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Tag: corruption
Shoddy Research Reinforces Anti-Vaping Narrative
In 2019, The Journal of the American Heart Association published a study suggesting that nicotine vaping doubles the risk of a heart attack. The authors claimed e-cigarette use is “independently” associated with a heightened risk of myocardial infarction, which is “similar” to the risk among cigarette smokers.
Three years later, the World Journal of Oncology published a study that claimed vapers face about the same cancer risk as smokers. The authors said “prospective studies should be planned to mitigate the risk.”
Both studies were later retracted, largely because they shared the same glaring weakness: The researchers failed to consider whether the medical problems that survey respondents reported were diagnosed before or after they began vaping, a minimum requirement for inferring a causal relationship. As University of Louisville researchers Brad Rodu and Nantaporn Plurphanswat showed in a 2022 Internal and Emergency Medicine article, that failure is characteristic of studies that allege a link between vaping and smoking-related diseases, including several articles that so far have not been retracted.
In all of these cases, the researchers seemed so eager to discredit vaping as a harm-reducing alternative to smoking that they overlooked a fundamental methodological flaw. So did the peer reviewers and journal editors.
This sort of tendentiously sloppy research compounds a problem that harm reduction advocates have been decrying for years: Although the evidence indicates that vaping is far less dangerous than smoking, most Americans think vaping is just as dangerous, if not more so. And while public health officials could help correct that misconception, which undermines the lifesaving potential of e-cigarettes, they frequently contribute to the confusion by obscuring the difference between these two modes of nicotine consumption.
North Carolina Using Eminent Domain To Seize Homes and a Church for Electric Car Factory
VinFast is the first company to develop electric vehicles in its native Vietnam, and it’s now making inroads into the American market. Last year, it announced it would build a factory in North Carolina that would manufacture both electric cars and batteries. Then, last week, the company said it would not be able to begin production at the facility until 2025, rather than the initial summer 2024 target.
An upstart company needing extra time to fulfill its promises is hardly news. But in this case, a lot hangs in the balance, as the North Carolina government has pledged to use eminent domain to evict multiple homeowners, businesses, and a church.
When Gov. Roy Cooper announced the deal in March 2022, he called the project “transformative” and said it would “bring many good jobs to our state.” CNBC cited the project when it named North Carolina America’s Top State for Business, marveling that Cooper, a Democrat, was able to strike such business-friendly deals with a General Assembly dominated by Republicans.
While it was only founded in 2017, VinFast has the backing of Vietnam’s wealthiest citizen and has been valued somewhere between $20 billion and $60 billion. For the North Carolina factory, the company pledged to spend $4 billion and create 7,500 jobs within five years. In exchange, the state promised incentives totaling $1.2 billion, including $450 million toward site preparation; $400 million from Chatham County, where the facility would be located; and a $316 million grant over 32 years in which the company is reimbursed for the state income tax money its employees pay.
But taxpayer money isn’t the only thing the state is giving away. As part of its site preparation process, the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) also planned roadway improvements to accommodate the traffic a new factory would create. Those plans would require displacing a total of 27 homes, five businesses, and Merry Oaks Baptist Church, which has stood on its spot since 1888.
They’re Rebooting “Axis Of Evil” On The 20th Anniversary Of The Iraq Invasion
The western political/media class has suddenly resurrected the phrase “Axis of Evil” in recent days to refer to the increasing intimacy between Russia and China, just in time for the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
Famed Iraq War cheerleader Sean Hannity appears to have kicked things off last week, saying on his show that “a new Axis of evil is emerging” between China, Russia and Iran, a slogan that has since been echoed numerous times this week.
On Tuesday former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told Fox News that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are “two dictators that have said they are unlimited partners,” asserting that “This is the new Axis of Evil, with Iran being their junior partner.”
Also on Tuesday Representative Mike Lawler tweeted, “Xi’s meeting with Putin in Moscow is deeply concerning and highlights the growing threats posed by this new axis of evil,” and on Thursday he tweeted, “We are dealing with a new axis of evil and failure to stop Putin in Ukraine will have far-reaching implications as Russia pushes further into Eastern Europe and China moves against Taiwan.”
For Five Straight Years, The Pulitzer Prizes Have Rewarded Misinformation
The way the Pulitzer Prizes work seems simple enough – an Ivy league university hands out annual awards that ostensibly recognize important journalism. In practice, however, my former colleague Phil Terzian, a Pulitzer finalist who has served on the nominating committee, described the inner workings of the Pulitzers this way:
The Pulitzer Prizes are a singularly corrupt institution, administered by Columbia University and the management of the New York Times largely for the benefit of the New York Times and a limited number of favored publications and personalities. Any citizen who thinks that the annual distribution of awards has something to do with quality probably believes that the Oscar for Best Picture goes to the most distinguished film of the year. If you’re a connoisseur of unrestrained self-praise, may I recommend the citations when the Times awards itself the Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service.
While the Pulitzer Prizes have always been little more than self-dealing masquerading as journalistic beauty pageant, it was a lot easier to believe in this manufactured prestige back when journalism was at least slightly more competent and concerned with the appearance of objectivity. In fact, a spin through the last five years of Pulitzer recipients reveals some interesting choices that add up to a clear pattern.
In 2018, a Pulitzer for national reporting was given to The New York Times and Washington Post for reporting on the Donald Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. A 2019 Pulitzer for “Explanatory Reporting” was given to The New York Times for reporting on Trump’s taxes.
The 2020 Pulitzer for commentary was given to Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times for the 1619 Project. In 2021, a public service Pulitzer was given to The New York Times for its coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic “that exposed racial and economic inequities, government failures in the U.S. and beyond.” In 2022, the Washington Post won a public service Pulitzer for its coverage of January 6.
Every one of these major stories was badly handled by the media writ large, served activist political narratives, frequently involved credulously regurgitating actual misinformation, or some combination thereof. While there is always reason to be suspicious of Pulitzers, historically most of the objections to the awards handed out never rose beyond the level of newsroom gossip.
The Pulitzers always reflected journalism’s skewed priorities. However, this many high-profile failures in such a short time underscores the rapid and catastrophic descent of American journalism into radical political activism and makes winning a Pulitzer look definitively like a mark of ignominy.
Air Force Confirms Military Records of Two More GOP Candidates Were Leaked to Democratic Firm
The U.S. Air Force has admitted that it improperly released the military records of a further two GOP candidates to a Democratic-aligned research firm in an issue that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said is “not going to go away quietly.”
In a letter last Friday obtained by Politico, the Air Force informed House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) that an internal audit confirmed nine people’s records were “released without authority” to the Due Diligence Group between 2021 and 2023.
“During the two-year period covered by the timeline in your letter, AFPC received a total of 19,597 requests for records,” the letter read. “AFPC also initiated a separate audit of all third-party requests received between early 2021 and early 2023. That audit identified a total of 11 individuals who had their military records released without proper authority.”
According to the letter, seven of the disclosed records affected GOP candidates running for office in 2022. Among them, five had already been made public, while a further two have just been confirmed. The first is J.R. Majewski, an Ohio candidate who faced campaign-trail scrutiny for embellishing part of his military record. The other is Robert “Eli” Bremer, who lost in last year’s GOP primary race to take on Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO).
The FBI Used an Undercover Cop With Pink Hair to Spy on Activists and Manufacture Crimes
THE YOUNG WOMAN with long pink hair claimed to be from Washington state. One day during the summer of 2020, she walked into the Chinook Center, a community space for left-wing activists in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and offered to volunteer.
“She dressed in a way that was sort of noticeable,” said Samantha Christiansen, a co-founder of the Chinook Center. But no one among the activists found that unusual or alarming; everyone has their own style. They accepted her into the community.
The pink-haired woman said her name was Chelsie. She also dropped regular hints about her chosen profession.
“She implied over the course of getting to know her that she was a sex worker,” said Jon Christiansen, Samantha’s husband and another co-founder of the Chinook Center.
“I think somebody else had told me that, and I just was like, ‘Oh, OK. That makes sense,’” said Autum Carter-Wallace, an activist in Colorado Springs. “I never questioned it.”
But Chelsie’s identity was as fake as her long pink hair. The young woman, whose real name is April Rogers, is a detective at the Colorado Springs Police Department. The FBI enlisted her to infiltrate and spy on racial justice groups during the summer of 2020.
Craigslist Craig Funded The Censorship-Industrial Complex To Silence Dissent Online
The billionaire founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark, is using his fortune to further shape journalism into partisan activism to help Democrats win elections. He is the nation’s leading financier of the “mis”- and “disinformation” industries and is now the largest private stakeholder in America’s legacy journalism schools.
The most recent Twitter Files released by Matt Taibbi add a deeply disturbing new layer to the story. They show Newmark is at the very heart of an incestuous web of government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and corporate media institutions operating in concert to censor political opponents on social media. Newmark is financing the largest coordinated assault on American free speech in living memory.
On March 9, journalist Matt Taibbi outlined how pre-Elon Musk Twitter acted as “a partner to government,” working in concert with the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Health and Human Services, Treasury, the National Security Agency, and local police. An elaborate system for reporting hundreds of thousands of accounts was set up, and Twitter obliged by deleting thousands of accounts on demand.
According to Taibbi, the grounds for reporting and deleting many accounts were “shaky.” He pointed to examples of several legitimate journalists and even leftist news outlet TruthOut appearing on internal “disinformation” lists.
However, Taibbi states the majority of requests for censorship did not come from government agencies. Instead, Twitter relied upon a coalition of machine learning, internal human review, and outside “partnerships” to detect “misinformation” on the site.
These outside partnerships played an aggressive role in pushing Twitter censorship. Taibbi calls this group the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.” A 2020 internal email from Nick Pickles, then public policy director at Twitter, set up a working group with nine disinformation non-governmental organizations (NGOs): First Draft, Centre for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), International Republican Institute (IRI), Atlantic Council/DFRLab, Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), Brookings, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI).
As Taibbi points out, the NGOs should have checked the power wielded by government agencies within Twitter. In reality, members of the Censorship-Industrial Complex entered into an incestuous working relationship in which it became difficult to disentangle one from the other due to their shared drive for censorship to further leftist political goals.
The Biden Administration’s Strange, Secret Effort to Bail Out Moderna
American taxpayers have already given Moderna $10 billion for its coronavirus vaccine. If the Biden administration gets its wish, that tab could soon grow.
In a court filing last month, Department of Justice lawyers offered to “relieve” Moderna of any liability it faces from a lawsuit that accuses the drug company of failing to pay licensing fees for technology it used to develop its vaccine during “Operation Warp Speed.” Moderna has argued that the federal government should be on the hook for any legal settlement because of a stipulation in its contract that protects the company from patent litigation. The government had stayed silent on the matter until last month, when Justice Department lawyers said that any liability that Moderna faces should “transfer” to the United States government, citing a World War I-era law that protects federal contractors from patent disputes.
While the judge handling the case recently denied the request, Moderna and the federal government could appeal the decision and put taxpayers on the hook for any legal payout. Genevant, one of the companies that sued Moderna, has already accused the drug maker of “trying to shift responsibility for its patent infringement to the U.S. taxpayer.”
Ron DeSantis Cut Lenient Plea Deals to Shorten Prison Sentences for Child Porn Crimes
As a prosecutor, current Florida governor Ron DeSantis repeatedly cut plea deals to give lenient sentences to defendants convicted of child pornography crimes, according to records obtained by NATIONAL FILE.
- In one case, the deal DeSantis cut with the child porn aficionado cut the perpetrator’s sentence from thirty years down to six year.
- In another plea deal DeSantis cut with a sailor facing a child pornography charge, the service member ultimately only received a 6-month prison sentence rather than a maximum 10-year sentence.
- At least two of the child porn consumers DeSantis cut deals with were members of the U.S. Navy.
In 2007, Gregory Baker was charged for allegedly possessing a thumb drive with child porn on it.
According to a court document: “visual depictions involved the use of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct and which visual depictions were of such conduct.” In June 2008, DeSantis became the assistant U.S. attorney on the Baker case.
DeSantis did not oppose Baker’s attempt to modify the conditions of his release pertaining to curfew and travel. In October 2008, DeSantis submitted a “downward departure” motion that created a “one level reduction in the Defendant’s total offense level,” and Baker ended up getting sentenced to only one year and one day in prison.
DeSantis signed the motion, which stated: “The defendant’s guilty plea permitted the government to avoid preparing for trial and permitted the government and the Court to allocate resources efficiently.”
Hellbound and Down 
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