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The post House Democrats Vote in Favor of Lowering Voting Age to 16 appeared first on The Bongino Report.

TO ASK THE QUESTION IS TO ANSWER IT: Why Does Big Tech Censor Conservatives And Not Terrorists?

IF IT WEREN’T FOR THE GOVERNMENT, WE’D BE AT THE MERCY OF UNSAFE PRODUCTS: Popular flea collar linked to almost 1,700 pet deaths. The EPA has issued no warning.

For years, Julie Hall has been running a small animal rescue operation without incident on her farm in the northern Michigan town of Petoskey.

That ended in late January when state wildlife officials showed up at her door in response to a complaint that she was taking in animals without the proper permits. Hall has since been charged with a misdemeanor, and six of her animals, including a blind raccoon and a one-legged crow, were confiscated and euthanized by the state.

"I truly did not know I was breaking the law because I had done this all my life, as a farmer, I'd done this," says Hall. "Had I known I was such a criminal, I would have never done it. I'm not built that way."

The state's Department of Natural Resources (DNR) says that licensing requirements exist to prevent rescued wild animals from becoming a danger to the community and that it had no choice but to put down the animals collected from Hall's farm.

"We put out press releases every spring saying, do not pick up wildlife, do not keep wildlife, do not take wildlife out of the wild. It's illegal and it's not good for wildlife," said Jim Gorno, an official with DNR, to the Charlevoix Courier in late February. "What happens is the wildlife is raised, sometimes if you let it go, they become a nuisance or even a disease issue here."

Hall has been taking in animals at her family's KeiJu Farm for decades. She candidly admits that she didn't have the required state permission to be a Michigan Licensed Rehabilitator.

Everyone from farmers and friends to members of the community would bring her all sorts of creatures in need of help, she says, from animals injured by hunters to orphaned baby raccoons.

"We have nothing but wildlife up here. We've moved into their homes. It's our responsibility when something like that happens," she says of her animal rescue work.

Hall, assisted by a crew of volunteers, would do what she could to nurse the animals brought to her back to health so that they could be released back into the wild. Animals that came to her as babies were taught to fish, hunt, and fend for themselves before being let go, she says.

Those animals with more serious disabilities—or which failed to pass tests showing they would be able to survive in the wild—she kept around permanently alongside her domesticated goats, chickens, and alpacas.

"I'm not a fool. I know exactly how this works. I've read articles, books. I've done this all my life," she says.

The crackdown on her rescue operation, Hall says, came after a disgruntled volunteer—who she had let go for stealing—complained to a number of state agencies about her farm.

A few of these agencies conducted uneventful site visits in response to those complaints. Officials from the state's Department of Agriculture showed up, she says, but left after finding no violations and helping her move some hay around.

Things went differently when DNR officials showed up at her farm on January 28.

"Four DNR vehicles pulled into my driveway like SWAT," Hall says. "I think they were expecting me to be erratic. I calmly and quietly took them to the enclosures where the animals were."

What followed was a traumatizing experience for Hall. DNR officials went around scooping up the unpermitted wild animals she was keeping on her farm, including Sassy, a blind raccoon, and several Canadian geese who'd been wounded by hunters and had been living on Hall's farm for a few years.

"Sassy didn't want to move for nothing," recalls Hall. "She didn't want to come. She could sense something was wrong."

A deer that Hall had taken in as a fawn was euthanized that day on the farm. DNR officials gave the animal two injections, one to put it to sleep, and then another to put it down.

"It was so horrible," says Hall, tearing up. "I couldn't fix anything."

The Charlevoix Courier reports that six animals in total were eventually euthanized by DNR. Hall was charged with holding wild animals in captivity without a permit, a misdemeanor offense.

Hall is currently working to get the necessary permits to restart her rescue operation. But that effort could be derailed if she is convicted. She says that she intends to fight the charge, and that a court hearing is set for March.

Hall is clearly rankled that her rescue work has become a legal issue. "If you love and care for an animal," she says, "it's against the law."

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Ex-Michigan health director cashed out $155,506 in hush money deal with Whitmer administration.

The separation deal between Michigan Governor Whitmer’s people and health department director Robert Gordon had a two-side confidentiality clause.

Detroit News laid out the backroom negotiations done with taxpayer money. A four-page agreement was signed on February 22nd: Robert Gordon gets nine months salary and healthcare benefits, and in return Gordon promised not to pursue any legal claims against the state.

The decision by both parties not to talk about details had a stated reasoning to it: “In response to any inquiries from prospective employers, employer will state that employee voluntarily resigned,” according to the agreement.

The parties involved assert such secret dealings are standard legal practice. But not everyone in the state’s political sphere is satisfied with this explanation. One such person is state representative Matt Hall. He’s questioning as to why taxpayers are secluded from knowing what’s going on, even though it’s their money on the line in this situation. “The people of Michigan deserve to know what was going on here.”

You’ll get nothing and like it.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: With Pandemic Ending, People Who Yell At Others To Wear Masks In Danger Of Never Feeling Important Again.

Earlier: COVID Is on the Verge of a Humiliating Defeat.

The post At Least 12 Killed in Fatal Crash in California appeared first on The Bongino Report.

Guest “debunking the debunkers” by David Middleton Setting the Stage Why was Texas, ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) in particular, so unprepared for the onslaught of frigid weather? This…

Neighborhood activists in San Francisco are suing to stop the University of California, San Francisco's (UCSF) plans for an ambitious expansion of the medical center at its Parnassus Heights campus, which would include a new hospital and housing for students and staff.

These neighborhood groups argue in three separate lawsuits that the University California Board of Regents, the governing body of the UC system, failed to properly consider the serious impacts UCSF's planned expansion would have on housing demand, traffic, air quality, and aesthetics in the surrounding area when it approved those plans last month.

One of these lawsuits—filed Friday in the California Superior Court of Alameda County by the Parnassus Neighborhood Coalition and Haight-Asbury resident Calvin Welch—argues that a 2,100-page environmental impact report on UCSF's Parnassus expansion should be thrown out, and another analysis be performed that more closely examines the project's impacts.

"Although the [UCSF] project will cast shadows on Golden Gate Park and the Grattan Playground, result in more than 6,000 bird deaths a year, increase housing demand, and make traffic worse, the [environmental impact report] improperly dismissed all of these impacts as 'less than significant,'" fumes the Parnassus Neighborhood Coalition on its website.

Two other groups, San Franciscans for Balanced and Livable Communities and the Yerba Buena Neighborhood Consortium, have filed similar lawsuits, reports the San Fransisco Chronicle. 

The Parnassus Neighborhood Coalition lawsuit also argues that UCSF's expansion plans violate a Board of Regents resolution from 1976 that capped development of the Parnassus campus at 3.5 million gross square feet. UCSF's planned expansion would bring the campus's building space up to around 6 million square feet by 2050.

That 1976 resolution was passed under remarkably similar circumstances. At the time, UCSF was moving forward with a plan to modernize a hospital building on its campus and construct a new dental school.

Those plans also raised the ire of neighborhood activists, including Welch, who filed lawsuits to stop these projects and lobbied the state legislature to cut off funding to them, according to his complaint.

In an effort to safeguard its funding, the Board of Regents approved a compromise resolution that placed a number of limits on the campus's growth, including the aforementioned cap building space. In return, activists agreed to drop their lawsuits and lobbying efforts.

According to the Parnassus Neighborhood Coalition's complaint, that cap was understood at the time to be permanent.

But 50 years on, UCSF says an expansion of its campus is necessary in light of its growing student and faculty population, the outdated nature of its hospital facilities, and the increased demand for hospital beds.

Each year, UCSF turns away about 3,000 patients for lack of bed capacity, the university said in a press release. One of its existing hospital buildings, the 70-year-old Moffitt Hospital, also doesn't meet state seismic standards and will have to be decommissioned for inpatient use by 2030, it said.

Nearly half of the additional building space UCSF is looking to add would be taken up by a new hospital building, which would bring with it an additional 200 hospital beds. New on-campus housing would add another 673,000 gross square feet of space and about 762 new units, according to the environmental impact report for the project.

Planning for this major expansion was kickstarted in 2018 after UCSF received a $500 million private donation from the Helen Diller Foundation to help construct a new hospital.

In July 2020, UCSF released a final environmental impact report on the planned expansion, which was then approved by the UC Board of Regents on January 20.

The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires government agencies like the Board of Regents to perform these kinds of environmental reviews when considering approval of a project.

The CEQA is a citizen-enforced statute, meaning that third parties have the power to sue government agencies if they believe they've abused their discretion by approving a project without doing a thorough enough analysis of its significant environmental impacts.

The law, passed in 1970, was originally intended to apply to major state infrastructure projects like a new highway or dam. Subsequent amendments and judicial interpretations have vastly expanded the law's scope to include even largely pro forma government approvals of privately sponsored projects like a new apartment building or a new burger joint.

The Parnassus Neighborhood Coalition's lawsuit, which is challenging a state agency's approval of a public university's expansion plan, is seemingly closer to the original purpose of the law.

Their petition is nonetheless trying to stop a hospital from modernizing and expanding its facilities on its own property over some very typical NIMBY ("not in my backyard") concerns, including parking and population growth.

Given the twin housing and health crises faced by the city, maybe it'd be better to let this project proceed without litigation.

When you hear the word eugenics, you may be more likely to think of Nazi Germany than California. But the former studied the latter's sterilization practices to hone its approach. And while Germany's program died with the Nazi regime, California's has lasted much longer.

To see it at work, watch Belly of the Beast, a documentary exploring forced sterilizations in the state's women's prisons. The film follows Kelli Dillon, who spent 15 years in the Central California Women's Facility for killing her abusive husband. While she was behind bars, her uterus was removed against her will.

In 2006, Dillon sued the government after experiencing menopause at the ripe age of 24. Along the way, she and her legal team received reports from other prisoners who were forcibly sterilized while giving birth or undergoing unrelated surgeries.

Dillon lost her suit. But years later, in 2014, she testified in support of a California bill to ban sterilizations as a form of birth control; that time she succeeded. It's up to the viewer to decide if she won the larger war. "As to whether I think it should be illegal," says one anonymous prison nurse shrouded in darkness, "not necessarily."

Over the course of this pandemic I have often wished that Hans Rosling was still alive. For those who are unaware, he was a medical doctor and a professor at Karolinska Institutet who had a particular interest in global health and development. In 2012, Time magazine declared him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

During the last few months of his … Read more

The post Lockdowns have killed millions appeared first on Sebastian Rushworth M.D..

GOOD POINT:

(Bumped).

‘SOCIOPATHS:’ The World Economic Forum shared a video on how ‘lockdowns are quietly improving cities.’

WELL, THANK HEAVENS THAT WARMONGER TRUMP IS GONE, RIGHT?  Someone From the Biden Administration Bombed Syria – White House Silent.

LOL, INDEED:

DOING THE STATE’S BIDDING THIS WAY IS CENSORSHIP: Sheryl Sandberg and Top Facebook Execs Silenced an Enemy of Turkey to Prevent a Hit to the Company’s Business.

I’ve written many times about the spectacularly positive impact of pro-market reforms in Chile.

The shift toward free markets, which began in the mid-1970s, was especially beneficial for the less fortunate (see here, here, and here).

But it’s quite common for critics to assert that Chile is a bad example because many of the reforms were enacted by General Augusto Pinochet, a dictator who seized power in 1973. And some of those critics also attack Milton Friedman for urging Pinochet to liberalize the economy and reduce the burden of government.

Are these critics right?

To answer that question, I very much recommend the following cartoon strip by Peter Bagge. Published by Reason, it accurately depicts the efforts of reformers to get good reforms from a bad government.

It starts in 1973, with a group of Chilean economists, known as the “Chicago Boys,” who wanted free markets.

In 1975, they invited Milton Friedman to help make the case for economic reform.

This 1982 strip shows some of the controversies that materialized.

But by the time we got to the 21st century, everything Friedman said turned out to be true.

Chile had become an “improbable success.”

This cartoon strip is great for two reasons.

• First, I’ll be able to share it with people who want to delegitimize Chile’s transition to a market-oriented democracy (ranked #14 according to the most-recent edition of Economic Freedom of the World). Simply stated, it was bad that Chile had a dictatorship, but it was good that the dictatorship allowed pro-market reforms (particularly when compared to the alternative of a dictatorship with no reforms). And it was great that Chile became a democracy (a process presumably aided by mass prosperity).
• Second, we should encourage engagement with distasteful governments. I certainly don’t endorse China’s government or Russia’s government, but I’ve advised government officials from both nations. Heck, I would even give advice to Cuba’s government or North Korea’s government (not that I’m expecting to be asked). My goal is to promote more liberty and it would make me very happy if I could have just a tiny fraction of Friedman’s influence in pursuing that goal.

P.S. Here’s Milton Friedman discussing his role in Chile.

P.P.S. While I disagree, it’s easy to understand why some people try to delegitimize Chile’s reforms by linking them to Pinochet. What baffles me are the folks who try to argue that the reforms were a failure. See, for instance, Prof. Dani Rodrik and the New York Times.

P.P.P.S. Critics also tried to smear Prof. James Buchanan for supporting economic liberalization in Chile.

THE BUREAUCRATIC MENTALITY IS THE ONLY CONSTANT IN THE UNIVERSE: Pharmacists Wonder: When Are We Going To Stop Throwing Out All These Vaccine Doses?

Ever since the vaccines began rolling out, we’ve heard far too many stories of large numbers of doses being discarded. Some cases have been from intentional spoilage by bad actors and conspiracy theory junkies. Others have been caused by refrigeration equipment failures or just simple human error. But it turns out that an even larger number of doses are going into the waste bin every week without any of those things happening. NBC News has a distressing report out this week revealing that healthcare workers are increasingly dismayed by the high number of doses that wind up being discarded while people are still waiting on line for a jab. The reason is that when they get down near the end of a vial, they are not allowed to use a process known as “pooling” to avoid wasting the precious liquid. The result is that for every shipment of 80 vials, forty full doses of the vaccine wind up in the trash. And they’re blaming the FDA.

“Get the hell out of my way!” the wise man once said.

WITH APLOMB: How Starlink Is About To Disrupt The Telecommunications Sector.

Starlink’s evolution very interesting: on the one hand, it is leveraging SpaceX’s rocket launch missions, a company that has managed to systematically lower the cost and entry barriers for putting satellites into orbit (it can launch up to 60 satellites at a time, or even use them to fill idle capacity on other missions). At the same time, it has created its own satellite technology, making them much cheaper, more efficient, and with a very low failure rate. But above all, it aims to create an infrastructure that can be used anywhere in the world, simply by offering it through a web page, without the need for too much development of corporate infrastructure in each market: the antennas can be installed independently, and the service can be provided with almost no need to deploy teams of people to provide backup.

Musk is also learning how to operate the satellite constellation he’ll need for communications on his eventual Mars colonies.

A groundbreaking new rule you might not have heard about could save you thousands of dollars. For the first time, America's hospitals are required to give upfront pricing on medical procedures so you can shop around. It's the result of a June 2019 Executive Order from President Trump. It took effect January first after surviving […]

IT’S NOT “PRIVATE COMPANIES” MAKING DECISIONS WHEN CONGRESS IS PRESSURING THEM: Democrat Congressmen Pressure Cable Providers to Censor Conservative News Networks.

Related:

AFTER OVER A MONTH OF THE MEDIA SPREADING DISINFORMATION:

They told us all that time — without evidence — that he died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher by a protester. That was false. How long did they know it was false before they came clean? Many of them still haven’t.

OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE CESSPITS OF RACISM: Bronx educator claims she was fired after sharing Holocaust story, refusing ‘Wakanda’ salute.

At an implicit-bias workshop where superintendents were asked to tell their personal stories, Ames talked about her grandparents’ loss of two children during the Holocaust — only to have colleague Rasheda Amon tell her, “you better check yourself,” the lawsuit alleges.
see also

Veteran Bronx educator claims she was fired after refusing ‘Black Panther’ salute

“That is not about being Jewish! It’s about black and brown boys of color only,” court papers quote Amon as scolding.

In August 2018, Ames was summoned to DOE headquarters, where Watson-Harris handed her a termination letter, telling her the department “was moving in a new direction,” she says in the lawsuit. Colleagues were prohibited from communicating with her, and Watson-Harris ordered staff to “eradicate” any reference to Ames, down to the district’s purple color scheme she had designed, she charges.

When the single mom pleaded to keep her employment, retirement benefits and health insurance, the DOE sent her to a Brooklyn “rubber room” with nothing to do.

A month later, Ames was given a choice: take a demotion or be removed from the payroll in 24 hours. She took the demotion.

The DOE eventually assigned Ames to the Office of School Health, but gave her no work for five months, she says. In July, Ames finally took a job as a school administrator in another state.

“This case highlights that those in power often put their own agendas before the well-being of our community. It’s a terrible example for our children to be taught to judge people on anything other than merit,” her attorney Israel Goldberg said.

It’s becoming clear that “antiracism” is just state- and corporate-sanctioned racism.

BLUE CITY BLUES: Trump Organization says it is closing Central Park ice rinks after city severs contract.

Two ice skating rinks operated by the Trump Organization are set to close in Central Park at 4 p.m. on Sunday as the city severs its contract with the company. The decision to cut ties by the de Blasio administration came after the Capitol riot, CBS New York reports.

The leases to the Wollman Rink and the Lasker Rink will be terminated on February 26. The rinks are set to close Sunday to allow time for the Trump Organization to move out.

Families decried the move, with one skater pleading for more time. “So much has been taken away from us this year, and this was one thing that was kind of holding us all together,” Mya Henning told CBS New York. “It’s only, like, six weeks more that we’re asking for.”

More: “The Wollman Rink was the one that then-New York Mayor Ed Koch tried and failed to renovate for years at great public expense. Trump took over the project and at his own expense got the rink operating for the public in just six months. The Trump Organization has operated it since, returning most of the profits to public works.

But Orange Man Bad.

THE SCIENCE WASN’T SETTLED: “As Samuel West combed through a paper that found a link between watching cartoon violence and aggression in children, he noticed something odd about the study participants. There were more than 3000—an unusually large number—and they were all 10 years old.”

Yet West added the 2019 study, published in Aggressive Behavior and led by psychologist Qian Zhang of Southwest University of Chongqing, to his meta-analysis after a reviewer asked him to cast a wider net. West didn’t feel his vague misgivings could justify excluding it from the study pool. But after Aggressive Behavior published West’s meta-analysis last year, he was startled to find that the journal was investigating Zhang’s paper while his own was under review.

It is just one of many papers of Zhang’s that have recently been called into question, casting a shadow on research into the controversial question of whether violent entertainment fosters violent behavior. Zhang denies any wrongdoing, but two papers have been retracted. Others live on in journals and meta-analyses—a “major problem” for a field with conflicting results and entrenched camps, says Amy Orben, a cognitive scientist at the University of Cambridge who studies media and behavior. And not just for the ivory tower, she says: The research shapes media warning labels and decisions by parents and health professionals.

The investigations were triggered by Illinois State University psychologist Joe Hilgard, who published a blog post last month cataloging his concerns about Zhang’s work. Hilgard was initially impressed when he came across a 2018 paper of Zhang’s in Youth & Society, another study with 3000 subjects. “I was like, holy smokes!” he says. The study found some teenagers were more aggressive after playing violent video games. Given the huge sample size, it had the potential to be a “powerful chunk of evidence,” Hilgard says.

But he found the paper’s statistics mathematically impossible. Zhang and his co-authors reported high levels of statistical significance for their finding, but the reported differences in the effects of violent games versus nonviolent games were too small for that high statistical significance to be possible. Hilgard alerted Zhang and the journal, and Zhang submitted a correction. Hilgard says that made the statistics seem more plausible, but they were still incorrect.

Hilgard says he found problems in other papers of Zhang’s, such as nearly identical results reported in three different papers. He emailed Zhang and asked to see his data, but he says Zhang refused. Hilgard then contacted Dorothy Espelage, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and co-author with Zhang on multiple papers. She told Hilgard that Zhang had refused to send her the data, too. It was only after Hilgard asked Southwest University to investigate that Zhang sent Hilgard data for a Youth & Society paper on movie violence.

But the data were odd, Hilgard says, and missing features normally found in similar experiments. He sent his findings to Zhang’s university, which said it found problems, but not fraud, with Zhang’s data, and that Zhang was “deficient in statistical knowledge and research methods.” Dissatisfied with the response, Hilgard sent his observations to all the journals involved.

Modern science has a lot more bad research than it should, because the rewards for research are so high, and not especially dependent on its quality.

I’m going to start this article by revealing my own biases. I’m not sure where the idea that alcohol might be healthy comes from. It’s pretty well established that alcohol is poisonous to all living organisms. That’s why we use it to disinfect surfaces, and why I lather my hands in it several times per hour when I’m working in the hospital. It interferes with … Read more

The post Is moderate alcohol consumption healthy? appeared first on Sebastian Rushworth M.D..

OTHER THAN THERE BEING NO SUCH THING AS A SEMIAUTOMATIC ASSAULT RIFLE, THIS IS COOL: YOU CAN NOW 3D PRINT AN ENTIRE SEMI-AUTOMATIC RIFLE AT HOME.

SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: Biden Removes ‘We the People’ Petitioning From White House Website.

The system has been around for many years. At any given time, hundreds of petitions were active. If you get 100,000 signatures, the White House is supposed to give an answer. You may remember that there was an active “Free Assange” petition that the Obama Administration was obligated to answer (and gave a bad answer).

When Trump took office, he briefly discontinued it but put it back up after a media uproar.

Now it appears the Biden White House has removed it.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for another uproar.

SOME PEOPLE GET TO USE CULTURE AS AN EXCUSE:

Others do not.

COVID WOULD BE THE LEAST OF HIS PROBLEMS: Covid: Man offered vaccine after error lists him as 6.2cm tall. “A man in his 30s with no underlying health conditions was offered a Covid vaccine after an NHS error mistakenly listed him as just 6.2cm in height. Liam Thorp was told he qualified for the jab because his measurements gave him a body mass index of 28,000.”