
→ Trump gets to East Palestine before the White House: Trump visited the site of the toxic train derailment, spoke to residents, and brought pallets of water (Trump-branded, of course). He stopped at McDonalds, telling workers quite believably: “I know this menu better than you do.”
Meanwhile, local officials in East Palestine are getting on camera to show themselves drinking tap water. Like, see, it’s totally safe! The fish are dead and your dog is dying, but we’re cool! Don’t be so uptight about “vinyl chloride” and “phosgene,” which are just fancy words for totally not-toxic water.
One thing that makes Trump successful is he says that things are shitty when they’re shitty, and I’m sorry, but the water in East Palestine is shitty right now.
Racing there after Trump was Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, the man who is proving single-handedly that Rhodes Scholars are overhyped. Buttigieg whiffed when he arrived: he ran away from reporters, leaving his press secretary begging those reporters to turn off their cameras before she would talk to them. When he did finally speak, he said he “lost his train of thought.” Oh god:
Is there something I’m missing here? Why did the train derailment get coded as so conservative that no one could talk about it? Why do the cameras have to be off? Why isn’t Michael Moore there? To me, this whole thing is a gimme for Democrats: use it to argue for more and smarter government infrastructure spending. But for some reason, acknowledging the crash and its environmental impact is verboten. If you can answer this political mystery, please do in the comments.
→ I really don’t like this item: Mark Middleton, a one-time advisor to Bill Clinton, who seemed to be involved with handling his Jeffrey Epstein relationship, is dead by apparent suicide. Details came out this week: Middleton was found hanged with an electrical cord—and with a gunshot wound to his chest. When it comes to Epstein-related shadiness and the extended cover-up of that scandal, at this point, I’m willing to believe just about anything. On the other hand, people who have done bad things do generally want to avoid facing their own souls. So I’d say I’m Epstein-related-murder-conspiracy-open but not sold. But let’s give it a week.
→ James O’Keefe is out: Project Veritas, the right-wing undercover investigations outlet, has ousted its leader and star, James O’Keefe. He spoke to staff before leaving and you can watch that strange, rambling speech here. The board accused him of spending “an excessive amount of donor funds in the last three years on personal luxuries.” Items and amounts that the Veritas board lists: “$14,000 on a charter flight to meet someone to fix his boat under the guise of meeting with a donor” and “over $150,000 in Black Cars in the last 18 months.”
Now, to be clear, James O’Keefe’s job is setting up shady stings of his enemies. One of my friends who got stung was on his third date with a woman who turned out to be an undercover Veritas operative. It was on that date that she recorded him. To me, there’s no one better to run an operation like that than a dude who spends $14,000 to meet someone about a boat. Over $150,000 on limos is basically the minimum spend for a guy like this.
→ Ozy Media founder arrested: It’s not only right-wing media that’s losing a star this week. On Thursday we learned that Carlos Watson, founder of progressive media company Ozy, had been arrested on charges of fraud. The United States of America v. Carlos Watson and Ozy Media, Inc. is pretty fun reading. Among other things, Watson allegedly had a subordinate— Samir Rao, Ozy’s COO—pretend to be a YouTube executive on a call with Goldman Sachs, to say how great Ozy Media was doing on YouTube.
This whole thing was first broken open by scoop hound Ben Smith, now of Semafor. An idea: maybe Carlos Watson and James O’Keefe can start something new together?
And now, a word from resident cartoonist David Mamet . . .
→ University DEI admins come up with their perfect replacement: Vanderbilt University’s office of diversity issued a statement consoling students about a recent mass shooting at Michigan State. But apparently they are so very busy that they used AI to write it.
Let me back up: last week, 43-year-old Anthony Dwayne McRae—who had previously pleaded down a felony charge that would have prevented him from possessing a gun—slaughtered three students, seemingly at random, on Michigan State’s campus.
In response, Vanderbilt’s equity workers released a touching statement about how everyone needs to be kind and inclusive to, I guess, prevent mass shootings by nearby career criminals: “Another important aspect of creating an inclusive environment is to promote a culture of respect and understanding.” And: “[L]et us come together as a community to reaffirm our commitment to caring for one another and promoting a culture of inclusivity on our campus.” And: “Finally, we must recognize that creating a safe and inclusive environment is an ongoing process that requires ongoing effort and commitment.” It’s the same nonsensical but warm sentiment said over and over—inclusive (7 times), community (5 times), safe (3)—and it kinda worked!
Except at the bottom of the statement was this sentence: Paraphrase from OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI language model, personal communication, February 15, 2023.
People were upset. The university apologized. And yes, you could ask what exactly these bureaucrats are doing all day. But their laziness might also be their genius: replace all university bureaucrats with ChatGPT. Like the discovery of penicillin, sometimes accidents make genius.
→ NPR cutting 10 percent of its staff: The public radio station—that is, in part, taxpayer funded—is losing money and needs to cut staff. I can’t point to an institution that has more fully failed its mission than NPR, which went from fulfilling a genuine public service with news and great stories (I’m thinking of early This American Life) to just another hyper-partisan maker of mush. Tote bags and mush.
→ NYT union versus NYT workers: The New York Times’ labor union is a funny thing because reporters pay into it every two weeks and, in turn, the union’s main project is getting some of those reporters fired. It’s a bit like musical chairs: If you’re too slow putting the fist in your Twitter profile picture, you’re it. See, the union is pretty bad at achieving boring stuff like raises, but it shines at gathering groups of reporters to get a deskmate ousted. Who needs money when you can draw blood?
The latest: the union stepped in to help ax a couple Times writers who reported on trans issues with anything close to an objective lens. Here’s what union head Susan DeCarava wrote to Times staff in a note about how to organize: “[E]mployees are protected in collectively raising concerns that conditions of their employment constitute a hostile working environment.” Oh yes, reporting on trans issues makes a hostile work environment. Perfect. We got the language, now let’s march on Katie, that very bad Times reporter! Let’s picket the awful Emily! The people united will get Katie fired!
Except finally, finally, the union this week is seeing some organized pushback, and a group of Times people wrote their own letter asking the union to just please stop. “We ask that our union work to advance, not erode, our journalistic independence.”
If media union bosses can’t wake up and get Katies and Emilys fired, what exactly are they supposed to do all day?
This post is for paying s
I want to thank the Daily Caller for this article.
AILAN EVANSASSOCIATE EDITOR
The U.S. State Department, through its Global Engagement Center (GEC), helped facilitate funding for a group that reportedly works to demonetize sites it claims are disseminating “disinformation,” including conservative news outlets, according to its website.
The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a United Kingdom-based nonprofit that styles itself as a “non-political” monitor working to “disrupt the business model of disinformation,” lists as a funder the Disinfo Cloud, a now-shuttered GEC project. However, GDI has worked to demonetize conservative news sites by collaborating with ad exchanges to flag alleged purveyors of disinformation, the Washington Examiner reported.
GDI maintains a “dynamic exclusion list” of the worst offenders of disinformation online, according to its website. The organization then provides this list to ad tech companies, which can then “defund and downrank these worst offenders” and thereby defund sites allegedly promoting disinformation.
While the exclusion list isn’t publicly available, popular conservative news site Breitbart is on the list, according to the Examiner, and it is “plausible” that any of the “riskiest” outlets would also be on the exclusion list, according to a member of the GDI advisory panel who spoke to the Examiner.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a press conference before a meeting with Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Eli Cohen (not pictured) on January 30, 2023 in Jerusalem, Israel. (Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images)
In this list of news outlets that were deemed the “riskiest” for alleged promotion of disinformation, GDI identified several prominent conservative news sites including the New York Post and the Daily Wire. By comparison, the “least risky” sites were overwhelmingly left-wing.
Moreover, GDI flagged the Examiner itself as disseminating “anti-LGBTQ+” disinformation, according to an October 2022 GDI memo, and pointed to an Amazon ad displayed on the Examiner page. The “anti-LGBTQ+” content in question was found in an opinion article.
In September 2021, the State Department’s GEC hosted the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge, an event seeking to “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda” in Europe and the U.K. The event was held in “collaboration with U.S. Embassy Paris, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)” and several other entities.
GDI, along with the U.K.-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), were two of the three winners; ISD also works to monitor and combat perceived misinformation and disinformation, and lists as government partners the U.S. State Department and U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The three winners will receive grants totaling $250,000, according to the Atlantic Council, which partnered with the State Department to arrange the event.
GDI also lists among its funders George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Pierre Omidyar’s Luminate and Craig Newmark Philanthropies.
The Global Disinformation Index and the State Department did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
This is the original article (New items follow below.)
Note the date above: May 7, 2025. On that date, you will become a second-class citizen unless you bow to your masters’ demands.
Although it’s been delayed several times, the insidious Real ID is coming. You will need to pay for the government’s approval so you can board a flight that NEVER LEAVES THE COUNTRY. And you won’t be able to seek redress of grievances because you won’t be ALLOWED into a Federal — and likely state — building if you don’t have their “Good Sheeple” ID to see your elected representatives. You won’t even be able to check with your local Social Security office about retirement without it. Or register to vote — if you’re a native-born American, that is.
Already, Drivers License locations have a security guard stationed inside them, because “Real ID” is given out there.
Does anyone really believe that the bureaucrats won’t draw from that well again — and again? Isn’t that what we were promised for the Covid-19 clot shot, one-and-done? How about the promise that Federal Income tax would only be on the rich? Or that electric cars would be cheaper to run — and less polluting — than internal combustion vehicles?
Okay, so maybe you don’t need to fly across the country, so what? Remember though that the TSA controls ALL public transportation. Think I’m kidding? Did you ever see those notices like on City buses: “The TSA requires all passengers to wear a mask….” How long do you suppose it will take the elitists to require Real ID to board a cross-town bus? They’re already trying to take our cars away from us.
The very idea of Real ID is anathema to what the country stands for (or used to stand for) in the first place. In the second place, does anyone care to bet that the current surge of illegal immigrant/future democrat voters won’t need it — or that the elitists will provide it to them so they can continue to vote democrat?
I didn’t think so.
I know some leftist loons will claim I’m a conspiracy theorist. OTOH, how many things that the left decried as a “conspiracy theory” has been proven true?
The much-delayed “Real ID” will violate the Constitution if allowed to go into effect.
First, In limiting access to ALL federal buildings only to those with a “Real ID,” the law infringes on the 1st amendment right “..to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” Already you can find armed security personnel in many federal and other government buildings. If you can’t get into the building, you can’t see your elected Congressional representatives or testify before any federal entity. If they can make exceptions, then the law is i weapon to silence critics, not to protect anyone.
Second, The need for a “Real ID” to fly on a commercial airplane WITHIN THE UNITED STATES is effectively a “no-fly” list for citizens who don’t desire a “Real ID.” This violates the “general welfare” clause of the Preamble, and while it might be construed as lawful under Article One, Section eight “regulate interstate commerce” clause, personal (ie non-business) travel by definition is NOT “commerce.” And one could reasonably argue that it violates the 1st Amendment right to peaceably assemble.
“Real ID” creates an illegal underclass for people who may simply want to be left alone and not have “Big Brother” constantly looking over their shoulders.
Original Article By Maggie Koerth for FiveThirtyEight (part of ABC‘s online presence)
In the first month of 2023, 25 people lost their lives in four mass shootings in California over just eight days. It’s a grim statistic, made all the more distressing when you consider the fact that California has one of the lowest gun death rates in the entire country. This is what a safe state looks like.
California also has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country. And in the aftermath of those four mass shootings, new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who represents a district in southern California — took the opportunity to poke at the state’s firearms restrictions, saying in a press conference that federal gun control legislation would not be an automatic response to these tragedies because such laws “apparently … did not work in this situation.”
So, did California’s gun laws succeed at making it one of the safest states … or did they fail to stop a string of mass shootings? Questions about the efficacy of gun laws have gotten easier to answer in recent years as changes to federal policy have helped to bring money and people back to the field of gun violence research. But decades of neglect mean there are still lots of blank spaces — policies that don’t yet have good quality data backing them up. A recent report from the Rand Corporation that reviewed the evidence behind a variety of gun policies found just three that were supported by evidence that met the report’s quality standards.1
That fact, however, doesn’t mean other gun laws don’t work — just that the research proving it doesn’t yet exist. Scientists I spoke to saw it as an “absence of evidence” problem, stemming from long-standing, intentional roadblocks in the path of gun violence research. Even the authors of the Rand report say lawmakers should still be putting policies aimed at preventing gun violence into practice now — regardless of what the science does or doesn’t say.
“I think that the goal of the lawmaker is to pick laws that they have a reasonable hope will be better than the status quo,” said Andrew Morral, a senior behavioral scientist at the Rand Corporation. “And there’s lots of ways of persuading oneself that that may be true, that don’t have to do with appealing to strict scientific evidence.”
California doesn’t just have some of the nation’s strictest gun laws and lowest gun death rates, it’s also maybe the best state to study gun laws in, said Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at University of California, Davis Medical Center. That’s because of both the way the state makes data available to researchers and its willingness to work with researchers to further the science. Wintemute is currently part of a team that is working on a randomized controlled trial of one particular California gun law — an initiative that tracks legal gun owners over time and dispatches authorities to remove their weapons if those people later break a law or develop a condition that would make them ineligible to own guns in the state.
It’s hard to oversell what a big deal this is. Frequently referred to as the “gold standard” of evidence-based medicine, randomized controlled trials split participants randomly (natch) into groups of people who get the treatment and groups that don’t. Because of that, it’s easier for researchers to figure out if a medication is actually working — or if it just appears to be working because of some other factor the people in the study happen to share. These kinds of studies are crucial, but almost impossible to do with public policy because, after all, how often can you randomly apply a law?
But California has been willing to try. It took cooperation from many different levels of state leadership, Wintemute said. The government was always going to slowly expand this particular program statewide, but in this case legislators were willing to work with scientists and randomize that expansion across more than 1,000 communities, so that some randomly became part of the program earlier and some later. When the study finally concludes, researchers will be able to compare these two groups and see how joining the program affected gun violence in those places with a high level of confidence.
Most of the time, however, the scientists who study gun laws aren’t working with the kind of research methodology like this that produces strong results. Morral, along with his Rand colleague, economist Rosanna Smart, have reviewed the vast majority of the research on gun control policies done between 1995 and 2020. Their research synthesis found that a lot of what is out there are cross-sectional studies — observational research that basically just compares gun violence statistics at one point in time in a state that has a specific law to those in a state that doesn’t. That type of study is prone to mixing up correlation and causation, Smart said. There could be lots of reasons why California has lower rates of gun violence than Alabama, but studies like this don’t try to tease apart what’s going on. They end up being interpreted by the public as proof a law works when all they’ve really done is identified differences between states.
The Rand analysis threw out these kinds of studies and only looks at research that is, at least, quasi-experimental — studies that tracked changes in outcomes over time between comparison groups. Even then, the analysis ranked some studies as lower quality than others, based on factors such as how broadly the results could be applied. For instance, a study that only looked at the effects of minimum age requirements for gun ownership in one state would be ranked lower than a study that looked at those effects in every state where a law like that existed.
Following these rules, the Rand team found just three policies that have strong evidence supporting outcomes — and two of these are about the negative outcomes of policies that increase gun access. Stand-your-ground laws, which allow gun owners to use deadly force without trying to leave or deescalate a situation, appear to increase firearm homicides. Meanwhile, conceal-carry laws, which allow gun owners to carry a gun in public places, appear to increase the number of all homicides and increase the number of firearm homicides, specifically. The only laws restricting gun ownership that have this level of evidence behind them are child-access prevention laws, which have been shown to reduce firearm suicide, unintentional self-injuries and death, and homicides among young people.
That makes gun control laws seem flimsy, but it shouldn’t, Morral said. Instead, the lack of evidence ought to be understood as a product of political decisions that have taken the already challenging job of social science and made it even harder. The Dickey Amendment, first attached to the 1996 omnibus spending bill, for example, famously prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from funding gun violence studies for decades. A new interpretation of that amendment in 2018 changed that, but Dickey wasn’t the only thing making it hard to study gun violence.
Instead, the researchers told me, the biggest impediment to demonstrating whether gun control policies work is the way politicians have intentionally blocked access to the data that would be necessary to do that research.
“So for instance, the federal government has this massive, great survey of behavioral risk indicators that they do every year in every state,” Morral said. “And you can get fantastic information on Americans’ fruit juice consumption as a risk factor for diabetes. But you can’t get whether or not they own guns.” Not knowing gun ownership rates at the state level makes it hard to evaluate causality of some gun control policies, he explained. “And it’s not because anyone thinks [gun ownership] is not a risk factor for various outcomes. It’s because it’s guns.”
The missing data problem also includes the 2003 Tiahrt Amendment that prevents the sharing of data tracing the origins of guns used in crimes with researchers, said Cassandra Crifasi, co-director of the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University. “So now all we can see are these sort of aggregate-level state statistics,” she said. “We can no longer look at things like, when a gun is recovered in a crime, was the purchaser the same person who was in possession of the gun at the time of the crime?”
Recently, researchers have even been missing basic crime data that used to be reported by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program. Law enforcement agencies and states were supposed to be shifting to the relatively new, much more detailed National Incident-Based Reporting System, but the transition has been a catastrophe, with some of the biggest law enforcement agencies in the country not yet making the switch because of financial and logistical complications, Smart said. “The FBI has not been able to report for the last eight quarters whether homicide rates are up or down,” Morral added.
But much of the data that’s not available at a national level is available in California, Wintemute said. “Unlike researchers in any other state, we have access to individual firearm purchaser records,” he told me — the very data the Tiahrt Amendment blocks at the national level. “We do studies involving 100,000 gun purchasers, individually known to us, and we follow them forward in time to look for evidence of criminal activity or death or whatever the outcome might be that we’re studying,” Wintemute said.
Unfortunately, because the data is only available in California, the results of those studies would only be applicable to California — making it data that wouldn’t be considered high-quality in the Rand report. Wintemute can demonstrate if a policy is working in his home state, but not whether it works in a big, broad, existential sense. It wouldn’t count towards expanding the number of policies Rand has found evidence to support. This is something researchers like Crifasi see as a flaw in the Rand analysis, but it’s also a reason why Morral and Smart don’t think the evidence-based policy is a good standard to apply to gun control to begin with.
It’s useful to know what there is evidence to support, Morral said. “But we don’t at all believe that legislation should rest on strong scientific evidence,” he said. Instead, the researchers from Rand described scientific evidence as a luxury that legislators don’t yet have.
“There’s always gonna be somebody who’s the first person to implement the law,” said Smart. “And they’re going to have to derive their decision based on theory and other considerations that are not empirical scientific evidence.”
Maggie Koerth is a senior science writer for FiveThirtyEight. Part of ABC.
Thanks to Jordan Schachtel for this first article
Adrian Monck, the managing editor and comms director of WEF, announced the news in a LinkedIn post. Monck oversaw the WEF’s notorious Young Global Leaders and Global Shapers programs, which Schwab infamously bragged had helped the outfit to “penetrate the cabinets” of foreign governments.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) and its benefactors continue to face major headwinds, as a global resistance has formed against the organization’s advocacy for a two-tiered feudalistic society. What was once a shadowy-by-design network has been forced into the mainstream spotlight, and the blowback to the WEF was on display for the world to see in its 2023 Davos conference.
The WEF’s extremist agenda, which advances tyrannical, anti-human narratives such as “The Great Reset” and “Build Back Better,” among others, met several unexpected challenges at Davos through independent and non-institutional media operations.
One Japanese journalist even got a few questions in with Schwab, who was incredibly displeased with this impromptu interview attempt.
In the United States, several Republican members of Congress even backed out of Davos after The Dossier reported on their planned participation in the confab.
At Davos 2023, Monck cut a free promo for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to the expressed approval of the Chinese state media operations that were invited to the meeting.
Just weeks before its annual invite-only, closed-door gathering in Davos, Monck sought to mitigate the reputational damage to the WEF, churning out a series of articles claiming the outfit is the victim of “disinformation campaigns.”
In one such piece that was published in The Globe and Mail, Monck declares that “a Russian propaganda campaign” is to blame for people’s negative perception of the WEF.
“The intent was apparently to spread disinformation in a bid to stir far-right outrage about COVID-19 and perpetuate domestic extremism,” the retiring WEF comms chief rants. “The means was often via bots that would push far-right conspiracy theories to communities on boards such as 4chan.”
In calling for a global censorship and surveillance regime akin to the one installed by the Chinese government, Monck declared:
Monck has not publicly revealed his plans for the future.
While eating caviar and sipping on fine wine, wealthy elites at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos hobnobbed with an assortment of academics, government leaders, and environmental activists to discuss their plans for a global transition in agricultural production. They all agreed that the conventional practices now feeding the world need to be scrapped and replaced by organic-style farming, which they claimed would help fight climate change and make food systems more secure.
One wonders if these entitled leaders took a momentary pause in their deliberations to consider the ongoing suffering and starvation in Sri Lanka, where past president Gotabhaya Rajapaksa took this kind of advice and bought into the fantasy of becoming the world’s first “fully organic and toxin free” nation.
Amid cheers from Davos-type eco-extremists, Rajapaksa proudly announced his plans at the 2021 Glasgow Climate Summit. Almost overnight, he banned agrochemicals and forced growers to adopt organic farming and become “in sync” with nature.
Shortly after in July 2022, Rajapaksa fled for his life amid mass protests and chaos as agricultural output dropped by 40%. Even today, more than 43% of children under five suffer from malnutrition there.
The Davos elites trumpet organic agriculture as the way to end food insecurity, even though it yields 35% less food per acre on average and could not possibly sustain the current population, let alone the almost 10 billion predicted by 2050. Their Swiss experts admit, and researchers confirm, that it cannot be scaled-up to feed even half the current world population.
In fact, every sustainability goal touted in Davos would be undermined by a shift to organic. Being 35% less productive means 50% more land needed to grow the same amount of food. Massively increasing farmland means cutting down forests and destroying habitat. That would devastate biodiversity and produce 50% to 70% more greenhouse gasses (GHGs).
Organic promoters should admit that organic farmers use lots of pesticides. They’re just older, less-targeted pesticides like copper sulfate, which are broadly toxic to humans and wildlife and must be used in greater amounts because they’re less effective.
Just weeks before the WEF at this year’s Conference of the Parties, a.k.a. the UN Convention on Climate Change in Egypt (COP27) and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal (COP15), leaders were singing the same bad tune, calling for “regenerative agriculture,” “sustainable intensification” and the word on everyone’s lips: “agroecology.”
It’s not just that more land is needed for organic. GHG emissions are increased because farmers must till (plow) fields or flood them to control weeds, rather than use modern herbicides. Replacing 100kg of synthetic fertilizer requires 2-3 tons of organic compost, and organic manures made from farm waste contain phyto-accumulated heavy-metal toxins from soils, promoting dangerous runoff.
Yet the European Green Deal – a prime example of failing organic policies similar to those tried in Sri Lanka – was still touted at these meetings.
Conventional agriculture tripled farmland productivity between 1948 and 2019. Globally, it boosted cereal production over 300%. Though the cognoscenti pretend otherwise, conventional agriculture has adopted many truly regenerative practices. In no-till agriculture, farmers use herbicides, like atrazine and glyphosate, to control weeds instead of machine tilling.
Yes, atrazine and glyphosate reduce erosion and create higher-quality soil. They also reduce CO2 emissions by 280,000 metric tons and save 588 million gallons of diesel annually—equivalent to the emissions of 1 million cars. And, no, these herbicides are not bad for people and the environment. Atrazine does not leach into groundwater, as Health Canada showed in response to EU’s atrazine ban; and glyphosate does not cause cancer, as evidenced by the world’s largest and longest health study.
The wealthy elites steering the WEF and COP could make progress toward their laudable goals if they base their policies on such demonstrable facts, rather than fashionable organic fantasies.
Yet the pseudo-ecology haunting COP27, COP15, Davos and the EU channels the planet’s food security, biodiversity, and GHG mitigation efforts toward disaster, as Sri Lanka could attest.
So these leaders fly home on their greenhouse-gas-emitting jets, unaware or uncaring about the human and environmental damage their policies are promoting.
Thanks to Joe Biden and the National Archives, President Trump walks. As you know, Biden carried on about how President Trump had top secret documents and how irresponsible it was. Well the National Archives jumps in and demands the missing documents back. Trump had the power to declassify. So what happens? Biden who doesn’t have that power has top secret documents for months and says nothing.
The National Archives says nothing cause they claim they didn’t know. Three more times documents are found with Biden. Again the National archives has no clue. So now what do they do?
National Archives asks all past Presidents and VP to look for top secret documents. No planned raids or FBI agents showing up guns drawn. The wives don’t have to worry about anyone going threw the panty drawer. Moral of the story? Trump walks.
Is it time for another special prosecutor? Thursday the WP ran a article where the DOJ and the WH were not going to go public with the information about the missing top secret papers found at the Penn Center or Biden’s home. All documents Biden had no right to have. Documents that were Top Secret.
According to the Washington Post on Thursday, the White House and Justice Department not only agreed to obscure the scandal from public view, but they also refused to divulge that the second trove of classified documents was already unearthed at Biden’s home in Wilmington when CBS News first contacted the White House about the initial leak of classified documents illegally stored at the Biden Penn Center.
“CBS News was the first news organization to learn of the matter, contacting the White House on Jan. 6 to ask about the Penn Biden Center documents,” the report continued. “White House officials confirmed the scoop, but since the investigation was ongoing, they decided not to offer any additional details — including the critical information that a second batch of documents had been discovered at Biden’s home.”
And a third. Who knows if more will be found?
