Annals of Corruption: Doctors Transitioning Kids

For liberals, "helping" someone is just an excuse to make money. The New York Post reports: "Hospitals, doctors got rich through shady gender-care billing tactics — and taking advantage of kids: damning report." From the lede: "US hospitals and clinics have billed out nearly $120 million in gender-related medical treatments to minors since 2019, putting thousands of children on an expensive and irreversible treadmill requiring lifelong upkeep — with the blessing of doctors and lefty politicians."

    HHS points to “financial incentives” as one potential explanation for the explosion in gender-related care for minors — as hospitals sought a way to juice profits in pediatric departments, which typically bring in lower margins than other specialties.

    “Gender clinics changed that calculus by introducing a novel source of revenue: they promised a new stream of continuous revenue for pediatrics, endocrinology, and surgical specialties by taking physiologically healthy young people — who otherwise would not need to seek medical attention, and rendering them dependent for life on the medical system.”

    The report cited watchdog analyses that have found hospitals and clinics have billed almost $120 million in gender care treatments since 2019 — involving 5,500 surgical procedures and 8,500 courses of hormones or blockers.

    HHS accuses health care providers of willfully misusing diagnostic codes — diagnosing patients with endocrine disorder or precocious puberty — to get insurance to foot the bill or to protect a patient’s privacy. 

NFA Injunction Takes Effect

From The Truth About Guns: "DOJ Lets the Stay Expire — Silencer Shop’s NFA Injunction Takes Effect." From the article:

    At 12:01 a.m. Central on August 13, the seven-day stay on Judge James Wesley Hendrix’s ruling in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF ran out — and the Department of Justice let it. No emergency motion to the Fifth Circuit. No request to extend the pause. Nothing.

    For the first time in more than 90 years, a federally licensed dealer legally transferred a suppressor to a private buyer with no tax stamp, no Form 4, and no entry in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record.

    Gun Owners of America, Silencer Shop, and two buyers; YouTuber turned congressional candidate Brandon “The AK Guy” Herrera and Texas state Rep. Wes Virdell closed the deal minutes after the stay lapsed.

    GOA called them the first unregistered suppressor purchases from Silencer Shop in the NFA era, and argued both men were covered twice over: as GOA members and as Silencer Shop customers. 

The article warns, however: "This is where readers need to slow down before doing anything stupid. The injunction is broad, but it is not nationwide amnesty." 

• The relief covers suppressors and AOWs bought through Silencer Shop or its dealers — not every gun store in America.
• It applies only in the 27 states without state laws mirroring the NFA. Fifteen states will still require ATF registration, and suppressors remain flat-out banned in others.
• SBRs and SBSs are covered by the ruling — but a separate law still stands. Hendrix’s order struck the NFA registration and approval requirements as applied to short-barreled rifles and shotguns too. The catch is the Gun Control Act: 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(4) independently bars a dealer from transferring an SBR or SBS without ATF sign-off, that provision sits outside the enjoined NFA sections, and an approved Form 4 is currently the only paperwork ATF offers to satisfy it. The tax is $0, and the NFA hook is gone, but a Form 4 is still required for short-barreled long guns, which is why Silencer Shop launched with suppressors and AOWs only.
• State and local law still remains regardless of this potential win.

There are more details in the article, so be sure to read the whole thing. The Mr. Guns 'n' Gear channel also goes into more detail:

VIDEO: "Breaking: The Biggest 2nd Amendment Win Ever - What You Need To Know"
Mrgunsngear Channel (26 min.)

Jelly Fish UAP On Mars?

 You may have seen images or video of a jelly-fish like UAP recorded flying over a military facility in Iraq in 2017 (if not, here is a link to a video on YouTube that has the footage). There is now being circulated a photograph taken NASA's Curiosity rover on August 20, 2023, that shows a jelly-fish like object seemingly hovering or walking over the Martian surface. "Fueling speculation that NASA’s rover had captured something moving across Mars, images taken of the same area less than a minute earlier showed no sign of the mysterious figure," the article relates, but the key photo was the last taken in that direction for that day. 

An enlarged portion of the original image. 

Islamification and the Dallas Fort Worth Airport

The Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport will be installing Muslim foot washing stations inside its terminal bathrooms.  "The washing stations will provide a dedicated space in the public airport bathrooms for Muslims to wash their feet before prayer, an Islamic tradition known as Wadu," with the excuse given that it will keep Muslims from washing their feet in the bathroom sinks. It won't, and it seems suspiciously like a violation of the separation of church and state. Airports can install chapels or "meditation rooms" where they can be used by people of any religion (or none at all) for prayer or introspection, but not to promote a particular religion. In this case, though, there is no question but that the washing stations are to accommodate a religious practice specific to Muslims. 

Interesting: Fallout Season 2 Used Abandoned LA Mall For "New Vegas"

From the New York Post: "Abandoned California mall transformed into post-apocalyptic Las Vegas set for ‘Fallout’." The article relates that "[i]nstead of filming in the real Las Vegas, [Production designer Howard] Cummings used the long-abandoned Valley Plaza Mall, which opened in 1951 and has been dormant for over a decade, and turned it into the small screen New Vegas."

    The mall’s old Regal Theater building was rebranded as the Gomorrah Hotel and Casino, with the 27-foot Lucky 38 sign standing next to it, which was built by his team on set.

    “Most people think this is all CG and they just did a greenscreen,” Cummings said, insisting that these were all real practical sets, aside from digital Vegas backdrops.

    The prewar flashback scenes were filmed first, before the nuclear blast that turned Goggins’ Howard into The Ghoul, before Cummings and his team went back and “trashed” that set. 

    “All the palm trees look good at the beginning, and then they’re all dead. The brand-new cars [were] rusted and destroyed,”

    Cummings also shot the Freeside district of New Vegas in an Old West town in Santa Clarita, California, the same location where another show he worked on was shot, HBO’s “Westworld.”

    The production designer and his team had to re-face the buildings to match them to the buildings from the game, though there was some digital work as well.   

However, the Valley Plaza Mall is slated for demolition, so it won't be showing up in any subsequent seasons of the show.  

Annals of Corruption: Fauci's Pay-to-Play Scheme

The College Fix states that "Fauci’s ‘pay-to-play scheme’ both ‘unlawful’ and ‘unethical,’ Rutgers expert says." 

    New documents released by Senator Rand Paul detail Fauci’s “side hustle,” which include winning millions of dollars in cash prizes. Fauci would solicit his allies who also received federal funding from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases to nominate him for prizes.

    Some of the solicitations occurred during the nationwide COVID lockdowns that were created at the prompting of Fauci.

    He also instructed federal staffers to work for him to find prizes and manage the application process, including one that netted him $900,000.

No wonder he needed a blanket pardon. 

Surviving An Earthquake

The Associated Press addresses the question of "After an earthquake, how long can trapped people survive?" As with most questions in life, the answer is "it depends."  The article explains that "[t]rapped victims are more likely to survive if they are in a debris-free pocket that prevents major injury while they await rescue, like under a sturdy desk...." Beyond that, survival depends on having food, water, and air. And this advice:

    The best practices for survival during an earthquake depend on where you are in the world. Building codes in regions with active fault lines are often designed to withstand earthquakes, but that doesn’t hold true everywhere.

    In many countries, including the United States, the best practices are to drop, seek cover and hang on unless you are close to a building exit. Seek shelter under a heavy table or near sturdy furniture that may yield a survivable pocket if the roof collapses. Cover your face with cloth or a mask to protect from dust and debris.

    If you are trapped in the rubble after an earthquake, save your energy and don’t overexert. Ration food and water, listen for rescue calls and search for something near you to make noise. If you have a phone with you, conserve its battery and try for help in short spurts each day.

As for time, the article notes that most survivors are rescued within 24 hours, but notes that in 2011, two people in Japan were found alive after being trapped for 9 days; and a survivor of a 2010 earthquake in Haiti was pulled from the rubble after 15 days.  

Is AOC The Democrats' Next Chosen One?

Those of you old enough to remember when Obama came on the scene probably remember how he quickly went from a complete unknown outside of Chicago to the head of the Democratic party ticket as though he had been chosen for the role. I'm seeing pundits make similar predictions about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Certainly she seems to be modifying her rhetoric to make her more palatable to the national electorate. Scott Pinsker has some thoughts about this in his piece, "The Cunning Genius of AOC’s ‘Woke’ Reboot." He warns:

    Tread carefully, Republicans: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is still America’s most dangerous Democrat — and still the odds-on favorite to win her party’s 2028 presidential nomination.

    And if she captures the nomination, there’s (roughly) a 50%-50% shot she’ll win the White House. Don’t underestimate her: She’s media-savvy, camera-friendly, photogenic, and her PR instincts are as sharp as Sardinian swords.

And his example of this is her recent comments attempting to downplay "wokeness":

    Consider how deftly she just rebooted the “woke” narrative.

    Because woke is a joke in 2026: Woke is cringe, woke is dead, woke is done. 

    Other than the fringiest of the fringe, nobody takes it seriously anymore. ...

[snip]

    The excesses of wokeism are legion. A lesser politician would’ve tried to relitigate this or recalibrate that. 

    But AOC knew better. 

    Instead of polishing a turd and pretending it’s chocolate, she acknowledged overreaching, killed the old narrative, and set the stage for the “new and improved” version 2.0.

    Remarkably, she did it in a single sentence.

Pinsker goes on to note that by this, AOC "signaled a willingness to learn, grow, adapt, and change," which will be critical on a national stage because she will come across as an open-minded pragmatist because of her ability to grow and change. 

    Dace Potas also poo-poos AOC's retreat from "Woke 1.0" in an op-ed at USA Today. He concludes:

The existence of "Woke 1" implies that a "Woke 2" is already in the works. From what I can tell, it isn't all that different in substance, just strategy and rhetoric. Progressive candidates will keep being haunted by Woke 1.0 for as long as they run for office, unless they explain – explicitly – why this time is different. Otherwise, voters will see right through it. 

And he explains:

    To anyone paying attention at the time, woke was a lot more than “a derogatory euphemism for civil rights & justice,” as AOC put it back in 2021, when she wanted those positions taken seriously.

    Among the excesses of Woke 1.0 was a movement aimed at defunding or abolishing the police, gender reassignment surgery for minors, the insistence that men can menstruate, justification of rioting, racial discrimination in hiring and much, much more. 

    Not every progressive held each of these positions, but as a collective, they were fine letting them enter the political mainstream. By her own admission, AOC described Woke 1.0 as an attempt to shift the Overton window, the range of ideas considered acceptable in mainstream political debate.

    “During this time, especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window,” AOC said. “We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns, and I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place, and I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.”

    But it was more than that. Progressives pushed corporate America into diversity, equity and inclusion mandates that indoctrinated employees and built a cancel culture that met dissent with job losses and charges of bigotry.

    Even progressives who didn't believe the most extreme positions were incentivized to promote them, since it made their own positions sound reasonable by comparison. Instead of "abolish the police," mainstream Democrats arrived at "defund." Instead of "abolish borders," many arrived at "abolish ICE."

    In any event, the pivot from "Woke 1.0" is all show. To the extent there is a "Woke 2.0" it will be far worse than anything we have seen so far; just as Obama's idea of "racial healing" was to stoke racial hatred against whites. Over at the Battleswarm Blog, Lawrence Person points out:

    There was no “Woke 1.0,” just a continuous racialist, anti-Western Civilization, anti-rational, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, anti-Republican movement whose roots stretch back into the Comintern, Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, carried forward into the Port Huron Statement, the Weather Underground, the campus radicals of the 1960s and their long march through academia and other western institutions, special campus victimhood identity politics carve-out departments for blacks, Hispanics, radical feminists and “Queer Theory,” into the political correctness of the 1980s that blossomed into the poisonous flowers of social justice, radical transsexism, Palestinian- and Islamo-felia and anti-Israel animus that has turned into full-blown antisemitism, and a radical fringe in the Democrat Party that metastasized to its core under Obama and President Autopen. AOC’s Democratic Socialists of America and their fellow-travelers were all on-board with their lunacy every step of the way.    

[snip]

    And throughout it all, the SJW/DSA types were onboard with all of it, every step of the way. There was no “woke 1.0,” there was only the same madness taking on new forms.

    You didn’t regret it then and you don’t regret it now, you only regret getting caught. ...

[snip]

    You don’t regret any of the pain you inflicted on normies, you only regret not getting to inflict more of it. You still view yourself as the natural anointed rulers of those benighted rubes in JesusLand.

 Like other socialists before them, the DSA and its adherents truly believe "[e]verything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State". And they intend on controlling the State. Stalin blamed the Kulaks for the ills of society; Hitler blamed the Jews; and the modern Leftists blame white people. We've seen this play before and we know how it ends. 

More Memes!

 John Wilder's dog once again ate his homework, so he is offering up funny memes instead. (Link here).

AI Assistant Hacks Gym Website

The New York Post, in its article, "AI assistant goes rogue, hacks Australian gym website in stunning breach: report," relates that "[a] rogue AI assistant hacked an Australian gym’s website after a local man asked for help booking a workout class[.]" 

    An Australian man identified as Andrew asked his OpenClaw AI assistant – an open-source software whose AI agents can perform real-world tasks — to book him a spot in a morning class, Australian outlet ABC reported.

    Instead of just following instructions, the assistant, which relied on Anthropic’s Claude as its underlying model, bypassed the gym website’s safeguards to book the man in classes months in advance – beyond what the gym usually made possible, according to the outlet.

    The hack escalated after the man asked the AI assistant if it could help him get off the waitlist for a workout class schedule for later that same week. The assistant immediately found a flaw in the website’s code and exploited it to cancel another gym-goer’s reservation.

Imagine what AI will be able to do in a year or two.