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Is Your Medication Made in a Contaminated Factory? The FDA Won’t Tell You.

They were the sort of disturbing discoveries that anyone taking generic medication would want to know.

At one Indian factory manufacturing drugs for the United States, pigeons infested a storage room and defecated on boxes of sterilized equipment. At another, pathogens contaminated purified water used to produce drugs. At a third, stagnant urine pooled on a bathroom floor not far from where injectable medication was made.

But when the Food and Drug Administration released the grim inspection reports and hundreds of others like them, the agency made a decision that undermined its mission to protect Americans from dangerous drugs.

Instead of sharing the names of the medications coming from the errant foreign factories, the FDA routinely blacked them out, keeping the information secret from the public. That decision prevented doctors, pharmacists and patients from knowing whether the drugs they counted on were tainted by manufacturing failures — and potentially ineffective or unsafe.

“Is there some quality issue? Is there a greater difference in potency than expected? Is there a contaminant? I don’t know,” said Dr. Donna Kirchoff, a pediatrician in Oregon who has spent hours trying to find out where certain drugs were made for patients reporting unexplained reactions.

There’s no specific requirement that the FDA block out drug names on inspection reports about foreign facilities. Still, the agency preemptively kept that information hidden, invoking a cautious interpretation of a law that requires the government to protect trade secrets.

It’s part of a decades-long pattern of discounting the interests of consumers who want to make informed choices about the drugs they take — even as 9 out of 10 prescriptions in the United States are filled with generics, many from India and China.

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Newsom Signs Bill Pointing Kids Toward LGBT Site with Possible Predators

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed new legislation pointing children in government schools toward an LGBT online forum that some in the state believe is likely a hotbed for predators.

Newsom signed Assembly Bill 727 on Oct. 10, which was World Mental Health Day, mandating that school IDs for public middle schools, high schools, and colleges have contact information for The Trevor Project on the back.

The group purports to prevent suicide for self-proclaimed homosexual and transgender young people, but their online forum, TrevorSpace, lacks age verification and moderation standards, according to The Christian Post.

Brenda Lebsack, a Santa Ana Unified School District trustee, said that The Trevor Project allows for easy predation on children.

“I saw with my own eyes that Trevor Project is putting kids in harm’s way through TrevorSpace by connecting minors with unfettered random adults on an international virtual platform to explore their genders and sexualities, and this is dangerous for our most vulnerable kids who identify as LGBTQ,” Lebsack wrote in a recent article, according to a release from the California Family Council.

TrevorSpace is advertised as a “welcoming online social community for LGBTQ+ young people between the ages of 13-24 years old.”

There are over 400,000 members on the forum, where young people can “find support groups and make friends.”

The California Family Council wrote that “multiple investigations, including those cited by law enforcement and school officials, reveal that anyone can create an account, set their age, and directly message minors.”

“There is no reliable age verification, and moderation is limited,” the organization said.

Kevin Brown, a retired police officer who launched the anti-trafficking entity Lives Worth Saving, said that his experience in law enforcement led him to believe that TrevorSpace could be easily compromised.

“I understand the strategies used by child predators and traffickers to lure their victims,” Brown said in written testimony against Assembly Bill 727.

“Because TrevorSpace readily admits it does not constantly monitor the site, and there are people of all ages online, the opportunity for a child to be manipulated by a predator is an exponential threat.”

Brown testified that he had even tested the site himself, creating a fake account designed to resemble a 15-year-old boy.

“Within minutes, I was able to connect with several others via a ‘club’ that is actually a chat room,” he continued.

“One person was of particular interest, as he wanted to take our chat from TrevorSpace and move it to Discord, another social media site I’m familiar with. In an undercover capacity, I have made contact with people on Discord who sell and distribute Child Sexual Abuse Materials.”

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The Charlie Kirk Hysteria Is a Blueprint for Future Political Chaos

Despite their stark differences, both partisan reactions stemmed from deeply held beliefs expressed with intense emotion. Many of these beliefs concerned the biggest threats facing the United States. The mainstream right-wing reaction generally reflected a narrative familiar to their worldview: the evil left killed Charlie Kirk. Meanwhile, left-wing indifference and celebration reflected their worldview: that Charlie Kirk was a Nazi, and MAGA is largely a collection of evil fascists.

The reactions to the assassination have settled down—for now. But the collective reactivity it triggered is cause for both concern and curiosity and applies to far more than his murder. Such volatile emotions and behavior will undoubtedly flare up again as current events grow increasingly inflammatory and polarized. Because this dynamic will inevitably play out again, it is vital to understand what made it so explosive.

One way to understand the collective chaos in response to Kirk’s death and many other dramatic events comes from a book that inspired one of America’s top propagandists, Edward Bernays. Bernays helped engineer public support for World War I, lent his talents to promoting and sanitizing a CIA-backed coup while working for the United Fruit Company, and wrote openly about the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the masses.”

“The Leaders of Crowds and Their Means of Persuasion”

The Crowd by Gustav Le Bon, written in 1895, explores crowd psychology, analyzing the hivemind and herd-like behavior of collective groups. In a chapter called “The Leaders of Crowds and Their Means of Persuasion,” Le Bon discussed how “leaders” can program beliefs, sentiments, and behaviors into collective groups. He explained how leaders can “stir up a crowd for a short space of time, to induce it to commit an act of any nature,” cautioning that “the crowd must be acted upon by rapid suggestion.” While rapid suggestion is key, Le Bon stressed that “it is necessary that the crowd should have been previously prepared” to react in the way the leaders desire.

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Delusional Chuck Schumer Implies the Trump Administration is Being ‘Shielded’ by the Press

How out of touch with reality is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer? So out of touch that he recently suggested that the Trump administration is being shielded by the press.

Schumer was talking about the fact that some media companies are being acquired by conservatives who might be more positive in their coverage of Trump and the administration. You know, the way that 99 percent of the media has treated Democrats for decades now.

In the course of his remarks, he used this to say that we aren’t going to have a free press anymore. Naturally, he tried to tie in the whole stupid ‘No Kings’ thing as well.

Transcript via Schumer’s Senate Page:

Schumer: I had a few questions this morning of my great colleague — and once again, his strength, his indomitability, and his caring about this democracy, which we all know is at risk, is just amazing and so my question relates to something he touched on before, in his discussions with our great senator from New Hampshire. There are so many ways this administration is trying to rip apart democracy and one of them, you mentioned a minute ago, is the threatening of media to just do what Trump wants and the man who’s head of the FCC seems to be an instrumentality of that.

Trump has said, things they say I don’t like should not be put on the air, and they’ve held over the heads the broadcast licenses of some of our great media companies. In other ways, they’re getting some of their friends to take over some of our media companies. And isn’t one of the greatest blows to democracy — I would ask my colleague — one of the greatest blows to democracy when we don’t have a fully free press?

And has it been a hallmark of so many of the countries that he has mentioned that are autocracies or absolute dictatorships to have no free press, so no information can come out? And doesn’t that dramatically hurt the American people, when government is shielded and can do whatever it wants — and hurt as many people as it wants — because you don’t have a free press? Shouldn’t it really frighten every American that this is a large step on the road away from democracy towards tyranny and towards authoritarian government?

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RFK Jr. Gave Ed Martin a List of 28 Scientific Studies that Defrauded the American Public – The Scientific Journals Have Been Put on Notice

On Wednesday morning James Lyons-Weiler joined Steve Bannon on The War Room to discuss the “weaponization of science” and its destructive effects on the American people.

James Lyons-Weiler is an American scientist and activist who operates the non-profit organization Institute for Pure and Applied Knoledge. Lyons-Weiler holds a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology.

Lyons-Weiler explained the epidemic of fraud in today’s scientific community.

James Lyons-Weilor: I know for a fact that if there’s a narrative that the former CDC or NIAID with Anthony Fauci had to have for public health. If you’re at a university and you actually went against the green, your university got a call and all of your NIH funding was threatened over, let’s say, HPV vaccine safety or MMR vaccine safety… There’s a mix of fraud in weaponized science and then use of science in a way that is just fooling the public, right?

Steve Bannon: Can you give me a specific example of either fraud or weaponization in this regards?

James Lyons-Weilor: Yeah, absolutely. So when the CDC whistleblower, who I’m sure you’ve heard about, William Thompson came out. He told Brian Hooker that a study that was published in 2004 by Frank DeStefano and a lot of people at the CDC actually buried data so the institutes of medicine could look at it, that the MMR vaccine did indeed seem to contribute to an increased risk of autism in African-American boys. And they manipulated the study by dropping everybody from the study that didn’t have a Georgia birth certificate just to reduce the sample size, which is the number of people in the study. So the statistics couldn’t pick it up. And that’s fraud. So the demarcation between science and fraud is something that’s been going on for decades, over 100 years…

…Coleen Boyle, Frank DeStefano, others. They were absolutely hired to go to work at CDC because they knew how to fix the science, the data, the fraud.

Lyons-Weilor says we are likely going to see prosecutions over the science fraud.

James Lyons-Weilor: I think that we’re going to probably see some prosecutions on the basis of defrauding the federal government. If I’m funded by the federal government to do science, to do research, and I falsify the data, I can be fined personally, and I can be banned from doing research for 10 years…

…Ed Martin. He was at the Association of Physicians and Surgeons meeting last month. I was there Yes. And he made an announcement that Mr. Kennedy, Secretary Kennedy, gave him a list of 28 studies with the journals and layperson’s summaries that actually they were wrongfully retracted and that those journals have been put on notice by the attorney general’s office. And I was asked by Secretary Kennedy to put that list together for him.

Lyons Weilor ended the interview suggesting that there is a government investigation into the individuals who scammed the American public and lied to them about the dangers of particular vaccines.

These deceitful officials may finally face justice for the dangerous policies they pushed on the American public.

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Who Would Jesus Bomb? The Gospel According to the Military-Industrial Complex

“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”—Thomas Jefferson

For a man supposedly intent on winning a Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump spends an extraordinary amount of time waging war, threatening to wage war, and fantasizing about waging war.

Notwithstanding his dubious claims about having ended “seven un-endable wars,” Trump has continued to squander the American people’s resources and moral standing by feeding the military-industrial complex’s insatiable appetite for war—preemptively bombing nuclear facilities in Iran, blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean, and flexing military muscle at every opportunity.

Even the Trump administration’s version of “peace through strength” is filtered through a prism of violence, intimidation and strongman tactics.

It is the gospel of power, not peace—a perversion of both Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and the U.S. Constitution.

Thus we find ourselves at this peculiar crossroads: a president hailed by his followers as an “imperfect vessel” chosen by God to save the church and restore Christianity—while they turn a blind eye to his record of adultery, deceit, greed, cruelty, and an almost religious devotion to vengeance and violence.

If anything captures Trump’s worldview, it is the AI-generated video he shared on social media: a grotesque fantasy of himself wearing a golden crown, flying a military fighter jet, and bombing a crowd of protesters with brown liquid feces.

This is the man who claims to be “saving God”?

Dismissed by his devoted base as harmless humor—a cheeky response to the millions nationwide who took part in the “No Kings” protests on Oct. 18—Trump’s crude fantasy of assaulting critics with fecal bombs nevertheless begs the question: Who would Jesus bomb?

That question, of course, is meant less literally than morally.

To answer it, we must first understand who Jesus Christ was—the revered preacher, teacher, radical, prophet and son of God—born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of America’s own police state.

When he came of age, Jesus had powerful, profound things to say, about justice, power and how we are to relate to one another. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” “Love your enemies.”

A revolutionary in both spirit and action, Jesus not only died challenging the police state of his day—the Roman Empire—but left behind a blueprint for resisting tyranny that has guided countless reformers and freedom fighters ever since.

Far from the sanitized, domesticated figure presented in modern churches, Jesus was a radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn. He spoke truth to power, defied political and religious hierarchies, and exposed the hypocrisy of empire.

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Massive SCOTUS Case Could Guarantee House Control For GOP

The Supreme Court took a second look at a case that could result in handing the Republican Party guaranteed control of the House of Representatives last week, and initial reports suggest a major ruling is on the horizon. If the highest court in the land strikes down Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, the GOP’s hold over the House could become insurmountable.

Reports say that if Section 2 is removed, which has been interpreted previously as requiring the creation of majority-minority districts, the Republican Party could toss out a dozen Democratic-held districts in the South.

It all started when a group of voters challenged a 2024 congressional map by claiming that it pushes unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. This means the map sorts voters based on their race, which is a violation of the 14th Amendment.

The court heard two-and-a-half hours of oral arguments, with conservative justices signaling they are most likely going to undermine a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, though they might not strike it down completely.

“Wednesday’s oral argument was the latest chapter in a dispute that dates back to 2022, when Louisiana adopted a new congressional map in the wake of the 2020 census. Roughly one-third of the state’s population is Black, but the 2022 map had only one majority-Black district out of the six districts allotted to the state. That prompted a group of Black voters to go to federal court, where they argued that the 2022 map violated Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act, which bars discrimination in voting practices,” SCOTUS Blog reported.

U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick agreed that the 2022 map likely violated Section 2. She then forbade the state from using this particular map in future elections and ordered the state to create a new map featuring two majority-Black districts.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit supported that ruling. It then gave the state until January 15, 2024, to produce a new map; otherwise, the lower court would develop a plan for the 2024 elections.

Louisiana then created a new map that created a second majority-Black district. Complaints came forward from a group of voters who referred to themselves as “non-African American.” A three-judge federal district court ruled that the 2024 map violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause, as it sorted voters based on race. The court banned the state from using the map in future elections.

“In May 2024, the Supreme Court put the three-judge district court’s ruling on hold, which allowed the state to move forward with using the new map in the 2024 elections. Voters in the 6th District, the new majority-Black district, elected Cleo Fields, a former member of Congress who had represented another majority-Black district during the 1990s, to represent them,” SCOTUS Blog writes.

Louisiana and the Black voters then appealed to the Supreme Court, which listened to oral arguments for the first time since spring. The state stated that once the lower courts determined the 2022 map likely violated the VRA, it directed the state to redraw a map with a second majority-Black district. State Republicans’ primary goal was to provide protection for the state’s GOP incumbents, such as Speaker Mike Johnson and Rep. Julia Letlow, who is an active member of the House Appropriations Committee.

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Ninth Circuit Hands President Trump Sweeping Win Over Gavin Newsom — Trump Can Federalize California National Guard to Enforce Federal Immigration Law

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has denied en banc rehearing in Newsom v. Trump, effectively upholding the earlier panel decision that sided with Trump and affirmed his authority to federalize the California National Guard to support federal immigration enforcement.

When California officials refused to cooperate with federal agents, Trump invoked § 12406(3), federalizing and deploying 4,000 members of the California National Guard to Los Angeles to secure ICE facilities and restore order.

California Governor Gavin Newsom and the State of California sued over President Trump’s order, claiming it was unconstitutional and violated state sovereignty.

Newsom wrote at the time:

“We are suing Donald Trump. This is a manufactured crisis. He is creating fear and terror to take over a state militia and violate the U.S. constitution. The illegal order he signed could allow him to send the military into ANY STATE HE WISHES. Every governor — red or blue — should reject this outrageous overreach. There’s a lot of hyperbole out there. This isn’t that. This is an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism that threatens the foundation of our republic. We cannot let it stand.”

US District Judge Charles Breyer (brother of retired SCOTUS Breyer), a Clinton appointee, granted Newsom a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) and said Trump’s decision to federalize the National Guard was illegal.

But the appellate panel ruled that the statute clearly empowers the President to act whenever he is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

In practical terms, this means the Commander-in-Chief may call Guard troops into federal service when local or federal law-enforcement personnel cannot safely or effectively enforce the law.

After Senior Judge Marsha S. Berzon, joined by several liberal colleagues, requested a full-court rehearing, a vote of active Ninth Circuit judges failed to secure a majority, and rehearing en banc was denied on Wednesday. That denial makes the earlier Trump victory final within the circuit and binding precedent across nine Western states.

Judge Marsha Berzon’s 38-page dissent argued that the ruling “invited presidents, now and in the future, to deploy military troops… in response to commonplace, short-lived, domestic disturbances.”

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Key State Passes New Congressional Map ‘Locking In’ Additional GOP Seat

Duke University math professor Jonathan Mattingly conducted an analysis to discover if a new Trump-supported congressional map in North Carolina would result in the Republican Party locking in additional seats. The answer, he uncovered, is a resounding yes.

Three days before publishing his results on Sunday, the GOP revealed another mid-decade congressional map proposal that would bolster the party’s grip in Congress. It does so by expanding the boundaries of the state’s 1st Congressional District, which is currently held by Democrat Don Davis, pulling in some of the 3rd Congressional District, which is represented by Republican Greg Murphy.

The 1st District is the only one in the state considered a swing district, meaning it’s not a guaranteed win for either Democrats or Republicans.

A report from The News Observer shared Mattingly’s findings after the state’s Senate passed the map, sending it down to the House for final approval.

“Lawmakers returned to Raleigh on Monday and are expected to pass the proposed map, after failing to pass a full state budget before the end of the fiscal year in June or approve during its session last month additional funding to avoid Medicaid cuts,” the report said.

Mattingly claims the new map is all but certain to shift a House seat to the GOP for the foreseeable future if passed by the state’s full legislature.

“The previous map was not very responsive to changing public sentiment. But there was one district that was in doubt, and this one (new map) has largely removed that district,” he explained. “It’s very effectively shifted one district from the Democrats to the Republicans,” and “seems to lock in, 11-3, no matter what happens.”

North Carolina’s congressional map was redrawn in 2023 by the Republican-led legislature in order to provide the GOP with a boost, leading to the election of 10 Republicans and four Democrats during the 2024 elections. The article goes on to say that the map replaced a previous one drawn up by court-appointed “experts” for the 2022 midterm elections as a replacement for one drawn following the 2020 Census. It was ruled unconstitutional by federal courts in Harper v. Hall.

The map that was drawn after the intervention of the court led to a 7-7 split in the 2022 elections. The North Carolina Supreme Court gained a GOP majority that year, and the new court ruled it didn’t have jurisdiction over claims of partisan gerrymandering.

Mattingly’s latest analysis reveals the latest map would preserve a total of three seats for the Democratic Party under a variety of scenarios taking into consideration how residents might vote. Even if the statewide vote should shift significantly along party lines, the same number of Republicans, 11, would pull in victories.

“That pattern appears in a graphic from the new analysis, which looks at several statewide elections from 2016 and 2020, including races for governor, auditor and others, where the Democratic vote share ranged from just over 46% to more than 52%. The graphic shows how many seats Democrats and Republicans would likely win under different simulated map scenarios. It indicates that under the newly proposed map, Democrats would win only three seats across more than 10 elections tested, except in one case — the 2020 auditor’s race,” The News Observer wrote.

“When the electorate changes its mind dramatically — when it switches from 46% statewide to a 52% … you’d like to have a map with a number of districts that would change who controls them,” Mattingly stated in his analysis.

Researchers used the results from past elections to show how the new map packs voters into a district or splits them across district lines, which they claim will dilute their influence.

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Disabled Canadians increasingly under pressure to opt for euthanasia during routine doctor visits

Inclusion Canada CEO Krista Carr revealed that many disabled Canadians are being pressured to end their lives with euthanasia during routine medical appointments.

During an October 8 session of the Parliamentary Finance Committee, Carr, an advocate against Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), explained that Canada’s expansion of MAiD to the non-terminally ill has led to people with disabilities being pressured to end their lives during unrelated medical visits.

“Since the bill was brought in around Track 2 MAID … that has certainly changed people’s interactions with the healthcare system,” she explained, referring to the 2021 expansion that allowed those who are chronically ill but not terminally ill to be euthanized.

“People with disabilities are now very much afraid in many circumstances to show up in the health care system with regular health concerns, because often MAID is suggested as a solution to what is considered to be intolerable suffering,” she revealed.

Overall, 116 of Ontario’s 4,528 euthanasia deaths in 2023 involved non-terminal patients, with many of those killed from impoverished communities.

Data from Ontario’s chief coroner for 2023 revealed that over three-quarters of those euthanized when death wasn’t imminent required disability support before their death.

Similarly, nearly 29% of those killed when they were not terminally ill lived in the poorest parts of Ontario, and only 20% of the province’s general population lives in those areas.

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