A sword-wielding man dressed as a ninja attacked several special operations soldiers who were training at a California airport, reportedly forcing them to shelter in a hangar and inflicting wounds that required stitches.
The bizarre assault took place at Inyokern Airport, an airfield in the Mojave Desert about 100 miles north of Los Angeles, sometime after 1 a.m. on Sept. 18, according to what appears to be a military incident report shared onInstagram andReddit.
Records from the Ridgecrest Police Department seem to confirm some detailsin the document posted to social media in a photo late Wednesday that said two soldiers had to receive stitches before returning to duty.
Their names were redacted inthe photo shared on social media, but one was identified as a staff sergeant and the other asa captain. The details suggest that they are members of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, an elite helicopter unit known as the Night Stalkers.
The staff sergeant was sitting outside the administration building at the airport hangar smoking a cigarette when he was approached by “an unknown person wearing full ninja garb,” the photographed document states.
It is unclear from the records whether the man was an actual practitioner of ninjutsu.
“Do you know who I am?” the ninja asked, to which the soldier replied no, according tothe document, which has not been independently verified.
“Do you know where my family is?” the black-clad man then asked. The staff sergeant again answered no.
“The person in ninja garb began to slash at (the soldier), striking his phone and his knee and leg,”the record states.
The staff sergeant took off running across the parking lot to escape the attacker, and then he jumped a fence and entered the administrative building, where he and the captain locked doors and called 911.
Meanwhile, the man dressed as a ninja was “kicking and punching doors and windows” before leaving to grab a large block of asphalt, which he heaved through the window of the administration building.
The captain was struck by the chunk of asphalt, said the document on social media.
Thefirst assistance call was recorded about 1:20 a.m., the Ridgecrest Police Department log shows. A man “with a sword” was in a parking lot, and there was at least one victim, the log states.
About 30 minutes later came a second call via 911: “26 spec op military members doing training at the airport,” the log states. “Hunkered down in a hangar wondering where help is.”
The ninja fled and was arrested elsewhere, according tothe document shared on social media.
It indicatesthat the soldiers were with F Co., 2nd Battalion, 160th SOAR, which had been tasked with support at Fort Irwin’s National Training Center.
The incident report photo was shared Wednesday on the Instagram meme page Daddy SOARbucks before appearing on Reddit.
The Daddy SOARbucks page posted several more memes mocking the company and the battalion over the incident.
The regiment did not immediately respond to a query seeking confirmation of the information shared on social media. It was unclear which law enforcement agency responded to the calls.
NOTE FROM GLENN GREENWALD: The corporate media has worked very hard to propagate the liberal-pleasing narrative that COVID has become a partisan disease due to vaccine hesitancy on the right, often ignoring the inconvenient truth that large percentages of politically diverse groups, principally African-Americans and Latinos, remain resistant to vaccination. Recent reporting from The New York Times serves to further this distorted narrative, dubbing the positive correlation between support for Donald Trump and COVID death rates “Red COVID,” and brandishing it evidence of a partisan pandemic. But the Times’ reportmisleads readers through statistical manipulation and data games, as illustrated by this meticulous analysis, presented in an Outside Voices contribution by Jeremy Beckham:
A masked couple waits for the train at Harpers Ferry station in West Virginia, July 3, 2020. (Photo by Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images)
By Jeremy Beckham
A widely shared article recently appeared in The New York Times’ “The Morning” newsletter titled “Red Covid,” authored by David Leonhardt. This article, presented as news reporting and not an opinion piece, argues that deaths from COVID-19 are “showing a partisan pattern,” with the worst impacts of the disease “increasingly concentrated in red America.” Given that this narrative perfectly flatters a liberal sense of superiority, it has predictably gained substantial traction on MSNBC and on Twitter.
One particular claim in the Times article caught my attention: that there is a clear and strong association on a county level between COVID deaths and support for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Specifically, the article alleged that those counties which voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump had more than a four-fold greater mortality rate than those counties which decisively voted against Trump. If true, that would indeed be a striking observation.
But, as is often the case with epidemiological observations, the question is more complicated than two variables. There are three analytic errors that can lead someone to make false conclusions from what appears to be a meaningful association between two variables: bias, confounding variables, and random statistical error. In this case, the Times’ analysis failed to discuss significant confounding variables.
Age is a common confounder in public health research, and COVID-19 is no exception. The mortality burden of COVID-19 is not randomly distributed across age groups. Indeed, age appears to be the “strongest predictor of mortality” from COVID-19, with one’s risk of death increasing exponentially with age. According to CDC figures, the oldest populations experience a rate of death 570 times higher than the youngest populations. This is precisely why older populations were vaccinated first; we knew that prioritizing this population would have the most dramatic effect in curtailing hospitalizations and deaths. Yet the crude county-level analysis reported in The New York Times failed to adjust or account for age at all.
COVID-19 Death Rates by age. Graph from “Demographic perspectives on the mortality of COVID-19 and other epidemics,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, by Joshua R. Goldstein and Ronald D. Lee.
Why is it especially important that we adjust for age when comparing COVID-19 mortality rates in “red” counties with “blue” counties? Because age is not randomly distributed geographically, nor is it randomly distributed on a partisan basis. Republican voters tend to be older than Democratic voters. And rural counties, where Trump won by the largest margins, have older populations than suburban and urban counties. So this means that age is clearly a third, unaccounted for factor that is associated with both the independent variable (a county’s political affiliation) and the dependent variable (COVID-19 fatality rate) in question. This makes it a significant confounder that could easily exaggerate or distort the measured effect and lead one to spurious conclusions.
To be clear, age affects a wide range of health outcomes, and the presence of age as a confounder doesn’t necessarily preclude a subject from methodologically sound inquiry. But you do need to account for it typically by using a statistical process like age-adjusting. For instance, one study looked at seven different nations with widely different crude COVID-19 case fatality rates, ranging from 0.82% to 14.2%. However, once the study’s authors performed age-adjusting, they found that the difference in fatality rates between these countries almost evaporated. If this research technique is not feasible on the county level, perhaps because the available data is incomplete, then it’s important to explicitly state that a known confounder is a limiting factor in extrapolating the significance of your research, so that the reader knows to take the findings with a grain of salt.
Another way researchers try to tease apart a confounder from the variable being investigated is looking only at data where the distorting effect of the confounder is not present. We could do something similar for this research question. Take my home state of Utah, for example. Utah is a very red state. Trump won Utah by more than 20 points in 2020. But Utah also has the youngest population in the country, with a median age of approximately 31 years old. If partisan affiliation were a significant factor that explains deaths from COVID, we would expect Utah to have a greater COVID death rate than the national average, and the younger population helps us minimize the effect of this confounder. But instead, what we find is that Utah ranks 45th in the nation for COVID deaths, with 91 deaths per 100,000 population, far below the national average of 210 deaths per 100,000. This suggests (without proving) that age, not partisan affiliation or ideology, is paramount.
To be clear: there is no question that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and an important tool in protecting people from severe disease and death. The vaccination rate for rural counties is 41.4%, while the rate in urban areas is 53.3%. This difference also surely has an impact on the different rates of death from COVID-19. But this is only one part of the equation, and The New York Times’ recent viral article contained no such nuanced or informative discussion about this complex web of interrelated factors influencing disease burden and health outcomes. If you search the article for any mention of ‘age,’ or ‘rural’ you get no results, because these factors didn’t appear in their analysis at all. In any discussion about factors influencing COVID-19 mortality rates, failing to mention the role of these important demographic influences is journalistic malpractice that grossly distorts reality.
So if it failed to account for any of these factors, how did The New York Times ultimately account for the higher death rate in Trump/rural counties? It does so entirely by invoking the ideological makeup of their knuckle-dragging residents and their apparent self-destructive desire to “own the left.” Under the subheading “Why is this happening?”, The New York Times asserts the following:
What distinguishes the U.S. is a conservative party — the Republican Party — that has grown hostile to science and empirical evidence in recent decades. A conservative media complex, including Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group and various online outlets, echoes and amplifies this hostility. Trump took the conspiratorial thinking to a new level, but he did not create it. “With very little resistance from party leaders,” my colleague Lisa Lerer wrote this summer, many Republicans “have elevated falsehoods and doubts about vaccinations from the fringes of American life to the center of our political conversation.”
Part of the problem is that The New York Times relied on incredibly shaky source material. Much of the article is based on writings of an individual named Charles Gaba, who appears to be a web designer and “internet consultant.” Gaba runs a Patreon page where he disseminates his writings to subscribers, which are not submitted to reputable peer-reviewed publications. But this lack of rigorous scientific review was no barrier for The New York Times relying on his “findings,” even as the Paper of Record in the same breath scolds those who it says remain “hostile to science and empirical evidence.”
The irony is thick indeed, and the reason why should be obvious: even if the methodology is unsound, the findings fit a preferred narrative that the overwhelmingly liberal readers of The New York Times want to hear. If Gaba’s blog had made the opposite claim – if it had focused on counties like those in Utah, for instance – I think it’s safe to say it would have never seen publication in The New York Times. For this paper, it appears that feeding its readers’ desire to feel intellectually and morally superior to “Red America” is of utmost importance, even if it comes at the expense of accurately reporting on the complex reality of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We may not be better informed, but at least we know who to hate.
Jeremy Beckham, MPH, MPA, is a Utah resident who writes on matters related to science, politics, and animal rights.
Everything else under “Joe Biden’s” watch looks like a pyromaniac seeking to burn down the country. Over 10,000 Haitian interlopers have been surreptitiously dispersed from Del Rio, Texas, to nether regions of the USA. The government made no effort to vaccinate them — what does that tell you?
Behold the photo (above) showing President “Joe Biden” getting his booster shot of the Covid-19 “vaccine,” with the news media clustered to the left of what is apparently a stage-set built in a larger chamber. Do you possibly ask yourself: why bother to build a set for this event in or under the White House somewhere — including even fake daylit windows — when there are any number of actual rooms in the White House perfectly suited to holding this grand event in real daylight? What is going on here?
And, by the way, how do we know that “JB” is getting an actual mRNA booster? Or is it just 3 CCs of saline solution? Is not the syringe, after all, just another prop in the show? The video of this event was broadcast on cable TV channels and corporate media websites everywhere. None of them commented on the strange artificiality of the staging. And so, the mystery abides….
It only reinforces the creeping suspicion that absolutely everything about the “Joe Biden” regime is fake. And malevolently so. How else could it be that so many bad things are happening at the same time in this country if there was not some faction seeking to destroy it?
The Democratic Party has been accused of trying to “erase women” after it emerged that its $3.5 trillion infrastructure spending bill uses the terms “birthing,” “lactating” and “pregnant” persons alongside “women” and “mother.”
In all, the spending package – one part of the Biden administration’s ‘Build Back Better’ program – uses the word “mother” three times and the word “maternal” 50 times. Meanwhile, the word “women” appears on 20 occasions in a number of contexts, including domestic violence, business ownership, health insurance and maternity-related concerns.
However, it also mentions the phrase “pregnant, lactating, and postpartum individuals” in 11 instances when focusing on maternal health conditions and concerns – with the individual descriptor terms making more appearances throughout the 2,465-page document.
In addition, there also appears to be inconsistent usage of gender-specific and non-gendered language. For instance, the phrase is used as a whole some four times in Section 31045 of the bill, which deals with “funding for maternal mental health equity grant programs.”
The Democrats’ use of ‘inclusive language’ marks a departure from the party’s recent Women’s Health Protection Act, which was passed by the House of Representatives last week. The legislation does not include gender-neutral references, and instead uses the terms “woman” and “women” once and 15 times respectively when discussing reproductive issues, pregnancy and abortion.
But it does note that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘women’ were used to “reflect the identity of the majority of people targeted and affected by restrictions on abortion services.” Besides stating that access to abortion services was “critical to the health of every person capable of becoming pregnant,” the act was “intended to protect all people with the capacity for pregnancy – cisgender women, transgender men, non-binary individuals, those who identify with a different gender, and others.”
A similar situation played out in June with the Biden administration’s budget proposal for 2022 drawing controversy over the use of the phrase “birthing people” instead of mothers in a portion that deals with maternal mortality rates.
The section begins by using the gender-specific terms “maternal” and “women of color” to note that the US has the “highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations” but then switches to the term “birthing people” when allocating over $200 million to tackle the issue. As well, that funding includes investments to “implement implicit bias training for healthcare providers.”
Olaf Scholz, who may become the next chancellor of Germany, won with just about 27% of the vote. He has said he will rule out a return to lockdown as the government struggles to breathe life into its flagging vaccination efforts amid a disastrous economic decline. Scholz has promised that schools would remain open despite an anticipated wave of infections over the autumn. “There will be no new lockdown in Germany and we will make sure that the pupils can go to school and their lessons will take place in the classroom,” he told a party rally in Nuremberg, northern Bavaria.
The whole agenda of this World Economic Forum pushing for feudalistic-Marxism is running into resistance. The elections in Canada and Germany show this agenda is not as popular as expected. Our police departments have far too often turned against the people, supporting the rise of tyranny. The brutality in Australia, in particular, has been just off the charts.
I have worked with politicians for 40 years. Never in my entire life have I witnessed such a totally irresponsible crop who think taking money in their back pocket to do the bidding of others behind the curtain will lead to a world where they can live the high life. Their dreams are corrupt, as Pelosi’s husband rakes in millions on his Big Tech stocks on inside information.
The wicked witch of the West and all her flying monkeys could not push this insane $3.5 trillion spending spree that they think will buy votes for the Democrats at the expense of the nation. Pelosi had to pull the vote because there is resistance within her own party. I have been stating that I have seen firsthand resistance among the Democrats to this wild agenda. The conservative Democrats are starting to stand up, proving, at last, the Resistance is Not Futile.
Pelosi was born on March 26, 1940. She is 81, Fauci is 80, and Biden is a bit younger at 78. Even Yahoo News is starting to see what is taking place. Have they suddenly become a right-wing conspiracy chaser for simply looking at what these people are doing to the country? The title today:
“What Happened to ‘Honest Joe’? President Joe Biden’s Promises are Turning into Lies.”
I have worked with politicians for 40 years. Never in my entire life have I witnessed such a totally irresponsible crop who think taking money in their back pocket to do the bidding of others behind the curtain will lead to a world where they can live the high life. Their dreams are corrupt, as Pelosi’s husband rakes in millions on his Big Tech stocks on inside information. The broader agenda here is not going to prevail. This is really treason, and they are so greedy that they are only looking at the immediate money dangling in front of them. They are probably ignorant of the end game that wants to end the United States and propel the United Nations to rule the world and end democracy, as they have already achieved in Europe.
The usual “debt ceiling” theatrics have reappeared. We’re again greeted with the propaganda that if the most indebted government in the history of th
e world doesn’t continue to go deeper into debt, the world would grind to a halt. But economic “crisis,” which is really a painful return to economic reality, is inevitable. The real “crisis” is continuing to dig a deeper hole. So it’s certainly time to think about getting one’s own person financial house in order.
The default is already happening via devaluation of money.
