Monday, October 3, 2022
Blogs With Rule 5 Links
The Other McCain has: Rule 5 Sunday: Oktoberfest
Proof Positive has: Best Of Web Link Around
The Woodsterman has: Rule 5 Woodsterman Style
EBL has: Rule 5 And FMJRA
The Right Way has: Rule 5 Saturday LinkORama
The Pirate's Cove has: Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup
A Bad American has: Best I’ve Seen This Week…
Emails: Biden-Backing Billionaire Michael Bloomberg Tried To Meddle In Pennsylvania’s Election
At least Zuckerberg’s millions were laundered through nonprofits with grant procedures in place. Emails suggest Bloomberg just used liaisons to coordinate the funding.
A prominent professor of election law served as an intermediary between Democrat billionaire Michael Bloomberg and the Philadelphia election board, attempting to broker as much as $3 million in private funding for the Democrat stronghold mere months before the 2020 election, emails obtained by investigative journalist Todd Shepherd reveal.
Reporting for Broad + Liberty on Sunday, Shepherd unveiled a series of email communications between Stanford Law Professor Nathaniel Persily and Nick Custodio, the latter of whom was the deputy commissioner in the office of Philadelphia City Commissioner Lisa Deeley. At the time Deely was the chair of the three-member board that sets and enforces policies to administer voter registration and conduct elections.
After noting that the board had just finalized its “CTCL grant” — a reference to the Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) election grants — Custodio asked Persily whether he needed to “get” Persily the “Bloomberg thing tonight or can it wait until tomorrow afternoon?” Custodio dispatched that email to the Stanford professor late on Friday, Aug. 7, 2020. After Persily responded that “Monday should be fine,” the Philadelphia election-board deputy followed up, asking, “Who should the Memo be addressed? Bloomberg or someone else?”
Persily’s reply indicates he worked directly with Bloomberg to push the funding request, with the Stanford professor telling Custodio to “just send me some bullet points on how much you would want from him and what it would be spent on.” Custodio replied with a $3,074,900 ask, with a little more than $2 million shown allocated to “staffing,” about $483,000 to mail-in voting consumables and the cost of initial mailing, and $590,000 for communications.
Whether Bloomberg ever provided the requested funding is unknown from the email threads, with Shepherd reporting that his questions to Persily, Custodio, Bloomberg, and Philadelphia went unanswered. But the mere effort by the Philadelphia board to obtain private funding from Bloomberg proves scandalous and raises questions concerning Bloomberg’s other efforts to commandeer the operations of Democrat districts.
Bloomberg’s Track Record
Prior to backing Biden, Bloomberg ran in the Democrat presidential primary. And even before dropping out of the race, Bloomberg vowed that “his massive campaign apparatus and an army of some 500 staffers will march on through the general election in November even if he loses the Democratic nomination.”
“Mike Bloomberg is either going to be the nominee or the most important person supporting the Democratic nominee for president,” Bloomberg’s campaign manager Kevin Sheekey told NBC News, stressing Bloomberg “is dedicated to getting Trump out of the White House.”
The Bloomberg campaign then previewed how the former New York City mayor intended to achieve his goal of keeping Trump out of the White House, noting that “Bloomberg’s extensive data and analytics capabilities” through his company Hawkfish could offer the eventual Democrat candidate an edge. While Bloomberg could not coordinate the digital operations of Hawkfish with the Democrat nominee’s campaign, according to Bloomberg officials, the former mayor would establish an independent funding vehicle to pay for the Hawkfish analytics and for staffers to support the eventual Democrat candidate.
“In states where the Democratic nominee will be competing in the fall, the Bloomberg staffers could play a critical role driving up Democratic turnout, in line with the former mayor’s pledge to spend more than $15 million this election on get-out-the-vote efforts,” NBC News reported in early 2020. “They could also organize their own events, ad campaigns and other organizing tactics in support of the nominee…”
But the emails exchanged between Professor Persily and the deputy commissioner of the Philadelphia board of elections indicate Bloomberg’s efforts to “get Trump out of the White House” extended beyond privately funding get-out-the-vote efforts and ad campaigns. The emails suggest the Democrat billionaire sought to infiltrate at least one government election office — the most populous one in the swing state of Pennsylvania and a stronghold for Democrats.
‘Arbitrary and Disparate Treatment’
In 2020, of the more than 1,700 voting divisions in Philadelphia, only about 30 went for Trump, and 604,175 Philadelphians voted for Biden compared to 132,870 for Trump, resulting in a 471,305 net advantage for the Democrat candidate in that one city. Biden eventually won Pennsylvania’s 20 electors by just slightly more than 80,000 votes.
Private funding of get-out-the-vote efforts is one thing, but when individuals coordinate with government actors, that triggers constitutional concerns under the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. In Bush v. Gore, the United States Supreme Court made clear that “the right to vote is protected in more than the initial allocation of the franchise.” The Equal Protection clause requires both that the right to vote be granted on equal terms, but also that the state “not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of any.”
Shepherd’s investigative journalism previously revealed extensive evidence that such “arbitrary and disparate treatment” occurred in 2020 in Pennsylvania when “beginning in July 2020, consultants working for leftist organizations coordinated with local election officials and Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf’s office to lobby five blue counties to apply for private grants.”
As I previously reported following Shepherd’s testimony before Pennsylvania’s State Government Affairs Committee, “While the grants originated with the nominally non-partisan Center for Tech and Civic Life — an organization that Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s private foundation later infused with some $350 million in cash — emails reveal that a main consultant involved in targeting select counties, Marc Solomon, worked for the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, or the CSME.”
In his testimony before the Pennsylvania General Assembly, Shepherd stressed that what’s “important to know about CSME is that it is not a 501(c)3, but rather it is a fiscally sponsored project of the New Venture Fund,” which is “managed by Arabella Advisors.” Shepherd added that “the ‘parent’ group of Arabella, New Venture Fund” is “part of what the Atlantic Magazine identified as ‘The Massive Progressive Dark-Money Group You’ve Never Heard Of.’” The New York Times would in fact spotlight the New Venture Fund in its article “Democrats Decried Dark Money,” Shepherd told the Pennsylvania lawmakers earlier this year.
The emails uncovered by Shepherd further expose the incestuous relationship between the leftist CSME project and the nominally nonpartisan CTCL. “In Persily’s mind, the two were closely related enough that he conflated them as the same project,” Shepherd wrote, highlighting the email exchange in which Philadelphia’s Deputy Commissioner Custodio noted they had “just finalized our CTCL grant,” prompting Persily to respond, “I understand that the requests for CSME will be fully granted.” But “when Custodio informed Persily that Philadelphia hadn’t been in contact with the CSME, Persily said, ‘Yes — CTCL is working with CSME.’”
Notwithstanding Persily’s apparent role as an intermediary for Bloomberg and his knowledge of the CSME’s collaboration with CTCL, there is no indication that the Stanford professor’s involvement stemmed from a partisan desire to benefit Biden and oust Trump. Instead, Persily, who co-led the Stanford-MIT Health Elections Project, viewed his work and the efforts of other “policy makers,” “the courts,” and “civil society groups” as making “an unprecedented effort to help local election administrators deal with the pandemic.”
In fact, in his post-election write-up, “The Miracle and Tragedy of the 2020 U.S. Election,” Persily even spotlighted the CSME and other left-leaning or leftist organizations, such as the Center for Inclusive Democracy, the National Vote at Home Institute, the Center for Election Innovation and Research, and Democracy Works, framing their donations as “philanthropic contributions” to provide election officials with “resources and technical assistance in support of mail voting and safe polling places.”
There was nothing altruistic about these gifts, however, with evidence establishing that leftist groups financed “the infiltration of election offices at the city and county level by left-wing activists, and using those offices as a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods, and data-sharing agreements, as well as to launch intensive outreach campaigns in areas heavy with...
Biggest EVER bird flu outbreak means 48MILLION chickens, turkeys and ducks have now been culled across UK and Europe
- Cases of the highly contagious virus usually die out in the summer
- Yet this year, avian influenza appears to have persisted all-year round
- Government advisers have called the current situation 'unprecedented'
The highly contagious virus — which experts fear could jump to humans and trigger another pandemic — usually dies out in the summer.
Yet this year, avian influenza has persisted all-year round.
Government advisers have called the current situation 'unprecedented' and farmers have warned Christmas turkey supplies are potentially at risk, if the virus continues to rip through poultry farms.
Rates are only expected to spiral as flocks of migratory birds start to arrive in the UK over the coming weeks.
The culling figures cover the whole of Europe as well as the UK, which has killed 3m chickens, turkey and ducks already.
Thirty-seven countries — ranging from Norway's Svalbard islands to Ukraine — have recorded cases.
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the EU Reference Laboratory for Avian Influenza, which were behind the report, said the 'geographical extent of the outbreak is unprecedented'.
There have been 161 cases of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in captive birds, compared to 26 cases in 2020/21.
Wild birds, particularly terns and gulls, have also been decimated by avian flu.
There have been 1,727 cases of avian flu in wild birds in the UK, in 406 locations and 59 bird species.
The Department for the Environment (Defra) has declared Avian Influenza Prevention Zones in all of Norfolk, Suffolk and parts of Essex.
In the latest outbreak, Defra said on Friday bird flu had been detected near Bury St Edmunds, and two locations in Breckland Norfolk.
The UK's chief veterinary officer, Dr Christine Middlemiss told the BBC levels of the disease in wild birds was leading to the rise.
She said: 'Unfortunately we expect the number of cases to continue to rise over the coming months as migratory birds return to the UK, bringing with them further risk of disease that can spread into our kept flocks'.
The ECDC warns that bird flu, has 'the potential to severely affect public health' although in the current outbreak so far no human has yet been infected in western Europe.
The ECDC said that despite the exceptionally large number of cases recently detected in poultry and birds as well as numerous transmission events of avian influenza to different mammal species, no human transmission has been observed in the EU/EEA in recent years.
But worldwide, between January 2003 and 31 March 2022, there have been 863 cases of human infection with...
The case against fluoride
Nobody likes to admit they made a mistake.
At the AB 2098 event in Sacramento today, Jay Sanders of fluoridealert.org walked up to me and asked me, “Can I give you a book?”
This is the sort of life changing question that got Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to realize that vaccines aren’t safe.
So after a 10 second hesitation to overcome my cognitive dissonance (<sarcasm on>since as we all know fluoridation must be safe since it is mandated everywhere <sarcasm off>), I said yes, and I ended up with a copy of “The Case against Fluoride: How Hazardous Waste Ended Up in Our Drinking Water and the Bad Science and Powerful Politics That Keep It There.”
Sound familiar? :)
In a nutshell, here is what you need to know.
Trials began in 1945.
It was approved in 1950, before any trials were completed and any comprehensive studies were published.
There is a tiny net benefit to fluoride if it is kept in your mouth and not swallowed. It can slightly reduce your risk of a cavity.
Once you swallow it, the risks strongly outweigh the benefits. IQ drops significantly and other negative health outcomes accrue. It’s not a close call.
In hindsight, it was a stupid intervention.
It would have been better to have limited fluoride to small doses in toothpaste, mouth rinse, etc, that are then spat out. This provides the benefits of strengthening tooth enamel, without the detriments of deteriorating bones by drinking an unknown dosage.
But nobody likes to admit they made a mistake! Does this sound familiar?
All large towns “in California” are required to fluoridate (CA Law AB733). There is no federal fluoridation law.
BUT, almost all large U.S. cities are fluoridated. The ADA is an extremely powerful lobby.
Short term ways to avoid fluoride:
- Drink spring water (fresh or bottled)
- Drink distilled water (or purified with reverse osmosis)
- Use a reverse osmosis filter for drinking water
- Other methods (less recommended)
- Use a Berkey filter (you have to get the special fluoride filter). Berkey is much better at filtering F but you have to frequently replace the supplemental fluoride filters. Also, you have to keep the Berkey filters from drying out which makes them more maintenance intensive, however they have lots of happy customers.
- Use a 3 stage Clearly Filtered system. However, Clearly Filtered filters rapidly lost their ability to filter out F after the first few fills. They don’t make this clear.
- Donate to fluoridealert.org. This is the best long-term investment that helps everyone.
- Get your town to stop fluoridating the water. It’s poison. You will have to overcome the same disbelief you get when you tell people the COVID vaccines aren’t safe.
- Change the law in your state to outlaw fluoridation. Like vaccines, the science is crystal clear when you look at it; but nobody wants to look at it. After we take down the COVID vaccines, people will hopefully be more receptive to looking at the risk-benefit here.
- Watch the movie “The fluoride deception” (just 28 minutes)
- See fluoridealert.org
- Read the book
- Read the amazing comment by AMD
- Since the book was published, the strongest studies on F neurotoxicity have come out, including two NIH-funded long-term prospective cohort studies.
The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #1160
Before You Click On The "Read More" Link,
Please Only Do So If You Are Over 21 Years Old.
If You are Easily Upset, Triggered Or Offended, This Is Not The Place For You.
Please Leave Silently Into The Night......
The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1860
You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,
from the beautiful to the repugnant,
from the mysterious to the familiar.
If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,
you could be inspired, you could be appalled.
This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
You have been warned.
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