New Research Reveals That Wearing Face Masks Did Not Reduce Risk of COVID Infection After First Omicron Wave.

A new study indicates that face masks did not significantly lower Covid-19 infection risk after the initial Omicron wave, highlighting the need for adaptable strategies and further research as risk factors evolve.

New findings from the University of East Anglia suggest that wearing face masks did not reduce the risk of Covid infection after the initial rise of the Omicron variant. An analysis of official data indicated that the risk factors for infection changed notably when the dominant Covid variant in the UK shifted from Delta to Omicron in December 2021.

These included wearing a mask, a history of foreign travel, household size, whether people were working or retired, and contact with children or over-70s.

Lead author Professor Paul Hunter, of Norwich Medical School at the University of East Anglia (UEA), said: “Early in the pandemic there were many studies published looking at risk factors for catching Covid, but far fewer studies after the first year or so. Our research shows that there were changes in some risk factors around the time that the Omicron BA.2 variant became dominant.”

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Anti-Gunners Channel Orwell to Defend Bump Stock Ban

With the Supreme Court’s decision in Garland v. Cargill looming, gun control activists are engaging in some Big Brother-esque torture of the English language to defend the ATF’s abuse of its regulatory authority.

The doubleplus ungood spin from groups like Brady and Giffords is being aided and abetted by gun control-friendly writers like The Hill‘s Clayoton Vickers, who contends that if the ATF’s rule is struck down by the Supreme Court it “could quickly open an unfettered marketplace of newer, more powerful rapid-fire devices.”

David Pucino, legal director at Giffords Law Center, said lower courts are currently treating bump stocks and similar devices like machine guns, which are banned.

“The use case for new rapid-fire devices lower courts are considering is that somebody wants to have a machine gun, and the law won’t let them have one,” Pucino said.

If the Supreme Court does overturn the ban, he said, it “would be very, very dangerous for public safety.”

Pucino’s comments are erroneous on several counts. First, not every lower courts are treating bump stocks like machine guns. If that were the case the Court might never have agreed to hear Garland v. Cargill. It’s the government that asked the Court to take the case, after all, and the DOJ filed that request because the Fifth and Sixth Circuits have both issued rulings that bump stocks do not turn firearms into machine guns.

Pucino is also off base when he claims that the argument boils down to “someone wants a machine gun but the law won’t let them have one.” Garland v. Cargill technically isn’t even a Second Amendment case. The question before the Court is whether “a bump stock device is a ‘machinegun’ as defined in 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b) because it is designed and intended for use in converting a rifle into a machinegun, i.e., into a weapon that fires ‘automatically more than one shot … by a single function of the trigger.'”

It’s that phrase “single function of the trigger” where Pucino and other anti-gunners are trying to play games with the English language.

Gun control advocates argue that a debate over “single function” misses the point of bans on machine guns.

“The Justices are aware there’s a sort of forced nature to the other side’s argument,” Shira Feldman, director of constitutional litigation at Brady United Against Gun Violence, told The Hill.

Brady, a gun-control advocacy group, has also filed a brief in Cargill.

“Is it really reasonable that Congress would have written the law such that we have to read these statutes in a way that we wouldn’t normally parse language?” Feldman said.

It’s the gun control groups who are wanting to read these statutes in a way that defies common sense. In their view, a “single function of the trigger” is the same as “multiple functions of a trigger”, so long as any device attached to a firearm can help increase the rate of fire. Congress didn’t define “machine gun” by how many rounds could be sent downrange in a given period of time, which is essentially how the gun control groups want the statute in question to be interpreted. A bump stock doesn’t change anything at all about how a trigger functions, and it certainly doesn’t turn a semi-automatic rifle into a fully automatic machine gun.

There’s another flaw in the logic (and I use that term loosely) of the gun control groups. Like Vickers, they claim that allowing bump stocks to be sold will be “very, very dangerous for public safety.” But they also claim that the gun industry is already flouting federal law to sell any number of devices that turn AR-15s into machine guns.

According to Feldman and fellow legal experts at Brady, the gun industry has been “disingenuous” in calling rapid-fire accessories legal and has sold them as “get them before … [they’re] banned” products.

“We’ve seen the gun industry do everything they can do to skirt federal regulation to increase the lethality of the weapons that they can sell to civilians, whether it’s a hellfire [trigger], a bump stock or a host of other accessories,” said Christian Heyne, chief programs officer at Brady.

“The main reason you have these is to kill as many people in this short amount of time as you can. And to victims, it isn’t important exactly how the trigger mechanism works,” added Douglas Letter, Brady’s chief legal officer.

“The point is that what Congress was trying to do [when it passed machine gun bans] was make these unbelievably dangerous weapons not a part of our civilian society,” he said.

It’s not disingenuous to sell products that the ATF says are perfectly legal. What’s disingenuous is the agency reversing years of determinations to the contrary, while writing rules that are so ambiguous it’s impossible to know whether you’re in compliance or violating their edicts. It’s disingenuous to claim that the main reason someone wants a bump stock or a binary trigger is to “kill as many people as possible” given the fact that hundreds of thousands of bump stocks were lawfully purchased before the ATF banned them, but were rarely used in crimes of any kind.

Garland v. Cargill is a case about bump stocks, but it’s also inherently about agency power. Will the Supreme Court give the green light to ATF and other federal agencies to ignore the plain text of federal statutes and essentially write new laws out of existing regulations, or will it rein in the multiple administrative abuses that have taken place since the bump stock ban was imposed in 2017? I have no idea where the Court will come down, but with a decision expected before its summer recess in June, we don’t have too long to wait before we learn the answer.

The day was really quite beautiful, so I sat down and had a cold beer.
The drink facilitated some deep thinking.

My wife walked by and asked me what I was doing,
and I said, “Nothing.”
The reason I said “Nothing” instead of saying “Just thinking” is because she then would have asked, “About what?”
At that point I would have had to explain that men are deep thinkers about various topics, which would lead to other questions.

Finally I pondered an age old question:
Is giving birth more painful than getting kicked in the nuts?

Women always maintain that giving birth is way more painful than a guy getting kicked in the nuts, but how could they know?
Well, after another beer, and some more heavy deductive thinking, I have come up with an answer to that question.

Getting kicked in the nuts is more painful than having a baby, and even though I obviously couldn’t really know, here is the reason for my conclusion:
A year or so after giving birth, a woman will often say,
“It might be nice to have another child.”
But you never hear a guy say,
“You know, I think I would like another kick in the nuts.”

I rest my case.

Time for another beer. Then, maybe a nap.

-Unknown Author

Ahhhhh hahahahah. Ahhhhhh HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Gas fracking for lithium production?
In order for the US to meet its domestic lithium demand to power all of the electric vehicles we are going to be compelled to buy, we have to engage in natural gas fracking?
YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS IRONY UP.

A Vast, Untapped Source of Lithium Has Just Been Found in The US

Almost two centuries after California’s gold rush, the United States is on the brink of a lithium rush. As demand for the material skyrockets, government geologists are rushing to figure out where the precious element is hiding.

In September 2023, scientists funded by a mining company reported finding what could be the largest deposit of lithium in an ancient US supervolcano. Now public researchers on the other side of the country have uncovered another untapped reservoir – one that could cover nearly half the nation’s lithium demands.

It’s hiding in wastewater from Pennsylvania’s gas fracking industry.

Lithium is arguably the most important element in the nation’s renewable energy transition – the material of choice for electric vehicle batteries. And yet, there is but one large-scale lithium mine in the US, meaning for the moment the country has to import what it needs.

Officials at the US Department of Energy are desperate to change that. By 2030, they want all lithium produced domestically.

Expanding America’s lithium industry, however, is highly controversial, as mining can destroy natural environments, leach toxic chemicals, and intrude on sacred Indigenous land.

At the same time, however, lithium-ion batteries are considered a crucial technology in the world’s transition to renewable energy, storing electricity generated by the wind and the Sun. Finding a source of lithium that doesn’t cause more environmental destruction than necessary is key, but a clean solution is complicated.

Pennsylvania sits on a vein of sedimentary rock known as the Marcellus Shale, which is rich in natural gas. The geological foundation was deposited almost 400 million years ago by volcanic activity, and it contains lithium from volcanic ash.

Over vast stretches of time, deep groundwater has dissolved the lithium in these rocks, essentially “mining the subsurface”, according to Justin Mackey, a researcher at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pennsylvania.

“We just didn’t know how much was in there,” says Mackey.

Because of its location, Pennsylvania is a leading state in controversial fracking activities, which have spurred numerous environmental and health concerns.

Such practices could squander precious lithium. As this new study shows, in properly measuring lithium reserves in fracking wastewater, there could be another way to put the waste to good use.

The regional analysis is based on data from oil and gas companies, which report the elements found in their wastewater to government officials. Mackey and his colleagues considered data collected from 2012 to 2023 from the wastewater of 515 wells in Pennsylvania.

Their results suggest that the Marcellus Shale “has the capacity to provide significant lithium yields for the foreseeable future” – as long as fracking continues, that is.

If scientists can extract even a conservative amount of lithium from fracking wastewater in the state, they calculate it could meet more than 30 percent of the current US demand.

To fulfill our climate goals, global demand for lithium is expected to increase by 400 percent in the coming decades. It remains to be seen how lithium requirements will be met and what new environmental crises those solutions might wreak.

The study was published in Scientific Reports.

Well, it tells me that the NRA BoD aren’t really capable of making the hard decisions necessary to clean the slate. It’s more likely now that State Supreme Court Judge Cohen will take matters in hand which could have been avoided if the BoD had the guts to take care of business.

An Open Letter From NRA Staffers To The Board

I received this open letter to the NRA Board within the last hour. It is reportedly from current and former NRA staffers who are fed up with Charles Cotton, Bill Brewer, and most of the upper management of the NRA. The level of detail in the letter is enough to convince me it is real such as Sonya Rowling being forced to cut a check to Brewer by Andrew Arulanadam. I learned of that just earlier this afternoon.

Here is the letter in its unedited entirety. Given it is an open letter, it is meant for sharing. You might want to share it with each and every Board member that you know. I know they sent it to the NRA email address for the Board but I doubt it will be routed to Board members before their 9am CDT meeting tomorrow in Dallas.

Dear NRA Board of Directors,

We are writing as current and former NRA staff members. We choose to remain anonymous due to the almost certain retaliation from NRA executives and the Brewer firm. Since 2018, our association has been in complete peril, and no one has asked the NRA’s staff for their input. We are the ones who work day in and day out to accomplish the NRA’s mission of promoting the safe and responsible use of firearms and defending the Second Amendment. Meanwhile, it has become clear that NRA’s executives and officers are focused on ensuring a steady revenue stream for the Brewer firm. We pose this question: When will we stop the bleeding, and when is enough, enough?

Over the past six years, the NRA has become unrecognizable. The NRA of 2018 is far different from the NRA of 2024, and this convention hall is proof. This deterioration is due to the NRA’s poor leadership. President Cotton, Andrew Arulanandam, Randy Kozuch, Tyler Schropp, Doug Hamlin, and Sonya Rowling have not, and arguably never have, acted in the best interest of NRA members. The NRA’s recent misfortunes are often blamed on the New York Attorney General. While we are no fans of Letitia James, 90% of the NRA’s issues are now self-inflicted. Yes, AG James has had a gun pointed at the NRA from the start of her campaign, but NRA’s leadership continues to hand her magazines with ammunition.

We will briefly discuss each leader, avoiding rehashing old issues.

President Cotton has overseen many of the NRA’s poor decisions over the years on the Audit Committee, the SLC, and as President. It’s time to change his title from president to king because he is acting as a monarch. King Charles has been positioning himself to become executive vice president and chief executive officer. Anyone familiar with his record at the NRA knows he is not the right fit for EVP. The new NRA EVP needs to be unapologetically pro-gun, innovative, politically connected, and experienced in turning around failing organizations. King Charles is not that person. His primary focus is on maintaining his relationship with the Brewer firm. Recent reports confirmed by the Brewer firm show that King Charles and Bill Brewer even fly on private jets together. The firm claims this saves the NRA money, but this is unlikely. While the firm may not directly bill the NRA for the jet, there is nothing to stop them from increasing their billable hours. This is reminiscent of the MMP yacht situation. King Charles and Bill Brewer are the only ones pushing for the move to Texas because they are both based there. No other staff member, including NRA’s Interim CEO Andrew Arulanandam, plans on moving to Texas. King Charles’s goal is to secure a high salary for a few years as his retirement fund.

Andrew Arulanandam cannot make a good decision to save his life. Since taking his position on February 1, the NRA has continued to decline. Arulanandam exists in his position solely to follow King Charles’s orders and maintain the relationship with the Brewer firm. In fact, Arulanandam reportedly forced Sonya Rowling to pay Brewer millions of dollars today before tomorrow’s board meeting. If King Charles becomes EVP, Arulanandam will be rewarded and return to his high-paying job as executive director of General Operations, with an updated salary and maximized pension at retirement.

Randy Kozuch has been consistently overlooked throughout his career at the NRA. Kozuch is not a leader, and most of the ILA staff don’t respect him. Kozuch is a yes-man. Shortly after becoming executive director of ILA, Wayne asked him for millions from the ILA budget to keep the NRA afloat. Kozuch complied, and his newly hired ILA Finance Director quit after the first week due to discomfort. This wasn’t the first time the NRA asked ILA for millions, and Kozuch complies every time. King Charles, Bill Brewer, and Arulanandam don’t respect Kozuch; he is just the perfect puppet to help pay off Brewer’s excessive bills.

The other executives are equally ineffective. Tyler Schropp, the highest-paid executive at the NRA, can barely raise money without Wayne. Doug Hamlin operates entirely in the red and doesn’t know how to run an organization. Sonya Rowling is only in her position because she is a “whistleblower,” which looked good for the Brewer firm to show a course correction. However, she is inexperienced and would run the organization into the ground without realizing it.

Finally, the Brewer firm is the most ineffective and corrupt part of the NRA. Bill Brewer excels at one thing: losing. He flaunts the money he has taken, pulling up to the hotel this weekend in an Aston Martin while losing consistently. And he is Angus McQueen’s son-in-law. The NRA has funded the McQueen/Brewer family feud for too long, at the expense of our members who faithfully support us.

Board members, when is enough, enough? You are the only ones who can stop this. Charles Cotton is not fit for EVP. Andrew Arulanandam is not fit for EVP. No one at the NRA is currently fit for EVP. The Texas move is a waste of money and unnecessary. The Brewer firm is ripping the NRA off for every dollar we have. The NRA is failing. Revenue is failing, membership numbers are falling, ILA’s power is a fraction of what it used to be, and other training organizations are outpacing us. It is so bad that NRA is liquidating investments to continue paying Brewer. We beg you, as you go into the meeting tomorrow, to stop the bleeding and hold Charles Cotton, Andrew Arulanandam, and the other officers accountable.

Save the National Rifle Association of America.

Armed man shot outside home of woman who had restraining order against him in Monrovia

A man who was allegedly armed with several knives was fatally shot outside of the home of a woman who had a restraining order against him in Monrovia on Friday.

Officers were sent to a home in the 400 block of S. Shamrock Avenue at around 9:20 p.m. after receiving a call from the woman, according to a statement from the Monrovia Police Department.

“Officers responded immediately and discovered the male subject deceased with a gunshot wound,” the statement said.

During the course of their investigation, authorities said that the man had gone to the home where he allegedly tried to stab two people.

At some point during the confrontation the “female adult discharged a firearm,” deputies said.

The man’s identity has not been released.

Several knives and a firearm were recovered by investigators at the scene.

Two people were detained for questioning and provided voluntary statements. No arrests have yet been announced.

Paulette Polk, who lives in the home that shares a driveway with the house where the shooting happened, says that she woke up to find that there was still blood on her car.

“He did not live there, I had minimal experience with him,” Polk said. “But, it was not pleasant, just saying.”

She says that she saw him fixing a fence at the home just three days ago, and many times over the last six months since the woman and her teenage daughter moved in. She believes he was the woman’s boyfriend.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigators were contacted to assist MPD with the investigation.

‘Martyred’: Iranian Media Declare Raisi Dead; ‘No Sign’ of Life at Helicopter Crash Site

Search teams have reportedly located the site where a helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, crashed on Sunday, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), the state’s news agency.

There was “no sign’ of life, according to Iranian state television (via the Times of Israel).

IRAN – MAY 20: A screen grab captured from a video shows from Akinci Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, which participated in search and rescue operations for the helicopter carrying the Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his delegation in Iran on May 20, 2024. A Turkish Akinci unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) identified a source of heat early Monday suspected to be the wreckage of a helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and shared its coordinates with Iranian authorities. (Photo by Anadolu/Anadolu via Getty Images)

State-run media also declared that Raisi had died — or, rather, that he had been “martyred.”

The Times of Israel quoted Iran’s Mehr news agency:

“The president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ebrahim Raisi, had an accident while serving and performing his duty for the people of Iran and was martyred,” Iran’s Mehr agency says as other media outlets also reported the news.

Iranian Foreign Minister Amirabdollahian and other officials were also reported to have been on board when the helicopter went missing in a mountainous area of the country.

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Former NIH Director Admits Government Was Top Source Of Covid Misinformation

Four years ago, U.S. state, local, and federal goverments pushed “social-distancing” policies separating Americans six feet away from other people everywhere they went. Now former National Institute of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins has admitted no “science or evidence” ever backed these heavy-handed, comprehensive restrictions — another key proof the left’s war on so-called “disinformation” is so dangerous.

A memo National Review obtained, from the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, details Collins’ closed-door testimony earlier this year. It reveals that Collins had not seen evidence on March 22, 2020, to support the widely obeyed federal policy when the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) instituted six-foot social distancing rules.

“Do you recall science or evidence that supported the six-foot distance?” Collins was asked.

“I do not,” Collins said. “I did not see evidence, but I’m not sure I would have been shown evidence at that point.”

“Have you seen any evidence since then supporting six feet?”

“No,” Collins responded.

So Collins admits the federal government lacked any scientific basis for this massive social policy it pushed on Americans, including by colluding with Big Tech to shut down public debate about Covid-19 responses. Such debate could have revealed that many Covid policies weren’t backed by good research. Instead, numerous federal officials pressed Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to shut down skepticism and contrary information it falsely labeled “misinformation” and “disinformation,” including articles from The Federalist.

This censorship effort effectively secured an information monopoly for federal agencies, including the CDC and NIH, to spread false information. As the lawsuit Murthy v. Missouri and other investigations later revealed, these government officials then used their information monopoly gained through accusing others of “misinformation” to spread actual misinformation, including that “social distancing” was scientifically proven necessary to “save lives.”

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