Bill Wine

[Bill Wine @commonwealthin3]

@steeve How old are you,5?

[Rand Paul @RandPaul]

Americans deserve to know why Jack Smith was spying on the Trump campaign. Surely he has a decent reason, right?

[🇺🇸 Mike Davis 🇺🇸 @mrddmia]

This is stunning a sitting U.S. senator is saying this out loud.

She is quite explicitly advocating for prosecutions to scare young people away from politics.

@ElissaSlotkin is truly a danger to democracy--a democracy she pretends she's protecting.

This is a fascist tactic.

[Bill Wine @commonwealthin3]

@feyiszn Or Dad:)

[Stephen McIntyre @ClimateAudit]

I've been re-examining the chronology related to Manafort and Kilimnik and noticed a (possibly) remarkable sequence connecting to Manafort's FARA charges. I noticed this old tweet (Feb 2018) in which I had remarked on the strange digression of Mueller investigation into the Ukrainian conviction of oligarch Yulia Tymoshenko - a buddy of Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland. In the chronology, I observed that Hillary had made a prominent speech on February 7, 2012 about Tymoshenko's case, stating that it was a "matter not just of legal reform but all of us wanting to support Ukraine's European integration". The article observed that Tymoshenko's daughter had visited Hillary the previous week.

[Larry Elder @larryelder]

Journal Retracts COVID-19 Vaccine Paper Based on Faked Content

“More than four years after publishing ‘SARS-CoV-2 S2–targeted vaccination elicits broadly neutralizing antibodies,’ the journal stated that an investigation conducted by an institution for which some of the authors worked or work determined that the paper included ‘fabricated data’ and ‘falsified images,’ the retraction note stated.

“The paper had claimed that experiments showed vaccination against SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19, elicited strong antibodies.”

https://t.co/eO833dEKdJ

[Bill Wine @commonwealthin3]

@ChinaRider82772 I have read that was not a great time to see them, even though that was my time to see them. So dependent on venue. I feel your dilemma!!

[Bill Wine @commonwealthin3]

@GeboMpls @charlie1zulu You need to get out some more with your reading, so to speak. Try Basic Economics or maybe a better fir for you would be Vision of the Anointed. Both by Thomas Sowell.

[Handre @Handre]

The welfare cliff does not trap poor families by accident.

Congress engineered a benefits system where earning one additional dollar can trigger simultaneous cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, housing vouchers, and childcare subsidies, collapsing your effective income by $5 or more. The government built a cage, and somehow we call it a safety net.

Take a single mother in Houston. She earns $22,000 annually and qualifies for $35,000 in combined federal and state benefits. She gets a raise to $25,000. That $3,000 in new wages costs her $18,000 in benefits. Her employer rewarded her productivity; the state punished her for it. No rational actor climbs that wall.

This is price control, but applied to human ambition. Every welfare threshold functions as a marginal tax rate that would make a Scandinavian bureaucrat jealous, often exceeding 80 or even 100 percent on the next dollar earned. This disincentive is the system's core mechanism.

Dependency concentrates political power. Families tethered to benefit rolls vote to protect those rolls, and the politicians who administer the programs vote to expand them. The cliff self-perpetuates. Free market economists have traced this perverse incentive structure for decades, but the administrative state expands regardless, because a bureaucracy that manages poverty also survives by it.

Genuine exit from poverty requires accumulating capital, building skills, and taking calculated risks. The welfare cliff taxes all three.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

Five years ago, an important miscarriage of justice occurred.

The story began in April 2018 when David Sabatini, an MIT, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and Whitehead Institute scientist and professor began a consensual intimate relationship with Dr. Kristin Knouse, a principal investigator with her own lab at the Whitehead.

By January 2020, David sought to end the relationship, but Knouse apparently did not want it to end. When David thereafter started a new relationship and Knouse learned about it, she began a secretive campaign to destroy him by attempting to end his career as a scientist. She did so by damaging his name, reputation, and that of his family with false sexual harassment and other claims, thereby making him unemployable.

Knouse conspired with Dr. Ruth Lehmann, the then- and still current Director (i.e., President) of the Whitehead Institute, in her efforts to destroy Sabatini.

The record presented in court demonstrated that Dr. Lehmann committed to Knouse in October of 2020 that she would fire David. Dr. Lehmann made this commitment to Knouse before any investigation of the facts had taken place.

Seven months after committing to fire him, in March of 2021, Dr. Lehmann, on behalf of the Whitehead, hired the law firm of Hinckley, Allen, Snyder (HAS) to undergo an investigation of David. By July 2021, HAS shared a draft of its conclusions with MIT, HHMI, and the Whitehead, but not with David or his lawyers.

On the morning of August 19, 2021, David for the first time received the more than 200-page investigative report and a calendar invite for a meeting the following day with Dr. Lehmann, the president of HHMI, and the HR directors of both institutions. The report was riddled with errors and unsupported claims about David and his relationship with Knouse.

When David's lawyer immediately thereafter reached out to Whitehead counsel to ask whether David was about to be fired, they confirmed that he would be terminated at the meeting.

On the advice of his lawyer, David immediately resigned from HHMI and the Whitehead rather than attend the meeting. HHMI did not accept his resignation, choosing instead to fire him. MIT put David on leave and ultimately revoked his tenure. David thereafter resigned from MIT.

On August 20, 2021, one day after sending David the HAS report and before David had the opportunity to dispute the facts and the conclusions of the investigation, Dr. Lehmann emailed all employees at the Whitehead informing them that David had violated a number of Whitehead policies "including policies concerning sexual harassment."

The Lehmann public email, David's resignation and firing, and Dr. Lehmann's claims about David's sexual harassment exploded into a major global scandal covered in mainstream, social, and scientific media around the world as it had all of the requisite ingredients:

An attractive target with David, one of the most important scientists of his generation in line for the Nobel Prize, a purported inappropriate sexual relationship with a younger female colleague, and a political and institutional environment where punishing a man for sexual harassment advanced the career and reputation of the person and/or institution that destroyed the career and reputation of the accused, regardless of the validity of the allegations.

As a result of Knouse's claims, Lehmann's sham investigation, and the media onslaught that followed, David lost all sources of income and his reputation was destroyed. All prizes he had been previously been awarded were withdrawn. He was removed from all scientific advisory and other honorary roles other than as a member of our family foundation's (the Pershing Square Foundation's) scientific advisory board.

When I initially learned of the news about David in the summer of 2021, I hired him as a consultant to the Pershing Square Foundation as I believed our small foundation team would benefit greatly by his insights (and he now had the time to help us), and he needed the money to support his family.

At my request and under a confidentiality agreement, David provided us with many hundreds of pages of documents including texts and other communications with Knouse, the investigative report, and David's responses to the allegations so that we could do our own evaluation of Knouse's claims.

I and a member of our family office's legal team carefully reviewed the documents. After a careful review of the empirical documents -- in particular the texts between Knouse and David -- it became abundantly clear that Knouse's actions were that of an angry and jilted lover, not those of a sexually harassed junior colleague. And the investigative report appeared designed to deliver a pre-ordained conclusion rather than a dispassionate fact-based analysis.

The impact of the firings and the destruction of his career and reputation on David and his family was extraordinarily devastating, so much so that we became increasingly concerned that he might commit suicide.

[In order to make sure that David's important scientific research would continue, in February 2023, in partnership with an anonymous donor, we funded $25 million to support David launching a new lab. As you might expect, I was reviled in the press, in scientific journals, and on social media for doing so and for supporting a so-called sex offender.]

On October 20, 2021, David filed suit against Knouse alleging defamation and tortious interference in his career and his contractual arrangements. Thereafter, Knouse brought counterclaims against David.

Today, nearly five years to the date of the filing of the suit, he has finally received justice.

Today, a 13-person jury (seven men and six women) of David Sabatini's peers (12 jurors plus an alternate) unanimously determined that David proved that Kristin Knouse defamed him, tortiously interfered with his contractual relationships (his entire career as a scientist), and tortiously interfered with his prospective advantageous relationships (his future employment). The jury awarded him nearly $10 million in damages including interest.

The jury rejected all of Knouse's claims including her claims that David engaged in quid pro quo sexual harassment and created a sexually hostile work environment.

While five years is a very long time to live under a reputational cloud, justice was finally served today for David, but not completely in my view.

To this day, Dr. Ruth Lehmann remains Director of the Whitehead Institute. Dr. Lehmann worked alongside Dr. Knouse to destroy David Sabatini, an acclaimed scientist and professor. She did not follow due process before she intentionally destroyed David's career and reputation.

Dr. Lehmann nearly killed David with her actions, as had we not rescued David by finding him employment, supporting him publicly to buffer the reputational damage, and supporting his recovery, he could have ended his life and left his son without a father before the world understood what had transpired here.

And the reputational damage was not just to David.

David's brother, Bernardo Sabatini, is one of the most important neuroscientists in the world. To this day, he has had to deal with a large cloud over his family name and reputation. Recently, when the new CEO of our brain institute mentioned that Bernardo Sabatini was on our board, he was asked: "Wasn't he involved in some kind of sex scandal?"

For obvious reasons, the character of the person who runs a scientific institute is of utmost importance. Among other failures here, Dr. Ruth Lehmann committed to Knouse that she would fire David many months before an investigation was even launched and without consideration of the empirical facts.

How can one trust research produced by a scientific institute if its leader is not committed to observing the empirical facts before reaching conclusions that have life-threatening import? We have unfortunately seen massive amounts of scientific fraud which has harmed innumerable human lives and wasted billions of dollars of research funding and time.

For her ethical breaches here, Dr. Lehmann should be fired from the Whitehead. Based on her actions in this case, she is in no position to serve as the leader of an important scientific institute.

I speak with some perspective on how scientific and other institutions should be led. Including the recent launch of the Ackman Oxman Institute, we have funded approximately $1 billion of scientific research and institutions over the last decade or so, and this experience has given us the opportunity to meet the leadership of many of the most important scientific institutions in the world.

To put it plainly, we would not give a dollar to a scientific institute whose leader compromised basic moral principles as has happened here.

At an absolute minimum, the board of the Whitehead should immediately launch a detailed and independent investigation of Dr. Lehmann's actions in the Sabatini case. I would encourage the investigation, among other considerations, to carefully exam all of the correspondence between Lehmann and Knouse, as well their correspondence with the HAS law firm on among other areas, the various drafts of the Sabatini investigative report.

Alternatively, Dr. Lehmann could resign, minimize further distraction for the Whitehead, and save institutional time and resources that would be better spent on research that benefits humanity.

[Bill Wine @commonwealthin3]

@BayAreaBiotechI None of the above. Live music, reading, kayaking.

[Bill Wine @commonwealthin3]

@Jason___YYC But I bet his teachers were not MAGA and they indoctrinated him.

[Bill Wine @commonwealthin3]

@michaelbd "we allow" why is permission needed? Sounds like a DSA post.

[Bill Wine @commonwealthin3]

@ArynneWexler He is not wrong.

[Bill Wine @commonwealthin3]

@RepSarahElfreth For no words, that is a lot of words.

[Bill Wine @commonwealthin3]

@AlfredoABrown You sound like the life of the party trye of guy, not.

[Bill Wine @commonwealthin3]

@BernieSanders Good grief you are stupid Bernie.

[Bill Wine @commonwealthin3]

@graceauta101_ Doubt that is true, but at least Musk is not a leach upon American society.

[Bill Wine @commonwealthin3]

@baseballot Shocking until you educate yourself on tje facts. Then it is only shocking that it took so long.

[Jason Miyares @JasonMiyaresVA]

@SoanbergerVA parole board just released a felon on parole who previously, when he was on parole for 2 PRIOR rapes, then raped a child under 13! Youngkin’s board said NO, Spanberger’s board called it a ‘technical violation,’ said just THREE years was enough, and let him out without a single no vote! Raping a child while on parole for 2 PRIOR takes is not a “technicality.” FIRE THE SPANBERGER PAROLE BOARD!

https://t.co/WM85yznQBt