Month: February 2024

The idiots running Portland, Oregon have declared a 90-day state of emergency over an ongoing fentanyl crisis, just three years after decriminalizing possession of all drugs.

State, County and City officials declared the ‘tri-government’ fentanyl emergency following recommendations by the governor-established Portland Central City Task Force late last year. As part of the response, the city, state and county will work together to ‘tackle the crisis’ (sure!), which will include the establishment of a “command center” in the central city to coordinate efforts and “refocus existing resources.”

Fentanyl addicts who interact with first responders in downtown Portland over the next 90 days will be triaged in this new command center.

“Our country and our state have never seen a drug this deadly addictive, and all are grappling with how to respond,” said Gov. Tina Kotek (D).

According to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, “We cannot underestimate the tremendous value of bringing leaders from different disciplines in a room on a daily basis who all account for a different part of the solution.”

Mike Meyers, director of Portland’s Community Safety Division will head up the command team, while deputy police chief Nathan Reynolds of the state’s Office of Resilience and Emergency Management will be the state’s incident commander.

Portland Police will also work with Oregon State Police to jointly patrol downtown streets for fentanyl sales.

As the Epoch Times notes further, the emergency declarations do not provide extra funding for the joint actions, and government agencies will instead rearrange current budgets to cover the costs.

According to U.S. officials, an increasing number of Mexican cartels have been importing fentanyl from China before pressing it into pills or mixing it into other counterfeit pills made to look like Xanax, Adderall, or oxycodone. The drugs are then sold to unaware buyers in the United States

Announcing the tri-government actions, Ms. Kotek noted the ongoing opioid is impacting not just the state but the entire nation, with the deadly synthetic drug fentanyl leading to the deaths of thousands of Americans each year.

From 2016 to 2021, drug overdose deaths involving fentanyl more than tripled across the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In Oregon, health officials saw a 74 percent surge in fentanyl-related deaths from 2019 to 2020, according to the Oregon Department of Education.

“Our country and our state have never seen a drug this deadly and addictive, and all are grappling with how to respond,” Ms. Kotek said. “The Chair, the Mayor and I recognize the need to act with urgency and unity across our public health and community safety systems to make a dent in this crisis. We are all in this together.”

Ms. Kotek added that the next 90 days will “yield unprecedented collaboration and focused resources targeting fentanyl and provide a roadmap for the next steps.”

Elsewhere, Portland Mayor Wheeler said the joint emergency declarations are “exactly the type of coordinated action needed to make a direct impact and a lasting difference.”

The joint emergency declarations come after U.S. and Chinese officials resumed talks in Beijing on Tuesday regarding how to counter the ongoing illicit trafficking of fentanyl.

The discussions come more than a year after they were put on hold amid rising tensions between Washington and Beijing in the wake of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Wang Xiaohong, China’s public security minister, said his deputy—who attended the closed-door talks with U.S. officials earlier in the day— had reached a “common understanding on the work plan” with officials and hopes the two delegations could “enhance and expand cooperation to provide more positive energy for stable, sound and sustainable China-U.S. relations.”

Senior U.S. officials from the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, State, and Treasury participated in Tuesday’s talks. U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns was also in attendance.

Reuters contributed to this report. 

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Updated COVID-19 vaccines may cause heart inflammation and severe allergic shock, according to a new study from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Researchers with the FDA, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and companies like CVS looked at health care databases to try to figure out if there were signs the Moderna and Pfizer bivalent COVID-19 vaccines might be linked to any health issues.

They found several safety signals. One signal was for myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, and a related condition called pericarditis following Pfizer vaccination in adults aged 18 to 35. Another was for anaphylaxis, or severe allergic shock, following Moderna and Pfizer vaccination in people aged 18 to 64.

The signals were detected in a database from Carelon Research.

The incidence rate for anaphylaxis was 74.5 cases per 100,000 person-years following Pfizer vaccination and 109.4 cases per 100,000 person-years following Moderna vaccination.

Researchers arrived at an incidence rate of 131.4 cases of myocarditis/pericarditis per 100,000 person-years after a Pfizer shot.

No stratification was done by gender, despite myocarditis, according to many studies, disproportionately affecting males.

Person-years is a measure used in some studies. In this study, all time during post-vaccination periods of time known as risk intervals were included. The risk intervals were different depending on the health outcome. For anaphylaxis, the risk interval was 0 to 1 day; for myocarditis/pericarditis, it was 0 to 7 days or 0 to 21 days.

Additional issues were also identified in the four databases that were analyzed, but none rose to the level of a safety signal, a set criteria that is an indication of a vaccine causing an issue.

The study analyzed data from people aged 6 months and older from August 2022 to July 2023. The bivalent shots were replaced soon after by updated vaccines because their effects, which already started low, were shown to wane in observational studies.

Researchers only included people who were continuously enrolled in an insurance plan and did not suffer health issues during a “clean interval,” or if the health outcome in question did not occur during a certain interval.

“References for the clean interval could not be located in the literature and are based on clinician input,” the authors said in a footnote.

Pfizer and Moderna, which make COVID-19 shots that utilize modified messenger RNA (mRNA), did not return inquiries.

FDA Response

Patricia Lloyd, an FDA researcher, and her co-authors said the study “supports the safety of these vaccines” and “supports the conclusion that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks.”

Asked for evidence to support those conclusions, Ms. Lloyd referred a request for comment to the FDA.

“With over a billion doses of the mRNA vaccines administered, available scientific evidence supports the conclusion that the vaccines are safe and effective. The FDA stands behind its findings of quality, safety, and efficacy for the mRNA vaccines. Additionally, it is simply a fact that millions of lives have been saved because of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, which most Americans undergoing vaccination have received,” an FDA spokesperson claimed.

The agency provided a single citation from the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that used modeling to estimate that through November 2022, the vaccines prevented millions of deaths.

The study was published ahead of peer review on the medRxiv server.

Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist and president of the McCullough Foundation, told The Epoch Times in an email that results from the paper show “cardiovascular and neurological safety events are numerous and unacceptable on a population basis.”

Dr. McCullough, who was not involved with the paper, noted that the study did not analyze COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness.

“The FDA’s conclusion on risk benefit is not valid and reflects agency bias in attempting to promote the unsafe, ineffective products,” he said. “Our regulatory agencies should not be promoting or advertising the products they are charged with regulating.”

The FDA clears vaccines. The agency in 2022 authorized and approved the bivalent vaccines despite there being no clinical trial data available.

Limitations of the new paper included the lack of medical record review. Many authors reported their employment for health care companies as conflicts of interest.

A previous study analyzing the health claims databases detected signals for seizures/convulsions among children aged 2 to 4 after Pfizer vaccination and children aged 2 to 5 following Moderna vaccination. That study analyzed the version of the vaccines that preceded the bivalent shots.

In another new study, co-authored by Dr. McCullough, researchers reported finding a spike in reports of myocarditis in the federally-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System in 2021.

“We found the number of myocarditis reports in VAERS after COVID-19 vaccination in 2021 was 223 times higher than the average of all vaccines combined for the past 30 years,” the researchers said.

Applying causality principles, the researchers said that COVID-19 vaccination was “strongly associated with a serious adverse safety signal of myocarditis, particularly in children and young adults resulting in hospitalization and death.”

Federal officials have said that the COVID-19 vaccines cause myocarditis, pericarditis, and anaphylaxis, but that the vaccines also provide protection against infection and severe illness, tilting the risk-benefit balance in their favor. They have increasingly cited, in lieu of clinical trials, observational studies from the FDA and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), some of which lack peer review.

Current U.S. recommendations are for essentially all Americans aged 6 months and older to get one of the newest COVID-19 vaccines, introduced in 2023. That contrasts with a number of other countries, such as the United Kingdom, which have stopped offering or no longer recommend COVID-19 vaccination for wide swaths of their populations.

Weeks after the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay over a plagiarism scandal, the university’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, has been accused of doing the same.

According to a Monday complaint filed with the university, as well as an analysis by the Washington Free Beacon‘s Aaron Sibarium, large portions of Charleston’s work very clearly appears to have been lifted from others without so much as quotation marks. She even took credit for her own husband’s work, according to the report.

The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston’s thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges. And in her sole peer-reviewed journal article—coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014—the couple recycle much of a 2012 study published by LaVar Charleston, the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, framing the old material as new research.

Through that sleight of hand, Sherri Ann Charleston effectively took credit for her husband’s work. The 2014 paper, which was also coauthored with Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, and appeared in the Journal of Negro Education, has the same methods, findings, and description of survey subjects as the 2012 study, which involved interviews with black computer science students and was first published by the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. –Free Beacon

As Sibarium notes on X:

The sleight of hand gave Sherri Charleston credit for her husband’s work. The 2014 paper, which was also coauthored with Jerlando Jackson, has the same methods, findings, and description of survey subjects as the 2012 study, which involved interviews with black comp sci students. pic.twitter.com/jUs2euAz6G

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) January 30, 2024

“The 2014 paper appears to be entirely counterfeit,” said Peter Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars and a former associate provost at Boston University.

“This is research fraud pure and simple.”

Prior to joining Harvard in August 2020, Charleston was the chief affirmative action officer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After joining Harvard, she served on the staff advisory committee which helped choose Claudine Gay as president in December 2022, the Harvard Crimson reports. Charleston taught gender studies courses at the University of Wisconsin, while her bio describes her as “one of the nation’s leading experts in diversity” whose work involves “translating diversity and inclusion research into practice for students, staff, researchers, postdoctoral fellows and faculty of color.”

It apparently also includes copious use of ‘ctrl-c’ and ‘ctrl-v.’

“Sherri Charleston appears to have used somebody else’s research without proper attribution,” said former Villanova University political theory professor, Steve McGuire, who reviewed two of Charleston’s papers, the Beacon reports.

Papers that omit a few citations or quotation marks rarely receive more than a correction. But when scholars recycle large chunks of a previous study—especially its data or conclusions—without attribution, the duplicate paper is often retracted and can even violate copyright law.

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) January 30, 2024

Read the rest of Sibarium’s extensive reporting here…

Authored by Michael Clements via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Attorneys General of 28 states are demanding that President Joe Biden ignore a request to investigate the Lake City Army Ammunition plant’s policy of selling 5.56 mm rifle ammunition to civilians.

A Jan. 24 letter written by Attorneys General Andrew Bailey of Missouri, Brenna Bird of Iowa, and Todd Rokita of Indiana and signed by 25 other attorneys general, warns that ending sales would harm America’s military readiness and do nothing to prevent crime.

The letter derides a previous missive, dated Jan. 9 and written by New York Attorney General Letitia James and signed by 19 other Attorneys General calling for the investigation, as dangerous and uninformed.

According to the James letter, the Lake City plant in Missouri has flooded communities with “military-grade” ammunition that has been used in a number of mass shootings.

“Compounding the horror, the bullets used in this violence were subsidized by American taxpayers, as the federal government has apparently invested more than $860 million to improve production,” the letter reads.

In their response, Mr. Bailey and his colleagues claim the writers of the Jan. 9 letter either don’t understand or are ignoring the facts.

“The Democrats’ letter contains a litany of errors. These errors demonstrate our colleagues’ outright ignorance of firearms and ammunition,” the Jan. 24 letter reads.

In a statement on his website, Mr. Bailey wrote that shutting down the plant would make Americans less safe, in addition to costing his state hundreds of jobs.

“I will not let Joe Biden sacrifice the rights of law-abiding gun owners and manufacturers on the altar of appeasement to the Radical Left. Lake City Ammunition did nothing wrong,” Mr. Bailey wrote in a statement on his website. “I’m proud to stand in the gap with these like-minded attorneys general to protect Americans’ Second Amendment rights.”

Mr. Rokita agreed. In a statement on the Indiana Attorney General’s website, Mr. Rokia wrote that the principle at play covers more than just military readiness.

“A tyrant’s tactic is to chip away at liberties little by little,” he wrote. “Americans cannot exercise their constitutionally protected right to use their firearms without access to ammunition. That’s why we’re taking a strong stand.”

The Jan. 24 letter points out that the Lake City ammunition sold to civilians is not the same ammunition used by the military. And even if it were, the letter states, that would not be enough reason to ban its sale to civilians.

“The primary cartridge is proprietary to the Army and may not be sold commercially. If the United States military using ammunition precluded that ammunition’s use by civilians, then other widely and commonly available ammunition, including 9mm and 12-gauge shotshells,” the letter reads. “Lake City only sells ammunition to commercial customers that is legal to manufacture. Lake City complies with all the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (“ATF”) requirements.”

They also write that the claim that taxpayers are subsidizing the sales is the opposite of what’s happening.

“They get causality backward. The law-abiding target shooters and gun owners who buy Lake City ammunition are subsidizing national defense and military readiness,” the Jan. 24 letter reads.

The letter from Mr. Bailey and the other pro-Second Amendment attorneys general points out that Lake City began selling ammunition to civilians as a means of maintaining production levels and a trained workforce in the event of war.

The plant had been basically mothballed prior to 1990. With the early 1990s military actions in Iraq, Kuwait, and other areas, the Lake City plant found itself playing catch up, trying to get machinery running and employees trained to meet the surge in demand for ammunition.

The addition of civilian sales to its government contract means the plant continues production and maintains its equipment and trained workforce, ensuring it’s able to meet future surges.

“That section in the Lake City contract was—and remains—a sound policy choice. As we confront an increasingly dangerous world with unpredictable adversaries, now is not the time to undermine our military readiness,” the Jan. 24 letter reads.

Mr. Bailey, Mr. Rokita, and Ms. Bird were joined by attorney generals from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina House of Representatives, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

The Lake City Army Ammunition plant is located in Independence, Missouri, and has provided ammunition for every armed conflict America has been involved in since World War II. According to an information sheet, the facility covers more than 3,000 acres, has 408 buildings, and can produce 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition annually.

In addition to small arms ammunition, the plant produces pyrotechnics, primers for various cartridges, and pyrotechnic and tracer mixes.

Hundreds of thousands dead in Eastern Europe as the Russia-Ukraine war is about to reach a grim 2-year mark… tens of thousands of civilians slain in Gaza, Israel, and the West Bank… Iraq, Syria, and Yemen again sliding into chaos, on the precipice of yet more Western military intervention… no one wins. 

Correction: someone does win….

With all the global geopolitical flashpoints erupting at the same time in the last year, Western defense firms have been raking it in, with US arms exports in particular reaching a record high in fiscal year 2023.

“The United States sold $238 billion worth of weapons to foreign governments in 2023, as many European countries sought to replace stock sent to Ukraine for its defense against invading Russian forces,” Stripes writes. “That sum is a 16% increase from the year before and includes sales by U.S. arms companies and those directly negotiated by Washington, a statement Monday from the State Department said.”

The demand has largely been driven by the war in Ukraine, which has cost the West tens of billions each month to sustain in support of Kiev. More importantly, in the now two-year long effort to keep up the flow of advanced weapons and vital artillery ammo, which is constantly depleted on the stalemated frontlines, European nations have seen their own stockpiles dwindle.

NATO leadership has in response issued a desperate plea for members states to drastically and urgently jump start and ramp up production. The private sector, especially in France in Germany, is also racing to forge partnerships with Kiev.

But meanwhile, standing in the gap remains the major US defense firms, with the biggest companies like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman leading the way. As global instability rises, so do their stock prices…

Arms sales and transfers are viewed as “important U.S. foreign policy tools with potential long-term implications for regional and global security,” the State Department said in a statement.

Sales approved in the year included $10 billion worth of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to Poland, $2.9 billion worth of AIM-120C-8 Advanced Medium-Range Air-To-Air Missiles (AMRAAM) to Germany, and National Advanced Surface to Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) to Ukraine.

NATO’s so-called ‘eastern flank’ has been a big driver, with State Dept. data confirming that Poland is a leading buyer. For a partial list of deals for major military hardware inked between US defense firms and Warsaw in the last year:

• $12 billion worth of Apache helicopters
• $10 billion worth of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS)
• $3.75 billion worth of M1A1 Abrams tanks
• Poland invested $4 billion in integrated air & missile defense command systems

Prime Minister Donald Tusk has lately committed NATO-member Poland to becoming “the most powerful land force in Europe” and he’s building a US-supplied arsenal to make that happen (in continuity with prior Polish administrations). What has helped is the perception advanced in Western media sources that Putin is eyeing expanding the war into Europe, even threatening NATO countries.

In the Pacific region, US arms sales have been boosted by the “China threat”. One report underscores, “Notably, countries outside Europe also participated in the arms market, with South Korea spending USD 5 billion on F-35 fighter jets and Australia investing USD 6.3 billion in C130J-30 Super Hercules aircraft. Japan secured a USD 1 billion contract for E-2D Hawkeye surveillance aircraft.” Of course, weapons have been drasticallyl boosted to Israel amid the Gaza war as well.

But while Biden’s State Department is busy bragging about “the highest annual total of sales and assistance provided to our allies and partners,” the bodies are piling up on blood-soaked soil in various far-flung corners of the globe. Responsible Statecraft asks the apt question here… Tone deaf? Admin brags about 55% hike in foreign arms sales.

Authored by David Glasser via The College Fix,

Citing a wrongheaded “GPA fixation,” Western Oregon University leaders have announced plans to abolish D- and F grades for students…

They will replace them with “no credit” in an effort to support student success and encourage struggling undergrads to continue their education despite obstacles, they said.

The public university announced in a news release this month the changes would start in the fall.

“Students not earning a passing grade will be required to repeat the course and demonstrate proficiency. Our goal is to ensure that students who have met the core competencies and learning objectives graduate and provide every student an opportunity to be successful at Western Oregon University,” Vice President of Academic Affairs Jose Coll said in an email to The College Fix.

Coll, who took the job as provost in June 2023, said in the news release that “GPAs will now be a true reflection of student success and course mastery; failures will no longer mask the demonstrated abilities of our students when they pass courses.”

The news release stated that “the institutional academic grading regulation will reflect a grade range of A through D; the letter grades of D- and F will be replaced with No Credit (NC) for undergraduate students.”

“The difference is that the grade of NC will not negatively impact student GPAs.”

The move comes as data from the school shows that 65 percent of freshmen who drop out of WOU have earned at least one “F,” Inside Higher Ed reported.

Western Oregon University acknowledged students receiving “no credit” are significantly more likely to continue with their education than those who fail classes, leading some to accuse the school of allowing “grade inflation” to occur, according to Inside Higher Ed.

In a statement to The College Fix, Coll resisted this characterization.

“The GPA fixation we have as a country and the grading system that’s been in place for over 200 years has been used to determine who belongs and who is capable, although we know that similar to the SAT and ACT, many capable students have been prohibited from pursuing their post-secondary education due to these barriers,” he said.

But the center-right Oregon Association of Scholars, a branch of the National Association of Scholars, said the policy raises “several concerns.”

“Colleges should be evaluating how well they are teaching and how well students are learning. This approach seems poised to increase retention by keeping struggling students in the system regardless of performance, until administrators can find a combination of courses to put a degree in their hand. Ensuring students can perform academically should come first,” a spokesperson for the group wrote in a prepared statement to The Fix.

“Students deserve the opportunity to try, to push themselves, and to fail. They have the right to be treated like adults, the right to fail and to learn from it. What they take away from that experience should be up to them to work out, not something framed-up for them by college administrators to mask their problems with student retention and performance,” the statement added.

The topic of grade inflation remains a pressing concern in higher education today.

In December 2023, it was revealed that 79 percent of the grades given out at Yale University in the 2022-23 academic year were As.

“As you can see, a large majority of grades in Yale College are in the A range (A or A-),” Dean Pericles Lewis remarked after the report’s release. “This results in compression, making it difficult for instructors to use grades for their intended purpose of helping students understand areas of strength and others that need attention.”

At Harvard, an identical 79 percent of grades were As in the 2020-21 academic year, an increase of over 20 percent in the last decade.

“Mean grades on a four-point scale were 3.80 in the 2020-21 academic year, up from 3.41 in 2002-03,” the Harvard Crimson reported.

Now 117 days into the Gaza war, with fighting having long been focused in the south, and there are already reports that Hamas militants are returning to the northern half of the Gaza Strip, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have for months exercised control of after pacifying it early in the ground offensive.

The Guardian is among major publications to report that Hamas is newly mobilizing in the north and even trying to reestablish a system of governance, citing Israeli officials and eyewitnesses.

One former Israeli national security advisor, Eyal Hulata, has described, “We are hearing more, unfortunately, of the recovery of [an] insurgency in both central and northern Gaza … We’re hearing more and more that Hamas are doing policing in northern Gaza and governing trade, and that is a very bad outcome.”

Michael Milstein of the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israel-based think tank, explained to the publication how this could be possible. “Hamas control these areas. There is no chaos or vacuum because it is the workers of Gaza municipality or civil rescue defense forces, who are effectively part of Hamas, who are enforcing public order. Hamas still exists. Hamas has survived,” he said.

“The IDF version is that in the northern part of Gaza the basic military structure of Hamas was broken … That only works with a conventional army but not for a flexible guerrilla operation like Hamas. We are already seeing individuals as snipers, setting booby traps and so on,” Milstein continued.

Presumably small Hamas teams are also still able to make effective use of tunnels to launch ambushes or utilize other insurgent or guerilla tactics. This makes it almost impossible to stamp out Hamas completely. 

Israel has meanwhile sought to actively prevent large swathes of Gazan residents from returning to their homes, also given it is still an active war zone. Some regional outlets have said the IDF is dropping leaflets warning refugees in the south against any attempts to travel back north.

Meanwhile, Israel’s plans for the Gaza Strip post-war are still unclear, but Palestinians fear that Jewish settlers will eventually move in. According to a new report in Reuters, that was precisely the focus of a controversial conference over the weekend.

“Israel’s hard-right Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir urged Jewish settlers to return to Gaza at a packed gathering on Sunday, drawing condemnation from Palestinians who said his words amounted to a call for their forced deportation,” Reuters reported.

On 29 January, a video was released by Hamas’s military wing Al-Qassam Brigades showing intense fighting with the Israeli military in Khan Younis.

The exact location and time of when the video was filmed have not been verified. Hamas has said that they destroyed two Israeli… pic.twitter.com/0ffefCIXIP

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) January 31, 2024

“The statement from the firebrand Ben-Gvir clashed with the official government position iterated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel does not intend to return a permanent presence to Gaza once the war with Hamas is over,” the report said.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Consider this: A brothel opens, offering “sexual services,” including “experiences” with girls under 15 years old.

Typically, the police response to such a brothel would make the Normandy landing look like a small skirmish.

But this brothel, Chub AI, is a virtual brothel, reportedly “staffed” by artificially intelligent bots.

The controversy is part of a broader debate over sex bots and even sex bot brothels.

Not long ago, the first sex robot brothel, Lovedoll UK, was shut down in Gateshead, England. 

Even individuals such as Steven Crawford have purchased a doll and then pimped it out to customers. With the rise in such sales, the number of legal and legislative actions are rising as well.

Over 50 years ago, what became known as the “sexual revolution” began in the United States with a debate over the scope of privacy and sexual freedom. We are now facing a second such debate, but liberal voices that once called for sexual freedom are now advocating bans and criminal penalties to deny the right to choose a different type of companion: sex dolls and bots.

Houston’s city council unanimously blocked a proposed “sex robot brothel” from opening in the city, which would have been the nation’s first pay-by-the-hour robot brothel.

“Westworld”-like technology is now on a collision course with long-standing privacy principles. For those fearing an “ex machina” future, there is an equal number of people fearing an ex-privacy future in the balance of this debate.

A growing market for both sex bots and dolls is fueling the debate around the world. For companies such as Kinky S Dolls, the brothels are the equivalent to road tests for prospective owners of anthropomorphic bots that can cost $3,000 each.

Sex dolls (which are anthropomorphic but not mechanical) are already widely used privately and increasingly in brothels. One Canadian brothel offered “six classy, sophisticated, and adventurous ladies; curated for the discerning gentlemen”…starting at $80 for a half hour.

Since Ovid’s story of Pygmalion in the “Metamorphoses,” the dynamic of humans and inanimate objects has been a part of our literature. In that story, the lonely sculptor created his perfect woman out of ivory, only to fall in love with the statue. He prayed to Venus to give him a lover like his statue Galatea. She did so, and “the maiden felt the kisses, blushed and, lifting her timid eyes up to the light, saw the sky and her lover at the same time.”

The robotic world is approaching its Pygmalion moment. New anthropomorphic devices are being programmed with more and more human features and lifelike responses. With breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, they can respond to questions and even display emotions from jealousy to desire. They are developing warm and reflective responses to touch.

Indeed, Pygmalian’s story captures both the fantasy and the controversy over the explosion of sexbots. While both male and female bots are available, the consumer base for bots remains largely men, and the objections have been almost exclusively focused on gynoids, or fembots. For feminists, the sexbots are allowing men to objectify women and domination fantasies.

In The Guardian, journalist Jenny Kleeman denounced new bots that can hold conversations and even joke precisely because they are “a dream woman” for men who “exist only for men’s use.”

Kathleen Richardson, a robot ethicist at the De Montfort University, wrote a paper calling for a ban on all machines, but not human-like dolls. Richardson insisted that “the development of sex robots will further reinforce relations of power that do not recognize both parties as human subjects.” A supporter of the Campaign Against Sex Robots, Richardson warned “technology is not neutral. It’s informed by class, race and gender. Political power informs the development of technology.”

This debate is different in that the fear is not how a product can harm humans, but how humans are simulating harm through a product.

From a legal perspective, these sex robots are nothing more than a ramped up toaster with a fetching name. Even the term “brothel” can be challenged. In Paris, a sex doll brothel was opened and licensed as a “game center.” The analogy is based on the fact that bots, in the view of customers, are simply machines designed for recreation.

The new bot battle is an extension of prior fights over pornography and prostitution. Some advocates long argued that pornography constitutes objectification and fuels violence against women. In the case of prostitution, many libertarians argue that two consenting adults should be allowed to contract for sex.

Our current system has a glaring disconnect, where you can get paid to have sex on camera for a movie with multiple partners, but not to have sex in private.

The bots remove the alleged victim in these scenarios. No one is being directly harmed when someone has relations with what is essentially an advanced appliance.

This issue becomes far more difficult, however, when the bots are designed to resemble children. Such devices have already been banned in some countries, including recently in the U.S. The possession or import of child sex dolls has led to arrests in various countries, including the seizure of 123 such dolls in the United Kingdom.

In the U.S., the “Curbing Realistic Exploitative Electronic Pedophilic Robots (CREEPER) Act” was notable in its sweeping underlying claims about not only childlike robots, but seemingly all robots.

“Dolls and robots not only lead to rape, but they make rape easier by teaching the rapist how to overcome resistance and subdue the victim,” it states.

Moreover, it maintains, “Dolls and robots are intrinsically related to abuse of minors, and they cause the exploitation, objectification, abuse, and rape of minors.”

There is now a push to pass a bill referred to as CREEPER 2.0, which would outlaw not only the importation and transportation of such dolls but also their possession and sale.

The vast majority of people have little problem with banning such childlike sex bots. These disgusting tools are depicting individuals who cannot consent in any context. However, the definition is vague and could raise legal questions in barring products that are perceived as having “features that resemble those of a minor.”

The legal problems are magnified in broader efforts to ban sex dolls and bots. In 2002, in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, the Supreme Court struck down two provisions of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 that dealt with virtual or depicted child pornography. That included purely computer-generated images where there is no actual child or victim. Both provisions were found to violate the First Amendment, and the court rejected the type of assumed harm claimed by CREEPER.

In the absence of a direct victim, we are left with a pure moral or social judgment on the private tastes and relations of adults.

In Paris, feminists opposed sex-doll brothels on the basis that the dolls cannot consent and allow for violent fantasies. Lorraine Questiaux of the feminist group Mouvement du Nid (Nest Movement) called the brothel a “place that makes money from simulating the rape of a woman.”

In Sweden, feminist organizations moved to ban sex bots as advancing the “objectifying, sexualised and degrading attitude to women found in today’s mainstream pornography.” They object to the right of men to create artificial women who “obey their smallest command” and “cannot say no to something that the man wants.”

For many libertarians, the answer remains the same, the matter should begin and end with personal choice.

In the series “Westworld,” “host” Annie asked a reluctant guest “if you can’t tell the difference, does it matter if I’m real or not?”

Legally, the answer is no. 

But as that difference erodes, the question as to whether it matters to others will grow.

Legacy media’s reporting on mass shootings does not reflect reality. 

X account Unbiased Crime Report said, “According to Mother Jones, there were only 12 mass shootings in 2023!?” 

According to Mother Jones, there were only 12 mass shootings in 2023!?
Source: https://t.co/tm427XqocC pic.twitter.com/djqXprxw2p

— Unbiased Crime Report (@UnbiasedCrime) January 20, 2024

“Meanwhile, CNN will tell you there were 658 mass shootings in 2023,” the Unbiased Crime Report said. 

Meanwhile, CNN will tell you there were 658 mass shootings in 2023… 🤔https://t.co/dckz4lDJf5

— Unbiased Crime Report (@UnbiasedCrime) January 20, 2024

But legacy media conveniently leaves out the majority of mass shootings were labeled “gang violence.” 

There were over 700 mass shooting deaths in 2023, but you are only supposed to care about 75 of them… 🧵 pic.twitter.com/qjnU7DFntx

— Unbiased Crime Report (@UnbiasedCrime) January 20, 2024

Unbiased Crime Report said there is no set definition of a mass shooting.

“The definition and numbers change drastically depending on the narrative they [corporate media] want to push,” the X user said, adding the narrative is entirely about gun control, plus the “Anti-white narrative: Exclude 98% of mass shootings! (because they MIGHT be gang related).” 

The definition and numbers change drastically depending on the narrative they want to push…

Gun control narrative: Include EVERYTHING!

Anti-white narrative: Exclude 98% of mass shootings! (because they MIGHT be gang related) pic.twitter.com/8m6hRYWoQL

— Unbiased Crime Report (@UnbiasedCrime) January 20, 2024

Another inconvenient truth is that most gang shootings occur in imploding Democrat-controlled cities where gun control is the strictest. 

In an interview, Joe Rogan and gun rights activist Colion Noir spoke about this issue this week. 

“When I look at who was pushing the narrative for gun control, it is always a Democrat. Always. Which is fine if that’s the way the party wants to lean. But what I have a problem with is when the vast majority of gun murders in this country are coming from inner cities that are all ran by Democrats. That’s where I have a problem. Because you’re pushing legislation and you’re pushing policies that do nothing to address the root cause of the issue. You’re literally using the deplorable conditions in these environments to justify more gun control policies that will do nothing to fix these environments but give you more control over people,” Noir told Rogan. 

🔥 Colion Noir & Joe Rogan GO OFF on Democrats Calling For Gun Control

“When I look at who was pushing the narrative for gun control, it is always a Democrat. Always. Which is fine if that’s the way the party wants to lean. But what I have a problem with is when the vast… pic.twitter.com/iEvIZobBqn

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) January 30, 2024

If you’ve noticed, radical Democrats and their billionaire funders, like Mike Bloomberg, who plows tens of millions of dollars into anti-gun groups, have no viable solution in fixing inner cities. Instead, they want to destroy the Second Amendment.