“Paul writes in to ask if I have the full JFK “secret society” speech. Why, yes, I do! And guess what? The full speech shows that those highly-edited two-minute YouTube videos you saw back in the day were misleading at best and downright dishonest at worst. Wait until you hear what JFK was actually saying.”
Watch the video HERE
Questions are being asked over the discovery of a Twitter account apparently belonging to Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on which she wished death on a conservative journalist and used vile and threatening language against others.
It appears that AOC outed herself as one ‘Zaza Demon’ on the account in response to another Twitter user who commented on a video of the Rep. being confronted by Libs Of TikTok founder Chaya Raichik.
This is how that went:
Libs Of TikTok Confronts AOC For Violating Committee Ethics Rules – Her Response Is Predictable
AOC zaza demon responded in the first person to the video, writing “Lol and what makes you think that i did anything to support nazis? You’re delusional. Seek help,” before then quickly deleting the response.
After that, scores of other tweets from the account began to disappear, before the entire account was nuked.
September 12, 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an “Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe and Secure American Bioeconomy.”1
This executive order makes biotechnology a national priority across agencies and branches of government. As noted in this order, biotechnology will also be used to “improve” food security, sustainability, and agricultural innovation in the U.S.:
“The Secretary of Agriculture, in consultation with the heads of appropriate agencies as determined by the Secretary, shall submit a report assessing how to use biotechnology and biomanufacturing for food and agriculture innovation, including by improving sustainability and land conservation; increasing food quality and nutrition; increasing and protecting agricultural yields; protecting against plant and animal pests and diseases; and cultivating alternative food sources.”
The high school graduation rate in Washington, D.C., is climbing. However, student school performance seems to be falling dramatically. While more and more seniors graduate high school, test scores are down and absenteeism is up.
According to a recent report from the D.C. Policy Center, graduation rates at D.C. public schools and public charter schools have been steadily rising since the 2018–19 school year. In 2022, 75 percent of all students graduated high school in four years, up seven percentage points from 2019. However, this progress is not reflected in measurements tracking students’ academic achievement. On state assessments, the percentage of high school students that “met” or “exceeded” expectations in the math test declined from 18.4 percent in 2019 to just 11 percent in 2022. English scores stayed the same. Absenteeism is also up, with the percentage of students absent for more than 10 percent of the school year reaching a staggering 48 percent in the 2021–22 academic year, increasing from 29 percent three years prior.
Based on academic achievement and school attendance data, fewer D.C. public school students should be graduating high school. Yet the steady rise in graduation rates remains. Why, then, are so many more kids getting high school diplomas?
The answer isn’t exactly clear. One possible reason is increasing grade inflation, meaning that students who haven’t actually learned course material are getting passing grades anyway. There’s an “increase in policy that we’re seeing to not fail students,” Max Eden, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, tells Reason. “You know, 50 percent as the lowest grade kind of policy, which is being picked up in more and more especially urban schools across the country,”
Eden also suggests that D.C. could also be failing to follow its own policies around attendance requirements for graduation. It wouldn’t be the first time District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) have made this blunder. In 2018, an audit of DCPS found that, despite the district’s sharp rise in graduation rates, the increase “was entirely attributable to schools systematically not enforcing their own policies,” says Eden. “And it’s not as though in the wake of these revelations … D.C. really clamped down and you saw the graduation rates plummet. They kind of didn’t do anything to change their policy because they could not stand to have their graduation rates decrease further.”
Unfortunately, graduating kids without necessary academic skills doesn’t lead to better outcomes. Just because more DCPS students are graduating high school doesn’t mean more of them are leaving with important skills.
South Side Chicago residents recently revealed to the Washington Post that the construction of the Obama Presidential Center has led to a significant increase in the neighborhood’s rent, causing the displacement of long-term residents, including many black families.
In September 2021, former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama broke ground on the Obama Presidential Center in the South Side of Chicago. The center, located on a 19-acre lot, will include a public library, playground, community centers, and a museum.
The $500 million project has been largely financed by private donors. The construction, which is still ongoing, is estimated to bring $3.1 billion to the community. In addition, it is predicted to generate another $16.5 million in state and local tax revenue.
At the groundbreaking ceremony, Obama told the audience that the center would “give back to Chicago and the South Side in particular.”
“The Obama Presidential Center is our way of repaying some of what this amazing city has given us,” he stated.
A controversial facial recognition database, used by police departments across the nation, was built in part with 30 billion photos the company scraped from Facebook and other social media users without their permission, the company’s CEO recently admitted, creating what critics called a “perpetual police line-up,” even for people who haven’t done anything wrong.
The company, Clearview AI, boasts of its potential for identifying rioters at the January 6 attack on the Capitol, saving children being abused or exploited, and helping exonerate people wrongfully accused of crimes. But critics point to privacy violations and wrongful arrests fueled by faulty identifications made by facial recognition, including cases in Detroit and New Orleans, as cause for concern over the technology.
Clearview took photos without users’ knowledge, its CEO Hoan Ton-That acknowledged in an interview last month with the BBC. Doing so allowed for the rapid expansion of the company’s massive database, which is marketed on its website to law enforcement as a tool “to bring justice to victims.”
Ton-That told the BBC that Clearview AI’s facial recognition database has been accessed by US police nearly a million times since the company’s founding in 2017, though the relationships between law enforcement and Clearview AI remain murky and that number could not be confirmed by Insider.
In a statement emailed Insider, Ton-That said “Clearview AI’s database of publicly available images is lawfully collected, just like any other search engine like Google.”
The company’s CEO added: “Clearview AI’s database is used for after-the-crime investigations by law enforcement, and is not available to the general public. Every photo in the dataset is a potential clue that could save a life, provide justice to an innocent victim, prevent a wrongful identification, or exonerate an innocent person.”
A team of military medical scientists in China says it has inserted a gene from the microscopic water bear into human embryonic stem cells and significantly increased these cells’ resistance to radiation.
They said success in this unprecedented experiment could lead to super-tough soldiers who could survive nuclear fallout.
The water bear, also known as tardigrade or moss piglet, is an eight-legged animal smaller than 1 millimetre long and the hardiest creature on Earth. Over years of scientific testing, it has survived -200 degrees Celsius, more than anour hour in boiling water and after flying in space.
The water bear’s toughness comes in part from a gene that can generate shieldlike proteins to protect its cells against radiation and other environmental damage.
The Chinese team said it had found a way to introduce this gene into human DNA using CRISPR/Cas9, a gene-editing tool now available in most bio-labs.
In their laboratory experiment, nearly 90 per cent of the human embryonic cells carrying the water bear gene survived a lethal exposure to X-ray radiation, according to the team led by professor Yue Wen with the radiation biotechnology laboratory at the Academy of Military Sciences, Beijing.
There has been a growing interest in the study since Yue and his colleagues published their findings in the Chinese-language journal Military Medical Sciences in October, according to a Beijing-based life scientist.
“This is amazing, considering the big difference between the water bear and a human,” said the researcher who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the technology.
Since the 2016 elections, politicians, journalists, and many others have raised the alarm about “foreign election influence” and “disinformation,” demanding greater “content moderation” by social media platforms. It is too easy, they argued, for foreign and malign actors to quickly “go viral” at low cost, leaving the good guys unable to correct bad information. We must become more “resilient” to disinformation.
It’s now clear that all of that rhetoric was cover for a sweeping censorship effort by the federal government and government contractors.
Since December, a small but growing group of journalists, analysts, and researchers have documented the rise of a “Censorship Industrial Complex”, a network of U.S. government agencies, and government-funded think tanks. Over the last six years, these entities have coordinated their efforts to both spread disinformation and to censor journalists, politicians, and ordinary Americans. They have done so directly and indirectly, including by playing good cop/bad cop with Twitter and Facebook. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of people have been involved in these censorship and disinformation campaigns in the U.S., Canada, and the UK.
We now know, thanks to the Twitter Files, emails released by the Attorney Generals of Missouri and Louisiana, and research by others, that the Censorship Industrial Complex is violating the First Amendment by coordinating with government agencies and receiving government funding to pressure and help social media companies to both censor information, including accurate information, while spreading disinformation, including conspiracy theories.
And such efforts are continuing if not accelerating. At Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” last week, US allies in Europe demanded that Facebook censor “false narratives” and news that would “weaken our support to Ukraine.” Facebook agreed.
One of the most intelligent, influential, and fascinating public-facing leaders of the Censorship Industrial Complex is Renee DiResta, Research Manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Diresta has, more than anyone else, made the public case for greater government-led and government-funded censorship, writing for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and other major publications, and through public speaking, including on podcasts with Joe Rogan and Sam Harris.
To many journalists and policymakers, DiResta is one of the good guys, advocating as a citizen and hobbyist for greater U.S. government action to fight disinformation. DiResta has argued that the U.S. has been unprepared to fight the “information war” with Russia and other nations in her bylined articles for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, and many others. And in her 2018 Senate testimony DiResta advocated “legislation that defines and criminalizes foreign propaganda” and for allowing law enforcement to “prosecute foreign propaganda.”
DiResta, as much as any other public person in the Western world, has sounded the alarm, repeatedly and loudly, for stronger governmental and non-governmental coordination to get social media platforms to censor more information. “The Russian disinformation operations that affected the 2016 United States presidential election are by no means over,” wrote DiResta in the New York Times in December 2018. “Russian interference through social media is a chronic, widespread, and identifiable condition that we must now aggressively manage.”
In 2021, DiResta advocated for creating a government censorship center, which she euphemistically referred to as a “Center of Excellence,” within the federal government. “Creation of a ‘Center of Excellence’ within the federal government,” she said, “could tie in a federal lead with platforms, academics, and nonprofits to stay ahead of these emerging narratives and trends.” DiResta argued that her censorship center could also help spread propaganda. “As narratives emerge,” she explained, “the Center of Excellence could deploy experts to relevant federal agencies to help prepare pre-bunking and messaging, to identify trusted voices in communities, and to build coalitions to respond.”
Did the Department of Homeland Security act on DiResta’s proposal to create a censorship center? It did. But DHS didn’t call it a “Center of Excellence.” Instead, it called it a “Disinformation Governance Board,” which the agency announced publicly in April 2022.
It’s a trope seen countless times in books and movies. A character emerges from a drug-induced psychedelic stupor with a fresh outlook and more positive perspective on life. According to new findings from The Ohio State University, however, there may really be some truth to this hallucinogenic notion. Scientists report particularly mystical and insightful psychedelic drug experiences may be associated with an enduring drop in both anxiety and depression symptoms.
Study authors performed a comprehensive machine learning analysis of data pertaining to nearly 1,000 survey respondents who answered questions about their previous non-clinical experiences with psychedelic drugs. Sure enough, those scoring the highest on questionnaires assessing the mystical and insightful nature of their experiences also consistently reported improvements in both depression and anxiety.
Of course, there’s also the risk of encountering a “bad trip.” What happens if a psychedelic experience becomes unpleasant, frightening, or destabilizing? Surprisingly, the study actually found that even challenging psychedelic trips can be beneficial — especially within the context of mystical and insightful experiences. This finding in particular may be especially helpful for practitioners to know as they guide patients through clinical trials focusing on the therapeutic potential of psychedelics.
“Sometimes the challenge arises because it’s an intensely mystical and insightful experience that can, in and of itself, be challenging,” says senior study author Alan Davis, assistant professor and director of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education in The Ohio State University College of Social Work, in a media release.
“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
H.L. Mencken
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