I t seems like the Progressive MSM and a few obscure websites are the only ones who know about Chinese balloons flown over our country during the Trump years.
EXCLUSIVE: Former President Trump and a number of his top national security and defense officials refuted Biden administration officials’ claims that Chinese surveillance balloons briefly transited the continental United States during the Trump administration, saying it “never happened.”
A defense official on Saturday said Chinese spy balloons briefly traveled over the United States at least three times during the last administration.
Chinese spy balloon flies above in Charlotte, North Carolina, Feb. 4, 2023. (Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
But Trump and his officials said that did not occur and criticized the Biden administration for spreading disinformation.
“This never happened. It would have never happened,” Trump told Fox News Digital on Sunday morning, adding that Beijing “respected us greatly” under his leadership.
“It never happened with us under the Trump administration and if it did, we would have shot it down immediately,” Trump said. “It’s disinformation.”
Former President Donald Trump (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump said the Biden administration is spreading this because “they look so bad, as usual.”
“They are incompetent,” he said.
Former Trump White House national security adviser John Bolton told Fox News Digital that he never heard of anything like this under his tenure.
“I don’t know of any balloon flights by any power over the United States during my tenure, and I’d never heard of any of that occurring before I joined in 2018,” Bolton said. “I haven’t heard of anything that occurred after I left either.”
Bolton said that if the Biden administration has “specific examples, they need to tell Congress.”
He added: “I can say with 100% certainty not during my tenure.”
Former national security adviser John Bolton gestures while speakings at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on Sept. 30, 2019. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)
Robert O’Brien, who served as White House national security adviser from 2019 to 2021, told Fox News Digital that he had no knowledge of anything like this occurring.
“Unequivocally, I have never been briefed on the issue,” O’Brien said, telling Fox News Digital that his team, which included Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national security adviser, and Allison Hooker, who served as senior adviser to Asia, also were not briefed on these activities.
National security adviser Robert O’Brien talks with reporters before boarding Air Force One. (AP)
Former acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell, who led the intelligence community at the onset of COVID, told Fox News Digital that he did “one of the biggest intelligence deep dives on China, their spying and the origins of COVID” during his tenure.
“It never came up,” he said. “If a balloon had come up, we would have known. Someone in the intelligence community would have known, and it would have bubbled up to me to brief the president.”
And former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who lead ODNI after Grenell and through the end of the Trump administration, also refuted the claim.
“It’s not true. I can refute it,” Ratcliffe said on “Sunday Morning Futures.” “The American people can refute it for themselves. Do you remember during the Trump administration, when photographers on the ground and commercial airline pilots were talking about a spy balloon over the United States that people could look up and see, even with the naked eye, and that a media that hated Donald Trump wasn’t reporting?”
He added: “I don’t remember that either, because it didn’t happen.”
U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell attends the “Rally for Equal Rights at the United Nations (Protesting Anti-Israeli Bias)” in Geneva, Switzerland, March 18, 2019. (Reuters/Denis Balibouse)
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia Heino Klinck told Fox News Digital that he also was unaware.
“I can’t rule out that things occurred that I was unaware of, but I do think something like this, I would have been aware of,” Klinck said.
Former Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper also said he was never told about Chinese surveillance balloons above the United States during his time at the Pentagon.
“I don’t ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States,” Esper said during an appearance on CNN. “I would remember that for sure.”
Defense Secretary Mark Esper speaks to members of the media during a news conference at the Pentagon in Washington, on March 23, 2020. (Army Staff Sgt. Nicole Mejia/Department of Defense via AP)
And former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, who had previously served as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, also told Fox News he never had heard of a Chinese spy balloon while he was in government.”
“Never heard a whisper and I have to think if anything like that happened that would have been a huge issue,” Miller told Fox News Digital. “No. Absolutely never heard of anything like that while I was in government or at the Pentagon.”
It is unclear, at this point, if these activities did take place, and if it was military leadership that chose not to brief civilian leadership on the matter.
But a senior administration official told Fox News Digital on Sunday that “U.S. intelligence, not the Biden administration, but U.S. intel assesses PRC government surveillance balloons transited the continental U.S. briefly at least three times during the prior administration and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration, but never for this duration of time.”
“They went undetected.And this is part of a larger pattern: These balloons are all part of a PRC fleet of balloons developed to conduct surveillance operations, which have also violated the sovereignty of other countries,” the official said. “These kinds of activities are often undertaken at the direction of the People’s Liberation Army.”
“Over the past several years, Chinese balloons have previously been spotted over countries across five continents, including in East Asia, South Asia, and Europe,” the official said.
The official added: “Two things can be true at once: this happened and it wasn’t detected.”
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment.
The balloon was shot down on Saturday off the coast of South Carolina, after traveling for days over the continental United States.
Senior defense officials said Saturday was the first time the U.S. had the chance to shoot down the balloon over water. Officials could have shot the balloon down over Montana and northern U.S. states, but out of an abundance of caution, chose to wait until it was transiting over water to prevent any risk to civilians or civilian property.
The military and intelligence community recovery efforts are underway. Fox News has learned that the FBI will play a role in the recovery efforts, and debris could be brought to Quantico for review.
Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter.
This was how Pfizer decided to combat this. If the person on the video wasn’t a employee, why hasn’t Pfizer said so? And if he never was, will Pfizer sue him? If this turns out that this was a set up, I’ll print a retraction.
Project Veritas, a conservative activist group known for spreading misinformation, recently published a concealed-camera videoopens in a new tab or window allegedly showing a Pfizer employee describing the company’s COVID-19 vaccine research efforts.
As described by Project Veritas, the video features “Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer Director of Research and Development – Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning,” sharing details about Pfizer’s plans for conducting gain-of-function SARS-CoV-2 research.
In the heavily edited clip, the so-called employee can be heard telling the Project Veritas reporter out of the camera frame “don’t tell anyone this, by the way” before outlining seemingly theoretical conversations being had at Pfizer.
Project Veritas, a conservative activist group known for spreading misinformation, recently published a concealed-camera videoopens in a new tab or window allegedly showing a Pfizer employee describing the company’s COVID-19 vaccine research efforts.
As described by Project Veritas, the video features “Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer Director of Research and Development – Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning,” sharing details about Pfizer’s plans for conducting gain-of-function SARS-CoV-2 research.
In the heavily edited clip, the so-called employee can be heard telling the Project Veritas reporter out of the camera frame “don’t tell anyone this, by the way” before outlining seemingly theoretical conversations being had at Pfizer.
“You know how the virus keeps mutating?” Walker asks in the video. “Well one of the things we’re exploring is, like, why don’t we just mutate it ourselves so … we could create preemptively developed new vaccines, right?”
It is currently unclear if the man in the video is actually an employee of Pfizer, and if that is his real name.
Pfizer released a statementopens in a new tab or window on Friday summarily debunking the claims made in the video, noting that the company “has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research” related to its “ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.”
The company further explained that it has “conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern,” after these new variants have been properly identified by public health authorities, and is used to “rapidly assess the ability of an existing vaccine to induce antibodies that neutralize a newly identified variant of concern.”
Pfizer noted that this research is made public when it is published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and is used “as one of the steps to determine whether a vaccine update is required.”
In an interview with MedPage Today, Paul Offit, MD, of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, explained the primary concerns with gain-of-function research and why Pfizer’s research efforts are not attempting to produce these kinds of results.
“Usually, when people talk about gaining function, they’re talking about making it so that the virus is either more deadly or more easily transmitted or that it now can jump species,” Offit said.
He noted that this kind of research is tightly regulatedopens in a new tab or window in the U.S., and that regulations against gain-of-function research were the result of one well-documented studyopens in a new tab or window that was conducted several years ago at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the study, researchers were working with a strain of avian influenza that only reproduced in birds, which was intentionally modified to be reproducible in mammals, specifically in ferrets.
Offit emphasized that unlike the ferret study, Pfizer has been working with an mRNA platform that is coded for coronavirus spike proteins, not a whole virus. Furthermore, Pfizer is only working on one of four possible spike proteins on this particular virus, he added, noting that even if the company was working with all four proteins, it would still not be enough to accomplish gain-of-function results.
“You have a whole virus, which is then modified to become either more contagious or more deadly, but you have to start with a whole virus,” he said.
“If there was some evil hand back there that was trying to make the virus more immune-evasive or more contagious, that would be considered gain-of-function research, but it’s not happening,” he added. “The evil hand is mother nature.”
Overall, the work that has gone into developing a vaccine for COVID has been “remarkably effective,” he said. The reality was that researchers were able to sequence SARS-CoV-2 in a matter of months, conduct two large clinical trials using a technology that had never been used to make a vaccine, and achieved an effectiveness against severe disease that was much greater than expected.
The statement below is very scary.
“This is the best medical achievement in my lifetime,” he said. “And my lifetime includes the development of the polio vaccine.”
BY Steve Kirsch Founder, Vaccine Safety Research Foundation (vacsafety.org) Updated 1/31/23
If the CDC was honest, this is what their new ads should look like!
If the CDC was honest, this is what their new ads should look like!
Using a novel analysis technique, anyone can now prove that there is no longer any doubt that the vaccines are SHORTENING the lifespans of EVERYONE who takes them. They should be immediately stopped.
Update at 12pm PST 1/31/23
This critique is convincing, but wrong. If everyone was last vaccinated just 10 days before the end of 2022, it would still be a .5 ratio if the vaccines were perfectly safe because the death rate in the final 10 days would be spread evenly over time.
I realized I made an error in some of the formulas so I’m re-doing the numbers.
Also, because the unvaxxed transition to the vaccinated, there are fewer unvaccinated to die in later months so there will be fewer unvaccinated deaths which will skew the ratio for the vaccinated to be lower than .5.
I’m currently using the date of last vaccination as the starting point and I believe it may be more correct to use the date of first vaccination. Still mulling that over.
Executive summary
This is the most important article I have ever written in my life.
It shows a novel method that anyone can use to prove that the COVID vaccines are leading to premature death in anyone who takes them, no matter what age. So you don’t have to believe me. You can collect the data yourself and do the same analysis I did. It’s very easy. It took me about an hour to collect the data and analyze it.
The methodology is both technically sound and objective. Anyone can collect their own data including any state in the US and many foreign governments. I predict no one will look. That tells you everything you need to know.
I asked UK Professor Norman Fenton to critique the method I used here. More about him in the text below. Bottom line: he loved the method I used (which he hadn’t seen before), he validated the calculations in the figure below, and he wasn’t aware of any way the conclusion could be legitimately challenged. There are always all sorts of hand-waving arguments such as “your study wasn’t IRB approved” or “your study is unethical because you are looking at deaths from the COVID vaccine” but they are just that: hand-waving.
To further prove my article cannot be challenged, I am pioneering a unique approach to that as well that is fair, thorough, and transparent. I’m publicly offering 10X your wager to anyone who believes that the data actually shows the opposite of what I claimed. See details of the offer in the text below. If you think I got it wrong, you can turn $25K into $250K in days!
This article describes how a simple objective analysis of objective death data (age, date died, date of last COVID vaccination) can be used to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the COVID vaccines are shortening lifespans and should be immediately halted.
This explains why all the world’s health authorities are keeping their data secret; their data would reveal that all world governments have been killing millions of people worldwide. No government wants that disclosed. They won’t debate me on this. They will try to censor this article because they can’t hide from the truth. Or they will try to create FUD by arguing the survey is biased without describing the bias.
I predict that this article will be ignored by the mainstream press and the medical community. The longer they ignore me, the worse it will look for them. The first rule of holes is that when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Unless there is a serious error in my methodology or someone can explain precisely how surveying “my followers” creates a biased sample that shifts the numbers for the vaccinated or shows us a more comprehensive, trustable data set, the game is now over.
If the vaccines are safe, the CDC should have produced this analysis using statewide data long ago. It is trivial to do. Why didn’t they? The answer is simple: because they know it would blow the narrative and prove to the world that they are incompetent fools.
If you want to prove me wrong, let’s get the statewide data from all states and make it public. All we need is Age, date of death, date of last COVID vaccine. That does not violate HIPAA or a dead person’s privacy because there is no PII.
But states will refuse to release that data because they know if they did, they are finished.
So in the meantime, they will say, “Your survey is biased.” But nobody can explain the “bias” that explains the result because my readers DO NOT CONTROL THE DATE THAT THEIR FRIENDS WERE VACCINATED, their age, or the DATE they died.
My readers may be more affluent than the average American so that’s a bias. But if the vaccine is killing affluent people, we have a problem. My readers might be more intelligent than the average American, so that’s a bias. They may have more intelligent friends. So this survey, it could be argued, just shows that intelligent people are being killed by the vaccine. That SHOULD be a stopping condition.
Or you could argue that my readers are less intelligent than the average person. And once again, unless you are trying to cull a society, that should be a stopping condition as unethical.
ANYONE CAN REPLICATE MY SURVEY if you think it is “biased.” The New York Times could replicate my survey and prove I’m wrong.
But they won’t.
And that tells you everything you need to know, doesn’t it?
If they want to argue with this article, THEY need to show us THEIR data and not engage in hand-waving arguments to create FUD that have no evidentiary basis.
The game is over. We have won. You cannot hide from the truth any longer.
We’ll see if anyone wants to challenge this article and get paid 10X their wager if they are right. Bring it on!
In this article, I show a clever new method for analyzing the death/vax records that is simple and objective; it relies on just a simple division of two time measurements.
The survey
A month ago, on December 25, 2022, I announced the survey below.
The survey asked people if they knew anyone who died in 2020, 2021, or 2022.
If they did know someone, simply report objective facts about the death: age, date died, and if vaccinated, the date most recently vaccinated.
If people knew >1 person who died in the period, just report the person whose details you are most familiar with (e.g., family member vs. friend).
As of January 29, 2023, I received 1,634 responses. The analysis here looks at the responses.
We only consider OBJECTIVE data and our analysis is OBJECTIVE. It’s all math.
If the vaccines are causing death, the analysis will pick it up.
Methodology
The analysis is done by looking at “days in category before death” divided by “days possible in category if you had lived to the end of the observation period.”
We do this for both vaxxed and unvaxxed people… across all ages, and also in various age ranges which I arbitrarily chose. You can choose your own if you don’t like the age categories I chose. It won’t change the result.
Here’s how the method works (credit to Clare Craig who suggested this wording):
Imagine a timeline for 2021 and 2022. For the unvaccinated we would expect an even distribution of deaths over time except for seasonal differences. For each person, we can compare how long they did live in that period with how long they could have lived. A few who died early would have lived for only a tiny fraction of their potential and a few that died late for a large fraction. However, most will be in between and the mean will be 0.5.
For the vaccinated, we start the clock on their date of their last vaccine. The timeline will therefore vary for each person but with a harmless vaccine we would still expect exactly the same distribution – a few early, a few late and most in the middle with a mean of 0.5.
If the vaccine killed people we would end up with more deaths early on. The mean ratio of life lived compared with life that could have been lived will fall below .5.
Given ratio=((time in category)/(time possible in category)) and knowing that the person died sometime in Jan 2021-Dec 2022, we have:
If the intervention (i.e., the vax) does nothing, ratio = .5
If the invention shortens life, ratio <.5
If the intervention increases lifespan, ratio > .5
It’s that simple. The important thing is that the ratio tells us if the intervention is helpful, neutral, or harmful.
The analysis is independent of the rates people die. The fact that older people die faster than younger people is immaterial. Pre-existing conditions, etc. do not matter.
There is an argument to be made that people who got vaccinated first were more vulnerable and were more likely to die, and thus the rate in a category changes over time, but that effect isn’t very large. I’ve run the numbers for those who died and were last vaccinated in 2022 and the numbers are all less than .5. You are welcome to prove me wrong, but you’ll need to do it with evidence, i.e., actual queries and not hand-waving arguments. Numbers talk.
To date, everyone who thinks they can debunk this has produced only handwaving arguments and no analysis.
Sorry, but that’s not very convincing.
Limitations
My survey includes reporters from all over the world, but all the readers speak English and 70% are in the US. The data can be analyzed just for the US and for specific vaccines as well, but below I include all the records to show that I’m not cherry picking and also to get more stability in the numbers (fewer data points creates more noise).
The people who answered are my followers and are most unvaccinated themselves. They are reporting deaths of the person they know the best, whether vaxxed or unvaxxed. I invite fact checkers to validate that people were true to the direction they were given. There are more vaccinated deaths reported simply because 75% of the US population is vaccinated.
The percentage of unvaccinated to total deaths was 29% (222/(222+542)).
So you might think “Ah ha! That proves that the unvaxxed are dying at a higher rate than the vaxxed because it should be only 25% of the deaths that should be vaccinated so this PROVES the vaccines are saving lives!”
No, it just proves that unvaccinated people hang around other unvaxxed people and are slightly more likely to report their deaths.
This is very helpful for our survey for two big reasons:
It gives us enough data in both the vaxxed and unvaxxed buckets so we can do meaningful comparisons between the two buckets
I can’t be accused of bias, e.g., you anti-vaxxers are just reporting vaccinated deaths to make the vax look bad. Clearly this isn’t the case… they are reporting disproportionately more unvaccinated deaths. So it looks very credible because it’s consistent with what you expect to see.
Note that the mix of vaxxed/unvaxxed deaths is immaterial to this analysis. Each cohort is examined independently. If I had 50% vaxxed and 50% unvaxxed deaths, the results would be exactly the same.
It’s important to note that my followers cannot determine the date of death of unvaccinated or vaccinated individuals (unless they have God-like powers). And I have contact info for all the records so they can be “spot checked” to validate that people followed my instructions to report the person they are most familiar with.
There is a recall bias in that people are more likely to report deaths that happened more recently. This shifts the average death time to the right. This is why unvaxxed are > .5 (more about that later).
For vaccinated people, there is also a healthy patient bias. If you are going to die in days due to a fatal cancer, most people would not get vaccinated.
There is some amount of seasonality in deaths that might skew things somewhat. It’s minimal for those <60, and small for the elderly. But we’re looking at a 2 year period so it shouldn’t be much different between vaxxed and unvaxxed.
Gaming
It wasn’t possible to game the survey because nobody, including myself, knew how I was going to analyze the data until after the data was collected.
There was one person who put in a bogus entry (record #260) but that was easily spotted and removed.
The analysis cut off time was before this article was written so anyone trying to pollute the data will be unsuccessful since any new records aren’t included in the analysis.
Transparency
The database has been in public view the entire time that the data has been gathered. When a record is submitted, it appears in the public view.
Verifications
No submissions were deleted (other than record 260 which was clearly gamed) or modified which can be verified by the changelog of the data. The database is hosted by a third party firm.
There is an “integrity check” field indicating which records passed simply sanity check such as date vaccinated < date died. Only those records were processed.
I have the contact information for each reporter. I am looking forward to being contacted by any mainstream “fact check” organization who is willing to be recorded on video as we discuss the article. I’m happy to supply contact info for any line(s) in the survey so the fact checker can verify every record is legitimate.
Expectations
People who die within 2021 to 2022 should be expected to die evenly throughout the period (there is some seasonality so it isn’t flat over the calendar months). Therefore, with no biases, we’d expect that the average days of life is 1 year in any 2 year observation period. So a ratio of .5. The seasonality cancels out.
But due to recall bias (since we are asking people to recall deaths rather than using government records), we’d expect the number to be skewed to dying more recently so maybe we’d see a ratio of .55 for the unvaccinated.
The vaccinated benefit from both recall bias and the healthy patient bias, so it might be .58 or more.
If the vaccines are safe and effective, the ratio of the vaccinated > ratio of the unvaccinated due to the healthy patient bias.
If the vaccines are killing people, the ratio of the vaccinated <= ratio of the unvaccinated (since the healthy patient bias would give the vaccinated an advantage).
If the vaccines are killing people, the ratio will be <0.5.
The ratio for the vaccinated is .31 or less for every age range with > 5 records.
For the unvaccinated, the ratios are .52 or better for every age range with >5 records
The data is remarkably consistent when there are enough records for the range (generally 10 or more records per the uV# or V # columns).
The values in red are unreliable due to a lack of sufficient data points.
Values in red have too few records to compute an accurate ratio. Ratios >.5 are expected for a safe intervention. Ratios <.5 mean something is killing these people prematurely.
For the unvaccinated, my Airtable filter looked like this and I used the unVaxxed days alive/days possible columns:
For the vaccinated, my Airtable filter looked like this and I used the Vaxxed days died/days available columns.
NOTE: The “Integrity check” is NOT complete. But when coupled with the restrictions of the two filtering conditions, invalid records are all filtered out of the final result.
inal result.
Is my analysis wrong?
This is an Occam’s razor analysis. You could get fancier but it wouldn’t change the result. The signal is very very strong that the vaccines should be immediately stopped.
If I have made a mistake, I’d be grateful to see the correct analysis of the data using the same methodology. So if you object, show us the proper analysis.
The data is remarkably consistent for each age range. But there is a huge difference between the vaxxed (.3) and the unvaxxed (.58). This is exactly what I expected to see; no surprises. But it’s IMPOSSIBLE for the blue-pilled medical community to explain how this could possibly happen if the vaccine is so safe since it was supposed to be the other way around.
A simple look at the Notes field confirms the role of the vaccine in these deaths. That’s subjective proof. It shows that the vaccines are not as safe as claimed.
As far as confidence intervals, the numbers are remarkably consistent so the confidence intervals appear to be small. I’ve asked Professor Fenton for the correct way to ascertain these. He’s thinking about it. I’ll update this when I hear back.
But there’s more confirmation…
Failure anecdotes » success anecdotes
Is this analysis consistent with reliable evidence? Yes.
As it turns out, it’s easy to find failure anecdotes for the COVID vaccines. The anecdotes we generally find show STRONG failures.
By contrast, it is nearly impossible to find a “success anecdote,” even a weak success. I always ask doctors who will talk to me and they’ve never mentioned a single success story. I do this constantly on Twitter Spaces in full public view and NONE of the DOCTORS will EVER be able to cite an example. In fact, I have not found any medical doctor who has ever been able to cite a single geriatric practice or nursing home where deaths dropped after the vaccines rolled out.
If the vaccines were saving lives, there should be THOUSANDS of “poster elderly” success stories, yet there are none. All the anecdotes are strongly negative. That’s simply impossible if the vaccines are saving “tens of millions of lives” as Neil deGrasse Tyson said on YouTube. When I called Neil to ask him for a success anecdote, he hung up the phone on me.
So we have a pretty good sense just from the failure to find a success that the vaccines are an utter disaster. We didn’t even need to do any numerical calculations!
Lots of things confirm our hypothesis:
Lack of success anecdotes, but failure anecdotes easy to find
People switch from pro- to anti- but not the reverse.
Nobody can explain the 15,000 excess deaths in VAERS for the COVID vaccines. It’s not there for other vaccines, the deaths are all consistent with vaccine deaths. What killed all these people if it wasn’t the vaccine?
Ed Dowd’s book “Cause Unknown” contains tons of data. Where is the document debunking everything in that book and showing the cause of all these deaths, especially the increase in child deaths happening right after the vaccines rolled out for kids.
What about the 770 safety signals in VAERS. Why didn’t the CDC tell anyone about any of those signals? They notified the public about the VSD signal for stroke and didn’t even mention that it also triggered in VAERS.
Geriatric practice: I finally found a large geriatric practice of 1,000 patients, 75% are over 65. Their normal death rate is 11 per year (the mean). In 2022, they had 39 deaths for the entire year. They attribute the 28 excess deaths to the vaccine. If it wasn’t the vaccine, someone needs to explain to us what is killing these people because whatever it is, it needs to be IMMEDIATELY stopped. They can’t go public for fear of retribution.
Savo Island Cooperative (Berkeley, CA): Roughly 150 people. No deaths for 5 years before COVID; 0 in 2020; 1 in 2021; 3 in 2022 and they were all vaccinated and boosted (plus 3 strokes and 4 heart attacks). Reported to me by Jane Stillwater last night at an event I spoke at. Nobody at the event could recall any success anecdotes.
Ed Dowd mentioned the vaccines have killed 800K Americans and disabled 4X as many as killed, 3.2M since the vaccine program began.
The peer-reviewed scientific literature published a paper by Mark Skidmore showing over 217,000 deaths in 2021 alone due to the COVID vaccine. But they are looking at retracting the paper because Mark didn’t include a full bio on one of the funders of the study. Also, he asked a question about deaths from the COVID vaccine and that’s unethical (COVID virus questions are OK and ethical).
Josh Stirling looked at how cities in the US did in 2022 vs. 2021. So it’s a longitudinal study where you compare the city with itself one year ago. This is the best way to see what is going on… did your mortality increase or decrease. Check this out: cities with higher vaccination had larger all-cause mortality increases than cities with lower vaccination rates. In other words, the line goes the “wrong way.” This is devastating for the narrative, but of course consistent with what the death reports are saying. The R2 doesn’t need to be .9 for this to be convincing. They are correlated and it’s the slope of the line that is significant. The slope is the wrong way. That’s the point.
US cities; all ages; compare 2022 vs. 2021 in the same city The line slopes up. In other words, the experts were completely wrong: the vaccines are deadly. This is very compelling proof of harm that is impossible for anyone to explain away with a straight face. When combined with this analysis, it’s not credible to keep claiming the vaccines are safe and effective.
NOTE: The summary and challenge to prove Steve Kirsh’s analysis wrong is at least as long as what is above. As of the 1/31 update, an error had been discovered and he is re-working against the same data. But he is still challenging Big Pharma and their deep state partners to prove his conclusions wrong and show how they got THEIR numbers.
FILE - President Joe Biden talks with reporters after speaking in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Jan 20, 2023. Senior Democratic lawmakers turned sharply more critical Sunday of President Joe Biden's handling of classified materials after the FBI discovered additional items with classified markings at Biden's home. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
Former White House national security official Kash Patel spoke with Breitbart News about how “government gangsters” at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) are “scrambling” to “cover up” President Joe Biden’s classified document scandal and the deep state’s targeting of former President Donald Trump.
Breitbart News Saturday host Matthew Boyle noted that former President Donald Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence, and President Joe Biden are all in controversy stemming from classified documents and asked Patel to break down the differences in each case.
The key difference is that in Trump’s case, he had the presidential authority to declassify the documents that were marked classified and found at Mar-a-Lago, Patel explained.
“When it comes to classified documents, there’s one person on planet Earth that is a universal arbiter of classification. That means they can declassify and classify at will, that is a sitting president of the United States. That is it,” Patel said. “Nobody else can do that, unless that power is delegated to them through the Office of Director of National Intelligence, and through the chain of command, from the White House. A vice president cannot do it.”
Patel accused Biden’s DOJ of creating a “two-tier system of justice” to try and “cover up” Biden’s classified document case, despite the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Patel urged House Republicans to subpoena documents from the FBI’s investigation into Biden’s classified documents “to show the world how bad and rotten the DOJ is.”
“And what we now know that this, they say the Biden investigation began in November, because a librarian said that the documents were overdue. I don’t believe that for one second,” Patel said. “This investigation began from Hunter Biden’s laptop, because they found classified information that he was using to shill and hawk documents to the Ukraine so he can get paid. That’s where it came. And that’s where the house must get the documents from the FBI to show the world how bad and rotten the DOJ is.”
Boyle noted that the $83,000 monthly payments Hunter Biden received for his business dealings with Ukrainian-based Burisma were so the company could get “an inside track to whatever’s going on in the White House.”
Patel pointed out that former President Barack Obama has been silent amid Biden’s classified documents scandal and agreed with Boyle’s suggestion that Obama be brought into the House committees to testify under oath.
Patel said:
But whether or not Barack Obama declassified certain documents, he certainly didn’t declassify documents that were classified when Joe Biden was Senator. Now we know that. Joe Biden has documents dating back 20 years. So Barack Obama had nothing to do with though, so even if you declassified some of this stuff Joe Biden took, and you’re right, his deafening silence is noteworthy here, he could have just come out and said, nothing to see here. I declassified those for Joe, he told me about them. And, you know, no big deal.
Patel also criticized the media for referring to “sets” of documents found in Biden’s possession because “one set could be 1000 pages.”
“In my career. I’ve never or rarely have I ever seen one set equal one page. And they’re doing this on purpose,” Patel said. “Of course at Mar-a-Lago, they strewn all the paperwork on a floor and say, ‘look at all of this stuff.’ With Biden, it’s like, ‘oh, he only had six sets here, and four sets there and 12 sets there,’”
“So this information that’s been classified has been in the wild in unsecure facilities for multiple decades, being touched and handled by people who don’t have the appropriate security clearance to do it, namely Hunter Biden, who has used it to gain inappropriately and unlawfully contracts and advisory work from foreign governments. that in and of itself, is there another violation of the federal statute,” Patel continued.
Boyle pointed out that Biden has a plethora of documents at the University of Delaware waiting to be released from his time in the Senate.
Patel, a former prosecutor, said he would have started looking for more classified documents at Biden’s center at the University of Delaware.
“But Matt, you and I know we don’t live in a in a uniform system of justice anymore. This is not the United States of America from 10 years ago. It’s not even the USA from seven years ago,” Patel said. “This government, under government gangsters like Merrick Garland and Chris Wray, have determined that anything that benefits Joe Biden and hurts Donald Trump is going to dictate how they operate the law to the facts at hand. And that is a total destruction of justice.”
Patel urged House Republicans to subpoena documents from “every single location Hunter and Joe ever resided in, ever uses an office space ever had an association with or ever had an employment agreement with.”
Patel explained that “Joe Biden is not our target,” instead, “our target is the administrative deep state that’s being run by these government gangsters.”
Patel continued:
And we need to educate everyone that this total bastardization of due process by using the Biden classified documents scandal criminal enterprise to show them that even though Merrick Garland goes to the podium every week and says we are prosecuting without fear or favor, he is prosecuted because he is in fear and needs to curry favor with the deep state so that he can maintain his job and look good in the media.
Boyle then asked Patel to give advice to House Republicans as they proceed with their investigations into Biden.
Patel encouraged House Republicans to “follow the money.”
He said:
These people need to do what we did during the Russia gate, which is follow the money. Money never lies. Subpoena the money, subpoena every bank that the Biden’s had anything to do with in relation to the Ukraine, China, and other pay-for-play schemes. And why do I say that? Because the banking information relates right back to the documentation, which is the scene of a crime here, the Ukraine document that Hunter Biden produced from classified information is point in case, you know, exhibit number one, to land a seven-figure contract in the Ukraine. That is hard evidence that shows you and the American public, what their actual intentions were with classified information, it was to take it to steal it and to peddle it for personal financial gain.
He also cautioned against launching too many investigations. Instead, Patel suggested they conduct “like two or three investigations,” with the FBI and DOJ being the focus of one investigation and “maybe the border and maybe Fauci.”
“If we can do those three things Well, then we will provide the American public with documentation to show the corruption of the government gangsters that are operating these agencies and departments,” Patel added.
Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News.
‘Historically marginalized communities like Philadelphia experience even higher levels of trauma’A professor at Thomas Jefferson University said incidences of Philadelphia parents and other adults coming to schools to settle their kids’ arguments and threaten teachers is due in part to the effects of the COVID pandemic, inflation and gun violence.Psychologist Kirby Wycoff (pictured) told The Philadelphia Inquirer that “historically marginalized communities like Philadelphia experience even higher levels of trauma than other communities,” and as such “may devolve to behavior that’s not helpful.”
“These families are stressed out, overwhelmed, and not sure how to get their needs met,” Wycoff said. “It’s not OK, but I can understand where it’s coming from.”
Over the last two years, the 217 schools in the city district have seen a concerning number of threats and incidents involving adults. In the first half of this school year there have been “five assaults on employees by parents and 35 threats by parents to employees.” At this same time last year there were two and 41, respectively.
Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, related how he recently approved the transfer of a teacher who had been assaulted by a student and, soon thereafter, members of the student’s family.
“Adults just marched right into the school, ignored the rules of checking into the office, walked right into the classroom, and attacked the teacher [physically],” Jordan told the Inquirer.
Former Principal Robin Cooper said school district officials share the blame: “Why would I act appropriately if there’s nothing in it for me, if I know I can come up and act a fool and my kid still gets to terrorize a school? Our schools are not bad if the supports are there to hold people accountable for behavior.”
Cooper’s comments reflect the situation in many American schools: a paucity of teachers.
Despite media accounts about things like poor salaries, constant student misbehavior and lack of administrative support rank consistently highest among educator (and potential educator) concerns.
Wycoff’s solutions — more school “resources” and “promoting trauma-informed practices across systems” — sound a lot like methods in line with “restorative justice.”
According to her faculty page, Wycoff is co-author of articles such as “Motherhood Among Young Black Women: Wisdom and Survival amidst Trauma, Racism, and Structural Oppression,” “‘I ain’t ready: It’s time to get ready:’ Exploring Dichotomous Feelings about Motherhood among Young Women of Color,” and “Applying a MTSS Framework to Address Racism and Promote Mental Health for Racially and Ethnically Minoritized Youth.”
Croatian President Calls Germany’s ‘We Are at War With Russia’ Comment Madness. Croatian President Zoran Milanovic responded to the German foreign minister saying “we are fighting a war against Russia” by calling the remark “madness” and wishing Germany better luck than with the last war they had with Russia 70 years ago.
Milanovic was responding to the bizarre and inflammatory statement made by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock during the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on Tuesday.
Croatian President Zoran Milanovic responded to the German foreign minister saying “we are fighting a war against Russia” by calling the remark “madness” and wishing Germany better luck than with the last war they had with Russia 70 years ago.
“Do you want us to enter the war?” asked Milanovic during a visit to the port city of Split, adding that Croatia “should in no way help” Ukraine militarily.
Croatian President Zoran Milanovic: The German Foreign Minister said in English the day before yesterday in Strasbourg that we must be united because we are at war with Russia. I quote: "We are at war with Russia." I did not know that. pic.twitter.com/dnQO1VllwQ
The Croatian president expressed his amazement that such aggressive rhetoric was being spouted by a representative of the usually pacifist German Greens.
“If we are at war with Russia, then let’s see what we need to do. But we won’t ask Germany for its opinion,” Milanovic asserted. “Let them figure out who is the actual chancellor over there. I’ve been in politics for a long time, and our country has been through a lot, but I’ve never seen this kind of madness before.”
Milanovic condemned NATO powers for flooding the region with tanks and other weaponry in order to prolong the war.
“Those tanks may burn, or they may reach Crimea, but Croatia will have nothing to do with it,” he insisted.
As we previously highlighted, US weapons sales to other countries rose from $103.4 billion in 2021 to $153.7 billion in 2022, with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon all making a killing out of the Ukraine conflict.
In a related development, the French Foreign Ministry claimed that the US, Germany and other countries sending battle tanks to Ukraine did not mean that NATO was at war with Russia.
“We are not at war with Russia and none of our partners are,” ministry spokeswoman Anne-Claire Legendre said.
Scholaroo ventures to discover the best and worst school systems across three factors — Student Success, Student Safety and School Quality. I’m in agreement with some and disagree with some. Interesting how California is good in Math but at the bottom in others ranked 45. My Ohio is ranked 22.
Education is a key indicator of the economic, social, and cultural success of any state. To analyze school systems across the United States, Scholaroo has identified various criteria such as student success, school quality, and student safety to compare all fifty states in order to assess which school systems are the best and worst in this 2023.
Student success can be measured through various academic metrics such as test scores and graduation rates. School quality accounts for the level of resources available to school districts. Finally, student safety is an important factor in determining school system rankings; this includes school security measures, bullying prevention programs, and other initiatives designed to ensure students feel safe at school.
The data set considers a depth of topics across 43 key indicators, ranging from metrics that measure how much a student is enabled to succeed, to metrics that measure the school’s security.
If you want to know which state has the best education system for 2023, here we show it to you.
Rankings of States with Best & Worst Public Schools
Category Breakdown
Methodology
In order to determine the best and worst school systems per state, Scholaroo compared the 50 states across three key dimensions:
Student Success
Student Safety
School Quality
We evaluated those dimensions using 43 relevant metrics, which are listed below with their corresponding weight. Each metric was graded on a 100 point scale, with a score of 100 being the max.
Finally, we determined each state’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its overall score and used the resulting scores to rank-order our sample.
Student Success (25 Points)
High School Graduation Rate: Double Weight (2.27 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of graduates High school graduates or higher.
High School Dropout Rate: Double Weight (2.27 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of high school dropouts among persons 16 to 24 years old (status dropout rate).
SAT Scores: Double Weight (2.27 points)
Note: This metric measures the SAT mean scores of High School Seniors.
ACT Scores: Double Weight (2.27 points)
Note: This metric measures the average ACT score (Composite score: English, Mathematics, Reading, Science scores) of Graduates.
College-Going Rates: Double Weight (2.27 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of High School graduates going directly to College.
Reading Test Scores: Double Weight (2.27 points)
Note: This metric measures the Average of Scale Scores between 4th and 8th Grade Reading scores.
Math Test Scores: Double Weight (2.27 points)
Note: This metric measures the Average of Scale Scores between 4th and 8th Grade Mathematics scores.
Science Test Scores: Double Weight (2.27 points)
Note: This metric measures the Average of Scale Scores between 4th and 8th Grade Science scores.
AP Exam Participation: Regular Weight (1.14 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of graduates who took an AP exam during High School.
AP Exam Scores: Regular Weight ((1.14 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of the Class of 2021 scoring a 3 or higher on an AP exam during High School.
Students in Gifted Programs: Regular Weight (1.14 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of public students enrolled in gifted/talented programs.
Class Suspension Rates: Regular Weight (1.14 points)
Note: This metric measures the number of days missed due to suspension (per School).
Expulsion Rate: Half Weight (0.57 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of student expulsions (per school).
Retention Rate: Half Weight (0.57 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of 8th Grade students retained (per school).
Student Participation in Sports: Regular Weight (1.14 points)
Note: This metric measures child participates in a sports team or did he or she take sports lessons after school or on weekends, age 6-17 years.
Note: This metric measures the percentage of Secondary Schools in which Teachers taught the benefits of healthy eating.
Sexual Health Curriculum: Half Weight (1.75 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of Secondary Schools in which Teachers taught all 20 sexual health topics (including topics related to how HIV and STD’s are transmitted, contraception methods, sexual orientation, gender expression, creating and sustaining healthy relationships, sexual risk behaviors, etc) in a Required Course in Any of Grades 9, 10, 11, or 12.
Teachers meeting State Licensing Requirements: Regular Weight (3.50 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of teachers that meet all State Licensing/Certification Requirements.
Level of Experienced Teachers: Regular Weight (3.50 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of teachers with 3 or more years of experience.
Average Teachers’ Salary: Regular Weight (3.50 points)
Note: This metric measures the cost of living adjusted to the average teacher salary.
Student Safety (40 Points)
Bullying Rate: Regular Weight (3.33 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of High School students who were bullied on school property.
Exposure to Illegal Drugs: Regular Weight (3.33 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of High School students who were offered, sold, or given an illegal drug on school property.
Absence of Students due to Safety Concerns: Regular Weight (3.33 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of High School students who did not go to school because they felt unsafe at school or on their way to or from school.
Bullying and Sexual Harassment Prevention: Double Weight (6.67 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of Secondary Schools where all school staff received professional development on preventing, identifying, and responding to student bullying and sexual harassment.
Sexual Assault Rate: Half Weight (1.67 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of Sexual Assault.
Rape or Attempted Rape Rate: Half Weight (1.67 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of Rape or Attempted Rape.
Robbery with a Weapon Rate: Half Weight (1.67 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of robberies with a Weapon.
Robbery with a firearm or explosive Rate: Half Weight (1.67 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of robberies with a firearm or explosive.
Robbery without a weapon Rate: Half Weight (1.67 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of robberies without a weapon.
Physical attack or fight with a weapon Rate: Half Weight (1.67 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of physical attacks or fights with a weapon.
Physical attack or fight with a firearm or explosive device Rate: Regular Weight (3.33 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of physical attacks or fights with a firearm or explosive.
Physical attack without a weapon: Half Weight (1.67 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of physical attacks without a weapon.
Threats of physical attack with a weapon: Half Weight (1.67 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of threats of physical attacks with a weapon.
Threats of physical attack with a firearm or explosive device: Half Weight (1.67 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of threats of physical attacks with a firearm or explosive device.
Threats of physical attack without a weapon: Half Weight (1.67 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of threats of physical attacks without a weapon.
Possession of a firearm or explosive device: Regular Weight (3.33 points)
Note: This metric measures the percentage of possession of a firearm or explosive device.
Drag Shows Are an Actionable Violation of Children's Rights.
Christopher was the Editor and owner of Western Free Press and my boss. He’s joined substack so please think about subscribing to his website. Here’s one of his articles.
(As I mention in my About section, there will be times when I lay out well-crafted arguments, rooted in months or years of deliberation and research, and there will be other times when I work things out on the fly. This will be a combination of both.)
Libertarianism is perpetually complicated by the reality of children—by their temporary condition of helplessness and inability to have full communion with their rights, and by the natural realities that grant parents temporary authority over them. Libertarian formulations that can easily be applied to adults become more challenging when applied to children. In spite of this, we do need to craft rights-based arguments for children too. They are sovereign beings, even if they cannot enjoy full expression of every aspect of that sovereignty from their first breath.
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Conservatives intuitively sense that a person dressed in drag, wearing a cartoonish prosthetic penis, taking a child by the hand and parading him or her around the room is—somehow—a violation of rights.
Even drag-queen story-time, with its general air of hyper-sexualization, crosses a clear line. Parents understand that this is about more than telling children a story. Putting drag queens in front of kids is the point of the exercise, not telling them a story that could otherwise be read by anyone.
So how can this be understood to be a violation of either the child’s rights, or the parents’, or both? Ultimately, I think the argument hinges on consent. So let me try my hand…
First, consent is central to the core rights of all humans. In the months ahead, I will be laying out formal proofs for this, but in brief…
You have exclusive and inalienable self-ownership as a natural fact of your existence, and coercive force exercised against the enjoyment of your self-ownership is morally (and ontologically) impermissible. Thus, things done directly to you against your will—things to which you do not consent—are impermissible.
But children cannot competently consent to anything. Normal human beings recognize this, and most of those charged with acting in loco parentis (teachers, daycare minders, etc.) don’t push anything so far that consent becomes an issue. They do normal things: they feed them, stop them from sticking forks in electrical sockets, and so on. The kids cannot exactly consent to those things either, but normal people try to do only those things that a parent would also do—reasonable things that a child needs. But leftist activists, I am sorry to say, are not normal. And at this point, neither are those who are seduced by the easy path to leftist-style “virtue” offered by the activist: “Letting me come to your preschool in drag and read weird stories to the children under you care will make you a better person.”
This then raises a problem: we don’t exactly have a hard-and-fast rule for the consent of children. Just like their parents have temporary authority over their children and can forcibly stop them from electrocuting themselves, or even make them clean their rooms, those acting in loco parentis have some of this authority too.
But surely they have this authority by proxy. Surely the parents are granting this authority, provisionally and temporarily, to teachers and others acting in loco parentis. So how, then, do the parents get this authority? There is not space for all the sub-arguments here, but the facts are pretty simple. It boils down a specific form of responsibility.
If you get drunk and drive through your neighbor’s fence, you have initiated a kind of force against his property. His property is, of course, an extension of his self-ownership, which means it was an act of force against your neighbor. Your act has made you responsible fix the fence. The same is the case, of course, if you drive over your neighbor’s foot rather than his fence.
This is also the case if you are a signatory to a contract. A contract involves the exchange of alienable property (or labor, which is an extension of self-ownership). If the other party abides by the agreement but you do not, you are essentially stealing from him (an act of force). You have taken an action—signing the contract—that makes you responsible to its terms.
If you are a parent, you are responsible for your child’s existence in the world. You have taken an action which produces a person who requires your help in order to exist. You are not responsible if a homeless person starves somewhere; you did not cause that homeless person to be. But you are responsible if your child starves because you are responsible for the existence of your child.
It might not feel, at first blush, as clear-cut as your responsibility for the hole in your neighbor’s fence, but the reasoning, and justification, are the same.
The natural facts of reality—specifically the temporary helplessness of the child—are such that in order to meet this fiduciary responsibility, you must exercise authority over the child. Common sense, Common Law, and the laws of nature all recognize this. Ideally, a parent eases this authority at a pace commensurate with the child’s growing ability to enjoy full communion with his own rights and sovereignty, and then, at a certain age, releases a free human being into the world. It’s not always easy to get the timing perfectly right, but the facts of nature make this the only logical and moral system to use. This authority places exclusive, dispositive decision-making power in the hands of the parents.
A child’s consent is thus placed, pro tempore, in the hands of the parent. A child cannot consent to being led around by the hand by a drag queen wearing a giant phallus. Period. Doing so violates the child’s rights. But since the decision about consent is temporarily in the hands of the parent, then doing so is a violation of the parent’s rights as well.
To sum up…
Parents’ fiduciary responsibility to their children grants them temporary authority over their children.
This authority includes the right to hold the child’s right of consent in proxy until the age of majority.
Anything to which the child is subjected without the consent of the parent is a violation of the rights of consent of both parent and child.
Again, this is not an issue most of the time, because most of the time, outside forces do not act against the wishes of children or their parents. Normal people will teach children math, read them a nice story, or keep them from getting hit by a bus, and parents are fine with things like that. But we’re not dealing with normal people; we’re dealing with leftists. And now we’re also dealing with people who have substituted the left’s idea of “virtue” for their own—people who have become so addicted to the narcissistic frisson they get from thinking they’re one of the BeautifulPeople™ that they actually think it’s okay to do this to children. And weak-minded, compliant narcissism addicts are just as dangerous as the leftists giving them the drug in the first place.
Drag queen story-time and similar activities are clear violations of the right of consent of both parent and child. They are acts of force against self-ownership, and are thus actionable. If the system does not punish these acts, then the system has failed. If the system allows them to occur—or worse, abets their occurrence and prevents recourse by the parents—then the system itself is committing an act of force against children and parents alike.
Libertarians ought to sense this as well, and many do, but presumably not quite as many. Libertarians are more rights focused, but I suspect they are, in the aggregate, less children focused. (This is based on an assumption that they are less likely to be married and have children than conservatives, though I do need to research that to be sure.)
This is one area where the otherwise rock-solid Murray Rothbard goes careening off the rails: In The Ethics of Liberty, he argues that a parent may, through inaction, starve his children.
If a person does a poor job of exercising his exclusive, dispositive decision-making power over his own life, that’s on him, but the parent-child situation is complicated by the fact that the child is a separate being from the parent. Nonetheless, ceteris paribus, this authority is natural, necessary, and generally good.
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By Christopher Cook · Launched 2 days ago
Human rights. The madness of the left. A way out of the darkness. The world has gone insane—we already know that. My job is to help figure out WHY.
Twitter Files: GEC, New Knowledge, and State-Sponsored Blacklists. twitter Photo
By Bryan Jung for The Epoch Times
An organization that says it is a coalition of “climate and anti-disinformation organisations” says Twitter under CEO Elon Musk is allowing more dissenting views on climate change.
Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), released a Jan. 19 study (pdf), accusing Musk of allowing misinformation about the climate crisis to spread on the social media platform.
The study accused Twitter of boosting the hashtag “#ClimateScam” to users when searching the word “climate,” as its top search result.
The hashtag has suddenly spiked on Twitter search results since July 2022, with its appearance increasing ever since, according to CAAD.
The report said that “in 2022, denialist content made a stark comeback on Twitter in particular.”
Twitter Search
CAAD alleged that at least 91,000 Twitter users reported the #ClimateScam hashtag more than 362,000 times by December.
“The source of its virality is entirely unclear, and re-emphasises the need for transparency on how and why platforms surface content to users,” said the study’s authors.
They said that term appeared to be trending despite “data that shows more activity and engagement on other hashtags such as #ClimateCrisis and #ClimateEmergency.”
The research team claimed that the rise of the term in search results could not be explained by user personalization, the volume of content, or popularity.
“A basic search for ‘climate’ on Facebook did not autofill with overtly sceptic or denialist terms; searching explicitly for #ClimateScam only showed 1.5k users mentioning the term, versus 72k for #ClimateEmergency and 160k for #ClimateCrisis.”
CAAD complained that the source of the #ClimateScam hashtag was unclear and that there was a need for transparency on how the search result came up. (Oh my! NOW they want “transparency!” –TPR)
“Equally, TikTok returned no search results for #ClimateScam, but instead suggested the phrase ‘may be associated with behaviour or content that violates our guidelines.’”
Interest Groups
The authors said that not enough of the content was labeled as misinformation by Twitter’s new management and claimed that it could not find a comparable trend or uptick in “#ClimateScam” on other platforms.
CAAD is partially funded by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank, which is heavily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The ISD said it is working with social media platforms to explore radicalization online, to minimize the impact of extremist recruitment by groups in Europe and North America.
Since buying Twitter in October, Elon Musk has reduced the social media team’s staff by 50 percent and cut down its content moderation team to protect freedom of expression.
Back in 2014 voters approved 3 billion dollars to build more reservoirs. To this day not a penny has been spent. If done, they would have enough reservoirs to hold water for ten years.
Environmental rules designed to protect imperiled fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta have ignited anger among a group of bipartisan lawmakers, who say too much of California’s storm-water is being washed out to sea instead of being pumped to reservoirs and aqueducts.
Since the beginning of January, a series of atmospheric rivers has disgorged trillions of gallons of much-needed moisture across drought-stricken California, but only a small fraction of that water has so far made it into storage. In the delta — the heart of the state’s vast water system — nearly 95% of incoming water has flowed into the Pacific Ocean, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
“With so much excess water in the system, there is no reason that exports south of the Delta cannot be increased,” read another letter that State Sen. Melissa Hurtado (D-Sanger) and Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains (D-Bakersfield) addressed to Newsom.
“We must make the most of the heavy precipitation we are receiving and use it to our advantage,” Rep. Jim Costa (D-Fresno) wrote in a letter to state and federal officials. He called for increased flexibility on the first flush rule.
See full article 
‘Historically marginalized communities like Philadelphia experience even higher levels of trauma’A professor at Thomas Jefferson University said incidences of Philadelphia parents and other adults coming to schools to settle their kids’ arguments and threaten teachers is due in part to the effects of the COVID pandemic, inflation and gun violence.Psychologist Kirby Wycoff (pictured) told 
