Why We Can Know Things and Why that Matters

From Break Point.org (Aug. 13):

We live in a confused and confusing age. Things once considered obviously true are now rejected. Things once considered unthinkable are now thought to be unquestionable. How should a Christian think?

In the state of Oregon, high school graduates will now no longer have to demonstrate proficiency in reading, writing, or arithmetic. The logic behind the suspension of the state standards, according to the governor, has to do with equity. Somehow, she missed that “helping” racial minorities by not giving them even the most basic tools for life is a different kind of bigotry altogether, one which Andrew Sullivan has called a bigotry of no expectations.

Then there’s the story of Michaela Kennedy Cuomo announcing to the world that she’s moved beyond identifying as a homosexual and bisexual, and even beyond pan-sexual, to now demi-sexual, meaning that she’s only attracted to those with whom she shares an emotional bond. The need to publicize each and every stop on a journey of identity tourism is an odd feature of our day. The idea that every feeling, attraction, or preference is in and of itself an identity, is a tragic feature of our day.

And in case anyone thinks we’ve reached the bottom of this slippery slope, a TikTok video has now resurfaced from last fall in which a young woman passionately explains what may be next. Instead of identifying as “he” or “she,” many now claim the words “kitty-,” “pup-,” or “bunny-self” as pronouns. All this means that we may soon see chosen identities that transcend species, not just gender.

As my friend Dr. Kathy Koch said at a recent event, “Our first response in all of this should be tears, not anger.” It’s true, of course, that many people are the victims of self-inflicted bad ideas. But it’s also true that we live in a cultural moment in which even medical schools deny the basics of biology. How sad for young people to feel so distant from their own bodies that they’d rather be called rabbits than humans.

But to be clear, our crisis is not merely a moral one; it’s a cosmological one and an epistemological one. We’ve not just lost the ability to know right from wrong; we’ve lost the ability to know what’s real, what’s true, and what’s false.

In the ancient world, it was much simpler. There were authorities, civic and religious, that would announce what was good and true. You were told these berries are good. The water from that spring will make you sick. Your people came from this place and therefore you worship these gods. People came to know the world primarily by trusting the accumulated wisdom of those who had lived before. [read more]

The world is going crazy. If you stop believing in reality then you’re closer to becoming psychotic. Once you fall in the abyss, you may not be able to escape.

Joe Biden’s incoherent, fear-mongering COVID vaccine speech

From NY Post.com (Sept. 9):

Joe Biden’s speech on COVID was bizarrely incoherent.

He told the American people without qualification that fully vaccinated people are at incredibly low risk: “Only 1 out of every 160,000 fully vaccinated Americans was hospitalized for COVID per day.”

Then he promised to shield them against the evil people who are threatening their very lives: “We’re going to protect the vaccinated from unvaccinated co-workers.”

But Joe, you just said the vaccinated were already protected!

The danger in what Biden himself called an “epidemic of the unvaccinated” is to the unvaccinated. That is what all the data show. Ninety-nine percent of the hospitalizations and more than 99 percent of the deaths from the Delta variant are among the unvaccinated.

More than 200 million Americans have been at least partially vaccinated — 73 percent of the 12-and-over population that is allowed to get the shot. Sixty-three percent are fully vaccinated; that number will close in on 75 percent by the end of September. [read more]

‘I Will Not Comply’: Social Media Erupts Over Biden Vaccine Mandate Speech

From Daily Wire.com (Sept. 9):

Social media erupted Thursday following President Joe Biden’s announcement that he will be mandating vaccination, testing, and mask requirements for not just federal employees, but many private businesses, too.

“Companies with at least 100 employees must require their employees get vaccinated or submit to weekly COVID-19 tests under a new Biden administration plan to combat the coronavirus and encourage vaccination,” The Daily Wire reported. “President Joe Biden is scheduled to outline a revamped federal strategy to address COVID-19 that includes far more invasive regulations and restrictions than the federal government has put in place to date. Part of Biden’s six-point plan involves cracking down on 100+ employee companies to push their employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19.”

According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Labor Department plans to issue an emergency temporary standard in a matter of weeks “implementing the new requirement, which will cover 80 million private-sector workers. … Businesses that don’t comply can face fines of up to $14,000 per violation, [officials] said.”

The backlash online was immediate.

Daily Wire co-founder and CEO Jeremy Boreing took to Twitter to say he would not comply with President Biden’s dictates.

“The Daily Wire has well over 100 employees. We will not enforce Joe Biden’s unconstitutional and tyrannical vaccine mandate,” Boreing wrote. “We will use every tool at our disposal, including legal action, to resist this overreach. More to come.” [read more]

These are the usual modes for all Leftists. What did lying demented note-card Joe say? "This is not about freedom or personal choice. It's about power and control. That's who the democrats are and always will be. We love our power over you Commoners. So, get used to it. And get that damn shot unless you're an undocumented democrat, Afghani, or a postal worker. I’m not joking." Okay, Biden didn't say the part after "personal choice" but he might  as well said it.

Other articles on the mandate:

• There Is No American Monarchy
• Sweeping new vaccine mandates for 100 million Americans
• Biden's vaccine mandate speech!
• Lockdowns and Vaccine Mandates: China's Most Successful Exports?
• Biden’s vaccine mandate speech proves we’re BEYOND ‘progressivism’ [video]
• Fauci: May Take ‘Many, Many’ More Vaccine Mandates to Get Pandemic Under Control
• Drop vaccine mandate on private business, House GOP tells Labor Dept.
• Vaccine Mandate Will Cost Us All
• Vax Mandates Will Disrupt Supply Chains Further, Truckers Warn
• “You’re a Lawyer with No Scientific Background” – Senator Rand Paul to Biden Secretary Becerra on Vaccine Mandates
• It's Time for Civil Disobedience: Here Is How We Stop Biden Vaccine Mandates
• Republican AGs vow to sue over federal vaccine mandate when it’s officially on the books
• ‘Big government on steroids’: House Republicans line up against Biden’s vaccine mandate
• 11 States File Suit Against Biden's Business Vaccine Mandate
• 10 States Sue to Block Biden’s Vaccine Mandate for Healthcare Workers
• BREAKING: Court Decision in on Biden's OSHA Mandate
• Biden's mandate madness is socialist tyranny
• Vaccine Mandate Is Cloward-Piven Plan To Destroy USA and End Capitalism
• They'll Use the Welfare State to Get Compliance on Vaccine Mandates
• Are vaccine mandates worth the hassle? Economists, lobby groups say voluntary measures work better
• Employer Vaccine Mandates: When the Feds Pay the Piper, They Call the Tune
• BIDEN'S VACCINE FIAT FORGES A FASCIST PHARMA CORPORATE STATE
• Stunning New Study Undercuts the Case for Vaccine Mandates
• Navy SEALs File Federal Lawsuit Against Biden Admin For Refusing Religious Exemptions To Vaxx Mandate
• Why Biden's Vaccine Mandate Hasn't Delivered the Promised Results
• Judge halts Biden admin COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health workers
• Biden Admin Asks Court to Immediately Lift Stay on COVID Vaccine Mandate
• BREAKING: 6th Circuit Court Upholds Joe Biden’s OSHA Vaccine Mandate
• OSHA moves back vax-or-test deadline for private sector to Feb. 9
• Biden On Americans Concerned About Vaccine Mandates Violating Personal Liberty: ‘What’s The Big Deal?’
• So now Democrats do want your employer to control your healthcare

Anxious staffers mute Biden's remarks: Report

From The Washington Examiner.com (Sept. 7):

Some staffers in the Biden White House would rather miss their boss speak in public than endure another gaffe, according to a new report.

Anxiety about what President Joe Biden might say if he takes questions from the media drives some in the White House to mute him or turn off his public appearances altogether, Politico reported Tuesday, citing White House officials.

“I know people who habitually don’t watch it live for that reason,” an unnamed official told the outlet for the report, which focused on occasions when Biden strayed from messaging crafted by the West Wing.

Biden has made frequent flubs during press events and other public appearances by losing his line of thinking, stumbling, and forgetting names.

The president mistakenly referred to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as "Jennifer" during an event in August, and in March, he said "President Harris" when referring to Vice President Kamala Harris.

On Tuesday, Biden asserted during a briefing about the damage incurred from Hurricane Ida that tornadoes are called something else now.

"The members of Congress know, from their colleagues in Congress, that, uh, you know, the, looks like a tornado, they don't call them that anymore, that hit the crops and wetlands in the middle of the country, in Iowa and Nevada. It's just across the board," Biden said at a press conference in New Jersey.

Biden occasionally shrugs off reporters' inquiries by telling the press that his staff directed him not to take questions, suggesting officials seek to minimize the number of those incidents.

Michael Gwin, the director of Rapid Response for the White House, told the Washington Examiner that Biden "deeply values" the press' role and asserted that Biden frequently makes himself available for questioning.

"As the president has shown over and over since he announced his candidacy more than two years ago, he's the most effective communicator for his vision and his agenda," Gwin said in a statement.

Some Republicans have seized on Biden's verbal miscues and overall posture, saying his public appearances indicate the 78-year-old president is out of his league.

“I think he’s either going to resign — they’re going to convince him to resign from office at some point in the near future for medical issues — or they’re going to have to use the 25th Amendment to get rid of this man,” Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician, said in July. [source]

His staffers are treating Biden like a child. He’s embarrassing them. Then again he does have mental issues.

The War on Supplements

From American Thinker.com (Sept. 8):

The Food and Drug Administration -- funded and controlled by Big Pharma -- is heavily biased in favor of drugs. And since Big Pharma wants to solidify its monopoly over medicine, it has coerced the FDA to campaign to limit consumer access to non-patentable nutritional supplements, which promote health and prevent disease. Drugs, even when taken properly under prescription, cause 1.9 million hospitalizations per year and close to 900,000 patients to experience serious drug reactions, according to a Harvard report. More alarming statistics: prescription drugs are a major health risk, ranking fourth (with stroke) as a leading cause of death; and new FDA-approved prescription drugs have a one-in-five chance of causing adverse reactions. But despite that, the FDA believes that it is supplements that are unsafe, and unleashes campaigns against them on behalf of Big Pharma.

Dietary supplements have never been considered drugs, and for long have been regulated as special foods. As intrinsic substances in the food supply, vitamins and supplements have been known for more than a century. The postulation that they are essential dietary factors, necessary to prevent disease, originated in research from as early as 1913. Vitamin C, for instance, prevents scurvy, and Vitamin D prevents rickets. So vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids, and other such substances were isolated and synthesized to guard against deficiency diseases and a variety of conditions.

But for at least the past decade, the supplement industry has been under siege by the FDA. Under the guise of protecting consumer health, several laws and regulations have been proposed to recharacterize them as drugs and thus give the FDA the power to regulate them. For decades, the FDA has subjected the industry to economic harassment in order to restrict consumer access to supplements. The agency has sought to achieve this through regulations and -- more importantly -- restrictions on claims that can be made for supplements. Therefore, although supplements, unlike drugs, do not kill people in the thousands annually, the FDA seeks expensive trials. Since the revenues of supplement manufacturers are way below those of Big Pharma, such demands jeopardize their products. As supplements are viewed as competition for drugs, such checks would prove a boon to the drug industry and benefit the FDA as well.

In the early 1990s, the FDA was moving toward a policy of restricting the availability of dietary supplements. It even stated that supplements represented a “disincentive for patented drug research.” In 1994, in response to requests from the whole-foods industry and health-freedom advocates, Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) to protect consumer access to a wide variety of safe and beneficial supplements. [read more]

Nothing good can come from gov’t and business alliances especially when one is influencing the other.

Why Every Functional Society Needs Fear of God

Commentary From Selwyn Duke on American Thinker.com (Aug. 8):

To use a twist on an Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen line, millions of people hate what they think Christianity is.  Far fewer people hate what Christianity actually is.

Bringing this to mind, again, is a comment I recently came across from an avowedly "non-religious" mother who was upset that her seven-year-old's Mormon best friend wouldn't stop talking to him about Bible stories and Jesus.  "I don't want him to be religious, honestly," the woman wrote to an advice columnist in April.  "I want him to learn that you should be a good person and do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, not because God will punish you if you don't."

This is a common atheist lament, one sometimes expressed even by Christianity's more intellectual critics, such as the late essayist Christopher Hitchens and biologist Richard Dawkins.  Yet it reflects a comic-book understanding of faith.

Here's reality: religious parents want their children to be good people, too (of course!), "and do the right thing because it's the right thing to do."  They know that motivation by love of God is the ideal.  But the wise among them understand something else as well: fear of God is also necessary.

In fact, something corresponding to the love of God/fear of God model is reflected where many would least expect it: in psychology's prescriptions.  Famed psychologist Erik Erikson, by way of his well known "Stages of Psychosocial Development," informed that when a child is in a certain early developmental stage, he understands that something is wrong only if he gets punished for it.

This reality may disturb the moderns who'd rather romanticize matters.  Yet it's akin to how very young children can't understand that an amount of liquid remains the same despite being poured from one size and shape container into one with different dimensions.  Certain things are still beyond their immature minds — moral understanding is one of them.

For this reason, the parent/child model must in a way reflect the God/child of God model in that a youngster should ideally love his parents but also fear that he'll endure their wrath should he misbehave.  For what else will keep him in line and prevent him from hurting himself and others until he's old enough to "do the right thing because it's the right thing to do"?  Moderns' failure to accept this reality is one reason today's parenting is often so poor and too many children are woefully uncivilized.

But here's the point: what do you do with people who, morally stunted and never rising out of those early developmental psychosocial stages, never learn to "do the right thing because it's the right thing to do" and only respond to fear of consequences?  Do you with resignation just accept that they'll do wrong? [read more]

Documents Indicate Fauci ‘Untruthful’ About Coronavirus Research in China, Disease Expert Says

From The Daily Signal.com (Sept. 7):

A trove of newly released documents detailing U.S.-funded coronavirus research in China prior to the COVID-19 pandemic shows that Dr. Anthony Fauci was “untruthful” when he claimed that his agency did not finance gain-of-function research in Wuhan, an infectious disease expert says.

Documents published by The Intercept on Sunday show that Fauci’s agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, provided federal funds to the U.S. nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology to construct laboratory-generated SARS- and MERS-related coronaviruses that demonstrated enhanced pathogenicity in humanized mice cells, according to Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard Ebright.

“The documents make it clear that assertions by the [National Institutes of Health] director, Francis Collins, and the [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at [the Wuhan Institute of Virology] are untruthful,” Ebright said in a tweet Sunday evening.

[“Gain of function” describes a risky process of making a disease more dangerous or contagious for the purpose of studying a response.]

Fauci said during a congressional hearing in May that NIH “categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Ebright and other experts have described EcoHealth Alliance’s work with the Chinese institute as gain-of-function research.

Ebright previously told The Daily Caller News Foundation that NIH “systematically thwarted” the federal government’s oversight of dangerous pathogen research by failing to flag research grants for review by a Department of Health and Human Services review board.

Fauci’s insistence that the EcoHealth Alliance research grant with the Chinese institute did not involve gain-of-function research led Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to send a criminal referral to the Justice Department in July to investigate whether Fauci lied before Congress.

Ebright said Sunday that the documents published by The Intercept show that one of the novel SARS-related coronaviruses created at the biosafety level 3 lab at the Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment was proven to be more pathogenic to humanized mice than the original virus from which it was constructed.

The documents also show that the NIAID-funded research in Wuhan supported construction of the novel MERS-related coronavirus, Ebright said. [read more]

Other articles about “I am science” Fauci:

• Floundering Fauci Demands Simple Answers to Complex Problems
• It's Not Hard to Figure Out Why You Didn't Hear About Fauci Being Exposed As a Liar Yet
• The Fauci Who Cried Wolf
• Dr. Fauci's plan to steal Christmas
• Judging Fauci
  

An 'Internet apocalypse' could ride to Earth with the next solar storm, new research warns

From Live Science.com (Sept. 6):

The sun is always showering Earth with a mist of magnetized particles known as solar wind. For the most part, our planet's magnetic shield blocks this electric wind from doing any real damage to Earth or its inhabitants, instead sending those particles skittering toward the poles and leaving behind a pleasant aurora in their wake.

But sometimes, every century or so, that wind escalates into a full-blown solar storm — and, as new research presented at the SIGCOMM 2021 data communication conference warns, the results of such extreme space weather could be catastrophic to our modern way of life.

In short, a severe solar storm could plunge the world into an "internet apocalypse" that keeps large swaths of society offline for weeks or months at a time, Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in the new research paper. (The paper has yet to appear in a peer-reviewed journal).

"What really got me thinking about this is that with the pandemic we saw how unprepared the world was. There was no protocol to deal with it effectively, and it's the same with internet resilience," Abdu Jyothi told WIRED. "Our infrastructure is not prepared for a large-scale solar event."

Part of the problem is that extreme solar storms (also called coronal mass ejections) are relatively rare; scientists estimate the probability of an extreme space weather directly impacting Earth to be between 1.6% to 12% per decade, according to Abdu Jyothi's paper. [read more]

Not good!

Lessons of Freedom From 20 Years of War Against Jihadism

From Real Clear Politics.com (Sept. 5):

Gross miscalculations, grave setbacks, and recurring deceptions and self-deceptions in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last two decades have brought nation building — another way of saying the promotion of democracy and freedom, since rights-respecting democracy is the only sort of regime that the United States seeks to build — into disrepute. More than 7,000 American soldiers lost their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq and tens of thousands were wounded. Direct Afghanistan and Iraq war costs to the U.S. taxpayer exceed $2 trillion. Notwithstanding genuine accomplishments in the two countries, Iraq’s Shiite-led government leans toward Iran, the world’s leading state-sponsor of terror and the United States’ primary adversary in the region, while a better trained and equipped Taliban now control more of Afghanistan than on 9/11. For many on the left and the right, the Biden administration’s calamitous pullout cements the conclusion they reached by the end of the Bush administration: promoting democracy and freedom are beyond America’s capabilities, impose destabilizing practices and institutions on local populations, and have no place in a responsible U.S. foreign policy.

The better conclusion, however, is that to serve the nation’s surpassing interest in securing the conditions conducive to freedom at home, U.S. foreign policy must responsibly identify opportunities to advance it abroad. In support of that conclusion, the two decades since the Sept. 11 attacks furnish several lessons of freedom, paid for with blood and treasure.

First, the conventional categories of foreign policy analysis — realists vs. idealists, isolationists vs. interventionists, and nationalists vs. globalists — should be set aside because they reflect hidebound dichotomies that derail clear thinking about America’s role in the world. The challenge is not to choose one of the poles but to secure American freedom by striking a reasonable balance among competing imperatives. U.S. foreign policy should begin with a clear-eyed assessment of the motives, aims, and geopolitical logic that drive nation-states while never losing sight, on the one hand, of how customs and ideas shape regime conduct and, on the other hand, of the rights inherent in all human beings. U.S. foreign policy should be grounded in America’s needs and priorities, which include the preservation of a free and open international order, while fashioning plans to act abroad — from speeches, educational initiatives, and foreign aid to (always as a last resort) military operations — to defend U.S. interests. And U.S. foreign policy should insist that sovereign nation-states are the fundamental political unit of international affairs even as securing freedom at home compels America to cultivate a diversity of friends, partners, and allies and to maintain — and reform — international institutions to promote comity and commerce among nations.

Second, the United States must distinguish between promoting democracy and promoting freedom. Both conservatives and progressives have a bad habit of treating these undertakings as synonymous. They are not. Although liberal democracies such as the United States weave together freedom and democracy to the benefit of both, they are separable and distinct achievements. Democracy refers to the people’s rule through fair elections. Hence, promoting democracy usually implies regime change. In contrast, freedom — which in the first place means the ability to choose how to live one’s life instead of being commanded by another — can be a matter of degree and enjoyed to a greater or lesser extent under a variety of regimes. Accordingly, freedom can be advanced — more religious liberty, more economic freedom, more free speech, more independence in the judiciary — incrementally and without replacing an authoritarian regime with a democratic one. Because freer nations are not only more respectful of human rights but also tend to be more productive, more reliable, and more aligned with the United States’ interest in a free and open international order, hardheaded political calculation requires the prudent allocation of scarce resources to advance freedom abroad. [read more]

No deaths linked to omicron anywhere in world

From WND.com (Dec. 9):

The European Union's counterpart to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an update Thursday that no deaths have been reported anywhere in the world linked to the omicron variant.

"All cases for which there is available information on severity were either asymptomatic or mild," said the report from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

The ECDC reported 1,780 confirmed cases of the omicron variant in 57 countries worldwide.

Former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield on Thursday told "Fox & Friends" that omicron could become the dominant variant within weeks.

But he confirmed that while omicron and other new variants appear to be more contagious than previous ones, they also produces milder symptoms. [read more]

That’s good news.

Another article about omicron:

CDC: About 75 Percent of Omicron Cases Are in Fully Vaccinated People

How America’s Authoritarians Use Empathy to Rule

From The Daily Signal.com (July 28):

America has a crisis of empathy.

That crisis isn’t expressed as lack of charitable giving: Americans give approximately seven times what Europeans do to charity per capita. And it isn’t expressed as an unwillingness to spend on a governmental level: The United States currently spends more money than any nation in the history of the world.

The crisis of empathy isn’t even about an inability to walk in other people’s shoes: America is one of the most racially and religiously tolerant nations on Earth.

The American crisis of empathy rests in a simple fact: America is now divided over two mutually exclusive definitions of empathy. That divide is unbridgeable, and it’s tearing the country down the middle.

One group of Americans—call them neutrality-driven empaths—defines empathy as treating people as individuals capable of free choice and deserving of equality under the law.

In this view, empathy manifests in respect for the capacity of other human beings, and in understanding that they make different decisions than you would. This version of empathy doesn’t require that we agree with anyone’s decisions, but that we understand that it is not our job, absent significant externalities, to rule them.

The other group of Americans—call them emotion-centered empaths—believes that empathy means mirroring solidarity with subjective feelings in policy. In this view, empathy means expressing agreement with someone else’s specific feelings, refusing to assess whether those feelings are merited or justified, and then shaping policy around assuaging those feelings.

Neutrality-driven empaths believe that politics ought to be about solutions geared toward equality of individuals before the law. Policy and emotional empathy may come into conflict in this view.

Emotion-centered empaths believe the opposite: They believe that politics ought to be about emotional solidarity rather than finding solutions. Policy must follow emotional empathy in this view.

To take a rather stark example, consider the question of black student test performance. Neutrality-driven empaths will suggest that meritocratic standards are in fact the only neutral rules that can be applied to education, and that such standards have acted as a ladder for a wide variety of human beings of various races; that if a disproportionate number of black students underperform on such tests, that may merit empathy, but it doesn’t merit discarding the standards. [read more]

Revealed: The secret army of 200 weapons-obsessed anti-vaxx ex-soldiers called 'Veterans 4 Freedom' plotting attacks on vaccine centres and chaos on Britain's streets

From Daily Mail.co.uk (Aug. 28):

A sinister private army of more than 200 ex-servicemen and women is plotting to cause mayhem across Britain with a series of devastating anti-vaccine offensives, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Calling itself Veterans 4 Freedom (V4F) and founded by a former Royal Marine commando, the self-styled paramilitary group is made up of 16 operational 'cells' across Britain, linked to a secret leadership command.

Some members appear obsessed with weapons and have discussed violent insurrection, including attacking vaccine centres and targeting employees – what one chillingly termed 'bringing the fight to the people sticking the needle in'.

The group insists all new recruits provide evidence of service in the Armed Forces.

Once 'vetted' they are given access to a channel on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app used by extremists and criminals due to its high security levels.

Over the past few weeks the group has quietly recruited and hopes to garner public support with a peaceful march on Parliament on September 8 during which the ex-servicemen will wear 'headdress'

But a Mail on Sunday investigator last week infiltrated V4F and discovered, far from benign, its goal is to escalate covert activities.

One senior member said: 'If it comes to an insurgency, the military will become enemy combatants and we'll take them out using dirty tricks. They are identifiable by wearing a uniform. We are not.'

Another V4F leader, who uses the name Bellzaac on Telegram, stresses publicly that the group only advocates 'legal forms of protest and resistance', but he is less circumspect when addressing the group on the app.

'We are f****** cavalry,' he wrote in one message. 'No one else is going to do what needs to be done when it gets messy. We know it's going to happen, it's not a matter of if.'

Another said of the September 8 march: 'We have to look military and the part, proud protectors of our oaths. This does not mean that in the future we need the same approach.' [read more]

I get it. They are mad that they are forced to get vaccinated. After putting their lives on the line to defend queen and country they are mandated to get vaccinated like children. Still, they shouldn’t violently protest or revolt. Do it peacefully. If they do it the other way, they gov’t will use the violence against them and make them an escape goat—saying they are anti-gov’t extremists or worse.

Sorry, America. You’ve already been hacked.

From money.yahoo.com (Sept. 1):

Last month, T-Mobile (TMUS), the nation’s largest wireless carrier, was hacked by a 21-year-old American living in Turkey named John Binns. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Binns said he spent about a week rummaging through the company’s servers.

T-Mobile has since confirmed the data of more than 50 million current, prospective, and former customers was stolen in the hack. That includes Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, names, addresses, and dates of birth.

The T-Mobile hack was massive, but not at all uncommon. In 2020, hackers accessed the customer data of 2.5 million customers of alcohol delivery app Drizly (UBER). In 2019, the information for 30 million payment cards used at Wawa convenience stores was stolen through a breach in the company’s payment systems. In 2018, Marriott confirmed cybercriminals stole the information of 500 million guests. And in 2017, credit monitoring bureau Equifax (EFX) was attacked, with hackers making off with the personal data of 147 million Americans.

Those are just a small sampling of hacks from the last few years. To put it bluntly, you, dear reader, have likely already been the victim of a hack.

“The answer is yes, you've been hacked,” NYU Tandon School of Engineering professor Justin Cappos told Yahoo Finance. “Your data, and everyone else's, is probably out there from one data breach or another.”

Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation, went even further by saying that for a mere $10 he can buy your mother’s maiden name, your Social Security number, and your current address.

It sounds scary, and it is. But there are ways to protect yourself even if your data is already out there including taking advantage of free credit monitoring services. As for the companies that fall victim to hacks, experts say the government needs to find a way to punish them so they start doing a better job of protecting your data. [read more]

Another hacking article: FBI Confirms Hack Sent More Than 100,000 Fake Emails

The Surprising Origins of Critical Race Theory

From American Thinker.com (Aug. 28):

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been cited as an offshoot of Karl Marx’s theory of class struggle, which was designed to pit one class against another so as to foment worker-led revolutions. It is also widely accepted that the Marxian Frankfurt School in Germany reworked Marx’s “social conflict theory” in the 1950s by adding “race” to their long list of “oppressed” minorities. But historically, the Frankfurt School theorists were latecomers to the racial theory table. They were not the originators of Critical Race Theory. A revolutionary socialist movement had already existed decades before in Germany. These racial justice warriors sought to pit one race against another and encourage the oppressed to overthrow the oppressor. They called themselves German National Socialists.

After World War II, the Frankfurt School intellectuals and academics began to plagiarize the “racial struggle” and “victimhood” theories that had originated with Nazi theorists in the mid-1920s. It is true that the Nazi theorists, many with Marxist leanings, were less sophisticated in their racial superiority approach. But their long-term goals on racial disparity and struggle were remarkably similar.

The National Socialists, like the Marxian Frankfurt School leaders, dedicated themselves to fighting racial oppression imposed by other advantaged races. But in the case of the Nazis, they identified the “oppressed race” as the Aryan and German people and the “oppressor race” as the Jews. They believed that the Jews controlled the world as members of a wealthy and privileged race that supposedly mistreated the so-called Aryan races.

To demean the so-called “Jewish oppressors,” the National Socialists taught German children that the Jews, Jewish-run banks, and capitalists were persecuting the German nation and its people. This “oppressor versus oppressed” narrative is pure classical Marxism, which had devastating effects across the annals of modern history. Such racist nonsense divides society, creating hostile tribalism and unending ethnic violence.

Of course, this racial struggle was exactly what the Nazi propagandists intended in their effort to purge certain “oppressor” races. They wanted only one race to exist in German-controlled lands. That is why Critical Race Theory is so poisonous. Its endgame almost always results in horrific final solutions to punish so-called privileged and oppressor races.

The march towards securing superiority over an oppressor race began in earnest after the Nazis nationalized most German schools in 1933.  School administrators quickly inserted racist policies into newly rewritten textbooks and school policies. With the assistance of the National Socialist Teachers League, (the official Nazis teacher’s union), students were inundated with racial theories that invaded most disciplines. Nazi party officials promoted the Führer’s Volksgemeinschaft concept of equality, which included social engineering, social justice, racial tribalism, national collectivity, and social Darwinism. But their biggest mission was to implant biased ethnic-racial studies into Germany’s classrooms. [read more]

CRT is just the old divide-and-conquer strategy. First it was class to divide the people, now its race. Then it will be gender and who knows what’ll be next.

Other articles on CRT:

• Critical Race Theory: The Specter of Communism
• I Am Not White: Obliterating Critical Race Theory
• Surge in Antisemitism Linked to Spread of Critical Race Theory
• The Ten Commandments of Critical Race Theory
• Critical Theory for Grownups
• Critical Race Theory is On the Ropes
• Jim Banks to Introduce Amendment to Ban Military from Promoting Critical Race Theory
• Critical Race Theory Is a Direct Attack on Market Freedom
• Critical Race Theory and the Many Piles of Dirt It Creates
• Critical Race Theory: Civil Rights Upside Down
• Boy Scouts Announce New Critical Race Theory Requirement
• Biden Criminalizes CRT Dissent

Dr. Scott Atlas: Science Killed Itself Over COVID-19

Commentary From Helen Raleigh on The Federalist.com (Sept. 1):

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the American people have been told to “follow the science.” Yet for a year and a half, they’ve heard contradicting messages from self-appointed prophets of “the science” like Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

We learned that politicians who claimed their decisions were science-driven often ignored scientific findings that didn’t fit certain political narratives. We discovered that scientists are fallible human beings, and some would let personal interests and political views cloud their judgment.

Is science itself one of the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic? I asked Dr. Scott Atlas at the 13th annual Freedom Conference hosted by the Steamboat Institute, a Colorado-based nonprofit organization. Formerly a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center, Atlas is now a senior fellow in health policy at the Hoover Institution.

Atlas has been under constant attacks by the left and the corporate media since he served as a special adviser to former President Trump and a member of the White House coronavirus task force from August to November 2020. The New York Times and the Washington Post ran hit pieces on Atlas, questioning his qualifications despite his distinguished career and scholarship.

Google-owned YouTube also removed a 50-minute video of Atlas’s interview with the Hoover Institute. Twitter took down his tweet that questioned the effectiveness of masks.

‘Science’ Destroyed Its Own Credibility

Atlas has refused to be silenced. He has a lot to say about how the scientific field and Americans’ trust in it have been tremendously harmed during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Science has been not just a victim,” he told me, “but actively participated in the self-destruction of its credibility.”

To prove his point, Atlas referred to the now infamous letter published in Lancet, which denounced the lab-leak theory as a “conspiracy” that created “fear, rumors, and prejudice.” Facebook “fact-checkers” used the letter to censor discussion of the lab-leak theory for more than a year.

It then surfaced in The Daily Mail that Peter Daszak, president of Eco Health Alliance, orchestrated a group of scientists to write the letter without disclosing the EHA’s close financial ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Now many scientists accept that the WIV lab-leak theory is just as probable as the natural origin theory.

Atlas also faulted leading scientific publications such as Nature and Lancet for playing “important roles in enabling, encouraging, and enforcing the false narrative.” In June, journalist Ian Birrell cited one source who estimated the publisher of Nature had sponsorship agreements worth millions of dollars from Chinese institutions.

“Science is not supposed to be about intimidating, countering interpretation of data, or abusing, or censoring data,” Atlas said. “Science is not supposed to have a view. Science is only about data and the scientific process. There is never supposed to be ‘an accepted view’ of science.” [read more]

The Second Amendment as an Expression of First Principles

From imprimis.hillsdale.edu (Mar. 2013):

We are currently mired in a frantic debate about the rights of gun owners. One example should suffice to prove that the debate has become hysterical: Second Amendment supporters, one prominent but less than articulate member of Congress alleges, have become “enablers of mass murder.”

Special animus has been directed against so-called assault rifles. These are semi-automatic, not automatic weapons—the latter have been illegal under federal law since the 1930s—because they require a trigger pull for every round fired. Some semi-automatic firearms, to be sure, can be fitted with large-capacity magazines. But what inspires the ire of gun control advocates seems to be their menacing look—somehow they don’t appear fit for polite society. No law-abiding citizen could possibly need such a weapon, we are told—after all, how many rounds from a high-powered rifle are needed to kill a deer? And we are assured that these weapons are not well-adapted for self-defense—that only the military and the police need to have them.

Now it’s undeniable, Senator Dianne Feinstein to the contrary notwithstanding, that semi-automatic weapons such as the AR-15 are extremely well-adapted for home defense—especially against a crime that is becoming more and more popular among criminals, the home invasion. Over the past two decades, gun ownership has increased dramatically at the same time that crime rates have decreased. Combine this with the fact that most gun crimes are committed with stolen or illegally obtained weapons, and the formula to decrease crime is clear: Increase the number of responsible gun owners and prosecute to the greatest extent possible under the law those who commit gun-related crimes or possess weapons illegally.

Consider also that assault rifles are rarely used by criminals, because they are neither easily portable nor easily concealed. In Chicago, the murder capital of America—a city with draconian gun laws—pistols are the weapon of choice, even for gang-related executions. But of course there are the horrible exceptions—the mass shootings in recent years—and certainly we must keep assault weapons with high-capacity magazines out of the hands of people who are prone to commit such atrocities.

The shooters in Arizona, Colorado, and Newtown were mentally ill persons who, by all accounts, should have been incarcerated. Even the Los Angeles Times admits that “there is a connection between mental illness and mass murder.” But the same progressives who advocate gun control also oppose the involuntary incarceration of mentally ill people who, in the case of these mass shootings, posed obvious dangers to society before they committed their horrendous acts of violence. From the point of view of the progressives who oppose involuntary incarceration of the mentally ill—you can thank the ACLU and like-minded organizations—it is better to disarm the entire population, and deprive them of their constitutional freedoms, than to incarcerate a few mentally ill persons who are prone to engage in violent crimes.

And we must be clear—the Second Amendment is not about assault weapons, hunting, or sport shooting. It is about something more fundamental. It reaches to the heart of constitutional principles—it reaches to first principles. A favorite refrain of thoughtful political writers during America’s founding era held that a frequent recurrence to first principles was an indispensable means of preserving free government—and so it is.

The Whole People Are the Militia
The Second Amendment reads as follows: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The immediate impetus for the amendment has never been in dispute. Many of the revolutionary generation believed standing armies were dangerous to liberty. Militias made up of citizen-soldiers, they reasoned, were more suitable to the character of republican government. Expressing a widely held view, Elbridge Gerry remarked in the debate over the first militia bill in 1789 that “whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia.”

The Second Amendment is unique among the amendments in the Bill of Rights, in that it contains a preface explaining the reason for the right protected: Militias are necessary for the security of a free state. We cannot read the words “free State” here as a reference to the several states that make up the Union. The frequent use of the phrase “free State” in the founding era makes it abundantly clear that it means a non-tyrannical or non-despotic state. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), rightly remarked that the term and its “close variations” were “terms of art in 18th-century political discourse, meaning a free country or free polity.” [read more]

Other articles about gun rights:

• CDC Director To Restart Gun Research Amid Spate Of Mass Shootings
• The CDC’s forever war on gun owners
• The CDC Is Coming for Your Guns
• House Passes “Red Flag” Gun Confiscation Bill For Ex-Military Members — And Lots Of Republicans Voted For It
• 51 House Republicans Send Letter Accusing ATF Of Creating Backdoor Federal Gun Registry

Natural immunity for the win

From Alex Berenson.substack.com (Aug. 27):

The question I get more than any other:

I had Covid. I had an antibody test to prove it. Am I protected (and do I need to get the vaccine)?

Let me start with the usual disclaimer: THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. I AM NOT A PHYSICIAN.

But the answer is now increasingly clear: natural immunity from Covid following infection and recovery is HIGHLY protective against future Covid infections. Rates of reinfection are very low.

Perhaps natural immunity eventually wanes, but we don’t know when. In fact, a little-noticed paper from June suggests it may actually strengthen for at least a year - and provide plenty of protection from Delta and other variants.

I am not going into the problems with vaccine-generated protection today or with our political unwillingness to recognize natural immunity. (Remember, GOOD NEWS - we could all use it).

Let’s just look instead at why natural immunity works so well.

You immune response comes in two forms: “humoral” and “cellular.”

When you are infected with Sars-Cov-2, your body’s “B-cells” - part of the immune system - quickly pour out “antibodies.” These antibodies attack the viral particles circulating in your blood and other fluids, hoping to keep the virus from entering your cells and replicating itself.

This is humoral immunity. Your B-cells make antibodies in many different shapes. Some are better at sticking to the virus. Scientists call these “neutralizing” antibodies because they neutralize the “antigen,” the foreign body attacking you, keeping it from entering your cells.

Amazingly, your B-cells quickly figure out which antibodies neutralize most effectively and make more of them, while cutting back on those that don’t work.

At the same time, another part of the immune system - killer or CD8 T-cells - attacks cells that the virus has already infected. You destroy your own cells to prevent the virus from using them to make more copies of itself. This is cellular immunity.

For a few days after you are infected, your immune system is in a race with the virus. If you win the race, defeat the virus, and recover - as the vast majority of people infected with Sars-Cov-2 do - within a week or two you should have no measurable levels of virus in your body. [read more]

Another article about natural immunity:  

Harvard Epidemiologist Says the Case for COVID Vaccine Passports Was Just Demolished

Why So Many Americans Reject Legal Due Process in the Age of Covid

From Mises.org (Aug. 2021):

The policy response to the covid panic of 2020 in the United States was one of the most widespread direct attacks on fundamental human rights in decades. Overnight—and without any deliberation, debate, or checks and balances—millions of Americans were denied their basic rights to seek employment, to freely assemble, and to engage in religious practices.

Business and churches were closed, and countless Americans were ordered to stay in their homes and abandon their sources of income.

This was all done with no legal process other than the issuance of edicts from a tiny handful of politicians, usually executives such as state governors and city mayors.

Those who pressed for lockdowns and the effective confiscation of property—for that's what a forced business closure actually is—denied that any sort of due process or “checks and balances” were necessary.

Rather, the lockdown advocates insisted that the public instead embrace unreservedly the “recommendations” of experts in government offices, who insisted that coerced lockdowns and business closures were the only reasonable response to the assumed threat of covid-19. Were one to suggest in mixed company that businesses ought to be afforded a hearing before being forcibly closed—or that an individual ought to receive some sort of due process before being deemed a “nonessential” worker—this was likely to elicit scoffing and contempt.

There’s no room for due process anymore, the official narrative tells us.

This new turn toward obedience to expert-fueled executive power didn’t appear from nowhere. Rather it is, in part, a manifestation of a long ideological process that has gradually replaced respect for legal checks and balances and due process with a deference to scientific experts. These experts, it is alleged, must not be subject to the slow and inefficient process of legal constraints on state power. [read more]

Chinese Regime Adds ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ to National Curriculum

From The Epoch Times.com (Aug. 2021):

The Chinese regime has announced that beginning in September, students will be taught “Xi Jinping Thought” from primary school all the way to university—in a bid to “arm” their brains with Marxist belief and communist ideology.

The Ministry of Education issued new guidelines on Aug. 24 incorporating the ideology tied to Chinese leader Xi Jinping into the country’s national curriculum. The measure formalized policies announced earlier this summer.

The move aims to strengthen the “resolve to listen to and follow the Party,” and new teaching materials must “cultivate patriotic feelings,” according to the guidelines.

An official of the Ministry of Education stated during an Aug. 24 press conference that it will introduce “Party-leadership”-related content into the curriculum and teaching materials of schools and universities.

A mandatory textbook, titled “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in the New Era,” is to “gradually form” the confidence of the young generation in supporting socialism and the Party’s leadership, the ministry said in a July 8 announcement.

The book will be taught in classrooms starting in September, following the summer break.

Xi’s sweeping efforts to indoctrinate the Chinese youth stem from a desire to build a personality cult similar to that of Mao Zedong, the Chinese regime’s first leader, noted Feng Chongyi, a professor on China studies at the University of Technology Sydney.

Chinese people in the 1950s and 1960s would “be in tears upon seeing Mao Zedong, and would read the ‘Little Red Book’ respectfully,” Feng said, referring to a book of Mao quotes that was required reading for virtually the whole populace during that time. [read more]

Not surprising Xi would do this. But it is surprising he hasn’t done the brainwashing/propaganda sooner.

Another article about China’s socialism: Communist Theocracy in China

Conspiracy theories aside, there is something fishy about the Great Reset

From Open Democracy.net (Aug. 16):

The Great Reset’ conspiracy theories don’t seem to want to die. The theories were triggered by the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) summit last year, which had the theme ‘The Great Reset’ and argued that the COVID crisis was an opportunity to address the burning issues facing the world. According to the BBC, the term ‘Great Reset’ has received more than eight million interactions on Facebook and has been shared almost two million times on Twitter since the WEF initiative was launched.

The set of conspiracy theories around the Great Reset are nebulous and hard to pin down, but piecing them together gives us something like this: the Great Reset is the global elite’s plan to instate a communist world order by abolishing private property while using COVID-19 to solve overpopulation and enslaving what remains of humanity with vaccines.

Intrigued by the palaver around last year’s summit, I decided to find out what the WEF’s Great Reset plan was really about. At the heart of conspiracy theories are supposed secret agendas and malicious intent. While these may be absent from the WEF's Great Reset initiative, what I found was something almost as sinister hiding in plain sight. In fact, more sinister because it’s real and it’s happening now. And it involves things as fundamental as our food, our data and our vaccines.

The real Great Reset

The magic words are ‘stakeholder capitalism’, a concept that WEF chairman Klaus Schwab has been hammering for decades and which occupies pride of place in the WEF’s Great Reset plan from June 2020. The idea is that global capitalism should be transformed so that corporations no longer focus solely on serving shareholders but become custodians of society by creating value for customers, suppliers, employees, communities and other ‘stakeholders’. The way the WEF sees stakeholder capitalism being carried out is through a range of ‘multi-stakeholder partnerships’ bringing together the private sector, governments and civil society across all areas of global governance.

The idea of stakeholder capitalism and multi-stakeholder partnerships might sound warm and fuzzy, until we dig deeper and realize that this actually means giving corporations more power over society, and democratic institutions less.

The plan from which the Great Reset originated was called the Global Redesign Initiative. Drafted by the WEF after the 2008 economic crisis, the initiative contains a 600-page report on transforming global governance. In the WEF’s vision, “the government voice would be one among many, without always being the final arbiter.” Governments would be just one stakeholder in a multi-stakeholder model of global governance. Harris Gleckman, senior fellow at the University of Massachusetts, describes the report as “the most comprehensive proposal for re-designing global governance since the formulation of the United Nations during World War II.”

Who are these other, non-governmental stakeholders? The WEF, best known for its annual meeting of high-net-worth individuals in Davos, Switzerland, describes itself as an international organization for public-private cooperation. WEF partners include some of the biggest companies in oil (Saudi Aramco, Shell, Chevron, BP), food (Unilever, The Coca-Cola Company, Nestlé), technology (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple) and pharmaceuticals (AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna).

Instead of corporations serving many stakeholders, in the multi-stakeholder model of global governance, corporations are promoted to being official stakeholders in global decision-making, while governments are relegated to being one of many stakeholders. In practice, corporations become the main stakeholders, while governments take a backseat role, and civil society is mainly window dressing. [read more]

New World Order here we come! Whether the rest of the world wants it or not. The Elites do of course. Then comes God’s new world order—His great reset. That’s the important one.

Other articles and videos about the Great Reset:

• The Great Reset’s destruction of property will TRAP us in POVERTY [video]
• Great Reset leaders ADMIT your ‘way of life’ doesn’t matter [video]
• 7 Biden 'failures' that are BY DESIGN to further the GREAT RESET [video]
• New church hints a ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT is being formed NOW [video]
• Vaccine Mandates and the "Great Reset"
• The Great Reset, Part VI: Plans of a Technocratic Elite
• How Biden Is Laying The Foundation For A ‘Great Reset’ Of America
• ESG catch 22
  

Why Wokeness is a Christian Heresy

From Break Point.org (July 12):

In 416 BC, during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, Athens decided to attack the neutral island of Melos. When the Melians protested they had done Athens no wrong, the Athenians replied, “The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must.” The Melians were starved into surrender, their men were killed, and their women and children were sold into slavery.

None of this was unusual in the ancient world. The strong, it was supposed, had every right to dominate the weak. Cruelty, rape, torture, and slaughter were ordinary means of enforcing power. Neither the gods nor the moral codes opposed dominations. Atheist historian Tom Holland, describes his feelings about the Greco-Roman world this way: “It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value.”

So what changed? As Holland notes, the difference was Christianity.

Christians and Jews believed that all persons were made in the image of God. Thus, every person had intrinsic worth and dignity, no matter their race, ethnicity, gender, or strength. On this basis, oppression of the poor and weak was condemned. Neither might nor wealth made right. Christianity further emphasized the spiritual and moral equality of all people. Not only do we all share the same humanity, but we all suffer from the same problem (sin) and are in need of the same solution (salvation through Jesus).

Because of these ideas, Christianity is the sole historical source of concepts now taken for granted: human dignity, human equality, and universal human rights. As not only Tom Holland but other prominent atheists such as Jürgen Habermas and Luc Ferry admit, these ideas are at the root of our modern concern for the poor and oppressed.

And this is why it’s accurate to call “wokeness” a Christian heresy. [read more]

Other articles of wokeness:

• Wokeness: An Evil of Our Age
• Woke apps to enhance your phone's social consciousness

India is showing us how to hold Fauci accountable

From WND.com (Aug. 24):

Early in the pandemic, India was plagued with the same COVID-related problems as the United States. And just as in the U.S. early on, parts of India's medical establishment did everything in its power to suppress the use of readily available medications for the early treatment of COVID-19.

Similar to the U.S., this policy was pursued in India in order to provide a legal justification for the emergency use of experimental COVID-19 vaccines.

Both republics have laws on the books that preclude the issuance of EUA (emergency use authorization) for new vaccines when treatments for the particular disease exist.

So, to get around this restriction, portions of India's medical establishment sought to expunge the reality of existing effective treatments in order to promulgate the dispensing of experimental vaccines among the masses via EUA.

And America witnessed exactly the same thing under Anthony Fauci.

There is plenty of debate over why this was done; whether sinister, for profit, incompetence, or some combination of these things, and it isn't the purpose of this article to join that debate.

The focus of this piece is on that which can no longer be credibly disputed. Namely, the effectiveness of available drug regimens such as described by Dr. Peter McCullough et al. and modified by others to treat COVID-19 early in the course of the disease and consequently reduce the outcomes of hospitalization and death by about 75%.

……………

In India, the Bar Association is now suing one person within their medical establishment (with a position similar in influence and visibility as Fauci in the U.S.) for suppressing as a matter of public policy, the reality of effective early treatments for COVID-19 via existing drugs.

It's a legal action that is designed to culminate in the criminal prosecution of this person for each death of an individual denied access to early treatment with existing drugs, because of this person's policies.

And due to his vocal role in suppressing early treatments of COVID-19 using available drugs, Anthony Fauci should be the first to be similarly prosecuted in America. [read more]

Good for them! Gov’t officials should be held accountable.

Border Patrol agents warn of morale collapse amid crisis: 'Downtrodden, almost dead inside'

From Washington Examiner.com (Aug. 22):

AUSTIN, Texas — Twelve Border Patrol agents are the only federal law enforcement officers present along a 245-mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border surrounding Del Rio, Texas. It’s the lowest-ever number of agents on duty in the area, even as more migrants illegally cross here now than ever before.

The surge of illegal immigration is taking a significant toll because it has kept agents from carrying out their national security mission. Agents say they are physically drained and struggling to see beyond the crisis.

“Morale is in the toilet,” said Jon Anfinsen, a spokesman for the Border Patrol's union. "Morale is low because agents aren't allowed to do their job — if our job is to be out patrolling the border in between the ports of entry and actively searching for people who have crossed illegally, but we're not allowed to go do that job, it basically creates this defeated feeling in everyone."

“Morale is tanking fast. This can be seen in the simple statements made by agents, but even more importantly, it can be seen in increasing processing times. Agents are just flat tired, and we are seeing and hearing it,” a former senior official at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency that oversees the Border Patrol, wrote in an email.

This isn’t the first crisis these agents have faced, but this one has taken a significant toll on personnel, according to Anfinsen, because agents are already “burned out and there’s really no end in sight.”

The Border Patrol’s 19,000 agents are not allowed to speak with the media, but five current agents and three former senior officials who worked in the Biden administration spoke to the Washington Examiner for this story. [read more]

Let’s go Brandon!

More articles on the border:

• With Work Stopped, 7 Things I Saw at Border Wall
• Biden administration asks Pentagon to send military to border
• Billionaire Donates 98% of Private Funds Raised for Texas Border Wall

HUH? They Removed This Boulder Because It Was RACIST?

From staff on Patriot Nation Press.com (Aug. 18):

Apparently, a “racist” 42-ton boulder that is said to be two billion years old is now no longer welcome on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The historical boulder was removed over the weekend.

Called the Chamberlin Rock since 1925, the boulder was named after Thomas Chamberlin, a geologist who worked as the university’s president from 1887 to 1892. However, despite the boulder’s long and illustrious history, the UW Black Student has been lobbying for years to remove the boulder due to the fact that it was once referred to as a “n*****head” in a 1925 newspaper article. To date, university historians have not been able to find any other racist reference to the boulder.

WKOW made the following report:

According to a news release from UW spokeswoman Meredith McGlone, Chamberlin Rock is known as a two-billion-year-old glacial erratic structure, and it is very rare in the natural world. Additionally, it was named after former University President Thomas Chamberlin. However, according to the Black Student Union, the rock had been known as a racial slur for several years after it had been dug up and installed. The Black Student Union wanted to remove it because it had caused harm to their community over the years.

“Removing the rock as a monument in a prominent location prevents further harm to our community while preserving the rock’s educational and research value for current and future scholars. The rock will be placed on university-owned land southeast of Madison near Lake Kegonsa,” McGlone said in the release. They removed this rock last Friday.

It seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to over an inanimate object, so I don’t know, how about just calling it something else? How about renaming it after a black activist, such as Malcolm X Rock or Sojourner Truth Rock? But I digress…. [source]

Completely stupid. Then again wokeness is stupid itself. Highways can be racist too you know.

The Sun, Not CO2, to Blame for Global Warming: Study

From News Max.com (Aug. 16):

Warmer temperatures in recent decades might be caused mainly by the sun and not carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new study by a team of international scientists.

The study's findings sharply contradict the conclusions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, The Epoch Times reported Monday.

The new peer-reviewed findings, released just as the UN released its sixth "Assessment Report" (AR6), was published in the international scientific journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Nearly two dozen scientists concluded that previous studies did not adequately consider the role of solar energy in explaining increased temperatures.

AR6 again argued that human emissions of CO2 unequivocally were to blame for global warming.

However, scientists and solar physicists said the IPCC was "premature" in blaming CO2. They added the UN body's conclusions were based on "narrow and incomplete data about the Sun’s total irradiance."

The study, if confirmed, could deal a devastating blow to the IPCC 's conclusion that human emissions of CO2 are the primary cause of global warming.

Based on several people who took part in the new study, The Epoch Times said the IPCC appears to display deliberate and systemic bias in what views, studies, and data are included in its reports. [read more]

Duh. If the sun goes away (or more likely dims when it becomes a white dwarf) what do you have? Global freezing.

The God Committee and Our Call to Play God

From Break Point.org (July 22):

A heart is available, the clock is ticking, and doctors are forced to choose between three viable candidates for a transplant: A woman who could live for several more years with a new heart but doesn’t want it; a beloved middle-aged father who’s chronically overweight; and a young rich kid who might have just overdosed on cocaine but whose dad is dangling a $25 million donation to the hospital if his son gets the heart. All of this is in the plot of the new movie, “The God Committee.”

The team of doctors and nurses deciding who will live or die are given the nickname The God Committee. But this is a corrupt understanding of God. God doesn’t work from an algorithm. He doesn’t give good gifts like new hearts to those people who will be missed the most, and withhold them from people with bad attitudes or harmful habits, or who are kind of annoying. Nor does He “play dice” with the universe.

A Christian worldview of life and human value is not based on quantifiables such as how many people love a particular person or how many years someone might go on to live. Because every life is endowed by God with His image and likeness, every human life is equally valuable. It is intrinsic to each and every person, and God doesn’t make what He doesn’t mean to make. God created people to bear His image and likeness before the rest of the created order.

In “The God Committee,” doctors accuse each other of “playing God” and it is meant as an insult. But the Book of Genesis describes how — within vitally important created and moral boundaries — God actually intended His people to play Him before the Creation. When Adam and Eve were commanded to be fruitful, to multiply, and to fill the earth and subdue it, they were told to do what God had just been doing. Throughout the first chapter of Genesis, God filled and formed an earth described in the second verse as being empty and void. Now, His image bearers are to carry on that work, ruling over the created order by filling it and subduing it. In fact, even after the Fall, that task continues, though now it is complicated by pain and by thorns.

The key distinction here is whether we play God as if God actually exists, or whether we play God as if we are God*. Whenever we think it’s our authority that determines what’s right and what’s wrong, we’re playing God in the wrong way. This was the Enemy’s very first temptation for Adam and Eve. This was the temptation of the builders of Babel. This temptation continues today, especially as our technological abilities advance so far beyond our ethics. [read more]

*This describes the Left perfectly. Why do you think America has socialized medicine (aka Obamacare) for? Power and control.