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New York Times issues massive correction after overstating COVID hospitalizations among children

The New York Times issued a massive correction Thursday after the liberal newspaper severely misreported the number of COVID hospitalities among children in the United States by more than 800,000. 

A report headlined “A New Vaccine Strategy for Children: Just One Dose, for Now,” by science and health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli, was peppered with errors before major changes were made to the story. The Times initially reported “nearly 900,000 children have been hospitalized” with COVID since the pandemic began, when the factual data in the now-corrected version is that “more than 63,000 children were hospitalized with Covid-19 from August 2020 to October 2021.”  

The paper also botched actions taken by regulators in Sweden and Denmark and even bungled the timing of a critical FDA meeting. 

“An earlier version of this article incorrectly described actions taken by regulators in Sweden and Denmark. They have halted use of the Moderna vaccine in children; they have not begun offering single doses. The article also misstated the number of Covid hospitalizations in U.S. children. It is more than 63,000 from August 2020 to October 2021, not 900,000 since the beginning of the pandemic. In addition, the article misstated the timing of an F.D.A. meeting on authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children. It is later this month, not next week,” the lengthy correction stated in full. 

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Google And YouTube Will Demonetize Content Denying ‘Scientific Consensus’ On Climate Change

Google and YouTube announced a new policy Thursday demonetizing all content that denies the scientific consensus on climate change.

Google will no longer allow ads for “content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,” the company announced in a support page added to its website Thursday. The policy, which Google will start enforcing next month, covers YouTube videos and websites that treat climate change as a “hoax or a scam,” content “denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming” and content “denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change.”

The search giant said it was implementing the policy due to pressure from advertisers, who didn’t want their products associated with content promoting climate denial.

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Rand Paul’s Warning to Americans: ‘Be Afraid of Your Government’

In the wake of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s announcement that he plans to sic the FBI on concerned parents who speak out at school board meetings against critical race theory and COVID restrictions, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) blasted the Biden administration and said Americans should “be afraid of your government.”

“Moms at school boards are being told that they’re criminals, potential domestic terrorists, for the crime of dissent, and I think criminalizing dissent is something that we should all be appalled with,” Paul told Fox News.

Garland claimed that there has been a “disturbing trend” of teachers being threatened or harassed. PJ Media’s Megan Fox looked into these allegations and concluded they’re mostly bunk.

When asked what he would tell Americans concerned that they’ll end up on some government list if they “say the wrong thing” at their local school board meeting, Paul didn’t mince words.

“I would say be afraid. Be afraid of your government,” he responded. “That’s a sad thing from someone in the government to say, but the thing is, is those lists already exist.”

“I think the problem is, it’s become so normalized to use government to search out and seek out your opponents,” Paul continued, before citing the abuse of FISA warrants to illegally spy on the Trump campaign as an example.

“If you go to a school board meeting and you’re disruptive and you don’t obey the rules of the school board meeting, then there will be local punishment,” Paul said. “But that has nothing to do with the federal law, it has nothing to do with the Department of Justice. What Merrick Garland did is, he’s attempting to stifle dissent, and he’s attempting to say, ‘Beware, or Big Brother’s coming after you if you speak out against my policies or against the Biden policies.’”

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UCLA Suspends Professor for Refusing to Assign Grades Based on Skin Color

This is the state of American academia today: Gordon Klein has taught courses in business law, tax law, and financial analysis at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management for no fewer than forty years. He is a respected academic who has been on CNBC and quoted in the Wall Street Journal for his economic expertise. But now, after being suspended, he has filed suit in California Superior Court against the university regents over his suspension. Klein has a good case: He was suspended from teaching at UCLA for the crime of refusing to discriminate and treat his black students differently from how he treated others.

“I was suspended from my job,” Klein explained, “for refusing to treat my black students as lesser than their non-black peers.” His ordeal began on June 2, 2020, when “a non-black student in my class on tax principles and law emailed me to ask that I grade his black classmates with greater ‘leniency’ than others in the class.”

In a sane society, a “non-black student” who demanded that black students be graded with greater “leniency” than others would be castigated as a racist. But in the Left’s funhouse mirror ethics, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and treating students differently based on race is racial justice.

The student wrote to Klein: “We are writing to express our tremendous concern about the impact that this final exam and project will have on the mental and physical health of our Black classmates.” Klein believes that the student was using an online racial justice form letter: “There was no project in this class, and it was unclear to me who the ‘we’ in this case was. I suspected the student simply used a form letter he found online and neglected to change the subject.”

The letter went on to claim that black students were too traumatized by racism to do well on the final exam: “The unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the life-threatening actions of Amy Cooper and the violent conduct of the [University of California Police Department] have led to fear and anxiety which is further compounded by the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the Black community. As we approach finals week, we recognize that these conditions place Black students at an unfair academic disadvantage due to traumatic circumstances out of their control.” It concluded: “This is not a joint effort to get finals canceled for non-Black students, but rather an ask that you exercise compassion and leniency with Black students in our major.”

Klein notes that “in a subsequent conversation with a university investigator,” the student who wrote the letter made it clear that he “intended that the requested adjustments apply to Black students and not the class generally.” To strengthen the case, the student invoked the Anderson School of Management’s “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” agenda, which stresses that a “commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion as fundamental to achieving Anderson’s mission.”

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NYT Gives Russia-Gate CPR – WSJ Pronounces It Dead

Special Council John Durham’s indictment of Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann met differing reactions Friday from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Those who may still think it was Russia that “interfered” with the 2016 election owe it to themselves to read the Sussmann indictment/charging document.

Spoiler: It was the very top officials of the Clinton campaign aided by a lawyer crooked as a hound’s hind leg that interfered in 2016. The tricks tried by Sussmann and associates might make even GOP “strategists” like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove blush.

One must recall that back in 2016 the Clinton campaign folks and their well-heeled coterie of attorneys were sure Mrs. Clinton would win. As the Sussmann charging document shows, there was some expectation of high-level posting in the “incoming” Clinton administration and – alas – absolutely no thought of indictment. This goes a long way to explain the brazenness of it all.

As discredited former FBI Director James Comey put it in his apologia-sans-apology book, A Higher Loyalty, “I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president …” Needless to say, a Clinton presidency would confer automatic immunity on key campaign miscreants and lawyers like Sussmann. Worse still for them, it appears likely that others of their breed may also find themselves criminally referred to the Department of Justice.

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The Deep Politics Of Vaccine Mandates

The debate over President Biden’s vaccine mandates has focused, understandably, on the tradeoff between individual rights to make medical choices and the potential harm the unvaccinated pose to others.

That tradeoff is unavoidable.

It is simply wrong for Biden to say, “It’s not about freedom.” It is.

It is equally wrong for some Republican governors to say it is all about freedom.

It’s also about the external effects of each person’s choice. To pretend that tradeoff doesn’t exist is demagoguery. But then, so is most American politics these days.

What’s missing or underappreciated in this debate?

The most important thing is that the Biden administration’s “mandate approach” is standard-issue progressivism. The pushback is equally standard. The mandates exemplify a dispute that has been at the heart of American politics for over a century, ever since Woodrow Wilson formulated it as a professor and then president. That agenda emphasizes deference to

  • Experts, not elected politicians,
  • Rational bureaucratic procedures,
  • Centralized power in the nation’s capital, not in the federal states, and
  • A modern, “living constitution,” which replaces the “old” Constitution of 1787 and severs the restraints it imposed on government power.

Implemented over several decades, this progressive agenda has gradually become a fait accompli, without ever formally amending the Constitution. The bureaucracies began their massive growth after World War II and especially after Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives of the mid-1960s (continued, with equal vigor, by Richard Nixon).

The judicial shackles were broken earlier, when Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the Supreme Court in 1937. Although FDR never followed through, his threat did the trick. The justices yielded to his pressure and began rubber-stamping New Deal programs that, until then, they had rejected as unconstitutional. Gradually, the older judges retired and Roosevelt picked friendly replacements. These judicial issues have reemerged now that progressives no longer dominate the Supreme Court. They are again threatening to pack the court and demanding that today’s justices stick with precedents set by their progressive predecessors (“stare decisis”).

The pushback against vaccine mandates is partly a debate about these progressive issues concerning the president’s authority and constitutional strictures.

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Black college student arrested after allegedly posting fake racist frat party invite that read, ‘No blacks’

A black student at East Carolina University was arrested after police said he posted a fake racist fraternity party invite that read “No blacks.”

The arrest comes after another student was initially accused of posting the invite, after which he said he received death threats.

What are the details?

James Daniel Edwards, 19, was booked Friday at the Pitt County Jail on a misdemeanor cyberstalking charge that came with a $1,000 bond. Edwards’ race is listed as black in jail records.

Officials said Edwards turned himself in at the jail, the News & Observer reported.

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Top Secret CIA Cable Admits “Dozens” Of Agents Abroad Are Being Captured, Killed

It was revealed this week in a bombshell New York Times report that the CIA has raised the alarm with all its overseas stations and officers that an unusually high number of US informants are being captured and executed abroad. There are “dozens” of such instances, according to an agency memo.

The report is an incredibly rare instance of the media getting hold of a fresh, very recent highly classified memo that’s also sure to be embarrassing for the agency. “The message, in an unusual top-secret cable, said that the CIA’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised,” the NYT writes. 

“Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

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Rand Paul Blasts “Lying” Fauci; ‘He Ignores Natural Immunity Because It Foils His Mass Vaccination Plan’

Senator Rand Paul charged that NIAID director Anthony Fauci is purposefully acting ignorant on the benefits of natural immunity to COVID because it would ‘foil his mass vaccination plan,’ further describing the notion that everyone needs to be vaccinated as “nonsense.”

“Hey, this guy has an opinion on baseball, hockey, Tinder, and Christmas, but he was asked the other day about natural immunity that you acquire after the disease, he is like, ‘Oh, that is really interesting thought, I never thought about that. I don’t have an opinion because I haven’t thought about naturally acquired immunity,’” Paul said during a Fox Business News interview, adding, “He has and he is lying to you.”

Paul continued, “The reason he won’t bring up natural immunity is because it foils his plans to get everybody possible vaccinated.”

“He thinks it might slow down vaccination. And I’m for people getting vaccinated particularly people at risk, but the thing is, if you ignore naturally acquired immunity then you’re saying we don’t have enough people, you have to force it on younger people,” the Senator further urged.

“There was a statistic that came out that somebody put together today. If you’re 85, your chances of dying are 10,000 times greater than if you’re 10. Should we treat a 10-year-old the same we treat an 85-year-old? It is nonsense,” Paul reasoned.

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