Author: Papa Giorgio

Dan Bongino Asks “What Was The CIA Doing?” (Must Listen)

Published by Papa Giorgio

In this episode [Dan Bongino] address the disturbing role of the CIA in the plot to spy on Donald Trump. I also address the latest moves on the Canadian truckers.

TECHNO FOG’S “The unstated scandal: The CIA collected info on President Trump: The DNC’s direct line to the CIA” via his The Reactionary

EXCERPT:

On Friday, Special Counsel John Durham filed a motion relating to a defense firm’s potential conflict of interest in the Michael Sussmann case. The conflict itself is certainly intriguing, with Sussmann’s lawyers at Latham & Watkins LLP (Latham) having represented potential witnesses in the case, including Perkins Coie, former Perkins Coie (and Clinton Campaign general counsel) Marc Elias, the Hillary Clinton Campaign, and Hillary for America.

The issue that made more noise, however, was Durham’s disclosure that Rodney Joffe – a contractor with deep ties to the Clintons, and what appears to be a deep hatred for Trump – had exploited Executive Office of the President of the United States data he obtained from a “sensitive arrangement” with the U.S. Government to damage President Trump. Here is our initial post on the topic…….

TECHNO’S newest posting as well: “It’s official: Durham is investigating the Clinton Campaign: Enter the Clinton Campaign Lawyers“

EXCERPT:

….The Involvement of the Hillary Clinton Campaign

After all, we know that the Hillary Clinton Campaign paid for the Steele dossiers and the work by Fusion GPS. This was arranged through their attorneys (and the DNC attorneys) at Perkins Coie – notably Mark Elias and Michael Sussmann. Elias left the firm this summer. Sussmann was indicted in September 2021 by Special Counsel Durham for giving false statements to the FBI as he was pushing them to investigate the Alfa Bank/Trump hoax.

It is highly likely that the Clinton Campaign was receiving updates on the Fusion GPS/Christopher Steele work once they were hired by Perkins Coie in the spring of 2016. This is work the client – the Clinton Campaign – paid for. (The sharing of this info would be consistent with the Clinton Campaign – notably Jake Sullivan – receiving backchannel updates on the Alfa Bank hoax.)

If the Clinton Campaign was being informed of the work by Fusion GPS, what of the likelihood that the Clinton Campaign was informing the work of Fusion GPS? It was Clintons’ idea to link Trump and Russia in the first place. To develop that theory, associates of the Clinton Campaign (Sidney Blumenthal) were working to corroborate parts of the dossier.

With that in mind, I offer you this bit of information provided by the New York Times in September (emphasis added) suggesting the complicity of the Clinton Campaign:

Some of the questions that Mr. Durham’s team has been asking in recent months — including of witnesses it subpoenaed before a grand jury, according to people familiar with some of the sessions — suggest he has been pursuing a theory that the Clinton campaign used Perkins Coie to submit dubious information to the F.B.I. about Russia and Mr. Trump in an effort to gin up investigative activity to hurt his 2016 campaign. (Emphasis added.)

The Latest Developments….

 

Jennifer Sey “Canned” Over Her Opinions on Opening Schools

Published by Papa Giorgio

Armstrong and Getty read from an NEW YORK POST editorial by former Levi Strauss & Co brand President, Jennifer Sey, titled: “How I Was Bullied Out of My Top Job at Levi’s by the Intolerant Woke Mob.” I read the entire article when I got home. Wow. This woman is bad ass! How many people could have done this?

…In the last month, the CEO told me that it was “untenable” for me to stay. I was offered a $1 million severance package, but I knew I’d have to sign a nondisclosure agreement about why I’d been pushed out.

The money would be very nice. But I just can’t do it. Sorry, Levi’s….

What a rock-solid chick!

The GOP is thinking,

  • “Keep it up #Woke Democrats… you are filling our voter rolls better than we could ever do” 

LEFTIE MOMS RAGE AGAINST THEIR MACHINE!

This first article is via THE ATLANTIC: Why I Soured on the Democrats: COVID school policies set me adrift from my tribe.

MOM #1

Until recently, I was a loyal, left-leaning Democrat, and I had been my entire adult life. I was the kind of partisan who registered voters before midterm elections and went to protests. I hated Donald Trump so much that I struggled to be civil to relatives on the other side of the aisle. But because of what my family has gone through during the pandemic, I can’t muster the same enthusiasm. I feel adrift from my tribe and, to a certain degree, disgusted with both parties.

I can’t imagine that I would have arrived here—not a Republican, but questioning my place in the Democratic Party—had my son not been enrolled in public kindergarten in 2020.

Late that summer, the Cleveland school system announced that it would not open for in-person learning the first 9 weeks of the semester. I was distraught. My family relies on my income, and I knew that I would not be able to work full-time with my then-5-year-old son and then-3-year-old daughter at home.

Still, I was accepting of short-term school closures. My faith in the system deteriorated only as the weeks and months of remote-learning dragged on long past the initial timeline, and my son began refusing to log on for lessons. I couldn’t blame him. Despite his wonderful teacher’s best efforts, online kindergarten is about as ridiculous as it sounds, in my experience. I remember logging on to a “gym” class where my son was the only student present. The teacher, I could tell, felt embarrassed. We both knew how absurd the situation was.

Children who had been present every day the year before in preschool, whose parents I had seen drop them off every morning, just vanished. The daily gantlet of passwords and programs was a challenge for even me and my husband, both professionals who work on computers all day. About 30 percent of Cleveland families didn’t even have internet in their home prior to the pandemic.

I kept hoping that someone in our all-Democratic political leadership would take a stand on behalf of Cleveland’s 37,000 public-school children or seem to care about what was happening. Weren’t Democrats supposed to stick up for low-income kids? Instead, our veteran Democratic mayor avoided remarking on the crisis facing the city’s public-school families. Our all-Democratic city council was similarly disengaged. The same thing was happening in other blue cities and blue states across the country, as the needs of children were simply swept aside. Cleveland went so far as to close playgrounds for an entire year. That felt almost mean-spirited, given the research suggesting the negligible risk of outdoor transmission—an additional slap in the face.

Things got worse for us in December 2020, when my whole family contracted COVID-19. The coronavirus was no big deal for my 3- and 5-year-olds, but I was left with lingering long-COVID symptoms, which made the daily remote-schooling nightmare even more grueling. I say this not to hold myself up for pity. I understand that other people had a far worse 2020. I’m just trying to explain why my worldview has shifted and why I’m not the same person I was.

By the spring semester, the data showed quite clearly that schools were not big coronavirus spreaders and that, conversely, the costs of closures to children, both academically and emotionally, were very high. The American Academy of Pediatrics first urged a return to school in June 2020. In February 2021, when The New York Times surveyed 175 pediatric-disease experts, 86 percent recommended in-person school even if no one had been vaccinated.

But when the Cleveland schools finally reopened, in March 2021—under pressure from Republican Governor Mike DeWine—they chose a hybrid model that meant my son could enter the building only two days a week.

My husband and I had had enough: With about two months left in the academic year, we found a charter school that was open for full-time in-person instruction. It was difficult to give up on our public school. We were invested. But our trust was broken.

Compounding my fury was a complete lack of sympathy or outright hostility from my own “team.” Throughout the pandemic, Democrats have been eager to style themselves as the ones that “take the virus seriously,” which is shorthand, at least in the bluest states and cities, for endorsing the most extreme interventions. By questioning the wisdom of school closures—and taking our child out of public school—I found myself going against the party line. And when I tried to speak out on social media, I was shouted down and abused, accused of being a Trumper who didn’t care if teachers died. On Twitter, mothers who had been enlisted as unpaid essential workers were mocked, often in highly misogynistic terms. I saw multiple versions of “they’re just mad they’re missing yoga and brunch.”

Twitter is a cesspool full of unreasonable people. But the kind of moralizing and self-righteousness that I saw there came to characterize lefty COVID discourse to a harmful degree. As reported in this magazine, the parents in deep-blue Somerville, Massachusetts, who advocated for faster school reopening last spring were derided as “fucking white parents” in a virtual public meeting. The interests of children and the health of public education were both treated as minor concerns, if these subjects were broached at all.

Obviously, Republicans have been guilty of politicizing the pandemic with horrible consequences, fomenting mistrust in vaccines that will result in untold numbers of unnecessary deaths. I’m not excusing that.

But I’ve been disappointed by how often the Democratic response has exacerbated that mistrust by, for example, exaggerating the risks of COVID-19 to children. A low point for me was when Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe inflated child COVID-hospitalization numbers on the campaign trail. It was almost Trumplike. (If I lived in Virginia, I admit I probably would have had to sit out the recent gubernatorial election, in which the Republican candidate beat McAuliffe.)

(READ IT ALL!)

MOM #2

And another Leftie mom wrote about an almost identical experience[s] in POLITICO: How School Closures Made Me Question My Progressive Politics: I’ve never felt more alienated from the liberal Democratic circles I usually call home.

June 26, 2020, was the day I went public with just how angry I was about my son’s school closing down for Covid, and my life hasn’t been the same since.

I had begun to sense a difference between my own feelings and those of my mom’s text group, which included nine of us whose kids had gone to preschool together since they were 2 years old; the kids were 8 at the time. These were the parents of my son’s closest friends. We even had a name for our group, the “mamigas”— as most of us were either Latinas or married to Latinos and shared a commitment to bilingual education.

I tweeted, “Does anyone else feel enraged at the idea that you’ll be homeschooling in the fall full-time? Cuz my moms group text is in full-blown acceptance mode and it bugs the shit out of me.” I didn’t know it yet, but this would be my first foray into school reopening advocacy, which eventually included helping lead a group of Oakland parents in pushing the school district to be more transparent about the process of reopening (particularly in negotiations with the teachers union) and writing several pieces on the topic.
I probably should have inferred that becoming a school-reopening advocate would not go over well in my progressive Oakland community, but I didn’t anticipate the social repercussions, or the political identity crisis it would trigger for me. My own experience, as a self-described progressive in ultra-lefty Oakland, is just one example of how people across the political spectrum have become frustrated with Democrats’ position on school reopenings.

Parents who advocated for school reopening were repeatedly demonized on social media as racist and mischaracterized as Trump supporters. Members of the parent group I helped lead were consistently attacked on Twitter and Facebook by two Oakland moms with ties to the teachers union. They labelled advocates’ calls for schools reopening “white supremacy” called us “Karens,” and even bizarrely claimed we had allied ourselves with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s transphobic agenda.

There was no recognition of the fact that we were advocating for our kids, who were floundering in remote learning, or that public schools across the country (in red states) opened in fall 2020 without major outbreaks, as did private schools just miles from our home. Only since last fall, when schools reopened successfully despite the more contagious Delta variant circulating, have Democratic pundits and leaders been talking about school closures as having caused far more harm than benefit.

Some progressive parents now admit they were too afraid of the blowback from their communities to speak up. And they were right to be wary. We paid a price.

So did Democrats, even if they didn’t realize it until later, or still don’t. Glenn Youngkin’s surprise gubernatorial win in Virginia in November was a wake-up call for the party. As has been recognized, Youngkin’s focus on school-related issues, especially after Terry McAuliffe made a dismissive remark about parents, was an effective tactic. Still, all over Twitter I saw progressives denying that parent anger at prolonged school closures was a major issue in that election — they claimed it was all about anti-critical race theory sentiment, despite research showing school pandemic policies were more to blame. Even more disturbing, as evidenced in the comments on a recent tweet by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), is that many still believe shutting down schools for a year or more was justified.
Some progressive parents now admit they were too afraid of the blowback from their communities to speak up. And they were right to be wary. We paid a price.

So did Democrats, even if they didn’t realize it until later, or still don’t. Glenn Youngkin’s surprise gubernatorial win in Virginia in November was a wake-up call for the party. As has been recognized, Youngkin’s focus on school-related issues, especially after Terry McAuliffe made a dismissive remark about parents, was an effective tactic. Still, all over Twitter I saw progressives denying that parent anger at prolonged school closures was a major issue in that election — they claimed it was all about anti-critical race theory sentiment, despite research showing school pandemic policies were more to blame. Even more disturbing, as evidenced in the comments on a recent tweet by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), is that many still believe shutting down schools for a year or more was justified.

Some unions and districts are now using last year’s closures as a precedent. Recently, with the Omicron surge, several major school districts announced they were switching to remote learning for a week or more, including Newark and dozens of other New Jersey districts, Ann Arbor and Cleveland. Then last week, the Chicago teachers union voted for a sickout, followed by teachers in San Francisco and Oakland engaging in similar actions.

Spring 2020 had been a disaster for my son when his school in the Oakland Unified School District switched to emergency remote learning. He had recently been diagnosed with ADHD and did not do well with me at home — he often flatly refused to do any work. Although I saw a range of reactions by teachers to emergency remote learning that spring, and know that some went to great lengths to keep their students engaged, my son’s teacher only met with the kids one-on-one on Zoom for 15 minutes a week. Beyond that, parents were given worksheets to do with our kids; there was no actual instruction that spring.

When the new school year began in August 2020, Oakland provided only fully remote instruction. My incredibly bright but impulsive son found the temptation of having a computer screen in front of him irresistible — and would often open other windows or try to surf the internet.

By January 2021, with my son increasingly disengaged as Zoom school dragged on and no hope of an imminent return to school in Oakland, I promised him I wouldn’t make him go through another year like this. I knew that he desperately needed to learn alongside other kids.

I had until then resisted my dad’s suggestion that I consider sending him to private school. I was a proud alumna of San Francisco public schools and planned for my kids to attend Oakland public schools, despite their reputation for behavioral and academic problems. As an interracial, bilingual/bicultural family, what we wanted was for our son to attend a dual-language immersion program with plenty of other kids of color. My family was also in no way able to pay for private school.

But I began to fear that even in-person school in fall 2021 was at risk because of the impossible demands of the teachers union (that schools remain fully remote until there were “near-zero” Covid cases in Oakland) and apathy of the school board and district; even after teachers were prioritized for vaccination, there was no urgency to get kids back to the classroom. My dad offered to help pay for private school, and we applied. In March we were notified that my son was admitted to a private dual-language immersion school, and that we had been granted a 75 percent scholarship. There was still no deal in place between Oakland’s school district and the union to return to in-person school. I had lost all faith in the decision-makers to do what was best for my kid. So I made the only logical decision.

Even then, I feared what fellow parents might think of me. I’m well aware of the stereotypes of white parents choosing the private-school option when the going gets tough at public schools. I told myself that prioritizing being a “good leftist” at the expense of my son’s well-being wasn’t good parenting, but as a red-diaper baby myself, the white guilt dies hard. My own parents had sent me to an elementary school with a huge majority of Black and Pacific Islander students; while many might assume the white parents documented in the New York Times podcast “Nice White Parents” were pioneers, my parents reverse-integrated me into a “failing” school 40 years ago. Sending my kid to private school was accompanied by a lot of angst.

My fears were amplified by the backlash I and other school reopening advocates had faced throughout the school year, particularly on social media. There were a range of insults lobbed at us: We were bad parents who didn’t care about our own kids or teachers dying, we only wanted our babysitters back and our frustrations about school closures were an example of “white supremacy.” Los Angeles teachers union head Cecily Myart-Cruz stated that reopening schools was “a recipe for propagating structural racism.”

(READ IT ALL!)

TRUMP WAS RIGHT. ABOUT ALL OF IT.

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here is my comment on the above at 60-Minute’s YouTube:

  • This didn’t age well. Leslie Stahl was spreading misinformation. Works by Lee Smith, Gregg Jarrett, Dan Bongino, Molly Hemingway, John Solomon, Chuck Ross, and the like — had already proven Trump’s statement via the E V I D E N C E. What a disgrace to investigative journalism 60-Minutes has become. Another example why more ppl distrust news sources, and with a recent poll showing a majority of Democrats now want Hillary investigated… 60-M will lose more viewers.

Suffice to say “spying” has been known to have happened already through multiple channels:

TRUMP WAS RIGHT. ABOUT ALL OF IT.

FLASHBACK!

And Remember These? I do (via NEWSBUSTERS):

Now This via PJ-MEDIA:

Lawyers for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign paid a technology company to “infiltrate” servers that belonged to Trump Tower and, later, the Trump White House “for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump,” according to a motion filed Friday by Special Counsel John Durham. Fox News reports:

Durham filed a motion on Feb. 11 focused on potential conflicts of interest related to the representation of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman, who has been charged with making a false statement to a federal agent. Sussman has pleaded not guilty.

The indictment against Sussman says he told then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016, less than two months before the 2016 presidential election, that he was not doing work “for any client” when he requested and held a meeting in which he presented “purported data and ‘white papers’ that allegedly demonstrated a covert communications channel” between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which has ties to the Kremlin.

According to the Feb. 11 filing, in a section titled “Factual Background,”  Sussman “had assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including a technology executive (Tech Executive-1) at a U.S.-based internet company (Internet Company 1) and the Clinton campaign.”

Billing records show that Sussman “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations.”

Sources told Fox News that Sussman and Tech Executive-1 had also met and communicated with another law partner, Marc Elias, formerly of Perkins Coie, who also served as General Counsel to the Clinton campaign.

Durham’s filing states that in July 2016, the tech executive worked with Sussman, a U.S. investigative firm retained by Law Firm 1 on behalf of the Clinton campaign, numerous cyber researchers and employees at multiple internet companies to “assemble the purported data and white papers.”

“In connection with these efforts, Tech Executive-1 exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data,” the filing states. “Tech Executive-1 also enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.”

“Tech Executive-1 tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” Durham states. “In doing so, Tech Executive-1 indicated that he was seeking to please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton campaign.”…..

PJ-MEDIA notes “get ready for more.”

MEDIA

Rep. Jim Jordan: This Is Worse Than We Thought

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, weighs in on new evidence from the Durham investigation that the Clinton campaign paid to spy on and link Russia to President Trump.

Ratcliffe Predicts More Clinton-Related Indictments

Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on the John Durham findings showing Hillary Clinton findings into the efforts to pin Russian collusion on Trump and his presidential campaign.

Hemingway: Durham Reveals Spying On Trump Was Worse Than Watergate

Bombshell Durham Report Finds Clinton Campaign Spied On Trump During Presidency

FOX Business Maria Bartiromo, Fox News Contributor Liz Peek and Michael Lee Strategy founder Michael Lee discuss the latest findings in the Durham report.

Gregg Jarrett & Peter Schweizer Respond to New Durham Info

Watters: ‘Criminal’ Clinton Should Be Banished From Polite Society

Jesse Watters comments on a filing from special counsel John Durham alleging the Clinton campaign paid money to penetrate Trump Tower servers and calls the former Democratic presidential candidate a ‘political criminal’ on ‘The Five.’

Racial Equity Includes Crack Pipes? Whodathunk

Published by Papa Giorgio

Armstrong and Getty use clips from Tucker Carlson to start out the show. Then a Facebook Fact Check of their “Fact-Check” is from 45-seconds in to about the 2-minute mark. This is worth listening to if nothing else – I will also have some related articles below as well. The rest of the commentary is golden. What a disgrace [not just the Biden Admin is] the progressive Left and Democrats are in their dealing with addiction. Great segment by A&G!

  • CrackPipeGate Just Got a Lot More Interesting—and Confusing (RED STATE)
  • ‘Mostly False’ Free Crack Pipes: How ‘Fact-Checkers’ Debunked Reality … Again (DAILY WIRE)
  • Snopes Claims Biden Admin Funding Crack Pipes For Racial Equity Is ‘Mostly False’ (RED VOICE MEDIA)

Kari Lake vs “Journalist” at 60 Minutes Australia

Published by Papa Giorgio

It’s no secret that the Media is OBSESSED with President Trump, but this nut-job from 60 Minutes Australia takes that obsession to a whole new level. Propagandist Liam Bartlett is infatuated with our favorite President.

It was clear from the start that this was another Corporate Media Cabal hit-piece. And when it ended Liam became desperate–he seemed panicked he didn’t get the interview he wanted.

Hey, Liam, stop lying to the people of Australia.

Dennis Prager Interviews M.D.’s: Marik, Kory; and Ph.D. Milgrom

Published by Papa Giorgio

Dennis Prager discusses with two medical doctors and one Ph.D. in the biomedical field the efficacy of vaccines as well as the consequences of not using cheap, effective, medications to treat Covid.

bio’s

Dr. Paul Marik

Critical Care physician. Founding Member of the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance

Co-Chief Medical Officer. Here’s his CV. Is he “anti-science”?

Dr. Pierre Kory

Former Chief of the Critical Care Service and Medical Director of the Trauma and Life

Support Center at the University of Wisconsin. Here’s his CV. Is he “anti-science”?

Asher Milgrom, PhD.

PhD in biomedical science, founder and chief science officer of AMA Regenerative Medicine in Southern California. Here’s his CV. Is he “anti-science”?

 

ACLU Fights Against Freedom of Choice

Published by Papa Giorgio

This craziness is via ACE OF SPADES…. had to share:

The ACLU — the American Civil Rights Union, supposedly — is challenging Youngkin’s optional masking order which… gives the right to choose masking, or choose not to mask, to Virginia citizens.

Or, as the Washington Post dysphemizes it (the opposite of euphemizes): “mandates choice.”

Imposes freedom!

The ACLU is now against the imposition of burdensome freedom and dangerous rights.

For those keeping track, the ACLU is now fighting on behalf of schools — government bodies — to take away the rights of citizen parents and citizen students.

Fired-Up Virginia Mom Paddles School Board

Published by Papa Giorgio

Clay Travis and Buck Sexton want you to hear what this fired-up mom had to say at a Virginia school board meeting. You don’t want to mess with this mama bear.

Here is her FULL SPEECH!

Clay and Buck note the author of the Atlantic whom they had on to interview a couple weeks back wrote this in said article:

To our knowledge, the CDC has performed three studies to determine whether masking children in school reduces COVID-19 transmission. The first is a study of elementary schools in Georgia, conducted before vaccines became available, which found that masking teachers was associated with a statistically significant decrease in COVID-19 transmission, but masking students was not—a finding that the CDC’s masking guidelines do not account for.

A second and more recent study of Arizona schools in Maricopa and Pima Counties concluded that schools without mask mandates were more likely to have COVID-19 outbreaks than schools with mask mandates. Yet more than 90 percent of schools in the “no mask mandate” group were in Maricopa County, an area that has significantly lower vaccination rates than Pima County. This study had other serious shortcomings, including failure to quantify the size of outbreaks and failure to report testing protocols for the students.

The third CDC study found that U.S. counties without mask mandates saw larger increases in pediatric COVID-19 cases after schools opened, but again did not control for important differences in vaccination rates. The CDC has cited several other studies conducted in the previous school year to support its claim that masks are a key school-safety measure. However, none of these studies, including ones conducted in North Carolina, Utah, Wisconsin, and Missouri, isolated the impact of masks specifically, because all students were required to mask and no comparisons were made with schools that did not require masks.

Therefore, the overall takeaway from these studies—that schools with mask mandates have lower COVID-19 transmission rates than schools without mask mandates—is not justified by the data that have been gathered. In two of these studies, this conclusion is undercut by the fact that background vaccination rates, both of staff and of the surrounding community, were not controlled for or taken into consideration. At the time these studies were conducted, when breakthrough infections were much less common, this was a hugely important confounding variable undermining the CDC’s conclusions that masks in schools provide a concrete benefit in controlling COVID-19 spread: Communities with higher vaccination rates had less COVID-19 transmission everywhere, including in schools, and those same communities were more likely to have mask mandates.

[….]

Other studies—not randomized trials—have looked at the effects of masks in schools, and their results do not support pervasive, endless masking at school. A study from Brown University, analyzing 2020–21 data from schools in New York, Massachusetts, and Florida, found no correlation between student cases and mask mandates, but did see decreased cases associated with teacher vaccination. A study published in Science looking at individual mitigation measures in schools last winter found that, although teacher masking reduced COVID-19 positivity, student masking did not have a significant effect.

Even though the first half of this school year was dominated by the highly transmissible Delta variant, the picture in more recent studies looks similar. In Tennessee, two neighboring counties with similar vaccination rates, Davidson and Williamson, have virtually overlapping case-rate trends in their school-age populations, despite one having a mask mandate and one having a mask opt-out rate of about 23 percent. One would expect a quarter of the students opting out of masking to affect transmission rates if masks played any significant role in controlling COVID-19 spread, but that was not the case. Another recent analysis of data from Cass County, North Dakota, comparing school districts with and without mask mandates, concluded that mask-optional districts had lower prevalence of COVID-19 cases among students this fall. Analyses of COVID-19 cases in Alachua County, Florida, also suggest no differences in mask-required versus mask-optional schools. Similarly, the U.K. recently reported finding no statistically significant difference in absences traced to COVID-19 between secondary schools with mask mandates and those without mandates.

Despite how widespread all-day masking of children in school is, the short-term and long-term consequences of this practice are not well understood, in part because no one has successfully collected large-scale systematic data and few researchers have tried. Mental and social-emotional outcomes are hard to observe and measure, and can take years to manifest. Initial data, however, are not reassuring. Recent prospective studies from Greece and Italy found evidence that masking is a barrier to speech recognition, hearing, and communication, and that masks impede children’s ability to decode facial expressions, dampening children’s perceived trustworthiness of faces. Research has also suggested that hearing-impaired children have difficulty discerning individual sounds; opaque masks, of course, prevent lip-reading. Some teachers, parents, and speech pathologists have reported that masks can make learning difficult for some of America’s most vulnerable children, including those with cognitive delays, speech and hearing issues, and autism. Masks may also hinder language and speech development—especially important for students who do not speak English at home. Masks may impede emotion recognition, even in adults, but particularly in children. This fall, when children were asked, many said that prolonged mask wearing is uncomfortable and that they dislike it……….

(THE ATLANTIC)

Whoopi Goldberg MAD (Ben Shapiro)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Whoopi Goldberg is reportedly furious that she was suspended from ABC’s “The View” over highly controversial remarks that she made about the Holocaust. Shapiro weighs in.

According to People, the name “Whoopi” comes from, you guessed it, a whoopee cushion. Whoopi Goldberg told The New York Times how the name came about during an interview in 2006: “If you get a little gassy, you’ve got to let it go. So people used to say to me, ‘You’re like a whoopee cushion.’ And that’s where the name came from.”

As for “Goldberg,” it turns out that it is a name she has family connections to. Per the Jewish Chronicle, she revealed in 2011 that while Whoopi was not her mother’s choice for her name, Goldberg was, “Part of my family, part of my heritage. Just like being black.” It’s been rumored that her mother thought the name Johnson wasn’t “Jewish enough” for Goldberg to make it big, but that’s not been confirmed.

Either way, it’s clear that the name Whoopi Goldberg has a memorable quality that Goldberg’s birth name lacks, and it can’t have been a bad decision to change her name — she’s had a remarkably successful career, becoming one of the biggest and most-loved names in Hollywood……….

(THE LIST)

 

 

Whistleblower: Hospitals “Coded” Covid for Profit

Published by Papa Giorgio

I have some real world examples here: Funny Covid-19 Numbers By Date (Why Many Are Skeptical)

COVID Cases Inflated for Profit: ‘The Guy Went in for Multiple Gunshot Wounds and he was Coded as COVID’

  • Jeanne Stagg, a whistleblower who worked in Inpatient Utilization Management, approached Project Veritas after seeing cases coded as COVID-19 that she says should not have COVID-19 listed as the “primary diagnosis.”
  • Stagg: “I’ve tried to raise awareness to my leadership and even with the Fraud, Waste, and Abuse Department, and it just kind of fell on deaf ears.”
  • The Chief Medical Officer for United Healthcare of Louisiana (Medicaid) opined in a recorded phone conversation that the Medicaid rate for reimbursement of COVID-19 patients, which is faster and significantly higher, could be the motivation for the improper “primary diagnosis” codes.
  • “Oh, yes. Yeah. I would think that there’s some motivation that it’s driving higher rates of reimbursement or quicker reimbursement, or something, because otherwise there’s no reason to put, you know, something like that as a leading diagnosis in an asymptom– basically asymptomatic patients,” said Dr. Morial, Chief Medical Officer for United Healthcare of Louisiana.
  • The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals has suspended utilization review which is the process of determining whether health care is medically necessary for a patient or an insured individual. The whistleblower says this could be a major contributing factor to spikes in COVID numbers, which then influence public health decisions.

[Baton Rouge, La. – Feb. 2, 2022] A source who works for United Healthcare of Louisiana’s Inpatient Utilization Management Department is blowing the whistle on COVID-19 cases possibly being inflated for financial incentive. The brazen instance of such potential abuse was a patient who had multiple gunshot wounds with his primary diagnosis listed as COVID-19.

United Healthcare of Louisiana is the states’ Medicaid arm, and as the whistleblower Jeanne Stagg points out in a conversation with the Chief Medical Officer of United Healthcare of Louisiana, Dr. Julie Morial, there are several financial incentives for hospitals to prefer to code patients as COVID-19 hospitalizations.

“Well maybe that’s… maybe that’s driving some of the motivation,” said Dr. Morial before stating that the Medicaid rate for reimbursement of COVID-19 patients is both higher and faster.

Project Veritas also published footage of a leadership call within United Healthcare of Louisiana wherein the whistleblower’s attempt to discuss the improper primary diagnoses she is seeing was dismissed.

A major element of this story is the fact that recent actions by public officials have allowed the problem to persist, and the whistleblower believes erroneous codes could be the cause of COVID-19 spikes which influence major public health decisions.

A health plan advisory, which announced that all utilization management for all medical hospitalizations [including but not limited to initial service authorization and concurrent reviews], must be suspended was the action taken — which is in question.

“Now, this is not specific to COVID-19. This is every single hospital admission. We’re not allowed to do medical necessity review. So, it gives the hospitals free reign to admit anything they want. Code it however they want,” says the whistleblower, Jeanne Stagg.

United Healthcare of Louisiana’s Dr. Morial was contacted for comment on this story and said, “When I see a patient, and if a patient is presenting other symptoms that aren’t suggestive of a COVID infection, even though they may test positive for COVID, that’s not my primary diagnosis.”

Delusions of Gender | Matt Walsh (WSJ Article Added)

Published by Papa Giorgio

There’s no doubt about it, the Left has transformed gender from a biological fact into an ideological opinion, but how did we get to this point? Why is everything the Left tells you about gender wrong?

Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh dispels the Left’s delusions of gender during a special event from The University of Texas at Austin. This event is part of Young America’s Foundation’s Robert and Patricia Herbold Lecture Series.

YAF makes every effort to host in-person campus events. Unfortunately, administrators at the University of Texas at Austin limited attendance to only 99 for this event.

Here is an excellent WALL STREET JOURNAL article (via TOP TECH SOLUTIONS):

‘What are your pronouns?” is a seemingly innocuous question that has become increasingly common. Pronouns are now frequently displayed prominently in social-media bios, email signatures and conference name tags. Vice President

Kamala Harris

features “she/her” pronouns in her

Twitter

bio, and Transportation Secretary

Pete Buttigieg

includes “he/him” in his. Then there are the singular “they/them” pronouns used by “nonbinary” people who identify as neither male nor female, as well as a growing list of bespoke “neopronouns” such as “ze/zir” or “fae/faer,” and the even stranger “noun-self” neopronouns like “bun/bunself” which, according to the

New York Times,

are identities that can encompass animals and fantasy characters.

A recent survey of 40,000 “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth” in the U.S. found that a full 25% use pronouns other than she/her and he/him exclusively. The Human Rights Campaign, which claims to be the “nation’s largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization,” recently tweeted that we should all begin conversations with “Hi, my pronouns are __________. What are yours?” We are told that asking for, sharing and respecting pronouns is “inclusive” to trans and nonbinary people, and that failing to do so may even constitute violence and oppression.

If this all sounds confusing and makes you uncomfortable for reasons you find difficult to articulate, you’re not alone. While being subjected to constant rituals of pronoun exchanges may seem silly or annoying at best and exhausting at worst, in reality participating in this ostensibly benign practice helps to normalize a regressive ideology that is inflicting enormous harm on society. To understand why, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with its core tenets.

Proponents of gender ideology have completely decoupled the terms “man,” “woman,” “boy” and “girl” from biological sex. Gender ideology teaches that the terms “man/boy” and “woman/girl”—and their corresponding “he/his” and “she/her” pronouns—refer to a person’s gender identity, while “male” and “female” refer to biological sex. While you may define a woman as a female human adult, gender ideology contends that a “woman” is an adult of either sex who simply “identifies” as a woman.

But what does it mean to “identify” as a man or woman?

Gender activists believe that being a man or a woman requires embracing stereotypes of masculinity or femininity, respectively, or the different social roles and expectations society imposes on people because of their sex. Planned Parenthood explicitly states that gender identity is “how you feel inside,” defines “gender” as a “a social and legal status, a set of expectations from society, about behaviors, characteristics, and thoughts,” and asserts that “it’s more about how you’re expected to act, because of your sex.”

A recent New York Times piece refers to “men, women and gender nonconforming people,” as though gender nonconformity were incompatible with being a man or a woman. According to the Genderbread Person, a popular educational tool for teaching young children about gender identity, the properties of “man-ness” and “woman-ness” include certain stereotypical “personality traits, jobs, hobbies, likes, dislikes, roles, [and] expectations.”

The clear message of gender ideology is that, if you’re a female who doesn’t “identify with” the social roles and stereotypes of femininity, then you’re not a woman; if you’re a male who similarly rejects the social roles and stereotypes of masculinity, then you’re not a man. Instead, you’re considered either transgender or nonbinary, and Planned Parenthood assures you that “there are medical treatments you can use to help your body better reflect who you are.” According to this line of thinking, certain personalities, behaviors and preferences are incompatible with certain types of anatomy.

So when someone asks for your pronouns, and you respond with “she/her,” even though you may be communicating the simple fact that you’re female, a gender ideologue would interpret this as an admission that you embrace femininity and the social roles and expectations associated with being female. While women’s-rights movements fought for decades to decouple womanhood from rigid stereotypes and social roles, modern gender ideology has melded them back together.

Coercing people into publicly stating their pronouns in the name of “inclusion” is a Trojan horse that empowers gender ideology and expands its reach. It is the thin end of the gender activists’ wedge designed to normalize their worldview. Participating in pronoun rituals makes you complicit in gender ideology’s regressive belief system, thereby legitimizing it. Far from an innocuous act signaling support for inclusion, it serves as an implicit endorsement of gender ideology and all of its radical tenets.

Let me offer an analogy. Consider the Human Rights Campaign urging people to begin conversations with “Hi, my pronouns are ________. What are yours?” Now imagine a similar request from the American Federation of Astrologers encouraging everyone to begin conversations with, “Hi, I’m a Sagittarius. What’s your sign?” To respond with your own star sign would be to operate within and signal your tacit agreement with the belief system of astrology. If you reject astrology and respond to the question with “I don’t have a sign,” the reply might be “Of course you do! When were you born?” But that’s a completely different question.

Similarly, if you reject gender ideology’s claim that men and women are defined by their willful adherence to masculine and feminine roles and stereotypes, and so refuse to answer a request for pronouns, your interlocutor might say, “We all have pronouns! Do you identify as a man or a woman?” But because that concept of man and woman is nothing like yours, stating pronouns will only further normalize the ritual and validate a radical worldview.

The redefining of “man,” “woman,” “boy” and “girl” around sex-related stereotypes has serious real-world implications. The rejection of these stereotypes is now commonly viewed as a medical condition (gender dysphoria) to be treated with puberty blockers (for children), cross-sex hormones and surgeries that result in permanent sterility and consign patients to a lifetime of medical bills. The redefinition is also threatening the safety of women in prisons, as well as compromising the safety, fairness and dignity of women and girls in sports, as males who simply “identify” as girls or women are allowed access to these protected spaces.

The effort to resist gender ideology is reality’s last stand. We simply can’t ignore fundamental realities of our biology and expect positive outcomes for society. Pronoun rituals are extremely effective at normalizing and institutionalizing the abolition of biological sex in favor of gender identity. These rituals take advantage of people’s confusion and compassion to achieve compliance. But the time for politeness has long passed. The only proper response to the question “What are your pronouns?” is to reject the premise and refuse to answer.

Mr. Wright, an evolutionary biologist, is managing editor of Quillette.

 

 

“Jim Crow Era” Filibuster To Block Janice Rogers Brown

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is a WASHINGTON POST article but is behind a pay wall. Here it is, though… a must read Thiessen article!

Biden Blocked A Black Woman Justice
by, Marc Thiessen

President Joe Biden wants credit for nominating the first Black woman to the Supreme Court.

But here is the shameful irony: As a senator, Biden warned President George W. Bush that if he nominated the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, he would filibuster and kill her nomination.

The story begins in 2003, when Bush nominated Judge Janice Rogers Brown to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The D.C. Circuit is considered the country’s second-most important court, and has produced more Supreme Court justices than any other federal court.

Brown was immediately hailed as a potential Supreme Court nominee. She was highly qualified, having served for seven years as an associate justice of the California Supreme Court — the first Black woman to do so.

She was the daughter and granddaughter of sharecroppers, and grew up in rural Alabama during the dark days of segregation, when her family refused to enter restaurants or theaters with separate entrances for Black customers.

She rose from poverty and put herself through college and UCLA law school as a working single mother. She was a self-made African American legal star. But she was an outspoken conservative — so Biden set out to destroy her.

Biden and his fellow Democrats filibustered her nomination, along with several other Bush circuit court nominees, all of whom had majority support in the Senate. Columnist Robert Novak called it “the first full-scale effort in American history to prevent a president from picking the federal judges he wants.”

Democrats argued that she was out of the legal mainstream, but Republicans responded that she had written more majority opinions than any other justice on the California Supreme Court — and she was reelected with 76% of the vote, the highest percentage of all the justices on the ballot.

When Democrats derailed her nomination, Bush renominated her in 2005. Brown eventually was confirmed by a vote of 56 to 43 — after Democrats released her and several other Bush nominees in exchange for Republican agreement not to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominations.

Biden voted a second time against her nomination. He never explained why, if Brown was so radical, Democrats let her through but killed 10 other Bush nominees.

The following month, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement, Brown was on Bush’s shortlist to replace her. She would have been the first Black woman ever nominated to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

But Biden appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation” to warn that if Bush nominated Brown, she would face a filibuster. “I can assure you that would be a very, very, very difficult fight and she probably would be filibustered,” Biden said.

Asked by moderator John Roberts “Wasn’t she just confirmed?,” Biden replied that the Supreme Court is a “totally different ballgame” because “a circuit court judge is bound by stare decisis. They don’t get to make new law.”

What Biden threatened was unprecedented. There has never been a successful filibuster of a nominee for associate justice in the history of the republic. Biden wanted to make a Black woman the first in history to have her nomination killed by filibuster.

Bush eventually nominated Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Today, Biden calls the filibuster a “relic of the Jim Crow era.” But he threatened to use that relic as a tool to keep a Black woman who actually lived under Jim Crow off the highest court in the land.

The irony is that now he wants to get rid of the filibuster, and claim credit for putting the first Black woman on the court.

There were many conservatives on Bush’s shortlist whose legal philosophy Biden opposed. But Biden only promised to filibuster the one Black woman. Why? Perhaps a clue lies in another confirmation fight that Biden helped wage.

In 2001, Democrats blocked the nomination of Miguel Estrada to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. According to internal strategy memos obtained by The Wall Street Journal, they targeted Estrada at the request of liberal interest groups who said Estrada was “especially dangerous” because “he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment.”

They did not want Republicans to put the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court. So, Biden and his fellow Democrats killed Estrada’s nomination — the first appeals court nominee in history to be filibustered successfully.

It paid off when President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor as the first Hispanic justice.

Democrats’ commitment to diversity is a ruse. Biden was willing to destroy the careers of an accomplished Latino lawyer and a respected Black female judge, and stop Republicans from putting either on the Supreme Court.

For Democrats, it’s all about identity politics. Indeed, Biden might not have become president had he not made the pledge to nominate a Black woman. That promise helped secure the endorsement of Rep. James E. Clyburn, D-South Carolina — which won Biden the South Carolina primary and rescued his faltering campaign.

So, when Biden tries to bask in the glory of his historic nomination, remember Janice Rogers Brown — the Black woman who does not sit on the Supreme Court today because of Biden’s disgraceful obstruction.

Follow Marc A. Thiessen on Twitter, @marcthiessen.