They had a bone to pick with him.

A Colorado judge Friday denied a motion by Donald Trump and the Colorado GOP to throw out a lawsuit seeking to block Trump from appearing on the ballot in Colorado.

“WHY DID I SLEEP IN THE FACTORY SO MANY TIMES? BECAUSE IT MATTERED.” Elon Musk blasts the work-from-home crowd, saying they are ‘detached from reality.’

The Biden administration’s National Tobacco Youth Survey for 2023 asks middle and high school students to disclose their sexual orientation and whether or not they are questioning their gender identity.

The survey is distributed annually by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention’s Office on Smoking and Health to gauge the progress of “comprehensive tobacco prevention and control programs” for youth in the U.S., according to the CDC website.

In 2020, changes were made to include a question asking if any students identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or “something else,” according to documents from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

In the 2023 survey, however, the questions went further and asked students about transgenderism and whether they feel in alignment with their biological sex.

“Some people describe themselves as transgender and/or nonbinary when the way they think or feel about their gender is different from their sex assigned at birth,” the survey reads.

It further asks: “Do you identify as transgender and/or nonbinary?”

“There is a concern that this important survey that essentially informs the federal government’s understanding of the issues and drives its policy surrounding youth smoking may be being exploited for other purposes, perhaps to the detriment of its ultimate integrity,” Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, a research and education organization, told the DCNF.

He added: “Whether controversial social goals are appropriate to be part of expensive taxpayer surveys on youth tobacco use may strike some as closer to appeasement of favored special interests than the genuine pursuit of sound scientific data.”

One of the answer options reads “I am not sure yet or questioning if I am transgender and/or nonbinary,” according to the survey.

Another question explains the definition of “sexual orientation” before requesting that students identify their romantic preferences.

“Sexual orientation is a person’s emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attraction to another person,” the question reads. “There are many ways a person can describe their sexual orientation and many labels a person can use.

“Which of these options best describes your sexual orientation?”

Students could choose “straight or heterosexual,” “Gay or lesbian,” “Bisexual, pansexual, or queer” or “Asexual,” according to the survey. The respondents could also say they weren’t sure or didn’t understand the question.

In February 2022, the CDC made a “Non-Substantive change request” to the OMB, asking to “update” existing questions on a variety of topics including “questions/answer choices on sexual orientation and gender identity (including non-binary),” according to OMB documents.

The CDC notes that the surveys are often changed slightly “to maintain relevance with emerging tobacco use behaviors.”

The CDC also requested for new questions to be added regarding situations where students may have experienced racial or ethnic discrimination. Students could answer yes to a number of situations, including being “wrongly disciplined in school,” “hassled by the police,” “given a lower grade than you deserved” or “received poor service in a restaurant or store,” according to the survey.

The CDC and OMB did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

The post Biden's Youth Tobacco Survey Has a Disturbing Question for Middle School Students - It Has Nothing to Do with Smoking appeared first on The Western Journal.

Comedian Dave Chappelle went on a pro-Hamas, anti-Israel rant at a show in Boston on Thursday evening -- and was cheered by the crowd, causing Jews present in the audience to walk out.

The FBI allegedly told Thiel to not discuss his interactions with Trump or other politicians.

“To what extent are temperature levels changing due to greenhouse gas emissions?” may prove to be the most important scientific paper in the last 10 years.

The post A New Report Throws Cold Water on Man-Made Global Warming Pseudoscience first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

"We must set federal dollars aside to rebuild Black infrastructure," Kennedy writes.

Washington County Circuit Court Judge Andrew Wilkinson was gunned down in his Hagerstown home, according to local reports.

A neuroscientist who studies alcohol and stress faked data in two published studies and two grant applications submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), according to a U.S. government watchdog. 

Lara S. Hwa, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, since January 2021, “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data, methods, results, and conclusions in animal models of alcohol use disorders,” the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) concluded in its findings. 

ORI found Hwa, who has not immediately responded to our request for comment, “falsified and/or fabricated experimental timelines, group conditions, sex of animal subjects, mouse strains, and behavioral response data” in the grant applications and papers. The articles were published when she was a postdoc at the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill. 

One of the grant applications in which ORI said Hwa submitted fake data, “Long-term Alcohol Drinking Alters Stress Engagement of BNST Circuit Elements,” was funded for $734,145. The other grant application was “administratively withdrawn” last December. Hwa was a principal investigator on another grant, not included in ORI’s findings, that received $84,218 from 2013-2014. 

“Alcohol drinking alters stress response to predator odor via BNST kappa opioid receptor signaling in male mice,” one of the papers included in ORI’s findings, appeared in eLife in July 2020. The authors retracted it in November 2021 “based on error [sic] in methods and data reporting, which they identified following publication, that cast doubt on the conclusions.” 

The extensive retraction notice stated that five co-authors, not including Hwa, the first author, notified the senior author of an error in the published data. Then, the authors “deeply examined the results and identified several more errors” in the paper, which are detailed in the notice. 

For several figures, the authors determined the published data “did not match the raw data values,” and after re-analyzing the raw data, “there were multiple changes in statistical significance, leading to an overall change in the interpretation of the results.” 

The notice concluded: 

The changes that would be required to correct the paper are sufficiently extensive that its overall conclusions must currently be considered to be in doubt. All of the authors are in agreement that retraction is the appropriate course of action.

The other paper, “Predator odor increases avoidance and glutamatergic synaptic transmission in the prelimbic cortex via corticotropin-releasing factor receptor 1 signaling,” published in Neuropsychopharmacology in 2018, has not been flagged. As part of the settlement agreement Hwa agreed to, she must request that the paper – which has been cited 24 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science – be corrected or retracted. 

Hwa also agreed to four years of supervision of her research, beginning on August 18 of this year. During the four years of supervision, she also may not serve on any NIH advisory or peer review committee. 

Baylor University has not immediately responded to our request for comment on the findings.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

When radical progressive ideology tries to compete with reality, there’s no contest. Reality always wins.

Whether or not the progressives will acknowledge defeat is anybody’s guess. If their track record is any indicator, they’re more likely to deny reality than admit defeat.

Take the case of Jason Williams. He’s the George Soros-backed district attorney in New Orleans. “Soros-backed” is synonymous with radical.

On Monday, Williams and his 78-year-old mother came up against a reality his progressive policies helped create when they were carjacked at gunpoint, according to WWL-TV.

In an interview with WWL, Williams said, “This tells you that this can happen to anybody. Nobody is immune from crime. Nobody is immune from all sorts of crime.”

What Williams doesn’t say is that nobody is immune from crime in large part thanks to him.

“Right now, I’m just glad to still be in the land of the living,” Williams continued. “I’m glad that nobody squeezed the trigger last night. I’m glad my mother was able to get out of that car and that she’s OK.”

Thank goodness Williams and his mother survived their brush with death. One wonders if the incident — that very well could have gone very bad — has caused Williams to self-reflect. Somehow, I doubt it.

Williams is one of many “woke” district attorneys around the country who opt to protect criminals rather than law-abiding citizens.

Soft-on-crime prosecutors often count on funding from radical leftist billionaire George Soros. Williams is no exception, according to the Washington Examiner.

“Soros-backed DAs have enacted ‘reforms’ that eliminate mandatory minimum prison time, fines imposed on criminal defendants, and jailing juvenile delinquents and small-time drug offenders,” the Examiner noted.

Williams, upon taking office in 2021, “decided the best way to combat one of the highest murder rates in the country was to put more criminals back on the street,” the Examiner reported.

During his tenure, “less than one out of every five felony cases have ended with a felony conviction (17%). Approximately 67% result in dismissal without legal consequences for the alleged criminal offender. And about 20% of the felony cases dismissed were crimes of violence.”

In 2021, “Williams rejected 46% of violent felony arrests for such criminal acts as murder, rape, kidnapping, carjacking, and robbery, among others. That represents an 84% increase over his predecessor.”

You get the picture.

It is in no way surprising that Williams and his mother found themselves victims of a crime in a city that Williams has made a haven for criminals. What’s surprising is that Williams didn’t see it coming a long time ago.

Williams’ vehicle was later recovered by investigators, according to WWL. But Williams doesn’t care about the car. And even if he’s not about to do any reflecting on his own policies, the incident did make him reflect on the importance of family.

“My 5-year-old growing up without his dad, that would be a big deal. My 17-year-old going off to college without me in his life, that would be a big deal. Not seeing what my 23-year-old — all her phenomenal dreams that she’s got planned for the next several years — if I did not get to see that, that’s what’s important.”

That’s encouraging. Family is the bedrock of society, and in embracing his own Williams might come to see that his radical leftist stance on crime endangers families and poisons society.

Then again, maybe not.

Radical progressives like Williams may have moments of clarity now and then, but — like alcoholics realizing they have a problem — odds are they’ll be coaxed back into inebriation by a Soros-induced fever dream that promises utopia and delivers hell.

---

The post Soros-Backed DA and His Mother Carjacked at Gunpoint appeared first on The Western Journal.

House Judiciary Committee chairman and Speaker-designate Jim Jordan (R-OH) urged House Republicans in a letter on Monday to unite against the Democrats amid the ongoing battle for Speaker of the House.

RECYCLING IS PRETTY MUCH ALWAYS A SCAM: Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again.

BREAKING:

Hochul introduces bill to limit teenage access to algorithmic social media in New York

Christopher Hutton

October 12, 11:54 AM October 12, 11:54 AM Video Embed

Lawmakers in New York introduced legislation to regulate teenagers' ability to access social media by requiring parental consent before they can access algorithm-driven feeds.

Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY), Attorney General Letitia James, and two members of the state legislature announced on Wednesday that they were introducing the Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation for Kids Act, or SAFE Act, for consideration as a response to the wave of mental health problems facing teenagers across the United States.

AMERICAN HONEYMOONERS REVEAL MAD SCRAMBLE TO ESCAPE ISRAEL AFTER HAMAS TERROR ATTACK

"Our kids are in crisis, and the adults in the room need to step up," Hochul said. "The statistics are extraordinarily disturbing: Teen suicide rates are spiking, and diagnoses of anxiety and depression are surging. It's critical we all stand together to address the youth mental health crisis."

The bill would implement restrictions on services such as TikTok's "For You" page but would not affect content viewed through chronological feeds, such as TikTok's "Following" page. The law would also allow parents or guardians to limit the number of hours teenagers can access platforms and restrict access between midnight and 6 a.m. Failure to comply with the law could lead to fines of up to $6,500 in damages per violation.

The officials also introduced the New York Child Data Protection Act, which bans the collection of minors' personal data without consent.

Meta noted it already provides many of the requested tools but that the algorithms that the legislation targets block harmful content.

"We refer to research, feedback from parents, teens, experts, and academics to inform our approach," Antigone Davis, Meta's head of global safety, said in a statement. "And we'll continue evaluating proposed legislation and working with policymakers on developing simple, easy solutions for parents on these important industrywide issues."

The bill is expected to appear before the state legislature in early 2024.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

New York's legislation is the latest effort by lawmakers to try and crack down on teenage access to social media. California passed an Age Appropriate Design Code last year that requires age verification for social media access, although the law was blocked in court last month.

Utah passed legislation in March requiring age verification for any teenager wanting to make a social media profile. Arkansas passed a similar measure, only for a judge to block it in September.

© 2023 Washington Examiner

Pop the popcorn, this 2024 election just got a LOT more interesting.

On Wednesday, Gavin Newsom signed into law an act that would outlaw counting ballots by hand.

"Resolved that the office of the Speaker of the House of Representatives to be vacant."

"I agree with you we need serious change, but there is no plan and no one capable even stepping up," MTG said.

"If five Republicans go with Democrats, I'm out,"

Billionaire activist investor Bill Ackman floats deal to take X public again

Christopher Hutton

October 02, 11:13 AM October 02, 11:13 AM Video Embed

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman said that he is interested in taking X, formerly known as Twitter, public less than a year after Elon Musk went through a high-profile and complicated process to buy it and take it private.

Ackman received a regulatory signoff for an investment vehicle, also known as a special purpose acquisition rights company, on Friday. This investment entity could be used to invest in a privately held company and take it public. Ackman, who is an active and prolific poster on X, said that he would "absolutely" consider a transaction with X, which Musk took private last year for $44 billion.

SUPREME COURT THREAT HOVERS OVER NEW BIDEN FCC NET NEUTRALITY PUSH

Ackman said that he has no idea if X would be interested in such a deal, according to the Wall Street Journal. But he said he had "enormous respect" for Musk and his vision for X. A spokesman for X said it had no comment.

The SPARC, known as Pershing Square SPARC Holdings, is expected to have $1.5 billion to invest in a deal, according to filings. Ackman was made to wait two years for approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission to approve the investment entity after he was forced to walk away from a large SPARC deal with Universal Music Group in 2021. He instead purchased a 7.1% share in the company.

Ackman posts often on social media, often promoting his investments at Pershing Square. He gained additional exposure in 2020 when he spoke out in favor of the government taking action to address the coronavirus as well as promoting mass vaccination.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

"It's like one big brain," Ackman has said of X.

Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion, closing the deal after months of trying to back out of it. While Musk initially took the company private, he said he would consider making it public again in a few years.

© 2023 Washington Examiner