Jts5665

Full monologue       Woody Harrelson hosted Saturday Night Live and used his opening monologue to criticize Big Pharma's response to COVID-19: "The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in… https://t.co/3elrFv53GW […]

Last summer, the plague chronicle got debunked by man-bun sporting “fact-finder” Pascal Siggelkow. This bizarre mediocrity writes for the clown car license-fee funded state media operation known as Tagesschau, and his latest foray into debunkery (knowledge of which I owe to Florian Warweg on Twitter) really sets a new bar for media ineptitude. As you read, remember that Tagesschau is not some stupid blog or a regional television show, but rather a leading German television news service produced by ARD with an associated online operation which reaches millions of Germans everyday.

Recently, Siggelkow directed both digits of his IQ to the problem of debunking Seymour Hersh’s Nord Stream story. His objections are mostly the usual stuff that everyone is complaining about, but at some point his beleaguered brain stumbled across what he thought was new and heretofore undeboonked detail. Specifically, he found Hersh’s report that divers would “plant shaped C4 charges” on the pipelines wildly improbable, because …C4 charges do not generally come in the form of plants.

With the help of an equally absurd “explosives expert” named David Domjahn, who looks like this …

… and who runs a creepy website where he talks about how exciting it is to be licensed to use explosives and how blowing things up is full of artistic possibilities, Siggelkow penned four full paragraphs debunking the possibility of plant-shaped C4 charges. All four of these paragraphs somehow made it through the entire Tagesschau editorial process unmolested and appeared on their website yesterday:

Explosives in plant form unlikely

There is also uncertainty about the details of the detonations. Hersh writes that the divers placed the plastic explosive C4 “in the form of plants on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers.” Only three of the four pipelines were destroyed, however, and one Nord Stream 2 pipe remains undamaged. Whether explosive charges failed or the attackers spared a quarter of the capacity is unclear as of today.

Additionally, experts say the seismographic recordings of the explosions show that the detonations must have had a TNT equivalent of several hundred kilogrammes. “It would be a safer bet to use 300 to 400 kilogrammes of C4 explosives per detonation," says David Domjahn, a lecturer in explosive technology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Against this background, the thesis that the explosives were placed in plant form is “unrealistic”.

“The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline was just recently completed, so plant growth on the order of 300 kg would have required a corresponding amount of time to grow and so wouldn’t be suitable for camouflage,” says Domjahn. The shape of the plant also raises questions, he adds. “Thick tree roots – which are unlikely at a depth of 80 metres – could be simulated with plastic explosives. When mimicking the filigree structures as on seaweed, the challenge is not to fall below the so-called limiting diameter of the explosive.”

Due to the plasticity and associated fragility, Domjahn considers it “impossible” that inconspicuous plant dummies robust to the water currents could have been used. The lack of splitting at the broken ends of the pipe also speaks against the thesis. It’s likely that the explosive charges were not placed directly on the pipelines, but at some distance from them, in order to achieve a “pushing effect” through the intervening water and at the same time to conceal the traces of the explosives used.

Within hours, Siggelkow and his crack fact-checking team were widely lampooned, and the article was swiftly corrected, complete with this brief and humiliating lesson on the various meanings of “plant”:

Note: An earlier version of this article referred to explosives “in the form of plants.” This was a translation error. Hersh writes of “plant shaped C4 charges.” In this case, the word “plant” should be translated as “place.” The paragraph has been corrected.

There are a lot of problems with the press, but the biggest one is just that they are extremely, profoundly, unimaginably stupid.

THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED, UNTIL IT WASN’T: Webb telescope discovery was so shocking astronomers thought it was a mistake.

The Pennsylvania State University’s Joel Leja, who took part in the study, calls them “universe breakers.”
“The revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science,” Leja said in a statement. “It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.”

Science advances by observation, not by proclamation.

Yesterday, opinion columnist Bret Stephens broke some uncomfortable news to New York Times readers, in a blunt piece headlined The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned? He went on to explain that the massive Cochrane literature review on Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses (which the rest of us covered weeks ago) failed to find any evidence that making people wear cloth or plastic on their faces does anything about rates of Covid or influenza infection.

There’s no point in talking about what he has to say; you’ve heard it all before. Let’s look instead at his commentariat, to see how the Faucian faithful are taking the news.

The highest-rated comment is by Stephen Levin. He’s had a look at the fine print and decided to take solace in the uncertainty of the authors – to the applause of nearly three thousand people:

John Bertuso, as a physician, has the same idea:

The prior, default position of these men – and, judging from the comments, easily 75% of everyone else who reads the Times – is that masks work, and any uncertainty in the studies is simply a failure to establish what they’re already certain of, namely that masks work. Twisted very far, uncertainty can even become a confirmation that masks are actually working, because at least it’s not evidence that they’re not working!

This is fairly crazy when you think about it. Not only do we lack studies showing that masks don’t work; we also have no studies showing that rain dances don’t work, and that sacrificing young goats to Hermes doesn’t work, and that hieromancy doesn’t work. In fact there’s no limit to the insane stuff you’ll end up doing if you assume everything works in the absence of proof that it doesn’t.

Michelle, who wants us all to know that she’s read the study, exemplifies the other major cope. This is that masks totally work, it’s just that their use requires such levels of care and consistency that – practically speaking – most people derive no measurable benefit from them.

It’s unclear how this line of argument saves masks, really, but that’s beside the point. It makes people like Michelle feel better about their heavy investment in one of the more absurd superstitions to afflict Western society in recent memory.

Beyond the Michelles and the Steven Levins and the Chrissies – people who are at least superficially concerned to appear reasonable – there’s a vast ocean of lunatics like BChad, whose raging confidence in masking has grown so enormous, it is beyond the power of any empirical evidence whatsoever to strike down.

Masks cover up nasal passages, and nasal passages are how the virus spreads, and BChad was in a hospital today, and everyone was masking in the hospital BChad was in, and that’s science. “Common sense prevails here,” and over 1600 Times readers agree.

A big part of the irrational appeal of masks, is their prior association with hospitals and similar self-consciously hygienic environments. This is enough to put the efficacy of masking beyond all question for readers like Steve:

Plenty of commenters claiming to be medical personnel agree, raising the strong possibility that even many nurses and surgeons don’t understand why they wear masks in the operating theatre.

But in this whole sea of writhing ignorance, which goes on for over a thousand comments, it’s statements from people like August West that really stand out for me.

Ninety-six upvotes for the tinpot totalitarianism of this loser, who believes himself entitled to order other people around on the basis of unfounded beliefs, then to claim ignorance as an excuse for his excesses, and nevertheless to condemn those who objected to his superstitious demands of selfishness.

Humans are fundamentally irrational, which is why a primary argument of the plague chronicle is that there can be no such thing as temporary measures to crush a curve, or deviations from routine to save a grandparent, or hyperbolic hygiene propaganda just to get through the winter. All this stuff, every time you try it, will warp the perceptions and opinions of millions of people forever. In 2055, we’ll be awakening from our second nuclear winter and some elderly eccentrics leftover from the 2020 pandemic will still be masking in the breadlines every morning.

UPDATE (h/t @M_Vronsky): This Twitter user asked a local government official for a response to the op-ed and received this totally insane reply, concluding: “You were right statistically, but I won’t apologize.”

The BBC recently ran a headline claiming Antarctica sea ice had hit a "new record low", but inexplicably missing was the fact that since 1979 the trend in the ice extent is "near zero" and not statistically significant.

The post Study Finds Zero Loss of Antarctica Sea Ice – But BBC Spins as “New Record Low” appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

NOT THE BEST WAY TO GO: Irish rooster with a violent past kills man with attack to the back of his leg, court says.

"I am alleging that this lack of inquiry is a failure of due diligence amounting to medical negligence towards a vulnerable patient," plaintiff said.

Okay, we all know the FBI was there on January 6th, but did you know there were also undercover DC police officers in the crowd and they were encouraging people to storm the Capitol?

#JOURNALISM:

You’ll be shocked at how that turned out.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Internal review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s Alzheimer’s research, colleagues allege.

In 2009, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, then a top executive at the biotechnology company Genentech, was the primary author of a scientific paper published in the prestigious journal Nature that claimed to have found the potential cause for brain degeneration in Alzheimer’s patients. “Because of this research,” read Genentech’s annual letter to shareholders, “we are working to develop both antibodies and small molecules that may attack Alzheimer’s from a novel entry point and help the millions of people who currently suffer from this devastating disease.”

But after several unsuccessful attempts to reproduce the research, the paper became the subject of an internal review by Genentech’s Research Review Committee (RRC), according to four high-level Genentech employees at the time; two were senior scientists and two were scientists who also served as executives. Three spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the allegations and non-disclosure agreements. The scientists, one of whom was an executive who sat on the review committee and all of whom were informed of the review’s findings at the time due to their stature at the company, said that the inquiry discovered falsification of data in the research, and that Tessier-Lavigne kept the finding from becoming public.

Tessier-Lavigne denies both allegations. Genentech said in a statement that “as part of our diligence related to these allegations, we reviewed the records from that November 2011 RRC meeting and saw no allegations of fraud or wrongdoing.” The company acknowledged that “given that these events happened many years ago … our current records may not be complete.”

After the review, which began in 2011, Genentech canceled research based on the paper’s findings. Till Maurer, a senior scientist at the company from 2009-2018 who said he was assigned to develop drugs based on the 2009 paper, told The Daily that his superior informed him that, in Maurer’s words, “the project is being canceled and it’s because they found falsified data.”

Read the whole thing.

TIME TO PURGE THE BUREAUCRATS: British gov’t: Reading Tolkien, Orwell, and CS Lewis are indicators of …

When I first saw these documents I felt a sort of white-hot anger. But then I read on and saw that these same taxpayer-funded fools provide lists of other books shared by people who have sympathies with the ‘far-right and Brexit’. Key signs that people have fallen into this abyss include watching the Kenneth Clark TV series Civilisation, The Thick of It and Great British Railway Journeys. I need to stress again that I am not making this up. This has all been done on your dime and mine in order to stop ‘extremism’ in these islands.

There is also a reading list of historical texts which produce red flags to RICU. These include Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, as well as works by Thomas Carlyle and Adam Smith. Elsewhere RICU warns that radicalisation could occur from books by authors including C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley and Joseph Conrad. I kid you not, though it seems that all satire is dead, but the list of suspect books also includes 1984 by George Orwell.

A government that feels threatened by these books is a government that deserves to be overthrown.

Green energy projects may soon rival the kill rate of Japanese Whale "research" vessels, if claims of a connection are true.

The post The Offshore Wind Turbine Whale Slaughter Continues? first appeared on Watts Up With That?.

What an exciting time to be alive! Which group do you think they'll suicide next?

Goodbye Disinformation Board, Hello Disinformation Index.  Less than a year after many celebrated the disbanding of the Biden’s Administration Disinformation Board, it appears that the Administration has been funding a British group to rank sites to warn people about high-risk disinformation sites. Gabe Kaminsky at the Washington Examiner previously ran a story on the Index. The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) has released its index and every one of the high-risk sites turn out to be . . .  wait for it . . .  conservative or libertarian sites.  HuffPost or Mother Jones (which were also analyzed), but HuffPost made the top list of most trustworthy for potential advertisers. It turns out that the “riskiest online news outlets” just happen to be some of the most popular sites for conservatives, libertarians, and independents. [N.B.: After my Hill column ran, the National Endowment for Democracy wrote to inform me that it had decided to stop funding the Global Disinformation Index].

The GDI is designed to steer advertisers and subscribers away from certain sites, potentially draining sites of revenue needed to operate. The organization issues the index to “advertisers and the ad tech industry in assessing the reputational and brand risk when advertising with online media outlets and to help them avoid financially supporting disinformation online.” The State Department is partially funding the effort. The Biden Administration gave $330 million to The National Endowment for Democracy, which partially supports the GDI’s budget.

GDI warned advertisers that these sites could damage their reputations and brands: New York Post, Reason, Real Clear Politics, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, One America News Network, The Federalist, Newsmax, The American Spectator, and The American Conservative.

The inclusion of the New York Post is particularly notable. It is ranked in the top ten newspapers in the country and the top ten digital news sites. (For full disclosure, I have written for the newspaper as well as many of those on the trusted side of the GDI ledger). The New York Post was suspended by social media companies over the Hunter Biden story before the 2020 election by companies relying on false stories appearing in many of the most trustworthy sites listed by GDI.

The allegedly dangerous sites also included Reason, a website associated with UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh, who was clearly gobsmacked by the warning. Reason regularly posts insightful and substantive analysis from conservative and libertarian scholars. With the diminishing number of such academics on faculties, the site is a relative rarity in offering a different take on cases and legal issues. The inclusion of Reason in the listing is absurd and shows an utter lack of objective and reliable criteria. For example, GDI says that the site offers “no information regarding authorship attribution, pre-publication fact-checking or post-publication corrections processes, or policies to prevent disinformation in its comments section.” That is obviously untrue as any cursory review of the site would confirm. The Reason articles contain clear indications of authorship.

Moreover, there is a reason why Reason does not have policies posted on the removal of disinformation: it opposes content moderation policies of groups like GDI on free speech grounds. Reason like my own blog Res Ipsa (www.jonathanturley.org) opposes disinformation “processes” used to limit free speech. As Volokh noted, “Reason does not specifically police disinformation in the comments section; that is perhaps an area where Reason‘s philosophy—free minds and free markets—clashes with GDI’s.”

The GDI reviewed sites on the far left like Mother Jones that routinely run unsupported attacks on the right and debunked theories on Russian collusion or other claims. For example, many of the sites ranked as most reliable only recently admitted that the Hunter Biden laptop was not Russian disinformation. For two years, these sites spread this false story with little or no opposing viewpoints despite early refutation by American intelligence.

Even in 2021, NPR still claimed that “The laptop story was discredited by U.S. intelligence and independent investigations by news organizations.” After a chorus of objections to the clearly false story, it corrected the story but still stated falsely that “numerous news organizations cast doubt on the credibility of the laptop story.”  It never explained the continuing “doubt”?  Media organizations that effectively imposed a blackout on the story had already confirmed that the laptop was authentic.

Likewise, sites like NPR continued to make the false claim that former Attorney General Bill Barr cleared Lafayette Park for a photo op long after the claim was proven to be categorically untrue. The government-supported news outlet also has been routinely challenged for making biased or false claims about conservatives, including Supreme Court justices.

Nevertheless, the New York Post and Reason are listed as dangerous sites while sites like HuffPost are actually listed at the top of the least risky disinformation sites. HuffPost is regularly challenged on false or misleading attacks on conservatives.

None of that means that I would put NPR or Mother Jones or HuffPost on a do-not-advertise disinformation list. These are sites with a well-known liberal bent just as other sites have a conservative bent. I am not here to denounce those sites any more than I am here to defend the other sites for their content. Rather the concern is that GDI is applying skewed measures to target disfavored sites. It is concerning that the sites at either extreme of GDI’s spectrum of disinformation largely reflect the political spectrum. (One exception is the Wall Street Journal, which is in the most trustworthy grouping).

GDI accuses sites like Reason of lacking transparency on issues like authorship but the group is fairly opaque on its own conclusions and standards. The explanations for tagging these sites are riddled with subjective and ambiguous terms. For example, GDI includes RealClearPolitics due to what GDI considers “biased and sensational language.” Did the reviewers actually visit the sites of Mother Jones and HuffPost in evaluating comparative levels of bias? Were those sites paragons of neutrality and circumspection?

GDI further says that RealClearPolitics “lacked clear and diverse sources.” Many of the sites ranked as most reliable (and thus worthy of advertising revenue) are routinely criticized for excluding conservative or libertarian perspectives. HuffPost and Mother Jones have a range of diversity that runs from the left to the far left.

The New York Times has led efforts to exclude opposing voices from the right. In 2020, the the Times issued a cringing apology for running a column by Sen. Tom Cotton. The Times forced out editor James Bennet and apologized for publishing Cotton’s column calling for the use of the troops to restore order in Washington after days of rioting around the White House. (Bennet recently denounced his former newspaper for abandoning journalistic standards of balance).

The GDI disinformation index shows the very favoritism that it attributes to others. For example, in discouraging advertisers from supporting the New York Post, the group declares that “content sampled from the Post frequently displayed bias, sensationalism and clickbait, which carries the risk of misleading the site’s reader.” The line reflects the utter lack of self-awareness of self-appointed monitors of disinformation. There is no effort to explain what constitutes “clickbait” or “sensationalism” in comparison to more favored sites like HuffPost.

The fact that GDI reflects such bias is not particularly surprising. Disinformation efforts have long displayed pronounced political influences and agendas. Indeed, we have seen recent disclosures of how members of Congress like Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Cal.) secretly sought to use disinformation claims to ban critics, including a columnist, from social media.

What is more troubling is the funding of the United States government for a group seeking to target conservative sites and deter advertisers from supporting them. I recently testified on the disclosures of the Twitter Files and the confirmation of coordination by the FBI and other federal agencies with social media companies in censoring citizens. I noted that the Administration played the public for chumps. After yielding to an outcry over the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board, the Administration disbanded it. It never mentioned that a far larger censorship effort was being carried out with an estimated 80 federal employees in targeting citizens and others. While the GDI effort is smaller in comparison and effect, it is an additional facet of this effort. It is not known if the Administration has other programs of this kind and the Democrats continue to vehemently oppose any investigation into these free speech concerns.

In other words, the Board was just a shiny object that distracted from a far more comprehensive effort to censor and control speech on social media. I still would not call it disinformation but one might call it deceitful.

NB: After this column ran, the NED wrote me to emphasize that the Biden Administration did not direct its funding of the GDI.

Democrat Congressman claims CRT not being taught at West Point and only discussed by Republicans interested in "scoring political points or what's gonna get you more likes on Twitter or hits on Fox News"

The post Dem Congressman: Republicans “Undermine Public Trust in the Military” by Questioning West Point CRT Indoctrination first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

THE STATE DEPARTMENT IS ITSELF A MAJOR PURVEYOR OF DISINFORMATION: U.S. State Department Funds a Disinformation Index That Warns Advertisers To Avoid Reason: Reason is listed among the “ten riskiest online news outlets” by a government-funded disinfo tracker. “Should the State Department spend public money to help an organization pressure advertisers to punish U.S. media companies? The answer, quite obviously, is no: The First Amendment prohibits the U.S. government from censoring private companies for good reason, and government actors should not seek to evade the First Amendment’s protections in order to censor indirectly or exert pressure inappropriately.”

Pretty much all “disinformation trackers” and similar outfits are simply adjuncts to censorship. They do not operate in good faith, nor do they want to.

Related:

NEW — Damar Hamlin is Asked What Reason Doctors Gave Him For His Heart Stopping “Umm, that’s something I want to stay away from” pic.twitter.com/pVUytXblOH — Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) February 14, 2023   Damar said everything without saying anything.  He knows it was the mRNA shot.           Full interview with Michael […]

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Jim Biden admitted he was hired to negotiate with Saudis over a secret $140million deal ‘because of his position and relationship’ to his VP brother Joe — who would be ‘instrumental to the deal,’ bombshell affidavit claims.

“Now we’re cooking with gas!”

This classic Americanism carries the sense of definite progress, things working according to plan, and being headed to success (perhaps after an uncertain start). It has the same rhetorical heft as “Full steam ahead.” It was popularized by radio stars Bob Hope and Jack Benny in the 1930s, and was even used in a Daffy Duck cartoon.

It originated, however, from brilliant marketing insight. In the 1930s gas-fired stoves and their electric competitors were vying to replace old wood-fired stoves. Rather than use the slogan in print and television advertisements, however, American Gas Association public relations executive Carroll Everard “Deke” Houlgate decided to plant it with Hope’s scriptwriters. It soon became the comedian’s catchphrase, and Benny and others picked it up from there as it entered the public lexicon.

Nearly a century later, however, the environmental zealots in the Biden administration and their media apologists would like to make cooking with gas much harder, or impossible, to do. When new research purporting to link gas stove use with asthma in children appeared in the  International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health on December 21, 2022, they must’ve thought: “Now we’re cooking with gas!”

Coming from researchers at RMI, a think tank seeking a “clean energy revolution,” the University of Sydney, and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the research filled the role of a study since the COVID era: just provide a modicum of “New Study Finds” justification for predetermined government intervention, and let state-awed media do the rest. Pandemic policies showed that lack of rigor notwithstanding, few are those who will say ‘to hell with your study, this isn’t government’s business in the first place.’

The study in question could serve as a classroom example of confusing correlation with causation. The authors started with 357 studies using a keyword search, which they whittled down to a handful of “potentially pertinent” studies based on narrowing their focus to data specific only to the US and Europe. Coincidentally, it meant they discarded the most comprehensive study in the research literature on the subject: a 2013 study for phase three of the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood, which involved “512,707 primary and secondary school children from 108 centers in 47 countries.”

That study found “no evidence of an association between the use of gas as a cooking fuel and either asthma symptoms or asthma diagnosis.” 

The authors instead used combined estimates of gas stove effects on the risk of developing childhood asthma in North America (three studies) and Europe (seven studies), and then estimated the proportion of children in the US in households with gas stoves using data from the American Housing Survey. There’s no measure of the exposure level of any child to a household gas stove. But by a string of inferences and associations they churned out a statistic that “12.7 percent of current childhood asthma nationwide is attributed to gas stove use, which is similar to the childhood asthma burden attributed to secondhand smoke exposure.”

The phrase “attributed to” certainly seemed to point the finger of causation. Nevertheless, one of the study’s authors, Brady A. Seals, told Washington Examiner that the study “does not assume or estimate a causal relationship” between childhood asthma and gas stoves. Oh?

Even if the study were not assuming causality by using language indicating causality, its authors assumed they knew how to mitigate it. “Given that this exposure is preventable, our study demonstrates that known mitigation strategies will lessen childhood asthma burden from gas stoves,” they wrote. By “demonstrates” they mean made up: “we can conceive of a broad-based public health intervention to reduce the disease risk in children exposed to gas cooking to that of the unexposed,” which would be “removing the source by replacing gas cooking with cleaner alternatives (e.g., electric)” and “reducing exposure through source ventilation (e.g., range hoods).”

To recap: the authors chose a handful of studies, discarded 35 times as many as they chose (including one that involved over a half a million children across four dozen countries), aggregated the gas stove risks estimated by the few they kept, used the Housing Survey to project how many kids are in homes with gas stoves, and determined that about one in eight cases of childhood asthma can be attributed to something that in is two of every five homes. That’s “causation” in the same way that a guess in the game of “Clue” is forensic science. Rather than the magnitude of their findings giving them pause, let alone the fact that they never measured the exposure level of any child to gas stove usage, they immediately proposed “mitigation strategies,” leading with “replacing gas cooking.”

It was well-timed. The American people were just becoming aware of efforts within the US Consumer Protection Safety Commission, going back to October 2022, to regulate and potentially ban some gas stoves, and the people were infuriated. Then Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told an Arizona news station it was all “so ridiculous” — mere days before the Department of Energy (DOE) proposed new energy-use limits on stoves. Never mind the CPSC, the DOE’s rules are so restrictive that they would “eliminate most current models” of gas stoves, effectively banning an estimated 95 percent of them. Taking up a whopping 86 pages in the Federal Register, these rules had obviously been in the works for a while.

So these preexisting regulatory efforts got that crucial “new study finds” lifeline. “Gas stove pollution causes 12.7 percent of childhood asthma, study finds,” reported The Washington Post. “About 12 percent of childhood asthma cases can be linked to gas stove use, according to a recent study,” said U.S. News & World Report. “One in eight cases of asthma in US kids caused by gas stove pollution – study,” the Guardian declared. Yahoo News opted for “Gas stoves have given 650,000 US children asthma, study finds.”

As this decade has made plainly evident, the distinction between correlation and causation is not important to those who want to expand governmental power. An aggressive bureaucracy needs only an affectation of justification for a regulation or ban already in the works.

The axle appeared to be on fire for at least an hour before the derailment.

LARRY NIVEN’S FUTURE HISTORY HAS ARRIVED IN CANADA: Canada performing more organ transplants from MAID donors than any country in the world.

Doctors in Canada, where medical assistance in dying (MAID) was decriminalized in 2016, performed almost half of the world’s organ transplants after MAID for that period (136), according to the publication.

Data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information confirms this new source of transplant organs accounted accounts for six per cent of all transplants from deceased donors in Canada in 2021. Some transplants, like those for kidneys and livers, can be done with patients who are alive.

“I was rather proud that Canada has done so well in terms of organ donation by MAID patients,” said Arthur Schafer, director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba, in an interview with CTV News.

Next, a newfound enthusiasm for breaking down criminals — especially otherwise-healthy “politicals” — for parts.

Related: Yale Professor: ‘Mandatory Euthanasia’ Will Be On The Table. For Yale professors? Hmm, I’ll get back to you on that. Otherwise, no.

“In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?”

The post Yale Professor: Mandatory ‘Mass Suicide’ of Elderly a Solution to ‘Japan’s Rapidly Aging Society’ first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

"This is further evidence that the Biden administration believes it has the authority to license thought and speech, and it doesn't," said Phill Kline.

I have a question.

Below is my column in the New York Post on the growing attacks on those who are challenging the alleged abuses by the FBI and the censorship system on social media.

Here is the column:

“The Democratic Party [is] the bedfellow of international communism.” Those words from Sen. Joe McCarthy captured the gist of the Red Scare and the use of blacklists and personal attacks to silence critics. The Democrats this week appear to have taken up the same cudgel in labeling opponents and critics Russian sympathizers and fellow travelers in opposing government involvement in a massive censorship system.

The Red Scare is back and it is going blue.

I testified this week in Congress on the Twitter Files and how they suggest what I have called “censorship by surrogate” or proxy.

The files show dozens of FBI and government employees actively seeking the censorship of citizens and others for their viewpoints. In my testimony, I warned that this was reminiscent of the McCarthy period where the FBI played a role in the establishment of blacklists for socialists, communists, and others. I encouraged Congress not to repeat its failures from the 1950s by turning a blind eye to such abuse.

This view was amplified by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who became persona non grata for her anti-war sentiments in Congress. She was later labeled a “Russian asset” by Hillary Clinton, who has refused to support that scurrilous claim against a former member.

For years, the Democrats pushed a Russian collusion theory that collapsed. It was later disclosed that the Clinton campaign hid and then lied about funding the infamous Steele Dossier. Nevertheless, people like Carter Page were falsely accused of being Russian agents and critics of the investigation labeled as Russian apologists. Ironically, the FBI was warned that the dossier appeared to be the result of Russian disinformation and relied on a presumed Russian agent.

If anything, my warning of McCarthy-like attacks and measures seemed to be taken more as a suggestion than an admonition by some. Soon after the end of the hearing, MSNBC contributor and former Sen. Claire McCaskill appeared on MSNBC to denounce the member witnesses (Sen. Chuck Grassley, Sen. Ron Johnson, and former Rep. Gabbard) as “Putin apologists” and Putin lovers.

She exclaimed, “I mean, look at this, I mean, all three of those politicians are Putin apologists. I mean, Tulsi Gabbard loves Putin.” (For the record, she also attacked me as not being “a real lawyer.”)

What was most striking is the level of attacks on those seeking an investigation into possible FBI abuses. The Democratic Party was once the greatest defender of free speech, the greatest critic of corporate power, and the greatest skeptic of the FBI. It is now opposing the investigation into the FBI’s involvement in a massive corporate-run censorship system.

In the 1950s, it was easy for politicians to avoid discussing underlying views by just labeling their opponents as fellow travelers. We are watching the same use of personal attacks today as a way to evade the troubling disclosures in the Twitter Files.

While some like McCaskill yell “Russians!” others use more modern labels, such as “conspiracy theorists.” That notably includes the FBI itself.

When criticized for the role FBI agents played in secretly targeting citizens for censorship, the FBI called critics “conspiracy theorists . . . feeding the American public misinformation.” It is something that you might expect from a pundit or politician. It is far more menacing when this attack comes from the country’s largest law enforcement agency.

Where the Hoover FBI would call dissenters “Communist sympathizers,” the Wray FBI labels them “conspiracy theorists.”

Alternatively, various Democrats portrayed anyone criticizing Twitter for censorship as supporting insurrections against the government. Member after member suggested that seeking to investigate the government’s role in censorship was to invite or even welcome another Jan. 6.

Thus, when Thomas Baker, a former FBI agent, testified on his extensive writings about changes in the FBI, he was attacked by freshman Congressman Dan Goldman (D-NY) who asked him if he had any experience investigating extremist groups. He didn’t get the answer he hoped for. When Baker responded, “Yes,” and tried to explain his prior experience, Goldman immediately cut him off and accused him of trying to sell a book.

For my part, I got off light. I was not accused of being a Russian mole or fellow traveler of insurrectionists. After responding to a question on the specific content of the files (released and confirmed by Twitter itself), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), denounced me for offering “legal opinions” without actually working at Twitter. It is like saying that a witness should not discuss the content of Pentagon Papers unless one worked at the Pentagon. (By the way, the content of the Pentagon papers as well as the Twitter Files are facts. The implication of those facts are opinions. I was asked about both the factual content of the files and their constitutional implications).

It is all tragically familiar. The effort this week was to attack witnesses rather than address what appears to be the largest censorship system in the history of this country. It is, of course, ironic that those seeking to check such government-supported censorship are the ones being called Putin lovers. Putin loves censorship and likely stands in awe at the success of the left in using the FBI and corporations to regulate speech on social media.

Putin and other authoritarian countries have long feared the Internet and social media. They have struggled to gain the very level of censorship carried out by Twitter and other executives with the support of politicians and pundits.

We now know that members like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) secretly sought censorship of critics, including a columnist. Their success would make Putin blush.

However, Democrats have insisted that freedom is tyranny. Columnist and former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich went full Orwellian when he previously dismissed calls for free speech in social media and warned that censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.”

He then added bizarrely of uncensored social media: “That’s Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.”

Indeed, it is a nightmare, but a familiar one.

Jonathan Turley is an attorney and a professor at George Washington University Law School.

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