RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/nih-covid19-pharmaceutical-companies-royalty-payments/2022/05/15/id/1069975/

The National Institutes of Health last year gave out $30 billion worth of government grants to nearly 56,000 contractors.

According to a report from Open The Books’ Adam Andrzejewski, despite a large portion of taxpayer money going out to fund research, an investigation revealed that a large influx of cash had come back to the NIH and individual NIH scientists in the form of royalty payments from third parties. “(T)hink pharmaceutical companies” the report said.

Andrzejewski’s investigation revealed that from 2010 to 2020, third parties paid an estimated $350 million back to the agency and its scientists. The third parties were credited as co-inventors. And because the payments enrich the agency or its scientists, the donations could be construed as a potential conflict of interest requiring disclosure.

The report details that the disclosure of payments from September 2009 to September 2014 showed that nearly 1,700 NIH scientists received more than 22,100 royalty payments totaling nearly $134 million. The revelation came from a federal lawsuit between Open The Books and the NIH, indicating that the agency has held onto 3,000 pages of line-by-line royalties since 2009. But so far, only 1,200 pages have been produced. The other 1,800 pages would detail the agency’s royalties from 2015 to 2020.

Most of the NIH documents are heavily redacted and point only to the number of payments scientists received, as well as the aggregate dollar amount per NIH agency.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/16/business/gas-prices-inflation/index.html

Prices at the pump continue to shatter records ahead of Memorial Day weekend.

The national average for regular gas hit a fresh record of $4.48 a gallon Monday, according to AAA. That marks an increase of 15 cents in the past week and 40 cents in a month.
Gas prices are now up by 27% from the day before Russia invaded Ukraine.

First on CNN: Record-high gas prices slash US spending by $9 billion a month

“Everything is pointing toward even higher prices. We are well on our way toward $5,” Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates, told CNN Monday.

Citing a surge in gasoline futures, Lipow is raising his gasoline forecast from $4.50 to $4.75 a gallon, suggesting drivers on Memorial Day weekend may be greeted by record-high prices.
Lipow said $5 is “possible,” though he conceded the outlook could change considerably if there is a surprise development in the war in Ukraine or with Covid.
According to AAA, the average is already above $5 a gallon in four states: California, Washington, Nevada and Hawaii. Oregon is just a penny away.
Gas spike is making inflation worse

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18530/department-of-commerce-cronyism

The Commerce Department is the fourth most lobbied federal office, behind only the Treasury Department, Health & Human Services, and the White House itself. It is more lobbied than the bigger budgeted Department of Defense and Department of Transportation, despite managing a far smaller budget. This is no accident, because Commerce makes what can be life-and-death decisions for particular industries and businesses.

Yet the mission of this “hodgepodge” of administrative agencies, bureaus, and offices could not be more important. The Commerce Department’s broad purpose is “to create the conditions for economic growth and opportunity.”

Through its Bureau of Industry and Security, Commerce regulates what are known as “dual use” technologies, which have potential military applications for foreign powers, another sore spot in the US-China relationship.

Let’s start with the current Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo.

Artificial intelligence is the focus of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security because it often has direct military applications, making it sensitive for US national security…. In February of this year, [Andrew Moffit, Raimondo’s husband] exercised his PathAI stock options and purchased at least $50,000 worth of its stock. He left his full-time job with the company and became instead its “strategic adviser,” thus deepening his financial ties to the firm while creating an appearance of greater distance between his role with the company and his wife’s duties as Commerce secretary.

In addition, Raimondo’s department has loosened restrictions on Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant that Trump administration regulators had sanctioned, because of the company’s ties to the Chinese government and particularly its military….. Huawei has been identified as a security threat by the governments of Japan, Taiwan, France, Great Britain, the US, Australia, and Germany, among others.

Then there was Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce under President Trump. Ross was a successful businessman with huge commercial ties to China. He had shipping companies that had major Chinese investment… Wilbur Ross kept investments in companies directly affected by tariff policy, even as the Commerce Department handed out tariff exemptions and negotiated new trade agreements.

Before Ross, President Obama’s Commerce Secretary was Penny Pritzker…. In 2015, the Clean Energy Trust, a Chicago-based not-for-profit supporting clean energy start-ups through business development, received $10 million of funding through a grant program administered by the Department of Commerce. It was the only Chicago-area group to receive such funding. Its board of directors was co-chaired at the time by Penny Pritzker’s cousin, Nick Pritzker.

GAI’s report discusses a number of other issues, personalities, and programs that are of questionable merit but generate high interest from Washington insiders who see their potential. The cronyism of past and present secretaries is but one part of the story the report tells. It is worth your attention.

The US Department of Commerce seldom grabs headlines or congressional scrutiny. It does not become “weaponized” against political opponents of the incumbent party. After the 2016 election, an article on Vox about incoming power-players of the Trump administration dismissed the department as a “hodgepodge of agencies,” and a “Cabinet backwater.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/05/15/heres-what-the-buffalo-shooters-alleged-manifesto-actually-says-n1597997

On Saturday afternoon, an 18-year-old from Upstate New York traveled to Buffalo and live-streamed himself shooting several people, ten of whom he killed, at a Tops Friendly Market in a predominantly black neighborhood. The suspect was captured by law enforcement and has been arraigned on 10 first-degree murder charges.

With their usual swiftness, leftists on Twitter quickly launched a seemingly coordinated effort to blame Fox News and Tucker Carlson for allegedly radicalizing the suspect.

As word of the shooting quickly spread on social media, so did reports that the shooter had posted a 180-page manifesto online, explaining his racist and anti-Semitic motives and detailing how he planned to carry out the attack. PJ Media obtained a copy of the manifesto, and while we cannot independently verify its authenticity, it is widely believed to be genuine, and some left-wing operatives are intent on claiming that the manifesto proves the shooter was radicalized by Fox News and right-wing politics. I’ll show you want the manifesto actually says (though I will not link to it).

First, despite the coordinated effort to blame Fox News, the manifesto attacks a number of news networks, including Fox, for hiring Jews.

A search of the entire manifesto also yields no mentions of Tucker Carlson and specifically mentions “the internet” as where he got his beliefs.

Others have tried to link the shooter in a more general way to right-wing politics. For example, the so-called conservative S.E. Cupp of CNN tried to blame “right-wing extremism” for the shooting.

But here’s what the manifesto says about the shooter’s politics:

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/15/the-cycles-of-revolutions-in-our-midst/

We are witnessing a number of radical military, social, and political revolutions that are changing the United States—and the world—in fundamental ways that we still have not appreciated. 

The taboo about never mentioning the first-strike use of nuclear weapons in a major conventional war is now apparently over. Vladimir Putin routinely threatens their use. Communist China hints at its growing nuclear capability and is hell-bent on rushing into production a huge new nuclear missile force. The world is defining nuclear incineration down.

The more China and North Korea talk about nukes, the more necessary it is that uneasy democracies such as Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan will make adjustments. And the more the United States bows out of its prior role of extending its nuclear umbrella over Western democracies, the more likely these societies will consider going nuclear themselves. Should Iran acquire nuclear weapons—and its patrons Russia and China seem to be ensuring that it will—then the long feared but heretofore never reified nuclear Middle East arms race will finally break out, as the petro-rich Arab world tries to deter Iran’s unhinged theocrats.

There is also a revolutionary vacuum occurring abroad. Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are trying to figure out whether there is still any old-style American deterrence, or whether the woke progressives now in power in Washington dislike the customs and traditions of the United States even more than they do.

Lots of disasters have contributed to the current perilous state of affairs, including the precipitous American retreat from and humiliation in Afghanistan. Add in voluntary cutbacks in oil and gas production by the West, and the subsequent embarrassment of a superpower beseeching thuggish regimes to send us their energy. 

The politicized transformation of the U.S. military from a meritocratic force focused on wartime lethality into an  extension of the social welfare state driven by diversity, equity and inclusion has encouraged our enemies to take risks they otherwise might not have taken. 

Other contributors to the American power vacuum are the enormous federal debt, hyperinflation, and likely stagflation and recession this winter—along with the worldwide mania following COVID and the disastrous blanket lockdowns. All of the above has suggested to the world that a cognitively challenged 79-year-old Joe Biden is both an illustration and cause of American decline, rather than a temporary embarrassing aberration. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/ultra-buck-passer-and-liar-white-house-joseph-klein/

On May 10th, President Joe Biden delivered a speech on inflation in an effort to get ahead of the expected bad news the next day concerning the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The president said that fighting inflation was now his “top domestic priority” even though it was not that long ago when he dismissed the steep price increases Americans were experiencing as merely “transitory.”

President Biden is calling inflation “a real tough problem to solve.” Too bad that the president has no clue on how to solve the “real tough problem” that he had a big hand in creating.

President Biden’s speech was long on passing the buck to others and short on offering real solutions. The president refused to accept any responsibility for the inflation that began surging early in his term.

Instead of following the advice from the sign on President Harry Truman’s desk in his White House office, “The Buck Stops Here,” Biden took to heart President Truman’s quip: “If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”

Indeed, President Biden tried to spin his own disastrous economic policies into something positive. He shamelessly boasted, “I think our policies help, not hurt.”

At a Democratic National Committee fundraiser on May 11th, Biden said that “until we got elected and we changed presidents, I think people started to lose faith in the capacity of the American government to deliver — to deliver, to make life better for people.”

The American people are not fooled. A majority has lost faith in President Biden’s capacity to perform his job and make life better for the American people. About two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the way President Biden is handling the economy, according to a poll reported by CNN earlier this month.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-house-subpoena-wars-jan-6-committee-congress-kevin-mccarthy-jim-jordan-nancy-pelosi-11652479291?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Partisanship on Capitol Hill is as bitter as we can recall, and it’s about to get worse. The Jan. 6 special committee has unleashed the subpoena power of the House against fellow Members.

The committee on Thursday issued commands to five GOP Members of Congress to testify about events surrounding the Jan 6 Capitol riot. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.)and Reps. Scott Perry (Pa.), Jim Jordan (Ohio), Andy Biggs (Ariz.) and Mo Brooks (Ala.) have refused to answer committee questions, so they’re getting unprecedented subpoena treatment.

House subpoenas to Members are typically reserved for investigations by the Ethics Committee focusing on allegations of corruption. The Ethics Committee has an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, and its investigations (if not always its judgments) are traditionally bipartisan.

The Jan. 6 committee has two GOP Members, though they were chosen by Speaker Nancy Pelosi after she rejected two of Mr. McCarthy’s candidates. The Minority Leader then declined to nominate anyone else. Republicans are sure to see the subpoenas as a case of turning the investigative power of the House against the opposition party.

If Democrats think this will be a one-time-only event, they are dreaming. If Republicans retake the House in November, you can guarantee that Mr. Jordan, as likely Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, will find some reason to subpoena Democrats about oh, say, what they knew about the Russian collusion narrative or Democrats who objected to the electoral vote counts in 2000, 2004, or 2016.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-lawsuit-will-shine-a-light-on-twitter-censorship-soical-media-big-tech-facebook-speech-11652634888?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Do social-media companies collude with the federal government to suppress speech? On April 29, Judge William Alsup issued a ruling in a case I brought against Twitter that could become a watershed in holding social-media companies accountable for censorship.

This problem became acute at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic. On Jan. 29, 2020, Twitter declared: “We’re committed to playing our part to amplify authoritative, official content across the globe.” Facebook essentially forbade discussion that the virus might have leaked from a Chinese lab. Today debate over the lab-leak theory is allowed, but free discussion of the side effects and efficacy of Covid vaccines isn’t.

Censorship by these vastly powerful companies is antithetical to the advancement of science and basic democratic principles, both of which require open debate. But the companies and government have closely guarded the secrets of how they work together—including whether and how they target dissenters like me.

After March 2020, I became a prominent skeptic of the U.S. coronavirus response, arguing that neither “nonpharmaceutical” interventions like masks nor vaccine mandates were likely to change the course of the epidemic. Much of what I wrote, though controversial at the time, is now conventional wisdom. Twitter—open to the public, available globally, and a crucial platform for journalism—was my primary outlet.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/yet-another-anti-conservative-study-was-fake-news/

Virtually all social-science hypotheses that attempt to find dark psychological reasons for conservatism haven’t held up at all under peer review.

Yet another major study claiming conservatism is caused by mental problems has been conclusively proven to be junk science.

The now-debunked study suggested conservatism is associated with conspiratorial thinking and “negativity bias.” But it proved impossible to replicate when tested by other researchers.

“We find no consistent evidence that negativity bias promotes right-wing ideology; promotes ‘closed’ values or personality traits, such as need for closure or (low) openness to experience; or interacts with political engagement,” researchers doing the debunking wrote in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature. “To support these null results, we conduct a series of data quality and robustness checks that suggest our data is comparable in quality to that of previous work and our results do not hinge on particular operationalizations or modeling choices. Indeed, our results are consistent with several recent studies that fail to replicate associations between physiological indicators of threat sensitivity and political ideology.”

Perhaps nothing confirms that the root of the crisis in science is government control as much as watching people with doctorates make mistakes that should be obvious to a freshman. The critical error of endlessly privileging hypotheses that coincide with progressive political preferences has become sadly common.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/14/thoughts-on-our-faucian-bargain/

“It’s a pity Donald Trump and his team did not consult Henderson’s work when COVID first reared its ugly head. They could have saved the country, and indeed the world, from much misery, not to mention Trump’s electoral prospects. They could also have saved the country from that other misery of listening to Anthony Fauci emit his poisonous advice. That would have been a blessing. But it would not not have done a thing to make the investigation into corruption at the NIH less pertinent. Kudos to Open the Books. ”

How much money does the federal government have? 

None. 

All those trillions of dollars the government spends is our money. Government has just appropriated it. 

The founders knew all about this process, and they abominated it. 

But as Christopher Marlowe put it in another context, “that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.” 

Over the years, I have several times written about the invaluable work Open the Books has done in exposing the corrupt, self-serving, nepotistic, unaccountable leviathan that is government bureaucracy. Ever since its founding in 2011, the organization has been like Jacob wrestling with the angel, struggling to bring transparency to the fetid, self-engorging swamp that our government, colonized by bureaucracy, has become. “Every Dime. Online. In Real Time.” Their motto is as neatly expressed as it is difficult to achieve. 

Open the Books has publicized outrageous taxpayer-funded pensions, lavish government subsidies to super-rich Ivy league colleges, and eye-popping public employee salaries. Every revelation is wrenched from the clenched fists of government bureaucracies whose byword, like that of the mafia, is “omertà,” silence. 

Perhaps their most damaging report was released just last week. Open the Books teamed up with Judicial Watch, another invaluable public-spirited watchdog, to mount a lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health in order to prise loose information about the millions and millions of dollars the organization has received from third-parties (that would be Big Pharma) and distributed to its scientists and administrators.

The last time the NIH was forced to disgorge such information was back in 2005 in response to a Freedom of Information demand filed by the Associated Press. 

The NIH, of course, is the preferred playground of Anthony Fauci, publicity hound and COVID scold par excellence. Fauci, as has been noted many times at American Greatness, is the highest paid federal employee. In 2021, his taxpayer-funded salary alone was $456,028. That’s $56,028 more than the salary of the president of the United States. (“But the president is Joe Biden,” you object. I point out that we’re talking about the office, not the man.)

Anthony Fauci has been a fixture in the public health establishment for decades. There he was during the AIDS crisis, warning that you might catch the disease from sitting next to someone who had it, and grimly raising the specter of “heterosexual AIDS.”

And there he was day-in and day-out at press briefings at the White House in 2020 and 2021, fanning the flames of COVID hysteria, dispensing oracular and contradictory advice to a confused and terrified public.