RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
September 18 to September 24, 2022 In RealClearInvestigations, Ben Weingarten reports on cumbersome, little-publicized conditions placed on federal Freedom of Information Act requests in the ever-escalating, at times Kafkaesque conflict between the public’s right to know and the protective bureaucracy’s right to “no.” When RCI (Weingarten) pursued information on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s landmark climate-risk disclosure rule, the SEC split the single FOIA request into a dozen administrative nightmare-inducing individual ones. For people whose records were being sought, the SEC demanded email addresses and seemingly duplicative domain names -- the “@gmail.com” part of them. FOIA officers even required the email address of SEC Chairman Gary Gensler himself, which the SEC officials presumably would have already known or could have easily found out. Responding to the 12th request – for “all records of or relating to the processing of” the first 11 as-yet-unprocessed requests – the SEC indicated that no processing records had been created, channeling the Joseph Heller satire “Catch-22.” Four months later, the agency had not provided a single page of responsive records. RCI is not alone. Several FOIA veterans said they had sued or demanded probes into Biden agencies that employed similar tactics. The number of FOIA requests has exploded (838,688 in 2021), whether because of the request-splitting practice, the growth of government, heightened political partisanship or, most likely, some combination of these and other factors. Sidebar: FOIA’s history, a road to acrimony paved with good intentions. Echoing conflicts from Sri Lanka to Canada to the Netherlands, tensions between farmers and green-minded policymakers are building in the United States, Steve Miller reports for RealClearInvestigations. Producers are squaring off against a costly proposed federal mandate for greenhouse-gas reporting from even the lowest rungs of corporate supply chains: The Securities and Exchange Commission wants food giants to demand data on fuel, fertilizer, and pesticides from their smaller-scale farmers, who say they lack the resources to comply. The mandate is being challenged by the powerful American Farm Bureau Federation and its state affiliates. “Our farmers do not have a team of compliance officers or attorneys," says an Illinois Farm Bureau representative, who adds that farmers are already regulated plenty. Farmer protests worldwide come against a gloomy backdrop of global food insecurity created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; pandemic supply-chain disruptions; and an inflation-precipitated recession already evident to many. The most dramatic consequences of the protests have occurred in Sri Lanka, where a 2021 fertilizer ban caused crop yields to plummet, sparking starvation that helped bring down the government in July. In the United States, the last major protest by farmers was in 1979, when thousands descended on Washington in a “Tractorcade.” Nebraska lobbyist: “If we start going down this path where regulators literally put farmers out of business as in Sri Lanka and the European Union with these climate decisions, you could see something like that.” Biden, Trump and the Beltway The FBI has come under scrutiny from Republican lawmakers in recent months over whistleblower claims of an anti-conservative bias weaponized against perceived foes while perceived friends are protected. Now one of those whistleblowers has stepped out of the shadows. This article reports that: Bombshell allegations by FBI Special Agent Steve Friend contained in a whistleblower complaint filed late Wednesday with the Department of Justice inspector general reveal a politicized Washington, DC, FBI field office cooking the books to exaggerate the threat of domestic terrorism, and using an “overzealous” January 6 investigation to harass conservative Americans and violate their constitutional rights. Friend, 37, a respected 12-year veteran of the FBI and a SWAT team member, was suspended Monday, stripped of his gun and badge, and escorted out of the FBI field office in Daytona Beach, Fla., after complaining to his supervisors about the violations. Friend reportedly alleges in the complaint that ... ... he was removed from active investigations into child sexual exploitation and human trafficking to work on J6 cases sent from DC. He was told “domestic terrorism was a higher priority” than child pornography. As a result, he believes his child exploitation investigations were harmed. Among other allegations that Friend raises, according to the article, is that: “FBI domestic terrorism cases are being opened on innocent American citizens who were nowhere near the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, based on anonymous tips to an FBI hotline or from Facebook spying on their messages.” A separate but related article jibes with Friend’s claims: Current and former FBI agents tell The Washington Times that the perceived threat [of white supremacy] has become overblown under the administration. They say bureau analysts and top officials are pressuring FBI agents to create domestic terrorist cases and tag people as White supremacists to meet internal metrics. “The demand for White supremacy” coming from FBI headquarters “vastly outstrips the supply of White supremacy,” said one agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We have more people assigned to investigate White supremacists than we can actually find.” …“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.” The FBI denies that it targets people based upon their political beliefs. Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee have obtained documents pointing to Joe Biden's involvement in the family business of selling American natural gas to the Chinese while he was planning to run for President. This article reports that according to multiple whistleblowers, the Biden family made promises to those who worked with them in 2017 and onward that they would “reap the rewards in a future Biden administration.” These revelations “pose national security concerns,” panel Republicans said: The Biden clan enriched itself by selling the natural resources to a Chinese firm closely affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—just a few years before the cost of gas in the United States hit record highs, the Oversight Republicans stated. In a letter to United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the ranking Republican on the Oversight Committee, alleged that according to whistleblowers, Joe Biden was heavily involved in this treachery. “This comes to light at a time when the cost of natural gas is at a 14-year high and Americans struggle to pay their energy bills,” Comer wrote in the letter to Yellen. “The President has not only misled the American public about his past foreign business transactions, but he also failed to disclose that he played a critical role in arranging a business deal to sell American natural resources to the Chinese while planning to run for President.” In a separate but related piece, this article reports that President Biden's appointee for chief climate risk officer for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Dr. Yue (Nina) Chen, studied at a Chinese Communist Party-controlled university that conducts research for the People's Liberation Army. Chen would be tasked with developing “climate risk management frameworks for the federal banking system." Quote: Chen earned her chemical engineering degree from Tsinghua University, which one think tank deems a "very high risk" because of its involvement in a "high level of defense research and alleged involvement in cyberattacks" on behalf of the Chinese military. ... Chen, who previously held a climate regulator position at the New York State Department of Financial Services, is a proponent of "environmental, social, and governance" guidelines, a socially progressive approach to investing known as ESG. China’s efforts to capture America’s elites extend beyond the political sphere. This article reports that Beijing paid scientists up to $1 million to leave their work on sensitive weapons technologies at the top U.S. nuclear lab and develop weapons for China: The report from Strider Technologies details Beijing’s campaign to embed 162 Chinese scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories, where the U.S. first developed nuclear weapons, in sensitive U.S.-funded research over the last three decades. At least 13 of the scientists later returned to China through the subversive “talent programs” to advance Chinese research in deep-earth-penetrating warhead, hypersonic missile, quiet submarine and drone technologies, according to the report. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway House GOP to Probe Chamber of Commerce Over ESG Intercept
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Big GOP Fundraiser Norm Coleman's Saudi Lobbying The Intercept Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Daily Wire host Matt Walsh uncovered details about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s (VUMC) so-called gender-affirming care. This article reports that video and archived webpages from the medical center show leaders' promoting “big money maker” transgender therapies and surgeries, and apparent threats against medical professionals who object for religious reasons. Walsh’s Twitter thread revealing his findings can be viewed here. In a separate but related piece, Substacker Wesley Yang did some on-the-ground reporting on a mom protesting outside the Boston’s Children’s hospital against the gender-affirming care promoted at Vanderbilt. Yang reports of the subject of his piece: This is a mother telling a very familiar story, one that I’ve heard more than a dozen times from parents who share her predicament. Their daughters have been caught up in a social contagion. Their daughters have been told that because they are gender nonconforming or uncomfortable with their female bodies as they undergo sexual maturation and all the difficulties that entails — the sexualization by a porn saturated society, the bloody monthly cycles and risks of pregnancy, and all the specifically gendered social pressures of adolescence — that they are in fact boys whose wrong bodies can be medically transformed to match the boy they really are on the inside. Their daughters have joined online communities that encourage them in this belief, and encourage them to regard anyone who stands in the way of this promised transformation as an enemy. These parents are trying to protect their children from the enormous risks that accompany the puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender surgeries that online influencers and peers, gender clinicians, federal government, and the educational establishment now cheerlead as the panacea for struggling gender-conforming, mentally-ill, and neurodivergent children. This article reports on campus “sugar babies” – co-eds snapping suggestive photos and filming lurid videos of themselves to be “sexted” to men for money, seen as a result of the unwinding of America’s traditional sexual mores and fostering of a culture of sexual anarchy that has normalized sex work. The article zeroes in on Stanford sugar babies Cassie and Lainey: For them, sugar-babying is a bit of entertainment and easy money that for now has virtually no consequences … any social stigma that once existed around this kind of thing is long gone. Their friends just laugh about it, and often participate. The sexting, Cassie said, “could escalate to being really sexual and that’s when I’d pass it off to a friend. … When I spoke to other students at Stanford about the sugar baby phenomenon, a few raised eyebrows at potential “safety concerns.” This is, of course, the only objection to sex work you are allowed to have as a good progressive feminist on a college campus. … While the girls come out more or less unscathed, what about the [often-working class] men [paying them]? The reporter concludes: Only th[e] complete upheaval of traditional gender dynamics could allow high-achieving women to “sugar baby” for working class men, and without any tangible consequence to the women. [The Stanford sugar babies’] experience is a microcosm of the broader cultural changes in America over the past few decades. American men, especially working class men, have been left behind with little hope for the “American dream” of a good family and stable job, income, and community. Rather, they self-medicate with drugs, alcohol, porn, and the pseudo-personal relationships offered by girls like Cassie and Lainey. Although the girls seem to be doing well while the men suffer, the girls describe the constant objectification with some queasiness. But both sides, the girls and the men paying them, benefit from the objectification of the other, at least on the surface — the girls, by profiting from the man’s isolation and dire circumstances, and the men, by sexualizing the girls. One perhaps is not worse than the other, but neither is worth celebrating. This article investigates the wave of deaths at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg. Some 109 soldiers assigned to the base, active and reserve, lost their lives in 2020 and 2021, casualty reports obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show. Only four of the deaths occurred in overseas combat operations. All the rest took place stateside. Fewer than 20 were from natural causes. All the rest were preventable. To what can we attribute this seemingly unprecedented wave of fatalities on a modern U.S. military installation? Forty-one Fort Bragg soldiers took their own lives in 2020 and 2021, making suicide the leading cause of death. A spokesman for the Army, Matthew Leonard, confirmed that no other base has ever recorded a higher two-year suicide toll. There were also a shocking number of incidents of soldier-on-soldier violence. Since mid-2020, 11 Fort Bragg soldiers have been murdered or charged with murder, including one murder-suicide. Five Fort Bragg soldiers were shot to death, and one was beheaded…newly obtained documents shed light on another kind of killer stalking soldiers and go a long way toward explaining the record-setting death toll. Fourteen of the casualty reports state explicitly that the soldier died from a drug overdose. Eleven of these identify fentanyl as the fatal agent. In five other cases, the soldier died at a young age from acute renal or liver failure, or from a heart attack — medical events that young people typically don’t experience, but that can be brought on by heavy drug abuse, complications from mixing drugs, or organ damage from the use of banned steroids. In addition, there were two cases where soldiers died from “undetermined” causes after being found unresponsive, for a total of 21 probable drug-related deaths in the two years ending December 2021. By comparison, there were about 13 illness deaths at Fort Bragg over the same period, 14 car and motorcycle crashes, and three fatal training accidents. Putting aside instances of self-harm, then, accidental overdose is the leading cause of death at Fort Bragg. A related article reports on a new, last-ditch effort to treat drug addiction. For addicts resistant to medication, therapy, inpatient and outpatient care, a new trial is testing deep brain stimulation. Making the article particularly fascinating is that the reporter himself had been treated for opioid addiction. Coronavirus Investigations W. Va.: How COVID Broke This Rural Doctor NY Times
Key Wuhan Lab-Leak Debunker's COVID Conflicts Daily Caller | 