Tag: bankruptcy

Pushback: Doctor partly reinstated after health officials threaten him for stating obvious facts about COVID

1:31 pm

John Littell, persecuted for being a thoughtful doctor
John Littell, persecuted
for being a thoughtful doctor

They’re coming for you next: When the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) stripped Florida doctor John Littell of his medical license in March 2023 because he had publicly advocated the use of ivermectin to treat COVID patients while questioning many of the government health policies being imposed during the epidemic, he immediate appealed.

I reported on ABFM’s attempt to blacklist Littell back in April, shortly after it took action against him. At the time it appeared the ABFM’s actions were prompted because he had spoken publicly about his successful use of ivermectin at a hospital board meeting, a meeting from which he was evicted.

Interviews with Littell went viral after he gave a speech at the Sarasota Memorial Hospital Board meeting last month in support of using Ivermectin to treat Covid and was subsequently removed by police after approaching a sympathetic board member. Since the video’s release Littell has amassed a large Twitter following and even appeared on Dr. Drew’s TV show to talk about what happened.

ABFM then sent him a letter “saying he’d been de-certified for ‘spreading false, inaccurate, and misleading materials about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccination, and treatment and mitigation of the virus.'”

Finally in response to Littell’s appeal in July ABFM decided to reinstate his license, but it also declared the license was retroactively de-certified for the previous three months, even though he had still being seeing patients because his license was supposed to be still active pending appeal.
» Read more

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The New York Times suddenly allows two scientists to admit the Big Bang theory might be wrong

9:09 am

Modern science
Modern science

The refusal by many in the scientific community to deny there is any uncertainty of science has been best illustrated for decades by the cosmologists who have put together the framework of the standard model for the creation of the universe, centered on the Big Bang, and their pitchmen in the mainstream press. Since the 1960s any skepticism of this model was generally treated as equivalent to believing in UFO’s, aliens, and the Face on Mars.

Thus, astronomers and astrophysicists did what necessary to protect their careers. Even if they had great doubts about the standard model and the Big Bang, they generally kept their mouths shut, saying nothing. Meanwhile, our increasingly corrupt press pushed this one explanation for the formation of the universe, treating the cosmologists who pushed it as Gods whose every word was equivalent of an oracle that must never be questioned.

This past weekend the New York Times suddenly admitted to the uncertainty surrounding the Big Bang, and for possibly the first time in decades allowed two scientists to write an op-ed that carefully outlined the problems with the standard model and the Big Bang theory, problems that have existed and been growing since the 1990s but have been poo-pooed as inconsequential and easily solved. Data from the Webb Space Telescope however has made that poo-pooing more and more difficult, as astrophysicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser make clear:
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Real pushback: School district immediately cancels ban on prayer when threatened with lawsuit

1:27 pm

The First Amendment, becoming accepted once again
The First Amendment, becoming accepted once again

Bring a gun to a knife fight: When the officials at West Shore School District in Pennsylvania sent out a letter to the presidents of the various booster clubs at its schools ordering them to “halt prayers at future banquets, and at any other school-sponsored activity” and claiming falsely that “student-initiated prayers at school events are illegal,” two non-profit free speech legal firms, First Liberty and the Independence Law Center teamed up to immediately send a letter to the district challenging that order:

First Liberty and our friends at the Independence Law Center quickly sent a letter to district officials asking them to immediately rescind that threatening letter. Our legal team offered to help draft a new letter and policies to ensure the district would not illegally discriminate against students and staff.

We explained in our letter that the First Amendment prohibits a school district from acting in a hostile manner toward religious belief.

To my readers this story is familiar. What has normally happened next in the past few years — since censorship and blacklisting has become all the rage by those in power — is that the government officials either ignore the letter or publicly defy it. Sometimes they double down and actually fire someone for exercising their First Amendment rights. What follows next is of course a lawsuit, which almost routinely ends in a crushing defeat for the school that costs it significantly in damages.

This story however ended quite differently:
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Pushback: Class action discrimination lawsuit filed against Gannett newspaper

1:34 pm

The Gannett logo abandoned in 2011
This Gannett logo was abandoned in 2011, for
one that eliminated any mention of equal employment.
We now know why.

“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” In what is certainly going to the beginning of a wave of lawsuits, five current and former Gannett employees, all white, have filed a class action lawsuit against the company, claiming its quota policies instituted in 2020 following the death of George Floyd are racist and discriminatory, favoring minorities over whites simply because of their race.

In the lawsuit, plaintiff Steven Bradley says he was fired from a management job at the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper in Rochester, New York, and then passed over for a different position with Gannett because he is white. Bradley in April filed a similar lawsuit against Gannett in New York state court. The status of that case was unclear.

Another plaintiff, Logan Barry, says he was in line for promotion to a leadership position at the Progress-Index in Petersburg, Virginia. After Gannett acquired the newspaper in 2019, the job went to a Black woman with fewer qualifications, according to the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs accused Gannett of violating a federal law prohibiting race discrimination in contracts. They are seeking to require Gannett to eliminate the 2020 policy, along with lost pay and benefits and other money damages.

» Read more

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The utter ignorance of modern educators on proud display the last two days in Colorado

3:32 pm

Jaiden and school official
Click to watch the video

In the last few days a story about a 12-year-old boy who was banned from classes because he had a Gadsden flag sticker on his backpack has gone viral, with the school, The Vanguard School, forced to cancel its parents night because of the outrage.

School officials had claimed that the Gadsden flag was not allowed at the school because it had “its origins in slavery and the slave trade,” a false statement of such utter ignorance of American history it leaves anyone with any education breathless with astonishment. The picture to the right shows the student Jaiden reacting in bemused disbelief at the moment that school official (in the background) made this absurd claim. He clearly knows more about American history than this brainless school official.

Not surprisingly, the uproar quickly caused the school’s board of directors to call an emergency meeting in which they backed down, especially as Jaiden had said he intended to continue to come to classes with the sticker on his pack, and would even do a sit-in if they dared try to kick him out again.

My purpose in mentioning this story however is to show how it illustrates so completely the bankruptcy of our education system today. Educators simply do not know American history, even though they are the people we expect to teach it. And when that ignorance is discovered, as in this case, they can’t just admit error and apologize, they have to equivocate and add more lies to their foolishness.
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Reviewing a book blacklisted by Amazon because it dared say things Amazon doesn’t like

1:35 pm

The Plague of Models, blacklisted by Amazon
The Plague of Models, blacklisted by Amazon

They’re coming for you next: Last week I posted an essay on the over-use and misuse of computer modeling in today’s scientific community, focused specifically on the unreliability of all climate models to successfully predict any actual climate trends.

One of the individuals who read my essay, Kenneth Green, immediately commented here on Behind the Black to note that he had just published a book on this very subject, entitled The Plague of Models: How Computer Modeling Corrupted Environmental, Health, and Safety Regulations, describing how the misuse of models has resulted in the proliferation of government regulations based not on actual data but on computer models that in many ways are nothing more than the opinions of the computer programs.

Green also noted that Amazon has refused to make his book available for sale, essentially banning it for no justifiable reason. As he explained to me in an email,

My publisher, who is a start-up small Canadian publisher specializing in public policy books, tried to upload The Plague of Models to Amazon, as he had previously done with half a dozen other books while working at previous institutions as in-house publisher.

This time, unlike his previous experiences, the book was taken down shortly after it was uploaded (and we know the upload process worked, since the book was available briefly for preview, so there was no technical issue with the manuscript file). The publisher got a form-letter email saying that the book had been taken down because it may have violated some (non-specific) Amazon Term of Service. When he sent a note back requesting clarification/appeal, he got another form letter, this one repeating that the book may have violated some term of service, and warning that any attempt to re-upload would get his entire account terminated.
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15 comments

Pushback: Court rules against East Lansing’s attempt to blacklist Christian for following his beliefs

1:38 pm

Country Mills Farms-banned!
The Tennes are a normal family! We must blacklist them!

They’re coming for you next: Today’s blacklist story is a follow-up on a August 2021 post, and is a victory, of a sort. As I reported then, after farmer Steve Tennes (shown to the right with his family) made the egregious error of stating his strongly held Christian belief that marriage is for a man and a woman only, and he would only rent his farm for such marriages, and not same-sex marriages, the city government of East Lansing decided to specifically write rules that would ban his farm from participating in its local farmer’s market.

The ban against their business, Country Mill Farms, was begun in 2016. Though a court quickly ruled that it was unconstitutional, the city renewed the ban in 2018 and has maintained it since, claiming the court’s ruling only applied to the 2017 season.

The logic of the East Lansing government is actually quite blatent: It believes it has the right to dictate what others can or cannot say in public, the first amendment be damned.

The city’s new rules quite clearly stated it was illegal for anyone to “make a statement which indicates that an individual’s patronage or presence at a place of public accommodation is unwelcome or unacceptable because of sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression.” You essentially had to agree to its queer agenda policies in all things, even if you were not in East Lansing or were doing business in a farm many miles away. And you better not express any dissent to those policies either!
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NASA reveals three year delay in its New Frontiers planetary mission program

9:21 am

NASA last week revealed that because of “budget uncertainty” it will not begin accepting project proposals in its New Frontiers planetary mission program this fall as planned, and will in fact not begin accepting new proposals until 2026.

At a NASA SMD town hall meeting July 27, Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, warned a potential extended delay in the release of the New Frontiers AO. “If the planetary science funding levels that are anticipated as a result of this tight budget environment are actually realized over the next two or so years,” she said, “it is unlikely we’ll be able to solicit New Frontiers perhaps not before 2026.” That delay was made official with the release of the community announcement.

The draft AO sought proposals for missions on six topics, as recommended by the planetary science decadal survey in 2011: a comet surface sample return, a mission to Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, a lunar geophysical network, a sample return mission to the moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin, a mission to characterize the potential habitability of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus and a probe of Saturn’s atmosphere.

The New Frontiers program previously funded the New Horizons mission to Pluto, the Juno mission to Jupiter, and the OSIRIS-REx asteroid mission to Bennu.

The article at the first link above as well as the NASA officials quoted attempt falsely to blame the budget problems on the Republican House leadership, which insisted that the committee which reviews the NASA budget as well as the budgets of Justice and Commerce cut 28.8% from among those agencies in its 2024 budget review. That committee (as well as the Senate) however was very generous to NASA, essentially giving it the same budget as previously, with only a 1% cut, while slashing budgets for departments in Justice and Commerce to make up the difference.

The real blame for this delay in NASA’s planetary program almost certainly falls on the Mars Sample Return mission, which has seen gigantic budget overruns that are apparently swallowing the entire future planetary program. NASA’s planetary budget can’t pay for any other new planetary missions as long as it must pay for the cost overruns for the sample return mission.

This is no surprise, as we’ve seen this movie before. When Webb’s budget ballooned 20x, from its proposed $500 million to $10 billion, it essentially shut down the rest of NASA’s astrophysics program, delaying or cancelling all other space telescope projects for more than a decade. Now the planetary program is experiencing its own version of this same pain.

The problem is the Mars Sample Return mission itself. Its design has been haphazard and sloppy and constantly changing. It is also reliant on older technology ideas that will soon be made obsolete by Starship/Superheavy. NASA would be wiser to delay that project to await the development of the launch capabilities that will make it cost effective, and let a fleet of other missions happen instead.

I guarantee however that NASA won’t do that, because it will require some boldness. The philosophy in Washington remains the same: Do the same failed thing over and over again in the vain hope it might work next time.

4 comments

Bank of America blacklists Christian nonprofit for what appears to be political reasons

12:38 pm

Bank of America-eager to blacklist

They’re coming for you next: Despite operating two different bank accounts without problems since 2015, Bank of America suddenly shut down the bank accounts of the Christian charitable non-profit Indigenous Advanced Ministries in April 2023, with the bank’s letters announcing the shut down [pdf] exceedingly vague but suggesting that politics played a part.

The initial letters gave no specific reason for the closures, only stating that “upon review of your account(s), we have determined you’re operating in a business type we have chosen not to service at Bank of America.” A later letter said, without explanation, that Indigenous Advance “no longer aligns with the bank’s risk tolerance.” The nonprofit does not advocate for any political causes and has maintained the same mission since it first opened its account with Bank of America.

Officials of the non-profit suspect hostility to its mission was the reason for the cancellations, however, and they have filed a consumer complaint [pdf] against Bank of America with Tennessee’s attorney general, demanding an investigation and noting that the sudden nature of the bank’s action caused a great deal of disruption and the non-profit.
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Reality strikes: Democrats in Democratically-controlled cities complain about the consequences of Democratic Party policies

1:34 pm

The Democratic Party, always failing but always voted for
The Democratic Party, though always failing it remains
the only party the voters in these cities can support

You get what you vote for: The utter disaster of the Marxist policies of the modern radical Democratic Party are now coming home to roost in numerous cities across America, making them all increasingly “unlivable” in ways that are savage, violent, and devastating. Crime is up, shoplifting is now a sports event, and murderers go free while local prosecutors indict ordinary citizens for simply defending themselves.

These facts are not news however. Since the 1960s Democratic Party policies have routinely done damage to the livability of American cities. What makes this collapse in civilization now even more significant however is who is noticing, as shown by three recent articles in the past week.

Let’s start with Minneapolis, where numerous videos document a formerly pleasant midwest city that has now become a hellhole.
» Read more

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Both Vikram and Pragyan functioning as planned on the Moon

9:29 am

Pragyan on the Moon
Click to see full movie.

According to tweets from India’s space agency ISRO, both the Vikram lander and the Pragyan rover are functioning as planned on the lunar surface, with the rover successfully activating its two science instruments.

The image to the right, taken by Vikram, shows the rover as it completed its roll down the ramp onto the lunar surface. This is a screen capture from a movie showing that roll down, which you can see by clicking on the picture. Since then it has moved another 26 feet from the lander.

I must add once again that Vikram did not land “on the south pole”, as too many so-called news organizations have been falsely claiming. It landed at about 69 degrees south latitude, quite a distance from that pole, in a flat region with no permanently shadowed craters. It is not specifically looking for water, though its instruments might help explain the orbital data that suggests there are areas on the surface of the Moon where hydrogen is somehow present.

If so many news outlets can’t seem to get these very basic facts about this mission correct, one must ask what else do they get wrong routinely? I don’t ask, because I always assume their information is wrong, check it constantly, and find repeatedly that they get numerous basic facts incorrect, especially when it comes to reporting on politics.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Real estate company fires a mother for expressing her opinions

3:43 pm

Janet Roberson and her family
Janet Roberson and her family

They’re coming for you next: A California mother of three, Janet Roberson, was fired only days after she stood up at her local school board and objected to the queer curriculum the board was forcing on young children. This is what she had said:

Janet Roberson spoke at a Benicia Unified School District (BUSD) meeting on April 20, where she expressed concerns about the district’s sexual education curriculum that she said taught “gender confusion, not gender clarification” because it told 10-year-old students they could choose their own gender and receive puberty blockers. She said teaching “vulnerable children that lifetime dependence on medical care is a viable option is completely unacceptable and evil.”

“Children are being asked to identify their pronouns and this is now part of the ten-year-old curriculum,” Roberson said of the curriculum. “This forces a gender discussion beyond the scope of the state requirements and complicates an already overburdened classroom environment.”
» Read more

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Biden’s Justice Department sues SpaceX

9:51 am

The corrupt and very partisan Justice Department of the Biden administration today sued SpaceX for discriminating against refugees and illegal immigrants because it restricts hiring to “U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.”

The lawsuit states SpaceX “failed to fairly consider” and “refused to hire” the asylees and refugees who ended up applying anyway. It also alleges that SpaceX “wrongly claimed” that the US’s export control laws allowed it to only hire US citizens and lawful residents. Additionally, the DOJ claims SpaceX hired “only” US citizens and green card holders from September 2018 to September 2020.

“Our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, says in a statement.

Justice is demanding compensation and back pay for anyone “deterred or denied employment”, as well as civil penalties.

This suit is utter garbage and puts SpaceX between a rock and a hard place. I guarantee if SpaceX had hired any illegal or refugee who was not yet a legal citizen, Biden’s State Department would have immediately sued it for violating other laws relating to ITAR (the export control laws mentioned) which try to prevent the theft of technology by foreign powers.

The Biden administration considers Elon Musk an opponent, and since it is now moving to indict and even imprison all political opposition, it is no surprise it is beginning to use lawfare against him. As I have written repeatedly, it has almost certainly pressured the FAA to slow walk any launch license approvals for SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy. This lawsuit today simply provides further evidence that my prediction will be right that the next orbital test flight of that rocket will be delayed months.

34 comments

Blacklisted 12-year-old appeals lower court decision saying he has no free speech rights

1:18 pm

The shirt that offended teachers at Nichols Middle School
Liam Morrison, wearing the evil shirt that he wore the
second time teachers at Nichols Middle School sent
him home.

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Today’s blacklist story is a follow-up from May. At that time 12-year-old Liam Morrison had discovered that his school, Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, would not allow him to wear a shirt that said “There are only two genders,” and when he tried to return to school with a shirt that instead said “There are only censored genders,” he was sent home again.

Morrison and his parents enlisted the non-profit legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom to sue for his first amendment rights, but in June Judge Indira Talwani (appointed by Barack Obama) ruled that Morrison had no right to the first amendment, that his shirt infringed other “students’ rights to be ‘secure and to be let alone’ during the school day.”

You can read her convoluted ruling here [pdf], which required her to ignore numerous previous Supreme Court rulings that have specifically protected student speech exactly like Morrison’s. Moreover, her decision is also based on the fraudulent premise that people are supposed to be protected from speech that offends them. If people have the power to silence any speech because it hurts their feelings then no free speech exists at all. We will live in a totalitarian nightmare worse than anything dreamed up by George Orwell.
» Read more

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I will NOT wear a mask, part two

5:16 pm

Here we go again! When the first panic over COVID arrived in 2020 and government thugs and their leftist minions in the culture began demanding that everyone wear a mask, I wrote the following:

It apparently has not been enough that they have successfully destroyed a thriving economy, put millions out of work, destroyed the airline, entertainment, sports, and restaurant industries, over a disease that, at best is nothing more than a slight blip in the overall death rate, and at worst will be comparable to similar past epidemics that we lived through without government-imposed panic or economic disaster.

No, destroying millions of lives has not been enough. They need to do more. They need to find more ways to squelch our freedom, nullify the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and, to paraphrase Orwell, stamp a boot down on our faces, forever.

And in this case, they mean to do this, almost literally.

They are now beginning to demand that we wear masks at all times in public, in the mindless and stupid belief that this will somehow stop COVID-19 from spreading.

I also declared unequivocally that I would not wear a mask, “and if you demand it of me you will have a revolution on your hands.”
» Read more

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It is time to devalue the software research of climate models

1:29 pm

When the table of contents of the most recent issue of the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Geophysical Research Letters was released on August 16, 2023, I could not help noticing it contained a string of papers repeatedly showing that the models used to prove the coming fire of global warming continue to remain untrustworthy and unreliable. All of the following papers indicated biases and uncertainties of both climate models as well as the data they used, and each did so in their titles:

All of these papers considered the models valid for future research, and were instead focused on refining and increasing the accuracy of the models. All however showed once again how little we should trust these models.

What makes the publication of these papers significant is that it was the AGU that published them, even though the AGU has a decidedly biased editorial policy in favor of global warming. Despite the AGU’s insistence that “realistic and continually improving computer simulations of the global climate predict that global temperatures will continue to rise as a result of past and future greenhouse gas emissions,” it still cannot avoid publishing papers that repeatedly disprove that conclusion.
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Movies when our culture was not run by barbarians

2:58 pm

Today’s essay will in a sense be part two of an essay I wrote earlier this week, entitled “We are becoming a nation of barbarians”. Then, I tried to show the decay in the western civilization by describing the accepted — almost encouraged — crudeness of modern language. While public cursing could easily be consider only a small and trivial issue, I think the increased use of obscene language in normal discourse is equivalent to the “broken windows theory” of psychology, which posits that minor visible signs of disorder and misbehavior encourage further and worse disorder and misbehavior, eventually leading to collapse.

Today I’d like to instead give some examples of the much more civilized nature of popular entertainment from only a half century ago, in order to contrast this with the present. To do this I will cite just four movie examples, and challenge everyone today who is a passionate fan of modern films to watch them (all of which are available for free on the internet) and recognize the differences that I will describe. If you like movies, you will enjoy the experience, but I warn you, modern popular entertainment films do not compare well with these mid-twentieth century pop movies.
» Read more

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Regulatory problems for Saxavord spaceport in Shetland?

9:53 am

In a short statement reported in the local Shetland press, the under-construction Saxavord spaceport in Scotland has apparently laid off some construction workers, claiming it has done so “because the project was so far ahead of schedule.”

The statement however also alluded to the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), which must issue a launch license before any launches can occur.

SaxaVord Spaceport said: “SaxaVord continues to have excellent dialogue with the authorities and is fully expecting to receiving its spaceport licence very soon from the Civil Aviation Authority. We are looking forward to hosting vertical rocket launches in the coming months.”

The application for this launch license was submitted in November 2022. It appears that the CAA still needs a year or more to approve any launch license, a slow and endless process that if not corrected will make launches from the United Kingdom completely unprofitable.

Saxavord had hoped to get its first launch off this year, by fall. It now appears that will not happen.

One comment

Today’s blacklisted American: California city harasses Rabbi for having guests over for dinner

1:20 pm

Beverly Hills: Where Jews are forbidden to pray
Beverly Hills: Where Jews are forbidden to pray

They’re coming for you next: The headline above is literally true, though you need to know a bit about Judaism, especially Orthodox Judaism, to understand what I mean exactly.

The story is this: Because Rabbi Levi Illulian, like all Orthodox Jews, routinely invites friends and acquaintances to join his family for Friday night dinner and Saturday lunch at his home during the weekly Saturday Sabbath, officials in Beverly Hills in California sent him a “notice of violation” on June 12, 2023, telling him that these dinners must cease, and ordered him to “terminate all religious activities” that included any “non-residents.” It also threatened him with civil and criminal proceedings if he didn’t stop praying with friends in his home.

It appears that the city’s actions were instigated by the complaints of one unnamed neighbor. As described in the letter [pdf] sent by Illulian’s lawyers to the city in response to its notice of violation, after receiving those two complaints in February and March about parking, trash, and noise, the city instituted an investigation that involved stake-outs of Illulian’s home and the use of drones over his property (without a warrant) in which city officials “not only tallied the number of individuals and cars coming and going from the Home, but also photographed Rabbi Illulian’s guests.”
» Read more

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Two-thirds of all approved cancer drugs do nothing for patients

4:26 pm

A long term study in Sweden of 22 cancer drugs that its government had approved for rapid use before being tested fully has found that two-thirds provided absolute no benefit to patients.

The Gothenburg team examined 22 cancer drugs approved for reimbursement in Sweden over the last 10 years, examining studies that tested their ability to improve quality of life or lengthen lifespans. On average, these reports examined the drugs for 6.6 years.

Results revealed only seven of the 22 drugs had at least one study which showed a clear benefit for cancer patients. Randomized controlled trials on the other 15 failed to show any tangible benefits for people with cancer. Only one drug in the study showed an ability to both improve the quality of life and extend lifespans for patients.

“We have shown that the majority of the drugs launched with limited evidence still lack clear evidence of how they actually affect survival and quality of life in patients,” says Gabriella Chauca Strand, a doctoral student at Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg and the lead author of the study, in a university release.

This sentence from the university’s press release was even more striking:

Only one of the drugs had scientific evidence of both increased life expectancy and improved quality of life for its indication.

Essentially, 95% of these approved drugs were failures. Most did nothing and were worthless, despite the Swedish government paying huge amounts of money buying them. A few either improved the quality of life (but failed to keep the patient alive) or kept the patient alive longer (but made their lives miserable).

Does this sound familiar? Doesn’t make you wonder about the drug approval process in the U.S., especially after the disaster of the emergency approval of the COVID shots that we know now not only failed to prevent infection, were actually very harmful to many.

6 comments

West Virginia University: to save money it eliminates 32 majors instead of its bloated overhead

1:15 pm

West Virginia University logo
West Virginia University: An example of bankrupt academia?

Bankrupt academia: The bankruptcy of intellectual thought in modern American academia is finally beginning to percolate down to the bankbook, at least in West Virginia. On August 11, 2023 the administration at West Virginia University released a report proposing the elimination of 32 majors while also eliminating 169 faculty positions.

The preliminary recommendations, released Friday afternoon, said 12 of those programs are undergraduate majors and 20 are graduate-level majors. Other programs were told to reduce their faculty size — 169 faculty jobs are on the line for cuts.

Programs marked for discontinuation included: master’s and doctorate in Mathematics; master’s and doctorate in Higher Education Administration; master’s of Public Administration; master’s of fine arts in Creative Writing; and a bachelor’s in Recreation, Parks and Tourism Resources. The Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, which includes Spanish, Russian and Chinese studies, was marked to be completely dissolved.

You can read the full report here. It is important to look closely at it, as it reveals some stark facts about how bankrupt academia remains. » Read more

5 comments

SpaceX report on first Starship/Superheavy launch failure submitted to FAA

9:34 am

Though we don’t know exactly when this was done, SpaceX has submitted to the FAA its final report on its investigation into the launch failure during the first Starship/Superheavy test launch in April, and now awaits the FAA’s response.

Now comes the FAA’s review of SpaceX’s investigation, fulfilling the agency’s role as the regulator charged with ensuring public safety during commercial launch operations. “When a final mishap report is approved, it will identify the corrective actions SpaceX must make,” an FAA spokesperson told Ars. “Separately, SpaceX must modify its license to incorporate those actions before receiving authorization to launch again.

Do not expect that response to be fast, or accepting. I predict the FAA will demand a lot more investigation and changes from SpaceX, actions that will take time to implement and be approved. Furthermore, I fully expect the FAA to take at least two months to review the SpaceX report before it issues those demands. As I have been predicting since May, there will be no Superheavy/Starship launch this year.

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We are becoming a nation of barbarians

2:16 pm

From Netflix's Barbarians series
Making heroes of barbarians, on Netflix

I have previous railed against the decline in the use of language in the United States. Not only do Americans now routinely use obscenities in normal language, they have been meekly acquiescing to the demands of the radical and somewhat insane queer movement to accept its weasel words in order to hide what it really is.

The recent viral and passionate endorsement by conservatives of all stripes to a new song and the performance by a new country singer, Oliver Anthony, illustrates how this decline to barbarism is accelerating. The focus of Anthony’s song is the cruel destruction of the American way of life by the power-brokers in Washington, and how those power brokers are making life so difficult for ordinary people.

What makes Anthony’s song indicative however of society’s increasing barbarous trend is his language. Right from the start he nonchalantly uses obscenities that would have once been considered unacceptable by everyone, and until recently utterly unacceptable among our more conservative population.

Yet now, even conservatives see nothing wrong with Anthony’s use of obscenities. Apparently, it is now okay for everyone to spew curse words everywhere, in public, in songs, for all to hear, from children to adults. Anthony’s message condemning the tyranny coming from Washington is too important to ignore. It must be touted widely, no matter how obscenely he couches his statement.

In other words, now even conservatives don’t care if our culture is debased and damaged. It doesn’t matter if we teach young children that they can act like barbarians, cursing and expressing wild emotions without thinking. It is policy and political power that matters, not doing right and behaving properly.

For though curses and obscenities have their place and proper time, in a civilization of rational civil adults one does not encourage their use. » Read more

16 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Gestapo police in Kansas raid home of 98-year-old newspaper owner, causing her death

12:44 pm

Joan Meyer
Joan Meyer, now dead because of police raid

On August 11, 2023 the entire police department of Marion, Kansas, performed a Gestapo-like raid of the home of 98-year-old Joan Meyer, co-owner of the local newspaper, the Marion County Record, resulting in her death from a heart attack the next day.

The elderly woman, who co-owned the newspaper with her son Eric, was subjected to the raid by five officers and two sheriff’s deputies on Friday – which caused her to be ‘stressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by hours of shock and grief.’ Eric, 69, has bashed the officers for their ‘Gestapo’ tactics in an attempt to seize information that hadn’t even gone to presses yet. Police have defended their actions.

Ms Meyer could not eat or sleep after the traumatizing hours-long ordeal. She was crying while the police raided her home and took her Alexa smart speaker – and died one day later. [emphasis mine]

It appears the police also that day raided the newspaper’s offices as well as the home of one of its reporters.

And why? All the evidence suggests this is a case of a local businesswoman working in teamwork with the police and a local judge to harass and destroy a newspaper. From the second link:
» Read more

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Today’s Blacklisted American: Best Buy joins the bigotry crowd

1:14 pm

They’re coming for you next: An anonymous employee at Best Buy has released through James O’Keefe’s new journalism outlet photographs of Best Buy’s new segregated and discriminatory management training program, specifically designed for minorities only, whites need not apply.

The picture below is from one of those photographs, cropped to show the instructions for applying to the program. The sections highlighted in red illustrate the program’s illegal and discriminatory nature.

Best Buy's Bigotry ProgramClick for original image.

If you have any doubt that Best Buy and its partner McKinsey & Company are doing this, you need only read Best Buy’s own press release announcing the program.
» Read more

9 comments

Retractions of peer-reviewed scientific papers has risen 13,750% in this century

11:47 pm

Modern peer review in science
Modern peer review in science

The present and growing dark age: According to the watchdogs who run the website Retraction Watch, the number of peer-reviewed scientific papers that have been retracted each year has risen from 40 in 2000 to 5,500 in 2022, an astonishing increase of 13,750%.

According to these watchdogs, there are two reasons for this increase in research failure:

Retractions have risen sharply in recent years for two main reasons: first, sleuthing, largely by volunteers who comb academic literature for anomalies, and, second, major publishers’ (belated) recognition that their business models have made them susceptible to paper mills – scientific chop shops that sell everything from authorships to entire manuscripts to researchers who need to publish lest they perish.

These researchers are required – sometimes in stark terms – to publish papers in order to earn and keep jobs or to be promoted. The governments of some countries have even offered cash bonuses for publishing in certain journals. Any surprise, then, that some scientists cheat?

I think the watchdogs are missing the major and much more basic source for this problem. » Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American was fired for refusing to participate in company’s programs that purposely excluded whites

12:50 pm

Cancelled at Compass Group
Cancelled unilatiterally by Compass’ management

They’re coming for you next: Courtney Rogers, who was fired as a human resources employee from the large food services company Compass Group because she refused to participate in any way with its “whites-need-not-apply” training and mentoring programs, has now filed suit against the company.

You can read her complaint here [pdf], filed by her attorneys working with the non-profit legal firm, the Thomas More Society. The introduction of that complaint outlines clearly the bigotry of Compass’s management and the policies it wished to install, as well as Rogers sincere and futile effort to not participate in this segregation and discrimination:

In early 2022, COMPASS—one of the largest companies in the world—devised a “diversity” program that it misnamed “Operation Equity.” The program offered only women and persons of color the opportunity to participate in training and receive mentorship, with a promise of guaranteed promotion.

The program’s accurate name would have been “White-Men-Need-Not-Apply.” The program was motivated by racial animus against white men held by certain members of COMPASS’s senior management. COMPASS executives like JOANN CANADAY, Vice President of Human Resources Operations (Canteen), and RALENA ROWE, Vice President of Talent Acquisition, stated that the program was intended to “right the wrongs of the last hundred years.” And they threatened would-be opponents of their program: “This is the direction the world is going, jump on the train or get run over.” And they proclaimed: “We are not here to appease the old white man.” Of course, RALENA ROWE and JOANN CANADY anticipated that “There would be a homogenous group of people against this program,” and they planned to draft a response to objections made by people in that “homogenous” group.
» Read more

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Pushback: Judge rules that libel suit against two black professors for slandering white real estate assessor can proceed

12:38 pm

Mott (l) and Connolly, eager to defame whites
Mott (l) and Connolly, eager to use race to
defame an innocent white man

Bring a gun to a knife fight: A U.S. district judge on August 2, 2023 ruled [pdf] that the defamation lawsuit of real estate assessor Shane Lanham against two black Johns Hopkins professors can now proceed.

And boy, does Lanhan stand a good chance of winning. This is a followup of an earlier blacklist story from February. The two professors, Nathan Connolly and Shani Mott, had publicly accused Lanham on national television of being a bigot because they had not liked the value he placed on their house. As I wrote then:

This story began when Connolly and Mott asked Lanham (who is white) and his company, 20/20 Valuations, to appraise their house. When they were unhappy with his appraisal, they decided to get another appraisal, but this time do what they themselves called a ““whitewashing experiment.” For the second appraisal they removed all evidence that a black family owned the house, to the extent of having a white friend present himself as the owner instead. The second appraisal, done months later, came up with a higher price.
» Read more

18 comments

Real pushback: Judge slams Southwest Airlines for violating settlement terms of free-speech court case

1:38 pm

Southwest: Enemy to free speech

Bring a gun to a knife fight: We now come to another chapter in the continuing saga of flight attendant Charlene Carter, who was fired in 2017 by Southwest Airlines because she had expressed opinions that were not liked by both the company and union officials. In 2022 a jury awarded her $5.1 million against the airline and the union.

In December 2022 the federal judge in the case, Brantley Starr, reduced the settlement award to $810,000 in order “to comply with federal limits on punitive damages.” However, he also approved the rest of the jury award, which required Southwest to rehire Carter as well as change its policies that violated the first amendment, and announce these facts publicly to its employees.

Only a month later Carter went back to court, demanding that the judge sanction Southwest for violating settlement terms of her court victory. Not only did the company not admit error to its employees, as required by the settlement, one company-wide memo slandered Carter again, calling her previous communications for which she was fired as “inappropriate, harassing, and offensive.”

Judge Starr yesterday responded to Carter’s demand for relief, slamming Southwest in no uncertain terms.
» Read more

10 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Chase bank politically cancels the accounts of several doctors, their families, and their employees

1:06 pm

JP Morgan Chase: eager to blacklist you for your opinions

They’re coming for you next: Continuing what increasingly appears to be its bank policy, JP Morgan Chase bank suddenly and without warning or reason recently canceled the bank accounts of several doctors, their families, and their employees, apparently because these doctors don’t abide by the lockdown policies and medical health advice of our government.

JPMorgan Chase is back to debanking. Once again, it’s not providing any explanations. And once again it’s targeting people who dare to question the Left Government/Woke Business conspiracy against liberty. At about the same time, it appears, Chase debanked, without warning, Drs. Syed Haider and Joseph Mercola. Wait, no. Not just them, but also Dr. Mercola’s employees – and his and their families. All without explanation.
» Read more

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