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September 2022

Whistleblower: FBI Manipulating J6 Cases to Support Biden Narrative of a National Crisis of Extremism By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/09/20/whistleblower-fbi-manipulating-j6-cases-to-support-biden-narrative-of-a-national-crisis-of-extremism-n1630716

According to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, an FBI whistleblower has come forward with information about how the FBI is manipulating cases related to the Capitol riot to create “the illusion” that domestic violent extremism is a pervasive problem in the United States.

Just The News reports that Jordan wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray stating that “the ‘manipulative case-file practice’ was being conducted by the bureau’s Washington field office, which was instructing local FBI offices to open up cases on their books that were in fact simply related to the Capitol breach.”

Jordan wrote, “The FBI’s case categorization creates the illusion that threats from [domestic violent extremism] are present in jurisdictions across the nation, when in reality they all stem from the same related investigation concerning the actions at the Capitol on January 6.”

“Such an artificial case categorization scheme allows FBI leadership to misleadingly point to ‘significant’ increases in DVE threats nationwide,” Jordan added.

California’s dead will have a new burial option: Human composting Melody Gutierrez

https://www.aol.com/news/californias-dead-burial-option-human-033705405.html

California will begin allowing an alternative burial method known as human composting in 2027, under a bill signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday.

Assembly Bill 351 by Assemblymember Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) will create a state regulatory process for natural organic reduction, a method in which human remains naturally decompose over a 30-to-45-day period after being placed in a steel vessel and buried in wood chips, alfalfa and other biodegradable materials. The nutrient-dense soil created by the process can then be returned to families or donated to conservation land.

Supporters say it’s an eco-friendly alternative to traditional end-of-life options. Cremation, for example, is an energy-intense process that produces carbon dioxide emissions, while traditional burial uses chemicals to embalm bodies and a nonbiodegradable coffin to store them.

California will join Washington, Colorado, Oregon and Vermont in allowing human composting.

“With climate change and sea-level rise as very real threats to our environment, this is an alternative method of final disposition that won’t contribute emissions into our atmosphere,” Garcia said in a statement.

MIT Study: Vaccine Hesitancy Is ‘Highly Informed, Scientifically Literate,’ and ‘Sophisticated’ Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/07/17/mit-study-vaccine-hesitancy-is-highly-informed-scientifically-literate-and-sophisticated-n1462591

Vaccine hesitancy is a big problem, according to the Biden administration.  Less than half the public is fully vaccinated while about 56 percent have received at least one jab.

The goal of fully vaccinating the American public appears to have stalled. This should not surprise us. When the vaccines were first approved for emergency use back in December 2020, 40 percent of Americans expressed skepticism about the vaccine.

Trying to shame the holdouts has failed spectacularly. Insulting and degrading them as “morons” or “ignorant” has resulted in a vicious pushback and a hardening of positions on getting vaccinated.

The administration’s plan of sending people door to door to vaccinate them only feeds anti-vaccine skepticism. Trust in authority is at an all-time low, which makes a government-sponsored vaccine program suspect.

Still, most experts agree that some people who should be getting vaccinated aren’t doing so. But the root cause isn’t ignorance or a belief in conspiracy theories. An MIT study on the problem revealed some surprising results.

Biden Student Loan Plan Backfire: Most Call It A Political Move — And Unfair: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/21/biden-student-loan-plan-backfire-most-call-it-a-political-move-and-unfair-ii-tipp-poll/

No doubt, President Joe Biden and his advisers believed student-loan forgiveness would be a big winner in the upcoming midterm elections. If so, it was a political miscalculation, with most Americans rejecting the idea as unfair and a political stunt, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

Under Biden’s plan, unveiled in late August, he will cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for those who had have Pell Grants and up to $10,000 in debt for those earn less than $125,000 per year, $250,000 for married couples.

By a margin of 59% to 32%, Americans agreed that Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan “is unfair to those whose children are not in college or who have already paid for their kid’s education to have to pay for other people’s education.” Another 8% called themselves “unsure.”

Perhaps surprising is that the rejection of the idea is multi-partisan in nature. While Republicans, as might be expected, agreed that it is unfair at the highest rate (67%), Democrats (55%) and independents (56%) weren’t that far behind.

Among all respondents, only one group was below 50%: Those who self-identified as “liberals.” Just 42% of that group agreed student-loan forgiveness was unfair. Among “moderates,” the level of agreement was 60%; for “conservatives,” it was 72%, tied for the highest for any of the other major demographic and political groups that I&I/TIPP polls routinely measure.

From Migrant Busing to Climate Change, Fake Virtue Abounds The layers of hypocrisy are thick enough to shield you from the wind as you play golf on Martha’s Vineyard. Gerard Baker

https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-migrant-busing-to-climate-change-were-awash-in-fake-virtue-esg-carbon-capitalism-moral-imperative-

“American-led capitalism—unencumbered by the modern mandates of ESG, impact investing and the rest—has done an astonishing job of creating wealth for all, lifting more people out of poverty than any economic system ever devised. The morally righteous urge to rein it in has always led to greater poverty, and the current prevailing ideology will be no different.”

With the labor market tight, you would think that the transfer of buses and planes of migrants to Democratic strongholds would be considered an economic opportunity for struggling liberal plutocrats.

If you were a leading progressive warrior for diversity, equity and inclusion battling it out in the trenches of Martha’s Vineyard, wouldn’t you be delighted at the sudden arrival of a little extra (minimum-wage) help from down south to assist in the final push toward social justice?

What self-respecting ESG fund manager wouldn’t welcome some additional (low-cost) labor to lower the Pride flag over her perfectly whitewashed clapboard colonial every evening or iron her copy of the New York Times in the morning?

But the layers of hypocrisy in our immigration debate are so thick you could wear them to shield yourself from the stiff breeze that can ruin your T-shot to the short 16th at the Edgartown Golf Club.

The White House calls the transfers “shameful.” New York Mayor Eric Adams describes them as “horrific.” Leading Democrats condemn them as “literally human trafficking” and “crimes against humanity.”

Somehow the Biden administration’s own shipping of thousands of migrants to New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere isn’t judged by the same standards. Homeland Security Department officials reportedly dubbed the moves the “Abbott plan,” in jocular homage to the earlier transfers organized by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whose actions progressives put on a moral par with those of the greatest despots in history.

A requiem for Black Lives Matter BLM was meant to help black people — it’s done the opposite Wilfred Reilly

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/20/a-requiem-for-black-lives-matter/

Black Lives Matter has yet to receive a requiem, a summation in print. More than seven years into the globally unavoidable anti-police movement, there certainly exists a sizable BLM academic literature, dealing – as my political science colleague Bob Maranto has pointed out – with questions ranging from how the movement impacted on youth-voter turnout to the social impact of Ben & Jerry’s selling politically themed flavours of ice-cream.

However, almost no one has examined how well Black Lives Matter met its initial goals: reducing the police violence that was invariably presented as ‘epidemic’ or ‘genocidal’ and reducing crime more broadly, as brothers and others came to trust a fairer criminal justice system. For that matter, whatever happened to the literally billions of dollars donated, in good faith, to national and local BLM chapters?

This article takes a shot at those tough questions. In most cases, unfortunately, the blunt but real answer seems to be: Black Lives Matter had few, if any, positive impacts. Police violence is down slightly, if at all, while overall crime in BLM-affected areas has sky-rocketed back to 1990s levels. As Dr Maranto and I recently noted for Commentary magazine, rates of fatal shootings of civilians by US police – per an authoritative database from the Washington Post – appear to have hardly budged during the post-2014 BLM era. There were 994 fatal police shootings in toto in 2015, 958 in 2016, 981 in 2017, 993 in 2018, 999 in 2019, and 1,020 in 2020.

Not only was this change in rate clearly not significant in statistical terms, police shootings of citizens actually increased almost three per cent during the period under review. Fatal police shootings specifically of black Americans followed a very similar pattern year-on-year, with 258 black men and women shot in 2015, 236 shot in 2016, 222 in 2017, 228 in 2018, 251 in 2019, and 243 in 2020. The same was true for killings of unarmed persons: 95 ‘fatal shootings of an unarmed individual’ did take place in the outlier year of 2015, but we then saw 64 in 2016, 71 in 2017, 58 in 2018, 54 in 2019, and 60 in 2020 – a variance of less than seven per cent between the first typical year given here and the last.