Tennessee GOP committee warns governor on special session
If Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee was hoping to bring his fellow Republicans around on the idea of a special session to pass his version of a “red flag” law and other gun-related legislation before officially calling the session into being, his hopes were dashed this weekend when the state’s Republican Party Executive Committee adopted a resolution instead asking the governor to drop his plans altogether.
According to the Chattanooga Free Press, the resolution’s language was suggested by committee member Tina Bensiker, who says she’s concerned that many of the ideas that have been floated would violate the rights of Tennessee residents, while failing to take a bite out of violent crime.
“I feel at this point a lot of this is really emotion as opposed to rational and reasoned,” Benkiser added. “My concern, and a lot of others’ concerns, is that some of the proposals we’ve heard really violate due process of law. And that is a fundamental concern. And when you start talking about potentially infringing on people’s constitutional rights, that needs to be thought out over a long period of time with people who have thought, debated, looked at the language and fleshed all that out. Not something to be rushed through.”
Benkiser said she hopes Lee will take heed of the GOP action.
“I understand that people sometimes act out of emotion when something horrendous has happened, as happened here in Nashville, but really to friends of his. I understand that, and I think the natural reaction is to want to do something and to want to do something now. But like I said, when you’re talking about constitutional rights, at the end of the day, you need to take the time to think that out.”
Other committee members are concerned that the statehouse could turn into a circus once the special session gets underway, pointing to the protests on the floor of the state House earlier this year that resulted in the expulsion of two Democratic lawmakers. Those legislators recently won special elections in their heavily Democratic districts and are vowing to introduce a host of gun control measures during the special session, and some on the GOP Executive Committee believe the special session would once again inflame tensions and create a flashpoint for anti-gun activists to rally around.
There’s too much money in geoengineering for “climate change” not to turn into a business. The Biden administration is already studying blocking the sunlight. Now Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement joins Solar Radiation Modification.
-Richard Fernandez
Meta’s former CTO has a new $50 million project: ocean-based carbon removal
A nonprofit formed by Mike Schroepfer, Meta’s former chief technology officer, has spun out a new organization dedicated to accelerating research into ocean alkalinity enhancement—one potential means of using the seas to suck up and store away even more carbon dioxide.
Additional Ventures, cofounded by Schroepfer, and a group of other foundations have committed $50 million over five years to the nonprofit research program, dubbed the Carbon to Sea Initiative. The goals of the effort include evaluating potential approaches; eventually conducting small-scale field trials in the ocean; advancing policies that could streamline permitting for those experiments and provide more public funding for research; and developing the technology necessary to carry out and assess these interventions if they prove to work well and safely.
The seas already act as a powerful buffer against the worst dangers of climate change, drawing down about a quarter of human-driven carbon dioxide emissions and absorbing the vast majority of global warming. Carbon dioxide dissolves naturally into seawater where the air and ocean meet.
But scientists and startups are exploring whether these global commons can do even more to ease climate change, as a growing body of research finds that nations now need to both slash emissions and pull vast amounts of additional greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere to keep warming in check.
Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) refers to various ways of adding alkaline substances, like olivine, basalt, or lime, into seawater. These basic materials bind with dissolved inorganic carbon dioxide in the water to form bicarbonates and carbonates, ions that can persist for tens of thousands of years in the ocean. As those CO2-depleted waters reach the surface, they can pull down additional carbon dioxide from the air to return to a state of equilibrium.
The ground-up materials could be added directly to ocean waters from vessels, placed along the coastline, or used in onshore devices that help trigger reactions with seawater.
Study Shows Gun Laws Don’t Matter, Race Does
33 people were shot over the weekend in Chicago. Urban gangland violence like that is what real “mass shootings” look like and finally a Journal of the American Medical Association paper addressed the problem by shifting the blame to something it calls “structural racism”.
The JAMA paper, which was quickly picked up by CNN as “Structural Racism may Contribute to Mass Shootings” and by Bloomberg as “Mass Shootings Disproportionately Victimize Black Americans”, acknowledged what conservatives have been saying about gun violence.
“There was no discernible association noted in this study between gun laws and MSEs [mass shootings] with other studies showing similar findings,” it noted.
The issue wasn’t gun laws, it was race. “The study found that in areas with higher black populations, mass shootings are likelier to occur compared to communities with higher white populations,” CNN reported. “The findings disrupt the nation’s image of mass shootings, which has been shaped by tragedies like the Las Vegas festival shooting and Sandy Hook in which most of the victims were not black,” Bloomberg added.
Faced with an immovable statistical object and the unstoppable force of equity, the JAMA paper blames the whole thing on structural racism. The study correlates urban areas and neighborhoods with high concentrations of single-parent households” to mass shootings. It then demonstrates that “structural racism” must be at fault because of “the percentage of the population that is black.” Black people in the study are interchangeable with racism.
Such is the state of woke medical science which tries to fix racism with more racism. The study never comes up with any plausible explanation of how structural racism causes people to shoot each other. At one point it claims that “racial residential segregation practices are predictive of various types of shootings” in a country where segregation had been abolished since 1964.
The study’s definition of segregation is so senseless that it lists majority black cities like Detroit, a 77% black city, as being 73% segregated, and Baltimore, a 62% black city, as being 64% segregated. A city with a strong black majority and black leaders is racially segregated and its people are suffering from “structural racism”. That’s why there are so many mass shootings.
But if segregation is the issue then why does Atlanta, which had actual segregation, have only 18 mass shootings, while Chicago has 141? Southern cities show up as less segregated and less violent in the paper’s data. A history of segregation is clearly not the issue. This isn’t about the past, whether it’s the historical revisionism of the 1619 Project, or any other.
If segregation were the issue, crime would have been far higher during segregation than after it.
August 7
1679 – The brigantine Le Griffon, commissioned the year before by French explorer René-Robert de La Salle, is towed to the southeastern end of the Niagara River, to become the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes of North America.
1782 – General Washington orders the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle. It is later renamed the Purple Heart.
1789 – The United States Department of War is established.
1794 – President Washington invokes the Militia Acts of 1792 to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania.
1819 – Simón Bolívar’s army triumphs over Spanish troops near Casa de Teja in what is now the department of Boyacá, Columbia.
1909 – Alice Huyler Ramsey and three friends become the first women to complete a transcontinental auto trip, taking 59 days to travel from New York City to San Francisco.
1927 – The Peace Bridge opens between Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo, New York.
1942 – On earlier learning the Japanese Army is building an airfield on the island, U.S. Marines begin invasion landings on Guadalcanal along with Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.
1947 – 101 days after launching from Callao, Peru, Thor Heyerdahl and crew aboard the balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki, ground on the reef at Raroia atoll in the Tuamotu Islands
1959 – NASA launches Explorer 6, a satellite to study the upper atmosphere from the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral.
1964 – Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving President Johnson broad war powers to deal with North Vietnam
1969 – President Nixon appoints Luis R. Bruce, a Mohawk-Oglala Sioux and co-founder of the National Congress of American Indians, as commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
1978 – President Carter declares a federal emergency at Love Canal, New York due to negligent disposal of toxic waste
1987 – Lynne Cox becomes first person to swim from the U.S to Russia, crossing the Bering Strait from Little Diomede Island in Alaska to Big Diomede in the Soviet Union. 2 1/4 miles away. Brrrrrrrrr.
1990 – In response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the concern that the invading forces will continue on towards the Saudi Arabian oilfields, the first wave of 15,000 U.S. troops arrive in Saudi Arabia.
1997 – Fine Air cargo flight 101, a McDonnell Douglas DC-8, crashes after takeoff from Miami International Airport, killing all 4 crew aboard and 1 person on the ground.
1998 – Bombings at United States embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya by Islamic Jihad, kill 212 people.
2007 – At AT&T Park, in San Francisco, during the game between his San Francisco Giants against the Washington Nationals, Barry Bonds hits his 756th career home run to surpass Hank Aaron’s 33 year old record.
About those 116 gun deaths per day…
Headlines over “gun deaths” will always draw eyes. Some people will immediately click the link, then share it all over social media, just so they can say, “See! I told you guns are bad!”
There are usually problems with this, though.
For example, these reports rarely provide any context and they also tend to involve a fair bit of sensationalism in presenting all firearm-related fatalities as the same.
As of Aug. 1, at least 25,198 people have died from gun violence in the U.S. this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive – which is an average of roughly 118 deaths each day.
Of those who died, 879 were teens and 170 were children.
Deaths by suicide have made up the vast majority of gun violence deaths this year. There’s been more than 14,000 deaths by gun suicide this year, an average of about 66 deaths by suicide per day in 2023.
The majority of these deaths have occurred in Texas, California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois and Louisiana.
The grim tally of gun violence deaths includes 488 people killed in police officer-involved shootings. Thirty-four police officers have been fatally shot in the line of duty this year.
So about 56 percent of those deaths were suicides and nearly 500 were killed in officer-involved shootings, meaning they were justified homicides.
Now, this is going to be used to push gun control. It’s going to be used to justify more and more restrictions on our basic civil liberties, and they dishonest hacks won’t even pretend there’s a difference in these categories of shootings.
Suicides are awful and tragic, as are homicides, but the two things are very different.
The solutions to suicides aren’t the same as those for homicides. The motivations are completely different, so addressing the underlying causes is going to be completely different.
Gun control doesn’t stop suicides. At best, it shifts people to use another method, but it doesn’t stop suicides. Granted, it doesn’t stop homicides, either.
Yet anti-gun voices in the media love to lump all gun deaths into one big bucket. They want as big of a number as possible to scare people with. You can’t do that with just the homicide numbers. So, suicides it is.
Yes, these are all “gun deaths” if you just want the total of people who were killed due to a gunshot. For many people, though, that’s all that matters.
And it’s telling, because most of these people claim they don’t want to ban gun ownership, but then can’t differentiate between criminals’ acts and someone who took their own life due to their own mental illness.
They want them lumped because the evil, at least in their minds, is the guns themselves. If it was really about saving people’s lives, they’d focus on the underlying conditions at play here. Everything from mental health treatment to job programs would be on the agenda.
The fact that they’re not is telling. It’s just not telling us anything we didn’t already know after decades of watching and listening to the anti-gun agenda.
Questioning election results is un-American!
*Cough*
The last time the Democrats admitted that a Republican had legitimately been elected president was in 1988.
*Cough*
HOW DARE TRUMP QUESTION THE ELECTION RESULT?
Now that Donald Trump has been indicted for questioning the result of the 2020 presidential election, we should never forget that the last time the Democrats admitted that a Republican had legitimately been elected president was in 1988, when George H.W. Bush carried 40 states. Democrats have denounced every Republican president since then as illegitimate (including George W. Bush twice). Roll the tape:
Recent Study Says That the Vaccinated Transmit mRNA COVID Aerosols to the Unvaccinated
Chalk up another one for the “conspiracy theorists.” A recent study found evidence to support the argument that COVID-19-vaccinated individuals can “shed” or transmit antibodies to unvaccinated individuals through aerosols.
The idea of the mRNA COVID vaccinated transmitting aerosols to the unvaccinated has been previously mocked as a conspiracy theory and censored online. But a recent study found evidence supporting the contention. The peer-reviewed study, “Evidence for Aerosol Transfer of SARS-CoV-2–Specific Humoral Immunity,” was published in ImmunoHorizons in May.
Aerosols are suspended droplets or particles able to be breathed in or absorbed through the skin.
The study’s conclusions note, “The extended mandates for mask wearing in both social and work environments provided a unique opportunity to evaluate the possibility of aerosolized Ab expiration from vaccinated individuals.” The study obtained surgical face masks and nasal swabs for the research.
The Epoch Times summarized in less technical terms than the study used on August 2:
Researchers used a combination of tests to detect SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies from masks vaccinated lab members wore and donated anonymously at the end of the day. Antibodies are proteins produced by the immune system that circulate in the blood and neutralize foreign substances such as bacteria and viruses.
Consistent with results reported by others, the researchers identified both immunoglobulin G (IgG) and immunoglobulin A (IgA) antibodies in the saliva of vaccinated individuals and on their masks.
The researchers’ hypothesis was that antibody transfer could occur between individuals through aerosols or droplets. And when they analyzed nasal swabs for children living variously in vaccinated, COVID-positive, or unvaccinated households, they found evidence to support that hypothesis, Epoch Times explained.
Results showed high IgG in the noses of vaccinated parents was “significantly associated” with an increase in intranasal IgG within the unvaccinated child from the same household, especially compared to the “complete deficit of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibody detected” in nasal swabs obtained from children in nonvaccinated families. A similar trend was found with IgA in the same samples.
In other words, their findings suggest aerosol transmission of antibodies can occur between COVID-19 vaccinated parents and their children—and the tendency for this transfer is directly related to the amount of nasal or oral antibodies found in those who received vaccines.
Brian Hooker, a biochemical engineer and chief scientific officer at Children’s Health Defense, told the Epoch Times that such “passive immunization” would not benefit the unvaccinated receiving the aerosols because the COVID vaccines provided little protection even for the vaccinated. The shedding could trigger autoimmunity and “all sorts of reactions” in “bystanders,” Hooker said. He suggested that the vaccine’s spike protein could also be transmissible, which is potentially harmful.
So the question is: are such transmitted aerosols dangerous? After all, there are multiple studies and pieces of research presenting evidence of the serious side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines. Would any of those side effects be possible for unvaccinated individuals through the process described above? If so, that makes the COVID vaccines not only dangerous for those who receive them but also for anyone who lives or works with vaccinated individuals.
‘His Heart Just Stopped’: NJ Family Mourns Rookie Officer Who Died Suddenly While Exercising
A family and a New Jersey community are grieving the loss of a young policeman who died of cardiac arrest on July 23.
Twenty-three-year-old Sam Irvin collapsed as he ran sprints outside at his fiancé’s family’s farm in Columbus, Fox 29 reported Thursday, noting he had an enlarged heart, which was revealed in the autopsy.
“His heart just stopped, and they said it happened within seconds, so he didn’t feel pain,” his fiancé, Mackenzie Santucci, explained, adding it was an extremely traumatic day.
Alan Dershowitz Issues Warning: “Looks Like Banana Republic Land”
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz said Friday the prosecution of former President Donald Trump “looks like banana republic land” following a NYT report that claimed President Joe Biden pressed for Trump’s indictment.
Alan said: “President Biden urged his attorney general to indict the man who he knew was going to be the leading opponent if against him.
“That begins to look like banana republic land. That’s what happens when people in power are afraid of the democratic process.
“What they do is they seek the indictment and prosecution of the people who are running against them.
“I have a constitutional right to vote against Donald Trump for the third time.
“I voted against him twice, I intend to vote against him again, but I want to have that right to vote against him and not have that right taken away from me by prosecutors and by the president, who wants to see him imprisoned.
“That’s just not the American way.
“This is a step in that direction(banana republic), and also placing the case in the District of Columbia, which is 95% anti-Trump, putting it in front of a judge with a history of anti-Trump.
“If the government thinks they have a strong case, they ought to join the defense and agree to move it to West Virginia or Virginia and put it in front of another judge who doesn’t have a long history of anti-Trump attitudes.
“So, I don’t believe he can get a fair trial in the District of Columbia.”
August 6
1538 – Bogotá Colombia, is founded by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada
1777 – American forces & allied indians attempting to relieve Fort Stanwix are ambushed by Loyalist forces & allied indians near Oriskany, New York.
1787 – Sixty proof sheets of the Constitution of the United States are delivered to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia
1862 – The Confederate ironclad CSS Arkansas is scuttled on the Mississippi River after earlier suffering catastrophic engine failure near Baton Rouge
1890 – William Kemmler becomes the first person in the U.S. to be executed by electric chair at Auburn Prison, New York
1912 – The Progressive “Bull Moose” Party opens its convention at the Chicago Coliseum.
1914 – Serbia declares war on Germany. Austria-Hungary declares war on Russia.
1945 – U.S Army Air Force Colonel Paul Tibbets and crew aboard the B29 bomber Enola Gay, drops “Little Boy” atomic bomb #L-11 on Hiroshima.
1965 – President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.
1990 – The United Nations Security Council orders a global trade embargo against Iraq in response to the invasion of Kuwait.
1991 – Tim Berners-Lee of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, inventor of HTML language, the web browser and web server, publishes on the internet a short summary of the World Wide Web project that had been activated in January.
2011 – A U.S. Army CH-47D helicopter, call sign Extortion 17 is shot down in Maidan Wardak province Afghanistan by Taliban forces, killing 23 U.S Navy SEAL Team-6 operators , 5 U.S. National Guard and Reserve aircrew, 2 U.S. Air Force ParaRescuemen, 1 U.S. Air Force Combat Controller, a U.S. military working dog, 7 Afghan soldiers, and 1 Afghan civilian.
2012 – NASA’s Curiosity rover lands on the surface of Mars.
Unlock the Health Benefits of Coffee.
Expert opinion by Aparna Nemalikanti
M.Sc. Clinical Nutrition and Dietetics · 10 years of experience · India
Coffee is a rich source of caffeine, which blocks the inhibitory neurotransmitter adenosine in the brain, which causes stimulant affect, mood and various aspects of brain. Caffeine can also boost the metabolic rate, increases adrenaline in the blood(fight or flight hormone) that boosts physical activity, relieve the symptoms of Alzheimer’s and lower the risk of having Parkinson’s. Contains manganese, potassium and magnesium. As per FDA about 400mg of caffeine is safe(4-5 cups of brewed coffee) per day.
This response has been generated using AI. It should not be considered as medical advice.
Coffee has been linked to many potential health benefits. According to Healthline, coffee may help boost energy levels and decrease fatigue by altering levels of certain neurotransmitters in the brain[1]. Regular coffee consumption may be linked to a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes over the long term[1]. Some research suggests that coffee may help protect against certain neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease[1]. Coffee is also an excellent source of several antioxidants, including hydrocinnamic acids and polyphenols. These compounds may play a role in preventing several chronic and acute conditions[2].However, it is important to note that excessive caffeine intake can lead to negative side effects such as anxiety, insomnia, digestive issues, and high blood pressure[1] [3]. It is recommended that adults consume no more than 400 milligrams of caffeine per day[1].I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
Sources: [1] healthline.com [2] webmd.com [3] hopkinsmedicine.org
Everybody Keeps Indicting Trump, Without Regard for Consequences.
Having already said what I had to say about the most recent indictment of the former president (“Banana Republic, U.S.A.”), I thought perhaps readers might want to know what liberals are saying about it.
Trump’s surreal arraignment day in Washington augurs ominous days ahead
That’s the headline on an “analysis” by CNN reporter Stephen Collinson, and this might be the first time I’ve ever the verb “augur” used in a headline. “Portend,” maybe, but “augur”? No, can’t recall ever seeing that one, and it might help to know that Collinson is not American. He’s from England, where I suppose schoolboys at posh academies are taught to use references to the ancient Roman practice of augury, but I digress . . .
As former President Donald Trump left Washington after answering charges of trying to subvert democracy, it felt like all the previous trauma and divisions of his eight-year journey into the nation’s psyche were just the start.
America now faces the prospect of an ex-president repeatedly going on trial in an election year in which he’s the Republican front-runner and is promising a new White House term of retribution. He is responding with the same kind of extreme rhetoric that injected fury into his political base and erupted into violence after the last election. Ominous and tense days may be ahead.
Trump spent the afternoon at a federal courthouse within sight of the US Capitol that was ransacked by his supporters on January 6, 2021. He pleaded not guilty in the gravest of the three cases in which he has so far been indicted – on four charges arising from an alleged attempt to halt the “collecting, counting and certifying” of votes after the 2020 election.
Live video of Trump motorcading to an airport and sweeping into yet another city for yet another indictment on his branded jetliner has become part of a sudden new normal. But if the arraignment of a former president seems routine, it’s a measure of the historic chaos Trump has wrought since he bulldozed into politics in 2015.Wearing his classic dark suit and long red tie, Trump on Thursday rose to his full height in court and slowly and clearly elucidated the words “not guilty” in a hearing in which his fall from president to defendant was underscored when he had to wait silently for the judge to arrive. He was irked, sources familiar with his mindset told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, that the judge referred to him simply as “Mr. Trump,” rather than with the presidential title he still used at his clubs.
The 45th president and special counsel Jack Smith – who has also indicted him for the alleged mishandling of classified documents – shared several glances, before a proceeding that, unlike when he was president, means Trump’s fate is now out of his control.
The entire day was surreal, but given its historic implications – after Trump became the first ex-president formally charged in relation to alleged crimes committed in office – also sad.Thursday was a day when the country crossed a point of no return. For the first time, the United States formally charged one of its past leaders with trying to subvert its core political system and values.
It was Trump who forced the country over this dangerous threshold. A man whose life’s creed is to never be seen as a loser refused to accept defeat in a democratic election in 2020, then set off on a disastrous course because, as Smith’s indictment put it, “he was determined to stay in power.”
Trump is steering a stormy course to an unknown destination. If he wins back the White House, the already twice-impeached new president could trigger a new constitutional crisis by sweeping away the federal cases against him or even by pardoning himself. Any alternative Republican president could find themselves besieged by demands from Trump supporters for a pardon that, if granted, could overshadow their entire presidency. And if Trump is convicted, and loses a 2024 general election, he risks a long jail term, which would likely become fuel for him to incite his supporters to fresh protest. . . .
Well, enough of that. Notice how Collinson pretends that all of this was Trump’s fault, as if nobody else involved — Attorney General Merrick Garland or Special Counsel Jack Smith — had any choice or discretion in the matter. No, they had to indict Trump. Because Trump “forced the country over this dangerous threshold,” which I suppose is pretty much how the Roundheads explained themselves after they beheaded King Charles I: “We had no choice! He made us do it!” The Roundheads then set up a “Republic” far more tyrannical than anything Charles ever did, much the same as those later regicides in France imposed a tyranny more brutal and repressive than the monarchy of Louis XVI, and likewise the Bolsheviks were infinitely worse than Czar Nicholas.
One might notice a historical pattern here, and then — since we’re speaking of ominous auguries — contemplate America’s future once Our Leaders save us from Trump’s alleged threat to “subvert democracy.”
But these people seem to have no proper sense of history, no more than they have any sense of irony or self-awareness, which explains the latest entry in John Hoge’s “I’m Not Making This Up, You Know” files:
RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) — Following some confusion Thursday, Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman spoke with ABC11 to explain why no charges were being filed in the deadly shooting outside a Food Lion.