Illinois sex ed classes to teach gender expression as early as K-2 starting next school year

Starting next school year, schools in Illinois teaching sexual education lessons will start as early as kindergarten.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Friday signed Senate Bill 818, which his office said will modernize sex education standards with age-appropriate content for grades K-12.

The measure requires the Illinois State Board of Education to provide the standards for schools that teach sex education by August 2022. Schools don’t need to adopt the standards unless they teach sex ed. Parents will be able to opt their children out.

The law states the curriculum will align with and be updated alongside the National Sex Education Standards. Those standards are cultivated in part by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, or SIECUS. That group has the tag line “Sex Ed for Social Change.”

Among the standards for grades K-2 are defining gender expression, different kinds of families and types of sexual abuse. Grades 3-5 go into anatomy, gender identity and sexual orientation. Grades 6-8 will learn about different types of sex, different types of sexual exploitation and trafficking. Grade 9-10 will learn about the history of “reproductive justice.” Grades 11-12 will learn about power and privilege within sexual relationships.

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Beijing Threatens “Counterattack” If White House Report On COVID Origins Blames Wuhan Lab Leak

Back in May, President Biden gave the intelligence community 90 days to produce a report on the likely origins of SARS-CoV-2, and the president promised to share the findings with the public, no matter how inflammatory.

Well, the 90-day window is nearly up, and it looks like the intelligence community has made good on its promise. Case in point: the first details of the report have been leaked to the Washington Post, which reported on Wednesday that the ultimate finding is “inconclusive”.

This means the administration couldn’t find enough evidence to support both of the leading theories: That the virus hopped from an animal to a human, or that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. While the notion that COVID leaked from a lab was once hyper-sensitive (indeed, Zero Hedge was banned from Twitter for daring to suggest that the WIV played a role in infecting the world with COVID), it’s now reportedly become the leading scenario in the eyes of the intelligence community (though they seem unwilling to publicly admit this).

WaPo says the Intelligence community will seek to de-classify the report in the coming days, meaning it will likely dominate the news cycle later in the week.

Biden asked America’s spy agencies to get to the bottom of the issue after receiving a report back in May from the intelligence agencies saying that they had “coalesced around two likely scenarios” but had not yet reached a conclusion. A group of scientists also published an open letter earlier this year declaring a lab leak to be the most likely scenario.

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Lawmakers Benefit From Booming Defense Stocks

Since U.S. military actions in Afghanistan were authorized in September 2001, the stocks of the top five defense companies have risen in value by an average of nearly 900%, strongly outperforming the S&P 500 index.

Among those who have benefitted from investments in the stocks are nearly four dozen members of Congress, the people who approve funding for the contracts that make up the bulk of the companies’ revenues.

At least 47 members of Congress and their spouses hold between $2 million and $6.7 million worth of stock in companies that are among the top 100 defense contractors, a Sludge analysis of financial disclosures found. 

The war in Afghanistan has caused an estimated up to 174,000 direct war deaths, according to the Costs of War Project, with economic costs reaching over $2.26 trillion there and in Pakistan. The total cost of post-9/11 wars including Iraq and other operations has surpassed $6.4 trillion through last year.

At least 11 U.S. senators hold up to $1.7 million in defense industry stocks and at least 36 U.S. representatives hold a maximum value of over $5 million. Congress only reports its investments in broad ranges, so it’s not possible to know exactly how much their stocks are worth. Members of Congress have at least 108 investments in 16 major defense contractors, including all of the top 10 companies by defense revenue.

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ANTARCTIC SEA ICE ‘REBOUND’ SURPRISES SCIENTISTS — MSM SILENT

Just two years ago, many mainstream media outlets declared that sea ice at the South Pole was melting at an “astonishing” rate.

As recently pointed out by notrickszone.com, German national daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported in June 2019 that Antarctic sea ice had “shrunk 1.8 million square kilometers”, writing: “the massive disappearance of ice is astonishing”.

And while the reporting was technically factual, it has proven to be yet more AGW-driving obfuscation and cherry-picking rather than well-founded indications of a concerning climatic trend.

And now, in 2021, as the ice sharply rebounds, these same MSM outlets have fallen silent–which is speaking volumes…

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Pfizer CEO Predicts Vaccine-Resistant COVID-19 Variant Likely to Emerge

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said on Tuesday that, at some point in the future, a strain of COVID-19 that is resistant to vaccines is likely to emerge.

“Every time that the variant appears in the world, our scientists are getting their hands around it,” Bourla told Fox News in an interview. “They are researching to see if this variant can escape the protection of our vaccine. We haven’t identified any yet but we believe that it is likely that one day, one of them will emerge.”

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The Bizarre Refusal to Apply Cost-Benefit Analysis to COVID Debates

In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevitably result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms, is foundational to public policy debates — except when it comes to COVID, where it has been bizarrely declared off-limits.

The quickest and most guaranteed way to save hundreds of thousands of lives with policy changes would be to ban the use of automobiles, or severely restrict their usage to those authorized by the state on the ground of essential need (e.g., ambulances or food-delivery vehicles), or at least lower the nationwide speed limit to 25 mph. Any of those policies would immediately prevent huge numbers of human beings from dying. Each year, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), “1.35 million people are killed on roadways around the world,” while “crashes are a leading cause of death in the United States for people aged 1–54.” Even with seat belts and airbags, a tragic number of life-years are lost given how many young people die or are left permanently and severely disabled by car accidents. Studies over the course of decades have demonstrated that even small reductions in speed limits save many lives, while radical reductions — supported by almost nobody — would eliminate most if not all deaths from car crashes.

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