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<p>HARRISBURG, Pa. — A Pennsylvania legislator shared on Facebook an image mocking the appearance of the state’s recently departed health secretary, Dr. Rachel Levine, a transgender woman who has been nominated to serve in the Biden administration, and then offered a general apology Saturday.</p>

President-elect Joe Biden has tapped Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine to be his assistant secretary of health, leaving her poised to become the first openly transgender federal official to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. “Dr. Rachel Levine will bring the steady leadership and essential expertise we need to get people through this pandemic — no matter their zip code, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability — and meet the public health needs of our country in this critical moment and beyond," Biden said in a statement.

EXCLUSIVE – Joe Biden's pick to run the Justice Department's enormously powerful Civil Rights Division is a woman called Kristen Clarke. Clarke says her job is simple: End hate. But like so many in her world, Clarke is actually an enthusiastic purveyor of what she claims to fight. A new investigation by "Tucker Carlson Tonight" has uncovered shocking statements that Clarke made while attending Harvard as an undergraduate. In 1994, Clarke wrote a letter to The Harvard Crimson in her capacity as the president of the Black Students Association to explain her views on race science. "Please use the following...

Coronavirus can significantly impact brain function, causing mental decline equivalent to the brain aging 10 years, according to an alarming new study. A study of more than 84,000 people in the UK found that the virus left even those deemed recovered with “chronic cognitive consequences” that it compared to dropping 8.5 IQ points. “People who had recovered, including those no longer reporting symptoms, exhibited significant cognitive deficits,” the study published on MedRxiv said.

Pope Hypes Alarmism on Melting Glaciers Scientific journals debunk pontiff's climate apocalypticism VATICAN CITY (ChurchMilitant.com) - Pope Francis ratcheted up his climate change alarmism to apocalyptic levels at his Wednesday public audience, warning that "two great glaciers in Antarctica near the Amundsen Sea" are "about to fall." Pope Francis greeting youths at his Wednesday audience "It will be terrible because the sea level will rise and this will bring many, many difficulties and cause so much harm," the pontiff predicted. "And why?" Francis asked. "Because of global warming, not caring for the environment, not caring for the common home," he categorically declared, attributing...

Surely, Timothy Litzenburg is a wealthy man. As one of the lead plaintiffs' attorneys suing Monsanto over the alleged (but factually incorrect) claim that its product Roundup (glyphosate) causes cancer, he likely has had several nice paydays in recent years as the company has been slammed with one jackpot verdict after another. Lawsuits have cost its parent company, Bayer, billions of dollars. The trouble with money, however, is that no matter how much you have, you never really have enough. You always want more. Litzenburg wanted more, too, and he knew just how to do it. After seeing how easy...

On June 20, 2020, Washington Governor Jay Inslee held a press conference claiming that Yakima was being overwhelmed by the corona virus. Given that in the past, Inslee claimed 2 million people would be killed in the US by the corona virus – and that hospitals in Washington state would be overwhelmed by the corona virus, it is amazing to me that anyone still believes anything this guy says. For those with short memories,...

Skepticism is at the heart of the scientific method. Question everything. Test everything. Scientific knowledge is established by evidence, not authority. The method is sound, but the execution may be imperfect. That's why I have faith in the methods of science but not necessarily in scientists. Experts in science have a store of credibility that can be maintained only by their performance. I have a great deal of trust in the meteorologists at the National Weather Service because their forecasts are 80%–90% accurate (no weatherman jokes, please — I used to be one!). But if most of their predictions began...

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the 2018 election by a landslide. His approach to government spending — even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout — might best be compared to that of conservative icons Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Recognizing that industrial wind and solar electricity bring little to no value to electrical grids, Mexico is moving to avoid the higher electrical prices experienced by Germany, Denmark, Great Britain, South Australia, California, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and other governments that have heavily subsidized their supply of intermittent electricity. The only things ‘inevitable’ about the ‘transition’...

In a scenario straight out of “The Twilight Zone,” a group of NASA scientists working on an experiment in Antarctica have detected evidence of a parallel universe — where the rules of physics are the opposite of our own, according to a report. The concept of a parallel universe has been around since the early 1960s, mostly in the minds of fans of sci-fi TV shows and comics, but now a cosmic ray detection experiment has found particles that could be from a parallel realm that also was born in the Big Bang, the Daily Star reported. The experts used...

It’s May 16, 2020, which means that there is nothing out of the ordinary about the phrase ‘sun lockdown’ trending on search engines and social media. Most of us are in lockdown, after all, because of the coronavirus pandemic, and so if the sun wants to join us, so be it, right? Wrong, some exaggerated headlines suggest, as they promise famine, freezing temps, and droughts on Earth because the sun has entered a completely predictable and entirely normal solar minimum, according to Astronomer Dr. Tony Phillips in an interview with The Sun.

It should be clear by now that most of the world's leaders were stampeded over the lockdown cliff like so many lemmings. What caused the stampede is even more remarkable: a tiny coterie of obscure, soft-spoken epidemiologists in white lab coats playing with numbers. Americans trying to keep up with the torrid pace of new developments over the past few months have been hearing about that work — the data-modeling these people do by feeding selected data and a variety of assumptions into a computer. The computer then disgorges diagrams and charts that attempt to describe the future progress of...

The University of Washington School of Medicine’s Virology Lab is reporting encouraging results from trial runs of a new test from Abbott Laboratories that detects the antibodies created by people who have had COVID-19, whether they knew they had it or not. “This is a really fantastic test,” Keith Jerome, who leads UW Medicine’s virology program, told reporters today. He said UW’s lab could process 4,000 samples per day starting next week, and conceivably ramp up to 14,000 samples per day within a couple of weeks. The test will be made available through health care providers, in medical clinics or...

Every year, 150 climate scientists fly far into the wilderness and bore deep into Greenland’s largest glacier. Their work is complicated and important. The EastGRIP project is trying to understand how ice streams underneath the glacier are pushing vast amounts of ice into the ocean, and how this contributes to rising sea levels. But this year the drills will be silent. The ice streams will go unmeasured. The reason is the coronavirus. The fallout from measures to contain the outbreak have made the research impossible. Greenland is closed to foreigners. Its government is worried any outbreak could be particularly dangerous...

Is the federal government a disinterested player in the debate on climate science? Not based on an impressive video that outlines some of the shenanigans of government agencies, which supposedly watch the matter. Composed of 13 federal agencies that conduct research on global changes that impact society, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) is a federal project that issues periodic reports about the climate in the United States. In 1989, the year it was established, USGCRP was mandated by Congress to coordinate federal research related to the human and natural forces that affect the global environment. Billed as the...

Yale Medicine Professor of Psychiatry Bandy X. Lee claims that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has the “right to have [Trump] submit to an involuntary evaluation.” Professor Lee, of the Yale University School of Medicine, also serves as president of the World Mental Health Coalition. She has been a longstanding and outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, providing “translations” of his communications on her Twitter feed. Lee was also an editor on The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, and is part of a movement demanding that the Judiciary Committee bring a panel of mental health experts to join impeachment...

Federal agencies will receive $25 million from Congress to study gun violence in a government spending deal reached by House and Senate negotiators — a major win for Democrats who have long pushed for dedicated funding to research the issue, a source told The Hill. "Democrats have broken the ban on funding for the first time in decades," the source said. The deal includes $12.5 million each for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health to study gun violence and ways to prevent it. It’s the first time in more than 20 years that...

Hold on to your hats, skeptics. The study of alien existence is about to become a real scientific field. Pennsylvania State University is gearing up to make the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) an established field of scientific study. This means that a degree in Alien Research, no matter how outlandish it might sound, is soon going to be a real thing. According to a report, the university is planning on doing this by offering courses on the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life in its course catalog. It will also conduct actual research into the subject through it’s newly-established Penn...

The Supreme Court on Friday will consider whether to take up a prominent climatologist's defamation suit against a venerated conservative magazine, in a case that pits climate scientists against the free speech rights of global warming skeptics. The dispute between scientist Michael Mann and the National Review has drawn attention from lawmakers, interest groups, academics and media, as the court weighs adding a potentially blockbuster First Amendment showdown to an already politically charged docket. Scientists hail Mann’s lawsuit as a necessary defense against efforts to erode public confidence in the scientific consensus that climate change is an urgent threat, while...

It turns out network television isn’t done lecturing us on abortion yet. We’ve had series after series come at us with pro-abortion stories, but NBC’s The Blacklist may have brought us the strangest case of them all. Let’s just say if this is where the propaganda is headed, liberals should stick to copying The Handmaid’s Tale. The November 15 episode “Hannah Hayes” concerns the strange case of a kidnapped governor reappearing on the day of a new election. The governor, however, isn’t sharing any details of his abduction, forcing the FBI to investigate the crime on their own. The agents...