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WHEN GOVERNMENT PAYS FOR SCIENCE, IT CONTROLS WHAT’S STUDIED:  Steady decline for decades in the publication of “disruptive science”.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW:

SpaceX had four rockets on four pads and two Dragons on orbit today—as CRS-26 Dragon departed the @space_station with Crew-5 Dragon still attached to the orbiting lab, Falcon Heavy rolled out of the hangar, two Falcon 9’s readied for launch, and Ship 24 was stacked onto Booster 7 pic.twitter.com/hJOcOVjRf7

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 10, 2023

In their experiments, the Chinese researchers essentially blended Zika with another virus that thrives in mosquitoes but not other lifeforms.

The post Chinese Scientists Manipulate Zika Virus and Mosquitoes to Create Vaccinator Insects first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

Will there be FBI Raids? CNN: "The classified materials included some top-secret files with the 'sensitive compartmented information' designation, also known as SCI, which is used for highly sensitive information obtained from intelligence sources."

The post Revealed: Then-VP Biden Removed Top-Secret “Sensitive Compartmented” Classified Documents, Kept In His Private U. Penn Office first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

WHAT ILLEGITIMATE GOVERNMENTS DO: There Are Receipts: Joe Biden’s White House Directed Facebook COVID-19 Censorship.

ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: Media Blackout Over Terror Incident At Vegas Power Plant.

The US power grid is under attack as extremists shoot, sabotage, and vandalize electrical equipment at power stations. One of the highest-profile attacks was when two men used guns to paralyze a substation in Washington state on Christmas Day, leaving thousands without electricity. The incident made national news, but strangely enough, another attack last week on the Las Vegas power grid went unnoticed by the national press.

Mohammad Mesmarian, 34, rammed his car through the gate of a solar power generation plant outside Las Vegas on Wednesday and set his car on fire, intending to damage a massive transformer, 8 News Now reported.

“Employees at the plant said they found a car smoldering in a generator pit,” 8 News Now said, adding the Mega Solar Array facility provides power to 13 properties on the Las Vegas Strip, all belonging to MGM Resorts.

Investigators believe Mesmarian “siphoned gasoline from his car to put on wires at the transformer,” 8 News Now said, citing documents from investigators.

“Mesmarian clarified he burned the Toyota Camry,” police said. “Mesmarian said he burned the vehicle at a Tesla solar plant and did it ‘for the future.'”

Move along, nothing to see here.

This review, co-authored by Vinay Prasad, sets out to assess the literature on the risk of myocarditis in young men following vaccination against SARS-CoV-2. Of 758 articles considered, the vast majority (89%) didn’t attempt any systematic risk assessment at all, and only 29 looked at population-wide risk. Of this meagre number, only eight properly stratified adverse events by sex, age, dose and vaccine manufacturer. This matters enormously, because the risk of myocarditis is heavily concentrated in men under forty following their second Pfizer or Moderna vaccination.

By failing to break out these specific categories, scientists can write studies that overlook the risk of the vaccines for younger men, effectively by spreading their heightened risk across broader subgroups or even the whole population:

By looking only at men, or only at which dose, or only at which vaccine, you can reduce the highest stated incidence of myocarditis enormously, putting you in an excellent position to argue that, yes, myocarditis is a rare side effect from vaccination, but the risk of myocarditis from infection is greater.1 This is a game that is played at both ends, with complementary studies that massively overestimate the rate of myocarditis from Covid by considering only documented infections. Almost everyone with a severe outcome will have an official positive test at some point, while vastly fewer people who recover without incident will bother. A similar tactic, would be inflating the risk of severe outcome by looking only at hospital patients, or inflating the case fatality rate by looking only at those receiving extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.

The problem isn’t that a memo went out from Science Headquarters instructing researchers to cover up the obvious fact that the vaccines are clearly and beyond all cavil a bad deal for males under 40. It’s rather that science is subordinate to broader political, social and cultural forces, all of which incentivise research showing that the vaccines are safe and effective, and disincentivise research showing anything else. One kind of finding will get you promotion and grant funding, the other will – in the best case – simply be ignored. Cast in this light, the sheer paucity of studies looking at population-wide risks from vaccination in the first place begins to look deeply ominous. This is an entire area nobody wants to look into, for fear of what they might find.

It will be a long time indeed before we have any clarity on exactly how risky the vaccines are, and for whom.

REVOKE HAMLINE’S ACCREDITATION: Hamline President Keeps Digging: In email to campus Hamline University president reemphasizes that academic freedom does not exist there. “Usually university presidents try not to be so explicit about what they are doing when they ride roughshod over academic freedom. But Hamline’s president tells you how things are.”

If you don’t have academic freedom, you’re not a university. If you’re not a university, you shouldn’t be accredited as one, and you shouldn’t get 501(c)(3) treatment as one.

JED RUBENFELD: How to Take the Twitter Files to Court: File a class action against federal agents seeking an injunction against social-media censorship efforts.

The First Amendment protects not only speakers but also consumers, listeners and viewers. As the high court held in Virginia Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council (1976), when speakers are muzzled, their intended audience suffers a First Amendment violation too. Twitter users, even those who weren’t censored themselves, would therefore have standing to bring suit.

Suing federal agents would pre-empt the claim that there was no “state action.” The nub of the “nothingburger” argument is that the Twitter Files fail to show government “coercion” and Twitter therefore never became a state actor. That argument is wrong: A private party can become a state actor through voluntary joint action with the government, which the Twitter Files richly detail. But a class action against federal defendants would avoid the entire question. They’re obviously state actors.

And as the Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), it is an “axiomatic” principle of constitutional law that the government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” That’s exactly what the Twitter Files show officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies doing—inducing and encouraging Twitter to censor constitutionally protected speech.

The plaintiffs wouldn’t have to prove Twitter was a state actor. It wouldn’t even matter if Twitter had rebuffed all the government’s censorship requests (which it didn’t). Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made this point in Backpage.com v. Dart (2015): When a government official unconstitutionally attempts to induce a private company not to carry someone else’s speech, the official’s conduct “is actionable and can be enjoined” even if the company “ignores it.”

A class action would eliminate another roadblock. Some free-speech cases against social-media companies have been dismissed on the ground that the individual plaintiffs couldn’t show that the government had targeted them or their posts in particular. A class action escapes this difficulty. It might target the CDC’s successful effort to get Twitter to adopt policies banning posts arguing that children didn’t need Covid-19 vaccines or observing that the government’s own data show the shots don’t prevent infection or transmission. These policies denied all users important information and opinions and thereby violated the First Amendment rights of listeners as well as speakers regardless of whether the government was involved in a particular individual’s being censored.

If Twitter is no longer acting as a federal censorship field office, why wouldn’t such a class action by social-media users be moot like an individual lawsuit against the company? Because of Facebook, Google and other internet companies. As Matt Taibbi reported, “the government was in constant contact not just with Twitter, but with every major tech firm.” There’s no reason to think that has stopped. A class action against federal defendants would seek to halt all government efforts to use social-media companies to achieve the censorship the Constitution forbids.

The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana have already jointly brought a similar lawsuit, and preliminary discovery has added more evidence of federal involvement in censorship at all major social-media companies.

Fight the power.

On New Year's day, a German doctor was sentenced to two years and nine months in prison PLUS a three-year work ban AND was ordered to pay $29,550.

AS EXPECTED, UNDER PRESSURE FROM THE INDUSTRY THEY’RE DROPPING METRICS THAT ONLY MATTER TO CONSUMERS: U.S. News Drops Student Loans And Employment-At-Graduation (In Addition To Expenditures-Per-Student) From Forthcoming Law School Rankings. How much debt students accumulate, and whether — and how well — graduates are employed is important information that might make law school look like a bad deal. So it’s gone!

YES:

Related:

They know who they work for, and it isn’t you.

RATIONIERUNG: Bundle Up, Germany. 2024 Could be a Long Winter. “The cryptically-named Federal Network Agency has announced plans to empower German power grid operators to remotely limit home heat pumps and EV chargers. And this can be done without the customer’s permission. And lest German citizens think that they have the spring, summer, and fall to make adjustments, this policy is set to take effect next month.”

Decline is a choice and one that Germany has made.

THEY DID NOTHING WRONG: Pentagon not planning to reinstate 8,000+ fired troops who refused COVID vax, says report.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): You wonder, given the state of today’s military, how many would even want to go back.

Charles Calomiris has a splendid WSJ review of a great book, "The Myth of American Inequality" by by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund and John Early.

It is a "'a truth universally acknowledged,' according to the Economist magazine in 2020" that 

little progress has been made in raising average American living standards since the 1960s; that poverty has not been substantially reduced over the period; that the median household’s standard of living has not increased in recent years and inequality is currently high and rising 

Most of all the last one. 

All of this is false. Most of all the last one. 

1) Income. The central jaw-dropping, astonishing fact: The statistics you read about income and income inequality ignore taxes and transfers. By doing so, of course, they create a problem that is immune to its purported solution! 

Especially on the low end, transfers including in-kind transfers (housing, medical payments, etc.) are a huge part of consumption and properly measured income. 

Pay especially attention on the left hand side of the graph. Actual income is essentially flat in the first three quintiles of earned income. 

Gramm Ekelund and Early are fond of quintile bar graphs, like this one. The bars are pretty flat from the lowest to third decile, and transfer income is a big part of the story. More, do just a little bit of adjustment for household size. Single person households are obviously going to have less income than two-earner households. Households with children have less per capita income, but people with kids may be more likely to work. How does it work out? In per capita terms (middle) actual income, including taxes and transfers is almost completely flat in the first four deciles. Average hours per week 17.3 vs. 38.6; workers per household from 0.2 to 2.0. Sort of mechanically, if you don't work you don't have earned income.

BBC reports "how women detained in recent anti-government protests are being sexually and physically abused."

The post Report Exposes Torture and Rape of Female Prisoners Arrested for Protesting Against Iranian Regime  first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

THOMAS JEFFERSON USED TO BE A TOP PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL: The War on Merit Takes a Bizarre Turn: Why are administrators at a top-ranked public high school hiding National Merit awards from students and families?

For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships. This episode has emerged amid the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned in. It’s a race to the bottom.

An intrepid Thomas Jefferson parent, Shawna Yashar, a lawyer, uncovered the withholding of National Merit awards. Since starting as a freshman at the school in September 2019, her son, who is part Arab American, studied statistical analysis, literature reviews, and college-level science late into the night. This workload was necessary to keep him up to speed with the advanced studies at TJ, which U.S. News & World Report ranks as America’s top school.

Last fall, along with about 1.5 million U.S. high school juniors, the Yashar teen took the PSAT, which determines whether a student qualifies as a prestigious National Merit scholar. When it came time to submit his college applications this fall, he didn’t have a National Merit honor to report—but it wasn’t because he hadn’t earned the award. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation, a nonprofit based in Evanston, Illinois, had recognized him as a Commended Student in the top 3 percent nationwide—one of about 50,000 students earning that distinction. Principals usually celebrate National Merit scholars with special breakfasts, award ceremonies, YouTube videos, press releases, and social media announcements.

But not at TJ. School officials had decided to withhold announcement of the award. Indeed, it turns out that the principal, Ann Bonitatibus, and the director of student services, Brandon Kosatka, have been withholding this information from families and the public for years, affecting the lives of at least 1,200 students over the principal’s tenure of five years. Recognition by National Merit opens the door to millions of dollars in college scholarships and 800 Special Scholarships from corporate sponsors. . . .

“Keeping these certificates from students is theft by the state,” says Yashar. Bonitatibus didn’t notify parents or the public. What’s more, it could be a civil rights violation, says local parent advocate Debra Tisler, with most TJ students in a protected class of “gifted” students, most of them racial minorities, many with disabilities, and most coming from immigrant families whose parents speak English as a second language. “It’s just cruel,” says Tisler.

In a call with Yashar, Kosatka admitted that the decision to withhold the information from parents and inform the students in a low-key way was intentional. “We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,” he told her, claiming that he and the principal didn’t want to ‘hurt’ the feelings of students who didn’t get the award.

It increasingly appears that ending your kids to public schools is parental malpractice.

TWITTER FILES, COVID EDITION: How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate With Help From the White House.

Much more to The Twitter Files: Covid Editon than this introductory thread.

Follow-up piece to come next week, featuring leading doctors & researchers from Harvard, Stanford & other institutions. https://t.co/TeEeCvMZa2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 26, 2022

1. THREAD:

THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE

– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022

Here we see another tragic victim of the anti-science woke critical theory of "body positivity" who appears to have completely bought into the "healthy at any size" nonsense.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE! NIH denies scientists access to genetic databases if research deemed stigmatizing.

This is an easy First Amendment case. But it’s also indicative of what politicized losers our science and health bureaucrats are.

A woman in Birmingham, UK was arrested and charged for the vicious and uncouth criminal behavior that is TOTALLY unacceptable in England.

Thousands of customers lost their vehicles and homes due to the bank's activity over the course of several years, the federal regulators said.

MEGAN FOX: Keep Calm and Sue Everyone: Wauwatosa School Board Is About to Find Out What Free Speech Is All About.

You all probably remember this hilarious exchange where I scolded the Wauwatosa School Board in Wisconsin for violating people’s right to speak and petition their government back in October. If you missed it, watch it. It’s hilarious. The board cut me off before my time was up, claiming that my comments were not in “alignment with the dignity of the board.”

At the end of the video, I comment that I could sue them for this. Indeed. I can. And so I spent the next few months pestering Robert Barnes of Barnes Law to take the case since he is a practicing lawyer in Wisconsin. Then on December 10, he wrote me back with one sentence that said, “Yes. I will take it.”

What a fighter — read the whole thing.

The researchers also found an increased chance of people over 65 experiencing blood clots, platelet disorders and heart attacks after receiving the Pfizer vaccine.

COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: A Popular Sweetener Has Been Linked to Increased Anxiety in Generations of Mice. “Approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1981, aspartame is widely used in low-calorie foods and drinks. Today, it’s found in nearly 5,000 different products, consumed by adults and children. When a sample of mice were given free access to water dosed with aspartame equivalent to 15 percent of the FDA’s recommended maximum daily amount for humans, they generally displayed more anxious behavior in specially designed mood tests. What’s truly surprising is the effects could be seen in the animals’ offspring, for up to two generations.”

TWITTER FILES PART SIX REVEALS FBI’S TIES TO TECH GIANT: ‘AS IF IT WERE A SUBSIDIARY.’

“The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” Taibbi began the thread on Friday. “Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth… a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.”

Taibbi highlighted the FBI’s social media task force established after the 2016 presidential election to monitor foreign interference prominently featured in the Twitter Files.

“Do agencies like FBI and DHS do in-house flagging work themselves, or farm it out? ‘You have to prove to me that inside the f—ing government you can do any kind of massive data or AI search,’ says one former intelligence officer,” Taibbi wrote.

Why, it’s as if: Head Of Twitter’s Censorship Operation Was A Former FBI, CIA Operative.

Related: Majority see FBI as Biden’s ‘personal Gestapo’ after Trump raid.

But why are these stories being dumped by Musk’s hand-picked journalists on the weekend? As Ace of Spades notes, “Of course he drops it late Friday afternoon, again. So… the media has an easier time ignoring it — bury news you don’t want covered with a Friday evening dump — and the only people who care about it, conservatives, have to blog about it Friday night. Yeah, let’s never hold this for Monday morning, ever. Not even a single time.”

OH, CANADA: