440 private links
Scientists are suing an academic publishing company for retracting three key studies exposing the dangers of the nation’s most popular abortion drug regimen shortly before the U.S. Supreme Court was slated to hear arguments in a landmark mifepristone case.
Ten of the researchers responsible for producing the three scientific papers filed a petition to compel arbitration this week against Sage Publications for issuing what they called “pretextual and discriminatory” retractions of their findings on the abortion pill. One of the studies in question, which the lawsuit notes is “the second most-read article” in the journal’s history, specifically determined mifepristone is responsible for a 500 percent increase in abortion-related emergency room visits.
The 2019, 2021, and 2022 papers originally passed peer review for publication without a hitch. The editor-in-chief of Sage’s Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology (HSRME) journal even emailed Dr. James Studnicki, the lead author of the 2021 and 2022 papers, to commend him for his “fine contribution[s],” according to the petition.
In February 2024, however, Sage’s tune changed over a “reader’s concern” that the authors’ links to pro-life organizations “present conflicts of interest that the authors should have disclosed as such in the article.”
Abortion activist researchers publish plenty of papers on the topic without scrutiny. Yet Sage, after what it called an “independent review,” ultimately followed through with the retractions.
According to Presler, he uncovered an attempt by the Pennsylvania Department of State to begin maintenance of their registration system during the Trump rally. As Presler stated in an interview with Human Events Daily, the registration site announced that the registration website will be "undergoing maintenance" during Trump's big return in order to deaden the hype around his appearance and hopefully cause fewer registration sign-ups.
As Presler noted, usually when maintenance is done, it's in the "wee hours of the morning," however, this particular maintenance was scheduled between 6 pm and 12 am. The Trump rally that day was going to begin at 5 pm.
"It was clear that the Pennsylvania Dept. of State was engaging in election interference, trying to stop all this national attention from translating into new voter registrations," Presler told Human Events. //
When you really stop to think about it, this kind of subtle manipulation could very well be happening all over the nation. Often, we see election interference and cheating as big things, but it's small, sometimes undetectable, things like this would have been in any other situation. The truth is that there are people out there who are doing everything they can in order to tilt the scales in Kamala Harris's favor, no matter how grand or small.
It's crazy that we have to be this observant, but this is the enemy Republicans are up against. They're a party whose unofficial motto is "by any means necessary."
Even if it means flooding swing states with illegals, this is what they'll do. //
KJSpeed 2 hours ago
And these same people are going to go quietly into the night if Trump pulls out an electoral victory on November 5th? Not bloody likely!
Maximus Decimus Cassius KJSpeed 2 hours ago
Correct. People who steal elections don't allow a transition of that power--peacefully or otherwise.
Trump War Room @TrumpWarRoom
·
.@AshleyMoodyFL: "Everyone should be waking up this morning outraged... They have taken the FEMA EMERGENCY food and shelter program, and over time, siphoned off hundreds of millions of dollars into basically making it an illegal immigrant resettlement program."
1:22 PM · Oct 3, 2024 //
FEMA @fema
·
If you were affected by Helene, we urge you to apply for assistance as soon as possible.
We understand that everyone's journey to recovery is different, so we are here to help with your unique situation.
To apply, call 1-800-621-3362 or visit http://DisasterAssistance.gov.
#Helene
5:22 PM · Oct 2, 2024
But riddle me this: How do people who have absolutely no access to phone, power, or internet accomplish this? This is one indication that someone at FEMA failed to think this through.
There have been claims that FEMA is restricting private citizens from rendering rescue, aid, and comfort to the ravaged towns and limiting emergency response to their approved agencies, and counter claims that this is not occurring. What appears to be confirmed is that whatever resources FEMA does have available are not being distributed. Aircraft, ambulances, fuel supply tankers, and trucks with supplies that are supposed to be for the Hurricane Helene victims are sitting on a tarmac in Greenville, SC, still waiting to deploy. //
RedinOR 3 hours ago edited
This is why we should NOT have socialized healthcare. The government (as currently mismanaged) is incapable of efficiency. No one in the government bureaucracy is incentivized to operate in a way to maximize resources and funding. Their survival is based on growing, when they should be focused on staying as small as they can be and still cover the bases. It is said that a piece of writing is perfect not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove. The same can be said of a bureaucracy.
This is a tragic reminder that the government cannot be trusted to be there when we most need support. //
duggersd 3 hours ago
Someone else pointed out to me that the beginning of the fiscal year is October 1. So how did they run out of money in less than 4 days?
Sonia Purnell’s just released biography of Pamela Harriman, Kingmaker, attempts to be fairer to its subject than previous biographies. As the subtitle implies, Harriman led a “Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue,” and there is a lot in here about the subject’s early role as a courtesan. Whatever the details of that role, it was far in the past when I came to know and work with Ambassador Harriman on issues of international importance.
During my last four years in the FBI, I worked with dozens of U.S. ambassadors. I served as the Legal Attaché (“Legat” in Bureau jargon) at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. However, for the FBI and the DOJ, our office had wide regional responsibility. We handled the business of the Justice Department with 26 countries in Africa. So, I dealt with a wide variety of our ambassadors at posts large and small.
“Political” ambassadors are often criticized as dilettantes who buy their appointments with large campaign donations. They are contrasted with career ambassadors, who rise through the ranks of the State Department. I have quite a different impression. The political ambassadors, coming from various roles in American society, saw their mission as representing the United States as a whole, while career ambassadors narrowly protected the interests of the State Department, to the exclusion of other agencies.
When I was first assigned to the embassy in Paris, it was led by an ambassador who understood and valued what the FBI could do. Yes, she was a substantial fundraiser for President Bill Clinton, who appointed her, but she demonstrated a love for her adopted country. Pamela Churchill Harriman, a British-born aristocrat, had become the U.S. ambassador to France just months before my arrival in June 1994. //
That is how we happened to set up a luncheon for a group of federal judges.
At that luncheon, Thomas S. Ellis III, a federal district judge from the Eastern District of Virginia, discussed the World War II Normandy landings. Tom Ellis was recommending a new book. He mentioned a specific finding by the author, concerning a key Allied decision.
Ambassador Harriman responded, “No, that was Ike’s call.”
Judge Ellis persisted. “This author says …”
The ambassador: “Oh, no, Omar Bradley told me it was Ike’s call.”
A look of recognition came over Judge Ellis’s face: He realized he was in the presence of someone with firsthand knowledge of World War II.
Pamela Churchill Harriman was truly a remarkable woman. Once married to Winston Churchill’s only son and the mother of Churchill’s only grandson, she was in the room when many of the key decisions of World War II were made. For the next half century, she would continue to meet influential men, be they from London, Washington, or Hollywood. //
Thomas J. Baker is an international law enforcement consultant. He served as a FBI Special Agent for 33 years in a variety of investigative and management positions facing the challenges of crime and terrorism. He is the author of "The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy."
Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today.
None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true.
What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.
More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science.
While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited. //
1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life’
But no such ‘great peril to life’ has been observed as the so-called ‘ozone hole’ remains: //
2008: Al Gore warns of ice-free Arctic by 2013
But… it’s still there:
The world is exploding – not just the Middle East. Russia is, again, rattling nuclear sabers. A thug union leader, who resembles Nikita Khrushchev playing a “mafia capo,” issued a Khrushchev-like “we will bury you” threat. A massive disaster is unfolding in America’s South. Joe has been napping.
The people close to him knew that he was a human train wreck. Jill Biden had to have known that even before he announced in 2020. Much like Edith Wilson taking the reins for her own addled husband, Jill Biden has been the titular president for at least two years. She knew. So did Kamala Harris. Not once has a debate moderator asked that very basic “leading” question.
"When did you know that Joe was incapable of being president?"
Sure, they would lie, but make her face the camera and lie to our faces.
Kamala Harris knew that her boss was incapable of acting as president, yet because of optics and Jill Biden's hubris, an addled, incompetent Joe Biden was “allowed” to stay in the presidency. A human head of broccoli is "running" the executive branch.
The world is falling apart but because of backroom politics, we have “Bob” from Shady Hills as President of the United States.
God Help Us. //
ibt
18 hours ago
They kept Joe in place so they could make the decisions and blame him when things went wrong. How much graft is going on behind the scenes to people that can legally claim they had nothing to do with the decision Joe made. //
Betsy Ross
20 hours ago
God stands back. He did with Israel. After doing EVERYTHING for his people, many times over, he allowed, what they allowed. You believe you are smarter than the Creator? You believe you can live among pagans and evil and take what you want from me and ignore what you don't like?
Prophets warned. People ignored.
Pretty much where we are.
Look around. People still believe government will save them. We have very little regard for the One who controls the universe.
Joe Biden is a perfect example of why governments have and will always fall. He believes he is God.
Perhaps you've seen the video of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg going around where he tells citizens to refrain from sending drones into the air, or piloting aircraft in the area where Helene has left a path of destruction.
"There's also some safety issues that come up," said Buttigieg. "For example, temporary flight restrictions to make sure the airspace is clear for any flights or drone activity that might be involved in helping to allow those emergency responders to do their job."
Brandon Morse @TheBrandonMorse
·
This video is the government attempting to stop footage from getting out that shows the extent of their ineptitude and halt civilians help so there’s no contrast to highlight it’s failure. Full stop.
12:26 PM · Oct 3, 2024
The excuse is that you need to keep your drone or aircraft out of the sky in order to allow emergency workers to do their jobs and not complicate matters. That would be a valid thing to suggest... if there was an effective rescue operation going on, but there's not. As I covered in my last VIP article, FEMA is out of disaster relief money because it was spent on illegals.
If you're like me, you probably didn't see this as a federal official attempting to help people. Given that this is the Biden-Harris administration, you probably became suspicious pretty quickly that something else was likely behind Buttigieg's words.
Personally, this feels a lot like a call for censorship, even if it's just an attempt to encourage it through "advice."
If you want to know what the real story on the ground is, the government isn't going to tell you. Their response has been disastrous, and it makes them look awful. The less you see of this disastrous response, the better for them. They can craft their own narrative where they were the ever-present heroes working hard to help victims.
But it would be an egregious lie. The real heroes are the ones out there helping their fellow civilians in any way they can. Private pilots are attempting to rescue stranded victims. Food and water are being delivered where it can be effective, and this is in spite of government disaster groups telling them to stop. //
Maximus Decimus Cassius
19 hours ago
The "authorities" are trying to enforce no-fly zones for everything--helicopters, drones, whatever--to prevent assistance to the stricken. This is beyond treason.
Lets just call it what it is: government sponsored genocide. //
Vigilo
17 hours ago
This is like the Biden regime response to the Maui wild fire. "No cameras allowed". //
Sancho Panza
18 hours ago
The idea of citizens taking direct action to make things better for their communities, neighbors, families and selves has uncomfortable connotations for fascists. They feel it keenly, and instinctively suppress it any way they can.
This is a conflict of good vs. evil. There is simply no other way to describe it.
Fawzia Amin Sido, an innocent girl, was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery. That's an act of such depraved barbarity as to be hard to imagine among civilized people, and yet, that's what happened. She was rescued by troops from Israel - the same Israel that clueless useful idiots on American college campuses accuse of "genocide." Israel was acting on information provided by the United States - the same United States that the mullahs running the theocracy in Iran accuse of imperialism. The United States was given that information by unnamed officials in Iraq, which is unfortunately at the crossroads of the entire Middle East (and thus all its conflicts).
Civilized people don't take children as captives and sell them into slavery. Good people don't do these things. Uncivilized, evil people do these things. Savages, barbarians, and the utterly inhuman do these things.
And they would do them here, in the United States, given the opportunity.
Those are the stakes. Fawzia Amin Sido's case serves as a horrible reminder. Her captivity is over, but she will bear the scars, emotional and physical, as long as she lives. She is back with her family, but the memory of her captivity will no doubt always haunt her. But if civilization does not prevail, her suffering, and the suffering of untold thousands like her, will have been for nothing. //
Claudius54 Indylawyer
16 hours ago edited
You really don't need to 'expect' ... 300K missing children in U.S. is a documented known fact due to Harris/Biden (illegal) immigration policy. Waltz tried to paint this as 'compassion' the other night. You really don't need to turn your eyes a half world away to witness barbarity. Most likely it's occurring right next to you. Truth be told the cartels probably make Hamas look like pikers. The difference is that IDF is resolving crap like this is Gaza ... while juvenile immigrant chattels in the U.S. are depending on Alejandro Mayorkas. I'm old enough to remember when they started putting missing kid's faces on milk cartons. Now all the talking heads can manage to do is change the subject or obfuscate the definition of "legal status".
If ActBlue is engaged in smurfing, that would be blatant election interference and give Democrats an unfair advantage in the all-important fundraising battle between the two parties. The Patriot Act gave law enforcement agencies the authority to curb money laundering by putting into place reporting requirements for deposits over $10,000. Given they have that authority, it's unlikely the group of state attorneys general will stop their investigation any time soon. They have requested the answers be delivered by October 23, 2024, well in advance of Election Day. //
Cynical Optimist
14 hours ago
ActBlue has been doing this for years, yet nothing has ever been done. I wonder how often I have said that phrase?
"Yet nothing has ever been done." //
KilRoy-db
11 hours ago edited
Yeah that 85yr old lady that Okeefe (from OMG) found that supposedly gave $105,000 from her social security check to Act Blue !! She didn't seem to know anything about it when
he spoke to her at her Government Housing apartment....
But it was broken up into 1050 donations over a period of a year. Yeah 3 a day !! //
chaz KilRoy-db
3 hours ago
https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/
I spent minutes and found lots of people donating small dollar amounts several times a day for months. The info is out there, it is beyond ridiculous. //
anon-6hg6
12 hours ago edited
For years OMG has shown examples of citizens being listed as small amount donors in the tens of thousands, but when the home owner/resident is asked they have no knowledge of the donations. Better late than never on these investigations.
Over the years Cummins has produced a series of innovations, such as the first automotive diesel, in addition to being the first to use supercharging and then turbocharging. All cylinders are commonly served through a low-pressure fuel line. The camshaft control of the mechanical injector controls the timing of injection throughout the operating range. This design eliminates the timing-lag problems of high-pressure systems. To meet Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) exhaust emissions standards, Cummins offers the Celect (electronically controlled injection) system. Since the Celect system did not start production until 1989, there are literally thousands of Cummins with pressure-time (PT) fuel systems. //
A major feature of the PT pump system is that there is no need to time the pump to the engine. The pump is designed simply to generate and supply a given flow rate at a specified pressure setting to the rail to all injectors. The injectors themselves are timed to ensure that the start of injection will occur at the right time for each cylinder.
Around 0800 hrs of 22 December 1992, the Boeing 727 of Libyan Arab Airlines, registered as 5A-DIA, underway on Flight 1103 from Benghazi to Tripoli, was approaching the Libyan capital. The ground control advised the crew per radio to hold its position at 1,067m (3,500ft) above the Papa Echo beacon, about 10 kilometres (5.4nm) from Tripoli International for three minutes, due to military traffic. The ‘military traffic’ in question was a MiG-23UB of No. 1023 Squadron, crewed by Captain Abdel-Majid Tayari and a novice pilot. Following the take-off from Mitiga AB, the ground control advised Tayari to climb, turn and head towards Papa Echo.
Unaware of the airliner ahead of him, the seasoned fighter-pilot followed instructions of his ground controller to the dot and comma.
Moments later, Tayari and the student in the front cockpit were shocked to sense a detonation on the underside or below their aircraft. A fire broke out. A friction of second later, they saw the big fin of the Boeing 727 right in front of them, already separated from the airliner – and then Tayari initiated an ejection. The airliner disintegrated while still on approach to Tripoli International, killing all 157 of its crew and passengers.
The ‘negative effects of international sanctions’
Barely surviving this tragedy – Tayari suffered multiple fractures in his right hand during ejection – the crew of the MiG-23UB was shocked to find itself jailed in the hospital of Mitiga AB. The investigation of the Libyan authorities – unfairly – blamed them of either colliding with the Boeing 727, or opening fire and shooting it down: many of their superior officers and civilian servants wanted them hung on the Green Square in Tripoli.
….actually: Gaddafi ordered the flight to be shot down to demonstrate ‘negative effects of international sanctions’ – imposed on Libya after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1989: because of numerous embargos, Libyan Arab Airlines could not fly its planes safely, and thus the victims of the crash were supposed to be presented as victims of ‘Western terrorism’. A bomb with a timer had been placed on board the Boeing 727: when this failed to detonate, Gaddafi personally ordered the aircraft to be knocked out of the sky….
Then it was time for the individual interview. The head of training and the HR guru sat me down and weren’t quite sure what to make of me. I was clearly the first (and probably only) F-14 pilot they’d ever interviewed, so they fumbled with questions like “Um… what makes you think you can handle a 250-knot turboprop?”
‘Then came the clincher: “So, why should we hire you versus all those other people out there?” They expected an answer involving hundreds of carrier landings, flying supersonic, blah, blah so I must be a great pilot. Instead, I thought for a second and said “I’m sure any of us can fly your planes just fine. I’d like to think I’m the sort of person who you can sit next to for ten hours, and not want to slug.”
‘The interview screeched to, a halt. Director of training looked at the HR dude and said “Write that down.” HR said “Already got it.” They thanked me, shook my hand, and I knew I had the job.’
The UK has announced it is giving up sovereignty of a remote but strategically important cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean after more than half a century.
The deal – reached after years of negotiations - will see the UK hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in a historic move.
This includes the tropical atoll of Diego Garcia, used by the US government as a military base for its navy ships and long-range bomber aircraft.
The announcement, made in a joint statement by the UK and Mauritian Prime Ministers, ends decades of often fractious negotiations between the two countries.
The US-UK base will remain on Diego Garcia – a key factor enabling the deal to go forward at a time of growing geopolitical rivalries in the region between Western countries, India, and China. //
Half a century or more after the UK relinquished control over almost all its vast global empire, it has finally agreed to hand over one of the very last pieces. It has done so reluctantly, perhaps, but also peacefully and legally.
The remaining British overseas territories are: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands. There are also two sovereign base areas on Cyprus under British jurisdiction.
Steve Sailer’s ‘Noticing,’ collects decades of the politically incorrect journalist’s columns, conclusively demonstrating that he is one of our most astute and farseeing pundits.
Mark Moyar’s story shows why Trump has to prove to the people he needs for an effective presidency that he will not leave them twisting in the wind. //
In advance of Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, the Democratic National Committee put up a billboard outside Madison Square Garden calling Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, the “Poster boy for Project 2025.” As predicted by campaign email blasts, during the debate Kamala Harris’ running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, name-checked this blueprint for conservative federal governance, yet again proving the Harris-Walz campaign has zero policy accomplishments to run on.
Since most voters don’t care about this pretty unremarkable effort to slim an ungovernable federal bureaucracy and staff the next Republican administration with effective people loyal to the United States, it’s telling that Democrats have turned it into the only other issue they’re running on besides abortion until birth. It shows Democrats believe growing the unelected bureaucracy that undermines elected officials such as Congress and the president is their top priority (competing with murdering mostly black and brown babies in the womb).
It’s also yet more evidence they always push Republican defeat even in the event of Republican victory, because Project 2025 proposals are nothing more than simple common sense. A majority of voters, and three-quarters of solid Republicans, think the federal government is corrupt. And it is. It’s now obviously a far cry from early progressive fantasies about “apolitical experts.” It’s a politicized fifth column enacting regime change by substituting unelected, unconstitutional government for elected, constitutional government of, by, and for Americans. //
A book out this year, Masters of Corruption, by former Trump appointee Mark Moyar, provides yet another vivid illustration of why. In it, Moyar, a former Trump appointee to the U.S. Agency for International Development, details how career bureaucrats sabotaged his whistleblowing on their corruption. His story shows that Trump has to prove to the people he needs for an effective presidency that he has their back, and that if they work to achieve Trump’s goals in office they will not be left twisting in the wind.
That’s effectively what happened to Moyar. A researcher with military and foreign policy experience, plus a PhD, Moyar wrote his sixth book in 2016. He submitted the manuscript for Defense Department review, in multiple ways going far above the legal and regulatory standards for ensuring he didn’t release classified information. After the department failed to review his manuscript despite receiving more than six times as much time to do so as court precedent allows, Moyar informed them he was moving forward with publication.
The book was published, and that was the end of it — until Moyar became a Trump appointee at USAID two years later and started to blow the whistle on corrupt employees. Then the manuscript review resurfaced. It was used as a pretense to deny Moyar the security clearance he needed to do his job, then ultimately to kick him out of the job on the grounds that he couldn’t do it without a security clearance. In a recent speech, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, started USAID to benefit U.S. policy, but it’s become a CIA front organization for regime change.
The entire time, no one ever provided any evidence that Moyar had published any classified material in his book that the Defense Department had failed — or refused — to review. And higher-level Trump appointees refused to defend Moyar against the bureaucratic jackals, leaving him defenseless. While his security clearance was held up simply out of spite, he couldn’t be hired for the majority of jobs for which he is qualified.
Torture by a Thousand Bureaucrats
That sounds Kafka-esque enough, yet it is a very brief gloss on the labyrinthian twists and turns that Moyar’s book relates. Reading them imparts a horror of ever getting caught in such a system embedded with people with the power to screw with you while they trap you there, all out of sheer hatred for political commitments that represent half the country. //
Moyar points out that anti-Trump bureaucrats worked furiously to sabotage the work voters had elected Trump to accomplish. They organized within agencies like an internal spy ring. They used their government positions to — often illegally — leak half-truths to media in a way that would damage Trump’s ability to govern. In Zoom meetings, they “offered the federal employees tips for thwarting Trump appointees, such as concocting excuses for procedural delays, demanding protracted legal reviews, leaking information to sympathetic journalists, and bringing complaints to the inspector general,” Moyar writes.
Thousands of good people who risked their careers to advance Trump’s policy agenda were not only backstabbed by agency colleagues, like Moyar was, but also placed on Democrat target lists and personally and professionally harassed to this day. //
Trump’s September promise to appoint Elon Musk to “conduct[] a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” also is the right direction. A week later, Musk gave more details, according to a RealClearPolitics transcript: “We do have an opportunity to do kind of a once-in-a-lifetime deregulation and reduction in the size of government. Because the other thing besides the regulations, America is also going bankrupt extremely quickly.”
When asked if federal agencies could be cut by “two, three, four, five percent,” Musk replied, “I think we’d need to do more than that.” Yes, more — try at least a factor of ten.
Iran had already been concerned for years that Mossad, an Israeli intelligence agency, had infiltrated Tehran’s ranks, the outlet reported. Following Nasrallah’s death, that concern has grown larger — and Iranian officials have become worried about Khamenei’s safety, officials and sources close to the matter told Reuters.
“The trust that held everything together has disappeared,” an Iranian official told Reuters.
“[Khamenei] no longer trusts anyone,” another source close to the Iranian regime told Reuters. //
Authorities have opened investigations to see whether some Iranian officials or members of Iran’s military are compromised, another Iranian official told Reuters. The investigations are particularly centered around officials who travel or have family outside the country.
Authorities are reportedly suspicious of Iranian military members who have recently been in Lebanon, one of the officials told Reuters. One of the military members had recently been asking about Nasrallah’s location, raising eyebrows among other officials. That individual was arrested, along with several others, the official told Reuters. //
Chillypod anon-ymous99 an hour ago
Mossad is freaking the Iran leaders out and it's probably by design. They will not trust their most trusted people right now and it's great. Think about them arresting their own close people, it's bound to make quite a few other ones very nervous. //
KJSpeed Chuck in TX 2 hours ago
It would be like Israel to plant incriminating evidence on anyone they want taken out. Let the Ayatollah be the means to his own end. //
veritaseequitas 2 hours ago
Mohammad nowhere to be found. No comfort, no peace, no absence of fear.
Islam is a cult, worshipping a man. //
DonH-Texas 2 hours ago edited
Isn't it odd that the ayatollahs are not so ready to be martyred as they are to send off their flunkies to die? They act a whole lot like godless politicians in secular states.
If you want to know what people really are, don't rely on what they say, look at what they do. //
Seidhom said he tried to de-escalate and asked the official for instructions on how to communicate with the Lake Lure Fire Department while he was flying a rescue mission near the town. Seidhom said the fire official ordered him to leave and not come back.
“If that’s what you want us to do, we’ll leave no issue. And I explained to him that I left my son on the side of the mountain, and I left another victim. I was going to go back and bring them. It was already set up for the landing spot and then I would get out of his area. He told me I wasn’t going to go back up the mountain to get them, I was going to leave them there.”
Seidhom said he asked the official for a specific reason he was ordering him to stop his rescue efforts. “You’re interfering with my operation,” is the reason Seidhom said the fire official gave.
“I’m going back and getting my copilot. He said, ‘If you turn around and go back up the mountain, you’re going to be arrested.’ I said, ‘Well, sir, I’m going back to get my copilot, I don’t know what to tell you.'”
Seidhom said the official called over two law enforcement officers and again threatened him with arrest if he flew back up the mountain.
“At that point, I had to make a decision. I have a victim, I have my son, and I politely asked the officers, told him the situation again, explained everything, told them who I’d been coordinating with, and I said, ‘Hey if I go back up and get this victim and bring him down to this landing spot that other emergency personnel have designated, am I going to be arrested? And the officers’ response was, ‘Man, I really don’t know what to do in this situation.’ I said, ‘So you can’t tell me if I’m going to get arrested or not?’ And he said, ‘Man, I’m not sure what to do.'”
The out-of-state chief and fire captain Seidhom said he encountered at the landing zone spoke with him before he took off.
“They came back over and said, ‘Hey, man, we can’t tell you to go get the victim. We can’t even ask you to go get the victim, but we can tell you if you come back with the victim, we’ll have you a designated landing spot and we’ll make sure they don’t come over here,” Seidhom told WJZY.
“So, at that point, I felt like the other person was going to pressure him to arrest me when I come back with the victim and then my son would have been left on the side of a mountain with this person to go and rescue him,” Seidhom said. //
The fire official told Seidhom to report to the Rutherford County Airport and wait for Federal Aviation Administration officials to meet with him, according to Jordan Seidhom.
The father of two got back into his chopper, turned it in the direction of the mountain and lifted off right back to where he left his son and the woman’s husband. He picked his son up and told the husband what happened at the drop-off with the Lake Lure fire official.
Seidhom took off and looked back at the husband, standing helpless in his crumbling driveway as the help he thought would come for him flew away. Seidhom said the fire official told him the fire department’s ground crew would walk up the mountainside to rescue the man “in a few hours.” Seidhom said it was a three-minute flight from the couple’s driveway to the landing site where he left the woman with first responders.
Seidhom and his son flew to the Rutherford County airport, just as they were directed.
“I did leave the Rutherford Airport. I knew at that point he had no jurisdiction, I was legal in what I was doing, and I was following all FAA guidelines and airspace guidelines. I was on private property,” Seidhom said.
The Seidhoms spent three hours at the airport, but no one from the Federal Aviation Administration came.
Within a half-hour of the fire official and the arrest threat, Seidhom said a Temporary Flight Restriction was set up over the Lake Lure gap, right in the center of where he and the fire official faced off minutes earlier. //
Seidhom said the fire official told him to tell any other pilots he knew that they would also be arrested if they came back. Seidhom said he was the only helicopter within 40 nautical miles of Lake Lure at the time.
After the encounter with the fire official, Seidhom decided to fly back to his home in Pageland, South Carolina, and call off his efforts to help. //
“I’m sorry, if I had to do it over again, I would have stopped and I would have rescued as many people until they decided they were going to arrest me,” said Seidhom.
Hurricanes in the United States end up hundreds of times deadlier than the government calculates, contributing to more American deaths than car accidents or all the nation’s wars, a new study said.
The average storm hitting the U.S. contributes to the early deaths of 7,000 to 11,000 people over a 15-year period, which dwarfs the average of 24 immediate and direct deaths that the government counts in a hurricane’s aftermath, the study in Wednesday’s journal Nature concluded. Study authors said even with Hurricane Helene’s growing triple digit direct death count, many more people will die partly because of that storm in future years.
“Watching what’s happened here makes you think that this is going to be a decade of hardship on tap, not just what’s happening over the next couple of weeks,” said Stanford University climate economist Solomon Hsiang, a study co-author and a former White House science and technology official.
“After each storm there is sort of this surge of additional mortality in a state that’s been impacted that has not been previously documented or associated with hurricanes in any way,” Hsiang said.
Hsiang and University of California Berkeley researcher Rachel Young looked at hurricane deaths in a different way than previous studies, opting for a more long-term public health and economics-oriented analysis of what’s called excess mortality. They looked at states’ death rates after 501 different storms hitting the United States between 1930 and 2015. And what they found is that after each storm there’s a “bump” in death rates.
It’s a statistical signature that they see over and over, Hsiang said. Similar analyses are done for heat waves and other health threats like pollution and disease, he said. They compare to pre-storm times and adjust for other factors that could be causing changes in death rates, he said. Complicating everything is that the same places keep getting hit by multiple storms so there are death bumps upon death bumps.
Just how storms contribute to people’s deaths after the immediate impact is something that needs further study, Hsiang said. But he theorized it includes the health effects of stress, changes in the environment including toxins, people not being able to afford health care and other necessities because of storm costs, infrastructure damage and government changes in spending.
“When someone dies a few years after a hurricane hit them, the cause will be recorded as a heart attack, stroke or respiratory failure,” said Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who wasn’t part of the study but has done similar studies on heat and cold deaths. “The doctor can’t possibly know that a hurricane contributed/triggered the illness. You can only see it in a statistical analysis like this.”
AkronMike 2 hours ago edited
Clearly, this malicious antipathy is intentional. So, the trillion dollar question is: why?
The Occam's Razor answer is that these suffering folks are mostly white, mostly Republican voters. So, the government doesn't care . . . or worse. If they die or are stuck wallowing in their destroyed homes, then they won't vote and key states go blue next month.
But my Spidey-senses tells me there might be something else going on. Maybe Joe Biden is getting payback against Harris-Pelosi-Shumer-Deep State for forcing him out. He's slow-walking all this aid to drive outrage in key swing states to ensure Harris loses those states.
Only the President can invoke Taft-Hartley to end a strike of national importance. But Brandon's not invoking the law . . . and it's going to bring lots of pain to lots of people ahead of the election.
Maybe Brandon has just enough grey matter left to get his revenge on those who crushed his dream of remaining President before he goes into a full vegetative state. Just maybe. //
Political-Paige 2 hours ago edited
NOBODY. Nobody on the planet is this incompetent. The only possible conclusion is that this is intentional.
Why?
NC is a critical swing state next month. The Dems are all clustered in the Piedmont to the east, where the academic & research triangle sits. The mountain side of the state (except for the lunatic clownshow of Asheville itself) is the Republican stronghold.
People with no power or water or livelihood don't vote.
Dead Republicans can't vote.
People who have been taught a lesson that failing to bend then knee has consequences are afraid to vote.
The only American disaster in my long life that would have bodies hanging in trees and underwater in cars a week out, that has no govt helicopter or supply support, that has government trying to actively BLOCK civilian rescue flights, is this one.
That can NOT be an accident.
So what's happening in WNC right now? Well, the sun has just come up, but:
- Yesterday, private NC & SC pilots airlifted 26 tons of food to us.
- Yesterday, the skies were full of private helicopters... not government.
- Yesterday, utility trucks from a plethora of southern states worked 24 hours to try to get power against massive odds.
- Yesterday, our local restaurants with any power or water at all gave free meals to everyone.
- Yesterday, donated water trucks pulled up in parking lots all over NC and people carried whatever they could: jugs, bottles, bins, even cat litter boxes, to scoop up some lifesaving water for their families.
- Yesterday, volunteers tried to clean up 500 mentally & physically disabled people left to rot in their own waste in a low-income complex in Asheville, but were deterred by looters.
- Yesterday, farmers from SC & north GA brought what feed they could to starving herds wandering WNC.
- Yesterday, animal shelters across the south desperately tried to find airlifts & transport for starving, stranded, & lost pets, but all the volunteer vehicles are needed to rescue people who are running out of time.
- Yesterday, police were ordered to stop anyone not local from taking passable interstates into the hard-hit areas, so volunteer relief supplies are stymied. One assumes they're acting on directives from the Democrat governor or FEMA bureaucrats. Social media was full of ways to out-fox them by taking passable back roads (scarce as those are).
- Yesterday, volunteers seeking FEMA in both SC and NC were turned away, but only after the FEMA workers took the meager cash donations they carried with them. FEMA, you see has smugly announced that it's out of money for this hurricane season, despite their 29.2 BILLION dollar budget and their decision APRIL 2024 to give 640,000,000 to DHS for illegal aliens.
Illegals will vote Democrat, now or later. 640 million.
WNC folks will vote Republican.
What's that tell you? //
Grumpy Right Seater 2 hours ago
Keeping the CNN crew out of a hard hit area is the same tactic used to keep news folks away from the Maui fire. Is this a new type of censorship? //
Random US Citizen 41 minutes ago
It’s on purpose. All those rural voters are cut off… but the big blue cities will be voting just fine. Harris was behind in NC… but there’s a very real chance she wins if actual Americans can’t submit ballots while those who are no longer our countrymen can stuff drop boxes like there’s no tomorrow. This could definitely swing the election.
As a side note: somebody should graffiti over the “Liberty” with Bragg on all the off post signs. //
Cafeblue32 2 hours ago edited
Biden: "We've given everything that we have."
If that's your best, then no wonder your party looks like a Chinese fire drill.
A smart party trying to win an election would have seen it as an opportunity for their candidate to take command of a tragedy dropped in her lap and show off her decision making and administrative chops, her being VP and all. But because they're rural folks, they must be Trump heads, so the instinct to punish them overides anything that might happen to be sane and logical. My granny used to call it cutting off your nose to spite your face. //
Ed in North Texas an hour ago
"...this is NOT the National Guard; it is the organization Ron DeSantis formed that caused some to befoul themselves over the thought that he may be going full Mussolini or something."
Texas formed the Texas State Guard in 1871 with Federal recognition starting in WW II. Among other missions, the State Guard takes over securing and operating the TXNG facilities on activation of the TXNG units to Federal service.