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Government watchdog agency can’t figure out where 20% of federal election grant funding went

An audit by the Government Accountability Office could not account for a significant portion of Election Assistance Commission grants provide to states to assist with voting last year during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After Congress approved the CARES Act, which was designed as a pandemic relief measure, the commission received $400 million in grants, but thus far, the GAO has only accounted for $326 million of that money, meaning the watchdog agency does not know where or how roughly 20 percent of that money was spent, according to a November report.

Republicans in the House first voiced concerns about the election grants in September 2020 in relation to an item of expenditure in California. According to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the ranking member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, the GAO’s analysis and findings provide validation for Republicans’ concerns that the problems are not limited to a single state.

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China moon rover to investigate cube-shaped ‘mystery house’ object

The Yutu-2 rover is on a roll. It’s been exploring the far side of the moon since early 2019, as part of China’s Chang’e-4 lunar lander mission. It now has its eyes set on a strange-looking cube-shaped object it spotted in the distance.  

Andrew Jones, a journalist who covers the Chinese space program for SpaceNews and Space.com, highlighted a new rover update in a series of tweets Friday. The nickname for the cube-shaped object translates to “mystery house.” 

The rover team is planning to drive over and get a closer look at the object.

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House Democrats Block GOP Effort to Codify Parents’ Bill of Rights

Parental oversight of their kids’ education shouldn’t be a complicated or divisive issue, but — as statewide elections in Virginia last month showed — parents’ rights have become a partisan wedge as Democrats seek to keep America’s families from having a role in what their children are learning.

To preserve parents’ ability to keep tabs on what’s going on in schools and protect their ability to get critical information about the people to whom they entrust their children, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy drafted the Parents’ Bill of Rights with Reps. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Julia Letlow (R-LA), Burgess Owens (R-UT), and Jim Banks (R-IN).

The House GOP’s proposal is simple: Parents should have the right to review their school’s curriculum and reading materials, to be heard, to see school budget and spending, to protect their child’s privacy, and to be updated on any violent activity at school.

While the ideas in the Parents’ Bill of Rights are straightforward and seemingly common sense, Democrats don’t want such rights protected under federal law. So, House Republicans led by Rep. Letlow put Democrats’ opposition to parental rights into the congressional record.

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United Kingdom Offers Government Employees Time Off To Attend Free Crystal Healing Sessions

Civil servants in the Westminster government are being offered crystal healing sessions, well-being events, and other “hocus pocus bollocks,” allegedly all paid for by the taxpayer.

First publicised and uncovered by the British politics blog, Guido Fawkes, British civil servants working in Westminster are currently offered a number of strange free courses to attend throughout the week, giving them the opportunity to skip work to attend these sessions.

The schedule for November 3 included a 9 a.m. “counselling session” for any ethnic minorities, a two-day “well-being event” entitled “it’s all about me,” and an interactive session at 12 p.m. entitled “reshaping negative thoughts and language into positive affirmations.”

Guido highlighted probably the most insane event of them all, which was “a beginners guide to crystal healing and deep relaxation,” which took place at 2 p.m. The programme invited the government employees to learn about the “benefits of crystals,” and then engage in a “deep relaxation” session. Speaking to Guido, a government minister slammed the sessions as being “hocus pocus bollocks,” and something that you’d expect to find in Los Angeles, “not in Whitehall!”

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Too good to fact-check? Academic journal publishes hoax on conservative takeover of higher ed

Aprestigious academic journal has egg on its face for publishing a hoax paper that claimed to find widespread concerns about “undue” conservative influence in higher education.

“Right-wing money strongly appears to induce faculty and administrators … to believe that they are pressured to hire and promote people they regard as inferior candidates, to promote ideas they regard as poor, and to suppress people and ideas they regard as superior,” according to the abstract in Higher Education Quarterly.

Peer reviewers failed to perform basic due diligence on the paper submitted in April and approved in October, neglecting, for example, to verify that authors “Sage Owens” and “Kal Alvers-Lynde III” were UCLA professors as they claimed. Owens even used an encrypted email service for correspondence with the journal.

They didn’t check whether the conservative foundations named as active funders of higher education actually existed. The “Randy Eller Foundation” is made up, while the Olin Foundation shut down in 2005.

The author who goes by Owens told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the journal didn’t even ask to see their data: “Every page has some glaring errors.”

The authors’ stated names provide a clue when spelled as an acronym: “SOKAL III.” That indicates this is the second successful hoodwink tracing its inspiration to physicist Alan Sokal’s famous parody of leftist “gibberish” in the journal Social Text in 1996.

“We wanted to improve over previous hoaxes by publishing in what was supposed to be a reputable journal,” Owens wrote in an email to Just the News. 

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Thieving Cops Steal Innocent Retired Marine’s Life Savings, $86K, Because It Smelled Like Drugs

Stephen Lara dedicated 20 years of his life to serving this country as a United States Marine. This father of two served two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, risking his life to protect a political system only to be chewed up and spit out by that very system when he returned. Because this system is set up to extract revenue through various means of extortion and theft, when armed agents of the state robbed Lara of his life savings on the side of the road, everything they did was considered “legal.”

In February of this year, Lara was driving from Texas to California to visit his two daughters who live with his ex-wife. He had committed no crime, police had no probable cause for which to pull him over, he had had broken no traffic laws, yet still, a Nevada Highway Patrol officer decided to initiate a traffic stop.

This wasn’t an ordinary traffic stop that would end in a small extortion via citation, however. No, this was legalized road piracy in which police would steal an innocent father’s life savings.

As the video below shows, after Lara was pulled over, the cop who detained him actually complimented his driving. This psychopath, who was about to rob a man of his life savings was cordial and nice as he carried out his roadside theft.

Lara was completely honest with the officer and told him that he had a large sum of cash in his car because he had withdrawn his cash from the bank. He actually had the receipts from the bank to prove this, yet the officer claimed something nefarious was afoot and he called in his fellow officers to separate Lara from his life savings.

Because they can’t simply take the cash for themselves, these thieving road pirates have to go through a federal procedure via the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) known as “adoption.” If they steal his life savings in the name of the DEA, the DEA will “adopt” the money and then kick back 80% of that money back to the department through a program called “equitable sharing.”

“Adoption,” as the Institute for Justice points out, is a process by which federal law enforcement agencies can take over a seizure by state and local law enforcement. If the federal government is successful in forfeiting the property, its “equitable sharing” program guarantees the state or local agency that seized the property up to 80% of the proceeds for use in the agency’s budget.

It literally creates an incentive for cops to steal money from innocent people like Lara.

Since Lara had committed no crime, the officers on the scene needed to manufacture a reason to steal his life savings, so they called in a drug dog to smell Lara’s cash.

It is widely known that a large percentage (upwards 0f 90%) of U.S. paper money contains trace amounts of cocaine. Having a large amount of cash will most assuredly alert a drug dog.

In fact, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled that government does not have probable cause to seize cash from individuals based only on a drug-detection dog’s reaction; stating specifically that the majority of money in circulation has drugs on it.

But court precedents and ethical enforcement of the law apparently mean very little the road pirates who targeted Lara that day and when the drug dog alerted to Lara’s cash, the officers used this a reason to steal an innocent man’s life savings.

As he had committed no crime, after they robbed him, the officers left Lara on the side of the road with nothing — not even enough money to get gas to make it home. Lara had to ask his brother to wire him money just so he could make it to see his daughters.

It would take Lara the remainder of the year to get his money back, only after he sued the DEA in federal court. Even though he’s gotten his money back, however, Lara is going to continue to fight and the Institute for Justice is helping him wage his war.

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An FDA Official Demanded Google Censor A YouTube Video The Agency Didn’t Like

Federal efforts to censor social media extend past discussions with companies like YouTube over broad guidelines about Covid-19 “misinformation” to specific demands for suppression of individual posts, an email from an FDA official reveals.

In the April 30 email, the Food and Drug Administration director of social media, Brad Kimberly, told a Google lobbyist about that the agency expected YouTube to pull a video touting the potential of a new monoclonal antibody treatment for Covid. (Google owns YouTube.)

“Overall, the video is very problematic when it comes to COVID misinformation,” Kimberly wrote to the lobbyist, Jan Fowler Antonaros.

“This video should be pulled.”

YouTube initially declined to remove the video. However, it has since been taken offline.

How often the FDA has made other censorship demands is unknown, because the agency is apparently hiding the existence of its efforts in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.

In October, I asked the FDA and several government agencies to disclose both their internal discussions about me and their communications with social media companies like Twitter and YouTube about censoring Covid “misinformation” in general.

On Nov. 30, the FDA responded it had found some emails about me – mainly in response to questions I had asked in April and May for a story about VAERS, the federal vaccine adverse events reporting system. But FDA said it could not find any emails between its officials and social media companies that met my request.

Yet at the bottom of the emails containing the agency’s discussions about me was the email between Kimberly and Antonaros – apparently attached there by accident, as it had nothing to do with me.

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Majority of mumps cases are among the vaccinated, CDC finds

Mumps cases continue to circulate in the U.S., largely among vaccinated people, including children.

Cases of mumps, once a common childhood illness, declined by more than 99 percent in the U.S. after a vaccine against the highly contagious respiratory infection was developed in 1967. Cases dropped to just 231 in 2003, down from more than 152,000 in 1968. But cases began climbing again in 2006, when 6,584 were reported, most of them in vaccinated people. 

According to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one-third of mumps cases in the U.S. from 2007 to 2019 were reported in children and adolescents. As many as 94 percent of those who contracted the illness had been vaccinated.

“Before that, large outbreaks of mumps among people who were fully vaccinated were not common, including among vaccinated children,” said Mariel Marlow, an epidemiologist at the CDC who led the new study. “But the disease symptoms are usually milder and complications are less frequent in vaccinated people.”

Experts aren’t sure why vaccinated people get mumps, but multiple factors appear to be affecting immunity in vaccinated people, including a lack of prior exposure to the virus, waning immunity and the circulation of genotypes the vaccine doesn’t contain. 

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Global CO2 emissions have been flat for a decade, new data reveals

Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement have rebounded by 4.9% this year, new estimates suggest, following a Covid-related dip of 5.4% in 2020.

The Global Carbon Project (GCP) projects that fossil emissions in 2021 will reach 36.4bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), only 0.8% below their pre-pandemic high of 36.7GtCO2 in 2019.

The researchers say they “were expecting some sort of rebound in 2021” as the global economy bounced back from Covid-19, but that it was “bigger than expected”.

While fossil emissions are expected to return to near-record levels, the study also reassesses historical emissions from land-use change, revealing that global CO2 output overall may have been effectively flat over the past decade.

The 2021 GCP almost halves the estimate of net emissions from land-use change over the past two years – and by an average of 25% over the past decade.

These changes come from an update to underlying land-use datasets that lower estimates of cropland expansion, particularly in tropical regions. Emissions from land-use change in the new GCP dataset have been decreasing by around 4% per year over the past decade, compared to an increase of 1.8% per year in the prior version. 

However, the GCP authors caution that uncertainties in land-use change emissions remain large and “this trend remains to be confirmed”.

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Biden administration purchased surveillance technology from CCP-linked firm, which is banned from doing business with the government

According to recent reports, different federal agencies of Joe Biden’s U.S. government have made technology purchases from a Chinese firm linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is on the list of companies from which the government has been banned from making purchases since the 2019 Defense Spending legislation was implemented during the Trump era.

Despite the federal ban, Fox News reported, U.S. government agencies have reportedly purchased surveillance technology from the firm Lorex, a subsidiary of controversial Chinese firm Dahua Technology.

Dahua Technology is one of several Chinese-based companies that were included on the list of firms banned from marketing technology to the U.S. government under the 2019 defense spending bill, citing fears that the Chinese regime could use the devices to conduct espionage.

The Dahua firm was additionally placed on a federal list of companies that have trade restrictions because the company is linked to the Chinese government’s efforts to suppress the Uighur population in China’s Xinjiang region.

As records released by Fox News show, federal agencies spent thousands of dollars on Lorex video surveillance equipment, including the Drug Enforcement Agency, which purchased Lorex hard drives in May through a Washington, DC technology supplier.

Records also show that the Department of the Army and the Defense Department’s Defense Finance and Accounting Service also purchased Lorex equipment. 

The news broke a day after Senate Democrats, in a last-minute intervention, excluded a bill banning the importation of goods made by millions of people detained in concentration camps by the Chinese Communist regime.

According to a memo from Senate leaders, the bill, which was being promoted as the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act, was excluded from the annual defense appropriations bill, the Washington Free Beacon reported Dec. 2. 

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