House told news pros mostly leftists

Censorship hearing targets gov't-media 'collusion'

A top Senate Republican sees most members of mainstream news organizations as leftists.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis, in testimony at a House hearing, said, “It is important to recognize corrupt individuals within federal agencies that I am talking about are not acting alone.”

Sen. Ron Johnson

These persons are "vital partners of the left-wing political movement, that includes most members of the mainstream media,” Johnson said before the hearing on de facto government censorship. Others pushing controls on political speech are “Big Tech, social media giants, global institutions and foundations, Democrat Party operatives and elected officials,”  added Johnson, a former head of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Johnson tied his allegations to the content of the recently released “Twitter files.”

“As the Twitter files reveal, these actors work in concert to defeat their political opponents and promote left-wing ideology and government control over our lives,” Johnson said in his remarks Thursday. “I have barely scratched the surface in describing the complexity, power and destructive nature of forces that we face.”

Useful wrapup of censorship hearings
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/weaponization-federal-government-hearing/

Michael Nevradakis brings a useful wrapup of a House hearings Thursday into FBI and other federal influence in social media. Nevradakis reports for the Defender, a periodical backed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an activist critical of big pharma and of news media.

WH denies pipeline sabotage expose

Hersh's detailed report targets CIA on Nord Stream sabotage;
Norway accused of assisting op to cut Germany's cheap gas

The detailed report by Seymour Hersh implies access to at least one high-level source. Among exposes by the veteran investigative reporter are the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the mass collection and opening of Americans' mail by a top CIA officer.

Hersh covered the Watergate scandal as a reporter for the New York Times.

His latest report was published by Global Research, a site which tends leftward and which publishes Ukraine war articles favorable to Russia.

The Kremlin has endorsed Hersh's report.

How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline
https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-america-took-out-nord-stream-pipeline/5807811

Latin mass backers face FBI scutiny

GRIST passes along Kyle Seraphin's report on the FBI's idea that schismatic Catholics constitute a threat to domestic security, which the Catholic former FBI agent documents with a batch of redacted FBI files.

FBI Doubles Down on Christians and White Supremacy https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/02/08/the-fbi-doubles-down-on-christians-and-white-supremacy-in-2023/

He writes that the law enforcement agency's analyst

makes an unsubstantiated leap that a preference for the Catholic Mass in Latin instead of the vernacular and a number of more traditional views on other world religions can amount to an “adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology.” This writer draws the important distinction between “traditional Catholics,” who simply prefer the Traditional Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teachings, and RTCs, who espouse “more extremist ideological beliefs and violent rhetoric."

Also see:

FBI worried by Latin Massers
https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/p/fbi-assesses-new-threat-latin-massers

Watchdog rips press on Russiagate

In case you missed it, here is Jeff Gerth's Columbia Journalism Review piece on the Trump-press war that the press lost [despite its major contribution to his overthrow in 2020]:

The press versus the president
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php

Gerth is a former reporter for the New York Times.

Gerth targets the New York Times, under then Executive Editor Dean Baquet, for a failure to deal responsibly with the fact that Robert Mueller, special counsel during the Trump years, was not going to confirm the press's oft-repeated "Russiagate" allegations.

Robert S. Mueller III

Dean Baquet

Free? Is that a fact?

Ground News boasts that it alerts readers to the credibility of news sources.

Yet, it has a bit of a problem with its own factuality. One Ground News page urged that we "Subscribe now" and "Sign up for free." But when you hit the signup button you are directed to a page that requires paid subscriptions, with no free option. Evidently by "free," Ground News means you are free to click the link.

Yes, yes. Mere tawdry marketing. But when one considers all the trouble to which Ground News goes in order to rate the factuality and credibility of news, eyebrows are bound to go up.

---

---

Vitamin D seen to curb diabetes

Some 11.3 percent of U.S. adults are afflicted with adult-onset diabetes. But, according to Dr. John Campbell's analysis of a new study, use of vitamin D drastically reduces the risk of contracting the disease.

The study was led by Anastassios G. Pittas, MD, MS, Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, Tufts Medical Center, Boston.

Vitamin D and Risk for Type 2 Diabetes in People With Prediabetes
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M22-3018

Backup link:
https://youtu.be/KqzaKro5Bt0

Vitamin D found to curb covid

Vitamin D strongly tends to keep hospitalized covid patients out of intensive care, according to an analysis of a group of studies. And death rates are kept substantially down, the analysts report.

The authors urged further studies.

Christiano Argano, Raffaella Mallaci Bocchio, Giuseppe Natoli, Salvatore Scibetta, Salvatore Corrao and Marika Lo Monaco are  all associated with the Internal Medicine Department, National Relevance Hospital Trust, Palermo, Italy. Lo Monaco is also associated with the University of Palermo. All the authors have numerous scientific papers to their credit.

Protective Effect of Vitamin D Supplementation
on COVID-19-Related Intensive Care
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9864223/

The authors found:

The current evidence supports the benefits of vitamin D interventions in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 due to the protective effect provided by vitamin D against ICU admission and mortality. A meta-analysis per se does not allow us to state whether the results are truly positive or false-positive. In addition, the inclusion of studies with large effect sizes and significant heterogeneity separates us from the truth. For this reason, a TSA is mandatory to verify the reliability of meta-analysis results. In conclusion, the positive results highlighted again and now validated by TSAs suggest that an indisputable association between vitamin D supplementation and the protective effect on ICU admission can be considered definitive evidence. On the contrary, further studies are needed to assess the utilization of vitamin D regarding the risk of death in patients hospitalized with COVID-19.

A useful discussion of the vitamin D report is given by Dr. John Campbell, a sometimes controversial covid commentator. In the video he laments the fact that U.S., UK and Canadian health authorities do not recommend vitamin D as a preventive for covid and other viral infections, such as influenza.


Backup link:
https://youtu.be/x5sc7G4s4CY