Catholic Seeds Planted in Afghanistan

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Ines A. Murzaku: We’ve had saintly examples of Catholic witness among Muslims before, and the results in Afghanistan may someday surprise us. 

As even the military leaders of the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan are admitting their failures and after so much else has gone wrong in that perpetually troubled nation, it’s good to remember that, in its own quiet way, the Church has been at work and had a significant presence there. Various Catholic agencies have been helping the Afghanis in recent years, but one, in particular, deserves some attention.

This is how Barnabite Father Giovanni Scalese, superior of the missio sui iuris in Afghanistan, and the only Catholic priest in Afghanistan, announced his return to Italy after the American withdrawal:

I arrived this afternoon at Fiumicino airport with five sisters and fourteen disabled children, whom the sisters were taking care of in Kabul. We thank the Lord for the success of the operation. I thank you all that these days have raised to Him incessant prayers for us, prayers, which, evidently have been answered. Continue to pray for Afghanistan and for its people!

Accompanying Fr. Scalese were four Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa’s order, who had served in Afghanistan since 2006, and a Pakistani Sister, Bhatti St. Shahnaz, of the Congregation of Saint Jeanne-Antide Thouret. Sister Shahnaz ran a facility for children with mental disabilities established by the association Pro Bambini of Kabul. Unfortunately, those children were unable to escape. Fr. Scalese’s return to Italy marked the end of the 88-year-old Barnabite Afghan mission.

What were the results of this mission? Was anything “accomplished” The only Catholic missionaries in the country were forced to flee and the prospects for their return are dim.  But the Church has faced seemingly impossible odds since it first appeared in the mighty Roman Empire. And God has His own ways.

So, a little history is in order – and hope for the future.  In 1921, Italy became the first Western country to recognize and establish diplomatic relations with Afghanistan. They agreed to exchange permanent diplomatic missions, and to the possibility of hosting a Catholic chaplain within the Italian embassy. At the time, Afghan King Amanullah was receptive to requests from foreigners living in Afghanistan for spiritual assistance.

A year later, he turned to the Italian government – probably the first time that a king ruling a majority Muslim country requested a Catholic chaplain to meet the spiritual needs of  Christian foreigners. There were two conditions. No proselytism of the Muslim population. And the Catholic chapel was to be erected within the Italian embassy (no Christian church could legally be erected on Muslim soil).

The Italian government turned to Pope Pius XI, who said: “A Barnabite is needed here [Kabul].” He chose the Clerics Regular of St. Paul, commonly known as the Barnabites, who include priests, religious women, and lay people – especially married couples.

The order, founded in 1530, draws inspiration from St. Paul. Fr. Egidio Caspani was Pius XI’s choice to start the mission. A second Barnabite, Fr. Ernesto Cagnacci, joined Fr. Caspani as a priest/official of the Italian embassy. The first Catholic Mass was celebrated there on January 1, 1933, the official beginning of the mission.

In 2002, Pope John Paul II elevated the Kabul Christian mission to a Missio sui iuris – an independent mission under the direct jurisdiction of the Church. Consequently, the mission and the church became official Christian presences in a Muslim country. The church, of course, did not have local faithful and local clergy, but with time, the mission and its clergy became part of the reconstruction of Afghanistan. The Barnabite Fr. Giuseppe Moretti in 2005 helped establish the Tangi-Kalay School of Peace, a school that received both state support and private donations.

The Barnabite mission to Afghanistan operated on the model of St. Paul’s Mission in Malta. (Acts 28, 1-10) His was a mission of presence, exchange, and gratitude. Paul’s presence and service to the islanders were Christ-like: Christ came to serve, not to be served – and Paul was imitating the Master. The Barnabite witness in Afghanistan was a witness to God: they were Catholic priests who became parish priests par excellence for the entirety of Kabul, and before the recent pull-out had been an almost a century-old presence among the Afghan people.

We’ve had saintly examples of such witness among Muslims before, and the results may someday surprise us. For example, Blessed Charles de Foucauld with his mystical imitation of Christ among North African Muslims resembles the Barnabite mission in Afghanistan. Foucauld’s life and death were a religious-prophetic witness. Similarly, for the Barnabites and other Christian missionaries, their lives in Afghanistan were a combination of prophecy, presence, and dialogue. The missionaries opted to live the hidden life of Jesus among the Muslim Afghanis.

Such efforts may seem, by human standards, meager. But instead of judging as the world judges, we would do well to pay attention to the words of St. John Henry Newman that authentic Christian prophets and mystics are those individuals who “live in a way least thought of by others, the way chosen by Jesus of Nazareth, to make headway against all the power and wisdom of the world. . . .They take everything in good part which happens to them and make the best of everything.”

The Barnabites did not go to Afghanistan to convert and proselytize the local Muslim population and openly proclaim the Gospel – conditions did not make that a possibility. But according to reliable reports, there is now a modest contingent of Afghanis who converted from Islam and practice their Christian faith in secret. As in other Muslim countries, these converts may be hidden now, but may lead to a surprising future.

Can we speak of the Barnabite Mission to the Afghanis as “Mission Accomplished”? No, not in the ordinary sense of the words. But is there hope for the mission’s future in Afghanistan? Afghanistan at present is in chaos. In Kabul, the witness the Barnabites have given has planted seeds that may lead to surprising growth in God’s good time among future generations of Afghanis.

You may also enjoy:

Michele McAloon’s A Christian Response to Defeat

Matthew Hanley’s The Strange Feminist Silence on Islam

COLUMN BY

Ines A. Murzaku

Ines Angeli Murzaku is Professor of Church History at Seton Hall University. Her extensive research on the history of Christianity, Catholicism, Religious Orders, and Ecumenism has been published in multiple scholarly articles and five books. She edited and translated with Raymond L. Capra and Douglas J. Milewski, The Life of Saint Neilos of Rossano, part of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. Dr. Murzaku has been featured frequently in national and international media, newspapers, radio and TV interviews, and blogs. Her latest book is Mother Teresa: Saint of the Peripheries.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2021 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

What Alabama’s Football Stadium Tells Us About the Risk of Dying from a Covid Breakthrough Infection

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Unvaccinated Americans pose virtually zero mortal risk to the fully vaccinated. How do I know? Because the Centers for Disease Control says so.

According to the CDC, 99.999% of fully vaccinated people had not died as of July 26 from contracting a breakthrough case of Covid. Stated differently, only 0.001%—one one-thousandth of a percent—of fully vaccinated people died of complications from a breakthrough infection. That’s less than one death out of every 100,000 fully vaccinated breakthrough patients.

To put that in perspective, check out the picture of the University of Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium, seating capacity 100,000. If every seat in the stadium was occupied by a fully vaccinated Covid breakthrough patient, only one of those seats would be occupied by someone who would die of complications. The other 99,999 seats would be occupied by vaccinated breakthrough patients who recovered.

So, how trustworthy is the CDC’s suggestion that Covid vaccines provide 99.999% protection against death for vaccinated patients with a breakthrough infection? Since I lack any understanding of how health statistics are calculated, I have no idea whether the CDC’s finding is trustworthy, but am skeptical that it is.

Last week, Emory University Healthcare weighed in with this: “The vaccines are highly effective—most importantly at preventing greater than 90% of severe illness and death—but they are not 100% effective.” The CDC’s finding suggests vaccine effectiveness against death is 99.999%, about as close as you can get to 100%.

There’s a canyon-wide gap between ‘greater than 90%’ and 99.999%, the latter of which is a specific percentage so high that it seems impossible to take seriously. I don’t take it seriously, partly because the politicized CDC could have manipulated the data to mislead Americans to think, incorrectly, that getting vaccinated is a virtual slam dunk guarantee against dying of a Covid breakthrough infection. Slam dunk guarantee? Hardly. According to this CDC webpage, 4,493 vaccinated Americans have died of Covid as of September 20.

If malicious data manipulation did occur, it wouldn’t be the first time the U.S. government has deceived the American people. For the last four decades, government-funded climate science has been riddled with politically motivated misconduct ranging from suppression of contrary research to outright scientific fraud. If not for a totally in-the-tank western media, the manmade global warming theory would have been blown out of the water decades ago.

Emory University arrived at an effectiveness range of greater than 90%. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the bottom of that range (i.e. 90%) of vaccinated breakthrough patients are protected against death, and that the other 10% would not be so lucky.

Referring back to the picture of Alabama’s football stadium, the 90% assumption means 90,000 of those seats would be occupied by vaccinated breakthrough patients who recovered, and 10,000 seats by breakthrough patients who died. 10,000 deaths is a whole lot more than one death, but 90% effectiveness is still very high odds of a favorable outcome, which is why I believe most people should get the vaccine, if they so choose. I did, Pfizer 1 & 2.

According to the CDC’s own 99.999% finding, unvaccinated Americans pose miniscule mortal risk to the vaccinated. If Democrats trust the CDC (they do), why are they insisting that unvaccinated people with religious or medical objections must be subjected to vaccine mandates?

Democrats say the mandates are necessary for the good of us all. Forcing vaccines on the unwilling is much like forcing Christians to embrace abortion because Democrats believe  allowing pregnant women to get rid of their unborn baby is a good thing.

To the extent it is seen as credible, the CDC’s 99.999% finding tells us there’s virtually no rational reason for Americans who are vaccinated to fear being around those who aren’t. The greatest threat the unvaccinated pose is to themselves and their fellow travelers. If they roll the dice and Covid takes them out, they’ll have only themselves to blame. In the meantime, my vote is to let them make their own decision.

©John Edison. All rights reserved.

How Homosexuality Harms The Church

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David Carlin wishes the pope would re-state Church teaching about homosexuality but doubts it will happen, or that America’s bishops will do so.

One of the most common defenses of homosexual behavior is: “This does no harm to you or any other third parties.”  To which my response is: “No harm?  Well, it has pretty much ruined the Catholic Church in America.”

Homosexuality among priests, and sometimes among bishops; plus an attitude of tolerance towards homosexuals among non-homosexual priests and bishops, as if same-sex intercourse is no big deal; plus the colossal scandal of sexual molestation of teenage boys by homosexual priests; plus episcopal attempts to cover up this molestation; plus the widespread pretense among both lay and clerical Catholics that homosexuality had little or nothing to do with the molestation scandal; plus a pro-gay sentimentality found among many lay Catholics; plus Fr. James Martin, S.J. – all this has done immeasurable damage to the Church in the United States.

Anti-Catholics have been given a cudgel with which to beat the Church that is as good as, or even better than, the classic cudgels: the Spanish Inquisition and the trial of Galileo.  A thousand years from now, late-night TV will still be making jokes about Catholic priests molesting young boys.

Non-Catholics (Protestants and Jews and agnostics and atheists) who in these morally corrupt times might have considered joining a Catholic Church that stands for goodness and truth have been driven away by the thought that the Church is as corrupt as any other of our rotten institutions.

We are told that Cato the Elder used to end all his speeches in the Roman Senate, regardless of the topic under discussion, with the words, “Carthage, it seems to me, must be destroyed.”

If I were a Catholic parish priest, I would end all my homilies, regardless of the Scriptural readings of the day, and regardless of the main topic of my sermon, with words like these: “Allow me to remind you, dear friends, that the Catholic religion – the religion you and I profess to adhere to – has always condemned homosexual practice as a very grave sin.”

If any priest, Cato-like, actually says this, he will upset certain parishioners, not a few of whom will drift away to a parish they perceive as being more tolerant and up-to-date, and they will take their money with them.  And some parishioners will write to the bishop complaining about their “homophobic” priest.  More than a few bishops, I suppose, will recommend that the priest “cool it.”  Such bishops, in a paternal attempt to guide their over-zealous parish priests, will explain: “Look, the people of your parish know perfectly well – without your reminding them – what the Catholic Church teaches about homosexuality. Why irritate them by harping needlessly on this theme?”

But is my hypothetical bishop correct when he says that all Catholics know what the Church teaches about homosexuality?  To answer that we must realize that the average Catholic makes a distinction between two ways in which the Church teaches something.  Sometimes the Church is really serious in its moral teachings, e.g., when it tells us not to rob banks or not to beat our wives.  But at other times (many Catholics believe) the Church is not truly serious, e.g., when it tells us that contraception is a serious sin or that homosexual intercourse is a very grave act.

Given all this, I’m lucky not to be a Catholic priest.  My head would soon be served on an episcopal platter for the delectation of Catholics, both clerical and lay, who are far more humane than myself, far more respectful of the fundamental human right to engage in homosexual sodomy, a right almost universally acknowledged today by all right-thinking people outside of Africa, that “dark” continent where most people still don’t understand how progressive and ultra-modern homosexuality is.

Catholicism is a religion that asks of its adherents – nay, demands of them – that they believe a number of hard-to-believe things.  It tells us we must believe that one God is three Persons, that God has become human, that a virgin has given birth, that a crucified man has come back from the dead, that Jesus has atoned for our sins, that bread and wine routinely become the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

If we can believe all that, why do we find it hard to believe that it’s a great sin for two men or two women to engage in sexual relations with one another?  Once upon a time almost everybody believed that.  And yet we actually do find it hard to believe – or at least many of us do.  For the world believes precisely the opposite.

And by “the world” I mean all the “best people,” that is, the social and cultural elites of North America and western Europe.  In America, the moral wisdom of these best people is communicated to the little people (you and me) by the journalistic mass media, by the entertainment industry, and by our best and most famous colleges and universities.  A little further down the line, our public schools even communicate this wisdom to school children.

In March of 1937, Pope Pius XI wrote two very interesting encyclical letters, one in which he denounced Nazism (Mit brennender Sorge), the other in which he denounced Communism (Divini Redemptoris).

I submit that a papal letter on homosexuality is long overdue.  The theory and practice of homosexuality, not to mention the great tidal wave of pro-homosexuality propaganda that is flooding the world – these things, it seems to me, are almost as grave a threat to the Church today as Communism and Nazism were in the 1930s.

I won’t be holding my breath till Pope Francis writes such a letter.  Nor will I hold my breath in hopes that the Catholic bishops in America will write a collective pastoral letter on the topic.

But is it too much for me to hope that some individual bishops here or there will address such an urgent pastoral letter to his priests and people?

You may also enjoy:

Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky’s Confronting the Gay Priest Problem

Fr. Bevil Bramwell’s Homosexuality in Romans One

COLUMN BY

David Carlin

David Carlin is a retired professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2021 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

26,041 Deaths after COVID Shots in EU Database!

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Today I want you vaxxers and non vaxxers to understand the reality of the China Virus vaccinations that the out of control city, county, state and federal political leadership and the “woke” businesses and conglomerates are doing all in their power to force you to take. Whew! That was a mouthful.

The following comes from the European Union database on Covid vaccine usage. I personally find this scary that our evil so called leaders and medical professionals are lying to you about the safety of the vaccine. How all social media is blocking the truth they consider anti vaccine.

America. It is not safe!! It is truly untested. All those who rushed to take it are the guinea pigs for the research. They will be the statistics. The best safety for everyone is to catch this virus and gain natural immunity – you know – the way God created our bodies to work.

I also posted a 15 minute video on why Not To take the virus. Watch it my friends.

DO NOT GIVE IT TO YOUR KIDS!

Please feel free to share this blog and links everywhere. This is important information for those still unvaccinated. Also for those that have taken this shot. This blog is a longer read than normal but a very important series of articles. There are more stories on the link below at the bottom of the blog.

26,041 Deaths 2,448,362 Injuries Following COVID Shots in European Union’s Database as Slovenia Suspends J&J Shot After Death of 20-Year-Old Student. ( by Brian Shilhavy, Editor, Health Impact News )

The European Union database of suspected drug reaction reports is EudraVigilance, and they are now reporting 26,041 fatalities, and 2,448,362 injuries, following COVID-19 injections.

A Health Impact News subscriber from Europe reminded us that this database maintained at EudraVigilance is only for countries in Europe who are part of the European Union (EU), which comprises 27 countries.

The total number of countries in Europe is much higher, almost twice as many, numbering around 50. (There are some differences of opinion as to which countries are technically part of Europe.)

So as high as these numbers are, they do NOT reflect all of Europe. The actual number in Europe who are reported dead or injured following COVID-19 shots would be much higher than what we are reporting here.

The EudraVigilance database reports that through September 25, 2021 there are 26,041 deaths and 2,448,362 injuries reported following injections of four experimental COVID-19 shots:

From the total of injuries recorded, almost half of them (1,176,130) are serious injuries.

“Seriousness provides information on the suspected undesirable effect; it can be classified as ‘serious’ if it corresponds to a medical occurrence that results in death, is life-threatening, requires inpatient hospitalisation, results in another medically important condition, or prolongation of existing hospitalisation, results in persistent or significant disability or incapacity, or is a congenital anomaly/birth defect.”

A Health Impact News subscriber in Europe ran the reports for each of the four COVID-19 shots we are including here. It is a lot of work to tabulate each reaction with injuries and fatalities, since there is no place on the EudraVigilance system we have found that tabulates all the results.

Since we have started publishing this, others from Europe have also calculated the numbers and confirmed the totals.*

Here is the summary data through September 25, 2021.

Total reactions for the mRNA vaccine Tozinameran (code BNT162b2,Comirnaty) from BioNTech/ Pfizer – 12,362 deaths and 1,054,741 injuries to 25/09/2021

  • 28,662   Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 172 deaths
  • 29,569   Cardiac disorders incl. 1,834 deaths
  • 277        Congenital, familial and genetic disorders incl. 23 deaths
  • 14,027   Ear and labyrinth disorders incl. 9 deaths
  • 822        Endocrine disorders incl. 5 deaths
  • 16,330   Eye disorders incl. 30 deaths
  • 92,590   Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 514 deaths
  • 274,633 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 3,517 deaths
  • 1,186     Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 59 deaths
  • 10,876   Immune system disorders incl. 65 deaths
  • 36,113   Infections and infestations incl. 1,214 deaths
  • 13,804   Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 191 deaths
  • 26,554   Investigations incl. 387 deaths
  • 7,555     Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 225 deaths
  • 138,223 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 155 deaths
  • 837        Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 78 deaths
  • 185,082 Nervous system disorders incl. 1,341 deaths
  • 1,347     Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 39 deaths
  • 172        Product issues incl. 1 death
  • 19,436   Psychiatric disorders incl. 159 deaths
  • 3,605     Renal and urinary disorders incl. 205 deaths
  • 24,848   Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 4 deaths
  • 46,177   Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 1,443 deaths
  • 50,420   Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 111 deaths
  • 2,007     Social circumstances incl. 15 deaths
  • 1,034     Surgical and medical procedures incl. 34 deaths
  • 28,555   Vascular disorders incl. 532 deaths

Total reactions for the mRNA vaccine mRNA-1273 (CX-024414) from Moderna – 6,907 deaths and 306,490 injuries to 25/09/2021

  • 6,051     Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 67 deaths
  • 9,283     Cardiac disorders incl. 744 deaths
  • 122        Congenital, familial and genetic disorders incl. 3 deaths
  • 3,769     Ear and labyrinth disorders incl. 1 death
  • 248        Endocrine disorders incl. 2 deaths
  • 4,627     Eye disorders incl. 20 deaths
  • 26,405   Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 269 deaths
  • 82,564   General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 2,617 deaths
  • 500        Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 29 deaths
  • 2,659     Immune system disorders incl. 11 deaths
  • 9,570     Infections and infestations incl. 487 deaths
  • 6,759     Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 127 deaths
  • 5,811     Investigations incl. 128 deaths
  • 2,944     Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 158 deaths
  • 38,397   Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 139 deaths
  • 369        Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 42 deaths
  • 53,562   Nervous system disorders incl. 706 deaths
  • 583        Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 8 deaths
  • 62           Product issues incl. 2 deaths
  • 5,772     Psychiatric disorders incl. 118 deaths
  • 1,772     Renal and urinary disorders incl. 114 deaths
  • 4,576     Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 5 deaths
  • 13,315   Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 682 deaths
  • 16,453   Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 62 deaths
  • 1,366     Social circumstances incl. 28 deaths
  • 1,032     Surgical and medical procedures incl. 71 deaths
  • 7,919     Vascular disorders incl. 267 deaths

Total reactions for the vaccine AZD1222/VAXZEVRIA (CHADOX1 NCOV-19) from Oxford/ AstraZeneca – 5,468 deaths and 1,008,357 injuries to 25/09/2021

  • 12,160   Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 226 deaths
  • 17,334   Cardiac disorders incl. 623 deaths 
  • 163        Congenital familial and genetic disorders incl. 6 deaths
  • 11,826   Ear and labyrinth disorders incl. 1 death
  • 522        Endocrine disorders incl. 4 deaths
  • 17,753   Eye disorders incl. 26 deaths
  • 97,985   Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 280 deaths
  • 265,482 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 1,320 deaths
  • 866        Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 53 deaths
  • 4,104     Immune system disorders incl. 25 deaths
  • 26,800   Infections and infestations incl. 347 deaths
  • 11,472   Injury poisoning and procedural complications incl. 153 deaths
  • 22,152   Investigations incl. 129 deaths 
  • 11,805   Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 77 deaths
  • 151,690 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 76 deaths
  • 536        Neoplasms benign malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 17 deaths
  • 209,576 Nervous system disorders incl. 872 deaths 
  • 456        Pregnancy puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 11 deaths
  • 164        Product issues incl. 1 death
  • 18,858   Psychiatric disorders incl. 50 deaths 
  • 3,752     Renal and urinary disorders incl. 49 deaths
  • 13,707   Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 2 deaths 
  • 35,537   Respiratory thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 654 deaths
  • 46,297   Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 40 deaths
  • 1,328     Social circumstances incl. 7 deaths
  • 1,199     Surgical and medical procedures incl. 24 deaths
  • 24,833   Vascular disorders incl. 395 deaths

Total reactions for the COVID-19 vaccine JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S) from Johnson & Johnson – 1,304 deaths and 78,774 injuries to 25/09/2021

  • 737        Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 32 deaths
  • 1,315     Cardiac disorders incl. 129 deaths
  • 26           Congenital, familial and genetic disorders
  • 687        Ear and labyrinth disorders incl. 1 death
  • 47           Endocrine disorders incl. 1 death
  • 1,067     Eye disorders incl. 6 deaths
  • 7,102     Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 59 deaths
  • 20,536   General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 333 deaths
  • 98           Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 9 deaths
  • 321        Immune system disorders incl. 7 deaths
  • 1,943     Infections and infestations incl. 79 deaths
  • 743        Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 17 deaths
  • 3,998     Investigations incl. 79 deaths
  • 465        Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 29 deaths
  • 12,263   Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 33 deaths
  • 37           Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 2 deaths
  • 16,253   Nervous system disorders incl. 148 deaths
  • 26           Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 1 death
  • 21           Product issues
  • 1,059     Psychiatric disorders incl. 11 deaths
  • 311        Renal and urinary disorders incl. 15 deaths
  • 1,139     Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 4 deaths
  • 2,786     Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 148 deaths
  • 2,426     Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 5 deaths
  • 235        Social circumstances incl. 4 deaths
  • 572        Surgical and medical procedures incl. 43 deaths
  • 2,561     Vascular disorders incl. 109 deaths

Joachim Kuhs, Member Of The European Parliament, to EU Commission: “Pull the brake on these vaccines and stop this experimentation on humans, I beg you!”

Slovenia Suspends Janssen (J&J) COVID-19 Vaccine After The Death Of 20-Year-Old.

LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA – The Slovenian government has suspended the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine after the death of a 20-year-old student. Katja Jagodic, who was vaccinated because it’s mandated for universities, received her shot on Thursday, September 16th. She suffered several health problems shortly afterwards. She was hospitalized on Monday, September 27th at the University Clinical Center (UKC) in Ljubljana. Her symptoms were so severe that immediate medical attention was required. She died today in the early morning.

Igor Rigler, head of the emergency neurology department at the University Clinical Center said, “she fell ill with a very serious condition. At the same time, she had blood clots and low platelet counts.

This caused blood clots and bleeding in her brain. We have done everything that modern medicine can do in such conditions. We consulted all the experts involved in this field at UKC: vascular specialists, hematologists, nephrologists, neurologists. We approached the treatment aggressively, but unfortunately we could not help her.”

Slovenian Minister of Health Janez Poklukar ordered the suspension of the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine after the news.

The father of the deceased 20-year-old was present at a protest today against the ‘COVID-pass‘. The participants of the rally dedicated a minute of silence before he said:

“She wanted to have freedom, just like everyone else here. On September 16th, she went to get vaccinated with Janssen so that she wouldn’t be limited by nonsense. She is no more today. She was 20 years old.”

“when you get to the vaccination site, no one warns you of possible complications. No one warns that vaccination with the Janssen vaccine is not recommended for people under 40. There are only numbers. There is only talk of percentages. My Katja was not a percentage. She was my Katja,” the emotional father said. After the speeches, the crowd moved towards the Presidential Palace and continued their journey through the streets of Ljubljana. The protesters, who are against the mandatory COVID-pass in order to work, access a gas station or a shopping center, eventually blocked a highway. Police were sent to the area with water cannons to fight to protesters.

©Fred Brownbill. All rights reserved.

RELATED VIDEO: Dr. Madej finds living ‘tentacle’ organism in vaccine vials.

Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ Big Lies

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“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” – Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels

Biden’s Big Lies

Watch the White House press secretary repeat the “big lie” that the Democrat $3.5 trillion spending bill “costs zero dollars.”

Biden in a September 25th, 2021 Tweet stated, “My Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars.”

The American people are now seeing the political, economic and military consequences of Biden’s big lie.

Let’s go down a short list of Biden’s “Build Back Better” Big Lies:

  1. The Coordinated Attack on Ivermectin is a Crime Against Humanity.
  2. Afghanistan pull out.
  3. Unvetted Afghan immigration crisis.
  4. Southern Border Crisis.
  5. Stagflation in the American economy. Gas is up 43%, Energy costs are up 25%, Rent is up 9%, Bacon is up 28%.
  6. Tyranny in the form of “mandates.” Get vaxxed or else!
  7. Rising gas and oil prices.
  8. The working class’ jobs threatened if they don’t get vaxxed.
  9. The “tax the rich mantra” of Biden and the Democrat Party.
  10. The increase in taxes on every working American.
  11. The attempt at raising the national debt to pay for massive spending bills (i.e. infrastructure).
  12. The continuing efforts to use Covid to shut down the economy.
  13. The continuing efforts to brainwash our public school, college and university students on the goodness of Communism.
  14. The racial hate created using the BLM/Antifa “white privilege” campaign.
  15. The growing scientific data showing that Covid vaccine shots are harming and in some cases killing large numbers of Americans.
  16. The anti-fossil fuels Green New Deal efforts to fundamentally transform American’s use of all forms of energy.
  17. Biden’s support to defund the police, anti-Border Patrol and anti-law enforcement policies.
  18. Biden’s anti-guns anti-self defense and anti-Second Amendment policies.
  19. The radicalization of the Democrat Party and its move toward Communism in the U.S.A.
  20. Biden’s policies to fundamentally transform our public schools into propaganda outlets for big government and centers to force Critical Race Theory on children, without parental concent.
  21. More to be determined…

Biden Has Become a Joke and the Whole World is Laughing

In my column “The Democrats elected a joke and now the world is laughing. But the joke is now on them” I wrote:

Everyone is now laughing at the Biden administration. Biden and his handlers (he has handlers because he is incompetent) are the laughing stock of the whole world.

What is even sadder is that his policies and political positions are now harming working class Americans. Consumer confidence has now reached a 22 year low. It has not been this low since the DotCom implosion under Bill Clinton.

From Biden’s broken national security policies, to his disaster in Afghanistan, to the ongoing border crisis (the border patrol estimated that illegal aliens will top a million for the month of September), to a dangerous immigration policy, to the Democrat controlled Congress’ bills that raise taxes, increase spending and turn one group against another have many Americans of all races crying.

Biden is now openly anti-American in everything that he, and his administration, does. Americans are today paying over $1.00 more per gallon of gasoline at the pump. Oil prices reached $80 per barrel, double the price under Trump prior to the virus from China. And Biden is just getting started on implementing draconian energy policies to “save the planet” from climate change. Go figure!

Here’s striking example of yet another a demented Democrat policy in California: 

Biden’s Mandates

Today the Biden administration’s operative word is “mandate.” Biden is forcing Americans to get Vaxxed. But what about those who get vaxxed and either, get sick, have long term health issues, get Covid and die. Here’s just one example of a pro-vaxx professor in Florida who died after getting her third (booster) shot:

Mandates are not leadership. Mandates are unconstitutional. Mandates are not the law.

Biden wants to mandate Covid vaxxing for every American citizen but will not test illegal aliens for Covid who are surging crossing our Southern border.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll, sponsored by The ANTIFA by Jack Posobiec, for Tuesday shows that 41% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Biden’s job performance. Fifty-eight percent (58%) disapprove. The latest figures include 21% who Strongly Approve of the job Biden is doing and 49% who Strongly Disapprove.

This gives him a Presidential Approval Index rating of -28. (see trends)

Conclusion

Political satire has now become public policy under Biden. But is anyone laughing? We think not. People are waking up and we are seeing civil disobedience protests against Biden and his policies growing, not just in the U.S. but globally.

Biden is just another in a long line of tax and spend big government socialists. From FDR to Carter to Clinton to Obama. They’re all birds of a feather who flock together to tax the rich and every single working American to death. Some have even characterized the Biden administration as Obama 2.0!

Gird your loins. Pray! Our only hope is to retake one or both houses of Congress in 2022.

We have made it a point to contest the uncontested absurdities we see. That is what I, as a citizen journalist, do each and every day. Sadly these absurdities have turned into legislation either pending or passed by the Democrats in Congress and pushed by the Biden administration.

The Biden administration will not be over until 2024. A ray of hope is if conservatives, note I didn’t say Republicans, take back a majority in the House of Representatives and Senate.

Be prepared. It will get worse. We hope and pray that one day we will reestablish our Constitutional Republican form of government where the power lies in the hands of the people not government.

It’s now clear that Biden’s Build Back Better agenda is causing crimes to be committed against humanity both foreign and domestic.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

RELATED VIDEO: Biden’s flailing agenda, a defeat of his own making.

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The Target Generation – Prologue to Tyranny.

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“America will never be destroyed from the outside.  If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” – Abraham Lincoln.

I received an emailed flyer, an announcement from an educator, its opening sentence an inquiry asking if we were aware of our biases, attitudes and stereotypes. It reminded me of that unanswerable question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Both a “yes” and a “no” condemn.

This was an outreach to a course that would introduce us to Critical Race Theory (CRT), an anti-American and anti-white/Christian movement that is making great strides through our schools (K-12 plus higher education), our media, news sources, and armed services.  CRT is a Marxist discipline that, by identifying biases and prejudices, regardless of whether they actually exist, sows the seeds of hatred and division, capturing and training the minds of many to fixate on the meaningless and disengage from what truly matters – a good education to navigate and live well in the world.  With only so many hours in the day, the old lessons are being laid aside to allow for the divisiveness to flourish, teaching that there are only two kinds of people, victims and victimizers, oppressed and oppressors, the downtrodden people of color and the exalted, advantaged whites. There are no winners in this dogma; that’s not the intent.

An associate professor of psychology at a Florida college will be leading the class described as a workshop about Implicit Bias (IB), an unconscious bias toward an individual or group based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity.  The workshop will attempt to define Implicit Bias; examine its origins; review its effect in education, justice, and management systems; and offer additional resources for studying and evaluating personal Implicit Bias.  The monster is conjured out of thin air and the professors will help us slay it – for a fee and political motive.

Prior to the introduction of these ideas, people of all ages befriended each other because of common interests and circumstances, which is verifiable by the ever-increasing number of intermarriages and the variety of ethnicities in the workplace and neighborhoods.  But these superficial differences must now be taught in order to denigrate and demolish the past and make way for a new society of compliant drones.

Left to our own, we naturally form opinions over the years because of our experiences and influences, not unreasonably.  As we grow and live, we are expected to face options and make decisions – our selection of activities, friends, reading material, schools, careers and jobs, marriage partners, homes, stores we patronize and items we purchase – everything!  That doesn’t mean our opinions are set in stone, as each new contact or experience may affect a previous view, but it is expected that by the time anyone reaches adulthood, (s)he should have amassed an immeasurable number of ideas about almost everything.  Sacha Guitrey is credited for saying “Wisdom comes from experience, and our experiences come from our foolishness.”

But this class purports to be superior to a mere conveyance for wisdom. It is, ominously, a means of manipulating ideas and behaviors, teaching that one’s encounters and ideas must not be accepted carte blanche, that we must disregard our senses and allow others to control the narrative for the greater good.  The so-called “noble purpose” is always wielded to gain control.

This insidious theory eradicates our G-d-given free will and aims to turn us into mindless, malleable, and obedient subjects of the powerful elite. If we cannot validate our own opinions, then what have we learned at all?  Should we live day by day and remain incapable of assessing anything?  Should we be so fearful of opining that conversation is discouraged?  And if we think and act alike, would we not have sameness instead of diversity, boredom instead of variety, stagnation instead of the individual’s growth and the satisfaction that comes through talent and achievement?  But in the world of CRT, talent and achievement must be neutralized for the sake of uniformity and in the dubious interest of equity – equality of outcome.  Call it what they will, this would result in the dominion of tyranny.

Surely, we must learn to judge whether something or someone is good or evil, right or wrong, fair or unjust, so that we might live in harmony with our fellow man.  If we are wrong to judge, then we are as mindless as the lowly amoeba.  God meant us to use our free will and to think, consider the options, and decide our own paths.  We are meant to weigh what to do under various circumstances, including to run from danger, but also to help others in need.  The Commandments caution to not bear false witness, but in order to protect others and contribute to a moral society, we must certainly bear witness.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., advised that we shall judge people by the content of their character.  Today’s Woke authoritarians judge by the color of one’s skin – a superficiality that accords with the selective extermination program of Hitler’s imperialists.

The course invitation has a negative overtone, using “bias” instead of “opinion”  to put us on the defensive and shut us down. This results in our backing off lest we utter something that will be criticized, just as the Woke politicos have curbed our thoughts, redefined much in our vocabulary, and limited the interchange of ideas on the Internet.  The purpose is to make people feel vulnerable and defensive, choosing to retreat and comply for acceptance,  With all the fearmongering surrounding the covid virus, wearing masks that shroud our expressions, the nearly-mandatory injections while suppressing medicines proven effective, threats of job loss and isolation, there come more control and the surrender of freedom in the name of security.

I admit to not having the lesson plan, but CRT is based on introducing ways of making people ashamed of what they are, thereby allowing themselves to be intimidated and controlled.

There are many ways of achieving control. Islam does so by keeping its people suppressed and ignorant; Nazism did so by exalting a certain group to the level of ubermenschen/supermen. The ultimate cost to both groups is the loss of humanity.

In America, the first among nations to legalize freedom and equality for all, we have a group of progressives, Marxists, that is working diligently to dominate our society.  The Boards of Education have changed the history books to discredit America and erase the ideals we set for ourselves.  The learning process has been so destroyed that we have finally reached a point where Oregon’s Governor Kate Brown signed into law that students may graduate without proof that they can read, write, or do math.  Students across America are being prepared for nothing but submission to the state for menial, mindless labor and communist social-justice issues.

With the dwindling threat of climate change, since alarming deadlines passed with no discernible disaster, the biases of personal characteristics are always the go-to guarantor of success.  Skin color and religion are the indictments as current today as they’ve been in the past, the attributes that the undereducated respond to most readily.  Presented in every class, all day long, the children are submerged in their differences, what demeans and makes groups vulnerable, each in its own way. The pupils of color are taught that they are worthless victims of the whites, and the whites are taught that they are innately evil and the cause of all wrongdoings.  Everyone is deemed without value and burdened with anxiety about what it takes to undo their inferiority and liability.  Having already been deprived of God and prayers, of the cohesive family, their heritage, their genders, their desires and ability to produce the next generation, they become willing to self-annihilate, if not yet literally, then figuratively to be the last of their lineage.

If they’ve dropped climate change, they discuss over-population, with Bill Gates’s assurance that he hopes to depopulate the world and has the means to do it.

Fears abound: the dangers of food scarcity, while stipulating that we should not be eating beef and its dairy products, chicken and fish. There’s always vegetarianism, except that Gates and China have purchased enormous acreage of agricultural land.  Gates says we will eat engineered meat from insects, or the migrants who come by the tens of thousands – shades of Soylent Green.

The elite have found their niche, and they’re playing it for all its worth. The young are the Target Generation.

©Tabitha Korol. All rights reserved.

CLICK HERE: For more columns on Critical Race Theory.

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The Moral Problem With Most Gun Free Zones

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By taking away our means of self-defense and refusing to provide a suitable substitute, gun-free zones violate our right to life.

Let’s start with a thought experiment. Suppose I push you into deep water as part of a swimming lesson. Because you do not know how to swim, you start desperately trying to keep yourself afloat, but to no avail. Now suppose further that I do nothing to rescue you, and as a result, you drown. My actions in this scenario are tantamount to murder. I intentionally placed you in a situation of great vulnerability and then refused to provide for you. Your rights were egregiously violated by my refusal to do anything.

The moral principle behind this thought experiment is the following: if I knowingly cause you to exist in a state of great need or vulnerability, then I am responsible for providing for you. If I do not, then I am negligent. If my negligence leads to your death, then I am guilty of murder.

This principle is enshrined in the legal system as part of the state-created danger doctrine. If the government does something that puts someone into a position of danger, it bears a special responsibility to provide for that individual’s safety. If it fails to do this, then it may be held liable for any harms that result.

This principle has direct relevance for so-called “gun-free zones.” These are locations in which the government has declared, using the threat of punishment to force compliance, that carrying firearms is prohibited. In coercively requiring us to disarm, the government intentionally handicaps our ability to effectively and reasonably protect ourselves.

It has, in other words, put us in a position of increased vulnerability with respect to our self-protection. If it does nothing to make up for the deficit in protection that it has created, then the government has violated our right to self-protection. If someone is harmed or killed as a result, then the government is guilty of a violation of said person’s right to life.

There is a large body of evidence showing that guns are very effective at producing successful outcomes when used in self-defense. Because of this, there is a strong moral presumption in favor of allowing individuals to carry guns in public. After all, our right to life follows us wherever we go, and so the right to defend our lives must also accompany us. If the government is to override this presumption and tell us that we can’t carry our guns into a specific location, then it must assume the special responsibility of making up for the deficit in self-protection that it has created. It must, in other words, provide some alternative that serves the same function that my gun would have served had I been allowed to carry it.

This deficit is sometimes met, such as in airports, courthouses, and prisons. However, the vast majority of gun-free zones are places in which the government clearly does not meet its special obligation of providing its citizens with a heightened standard of protection. The presence of an ordinary police force is not enough, as police responses almost always come after a crime has taken place.

When Seconds Matter, the Police Are Minutes Away

Indeed, according to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, only 47.3 percent of all personal crimes in 2008 were even reported to police. Of these crimes, only 28 percent of police responses came within five minutes of reporting, 30.3 percent within six to ten minutes, and 33.5 percent within eleven minutes to one hour of reporting.

Some might object to this by arguing that one’s chance of criminal victimization is so rare that the government does nothing wrong by refusing to provide a heightened standard of protection. This objection misses the point entirely. The very reason one carries a gun is precisely for those rare situations in which it becomes necessary.

Our right to defend ourselves isn’t a function of the risk of our being victimized. Rights are grounded in the dignity of the individual, not statistical averages. Self-defense is a liberty that I have by virtue of being a human being. I don’t lose that right just because the circumstances in which I will need to use it are statistically rare. Otherwise, this same argument could be used to rule out any kind of self-defense.

Another objection is that the same could be said of rocket launchers, machine guns, missiles, and nuclear weapons. In restricting these weapons, one might argue, the government “handicaps” our ability to defend ourselves. But it would be absurd to say that it violates our rights. So why are guns an exception? This objection fails for a simple reason: the use of rocket launchers, machine guns, missiles, and nuclear weapons are not proportionate methods for an individual to defend himself against threats that he may reasonably expect to encounter. Handguns and “assault” rifles are.

So where does this leave us? I’ve argued that most gun-free zones violate our right to self-defense. This is because the government clearly doesn’t meet its heightened obligation of providing for our protection in these areas. If this is correct, then we should be allowed to carry guns into most public places.

COLUMN BY

Tim Hsiao

Tim Hsiao is Instructor of Philosophy and Humanities at Grantham University and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Johnson County Community College and Park University. He is also a firearms instructor. His website is timhsiao.org.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Mayorkas: 1-in-5 Border Crossers Arrive to U.S. Sick with Illnesses

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During remarks at Georgetown University this week, open-borders enthusiast and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted that about 1-in-5 border crossers arriving at the United States-Mexico border are sick with various illnesses.

“We are confronted with a population of people that, as a general matter, that have a rate of illness of approximately 20 percent,” Mayorkas said. “When one is speaking of 7,000 or 7,500 people encountered at the border every day, if one takes a look at that the system, it is not built for that in a COVID environment where isolation is required.”

You know what a good solution for that would be? Secure the border.

Days later, Mayorkas conceded that DHS did not test roughly 13,000 Haitian border crossers for the coronavirus before releasing them into the interior of the U.S. In early August, top DHS officials admitted in court briefs that federal immigration officials were seeing “significantly increased rates” of border crossers arriving in the U.S. while carrying coronavirus.

In addition, CDC officials confirmed this month that Afghans brought to the U.S. by the Biden administration have spurred outbreaks of measles, varicella, mumps, tuberculosis, malaria, leishmaniasis, hepatitis A, and coronavirus.

But our children have to stay masked and socially distanced in school.

Alejandro Mayorkas

10 Known Connections

Mayorkas Defends Decision Not to Build Border Wall, Despite the Flood of Illegal Migrants

Between September 9 and 24, 2021, approximately 30,000 mostly Haitian migrants illegally crossed America’s southern border and gathered in Del Rio, Texas, where they hoped to be granted asylum. By September 25, approximately 12,400 of them had been released into the U.S. interior with instructions to report for immigration court hearings sometime in the future, while another 5,000 were being processed by DHS to determine whether they would be sent back to Haiti or permitted to pursue their immigration/asylum cases.

On September 26, 2021, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked Mayorkas: “You say 30,000 people walked across … into Del Rio in the last 17 days. Question: Why didn’t you stop them?” “We encounter them at the border. That’s where we encounter them, Chris,” Mayorkas replied.

Wallace then asked: “Why didn’t you stop them from coming into the country?” “We did,” Mayorkas stated. “We encountered them, they gathered – they assembled in that one location in Del Rio, Texas, and we applied the laws. We applied the public health law under the CDC’s authority, and we applied immigration –”

“My question is why did you allow them in the country in the first place?” Wallace replied. “Why didn’t you build, forgive me, a wall or a fence to stop them from walking – the flood of people coming across the dam, it looks like a highway that allows them to cross the Rio Grande.” “It is the policy of this administration, we do not agree with the building of the wall,” Mayorkas insisted, explaining that permitting individuals to seek humanitarian relief was “one of our proudest traditions.”

To learn more about Alejandro Mayorkas, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

YouTube Banning Prominent Anti-Vaccine Mandate Activists and Blocking All Vaccine Critical Content

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Totalitarianism on the left is spreading quicker than any COVID variant. What’s more frightening? The Democrats? Or American apathy?

YouTube is banning prominent anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

By: Gerrit De Vynck, MSN, September 28, 2021:

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SAN FRANCISCO — YouTube is taking down several video channels associated with high-profile anti-vaccine activists including Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who experts say are partially responsible for helping seed the skepticism that’s contributed to slowing vaccination rates across the country.

As part of a new set of policies aimed at cutting down on anti-vaccine content on the Google-owned site, YouTube will ban any videos that claim that commonly used vaccines approved by health authorities are ineffective or dangerous. The company previously blocked videos that made those claims about coronavirus vaccines, but not ones for other vaccines like those for measles or chickenpox.

Misinformation researchers have for years said the popularity of anti-vaccine content on YouTube was contributing to growing skepticism of lifesaving vaccines in the United States and around the world. Vaccination rates have slowed and about 56 percent of the U.S. population has had two shots, compared with 71 percent in Canada and 67 percent in the United Kingdom. In July, President Biden said social media companies were partially responsible for spreading misinformation about the vaccines, and need to do more to address the issue.
Analysis: ‘YouTube magic dust’: How America’s second-largest social platform ducks controversies

The change marks a shift for the social media giant, which streams more than 1 billion hours’ worth of content every day. Like its peers Facebook and Twitter, the company has long resisted policing content too heavily, arguing maintaining an open platform is critical to free speech. But as the companies increasingly come under fire from regulators, lawmakers and regular users for contributing to social ills — including vaccine skepticism — YouTube is again changing policies that it has held onto for months.

“You create this breeding ground and when you deplatform it doesn’t go away, they just migrate,” said Hany Farid, a computer science professor and misinformation researcher at the University of California at Berkeley. “This is not one that should have been complicated. We had 18 months to think about these issues, we knew the vaccine was coming, why was this not the policy from the very beginning?”

YouTube didn’t act sooner because it was focusing on misinformation specifically about coronavirus vaccines, said Matt Halprin, YouTube’s vice president of global trust and safety. When it noticed that incorrect claims about other vaccines were contributing to fears about the coronavirus vaccines, it expanded the ban.

“Developing robust policies takes time,” Halprin said. “We wanted to launch a policy that is comprehensive, enforceable with consistency and adequately addresses the challenge.”
Facebook and YouTube spent a year fighting covid misinformation. It’s still spreading.

Mercola, an alternative medicine entrepreneur, and Kennedy, a lawyer and the son of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy who has been a face of the anti-vaccine movement for years, have both said in the past that they are not automatically against all vaccines, but believe information about the risks of vaccines is being suppressed.

Facebook banned misinformation on all vaccines seven months ago, though the pages of both Mercola and Kennedy remain up on the social media site. Their Twitter accounts are active, too.

In an email, Mercola said he was being censored and said, without presenting evidence, that vaccines had killed many people. Kennedy also said he was being censored. “There is no instance in history when censorship and secrecy has advanced either democracy or public health,” he said in an email.

More than a third of the world’s population has been vaccinated and the vaccines have been proven to be overwhelmingly safe.

YouTube, Facebook and Twitter all banned misinformation about the coronavirus early on in the pandemic. But false claims continue to run rampant across all three of the platforms. The social networks are also tightly connected, with YouTube often serving as a library of videos that go viral on Twitter or Facebook.

That dynamic is often overlooked in discussions about coronavirus misinformation, said Lisa Fazio, an associate professor at Vanderbilt college who studies misinformation.

“YouTube is the vector for a lot of this misinformation. If you see misinformation on Facebook or other places, a lot of the time it’s YouTube videos. Our conversation often doesn’t include YouTube when it should,” Fazio said.

The social media companies have hired thousands of moderators and used high-tech image- and text-recognition algorithms to try to police misinformation. YouTube has removed over 133,000 videos for broadcasting coronavirus misinformation, Halprin said.

There are also millions of people with legitimate concerns about the medical system, and social media is a place where they go to ask real questions and express their concerns and fears, something the companies don’t want to squelch.
A major founder of the anti-vaccine movement has made millions selling natural health products

In the past, the company’s leaders have focused on trying to remove what they call “borderline” videos from its recommendation algorithms, allowing people to find them with specific searches but not necessarily promoting them into new people’s feeds. It’s also worked to push more authoritative health videos, like those made by hospitals and medical schools, to the top of search results for health-care topics.

But those methods haven’t stopped the spread of anti-vaccine and coronavirus misinformation. More than a year after YouTube said it would take down misinformation about the coronavirus vaccines, the accounts of six out of 12 anti-vaccine activists — identified by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate as being behind much of the anti-vaccine content shared on social media — were easily searchable and still posting videos. Wednesday’s policy change means many of those will now be taken down.

Once communities grow and build bonds on mainstream platforms like Facebook and YouTube, they often survive even if they get kicked off those sites, said Farid. Influential figures that get banned on YouTube can slide to another service like Telegram or Gab which have fewer restrictions on content, and ask their followers to come with them.

“These conspiracy theories don’t just go away when they stop being on YouTube,” Farid said. “You’ve created the community, you’ve created the poison, and then they just move onto some other platform.”

The anti-vaccine movement goes back to well before the pandemic. False scientific claims that childhood vaccines caused autism made in the late 1990s have contributed to rising numbers of people refusing to let their kids get shots that had been commonplace for decades. As social media took over more of the media landscape, anti-vaccine activists spread their messages on Facebook parenting groups and through YouTube videos.
How wellness influencers are fueling the anti-vaccine movement

When the pandemic hit, and vaccines became a topic that was suddenly relevant to everyone, not just parents of young children, many went looking for answers online. Influencers like Mercola, Kennedy and alternative health advocate Erin Elizabeth Finn were able to supercharge their followings. Some anti-vaccine influencers, including Mercola, also sell natural health products, giving them a financial incentive to promote skepticism of mainstream medicine.

The anti-vaccine movement now also incorporates groups as diverse as conspiracy theorists who believe former president Donald Trump is still the rightful president, and some wellness influencers who see the vaccines as unnatural substances that will poison human bodies. All of the government-approved coronavirus vaccines have gone through rigorous testing and have been scientifically proved to be highly effective and safe.

The company is also expanding its work to bring more videos from official sources onto the platform, like the National Academy of Medicine and the Cleveland Clinic, said Garth Graham, YouTube’s global head of health care and public health partnerships. The goal is to get videos with scientific information in front of people before they go down the rabbit hole of anti-vaccine content.

“There is information, not from us, but information from other researchers on health misinformation that has shown the earlier you can get information in front of someone before they form opinions, the better,” Graham said.

Getting authoritative information in front of people early can help, but fact-based videos often have trouble competing for people’s attention with ones spouting misinformation, Fazio said. “If you’re going to make up something you can make it as compelling as you want.”

YouTube’s new policy will still allow people to make claims based on their own personal experience, like a mother talking about side effects her child experienced after getting a vaccine, Halprin said. Scientific discussion of vaccines and posting about vaccines’ historical failures or successes will also be allowed, he said.
Nicki Minaj tweets coronavirus vaccine conspiracy theory, spotlighting struggle against misinformation

“We’ll remove claims that vaccines are dangerous or cause a lot of health effects, that vaccines cause autism, cancer, infertility or contain microchips,” Halprin said. “At least hundreds” of moderators at YouTube are working specifically on medical misinformation, he added. The policy will be enforced in all of the dozens of languages that YouTube operates in.

Still, there are dozens of past examples of videos going viral even if they explicitly break the company’s rules. Sometimes YouTube only catches them after they’ve been flagged by reporters or regular viewers, and have already racked up thousands or millions of views.

“Like always, the devil’s in the details. How well will they actually do at pulling down these videos?” Fazio said. “But I do think it’s a step in the right direction.”

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Manchin Trashes Democratic Spending Bill: ‘Fiscal insanity’

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The bill is a death sentence for this country. A no vote is the only rational option. Anyone who votes for this devastating attack on the American economy.

Sen. Joe Manchin said there is not enough time to produce the legislative framework for a massive spending bill that House Democrats are demanding in exchange for supporting a critical infrastructure bill on Thursday. “No, it’s not possible,” Manchin told reporters as he walked from the Senate chamber back to his office building.

Manchin trashes Democratic spending bill: ‘Fiscal insanity’

By: Susan Ferrechio, Chief Congressional Correspondent |Washington Examiner | September 29, 2021:

Sen. Joe Manchin, a key centrist Democrat whose approval is required to pass the party’s massive social welfare spending package, firmly rejected the proposal on Wednesday, criticizing the $3.5 trillion cost and the vast new entitlements it would provide.

Manchin issued a scathing statement about the massive spending package, criticizing the cost, tax increases, and social welfare programs that “spend for the sake of spending.”

The West Virginia Democrat’s thorough rejection of the measure follows days of talks with President Joe Biden and top Democrats, who had hoped to strike an accord with Manchin ahead of a House vote on the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package.

“What I have made clear to the President and Democratic leaders is that spending trillions more on new and expanded government programs, when we can’t even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, is the definition of fiscal insanity,” Manchin said in a statement Wednesday.

His rejection of the package likely jeopardizes the passage of the infrastructure bill on Thursday. House liberals said they plan to block the bill unless House and Senate Democrats agree to a spending level and framework on the social welfare spending bill. The Senate deal hinges on a few key moderates, including Manchin.

But Manchin signaled he’s in no hurry to help negotiate a deal by Thursday.

“In August, I recommended we take a strategic pause to provide time to develop the right policies and to continue to monitor how the pandemic and economic factors are affecting our nation’s fiscal situation before we spend more,” Manchin said.

In addition to opposing the staggering cost of the legislation, Manchin wants changes to tax hikes Democrats plan to impose to pay for the bill, which he said would weaken the nation’s economic competitiveness and would hurt small businesses.

“Overall, the amount we spend now must be balanced with what we need and can afford — not designed to reengineer the social and economic fabric of this nation or vengefully tax for the sake of wishful spending,” Manchin said.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer planned to huddle with Biden Wednesday to plot what to do next.

Earlier Wednesday, Pelosi would not promise a vote on the infrastructure bill on Thursday, blaming Senate Democrats for failing to strike a deal with Manchin.

“I can’t keep a commitment that the Senate has made impossible to do,” Pelosi said.

After Manchin’s statement made the rounds on Capitol Hill, liberal Democrats were more confident than ever they would block the infrastructure bill if Pelosi brings it up for a vote.

Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal said Manchin’s statement “has created a bunch more votes on the House floor,” against the infrastructure bill.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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The Gabby Petito case has been exploited by the media. We need to stop treating human tragedy as entertainment

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The murder of 22-year-old American Gabby Petito, and disappearance of her fiance, 23-year-old Brian Laundrie, have sparked worldwide interest and speculation.

Podcasts have been made covering the case, news outlets worldwide are giving daily updates — it would seem the public’s incessant consumption of true crime is feeding a market need for new material at an increasingly ravenous pace. As of yesterday a Google search of Petito’s name returned over 41,000,000 hits, and between TikTok and Twitter, there are now well over a billion posts with her name as a hashtag.

In June 2021, the couple embarked on a road trip across the US, sharing their trip on social media with her growing fan base. Although the couple were travelling together, on the first of September, Laundrie arrived at his parents’ home in Florida, alone, in their white van. On the 19th of September, Petito’s remains were found, and police have ruled her death as a homicide. An arrest warrant has since been issued for Laundrie, but his whereabouts remain unknown.

In essence, Petito’s life, and death, have been co-opted by the media and public as a form of entertainment. It would seem that the proliferation of true crime — and the constant need to feed that monster, have desensitised many to the human stories behind the deadlines.

But what effect does this have on those intimately caught up in these events, and why do some cases become of such significant public interest, while the families of other victims struggle to raise awareness of their own loved ones’ cases?

Media narratives

There are a number of factors at play here. The first is that there are all the elements present to allow media outlets to create a strong narrative around Petito’s disappearance and death; the endless images and videos she posted to social media of her road trip, the drama of her previous interaction with the police — captured on body camera and showing a very distressed young woman obviously in crisis — the building of the tension with her disappearance, which also acted as a cliffhanger, before the tragic news of her death.

In essence, all of the elements of a popular true crime narrative, with all the mystery, hooks, and tropes of recent shows and podcasts such as Casefile, Bowraville, and Serial.

But this is not a TV show or a movie. This was a young woman’s life, and death, which has now become media fodder, with her final days being treated as entertainment. Theories as to what happened are running rife, current affairs programs are pumping out hastily produced pieces with experts picking apart what we know, and what they predict may have happened.

The media benefit, as it provides high traffic content for the 24-hour news cycle, and clickbait for online stories.

And some individuals are also capitalising on Petito’s case to gain attention. For example one woman co-opted Petito’s murder as her personal brand, posting 70 videos on TikTok in 6 days, rocketing her following from 170,000 people to over 650,000, with many other TikTok users capitalising on the same trend.

Others have created Instagram and Twitter accounts in Petito’s name, in what could be seen as an opportunistic and narcissistic attempt to gain followers.

‘Missing white woman syndrome’

Since Petito’s case went “viral”, a lot of people have pointed out the media’s complicity in creating another case of “missing white woman syndrome”.

Missing white woman syndrome highlights the notion of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims — those who are considered valuable front-page news, and those who aren’t. This refers to the overabundance of coverage of cases of missing white women, and the lack of coverage of people of colour and men.

The argument is not that white women deserve less attention, just that others deserve the same level of interest. This disparity in media coverage has led to calls from Indigenous people, both in the US and Australia, for change.

Consider the case of 20-year-old Ashley Loring Heavyrunner, an Indigenous woman who disappeared in Montana in 2017, whose story was barely given a fraction of the coverage that Petito received by the media. But her story is sadly reflected across Native American communities where there is an epidemic of missing people.

The lack of reporting around Indigenous people’s disappearances highlights the media’s disinterest in helping to raise awareness of missing persons more generally, and that the purpose of news stories is to create a sensationalised narrative for public consumption.

Criminal case as fair media game

My concern, from a criminologist’s perspective, is what happens if this case goes to court, if someone is tried for her murder? Will this saturation of speculation have an impact on the judicial process?

Perhaps we all need to look at how we respond to victims of violent crimes. We can all make a change to the narrative and don’t have to buy into the media feeding frenzy.

This is an important discussion — these women and their lives are not ours to co-opt, to voyeuristically dissect. They are not a form of entertainment.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

COLUMN BY

Xanthe Mallett

Dr Xanthé Mallett is a forensic criminologist (University of Newcastle, Australia), author, television presenter, and social commentator. Xanthé specialises in re-investigating cold cases, often through… More by Xanthe Mallett

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Covid-19 Is Not a “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated”

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On Friday, September 17, the CDC published a study that refutes the common claim that Covid-19 is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Coauthored by more than 50 MD’s and Ph.D.’s, the study contains data on the vaccine status of adults hospitalized with Covid-19 at 21 U.S. hospitals across 18 states during March to August of 2021.

Contrary to assertions from the Associated Press and Anthony Fauci that fully vaccinated people comprise only 1% of those being hospitalized or killed by C-19, the study found that 13% of patients hospitalized with C-19 had been fully vaccinated. Moreover, that 13% figure is just the tip of iceberg because the authors excluded from their study a large group of hospitalized C-19 patients, the bulk of whom were likely vaccinated.

About half of the omitted group and 27% of the C-19 patients in these hospitals were people with “immunocompromising conditions,” such as cancer, HIV, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, scleroderma, and Crohn’s disease. In the words of an FDA official and 18 other coauthors published in a medical journal, “immunocompromised individuals” were “prioritized for early immunization” and are “plausibly more likely to be offered and seek vaccination” because they are highly vulnerable to C-19.

On September 21, Just Facts asked Dr. Wesley Self, the lead author of the study, to release the data on the vaccination status of the C-19 patients with immunocompromising conditions. He has not replied.

The authors of the CDC study also excluded another 25% of all people hospitalized with C-19 because they were partially vaccinated, “received a Covid-19 vaccine other than Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, or Janssen [J&J],” or “received doses of two different Covid-19 vaccine products.”

Accounting for all of the C-19 patients in these hospitals, including those the authors excluded, a majority may have been fully or partially vaccinated against Covid.

Filling the gap left by vagueness of the CDC’s study, a precise measure of the vaccine status of people who died from the Covid-19 Delta variant is available from the United Kingdom, where the government keeps detailed healthcare records on nearly all citizens. Relevantly, the U.S. and UK have very similar C-19 death rates and had roughly equivalent vaccination rates over the period of the CDC study.

In the UK from February through August 2021, 62% of all Covid-19 Delta variant deaths were among the fully vaccinated. This amounts to a conclusive majority in a dataset with virtually every death included.

Seeing Through False Statistics

The story behind the talking point that Covid-19 is “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” is a textbook case of how false statistics are born and proliferate. Hence, it provides valuable insights about the dangers of blind trust and how to recognize deceitful rhetoric.

Late in June 2021, the Associated Press published an article titled, “Nearly All COVID Deaths in US Are Now Among Unvaccinated.” Written by Carla K. Johnson and Mike Stobbe, it was republished or cited by more than 100 media outlets and so-called fact checkers like PBS, Snopes, Bloomberg, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, FactCheck.org, Yahoo News, and WebMD.

The article claims the AP conducted an “analysis” that found only 1.1% of all C-19 hospitalizations and 0.8% of C-19 deaths in May were due to “breakthrough infections in fully vaccinated people.” While using those decimal points that convey a false sense of precision, the authors slipped in this craftily worded admission: the AP calculated these rates based on “figures provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” but the CDC has not published such rates due to “limitations in the data.”

Those limitations, in the words of the AP, include the reality that “some” states are “more aggressive than others in looking for such cases.” The word “looking” is a coy way of saying that the states don’t have a comprehensive system to count these deaths, a fact that throws the entire analysis into doubt.

With a subtle nod to that reality, the AP confesses that the “data probably understates” the number of vaccinated people who died from Covid-19. Compare that softly worded disclosure to the CDC’s explicit warning that its data on breakthrough infections “relies on passive and voluntary reporting, and data might not be complete or representative.” On August 25, the CDC strengthened that language to make clear that the “data are not complete or representative.”

Put simply, the AP’s statistics are meaningless because they are based on materially incomplete data. That was evident from the outset from a close look at the AP’s methodology, and it is now undeniable given the CDC study and UK data detailed above. Again, these indicate that fully vaccinated people comprise about 50% of all Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths, not 1% as reported by the AP.

Nevertheless, Fauci appeared on the July 4th edition of NBC’s Meet the Press with Chuck Todd and parroted the AP’s bogus stat without mentioning any of its caveats. “If you look at the number of deaths,” declared Fauci, “about 99.2% of them are unvaccinated. About 0.8% are vaccinated. No vaccine is perfect. But when you talk about the avoidability of hospitalization and death, Chuck, it’s really sad and tragic that most all of these are avoidable and preventable.”

As Fauci uttered this misinformation, Todd, the political director of NBC News, never expressed a hint of skepticism. Acting like a mouthpiece instead of a journalist, Todd ended the segment by praising Fauci for “focusing” on his job and this “massive success story when it comes to vaccines and what this government-led effort did.”

Instead of correcting the AP and Fauci for misrepresenting CDC data, the director of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, amplified it. During a July 16th White House press conference with Fauci by her side, Walensky stated that “over 97 percent of people who are entering the hospital right now are unvaccinated” and that Covid-19 “is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

In turn, media outlets acted as megaphones for Fauci and Walensky without a word of critical analysis. This involved reports from the likes of ABC News, NPR, The Hill, CNN, Politico, Rolling Stone, USA Today, The Guardian, and the Washington Post, as well as three separate articles from the New York Times.

The Times later conducted its own analysis using the same ruse as the AP, reporting that fully vaccinated people were only 0.1% to 5% of Covid-19 hospitalizations across 40 states since vaccinations began. Buried near the end of the story, the Times revealed that it calculated these rates by lumping C-19 patients “with unknown vaccination status” into the “data for individuals who were not fully vaccinated.”

One week later, the Times began walking back those claims. On August 17, it alleged that reports from seven states with “the most detailed data” indicate that “breakthrough infections accounted for 12 percent to 24 percent of Covid-related hospitalizations.”

Despite those larger figures—which are still far removed from reality—the Times did not correct any of its earlier articles touting figures of 1% to 3% accompanied by quotes like this:

“The takeaway message remains, if you’re vaccinated, you are protected,” said Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York. “You are not going to end up with severe disease, hospitalization or death.”

Implications

The most glaring lesson from this affair is that people entrusted to protect and inform the public are untrustworthy. Government officials with prestigious credentials and prominent media outlets repeatedly misreported the facts of this simple matter with life-or-death consequences. Thus, it is crucial to learn and apply proven methods to sort out the claims that surround important issues.

Secondly, Covid-19 still poses a considerable risk to some fully vaccinated people because a vaccine is only as good as each person’s immune system. Vaccines don’t directly attack virulent microbes in the same manner as antibiotics or anti-viral medicines. Instead, vaccines trigger people’s immune systems to react more quickly than usual and kill pathogens before they can do harm. If a person’s immune system is compromised by factors like poor general health, old age, obesity, immunosuppressing drugs, or lack of sleep, a vaccine will be less effective or ineffective.

Also, the currently available C-19 vaccines create an immune response to only one part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (the “Spike” protein). This produces narrower immunity than exposure to the actual virus. In accord with this fact, a study in Israel that has not yet undergone peer review has found that the Pfizer vaccine is much less effective in protecting against the Delta variant than naturally acquired immunity.

Third, none of the above means that C-19 vaccines are ineffective. Randomized controlled trials, which are the gold standard for determining clinical efficacy, have found that the C-19 vaccines significantly reduce the odds of having a bout of severe Covid-19. The Pfizer vaccine, for example, reduced the odds of severe C-19 by 71% to 100% for people who were not immunocompromised over a period of six months. Whether or not this protection lasts and if the benefits exceed the harms will be the subjects of upcoming articles.

*****

This article was published on September 27, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from Just Facts Daily.

Parents, Get the Hell Out of My Way!

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“Your children aren’t yours!”

Today’s blog may have information you already have or heard but I am sure that there is more in it that will either amaze you but should rightfully anger you all. Any American that thinks anything enclosed in this blog is acceptable is truly an enemy of the state and in my mind a domestic terrorist. Plus they are obviously more mentally challenged than our usurper village idiot President.

As always I ask you to share this blog and especially to any one you know that voted for Sniffer Joe.

There are a lot of links in the blog, all of which are worth looking at as most are evidence to the statements made and you can use that information when talking to a libtard! In addition I have added a second part to this from a lady in Texas that you may want to read!! It shows what can be achieved by sheer persistence and dogged action. Stuff we all should be doing.

Part I: Parents, Get the Hell Out of My Way!

Hi all,

The vengefulness of the authoritarian Left was on full display at the gubernatorial debate last night in Virginia. Democrat candidate and former Governor Terry McAuliffe actually said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” He elaborated, “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions.” So if the school wants to shove pornographic novels and Marxist critical race theorydown kids’ throats, that’s perfectly OK with Terry McAuliffe and his authoritarian chums.

I guess that means if teachers want to fly the Antifa flag in their classrooms, have kids pledge allegiance to the rainbow flag, and recite Aztec prayers, it’s all good and parents should have nothing to say about it.  Heaven forbid, parents should make their own decisions about what’s best for their children or try to protect them from corrosive influences.  We can’t have that, if we’re going to succeed in turning kids into good little Leftist robots unable to think for themselves and totally dependent on government.  If you object to this, the authoritarian Left will sic the teachers unions on you, do research on you, and put you on an enemies list.  If you get candidates elected to your local PTA that oppose the craziness, the authoritarian Left will get the state PTA to swoop in and disband you.

McAuliffe’s comment puts it all out on the table, doesn’t it?  To the authoritarian Left, your children are state property and you have no parental rights.  And don’t try to argue parents fund the public schools through their tax dollars and should have some say in how those dollars are spent.  To the authoritarian Left, not only are your children not your children, your money is not your money.  Your money belongs to the authoritarian Left.  If you like this line of thinking, I hope you’re ready for what’s coming next – regular visits from government child welfare agents who will rummage through your house and your life and determine whether you are doing a good enough job raising your children to be allowed to keep them.   Sound far-fetched?  It’s already underway in Scotland where the authoritarian Left is in control.

Let’s see how else the authoritarian Left is torturing people lately, in their quest for absolute power.  The Biden administration issued a mandate forcing doctors to perform transgender surgery against their conscience.  Another Biden rule forces doctors to perform abortions against their will.  A med student in Kentucky got kicked out of his school for opposing abortion.  The authoritarian Left wants to deny insurance coverage to people who won’t get the COVID vaccine.  Colorado is forcing a website designer to create websites carrying messages about marriage that violate her religious beliefs.  This is called compelled speech and it’s unconstitutional.  City officials in California conspired with left-wing agitators to deny venues to members of Congress who wanted to hold rallies, showing another way the authoritarian Left has become the enemy of free speech.  Here’s a third way: a New York Times reporter said Trump supporters should be labeled“ enemies of the state” and handled as “national security threats”.  A U.S. soldier talked about shooting American citizens if they disobey orders under martial law.

These people are sick and getting sicker.  Psychologists are finally waking up to the pathology of the authoritarian Left.  A recent study found that authoritarians on the Left are no different than authoritarians of other stripes when it comes to their “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”

So here’s my question for all you every day Democrats out there:  Why would you support these crazies?  Why would you support a tiny group of people who are trying to take over absolutely everything and tell everybody what to do?  Why would you do anything that grows the authoritarian Left’s megalomaniacal desires for power when you know they will come for you first?   If you grow the government, you shrink the citizen and you mushy middle Democrats will not be spared.  The authoritarian Left wants your votes, your money, and your support to shrink the citizen until there’s nothing left but total robotic obedience to the whims of a tiny elite.  Think about that the next time you pull out your checkbook to support a Terry McAuliffe who wants a chokehold on your kids, and other authoritarian Progressives in the Democrat Party who are just like him.

Visit The Daily Skirmish

Part II:

Here is a related story from Austin Texas: It takes a combination of parental pressure and pressure from Conservative state representatives to deal with the Leftist agenda in controlling school curricula. Silent No More because Silence is Appeasement.

Received the following info today from a friend and sharing it with our List. – Mike Ramirez

“Because of Senator Campbell and Sen. Hughes’ efforts, the Austin ISD has cancelled its egregious and disgusting sex education for the 2nd year in a row. It was cancelled previously because of COVID and online learning. The district obviously didn’t want parents to witness the actual lessons and discussions their children would have been subjected to.

A6.PW_Human Sexuality and Responsibility K-8 Curriculum Update.docx – Google Docs

Sex ed is now parental opt-in (instead of opt-out). Parents are to be informed, and there is more transparency required. Many of us have worked for this for years.

I know a lot of happy parents in Austin.

Signed – Anne N. (San Antonio, TX)

©Fred Brownbill. All rights reserved.

The Vaccine Death Report by David John Sorensen & Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, M.D.

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Evidence of millions of deaths and serious adverse events resulting from the experimental COVID-19 injections.

The Vaccine Death Report

P U R P O S E

The purpose of this report is to document how all over the world millions of people have died, and hundreds of millions of serious adverse events have occurred, after injections with the experimental mRNA gene therapy. We also reveal the real risk of an unprecedented genocide.

F A C T S

Our aim is to only present solid facts, and stay away from unfounded claims. The data is clear and verifiable. References can be found with all presented information, which is provided as a starting point for further investigation.

C O M P L I C I T Y

The data shows that we are currently witnessing the greatest organized mass murder in the history of our world. The severity of this situation compels us to ask this critical question: will we
rise up to the defense of billions of innocent people? Or will we permit personal profit over justice, and be complicit? Networks of lawyers all over the world are preparing class action lawsuits to prosecute all who are serving this criminal agenda. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are rising up against this criminal operation. To all who have been complicit so far, we say: There is still time to turn and choose the side of truth. Please make the right choice.

W O R L D W I D E

Although this report focuses on the situation in the United States, it also applies to the rest of the world, as the same type of experimental injections with similar death rates – and comparable systems of corruption to hide these numbers – are used worldwide. Therefor we encourage everyone around the world to share this report. May it be a wake up call for all of humanity.

F I N A L  S U M M A R Y 

The data shows that millions may have died already from the covid injections, and hundreds of millions suffer serious side effects. This is just the short term destruction. The real devastation comes after a few years.

There is graphene oxide in the vaccines, which is the perfect conductor for 5G, and also the best substance for brain manipulation. The Chilean president said that 5G will insert thoughts and feelings into everyone. Klaus Schwab says that humanity will be lifted into one and the same consciousness. This reveals an agenda of total mind control.

All this is based on worldwide fraud of inflating covid numbers, relabeling every death as covid, a PCR test that produces false positives, media scare mongering, and government propaganda. The criminal network who is behind all this, has been buying the entire health industry, they direct the World Health Organization, they own all mainstream media, and control most governments. They suppress every treatment for covid, so the world would think a vaccine is the only way out.

Their power lies in the fact that they operate from the shadows, so the public has no clue about their existence. The solution is exposing them. Once enough people in the world – especially law enforcement, medical personnel, school teachers, and local authorities – understand what is going on, they will stop serving this criminal network and join the fight for freedom and the future of humanity.

Although most of the judicial system is corrupt, lawyers need to become brave warriors to present all the evidence for this crime, and start prosecuting all who are complicit. There still remain honest judges, who can turn the tide.

This can become the greatest awakening of all time, if we all rise up, share truth, and unify as one humanity against these criminals.

Click here to read “The Vaccine Death Report.”

©All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: 30 facts you NEED to know: Your Covid Cribsheet

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TANYA DAVIES MP – MANDATORY COVID VACCINES ARE UNLAWFUL, SIDE EFFECTS ARE NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY.

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Smokescreen: What the Marijuana Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know

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From the leading authority on marijuana Kevin A. Sabet—a man who has served as White House advisor on drugs to three different administrations and who NBC News once called “the prodigy of drug politics”—comes the remarkable and shocking exposé about how 21st century pot, today’s new and highly potent form of the drug, is on the rise, spreading rapidly across America by an industry intent on putting rising profits over public health.

Smokescreen: What the Marijuana Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know examines the inside story behind the headlines, containing accounts from Sabet’s time in the Obama administration to stunning revelations from whistleblowers speaking out for the first time. What it finds is how the marijuana industry is running rampant without proper oversight, leaving Americans’ health seriously at risk.

Included are interviews with industry insiders who reveal the hidden dangers of a product they had once worshipped.

Also contained in these pages are insights from a major underground-market dealer who admits that legalization is hastening the growth of the illicit drug trade.

And more to the heart of the issue are the tragic stories of those who have suffered and died as a result of marijuana use, and in many cases, as a result of its mischaracterization. Readers will learn how power brokers worked behind the scenes to market marijuana as a miracle plant in order to help it gain widespread acceptance and to set the stage for the lucrative expansion of recreational pot.

The author of this compelling first-person narrative leading the national fight against the legalization of cannabis through his nonprofit, Smart Approaches to Marijuana (aka SAM) is Kevin Sabet. As a policy advisor to everyone from county health commissioners to Pope Francis, and a frequent public speaker on television, radio and through other media outlets, his analysis is consistently relied upon by those who recognize what’s at stake as marijuana lobbyists downplay the risks of massive commercialization.

A book several years in the making, filled with vivid characters and informed by hundreds of interviews and scores of confidential documents, Sabet’s Smokescreen lays bare the unvarnished truth about marijuana in America.

©Kevin A. Sabet. All rights reserved.

The Constitution Under Fire

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By God’s grace, the American experiment has lasted for 232 years now, since the Constitution went into effect on April 30, 1789. Every political leader that is sworn in agrees to uphold the Constitution.

But now in our day of rampant political correctness, of Marxist revisionism, of “egg shell plaintiffs,” of “safe spaces,” of “hate speech” (which is often just the other guy’s opinion), even the Constitution has recently been labeled as “harmful.” It might offend someone.

Case in point. Recently, Ophelie Jacobson of Campus Reform approached students at the University of Florida to ask them what they think about the Constitution. Their responses, as seen in this video, were mostly negative.

Here were some of their comments on the U.S. Constitution:

  • “Absolutely terrible. Needs to be redone immediately.”
  • “I think it needs a lot more reform for the changes that happened since then.”
  • “I think we just need to update it on like—more equality, equity, stuff like that.”
  • It’s the product of “all old white men.”
  • “It should have been made by a group of diverse people.”
  • “The time period, you know, was rich, old white men; and that’s exactly what that document says and stands for and vouches for.”

No wonder so many of them were willing to sign a petition to abolish the Constitution!

Furthermore, even the keepers of the Constitution in Washington, D.C. have contributed to this negative view. On 9/224/21, The Federalist reported: “Over the summer, the National Archives issued ‘harmful content’ warnings on all its collections of online documents, including Founding-era documents like the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence.”

Why would they do this? The Federalist explains that the warnings “allegedly protect against documents that ‘reflect racist, sexist, ableist, misogynistic/misogynoir, and xenophobic opinions and attitudes; be discriminatory towards or exclude diverse views on sexuality, gender, religion, and more.’”

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) want the National Archives to remove these “harmful negative alerts” from our founding documents.

This is getting ridiculous. If these views prevail, the Marxist attempt in America to “tear it all down” and start over might well succeed. May it never be.

The Constitution has brought unparalleled political freedom and prosperity. Marxism has brought unparalleled misery and death. People don’t clamor to get into the Marxist countries like China or Cuba or Venezuela. But they do risk their lives to get into the United States. That’s not despite the Constitution and what it represents. It’s because of it.

But many forces today, because they love power (and often the perks that come with that power) are willing to undermine the Constitution, so they may gather unto themselves more control. This does not bode well for the future of our republic.

Thomas Sowell warns, “It doesn’t matter what rights you have under the Constitution, if the government can punish you for exercising those rights. And it doesn’t matter what limits the Constitution puts on government officials’ power, if they can exceed those limits without any adverse consequences.”

This point is reminiscent of a warning from the father of our country.

As Dr. Peter Lillback and I noted in our 2006 book, George Washington’s Sacred Fire, “Washington asserted that human depravity could ultimately destroy the Constitution, even with the checks and balances it possessed. In his proposed Address to Congress in April 1789, he described how the Constitution, with all of its wisdom, could ultimately come to naught by the depravity of the people and those who govern them, since the Constitution in the hands of a corrupt people was a mere ‘wall of words’ or a ‘mound of parchment.’”  (p. 220).

One of the geniuses of the Constitution is the way its principles were built by men who acknowledged the sinful nature of man. I believe that because it was based on a correct anthropology—one that recognizes our innate selfishness—that the Constitution has been so durable.

James Madison, a key driving force behind the Constitution, learned well from his teacher, Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon, the devout Presbyterian who was the president of Princeton, who taught Madison what the Bible says about man’s corrupt nature.

Madison said, “All men having power ought to be distrusted.” Therefore, the founders separated power, explicitly, so that we would have liberty rather than tyranny.

I agree with William Gladstone, the distinguished 19th century Prime Minister of England, who declared, “The American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.”

Why this constant attempt to tear down those things which are right in our world? The Constitution of the United States is one of them. We have our work cut out for us to convince many fellow Americans of that truth.

©Jerry Newcombe. All rights reserved.

Does Biden’s $1.2 Trillion Infrastructure Bill Include a Mileage Tax?

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Here’s a dismaying prospect: Paying 6, 8, or 10 cents in new taxes for every mile you drive. It may sound small, but at an 8 cent rate, that would be $1,144 in new annual taxes for the average American, who drives about 14,300 miles a year. Yikes!

Some on social media are claiming that this punitive tax scheme has been slipped into President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending legislation—which, after all, is nearly 3,000 pages and is chock full of unrelated waste and partisan pet projects. But are they right to be concerned about a mileage tax soon becoming reality?

No. At least, not yet.

The infrastructure legislation does not include a mileage tax or another form of driving tax. What it does include is a pilot program to study and test the idea. The legislation authorizes $125 million in taxpayer funding for this test initiative. (A lot of taxpayer money for an experiment, no?)

“People would volunteer to be part of the test,” fact-checkers at local New York news outlet WGRZ-TV report. “The test would require volunteers to record their miles, pay the fees, and then be reimbursed by the government. This pilot program would go through the year 2026 and at that point, if Congress and the president like it, they would have to pass another bill making it into law. This infrastructure bill simply creates the program.”

We can certainly question the wisdom of this endeavor. But rest assured that if the infrastructure legislation ultimately passes—a likely if not certain outcome—you won’t get a new per-mile bill from the IRS. However, this move does represent a shift toward mainstreaming and advancing the idea of a per-mile driving tax.

Such a tax would be highly regressive, meaning that it would disproportionately burden low-income Americans. So, too, the costs would fall harder on rural Americans who drive more than their city-dwelling counterparts. That said, proponents argue it simply funds highway infrastructure by taxing those who use it. They also note that it could replace the gas tax, which currently attempts to do the same yet fails to capture usage by electric vehicles.

Still, the prospect of sizable new taxes levied on working-class Americans solely for the privilege of being allowed to drive your own car isn’t an attractive one. Luckily, we aren’t actually facing this as an immediate reality, even if it is slowly being advanced into the mainstream.

WATCH: New Biden Vax Mandate Doesn’t Make ANY Sense (Here’s Why)

COLUMN BY

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Like this story? Click here to sign up for the FEE Daily and get free-market news and analysis like this from Policy Correspondent Brad Polumbo in your inbox every weekday.

Murders Increased Nearly 30 Percent in U.S. in 2020

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Democrat rules.

According to FBI reports (WSJ).  From another story:

The data shows the murder rate rising to large heights in the summer of 2020 and then remaining above normal the rest of the year. The jump is the biggest since this data started being collected like this in the 1960s (Washington Examiner).

Murders Rose Nearly 30% in the U.S. in 2020, FBI Reports

Homicide rates are still below highs of the 1990s; other violent crimes also increased last year, while property crimes fell

By: Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2021:

The number of homicides in the U.S. rose nearly 30% in 2020 from the prior year to 21,570, the largest single-year increase ever recorded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The rate of 6.5 homicides per 100,000 residents is the highest since 1997 but still below historic highs of the early 1990s.

The violent crime rate rose 5.2% last year compared with the previous year while the property crime rate dipped 8.1%, according to data released Monday by the FBI.

Cities are working to address the increase in killings, with some reversing cuts to police departments made in 2020 in response to the defund-the-police movement.

Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, who studies trends in homicides, said last year’s murder increase was startling given the years of declines that preceded it.

“The rise in homicides coincided with the pandemic last summer, and also the outbreak of widespread protests against police violence after George Floyd was murdered… neither of which was anticipated,” Mr. Rosenfeld said.

Data from major cities indicates the increase in killings has slowed so far this year, but homicide rates are still above pre-pandemic levels, he said.

The causes of the homicide rise over the past year have been debated by political leaders and researchers and are being studied. Some politicians and law-enforcement officials have said that a police pullback has been a factor in places like Portland, Ore., which has seen a large increase in homicides.

Some researchers blame frayed relations between law enforcement and Black communities after high-profile police killings, such as that of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Others point to the stress from the Covid-19 pandemic and the temporary shutdown of the court system………..

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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WASHINGTON STATE: High School Claims Being White Male Christian Heterosexual Brings One Extra ‘Privilege’

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As we have documented here many times, just the opposite is true. Victimhood is so much of a currency that Muslims not infrequently fake hate crimes so as to be able to claim victim status. In American culture today, Muslims, non-white people, women, and gays are focused upon, coddled, celebrated, and again and again cast as victims when it is those who aren’t in these groups who are really marginalized.

Teachers Force-Fed a Slice of ‘Privilege Pie’ at Washington High School

by Ryan Mills, National Review, September 27, 2021 (thanks to Darcy):

It’s still two months until Thanksgiving, and already one school district in Washington is serving up pie to its staff. Not pumpkin pie. Not apple or cherry. Rather, teachers at Tumwater High School recently were force-fed a big slice of “privilege pie.”

According to one employee, teachers in the district were required to attend diversity training where they were asked to examine their privilege. As part of the training, the teachers were instructed to color in a “privilege pie” – a pie chart with several so-called privileges, including being white, cisgender male, Christian, heterosexual, and U.S. born.

“The more we colored in, the more privileged we were,” the teacher, whose name was not released, told Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit that fights classroom indoctrination and activist-driven agendas in U.S. schools.

“I was so upset because we have so much to do and I would really prefer to use that time to design effective instruction or communicate with families,” the teacher said, according to a quote released by Parents Defending Education. “Instead, I’m sitting there for two hours learning about how I am privileged because of my skin color and about micro-aggressions.”…

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in America: Holy Cow, September Update

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Even the Fed is getting antsy about this raging mania house-price inflation. Housing Bubble 1 is starting to look cute in comparison.

House prices spiked 19.7% from a year ago, the biggest year-over-year increase in the data going back to 1987, according to the National Case-Shiller Home Price Index today. But the national index of this raging mania doesn’t do justice to individual metropolitan areas, where price spikes reached up to 32%.

The Fed is getting seriously antsy about this massive house price inflation, on top to the regular consumer price inflation that has hit 30-year highs. Just today, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, James Bullard, who’d been fretting months ago about the “threatening housing bubble,” came out with a proposal to reduce the assets on the Fed’s balance sheet right after the taper is completed by mid-2022, which would purposefully allow long-term interest rates, including mortgage rates, to rise significantly.

“Everything can occur much faster than it could have in the previous recovery,” he said.

Markets have started to anticipate the end of QE. Long-term interest rates have started to rise. The 10-year Treasury yield is currently at 1.55%, the highest since mid-June. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate today was 3.16%.

The mind-boggling price spikes in the charts below for individual metropolitan areas are based on the “July” Case-Shiller Index. The July data are a three-month moving average of closed sales that were entered into public records in April, May, and June. That’s the time frame we’re looking at here.

House price inflation. The Case-Shiller Index uses the “sales pairs method,” comparing the sales price of a house to the price of the same house when it sold previously, and includes adjustments for home improvements. By tracking the amount required to buy the same house over time, it is a measure of house price inflation.

Los Angeles metro: Prices of single-family houses rose 1.4% in July from June and spiked by 19.1% year-over-year.

All Case-Shiller Indices were set at 100 for January 2000. The index value for Los Angeles of 359 means that house prices have soared by 259% since January 2000, despite the Housing Bust in between. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) has risen by 62% over the same period.

This puts Los Angeles on the dubious pedestal of being the most splendid housing bubble on this list. All charts below are on the same scale as Los Angeles to show the relative heat of house price inflation in each market since 2000.

San Diego metro: House prices rose 1.6% for the month and by 27.8% year-over-year. Since 2000, prices have exploded by 255%:

 

Phoenix metro, holy cow: +3.3% for the month, +32.4% year-over-year. The reddest-hottest annual house price inflation among the most splendid housing bubbles here:

*****

Continue reading this article at Wolf Street.

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