What are your favorite bits of Chevron powered government overreach that you’d like to see get sued into oblivion now?
In my various jobs I’ve seen unelected bureaucrats make up all sorts of goofy nonsensical shit we had to obey or else.
When I was young and working on farms, factories, or construction I saw OHSA regulations that made job sites LESS safe. “Why are we doing it this stupid way?” “Because that government asshole who has never done this himself said we’d get fined if we don’t.” “Oh cool, let me unnecessarily insert my hands into this thing that can chop them off for the mandatory safety check then.”
I’m a rural westerner. Dear Lord, don’t get us started on the BLM. 90% of their bullshit isn’t law. They just make up wacky shit on the fly. Ignorant fucks who live in cities hundreds or thousands of miles away think they “protect the environment”. Lol no. There can be some obvious terrible problem, but some fucker in DC will say nope, you have to leave that terrible problem there to grow bigger or else we’ll fine you or shoot you if you try to fix it. If you’re in the west and you see some land that’s got some obvious issues or is about to burn down it’s government land.
Then I went into accounting, and the dirty secret of that industry is 3/4 of what companies pay accountants for is to do government mandated paperwork to send to the government which nobody in the government will ever read, and to respond to government audits which are usually useless. IRS just makes shit up as they go. And the shit they made up last time? They changed it this time. Either way, shut up and pay your fine.
But it isn’t just the agency that takes your money directly. Oh no. (honestly, the IRS was one of the more professional agencies I dealt with in my career! Not even joking. The others are worse.) Then there’s the dozens of other agencies that meddle in your industry who you also have to appease, even though sometimes they contradict each other, and all of them can fine you.
Then I worked in the gun business, where I got to discover the wonderful world of ATF inspections, where holy fucking shit, the dumbest people in the universe who don’t know how anything works at all, pretend to be mechanical engineers and lawyers. But Chevron said they’re “experts” so clearly that must be true, and if you disagree they’ll shoot your dog and burn your house down. The list of dumb shit the ATF makes up on the fly could fill a book (literally. I did write this book).
But surely, the ATF is the worst right? Oh no. Not even close. Because then for my next job I went into military contracting! Where the rules are whatever the DCAA or DFAS say they are today. And sure, you violated that secret impossible to know rule on accident, so we’re going to ruin your company and put hundreds of people out of work… but the big megacorporation did the same thing, only on purpose, and a million times worse? Oh well. Fuck you. Lockheed builds missiles. You don’t.
On that note, as an accountant I got companies through audits from probably eight or ten different federal agencies. The DCAA audit is by far the most annoying. This is the industry where the customer actually knows exactly how much profit you expect to make, and then you have to guess what everything will cost in the future, and if you guess wrong, they will fine you. Hell, if you guess in a way that actually SAVES the government money, they will fine you. If you charge the government too little, they will fine you. They will fine you for bookkeeping errors. They will fine you for typos. (keep in mind of the hundreds of government spreadsheets I saw, I never saw a single one that didn’t have serious computational errors on it… which I got to fix for them for free… or they’d fine me).
I once actually had a DCAA auditor sit behind me while I typed on my computer for about 4 hours to WATCH ME TYPE. At the end of this month long colonoscopy which cost the tax payers tens of thousands of dollars in government employee salary, they had found one mistake where I had UNDER CHARGED the government something like $16.
Keep in mind, none of this shit was a law passed by congress. It’s all stuff that the agencies made up based upon a vague idea congress gave them.
But the worst, the absolute worst, dumbest motherfuckers in the entire US government? The SBA.
The motherfucking SBA who I will despise with the fire of a thousand suns until the end of time. This is an agency congress created to HELP small businesses, and instead its a wretched hive of scum and villainy, who because they can just make up the regulations as they go, will always find a way to reward their friends and punish everybody who competes with their friends.
And they make up these arbitrary rules, which their employees don’t understand, and then if you fail to comply with the rule correctly, but they understand it wrong, they will actually actively try to destroy that small business, RATHER THAN ADMIT THEIR MISTAKE. I’ve got a saga about this particular one that would take ten thousand words to tell, where I fought with the SBA making shit up on the fly and lying about it for 6 straight months, and the only reason we got it solved was my company brought it to the attention of @BasedMikeLee who then stomped on their heads (with glee, which is why that dude has earned my vote). So how has Chevron fucked you?
Look, there’s so many young women who have been – including a young woman who just was murdered and he – he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by a – by – by an immigrant coming in, and they talk about that. But here’s the deal, there’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their – by their in-laws, by their – by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by – just – it’s just – it’s just ridiculous. And they can do nothing about it.
Joe Biden, sitting President of the United States, in his historic debate with former President Donald J. Trump, also on abortion:
I supported Roe v. Wade, which had three trimesters. First time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. And a third time is between the doctor – I mean, it’d be between the woman and the state.
Joe Biden, sitting President of the United States, in his historic debate with former President Donald J. Trump, on the national debt of the United States:
For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America – I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised $500 million – billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period. We’d be able to right wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do – childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the – with – with – with the Covid. Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with – look, if – …. – we finally beat Medicare.
Joe Biden, sitting President of the United States, in his historic debate with former President Donald J. Trump, on the climate crisis:
We find ourselves – and by the way, black colleges, I came up with $50 billion for HBCUs, historic black universities and colleges, because they don’t have the kind of contributors that they have to build these laboratories and the like. Any black student is capable in college in doing any white student can do. They just have the money. But now, they’ll be able to get those jobs in high tech.
“Biden is about to face a crescendo of calls to step aside,” said a veteran Democratic strategist who has staunchly backed Mr. Biden publicly. “Joe had a deep well of affection among Democrats. It has run dry.”
“Parties exist to win,” this Democrat continued. “The man on the stage with Trump cannot win. The fear of Trump stifled criticism of Biden. Now that same fear is going to fuel calls for him to step down.” …
Mark Buell, a prominent donor for Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party, said after the debate that the president had to strongly consider whether he is the best person to be the nominee. “Do we have time to put somebody else in there?” Mr. Buell said.
He added that he was not yet calling for Mr. Biden to withdraw but that “Democratic leadership has a responsibility to go to the White House and clearly show what America’s thinking, because democracy is at stake here and we’re all nervous.” …
Former Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, called it “a crisis,” saying that her phone was “blowing up” with senators, operatives, donors and other distraught Democrats doing “more than hand-wringing” about what happens next.
“Joe Biden had one thing he had to do tonight, and he didn’t do it,” she said on MSNBC. “He had one thing he had to accomplish, and that was reassure America that he was up to the job at his age, and he failed at that tonight.” …
On Thursday night, Democrats were imagining scenarios in which party elders like Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina were to intervene with Mr. Biden.
I have nothing else to say about this, but I’m very eager to read your thoughts.
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Who are the climate activists bringing down Britain's literary festivals with their climate boycotts? Fossil Free Books' leading lights seem to just love jetting off here, there and everywhere.
Dr. Eithan Haim was indicted last week, but he and his attorneys do not yet know the precise nature of the charges. (Photo courtesy Dr. Haim)
Eithan Haim, 34, is at the beginning of his career as a surgeon. He and his wife are expecting their first child in the fall. And now he is facing a four-count federal felony indictment for blowing the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital, where he worked while a resident.
At TCH, he discovered the hospital was secretly continuing gender transition treatments on minors—including hormonal intervention on patients as young as 11 years old—after publicly declaring, in March of 2022, it would no longer provide such services.
The hospital unwillingly backed away from the treatments under pressure from the Texas governor and attorney general. But Haim found not only were the treatments continuing—the program appeared to be expanding. He recorded several online presentations by medical staff encouraging the transition of children—one social worker described how she deliberately did not make note of such treatment in the medical charts of patients to avoid leaving a paper trail. Haim told me, “They were talking publicly about how they were concealing what they were doing. You can’t take care of your patient without trust. For me as a doctor, to not do something about this was unconscionable.”
Haim, like a growing number of medical professionals around the world, had grave doubts about the safety and efficacy of the explosively growing business of youth gender transition medicine. When he looked into it, he found that children distressed about their biological sex often had multiple mental health challenges—conditions that were being ignored in the rush to put vulnerable young people on hormones, and even to perform surgical interventions. These treatments are profoundly life-altering, with a high risk of rendering a young person sterile. In the last few years, a growing number of countries have investigated these treatments for young people, found the evidence wanting, and have effectively banned interventions such as puberty blockers—drugs that prevent children from entering puberty.
Haim felt he had to act, but he knew the career risks of speaking out could be enormous. He contacted conservative journalist Christopher Rufo, who published an exposé without naming Haim. Before giving Rufo evidence that puberty blockers were still being surgically implanted in young patients, Haim made sure the patient’s names and other identifying information were redacted. This was both to protect patient privacy, and himself from violating the law known as HIPAA, which protects individual patient identities while also allowing various uses of medical information. The story Haim gave to Rufo was published May 16, 2023. The next day, the Texas legislature voted to ban the medical gender transition of minors.
Haim says there was no immediate aftermath: “Everything went quiet. I was anonymous and went on with my life.” Then June 23 of last year, the day Haim was to graduate from his residency, two federal agents from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showed up at his house to have a little chat. Haim’s wife, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, a different division of the U.S. Attorney’s office than the one that has indicted her husband, advised him not to talk.
As Haim later wrote in City Journal, “Before leaving, they handed me a letter revealing that I was a ‘potential target’ of an investigation involving alleged violation of federal criminal law related to medical records.” Haim then went public about the threat facing him in an interview with Rufo. (The U.S Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas did not respond to a request for comment.)
Haim was indicted last week, but, as of this writing, he and his attorneys do not yet know the precise nature of the charges. One of his lawyers, Mark Lytle, told me it’s very unusual to bring felony charges for an alleged HIPAA violation unless there is a significant underlying crime, such as a hospital clerk selling a celebrity’s medical records. He said the indictment of Haim seems politically motivated. “The government is entering into the town square on the culture wars and didn’t like what Eithan had to say,” said Lytle. “I think they are looking to make an example of him.” Haim is raising money for his legal fees through this GiveSendGo account.
Haim told me despite the peril he is now facing he has no regrets about blowing the whistle and is committed to fighting the federal charges. He said, “If we don’t fight back, what world are we delivering our children into?”
Emily Yoffe is a senior editor at The Free Press. You can follow her on X at @emilyyoffe.
A man in Gaza walks amid the rubble of an Israeli bombardment on June 11, 2024. (Photo by Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images)
The conflict in Gaza has put my family through hell.
A few weeks ago, I flew to Egypt to help my brother’s wife and their four children flee Gaza and get safely to the UAE. It was just one day before the Rafah border closed on May 7, so we were cutting it close. My brother opted to stay behind. He’s a senior program manager for a British NGO in Gaza—similar to the American Red Cross—and he felt that without him, the whole operation might fall apart. But we all agreed it was time for his family to get out.
Our family’s home in Gaza City was hit by an Israeli air strike a week into the war, injuring several uncles and cousins on my dad’s side, and killing two. My brother’s family walked away from the rubble with minor injuries. But since then, they’ve been displaced eight times as they’ve made their way from Gaza City in the north to Khan Yunis, eventually reaching Rafah, where my mom’s family house has always been—effectively my second home.
That home was hit by an air strike in mid-December, just weeks before they arrived in Rafah. The attack killed twenty-nine of my relatives. All five of my aunts and uncles perished, as did most of my cousins. Those who made it out had the grim task of digging through the wreckage, pulling out the burnt and disfigured bodies of family members.
Almost everyone has known the pain of losing a beloved relative. But so many lost in the blink of an eye, all because they were bystanders in a bloody conflict they wanted no part of? It’s almost unbearable.
Whenever I share this story, people assume I must be consumed with rage, eager to get revenge on those responsible. I must despise all Israelis and consider them my sworn enemies.
Despite my deep frustration and resentment with the Israeli government’s action and the ongoing war in Gaza, I don’t. If anything, I’m more critical of some pro-Palestinian activists, many of whom are making things worse, putting the people they claim to defend in increasing danger. In fact, I’d argue that some aren’t all that interested in the well-being of Palestinians.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib at a pro-Palestinian protest in the U.S. in 2014. (Photo courtesy of the author)
For the first fifteen years of my life, Gaza was my home. And from a very young age, I knew that my home wasn’t safe.
I was ten years old in 2000 when the Second Intifada began. I remember it vividly: my friends and older boys talking about the fight against Israeli occupation as if it was something romantic and heroic, claiming that we’d be part of a revolution that would live forever in the history books.
The reality was anything but that—the conflict was violent and bloody, with ongoing air strikes and scenes of death and destruction all around. I never felt completely secure or calm. One day in 2001, when I was eleven, I was walking home from school with friends, and we passed a police station just as it was hit by a massive Israeli air strike. Two of my friends were killed by the attack, and though I survived, the blast left me with asymmetric hearing loss in my left ear and memories that haunt me to this day.
Was I angry at Israel? I was furious. I mourned my friends, and a part of me wanted vengeance. But everything I was told as a kid, every plan for retaliation that I had heard adults and older boys discussing, never made sense to me. Wouldn’t violence just lead to more violence, and more dead children? What sense did it make for the Palestinian people to fight the Israelis, who clearly had far more military strength than we did? I was a preteen who knew almost nothing about the world, but I knew everything I was being told about the revolution wouldn’t work.
I realized I had no future in Gaza, so I worked relentlessly to get out. In 2005, when I was 15 years old, I boarded a plane for California as part of a high school cultural exchange program. By the time it ended a year later, the 33-Day War was raging, and I was unable to enter Gaza through Egypt after the border closure. With the help of some amazing human rights advocates and friends in the Bay Area, I applied for political asylum in the United States. The very day of my asylum interview—June 14, 2007—Hamas violently took over the Gaza Strip and ejected the Palestinian Authority.
In the meantime, I finished high school and obtained a bachelor’s degree. I also became involved in pro-Palestinian activist groups in the Bay Area. Initially, I was enamored. I volunteered with them. I marched with them. I gave them money. I attended dozens of rallies, went to countless university events, and participated in educational conferences and advocacy campaigns, including the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
I met and worked with intelligent, sincere, and highly committed individuals who inspired me. I also met a lot of idealists who were too stubborn to realize that their all-or-nothing belief system, by which all Zionists are bad and all Palestinians are angels, isn’t just self-defeating but does an active disservice to the very people they claimed to champion.
As my asylum application progressed, some of my activist friends accused me of being a traitor. They told me I should move back to Gaza to defend the land for my people. I should resist the Zionist plot to empty Gaza of all Palestinian inhabitants. Never mind that returning there would only put my life in danger; if I truly cared, they told me, I would be on the front lines, fighting to destroy our common enemy.
It’s easy to lecture about the virtues of holding the land when you live in a city where it’s unlikely a bomb will ever fall from the sky to kill you and everybody you love. It’s the romantic idealism of somebody who’s never had to bury a cousin or an uncle or a best friend.
In 2008, during a San Francisco rally in support of Gaza, I was approached by a news reporter who asked for an interview. She wanted my thoughts on rockets being fired at Israeli targets. I made it very clear that I didn’t support Hamas, and that I believed the random violence against Israeli citizens was abhorrent and wrong. After the interview, I was taken aside by one of the rally’s organizers, who chastised me.
“Never talk about the rockets,” she told me. “You always pivot. If they ask you about Hamas, bring it back to the Israeli occupation.”
“But my family is there,” I insisted. “I don’t think either side should be killing civilians with rockets.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Stay on message.”
The biggest blow to my faith in the hard-line pro-Palestine movement came in 2015, when I tried (and ultimately failed) to lobby for a Gaza airport. An internationally run, Israeli-approved airfield in Gaza wasn’t going to end the fighting, but it might give people the option to go in and out of Gaza and provide some freedom of movement for Palestinians trapped by the blockade in the Strip.
I had detailed plans: the location, flight plans, the radar coverage, destinations, aircraft type, security, and robust outreach to all relevant parties. I was having productive talks with senior Israeli government officials and the Israel Defense Forces, and used intermediaries to obtain approval and support from the Palestinian leadership. The project received immense interest from the people of Gaza. What I didn’t have was the support of pro-Palestine activists.
They opposed my efforts, because cooperation would just make Israel “look good, if only parts of the blockade are addressed and not all of it.” That wasn’t acceptable to them, even if the Palestinian people stood to benefit. Some believed that with freedom of movement, many Gazans would choose to leave, thereby fulfilling the “Zionist plot” to empty the Strip of its inhabitants, essentially arguing that imprisoned Gazans were better for the greater cause.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Trapping people in Gaza was okay because that made it easier to “expose” and attack Israel? What kind of a cause relies on forcing its people to stay in perpetual misery so that Western activists can have an easier time condemning their adversaries?
Their totalitarian approach to solving the crisis left no room for nuance. “We don’t want partial solutions,” they’d tell me. “We want it all. No blockade, no occupation, no nothing.” It frustrated me, but I didn’t walk away. I still thought I could have a positive influence on the movement. I just had to make the dogmatic activists understand.
Things got much worse after October 7. Those who claimed to be in solidarity with Gaza didn’t just avoid condemning Hamas’s horrendous attack—they dismissed it, claiming the extent of the atrocities committed against Israeli civilians was being exaggerated, or outright invented. When I tried to argue that we shouldn’t look the other way, they scolded me. Focus on what matters, they told me.
That was a turning point for me. I needed to walk away from the pro-Palestine groups that were my community, my second family. Right now, I am not engaged with any of these groups.
It often feels like Palestinians have become pawns for activists, our plight making it easier to criticize Israel. But it’s my family in the crosshairs. My brother and surviving family members are still over there, along with many people I grew up with. This is personal to me.
I remain very pro-Palestine. I’m also in favor of peace and pragmatism. I’m vehemently opposed to everything Hamas represents and all of their vile acts against the Israeli people. I also think Prime Minister Netanyahu is a war criminal, responsible for killing my family members along with tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza. He has blood on his hands and will not be easily forgiven. Balancing these multiple truths is not something many activists seem capable of doing. They’re genuinely unwilling to acknowledge that the goal should be coexistence. To achieve true peace and anything approaching a realistic solution, we need to talk to each other as equals.
I have a large and robust network of friends within Jewish communities who are devoted to Israel, while viewing other Palestinians and me as humans who deserve to exist. I certainly don’t agree with many of their opinions, but they, like me, recognize our common humanity as well as the desperate need to work toward a shared future. We have a historic opportunity to push for the two-state solution. A secure and safe Israel right next to a free and independent Palestine is the only thing that would grant my homeland sovereignty and independence.
I know how hard it is not to get caught up in the emotions surrounding this conflict. I can’t stop thinking about my thirty-one dead relatives. I wake up every morning worried about my brother, family, and people, and I tense up every time the phone rings. But it’s precisely those losses and fears that make me want to find another way and not be driven solely by emotions and reactivity. I want to do something realistic, to look toward a better future when we finally break the repeating cycle of incitement, vengeance, anger, and hatred.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib is a political analyst from the Gaza Strip who writes about the coastal enclave’s political and humanitarian affairs, and is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Follow him on Twitter (now X) @afalkhatib.
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BBC 'Disinformation Correspondent' Marianna Spring worries about Russian spies, trolls, bots and Brexiteers. But most of all she worries "real people" will be "emboldened" to talk about politics online.
Cartman has infected the minds of so many. I can't help but see the cartoon of him screaming about respecting his authority every time I see headlines like this.
In my book out this week, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, I write about the anti-free speech movement that has swept over higher education and how administrators and faculty hold a view of free speech as harmful. Now Harvard is again at the heart of a free speech fight after Lawrence Bobo, the Dean of Social Science, rejected views of free speech as a “blank check” and said that criticizing university leaders like himself or school policies are now viewed as “outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct.”
Bobo warns that public criticism of the school could “cross a line into sanctionable violations.”
“A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors — be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government — to intervene in Harvard’s affairs. Along with freedom of expression and the protection of tenure comes a responsibility to exercise good professional judgment and to refrain from conscious action that would seriously harm the University and its independence.”
The column adopts every jingoistic rationale used by anti-free speech critics today, including the invocation of the Holmes “crowded theater” analogy:
“But many faculty at Harvard enjoy an external stature that also opens to them much broader platforms for potential advocacy. Figures such as Raj Chetty ’00, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jill Lepore, or Steven A. Pinker have well-earned notoriety that reaches far beyond the academy.
Would it simply be an ordinary act of free speech for those faculty to repeatedly denounce the University, its students, fellow faculty, or leadership? The truth is that free speech has limits — it’s why you can’t escape sanction for shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.”
First and foremost, the ability of faculty to speak out on public disputes should not depend on whether you are more popular or visible.
However, it is the theater analogy that is most galling.
I have an entire chapter in The Indispensable Right that addresses the fallacies surrounding this line out of the Holmes opinion. It is arguably the most damaging single line ever written by a Supreme Court justice in the area of free speech.
I have previously written about the irony of liberals adopting the analogy, which was used to crack down on socialists and dissenters on the left.
One of the most telling moments came in a congressional hearing when I warned of the dangers of repeating the abuses of prior periods like the Red Scare, when censorship and blacklisting were the norm. In response, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-New York, invoked Oliver Wendell Holmes’ view that free speech does not give a person the right to yell fire in a crowded theater. In other words, citizens had to be silenced because their views are dangerous to others.
When I attempted to point out that the line came from a case justifying the imprisonment of socialists for their political viewpoints, Goldman cut me off and “reclaimed his time.”
Other Democrats have used the line as a mantra, despite its origins in one of our most abusive anti-free speech periods during which the government targeted political dissidents on the left.
Dean Bobo is now the latest academic to embrace the theater rationale to justify the silencing of dissent. At Harvard, he is suggesting that the entire university is now a crowded theater and criticizing the university leadership is a cry of “Fire.” It is that easy.
By punishing criticism of the school’s leadership and policies, Bobo believes that they can look “forward to calmer times” on campus. It is precisely the type of artificial silence that academics have been enforcing against conservatives, libertarians, and dissenters for years. It is the approach that reduced our schools to an academic echo chamber.
The reference to Professor Steven Pinker is particularly ironic. As we have previously discussed, Pinker was targeted for exercising free speech. In past controversies, most Harvard faculty members have been conspicuously silent as colleagues were targeted by cancel campaigns. It was the same at other universities.
As faculties effectively purged their ranks of conservative or Republican members, the silence was deafening. Others either supported such campaigns or justified them. Notably, over 75 percent of the Harvard faculty identify as “liberal” or “very liberal.”
Then the Gaza protests began and some of these same faculty found themselves the targets of mobs. Suddenly, free speech became an urgent matter to address. Fortunately for these liberal professors, the free speech community is used to opportunistic allies. Where “fair weather friends” are often ridiculed, free speech relies on “foul-weather friends,” those who suddenly see the need to protect a diversity of opinions when they feel threatened.
Bobo’s arguments are consistent with years of rationales for silencing or investigating dissenting faculty for years. It violates the very foundation for academia in free speech and academic freedom. The university is free to punish students or faculty for unlawful conduct. However, when it comes to their viewpoints, there should be a bright line of protection.
Of course, this criticism is likely to trigger another common fallacy used to rationalize speech controls: as a private university Harvard is not subject to the First Amendment and thus this is not a true free speech issue.
As discussed previously, free speech values go beyond the First Amendment whether it is a controversy on social media or campuses. For years, anti-free-speech figures have dismissed free speech objections to social media or academic censorship by stressing that the First Amendment applies only to the government, not private companies or institutions. The distinction was always a dishonest effort to evade the implications of speech controls, whether implemented by the government or corporations.
The First Amendment was never the exclusive definition of free speech. Free speech is viewed by many of us as a human right; the First Amendment only deals with one source for limiting it. Free speech can be undermined by private corporations as well as government agencies. This threat is even greater when politicians openly use corporations and universities to achieve indirectly what they cannot achieve directly.
Dean Bobo’s desire for “calmer times” would come at too high a price for free speech as well as Harvard.
Net Zero will prevent almost zero warming, three top atmospheric scientists have said – even if it could be achieved. And it will cause untold devastation to human life in the process.
In Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, a court informs the irascible character of Mr. Bumble that it assumes a level of control of his wife’s conduct. Mr. Bumble responds that “if the law supposes that, the law is a ass – a idiot.” The scene came to mind with a decision yesterday when the Wisconsin Supreme Court voted 4-3 in Sojenhomer v. Village of Egg Harbor that a sidewalk is not a “pedestrian way.”Lawyers in Wisconsin are already sending around Bumble-like harrumphs to the decision, which is a testament to the ability of judges to ignore plain meaning to achieve desired results.
Where the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland asked “why is a raven like a writing-desk?,” the Wisconsin Supreme Court asked why a sidewalk is not like a pedestrian way. The result is equally maddening.
At issue was the effort of the state to create more sidewalks. Faced with resistance from homeowners, the state was using eminent domain to simply condemn the land and claim it for sidewalks. However, Wisconsin has strong protections for home owners, including statutes expressly stating that the power of eminent domain must be “strictly construed” against the government.
Moreover, there is a statute that expressly bars the use of eminent domain to take property for “pedestrian way[s].” It defines a “pedestrian way” as “a walk designated for the use of pedestrian travel.”
To every Bumble and non-Bumble alike, that would seem to describe a sidewalk, which is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a usually paved walk for pedestrians at the side of a street.”
Reading the text of this section as a whole, we find several indications that the definition of pedestrian way does not include sidewalks. For starters, both § 346.02(8)(a) and (b) use the terms “sidewalk” and “pedestrian way” in ways that signify that each term has a separate, non-overlapping meaning. … Section 346.02(8)(b) states that pedestrian ways shall be treated ‘as if’ they were sidewalks for utility installation and assessment purposes. The phrase “as if” signals that one category (pedestrian ways) should receive the same treatment as a different category (sidewalks). That is the same way the legislature used “as if” in, for example, Wis. Stat. § 53.03, which states that Wisconsin courts “may treat a foreign country as if it were a state” in guardianship proceedings. Just as foreign countries are not states, but should be treated as if they were for guardianship purposes, pedestrian ways are not sidewalks, but should be treated as if they were for utility-installation and assessment purposes.
The analogy is a poor one, in my view. The treatment of a foreign state like a domestic state captures the fact that both are governing units with similar inherent functions and powers. That is a far cry from saying a “pedestrian way” is NOT a “sidewalk.”
Justice Dallet then adds:
The language of § 346.02(8)(a) also suggests that sidewalks are not pedestrian ways. That paragraph makes the rules of the road pertaining to sidewalks also applicable to pedestrian ways. But if sidewalks are pedestrian ways, then the rules of the road applicable to sidewalks would already apply to pedestrian ways. The point here, to be clear, is not that reading the term “pedestrian way” to include sidewalks would result in surplusage….
However, that may indicate that “pedestrian ways” are a broader category than just sidewalks. It does not suggest that sidewalks are not pedestrian ways.
That seems to be the point of the dissent by Chief Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler:
The plain language of the statute demonstrates that the term “pedestrian way” is broadly defined, and includes sidewalks. A sidewalk——that portion of the highway created for the travel of persons on foot——is clearly a subset of pedestrian ways——walks set apart or assigned for the use of pedestrian travel. It is a straightforward, common sense interpretation of the statutory language that a “walk designated for the use of pedestrian travel” necessarily includes that part of the highway “constructed for the use of pedestrians…”
[I]n other words, a closer look at the plain meaning of the statutes reveals that all sidewalks are pedestrian ways, but that not all pedestrian ways are sidewalks….
What is particularly galling about the decision of the majority is that they avoid the required strict construction of the law against the government as inapplicable by simply declaring that there is no ambiguity in the language of the statutes, a preposterous claim that requires a level of willful judicial blindness.
The creative effort to ignore the obvious is reminiscent of the fictional Canadian case where a horse was declared a bird. Though sometimes cited as a real case, it appears to be an opinion written to show how legal interpretations can take on absurd dimensions to result in desired ends.
In Regina v. Ojibway (8 Criminal Law Quarterly 137 (1965-66)), a Canadian indigenous tribe member puts down a suffering horse but is then charged under a criminal provision for shooting a bird under the Small Birds Act (R.S.O.). Blue, J., delivers the opinion for the court, granting the appeal, saying:
For the purpose of the Small Birds Act, all two-legged, feather-covered animals are birds. This, of course, does not imply that only two-legged animals qualify, for the legislative intent is to make two legs merely the minimum requirement. The statute therefore contemplated multi-legged animals with feathers as well.
Counsel submits that having regard to the purpose of the statute only small animals “naturally covered” with feathers could have been contemplated. However, had this been the intention of the legislature, I am certain that the phrase “naturally covered” would have been expressly inserted just as “Long” was inserted in the Longshoreman’s Act.
Therefore, a horse with feathers on its back must be deemed for the purpose of this Act to be a bird, a fortiori, a pony with feathers on its back is a small bird.
In Wisconsin, it appears that the Supreme Court would have simply said that the pony, since a pony can be treated “as if” it is a horse, it is not a horse.
Tennessee Star journalist Michael Patrick Leahy is being ordered to appear in court to defend himself against possible contempt charges and jail time for publishing the leaked writings of the Covenant school shooter.
The publisher and the incoming editor of The Washington Post, when they worked as journalists in London two decades ago, used fraudulently obtained phone and company records in newspaper articles, according to a former colleague, a published account of a private investigator and an analysis of newspaper archives.
Will Lewis, The Post’s publisher, assigned one of the articles in 2004 as business editor of The Sunday Times. Another was written by Robert Winnett, whom Mr. Lewis recently announced as The Post’s next executive editor.
The use of deception, hacking and fraud is at the heart of a long-running British newspaper scandal, one that toppled a major tabloid in 2010 and led to years of lawsuits by celebrities who said that reporters improperly obtained their personal documents and voice mail messages.
Mr. Lewis has maintained that his only involvement in the controversy was helping to root out problematic behavior after the fact, while working for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
But a former Sunday Times reporter said on Friday that Mr. Lewis had personally assigned him to write an article in 2004 using phone records that the reporter understood to have been obtained through hacking.
Two things stand out. The first is that this 20-year-old story is news again. The second is that the NYT decided to publish it outside their paywall.
I’m starting to think that Lewis and Winnett might be serious about reforming the Washington Post — and so the knives are already out.
Almost two years ago, on 26 July 2022, a German Twitter user known only as MicLiberal posted a thread that culminated in his criminal trial this week. His is but the latest in a long line of such prosecutions – the tactic our rulers increasingly favour to intimidate and harass those who use their freedom of expression in inconvenient ways.
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MicLiberal’s thread aimed only to memorialise some of the crazy things the vaccinators had said. It opened with this tweet:
We were complicit!
We marginalised, defamed, discredited, insulted and cancelled people. On behalf of science!
By popular demand, this brief thread with statements that should not be forgotten:
There ensued nothing but a series of citations, most of them wholly typical samples of vintage 2021/22 vaccinator rhetoric, much of it not even that remarkable. For example, MicLiberal included this statement from Andreas Berholz, deputy editor-in-chief of the widely read blog Der Volksverpetzer:
“Fact-check: The unvaccinated remain the main drivers of the pandemic.”
“Corona sceptics forfeit their right to a place in intensive care in the event of overcrowding.”
You might be wondering what crime MicLiberal can possibly have committed by drawing attention to these already-public statements. The most honest answer is that his thread achieved millions of views in a matter of days, and at a very awkward moment – precisely when everyone was beginning to regret all the illiberal and wildly intemperate things they had said in the depths of the virus craze. He had embarrassed some very vain and powerful people with their own incredibly stupid words, and today many are of the opinion that that ought to be a crime in and of itself.
Alas, things have not yet deteriorated that far. Thus the police and prosecutors were left to scour our dense thicket of laws for a more plausible offence. They decided that their best chance lay with a novel provision of the German Criminal Code (Paragraph 126a). This provision makes it a crime to “disseminate the personal data of another person in a matter that is … intended to expose this person … to the risk of a criminal offence directed against them.” On 28 July, two days after MicLiberal posted his 25 tweets, Cologne police filed a criminal complaint against him, and afterwards the Cologne prosecutor’s office brought charges, arguing that MicLiberal had suggested that the people he cited were “perpetrators” and therefore associated them with “fascism.” The district court declined to approve the charges, but the prosecutors appealed to the regional court, where the judges saw things differently. They believed that a prosecution was warranted because of the “heated social debate” surrounding Covid measures, and because MicLiberal’s audience was composed of “homogeneous” like-minded people, who (in the summary of the Berliner Zeitung) “could either form groups or encourage individual members to commit acts of violence.” MicLiberal had furthermore assembled his citations from a website that the judges deemed guilty of an “anti-government orientation.”
We must take a moment to ponder this truly amazing argumentation, which would seem to criminalise such things as participating in the wrong discussions before the wrong kind of people and assembling one’s (wholly accurate) data from the wrong sources. In each of these cases, of course, it is the prosecutors and the judges eager to apply Paragraph 126a to their political opponents who get to decide what is “wrong.”
It is not only legitimate, but even ethically required, to strongly object to transgressive statements by people who occupy a prominent position in society, such as politicians or doctors. This is because these statements were discriminatory and threatened social peace.
Should it be legal [for] the former Federal President Gauck … to say: “Opponents of vaccination are idiots,” but illegal for my client to say that others have been insulted, defamed and marginalised by these statements? …
Anyone who makes public statements … must expect that their statements will be commented on, evaluated, socially condemned, and so on. This is because there is no entitlement to be free from criticism. There is no right to be able to communicate one’s views to the public without contradiction or criticism …
Although this is specifically about my client, it is also being decided today whether people are being pushed further and further into the private sphere by threats of punishment. It is obvious that if my client were convicted today, this conviction would send out a devastating signal.
It is a measure of how far the Federal Republic has deteriorated, that arguments like these have to be made at criminal trials. Fortunately, the authoritarian turn in German politics has penetrated the judiciary least of all, and so there is still some protection for those caught speaking in inconvenient ways. Emphasis, of course, belongs on some, because frivolous prosecutions like that of MicLiberal alone suffice as punishment and signal.
Friends often advise me to take a different tone here at the plague chronicle. Calling prominent politicians and scientists stupid idiots is an unnecessary risk, they argue, and could open me to prosecution for insult; some of my posts about mass migration might be interpreted as running afoul of criminal provisions against incitement; comparing the Federal Republic to the DDR may draw the attention of the constitutional protectors. What we learn from MicLiberal’s case is that it doesn’t matter at all what you say. All the caution in the world is not protection enough; if you embarrass and humiliate the right people, they’ll come for you. And I have to admit that it would be quite an honour to be prosecuted by these flaming fucking egregious retards, I would wear it as a badge of honour for the rest of my life. As I hope MicLiberal will.
HHS, NIH, NIAID misled House Energy and Commerce for 17 months about 2015 approval of monkeypox experiment to insert genes from more deadly "clade" into more infectious one, GOP report says. Science publishers allegedly hookwinked.
Across the media, journalists have recognized that the Hunter Biden laptop is authentic and, as established early by American intelligence agencies, not “Russian disinformation.” With the authentication of the laptop in the Delaware trial as “real” and untampered, most media has chosen to walk away with a slightly embarrassed shrug. Not the Washington Post. Its columnist, Philip Bump, was one of the most prominent purveyors of what the U.S. government now calls a “conspiracy theory.” This week, Bump ran another column to assure liberals that they were right all along about the laptop story.
In 2021, when media organizations were finally admitting that the laptop was authentic, Bump was still declaring that it was a “conspiracy theory.” Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Bump continued to suggest that “the laptop was seeded by Russian intelligence.”
After Bump had a meltdown in an interview when confronted over past false claims, I wrote a column about the litany of such false claims, including the laptop conspiracy theory. The Post surprised many of us by issuing a statement that they stood by all of Bump’s reporting, including the laptop conspiracy theory. That was in August 2023.
Well, Bump is back.
In his column, Bump takes after various people calling the media to account for burying this story before and after the election, including myself. I felt that it warranted a response.
In hitting Sean Hannity for a recent segment, Bump makes a common evasion among those who have long downplayed the laptop scandal. He objected that Hannity “is conflating the laptop presented as evidence at the trial, the one obtained by the FBI in 2019, with the ‘laptop’ that was the source of the New York Post story.”
For those of us who have covered the laptop since the story ran at the New York Post, it is as maddening as it is mendacious.
At the time of the story, some of us noted that the contents of the laptop could be confirmed since these emails and messages involved third parties. Some quickly confirmed the contents as authentic. The Bidens had long been accused of influence peddling and special dealing by using Joe Biden’s positions as senator, vice president, and president.
Moreover, as the media was referencing the debunked letter of former intelligence officials on this possible likely Russian disinformation, American intelligence quickly confirmed that there was no such evidence to support that claim.
The media ignored the actual intelligence agencies in favor of former intelligence officials who were organized by Biden campaign operatives to release the letter. Biden then cited the letter to refuse to answer questions about his son’s influence peddling and unlawful conduct.
Bump and others used the question over whether the laptop was an authentic copy or a tampered copy to avoid any serious investigation into the underlying emails. Many simply threw up their hands and said “oh well, what can we do.” To this day, the media has shown little interest in the influence peddling operation. Few people seriously argue that the media would have shown the same limited response if these emails tied Trump children to millions in foreign influence peddling schemes.
But Bump was not done:
After Hannity lamented the media’s silence on the so-called “critical development,” Turley offered a theory for why that silence had ensued.
‘If the laptop is authentic, if those files are real,’ he said, “then you have these detailed accounts of a multimillion-dollar influence-peddling operation run by the Biden family. Those would also be authentic. But the media just simply doesn’t want to go there.’
Except that we already know that many of those files were real, because we got access to them and verified them. The reason the media ‘doesn’t want to go there’ on breathless claims about a ‘Biden family’ influence-peddling operation is that the material doesn’t prove any such operation. It shows — as has by now been exhaustively explained — work done by Hunter Biden and his Uncle James that involved lots of money but did not demonstrably involve President Biden. The entire point of the House Republican impeachment effort has been to prove Joe Biden’s involvement; they have been unable to do so.”
Once again, Bump makes it sound like the Post vigorously and quickly verified the laptop. The belated acknowledgement did not come until much later. It was not until March 2022 that the Post finally admitted that the laptop was real, but then did comparably little to pursue the corruption and other unlawful conduct detailed on the laptop.
Washington Post columnist Thomas Rid appeared to state the quiet part out loud by telling the media: “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.”
For many, the Post has alienated readers who want to see equally rigorous attention to scandals on both sides of the political aisle. Indeed, the Post’s new publisher recently dropped a truth bomb on his writers by telling them “let’s not sugarcoat it…We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
Yet, it is Bump who is insisting this week that it is Fox News (the most watched cable news network) that is being tuned out in his column titled “The right takes a Biden-laptop victory lap around an empty arena.”
In deflecting questions about the coverage of the Biden corruption scandal, Bump simply ignores witness testimony that has proven that President Biden lied about having no knowledge of his son’s foreign dealings and met with his clients both in person and over the phone. More importantly, he ignores that this was a massive influence peddling operation where President Biden was the object. He was the “brand” being sold.
Influence peddling is a form of political corruption that the government continues to denounce worldwide. The fact that millions went to Biden family members rather than the President does not change the fact that this was one of the largest influence peddling operations in history. Just this week, even Politico stated the obvious that seems to escape Bump on this elaborate Biden operation involving not just family but close associates of the President. As I explained in my testimony in the Biden impeachment hearing, federal courts have repeatedly stated that it does not matter if a principal received money as opposed to family members. It can still constitute bribery and other offenses.
In the end, Bump continues to express frustration with those who would question his conclusions, as he did in his interview when confronted by a host asking about disproven claims. Bump exploded at the hubris of the interviewer and suggested that he is all the proof that the interviewer should need on such issues: “I’m sitting here and I’m telling you, you’re wrong about these things, and you don’t listen.”
Update: Notably, after the authentication of the computer in federal court, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, filed a motion on withdraw the lawsuit against former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in which claimed that the laptop contained manipulated data.
Major Headline! “That mouth-watering aroma of fresh food cooking? It may be degrading air quality”.
Story opens thus:
It’s been known for years that cooking indoors can taint the air in a home and cause health problems, especially when cooking without proper ventilation.
But a new study found that emissions from cooking may degrade the air quality outdoors as well.
“If you can smell it, there’s a good chance it’s impacting air quality,” researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory recently wrote about a new study looking at the “unrecognized and underappreciated sources of urban air pollution.”
Now let’s put ourselves into the mind of the typical NPC as he reads that.
Oh no! Cooking is killing us! It’s been known for years!
But we have to eat. Where to get food? Wait. I know. We can order from corporate-food factories. It’s safe and clean. That seed oil they’ll use can’t be as bad as white supremacists claim. And bug meat is still meat. That’s why they have meat in the name. Anyway, it can’t be as bad as air pollution caused by cooking. Especially cooking with gas! Then I’m sucking in fumes. Even outside! How have we even survived this long? Thank God Experts are here to save us all. Cooking needs to be regulated! I need to go to the doctor and have my lungs scanned.
If you think that’s bad, imagine what goes through the mind of somebody hearing that story on NPR. One shivers.
Smelling good cooking, once praised and savored, and even looked forward to, is now supposed to fill you with horror and angst. And make you want to be comforted by the soothing solutions of government Experts.
And they’re needed because, as the newspaper continues, “The researchers found that ‘on average, 21% of the total mass of human-caused VOCs [volatile organic compounds] present in Las Vegas’ outdoor air were from cooking activities,’ according to the NOAA report.”
Nearly everybody will stop there, seeing nothing but the propaganda. There curiosity will have been sated by hearing Experts are on the case. Maybe—and only maybe—one in a thousand will click over to the press release the newspaper uses as its source.
The NOAA press release was entitled “Those delicious smells may be impacting air quality”. Incidentally, by impacting they meant influencing or affecting. Anyway, it opens:
Stroll along the downtown streets of any major city around dinner time and you’re bound to encounter mouth-watering aromas enticing hungry patrons to nearby restaurants like moths to a flame.
If there’s one thing the researchers at NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory (CSL) have learned in their multi-year deep dive investigation into the unrecognized and underappreciated sources of urban air pollution, it’s this: If you can smell it, there’s a good chance it’s impacting air quality.
Yes. “Impacts” in a good way. Cooking smells good. Do they want it to smell bad? How in the unholy hell do they let themselves write something so abominably stupid? Is the author a charter member of the Cult of Safety First!?
The press release points to a “study”, which we’ll come to in a moment, and which has as one its authors one Coggon. This Coggon gurgitated this quote, “We kept seeing a specific class of compound in the urban measurements, what we call long-chain aldehydes, that we couldn’t explain from these other sources.” Cooking was the source.
Long-chain aldehydes, eh. Better than them short-chain ones, amirite? Well ain’t that something. That’s some kind of science, boy. Look at all those science words! We never learn what a long-chain aldehydes is, though.
Side Note: A big problem (we’ve discussed this before) comes with the blessing in ability to measure. The more things we can measure, it’s true there is a greater chance we can identify the causes of how things work. But there is also greater angst when things start deviating from “norms”. Because of reductionist attitudes, we focus on single things (think CO2). Like long-chain aldehydes, which previously were never a problem. Now that we can measure them, they are.
Of the rare birds that got as far as the press release, maybe again only one in a thousand of them will have sufficient curiosity to find the real source, the paper on which the press release relies.
Before that, we all grant that studying VOCs has been useful, such as in reducing LA’s smog. Good stuff. But success can lead to excess. It did here. An employed VOC scientist can only discover new VOCs.
In the paper—are you ready for this?—cooking is only mentioned three times, each time in an off-hand manner. A long paragraph on nasty chemicals in the air ends with this: “One possible source of aldehydes is cooking emissions.” That’s the only positive mentions.
Another references is to secondary organic aerosols (don’t ask), to which they say “Note that nonfossil contributions to SOA, such as from wood burning, cooking, and biogenic sources, are not considered here.” No, huh. Then we get to carbonaceous aerosols, “which does not include nonfossil components from cooking or biogenic sources.” I see.
That’s it. They even say “Indoor emissions of aromatic compounds have decreased by ~7% per year between 1981 and 2001”.
The whole paper is like this. Read it yourself. The message is Not Much Is Happening, But It Might Be Kinda Important.
From that thin reed an entire edifice of propaganda on how cooking stinks up the air was built. To which the authors of the paper itself even contributed. Hey, who doesn’t love publicity?
Many such cases, my friends. Many. Indeed, every time you see a “Research shows” you should first suspect something like this has happened.
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AT THE SAME TIME, WEIRDLY, LOTS OF MONEY IS FLOWING FROM CHINA INTO OUR POLITICAL CLASS:
“In my 30 years of public service, I’ve never seen U.S. Navy readiness at such a low point. And it’s not just me. This is a widespread, bipartisan concern… CRS told me “the U.S. Navy is in its worst state for designing, building, maintaining, & crewing ships in over 40 years.” https://t.co/y8lsuaCK96
I cannot help but find it ironic — to say the least — that the same people bleating about “saving democracy” are doing their damndest to subvert it.
“FBI officials conducting a top-secret security clearance review for a longtime employee asked witnesses whether that employee was known to support former President Donald Trump, if he had expressed concerns about the COVID-19 vaccine or had attended a Second Amendment rally, according to internal memos that prompted a complaint to the Justice Department’s internal watchdog alleging political bias inside the bureau.
The employee’s security clearance was revoked months after the interviews, which confirmed his support for Trump and gun rights and his concerns about the COVID vaccine, according to the documents obtained by Just the News.”
TBH, I suspect this is a matter of “the emperor’s new clothes.” That is to say there’s no evidence that this was directed by President Biden — who probably thinks FBI stands for “Female Body Inspector” — but some Permanent Washington lackey who thinks he (or she) is doing the country a service.
ROGER PIELKE JR’S ARTICLE ON HOW CLIMATE CHANGE NEEDS TO NOT USE IMPLAUSIBLE SCENARIOS IS BANNED ON THE BORK OF FECES. CLEARLY MORE PEOPLE NEED TO READ IT: Climate Science is About to Make a Huge Mistake.
“McRaven claims that those who criticize government institutions “undermine America.” “Undermining America” is a serious charge. And when it comes from a four-star admiral who commanded the entire United States Special Operations Command, you can bet that it carries some clout among those who are wielding power. For these reasons, McRaven’s comments merit close scrutiny.”
Our entire ruling class has been peddling variations on this for the past 5 years or so, at the same time they were gleefully screwing up — dare I say undermining? — America in so many ways. They should be begging for forgiveness, or maybe a pardon, rather than issuing arrogant diktats.
Plus, from John Lucas: “There are countries that do not tolerate speech critical of the government and its institutions. There are countries where citizens who publicly disagree with the actions of the government and its institutions are condemned as disloyal citizens, investigated and tried. There are countries where people with political views that differ from those of the governing authorities are subject to governmental abuse and ruin just because of their political opinions. We have a name for these countries. They are totalitarian.”
The Department of Justice has indicted Dr. Eithan Haim, a little-known surgeon who exposed Texas Children’s Hospital for secretly conducting transgender surgeries and treatments on minors, on four felony counts related to his alleged violation of a medical-records law.
Last year, Haim anonymously leaked evidence of the child sex-change procedures to conservative journalist Christopher Rufo. The documents revealed that Texas Children’s Hospital had continued running its transgender program, despite announcing that the program had been discontinued in accordance with Governor Greg Abbott’s 2022 directive equating such medical interventions with child abuse.
The Houston-based hospital was ultimately forced to stop its trans-medical practices after a state law took effect in September 2023, prohibiting drug and surgical “gender-affirming” interventions for minors.
U.S. marshals notified Haim of the indictment at his home this week and summoned him to court for violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Haim and his legal team, who don’t yet know the full nature of the charges, are set to appear in court on June 17.
The man who exposed the secret mutilation of children must be punished.
