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America’s Biggest Museums Fail to Return Native American Human Remains

As the United States pushed Native Americans from their lands to make way for westward expansion throughout the 1800s, museums and the federal government encouraged the looting of Indigenous remains, funerary objects and cultural items. Many of the institutions continue to hold these today — and in some cases resist their return despite the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

“We never ceded or relinquished our dead. They were stolen,” James Riding In, then an Arizona State University professor who is Pawnee, said of the unreturned remains.

ProPublica this year is investigating the failure of NAGPRA to bring about the expeditious return of human remains by federally funded universities and museums. Our reporting, in partnership with NBC News, has found that a small group of institutions and government bodies has played an outsized role in the law’s failure.

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Artificial Intelligence-Powered ‘Robot Lawyer’ to Represent Human in Court Next Month

A robot powered by artificial intelligence is set to become the world’s first “robot lawyer” and will take on speeding ticket cases in court next month, its creators have said.

Joshua Browder, the CEO of Startup DoNotPay, which bills itself as “the home of the world’s first robot lawyer” confirmed the news on Twitter on Monday.

Browder said the company is offering to pay any lawyer or person $1 million to use the AI lawyer in an upcoming case in front of the United States Supreme Court.

“We have upcoming cases in municipal (traffic) court next month. But the haters will say ‘traffic court is too simple for GPT.’ So we are making this serious offer, contingent on us coming to a formal agreement and all rules being followed,” Browder wrote.

The CEO did not provide further details regarding the defendants in the case or the location of the court.

According to DoNotPay’s official website, the company uses artificial intelligence to “help consumers fight against large corporations and solve their problems like beating parking tickets, appealing bank fees, and suing robocallers.”

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Pfizer scientists tout natural immunity in Project Veritas sting: ‘Antibodies are probably better’

Project Veritas jumped into the debate over vaccine mandates with an undercover video that shows two Pfizer scientists agreeing that naturally acquired immunity offers more protection than vaccination from the novel coronavirus.

The 10-minute video released late Monday featured three men identified as scientists at Pfizer, maker of the widely used two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

A man identified as Pfizer biochemist Nick Karl was shown explaining that after recovering from COVID-19, “your antibodies are probably better at that point than the vaccination.”

“When somebody is naturally immune, like, they got COVID, they probably have better – not better, but more antibodies against the virus,” says Mr. Karl in the hidden-camera footage. “Because what the vaccine is, like I said, that protein that’s just on the outside, so it’s one antibody against one specific part of the virus.”

He went on: “When you actually get the virus, you’re going to start producing antibodies against multiple pieces of virus, and not only just like that outside portion, like, the inside portion, the actual virus.”

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Youngkin aims to stop sale of some cannabis products, expand enforcement in Virginia

Governor Glenn Youngkin’s administration is trying to stop the sale of some potentially unsafe cannabis products.

Youngkin is asking lawmakers for more resources to bolster enforcement in his proposed budget, which will set the tone for debate in the 2023 session. Meanwhile, state officials say existing efforts to expand oversight have not resulted in any criminal penalties or lost permits to date.

Sarah Grant, general manager of “THE Dispensary” in Richmond, said state inspectors have stopped by three times since lawmakers took steps to enhance oversight last summer. They were asked to voluntarily remove all of their hemp-derived Delta-8 and Delta-10 edibles, which account for at least 40% of sales, according to Grant.

“We would at least have to cut staff and then we would have to look at closing our doors,” Grant said.

Grant says Delta-8 and Delta-10 are found naturally in small amounts in hemp, which is legal to sell. But a lack of regulation has allowed potentially unsafe synthetics with inaccurate labels to proliferate, according to some experts.

Grant said they’re currently defending the safety and legality of their products through an administrative hearing, which state officials described as an informal fact-finding conference.

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We’ve Been Dominated By Narrative Control Since The Dawn Of Civilization

The science of modern propaganda arguably got its start over a century ago during World War I when a young Edward Bernays was recruited to help sell the conflict to a reluctant American populace, after which he took what he’d learned on that front and folded it into a lifetime of work on the study of mass-scale psychological manipulation.

That was when propaganda as we know it today came into being, with the scientific method applied to the task of refining techniques for manipulating large-scale human behavior using modern media distribution. Those methods have been in research and development this entire time, and have advanced at least as much as our other instruments of warfare have advanced since World War I.

But that wasn’t the beginning of mass-scale psychological manipulation by the powerful. That has been going on since the dawn of civilization.

Back when humans were a nomadic hunter-gatherer species, there was no need for tribal leaders to impose mental narratives over their tribe in order to keep them moving and behaving in the way they wanted. The animal needs of food, drink, and safety were enough to keep those small societies moving, hunting, foraging, reproducing, and fighting wherever it was necessary; they would have done those things even without the existence of language, and our evolutionary ancestors probably did exactly that for millions of years before the behavior of speech first emerged in humans.

That all changed with the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. Once humans began learning to trick the Earth’s biosphere into making the food appear next to them, they became capable of sticking around in one place without starving, and civilizations began to emerge. Where as hunter-gatherers humans were only organizing in groups of a few dozen, with the ability to settle and build things we began congregating in villages and cities of hundreds or thousands.

Once you’re dealing with human groups of that size with sustenance coming from farmlands and livestock, the animal impulses of hunger, thirst and safety are no longer complex enough to determine the way those humans are going to be behaving from day to day.

Copious amounts of language will now be needed. Agreements. Protocols. Rules. Etiquette. How is the civilization planned out? How are decisions made? Who does the work? How are resources allocated? How are children conceived and raised?

From here you can already see how the possibility of abuse is opening up. Someone’s going to be doing the work. Someone’s going to be making the decisions. Someone’s going to be deciding where the resources go, and potentially assigning a lot more to themselves than to others. Someone’s going to be deciding who gets to have sex, and potentially assigning that responsibility entirely to themselves and their supporters, and potentially not leaving any say in the matter to the women.

Once humans moved from organizing in villages and cities to moving in kingdoms and empires, the potential for abuses increased exponentially. Then you’ve got the matter of wars and who should fight in them. You’ve got money and the capacity for vast wealth. You’ve got laws and the ability to determine what they are and whom they benefit. And you’ve got someone holding an immense amount of power over a very large number of people.

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‘All Three Vaccines Are Breaking Through:’ Emails Show Discussion of Vaccine Failure Among Health Officials

Officials in Washington state recorded jumps in post-vaccination infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in mid-2021, according to newly disclosed internal emails.

Fifteen percent of COVID-19 cases and 25 percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations from July 1 to July 20, 2021, were vaccinated—up from 2 percent between February and June that year, Chris Spitters, the health officer for the Snohomish County Health District, wrote in one of the messages. A fifth of the deaths attributed to COVID-19 were vaccinated.

Spitters also detailed a COVID-19 outbreak in a long-term care facility with over a dozen breakthrough, or post-vaccination, cases.

Dr. Yuan-Po Tu, of The Everett Clinic, responded by saying that about 20 percent of people testing positive in the clinic were fully vaccinated. “ALL 3 vaccines are breaking through,” Tu wrote.

Dr. James Cook, chief medical officer at the Providence Regional Medical Center Everett, told Spitters and Tu that some hospitalized patients were vaccinated and the majority of workers who were testing positive were fully vaccinated.

“I don’t think any have been hospitalized but I’m not 100% sure,” Cook wrote.

The emails, all sent on July 30, 2021, were obtained and published recently by Ari Hoffman, a 570 KVI radio host and an editor for The Post Millennial. They were reviewed by The Epoch Times, which confirmed their authenticity.

The emails were sent after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that 74 percent of COVID-19 cases from an outbreak in Massachusetts occurred among fully vaccinated people, undercutting claims from top health officials that the vaccinated would not get infected. The outbreak investigation prompted the agency to recommend vaccinated people wear masks indoors, a reversal from about two months prior.

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New House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul Is a Standard Old-School Interventionist

For those who hoped the new Republican-led and Trump-approved House of Representatives under Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) might promote some of the better aspects of MAGA-ism, such as a foreign policy that recognized the mistakes of the past three decades, and charter a less bellicose and controlling path for the U.S. abroad, the ascension of Rep. Michael McCaul (R–Texas) to chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee should be unpleasant cold water.

While the Trumpian strain in the GOP is supposed to favor a radical rethink of the U.S. mission to find and combat foreign adversaries with every sort of intervention, involvement, and pressure even if short of direct troop deployment, McCaul retains an older sense of an abiding American mission to shape the world to our desires and “interests.”

McCaul:

• is an enthusiastic supporter of U.S. military aid to Ukraine and helping ensure Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian leaders face war crimes tribunals;

• is fighting to raise the political costs of ending foreign interventions by an attack investigation on President Joe Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal (which was following through on Trump’s intentions) and insists the U.S. must even now “hold the Taliban accountable for their appalling actions”;

• wants to make sure the U.S. is optimally aggressive in supporting Taiwan against China, including “strategic, long-term security assistance well in advance of conflict in order to effectively deter, and, when necessary, to respond to, acts of aggression”;

• wants more U.S. pressure on Nicaragua;

• is angry that Biden “has backed away from the goal of North Korea’s complete denuclearization [and] failed to make the security commitments to the Indo-Pacific that its own National Defense Strategy demands”;

• demands “immediate action to combat and deter the proliferation of Iran’s conventional and non-conventional weapons, including through the use of sanctions and enforcement of U.S. export controls”;

• legislates to ensure the U.S. keeps an eye on foreign lands’ “freedom of expression…with respect to electronic information”;

• and had been a loud voice in opposition to former President Donald Trump’s plans to lessen U.S. presence in Syria.

While McCaul thankfully isn’t making open calls to immediately send in the troops to solve all the world’s problems, he is a largely pre-Trump Republican when it comes to foreign policy, eagerly demanding to keep U.S. money, arms, and pressure at play in as many foreign fields as he can survey.

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Panic grips Special Forces community amid investigation into drugs, human trafficking

Panic and fear spread throughout the special operations community at Fort Bragg and Fayetteville, North Carolina as CID and FBI agents investigated members of 3rd Special Forces Group and Delta Force who allegedly were involved in drug and in one instance human trafficking, according to nearly a dozen current and former military sources.

The arrests began Thursday, Jan. 5 and culminated with a 100% recall and accountability formation for 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group yesterday.

It is unknown when the investigation into drug and human trafficking in the Fort Bragg area began, but it is known that the FBI became involved in investigating the deaths of Timothy Dumas and Delta Force operator Billy Lavigne in 2020 when both were found shot to death at a training site on Bragg.

Last week’s arrests began with investigators receiving more evidence after an undercover law enforcement officer posing as an underage girl helped arrest a member of 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group back in December. That individual was known to moonlight as a bouncer at a bar in Southern Pines frequented by the Special Forces community, a military source close to the situation explained to Connecting Vets. The Green Beret is alleged to have been pimping underaged girls to the Special Forces community at drug-fueled parties in Southern Pines.

“This is what happens when there is no war, no direction, and an 18-month red cycle with no mission,” a Special Forces soldier said. “So dudes are fucking around with young kids and the craziest drugs. All these lives ruined because people are just bored.”

Whether the individual rolled on his accomplices or law enforcement ripped the data from his cell phone, it quickly led to the arrest of another Green Beret involved in drug trafficking in 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group.

With the information of additional suspects in hand, CID and military police set up shop at one of the main bottlenecks to entering or exiting Fort Bragg: the Longstreet gate between the post and Southern Pines.

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Illinois Senate Approves Ban on Commonly-Owned Firearms, Bill Heads Back to House

Lawmakers in Illinois on Monday night approved a bill to ban the sale and manufacture of certain semi-automatic weapons, which critics say are commonly used for self-defense and recreation.

The Protecting Illinois Communities Act passed the Illinois Senate on Monday night by a vote margin of 34–20.

The legislation will now return to the state House of Representatives, which passed it on a vote of 64–43 on Jan. 6, for a final vote before it goes to Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, who has supported the legislation and is expected to sign it into law.

In the House, the bill was sponsored by state Rep. Bob Morgan, a Democrat. The version that passed the lower chamber was changed slightly before the vote. A provision to raise the age for receiving a Firearms Owner Identification Card from 18 to 21 was removed.

However, the governor criticized the proposed changes on Sunday, arguing the Senate’s version fell short of what was needed, Bloomberg reported. House Speaker Chris Welch described the measure that reached the upper chamber as a “watered-down version” of the bill.

Lawmakers ultimately reached a deal that would immediately ban the manufacturing, selling, importing, or buying of a range of semi-automatic weapons, and ban attachments that increase the rate of fire.

Illinois state Senate President Don Harmon said in a statement that lawmakers reached a deal on “one of the strongest assault weapons bans in the country.”

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Washington Post admits years later that Russian trolls ‘had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior’

The Washington Post, whose journalists were awarded for peddling the discredited “Russia Hoax” narrative, has admitted that so-called Russian trolls “had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior” ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

What prompted the Post to call into question the central tenet of the narrative advanced by liberal media outlets for years was a study led by the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics.

The study

A study published on Jan. 9 in the journal Nature Communications concluded that “it would appear unlikely that the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter could have had much more than a relatively minor influence on individual-level attitudes and voting behavior.”

According to the study, it is unlikely that a handful of so-called Russian trolls exerted significant influence for these four reasons:

  • “exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts was concentrated among a small group of users, with only 1% of users accounting for 70% of all exposures”;
  • “exposure to Russian foreign influence tweets was overshadowed by the amount of exposure to traditional news media and US political candidates”;
  • “respondents with the highest levels of exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts were those arguably least likely to need influencing: those who identified themselves as highly partisan Republicans, who were already likely favorable to Donald Trump”; and
  • no “meaningful relationships between exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts and changes in respondents’ attitudes on the issues, political polarization, or voting behavior” could be found.

In short: Few people saw the trolls’ posts; those who saw them didn’t need further convincing; the mainstream media’s narrative and candidates’ agitprop was far more pervasive; and it doesn’t seem the trolling ultimately had any meaningful effect.

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