How to handle Covid-19 bullying thumbnail

How to handle Covid-19 bullying

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By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Could a teenager’s suicide have been prevented with a simple question?

An unbearable yet too-common tragedy resulting from bullying is the suicide of its victims. It is a parent’s worst nightmare. A rash of suicides in the 1970s set Dan Olweus on the path to establishing the field of bullying psychology. Suicides have been a major trigger for anti-bullying campaigns and laws.

Despite the proliferation of anti-bullying programs and laws in the past two decades, bullying continues to be considered an epidemic, with the youth suicide rate skyrocketing during this same period.

The latest high-profile suicide tragedy to hit the national news is that of Nate Bronstein, a 15-year-old student at the exclusive Chicago Catholic prep school, the Latin School. As reported in the Chicago Tribune, the parents are suing the school for no less than $100,000,000–yes, one hundred million dollars–for failing to prevent his death. And the taxpayer–you and I–will end up footing the bill if the parents prevail.

While we tend to think of bullying as serious physical attacks or threats against victims, the great majority of bullying, including the impetus for most suicides, is not physical but verbal. Any characteristic can become the subject of bullying: intelligence, appearance, race or religion, sexual orientation, and even clothing.

An unusual casualty of the war against Covid-19

Nate may be the first case of a suicide stemming from Covid-19 insults. Students falsely accused him of being unvaccinated. Vaccination against Covid-19 has been a top priority for the administration and the appointed leaders of our public health organizations, who intentionally blamed the unvaccinated for the epidemic and encouraged the rest of us to do the same, with many celebrities and pundits answering this “call to duty”.

It is no wonder that in such a climate, a child would get extremely upset by being called unvaccinated. This is the trap that leads individuals to become the victims of non-stop bullying: they get upset because they want the insults to stop. They don’t realize that getting upset is actually what keeps the insults coming their way.

Why aren’t anti-bullying efforts working?

Why, after decades of anti-bullying efforts, laws, and research, do kids continue to be bullied in school? It’s because the prevalent approach to bullying, developed by Olweus and universally enshrined in school anti-bullying policies and laws, is predicated on the school protecting children from each other. Students and their parents are instructed to inform the school when bullying occurs. It then becomes the school’s responsibility to investigate, determine who the guilty parties are, and punish or rehabilitate them.

However, research and plain experience show that this approach does little to stop bullying, and often makes it worse. Informing the school can only work if the schools have a reliable approach to handling bullying. Usually, they don’t. Instead, they follow mandated policies of investigating, judging, and punishing, which tends to cause hostilities to escalate, for no party wants to be accused of wrongdoing. The accused typically insist on their innocence and blame the informer.

Indeed, the Tribune reports, “In November and October alone, [mom] contacted Latin more than 30 times.” While the school allegedly didn’t punish anyone, we can be sure that the kids being investigated were furious with Nate for constantly trying to get them in trouble, spurring them to call him “a terrible person” and telling him to kill himself.

The school’s denial of guilt

As virtually all schools do in response to a bullying lawsuit, the Latin School denied the accusations. The Tribune reports:

In a statement, the school called the claims unfounded. It said it “deeply grieves” the death of one of its students, but it plans to “vigorously defend itself… The allegations of wrongdoing by the school officials are inaccurate and misplaced… The school’s faculty and staff are compassionate people who put students’ interests first, as they did in this instance.”

And the school is probably right. It did attempt to solve the problem. It’s just that the idea spread by the anti-bullying establishment that bullying occurs because the schools do nothing to stop it has no basis in reality.

If you are not sure about this, try this at home, if you have children of your own. Treat the aggression between them the way anti-bullying laws require schools to do it. Investigate every complaint they bring you, conduct interrogations, and punish the wrongdoer. The likely result is that your kids will be fighting more often than ever. They will come to hate each other, and at least one of them (the one you find guilty) will end up hating you, too. Strangely, the very interventions that cause intense sibling rivalry at home are somehow expected to reduce hostilities among students in school.

There is a better way

The prevalent approach to bullying requires large investments of time and effort–which costs money–and still can result in the school being sued for astronomical sums of money for failing to stop the bullying.

All the money in the world will not put an end to bullying. What’s needed is good psychology. The policies required are not those of protecting and policing children, but teaching them how to handle insults and accusations on their own, so that attacks are nipped in the bud and don’t evolve into ongoing bullying relationships. This knowledge can be obtained essentially for free. Any counsellor or staff member can do the following with a student complaining of being bullied for being unvaccinated or any other false accusation. It involves role-playing, conducted in two stages.

Stage One

(It may go as follows):

Counsellor: Accuse me of being unvaccinated, and don’t let me stop you.

Student: You’re unvaccinated!

Counsellor: No, I’m not!

Student: Yes, you are! You are going to get us all sick and make us die!

Counsellor: That’s not true!

Student: Yes, it is!

Counsellor: No, it’s not! Why are you saying that?

Student: Because your parents are anti-vaxxers!

Counsellor: No, they’re not!

Student: Yes, they are!

Counsellor: No, they’re not!

Student: Yes, they are!

After futilely going back and forth for a while…

Counsellor: I give up. I’m not making you stop, am I?

Student: No.

Counsellor: Who’s winning?

Student: I am.

Counsellor: And aren’t you having fun seeing me get upset?

Student: Yes.

Stage Two

Counsellor: Let’s do it again. Accuse me of being unvaccinated, and don’t let me stop you.

Student: You’re unvaccinated!

Counsellor: Is that what you believe?

Student: Yes!

Counsellor: If you want to believe it, I can’t stop you.

Student: No, you can’t.

Counsellor: That’s right. You can believe anything you want.

At this point, the student probably has nothing more to say. Counsellor continues…

Counsellor: Who’s winning this time?

Student: You are.

Counsellor: You see, the kids aren’t calling you “unvaccinated” because they believe that’s what you are. They do it because when you get upset and defend yourself, you automatically lose, they have a good time, and they continue doing it to you. So, instead of defending yourself, turn the tables on them. Make them defend themselves by asking, “Do you believe it?” If they say, “Yes,” you say, “You can believe it if you wish,” and you win. And if they say, “No,” you win even bigger.

One simple question. No bullying. No suicide. No lawsuit.

AUTHOR

Izzy Kalman is the author and creator of the website Bullies2Buddies.com and a critic of the anti-bully movement. More by Izzy Kalman

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

107 Times the Risk, Are ‘Boosters’ Designed to Kill? thumbnail

107 Times the Risk, Are ‘Boosters’ Designed to Kill?

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By MERCOLA Take Control of Your Health

FDA Authorizes Pfizer Boosters for Kids 5 to 11

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • The FDA has authorized the use of a booster COVID-19 shot in children ages 5 to 11; less than one-third — only 28.8% — of U.S. children in this age group have received the first two doses of this experimental gene therapy
  • Effectiveness of COVID-19 shots in children wanes rapidly; a CDC study found that two to four weeks after the second dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 shots, effectiveness was 60.1% among 5- to 11-year-olds, but this fell to just 28.9% by month two
  • There is still no data on whether the booster is effective against COVID-19, and whether the effectiveness will quickly wane, as it has with all previous shots as well as booster doses in adults
  • Artificially inflated antibodies triggered by booster shots signal to your body that you’re always infected, and the resulting immune response could prove to be detrimental to your health
  • COVID-19 shots are associated with liver injury, including liver failure that led to a liver transplant
  • Children are at an extremely low risk of serious illness from COVID-19, and CDC data show that COVID-19 case rates among children who received two COVID-19 shots are now higher than rates in children who did not get the shots

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration amended its emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 shot to allow a booster dose for children ages 5 to 11.1 The FDA’s “evaluation of safety” for the booster dose in young children was based on a study of only about 400 children, and no meeting was held with the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

The booster shot is intended to be given at least five months after the primary two-dose series has been completed, but less than one-third — only 28.8% — of U.S. children in this age group have received the first two doses of this experimental gene therapy.2

“[G]iven that these children have the lowest coronavirus vaccination rate of all eligible Americans, [as most parents have wisely avoided giving their child the jab,] public health experts are not expecting a rush for the booster,” The New York Times reported,3 and this is good news, since multiple red flags have risen regarding the use of these shots, particularly among children.

COVID Shots’ Dismal Effectiveness Wanes Rapidly

Booster shots are typically released because the initial shots aren’t working as planned. This is certainly the case with COVID-19 shots, which have been found to have dismally low effectiveness rates of 12%, according to research conducted by the New York State Department of Health.4 In their rationale for why a booster dose is now needed for children, Dr. Peter Marks, Ph.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said:5

“Since authorizing the vaccine for children down to 5 years of age in October 2021, emerging data suggest that vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 wanes after the second dose of the vaccine in all authorized populations.”

From December 13, 2021, to January 24, 2022, the New York State Department of Health researchers analyzed outcomes among 852,384 children aged 12 to 17 years, and 365,502 children aged 5 to 11 years, who had received two doses of the shots. Effectiveness declined rapidly among 5- to 11-year-olds, falling from 68% to just 12%.

Protection against hospitalization also dropped, from 100% to 48%. Among 11-year-olds alone, vaccine effectiveness plunged to 11%.6 The lackluster response was blamed on the dosage discrepancies among the age groups, as 5- to 11-year-olds receive two 10-microgram Pfizer shots, while 12- to 17-year-olds receive 30-microgram shots.7

A CDC study also found that the effectiveness of two doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 shots against symptomatic COVID-19 infection “was modest and decreased rapidly” from December 2021 to February 2022.8 The study found that two to four weeks after the second dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 shots, effectiveness was 60.1% among 5- to 11-year-olds. This fell to just 28.9% by month 2.

A similar trend was seen among adolescents aged 12 to 15 years. Vaccine effectiveness two to four weeks after the second dose of the shots was 59.5%, and this fell to 16.6% during month two.9 Among adolescents who received a booster dose, effectiveness went back up to 71.1% two to 6.5 weeks later, but it’s not revealed what happened after that.

If data from adults are any indication, the boost in effectiveness from the booster will also be short-lived. Among adults, within four to five months post-booster, protection against emergency department and urgent care visits due to COVID-19 decreased to 66%, then fell to just 31% after five months or more post-booster.10

Children’s Booster Trial Didn’t Test Effectiveness

The FDA’s decision to allow a booster dose for children was based on an ongoing Pfizer trial — the same one that it used to authorize the first set of COVID-19 shots in the 5- to 11-year-old age group.

Antibody responses were evaluated in only 67 subjects who received a booster shot seven to nine months after the two-dose primary series of shots. “The antibody level against the SARS-CoV-2 virus one month after the booster dose was increased compared to before the booster dose,” the FDA noted.11

However, there is still no data on whether the booster is effective against COVID-19, and whether the effectiveness will quickly wane, as it has with all previous shots. The New York Times also reported:12

“In the Pfizer-BioNTech clinical trial, children showed a sixfold increase in antibody levels against the original version of the virus one month after receiving the booster, compared with one month after receiving a second dose …

Laboratory tests of blood samples from a tiny subgroup of 30 children also showed 36 times the level of neutralizing antibodies against the Omicron variant compared with levels after only two doses. The study did not show how long the antibodies last or test effectiveness against Covid-19.”

High, Artificially Elevated Antibodies Come at a Cost

What’s more, the notion that increasing antibodies equates to disease protection and better health is misguided. Artificially inflated antibodies signal to your body that you’re always infected, and the resulting immune response could prove to be detrimental to your health.

Your adaptive immune system, specifically, generates antibodies that are used to fight pathogens that your body has previously encountered.13 During normal infections, your cellular immune system produces high fever and temporary T-cell elevations, along with elevated antibodies to the infection, gradually dissipate.

Ali Ellebedy, Ph.D., an associate professor of pathology & immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, explained, “It’s normal for antibody levels to go down after acute infection, but they don’t go down to zero; they plateau.”14 This is a normal response and isn’t a measure of waning immunity.

On the contrary, repeatedly, artificially inflating antibodies with booster shots comes with a cost and can lead to a “death zone,” accelerating the development of autoimmune conditions such as Parkinson’s, Kawasaki disease and multiple sclerosis, according to tech leader and COVID analyst Marc Girardot, who urges a retreat from the vaccination “death zone” before it’s too late.15

It’s known, for instance, that certain autoimmune diseases are seen alongside high levels of antibodies.16 Further, COVID-19 shots train your body to produce singular antibodies for one spike protein and cannot compare to the protection provided by natural immunity, which occurs after recovery from an illness. Speaking with Daniel Horowitz, pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole explained that natural infection produces broad immunity that can’t be matched by vaccination:17

“A natural infection induces hundreds upon hundreds of antibodies against all proteins of the virus, including the envelope, the membrane, the nucleocapsid, and the spike. Dozens upon dozens of these antibodies neutralize the virus when encountered again.

Additionally, because of the immune system exposure to these numerous proteins (epitomes), our T cells mount a robust memory, as well. Our T cells are the ‘marines’ of the immune system and the first line of defense against pathogens. T cell memory to those infected with SARSCOV1 is at 17 years and running still.”

Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA vaccine core platform technology,18 also stated, “When it comes to COVID, public health officials have consistently downplayed and ignored natural immunity among children. Yet 81 research studies19 confirm that natural immunity to COVID is equal or superior to any ‘vaccine immunity.’”20

COVID Shots Cause Liver Failure, Other Serious Adverse Effects

A concerning number of case reports describe the development of immune-mediated and autoimmune hepatitis in the days and weeks following COVID-19 injections.21 A team of researchers collected date from such cases from 18 countries, identifying 87 patients with a median age of 48 years who developed autoimmune hepatitis-like liver injury after a COVID-19 shot.22

Typically, the liver injury was diagnosed 15 days after the shot. Most cases (59%) were attributed to Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot while 23% were linked to the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot and 18% to Moderna’s shot. All of the patients in the study recovered from the liver injury after treatment — except for one. That man developed liver failure and had to have a liver transplant. The researchers concluded:23

“SARS-CoV-2 vaccination can be associated with liver injury. Corticosteroid therapy may be beneficial in those with immune-mediated features or severe hepatitis. Outcome was generally favorable, but vaccine associated liver injury led to fulminant liver failure in one patient.”

Young children are also developing severe hepatitis at an unusually high rate and nobody knows why.24 It’s unclear how many of the children have received COVID-19 shots, but researchers did suggest that mild or asymptomatic COVID-19 infection could have left behind spike protein that’s acting as a “superantigen”25 and triggering the immune system to over-react to other viruses, such as adenovirus-41F, which is causing liver damage.26

If that’s the case, the spike protein that circulates in the body after COVID-19 shots could also be problematic, especially since “mRNA vaccines promote sustained synthesis of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.”27 Other concerning adverse events have also been reported.

One study published in Scientific Reports, for instance, revealed that calls to Israel’s National Emergency Medical Services (EMS) for cardiac arrest and acute coronary syndrome increased more than 25% among 16- to 39-year-olds from January to May 2021, compared to the same time period in 2019 and 2020.28

COVID-19 Case Rates Higher in Injected Children

Children are at an extremely low risk of serious illness from COVID-19, making the recommendations for COVID-19 shots, and now boosters, among this population highly questionable — even ludicrous.

“Research shows that there is no benefit to children receiving a COVID shot, and in fact, the shots can cause potential harm, adverse effects and death. According to Pfizer’s own study trial data, the chance of death in children from the shot is 107 times higher than death from COVID,” Malone stated.29

The CDC’s own data also show that COVID-19 case rates among children who have received two COVID-19 shots have been higher than rates in children who did not get the shots since February 2022.30

“That’s the first time CDC recorded a higher case rate among fully vaccinated young children since data was first collected in December 2021,” Malone said,31 and perhaps it’s harbinger of things to come. Adding a booster dose to the already dangerous, ineffective and flawed COVID-19 shot recommendations for children will only add more fuel to the fire.

Sources and References

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

The Monkeypox pix reveal Western media’s double standards thumbnail

The Monkeypox pix reveal Western media’s double standards

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By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Africans are outraged by coverage of an outbreak of an exotic disease

There’s an outbreak of monkeypox, a simian relative of smallpox, in western Europe, North America, and Australia. There’s no monkeypox outbreak in Africa. Yet, if all you had to go by were the images initially used to illustrate news articles about the outbreak in the mainstream corporate press, you’d be excused to think that Africa was the blazing epicentre of the outbreak.

From the BBC to the New York Times, the Guardian to Reuters, coverage of the outbreak came with pictures of people of African descent, their exposed skin pocked with festering blisters. Crucially, the pictures were all old file photos, with some being from as far back as the 1990s. The only major news sites that didn’t use these photos were those not based in the West, like Qatari Al Jazeera.

Naturally, many Africans online have been blasting Western media houses for this usage and sharing recent photos of white people suffering from the disease. When the Twitter handle of a Kenyan broadcaster illustrated a post about the disease with one such picture, the comments section erupted in cheers. Even the association of foreign journalists working in Africa weighed in with a formal condemnation.

Following the backlash, many of the offending pictures have been taken down and replaced with electron micrographs of the virus that causes the disease or, in a few cases, pictures of white victims.

Unfortunately, a few articles, like this one from the BBC and this other one by the New York Times, still inexcusably sport photos of Africans suffering from monkeypox.

Why, you may ask, do Africans care so much about this? Isn’t the disease endemic to the continent, after all? Until recently, weren’t most photos depicting the disease taken in African countries, so that they were the only ones available at the outset of the outbreak? And, even if this hadn’t been the case, what’s wrong with using the images? Aren’t there black people in the West?

Well, part of the answer comes from the offending news organisations themselves. Just two years ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in Wuhan, these same institutions worked up a whole kerfuffle about keeping their coverage of the disease respectful to the Chinese people. Convinced that it was their duty to spare them the stigma associated with the disease, they contorted themselves into all kinds of shapes and forwent some of the thrills of photojournalism.

Instead of dramatic photos of intubated patients struggling for air, they elected to use images and artistic impressions of the virus in their stories. When the WHO conjured up a clumsy name for the disease that had nothing to do with its place of origin, they fell in line and carried it to all corners of the earth. And when a certain bad orange man insisted on calling it the China virus, they added it to the ledger in support of their allegation that he was a white supremacist.

Why then have they, who acted so sanctimoniously in a case where they would have been excused for using photos of victims (Covid-19 did break out in Wuhan, after all) not only not been as careful, but turned into the perpetrators of an arguably worse offense? Were they even sincere the first time? Or have two years been too long for them to keep up the act?

Many commentators have attributed malice and neo-colonialist attitudes to the journalists and editors clearing the use of the images featuring Africans. It fits into a macabre pattern of thought about Africa that Western media organisations just can’t seem to wean themselves off of. Western media, the charge goes, considers Africa to be a backward place filled with sub-human people, whose suffering can be safely ogled at by sympathetic Westerners, who have no dignity to be defended.

Though broad, this accusation isn’t spurious. It’s hard to find other reasons for the tendency of Western media to gravitate to the lens of disaster porn in their treatment of Africa. Not even in their Covid-19 coverage, when they were ostentatious about being respectful everywhere else, could they shake it off.

Instead, they were overly enthusiastic every time it seemed as though Africa was about to take a turn for the worse, and palpably disappointed with every implosion of that expectation.

To give the devil his due, though, maybe we should look for other reasons. After all, no one in the West talks louder about decolonisation, and no one wants to be thought of as an ally of marginalised groups more, than these organisations. Is it possible that Africa is just such a small part of their constituency that they don’t think about it as much, or as carefully, as they do about the rest of their readers, and so are in the dark about Africans’ perception of their attitudes?

Or maybe they do, but this is the only angle for effective storytelling about the continent. Maybe it even comes from a good place, a sympathetic posture towards a continent that’s still bottom of the global healthcare system ranks. Maybe, by using photos of Africans to illustrate a disease outbreak in the West, they are trying to get ahead of the curve, so that when the disease resurges on the continent, the spigots of assistance can flow unimpeded.

If these excuses sound unconvincing, it’s because they are. Try as I might, I cannot find any compelling alternative reasons. In a world where information is so easy to come by, it isn’t reasonable to excuse well-resourced media organisations for being too lazy to use accurate photos for their stories. They are taking photos from a literal warzone in Europe right now, for crying out loud!

And so we are left with the initial accusation. Mainstream Western news organisations have been falling into this pattern in their African coverage for far too long for it to be merely circumstantial. It is inexcusable, even by their own standards, and it’s high time they tried dealing with it.

AUTHOR

Mathew Otieno

Mathew Otieno writes from Kisumu, Kenya. More by Mathew Otieno

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

The right to bear arms is “child sacrifice” — and abortion is not? thumbnail

The right to bear arms is “child sacrifice” — and abortion is not?

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By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

As an Australian with conservative values and close family ties to the United States, I find mass shootings like the recent unspeakable tragedy in Texas every shade of confusing.

There is little doubt that ready access to guns in America makes the murderous fantasies of the insane more accessible, tempting, and efficient.

On the other hand, a laser focus on gun laws ignores a whole host of underlying cultural rot that contributes to these nihilistic horrors. Where do we even start? The drug epidemic, mental health, the expulsion of God from public schools, violent video games, social media, and fatherlessness (the latter especially) all play their diabolical part.

And then there’s, you know, the “right” to kill unborn children.

“I think of child sacrifice as a modern phenomenon, a barbaric one that defines this country,” mourns Maureen Dowd in a New York Times piece entitled ‘America’s Human Sacrifices’. “We are sacrificing children, not only the ones who die, but also those who watch and those who fear the future. Children having their tomorrows taken away. Small sacrifice if we can keep our guns.”

Dowd certainly puts her finger on a problem there, but without the slightest trace of irony she continues: “The Republicans are doing everything they can to stop women from having control over their own bodies and doing nothing to stop the carnage against kids; they may as well change the party symbol from an elephant to an AR-15.”

Hang on. If the radical autonomy of “a woman’s right to choose” supersedes a child’s right to not be killed in the womb, why on earth should Americans be prevented from keeping their second amendment rights to bear arms? After all, merely owning a weapon is not the same as ending a life, which is precisely what every abortion achieves.

Dowd is right to invoke abortion, but she has done so for all the wrong reasons. If we’re going to discuss child sacrifice and abortion in the same breath, let’s begin with the 63,872,429 babies killed since the passage of Roe v Wade.

The irony was likewise lost on a slew of leftwing lawmakers who sought to score political points while the news of the Texas tragedy was still fresh.

“As a nation, we simply cannot allow this to continue. Every single day, children and young people are losing their lives to people who do not value the sanctity of life and take advantage of the unabated presence of firearms in our communities,” pro-abortion Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in a statement.

Sanctity of life? If only we were really talking about that!

Abortion advocate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was pining for a tussle with Republicans in the aftermath. “There is no such thing as being ‘pro-life’ while supporting laws that let children be shot in their schools, elders in grocery stores, worshippers in their houses of faith, survivors by abusers, or anyone in a crowded place,” she wrote on Twitter. “It is an idolatry of violence. And it must end.”

The word “projection” springs to mind.

It was a grim spectacle in America last week — one that continued long after the last gunshot rang out. But to make the Uvalde tragedy all about gun laws is an exercise in mostly missing the point. And to weaponise it for political gain is unconscionable.

If every gun in America were confiscated tomorrow, the endemic mass killing of abortion would, if many of the Uvalde mourners had their way, remain.

Sure, let’s talk about gun laws. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that a technocratic tweak can alleviate America’s moral malaise. And may we never speak of child sacrifice again until we make wombs safer than a Texas school.

The UK’s Single-Payer Healthcare System Has Become a State Religion—and It’s Failing thumbnail

The UK’s Single-Payer Healthcare System Has Become a State Religion—and It’s Failing

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By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

The National Health Service has become a heavily bureaucratic and inefficient state monopoly.

The NHS (National Health Service) is known to be the closest thing to a state religion in the UK. During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, households around the country clapped outside their front doors in order to thank the NHS for its service.

The British healthcare system is “our” NHS and is claimed to be one of the best things about the UK. However, in reality the collectivism which nationalized healthcare promotes denies individuals their autonomy and places their healthcare in the hands of the heavily bureaucratic and inefficient state monopoly.

Due to the almost theocratic attitude that the British public has of the NHS, criticism is highly frowned upon and NHS failures are often excused. One of the biggest excuses of NHS failure is the claim that it is underfunded. For one, this is not true as NHS spending has continued to increase, especially throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. However, this accusation leads to a bigger question for the collectivists: considering a general election is bound to happen every five years in the UK, why are you potentially putting healthcare in the hands of a party you believe will underfund it?

The political process is subject to mood swings and political parties have different focuses. Individuals are forced to pay however much the current government dictates. This means that during economic turmoil, a healthy household which is struggling to put food on the table will still have to pay national insurance, despite rarely using it. Individuals should have control over what is prioritized financially in their household. There’s no point having expensive subscriptions to services you don’t use when you need other services more. Under a free market system, if an individual’s financial situation is tough they would be able to choose cheaper healthcare insurance.

In addition, under a single-payer healthcare system, patients get what they’re given and do not have much choice over it.

For example, in the UK during the Covid pandemic, 25,000 patients were discharged from the hospital to care homes without testing or isolation arrangements. This contributed significantly to 20,000 people in care homes dying after testing positive between March and June 2020. It’s clear that care home patients were an afterthought when it came to the NHS’s Covid response. They were not treated as consumers which a business would attempt to appeal and cater to. Instead, the country’s elderly were treated as pawns in the NHS’s strategy to deal with the pandemic.

Furthermore, those who want better quality healthcare don’t have much choice unless they want to go private. If an elderly person wants better healthcare, they don’t have much control other than getting what the state decides they should receive. Under a free market system, they would be able to have more choice over their healthcare. However, even if the state does decide to spend more on healthcare, national insurance increases probably won’t specifically target the needs of the patient since national insurance is standardised to the taxpayer.

If an individual does want to pay for private healthcare, they still have to pay for national insurance on top of that. This means that private healthcare isn’t realistically accessible to working-class people, making them dependent on state healthcare which is extremely inefficient and uncomfortable for many in the UK. The NHS is not a safety net, but a trap for working-class Britons which they cannot escape if they find the quality of care inadequate.

With increases in waiting times, both for A&E and GP appointments, it seems that having a healthcare system that is “free to the point of use” is pointless if those who need it can’t use it due to being on endless waiting lists. Single-payer healthcare sacrifices choice for “free” healthcare. Instead, the UK should focus on affordable healthcare through the free market. This would provide patients with genuine choice, making the healthcare system more comfortable, accessible and efficient.

AUTHOR

Jess Gill

Jess Gill is a British libertarian content creator. She is the host of Reasoned UK where she makes daily videos on British politics through a libertarian perspective.

RELATED ARTICLE: Guilty Secrets and The Fall of the National Health Service in the UK

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

U.S. Naval Officer Risked It All Refusing Pentagon Vaccine Order, Navy Board Unanimously Confirmed He Did the Right Thing! thumbnail

U.S. Naval Officer Risked It All Refusing Pentagon Vaccine Order, Navy Board Unanimously Confirmed He Did the Right Thing!

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By Save America Foundation

“A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.” – Christopher Reeve

Foreword by Fred Brownbill. Todays blog as we come towards Memorial Day is republished and all credits and links supplied. This officer is a true American. Fearless. Patriotic. Oath Keeper! God Bless him for what he did. I pray it helps others in similar positions. Attached is also another article you should find interesting where more military members are fighting back. Please make sure to hit that link too!

By Warner Todd Huston

A U.S. Navy board delivered a rare rebuke to the Pentagon after finding in favor of a COVID-19 vaccine objector in a unanimous decision that questioned the lawfulness of the vaccine mandate.

The case that came before the Navy’s nine-member administrative separation board struck a blow for members of the U.S. military all across the board and could serve as a precedent — leading to the end of the COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Navy Lt. William Moseley has over 22 years of experience and currently works as a systems test officer on the USS Bunker Hill. He states that he has over 22 years of experience, according to his Linkedin.

Moseley wanted to refuse to take the vaccine over religious objections, but upon learning that the Pentagon was issuing blanket denials for exemptions, instead of simply filing for the exemption, he decided to take his case straight to the board, according to Just the News.

“Lt. Moseley opposes the vaccine for religious reasons and could have submitted a religious accommodation request; however, when he learned that the Navy and the other services intended to implement a blanket denial policy, he began to prayerfully consider other options,” a press release from his legal representative read.

“After consulting with legal and medical experts, he became convinced that as an officer he had an obligation to take a stand against the unlawful order and be a voice for thousands of enlisted Sailors.

“Lt. Moseley risked his 22-year-career and his military retirement because of his faith and his commitment to his oath of office as a military leader,” the statement added.

The Pentagon has ruled that members of the military who have refused the vaccine are acting insubordinate.

The board ruled on Friday in Lt. Moseley’s favor and found that he “did not commit misconduct by refusing the COVID-19 injection” and ruled “unanimously that Moseley should be retained in the United States Navy.”

Mosely’s attorney, R. Davis Younts, based the case on the fact that the government cannot force members of the military to take “experimental” medications, and therefore, the COVID-19 vaccine mandate is not a lawful order, according to Just the News.

Indeed, Younts demonstrated that the initially mandated vaccine was not an FDA-approved drug and further showed that the military has not made the FDA-approved vaccine available to military members.

Younts added that with the favorable decision “we are encouraged that the truth was revealed in this Board, and we hope this ground-breaking case sends a strong message to the Department of Defense,” according to Just the News.

Lt. Moseley could have simply accepted retirement and finished with the whole situation, but he risked being cashiered out of the service dishonorably if the board had ruled in favor of the Navy.

It appears that Moseley is the first career officer to win his vaccine case before the board.

Any officer who has held his commission for more than six years has the right to appeal decisions before the board, and fortunately for Moseley, the board’s decision on retention is binding on the service.

Younts said that the board’s new precedent “puts the Navy in an interesting position” concerning other officers — and, perhaps, even enlisted personnel — who are threatened with separation over refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.

According to the Military Times, about 3,400 members of the U.S. military have been involuntarily separated from service for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Most have been given a general discharge, which allows them to retain their veteran’s benefits and allows them to rejoin the military after proving vaccination.

The U.S. military began the process of separating soldiers from the service in December 2021.

The Times added that by April the Marine Corps dismissed one percent of its forces over the vaccine, releasing 1,968 corpsmen. Further, the Navy shed .2 percent of its force with 798 dismissals, the Army separated 345 soldiers, a .07 percent loss, and the Air Force dumped 287 airmen, a .04 percent reduction of its forces.

Like Moseley, there are still some service members in each branch working their cases through the system, so more dismissals are yet to come.

This lends credence to Lt. Moseley’s contention that the Pentagon had issued a policy of blanket denials of exemptions despite tens of thousands of requests across all branches. As of the April 27, the Air Force had only handed out nine exemptions, the Marine Corps approved three, and the Army but one, the Times reported.

Written by : Warner Todd Huston has been writing editorials and news since 2001 but started his writing career penning articles about U.S. history back in the early 1990s. Huston has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN and several local Chicago news programs to discuss the issues of the day. Additionally, he is a regular guest on radio programs from coast to coast. Huston has also been a Breitbart News contributor since 2009. Warner works out of the Chicago area, a place he calls a “target-rich environment” for political news.

Lastly, is the one that may cost the American taxpayers a bundle.  The below article reports that 500 military members have just sued the government for forcing them to take the clot shot that never gained full approval status.  I’m not sure how the court will deal with this one because the Ferris Doctrine generally prevents military members from suing.  If successful, however, it will come with a huge price tag for American taxpayers.

Do we even have a physically fit, battle-ready military at present.

©Fred Brownbill. All rights reserved.

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The Corruption of the World Health Organization

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By David Bell

‘Global Health’ is confusing. A few short years ago community participation, disease burden, resource allocation, and human rights dominated its decision-making processes. Causes such as improving childhood nutrition, empowering minorities, and protecting girls from enslavement and mutilation were acceptable battles to fight.

Here we are in 2022: Coercion, exclusion, impoverishment and big business are in, whilst highlighting those other areas is ‘free-dumb’ or some subversive form of denialism. Same people, same organizations, same funders, just a change of the tide.

As with any historic shift towards fascism and colonialism, it takes a considerable group effort to ignore reality to keep this tide moving but humans, especially in hierarchical structures, have always been up to the task. We still are.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and its staff are currently engaged in two overriding priorities that are excellent examples of humanity’s proficiency at living such lies:

They are pushing the COVAX program to mass-vaccinate most of humanity, at an unprecedentedly high cost for any global health program, against a virus to which nearly all potential recipients are already immune.

They are working towards an expansion of their powers to manage infectious disease outbreaks, with the expressed intent of instituting the same measures used for the first time in the response to COVID-19, but more quickly and more often.

These are strange priorities for public health professionals because these same staff of the WHO all know the following to be true:

About COVAX:

Their COVAX slogan, “No one is safe until everyone is safe”, is completely illogical for a vaccination program unless it is purely transmission-blocking, as it implies that those already vaccinated are not protected.

The current vaccines against COVID-19 do not halt or greatly slow transmission, and require boosters to maintain efficacy against severe disease. Covid-19 is associated very strongly with old age, with mortality risk being several thousand-fold greater than in the young. Yet, more than half the people in sub-Saharan Africa – a major target of COVAX, are 19 years old or younger.

Most people in sub-Saharan Africa and India (so probably everywhere) now have post-infection immunity, which is equal to or more effective than vaccine-induced immunity, and not significantly enhanced by subsequent vaccination.

Vaccinating people in low- and middle-income countries with two doses, for a rapidly-waning benefit, would cost several times more than any other infectious disease program (up to 10 times the total spend on malaria).

The human resources devoted to the largest vaccination program ever undertaken would further reduce healthcare access for other diseases whose burdens are currently increasing.

About lockdowns:

Health is, by the WHO’s own definition, a state of ‘physical, mental and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease and infirmity,’ meaning that harming mental and social health is a negative for overall health.

The WHO noted that border closures, prolonged school closures, and quarantining of healthy people would be likely to do more harm than good in their 2019 pandemic influenza guidelines.

It is standard public health knowledge that poorer people tend to die younger, and poorer countries have higher infant mortality and reduced overall life expectancy.

The ‘lockdown’ response to Covid-19, a disease with severity predominantly confined to old age, killed hundreds of thousands of children, and will continue to do so due to increasing poverty, malnutrition, and rising teenage pregnancy rates.

The lockdown response also:

Is driving millions of girls into child marriage (which many in the humanitarian community would previously have characterized as institutionalized rape).

Is increasing child labor.

Interrupted over a billion children’s schooling, leaving millions never to return.

Reduced routine childhood vaccination, to diseases that do heavily impact children.

Reduced case-finding and treatment access for tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, leaving more infected people in the community untreated, to transmit to others and die.

Greatly increased inequality between a rich controlling few and a rapidly expanding disempowered poor, reversing years of poverty reduction.

The whole humanitarian and global health world knows these facts. Even bankers can figure this out; the International Finance Facility considers that twice as many children died from lockdowns as died from Covid-19, while the Bank of International Settlements, the key to international finance, recognizes that gross domestic product is a major determinant of long-term health.

Yet the WHO, as a public health body, acts as if unaware, even ignoring their standard age-dependent metrics for disease burden as they seek to justify policies that will increase child deaths to target a disease predominantly of the unwell elderly.

The WHO and other health organizations predicted lockdown harms, and have documented them since early 2020, whilst working to ensure they will happen more often. In 2018, they reiterated support for a horizontal approach emphasizing community control and empowerment in the ‘Astana Declaration,’ whilst in 2022 they advocate for a vertical approach based on population control and mass coercive use of pharmaceuticals. Human rights seem no longer a thing to be seen supporting, but the contradictions involved here are nothing short of remarkable.

We often see organizations as ‘beings’ in themselves, but of course, they are the sum of the individuals that staff them; humans who are making choices every day, every hour, about what they are doing and what they should do next.

In this case, it appears the WHO’s staff are comfortable with ensuring the people they were charged to support are increasingly impoverished and their rights and health autonomy removed. They are not just resigned to the abandonment of basic public health principles and ethics, but actively working to undermine them.

Perhaps we would all do that to protect income, pensions, healthcare benefits, and an attractive and genuinely interesting lifestyle of Swiss lakes, business-class travel and good hotels. We cannot criticize people who perpetrate such harm without recognizing much of ourselves in them.

Pressure to conform is strong and maintaining integrity carries risks. We all have families, jobs, and lifestyles to protect. The belief of many that the ‘humanitarian’ sector was somehow different should by now be shattered. That is a good thing, as illusions do not help us and we need to recognize the historical reality that preserving personal comfort has often entailed throwing others under the bus.

When the tide turns, the easiest approach is to turn with it. As a staff member of an international agency said to me recently – ‘the money is going into pandemic preparedness, you have to accept and go with it.’

As an insight into humanity, this response is a disappointing one. We are always poorly served by cowardice. But recognizing how things are, and that help is not coming from those paid to do so, will strengthen the resolve of the rest of humanity to move forward without them, taking the future into their own hands. As, according to orthodox public health, they should.

*****

This article was published by the Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

America is now aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called disinformation a “threat” that needs to be addressed with federal law enforcement power. (Is it coincidental that Elon Musk will shortly take Twitter private and re-establish a free speech platform in America?)

This new DHS office is the Biden Speech Police and represents an existential threat to our First Amendment and our Republic. Please click the adjacent red TAKE ACTION link for the resources to inform your Senators and Representatives about this unconstitutional and tyrannical assault on American Free Speech and our fierce rejection of it.

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Biden Admin: K-12 Schools Must Put Boys In Girls’ Bathrooms To Get Federal Lunch Money

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By The Geller Report

If only Democrats worked as hard as hardening school security and providing armed police than they do endangering our girls…..

By: Joy Pullman, The Federalist, May 26, 2022:

K-12 schools must allow boys into girls’ private areas to obtain federal funds for lunches, breakfasts, and snacks, the Biden administration announced this month. A U.S. Department of Education spokesman told The Federalist the Biden administration’s press releases from several agencies announcing this policy will be followed by formal rulemaking in June.

“It seems to be playing politics with feeding poor kids, which is really unfortunate,” John Elcesser, executive director of the Indiana Non-Public Education Association, said via phone amid weeks of attempting to sort out these new demands with government officials on behalf of private schools in his state. “Because if a school feels like they cannot participate because it’s in conflict with their mission or values, if a religious exemption is not granted, you’re taking away a program that’s feeding low-income kids.”

Before many schools shut down in response to Covid-19, the National School Lunch Program fed nearly 30 million kids every school day, in approximately 100,000 public and private schools and residential care facilities.

Under this new demand, establishments that accept any federal food funding, including food stamps, must also allow males who claim to be female to access female private spaces, such as showers, bathrooms, and sleeping areas. Such organizations must also follow protocols such as requiring staff to use inaccurate pronouns to describe transgender people and allowing male staff to dress as women while on the job.

Religious institutions, however, qualify for a waiver exempting them from these requirements, said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Greg Baylor in an interview Monday. According to the 1972 Title IX law, he said, religious institutions don’t have to file any paperwork to be exempt, although they can if they wish.

Baylor noted, however, that publicly affirming a commitment to sexual reality by seeking an exemption acknowledgment from federal agencies may assist extremist pressure campaigns. The activist group Human Rights Campaign’s blueprint for the Biden administration pushed for narrowing religious exemptions for multiple federal regulations and for the administration to “out” individuals and institutions who request such exemptions.

The Biden administration appears to be following that blueprint closely. According to Elcesser, USDA officials are telling schools to file paperwork to be exempt, although the Title IX law says that’s an option but not required. The USDA confirmed that to The Federalist Tuesday with this emailed statement: “Organizations may request a religious exemption by submitting a written declaration to the Secretary of Agriculture identifying the provisions that conflict with a specific tenet of the religious organization.”

Government schools can receive no exemption. At best, parents and taxpayers can urge school districts to not comply while inevitable lawsuits over the Biden administration’s interpretation work through courts for years.

“The Biden administration is grossly extending the Bostock holding where it does not belong. Like many of the Biden administration’s power grabs, this imposition transgresses areas of proper state and local authority. As the principal guardians of federalism, state attorneys general have the ability to combat such overreach where it injures state functions,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a Republican, told The Federalist in a statement.

Even if this regulation is ultimately overturned by one means or another, millions of American children will be forced to eat their school lunches with a side of sexual politics.

“There is a lot of harm that comes from inflicting this interpretation of Title IX on public schools and private schools that are not eligible for the exemption,” Baylor said. In Loudoun County, Virginia, in 2021, a young woman was sexually assaulted in a school bathroom by a young man granted access by the district’s transgender policies.

Parents have told The Federalist that their daughters no longer use the bathrooms or locker rooms at their public schools because they don’t feel safe there. Many parents are finding after the fact that school districts are helping their children live as the opposite sex and hide that from their families.

“Some percentage of school districts want to be told by the federal government that they have to implement gender ideology,” Baylor observed. “If anyone complains, they can say, ‘We’re just doing what they told us. Go blame Joe Biden, not me.’”

As Biden promised to do while campaigning, his administration is pushing sexual confusion on as many institutions as it can. This aim has gotten a huge boost from the 2020 Supreme Court decision Bostock v. Clayton County, an unconstitutional ruling that gives this extremist sexual agenda a legal fig leaf. That 5-4 decision clinched by President Donald Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch, however, concerned sex differences not in education but employment……

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

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Democrat Energy Policy Targets the Poor

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By Neland Nobel

In the last few days, through some slips of the tongue or brain by President Biden, it has become evident that our current energy mess is a designed crisis. It is designed to force us all into electric vehicles to satisfy the goal of changing the temperature of the earth by 1 ½ degrees in the next 100 years.

The idea is to subsidize wind and solar, and electric cars, and force up the price of traditional fuels so that you will be forced to switch to alternative energy, even though alternatives are far more expensive in a world of free competition.

They don’t want free competition. They want to favor their alternatives and punish those traditional sources that evolved naturally in the marketplace.

The purported reason is to fight “climate change.”

That’s right. Despite multiple other factors such as the tilt of the earth, undersea volcanic activity, above sea volcanic activity, natural fires, CO2 absorption rates, tectonic shifts in the earth’s plate, solar activity, seawater temperature, and countless other factors, politicians have taken on perhaps the most ambitious scheme ever devised by demagogues. Unable to house the homeless, cure the addicted, and even educate our children, being the gods they are, they are going to change the climate of the earth over the next century.

Rather than the less expensive and intrusive strategy of adapting to changes in the environment, they think they can change the climate. Forget that we can hardly correctly predict the weather two weeks out, these arrogant fools insist they can change the climate over 100 years.

You are just collateral damage in their grand quest to force all countries, except the big emitters like China and India, to do their bidding. But since they can’t control China or India, what they are doing is changing your standard of living, harming your life prospects, in a cause that will fail under their own theories. If they can’t stop China from emitting, what difference is your pain going to make?

This is the pain we are all feeling at the gas pump, the grocery store, and in our electric bills. And it is all going to get much worse.  Look at gas prices and electric prices in Germany, for example.

This pain will impact the poor most of all.

By starving oil and gas companies of capital and regulating them into oblivion, it is driving up the price of food. Literal starvation is likely in the poorest countries on earth.

But we can’t let what is good for humans (eating) get in the way of global climate change goals.

Even closer to home, we can see the effect of rising gas prices.

If you own a small business, employ household labor ranging from maids to lawn care, or need dishwashers and waiters, gasoline prices become a factor in employment opportunities.

Since by definition, most poor people own older cars (the US car fleet is now more than 12 years old on average, a record) than the average, many minivans and trucks of that era get around 20 miles per gallon. Working people need such vehicles.

If you make $15 to $20 per hour, and you live in Apache Junction, will you take a job that is in Glendale or Litchfield Park? You easily could be burning $25 to $50 a day in gas. That could be $500 to $1000 a month in gas.  And that is not the total cost of operating a vehicle.

The answer is that you probably will not and cannot take that employment. Therefore, both the potential employer and the prospective employee lose the ability to match the employer with the employee. At the lower end of the pay scale, transportation costs are pivotal.

Many of the poor live outside of the areas of expensive housing like North Scottsdale or North Central Phoenix. They have to drive long distances to serve their clients because they have to live where housing is less expensive.

Incidentally, this problem does not just influence what help the wealthy can get for landscaping care and such but hurts those who have long-term care situations.

For the disabled like the blind, autistic, wheelchair-bound, stroke, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, the very elderly, or other afflictions that need extensive care, the people that do this work do not get paid that much. In fact, the disabled poor, get state aid that typically is around $15 per hour. Sometimes such help is not needed for a full day, which makes the economics even worse.

It makes no sense for a person to burn $25 in gasoline per day to work six hours at $15 per hour, which often turns out to be $13 per hour after tax. This has made the current shortage of labor even more acute for those who need long-term care for themselves or their relatives.

We know personally of multiple families who can’t find help at all. And even if families have the means, it is illegal to pay state-paid workers under the table. The spike in the price of gas, which is part of the Biden Plan, is seriously hurting those who need care workers.

In addition, higher fuel costs increase the price of fertilizer, gas, or diesel for the farmer’s equipment, heat for drying or harvesting, processing, and transportation to the store. In short, these designed higher fuel costs, intended to force a change in your driving habits, are integral to the dramatic rise in food prices.

It would not be too much to say, that the war against fossil fuels is a war on our standard of living, and a war on the poor specifically. It drives up the price of fuel, electricity bills, and food.

President Biden says this transition will be very painful. Indeed, it is. It was designed to be so and it didn’t have to be this way.

TAKE ACTION

America is now aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called disinformation a “threat” that needs to be addressed with federal law enforcement power. (Is it coincidental that Elon Musk will shortly take Twitter private and re-establish a free speech platform in America?)

This new DHS office is the Biden Speech Police and represents an existential threat to our First Amendment and our Republic. Please click the adjacent red TAKE ACTION link for the resources to inform your Senators and Representatives about this unconstitutional and tyrannical assault on American Free Speech and our fierce rejection of it.

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A Cabinency of Dunces

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By Victor Davis Hanson

As the nation sinks inexplicably into self-created crisis after crisis, a debate rages about whether President Joe Biden is incompetent, mean-spirited, or an ideologue who feels the country’s mess is his success.

A second national discussion revolves around who actually is overseeing the current national catastrophe, given Biden’s frequent bewilderment and cognitive challenges.

But one area of agreement is the sheer craziness of Biden’s Cabinet appointments, who have translated his incoherent ideology into catastrophic governance.

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has essentially nullified federal immigration law. More than 2 million foreign nationals have illegally crossed the southern border without audit—and without COVID-19 vaccinations and tests during a pandemic.

Mayorkas either cannot or will not follow federal law.

But he did create a new Disinformation Governance Board. To head his new Orwellian Ministry of Truth, he appointed Nina Jankowicz—an arch disinformationist who helped peddle the Russian collusion, Steele dossier, and Alfa Bank hoaxes.

While Jankowicz’s adolescent videos and past tweets finally forced her resignation, Mayorkas promises his board will carry on.

In the days before the recent Virginia election, grassroots parent groups challenged critical race theory taught in the schools.

In reaction and under prompts from teachers’ unions, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed both the FBI and the Justice Department to establish a special task force apparently to “investigate threats” from parents against school board members.

The FBI recently has been knee-deep in political controversies. It illegally doctored a FISA application to entrap an American citizen. Its former directors, under oath before Congress, either claimed faulty memory or admitted lying to federal investigators.

The last thing a scandal-plagued FBI needed was to go undercover at school board meetings to investigate parents worried over their children’s education.

We are in a fuel price spiral that is destroying the middle class.

Yet when Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was asked about plans to lower gas prices, she laughed off the idea as “hilarious.”

Later, Granholm preposterously claimed, “It is not the administration policies that have affected supply and demand.”

Apparently haranguing those who finance fossil-fuel production, canceling the Keystone pipeline, suspending new federal oil and gas leases, and stopping production in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge all had nothing to do with high fuel prices.

Currently, supply chain disruptions are paralyzing the U.S. economy.

The huge Port of Los Angeles has been a mess for more than a year. Since last fall, dozens of cargo ships have been backed up to the horizon. Thousands of trucks are bottlenecked at the port.

During the mess, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was not at work. Instead, at the height of the crisis, he took two-month paternity leave to help out his husband and two newborn babies.

Such paternal concern is a noble thing. But Buttigieg is supposed to ensure that life-or-death supplies reach millions of strapped Americans.

This winter, trains entering and leaving Los Angeles were routinely looted in the Old West style of train robbing—without much of a response from Buttigieg’s transportation bureau.

In Senate testimony, Secretary of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland refused to explain why her department is slow-walking federal oil and gas leases at a time when Americans are paying between $5 and $6 a gallon for gas.

Haaland was unable to provide simple answers about when new leases will result in more supplies of oil and gas. Her panicked aides slid talking points to her, given that in deer-in-the-headlights fashion, she seemed incapable of providing senators with basic information about U.S. energy production on federal lands.

The United States is sending many billions of dollars worth of sophisticated weapons to Ukraine to combat Russian aggression. We rightly claim it is not a proxy war against Russia, but instead an effort to help stop a brutal Russian invasion.

Why then did Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin tell the world the very opposite in a fashion that could only convince Russians that our real aim in Ukraine is to destroy Russia as a superpower?

As Austin put it publicly, “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”

Even if that description of the agenda is true, why broadcast it, given Russia has more than 6,000 nuclear weapons and its president, Vladimir Putin, is increasingly erratic and paranoid?

The common denominator to these Biden appointees is ideological rigidity, nonchalance, and sheer incompetence.

They seem indifferent to the current border, inflation, energy, and crime disasters. When confronted, they are unable to answer simple questions from Congress, or they mock anyone asking for answers on behalf of the strapped American people.

We don’t know why or how such an unimpressive cadre ended up running the government, only that they are here and the American people are suffering from their presence.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

America is now aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called disinformation a “threat” that needs to be addressed with federal law enforcement power. (Is it coincidental that Elon Musk will shortly take Twitter private and re-establish a free speech platform in America?)

This new DHS office is the Biden Speech Police and represents an existential threat to our First Amendment and our Republic. Please click the adjacent red TAKE ACTION link for the resources to inform your Senators and Representatives about this unconstitutional and tyrannical assault on American Free Speech and our fierce rejection of it.

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Why Those Under 60 Are More Likely to Die if Jabbed

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By MERCOLA Take Control of Your Health

Well, the COVID jab pushers have had to resort to all sorts of obfuscation to hide the fact that the injections don’t work, and now they’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel of excuses. According to a recent Reuters report,1 “Increased contact among vaccinated people can give the false impression that COVID-19 vaccines are not working.”

This irrational explanation has been levied in response to studies showing COVID-jabbed individuals are getting infected at higher rates than the unjabbed, and there are many such studies.

“These studies are likely to involve statistical errors, particularly if they did not account for different contact patterns among vaccinated versus unvaccinated people,” Korryn Bodner, a research associate in infectious disease modeling in Toronto, told Reuters. Bodner is the first author of a preprint study2 posted on medRxiv at the end of April 2022.

Bodner’s claim is that those who got the jab may be more likely to throw caution to the wind and mingle with others, hence getting infected more frequently, while the unjabbed may be more cautious because they know they’re vulnerable. This rationale is dubious at best, considering:

a)The unvaccinated have continuously been accused of not taking COVID seriously and going about their lives as normal

b)Those who have taken the jab are, by and large, a far more fearful lot; they tend to listen to the “authorities” and take all of their advice to heart, which would include avoiding large gatherings and close one-on-one interactions without wearing a face mask

Check out the following story, reported by Anchorage Daily News:3

“Arianne Bennett recalled her husband, Scott Bennett, saying, ‘But I’m vaxxed. But I’m vaxxed,’ from the Washington hospital bed where he struggled to fight off COVID-19 this winter … Bennett went to get his booster in early December after returning to Washington from a lodge he owned in the Poconos, where he and his wife hunkered down for fall.

Just a few days after his shot, Bennett began experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, meaning he was probably exposed before the extra dose of immunity could kick in. His wife suspects he was infected at a dinner where he and his server were unmasked at times …

‘He was absolutely shocked. He did not expect to be sick. He really thought he was safe,’ Arianne Bennett recalled. ‘And I’m like, ‘But baby, you’ve got to wear the mask all the time. All the time. Up over your nose.’”

Within days of his third dose, he got a serious case of COVID. Yet they blame it on hypothetical exposure to an apparently healthy food server. This kind of irrational reasoning is prevalent among those who got the jabs and who keep going back for more as they are part of the 30% of the population that have been completely brainwashed.

To reiterate what I’ve explained since 2020, asymptomatic spread is likely to be so rare as to be nonexistent.4 It was a lie perpetuated to drive up fear and prop up rising “case” rates that didn’t really exist. It’s basic virology that you cannot transmit a virus unless you have a “hot” infection, and if you have an active, transmissible infection, you have symptoms. The symptoms are a sign that your body’s defenses are kicking in to rid itself of the live virus.

No symptoms, no transmission. So, unless the server was feeling sick and went to work anyway, the simplest explanation for Bennett’s demise was the shot itself. And if the server was sick, the fact that Bennett got so ill suggests the shot is ineffective, even at two doses.

The pro-pharma shills want you to believe there are so many confounding variables, we can’t possibly draw any conclusions from data showing the shots don’t work. Yet looking at data from a wide spectrum of sources, all show the same alarming trends. What “confounding factor” could possibly account for ALL of them being misinterpreted?

An Unproven Hypothesis

Reuters5 does note that Bodner’s simulations “do not prove that this type of bias affected studies of vaccine effectiveness versus the Omicron variant.” What it does show, according to Bodner, is that “even if vaccines work, increased contact among vaccinated persons can lead to the appearance of the vaccine not working.”

In other words, this is a hypothesis that has yet to be proven. Her modeling suggests it COULD make the jabs appear ineffective IF those who got the jab actually behave very differently from the unjabbed.

But again, it’s highly unlikely that the unvaccinated are avoiding exposure by steering clear of close contacts and crowds to a greater degree than those who got the jab. It’s far more reasonable to suspect that the shots don’t work.

On a side note, Bodner’s study was funded by the Canada COVID-19 Immunity Task Force.6 This task force is housed at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and McGill University is a long-term recipient of grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.7,8,9,10

What Do the Data Say About COVID Jab Effectiveness?

Based on data from around the world, it seems clear that the COVID gene transfer injections are not working. In fact, they’re having the opposite effect of what you’d expect from a real vaccine. According to a Washington Post analysis of state and federal data,11 in September 2021, when Delta was most prominent, 23% of those who died from COVID in the U.S. had received the jab.

In January and February 2022, when Omicron started dominating, that percentage jumped to 42%. In December 2021 and January 2022, just under half of all the COVID patients in intensive care at Kaiser Permanente’s hospital system in Northern California had also received one or more shots.12

Many argue that Omicron was more contagious than Delta, hence the higher death toll. But Omicron was also far milder than Delta, so why would the jabbed die at a higher rate from a less lethal variant than a more lethal one?

One attempt at an explanation is that the fatalities are now occurring primarily among the elderly. Nearly two-thirds of those who died from COVID during the Omicron wave were 75 and older. During the Delta wave, 75-year-olds and older accounted for just one-third of the deaths.13

But that was the case from the beginning, and it still doesn’t answer the question: Why would old people be more likely to die from a milder virus than a more serious one? To answer that question, the injection pushers revert back to the argument of waning potency. Two-thirds of those who died in January and February 2022 did not have a booster shot. According to Anchorage Daily News:14

“Experts say the rising number of vaccinated people dying should not cause panic in those who got shots, the vast majority of whom will survive infections. Instead, they say, these deaths serve as a reminder that vaccines are not foolproof and that those in high-risk groups should consider getting boosted and taking extra precautions during surges.”

So, in other words, the jab only works for a handful of months, and then you have to take another. And another. And another. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,15 the first two doses wear off after five months, necessitating a third dose, and the third dose wears off in just four months, at which time you’re supposed to get dose No. 4.

Israeli data16 show the effectiveness of shot No. 4 in preventing severe disease declines by 56% in just seven weeks. So, it appears the protection you get from the shots keeps getting shorter with each dose. Meanwhile, data show the shots can render you increasingly susceptible to all manner of infection and disease, through a wide variety of mechanisms.

Moderna Trial Data Reveal Repeated Infections Are Likely

Among such data is a preprint study17 posted on medRxiv April 19, 2022, which found adult participants in Moderna’s COVID jab trial who got the real injection, and later got a breakthrough infection, did not generate antibodies against the nucleocapsid — a key component of the virus — as frequently as did those in the placebo arm.

Curiously, placebo recipients produced anti-nucleocapsid antibodies twice as often as those who got the Moderna shot, and their anti-nucleocapsid response was larger regardless of the viral load. As a result of this reduced antibody response, those who got the jab may be more prone to repeated COVID infections. As reported by The Defender:18

“[T]he authors found that using the presence of anti-nucleocapsid (anti-N) antibodies to determine whether a person was exposed to SARS-CoV-2 will miss some infections. Thus, the sensitivity of this kind of test, when applied to vaccinated individuals, is not ideal.

However, there are more important implications19,20 of these findings … Specifically, the study implies that the reduced ability of a vaccinated individual to produce antibodies to other portions of the virus may lead to a greater risk of future infections in the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated.

It is important to note that this is not just another argument for the superiority of natural immunity. Rather, this is evidence suggesting that even after a vaccinated person has a breakthrough infection, that individual still does not acquire the same level of protection against subsequent exposures that an unvaccinated person acquires.

This is a troubling finding, and something investigators conducting the Moderna vaccine trial likely knew in 2020.”

UK Data Confirm Results

These findings are corroborated by data from the U.K. Health Security Agency. It publishes weekly COVID-19 vaccine surveillance data, including anti-nucleocapsid antibody levels. The report21 for Week 13, issued March 31, 2022, shows that COVID-jabbed individuals with breakthrough infections have lower levels of these antibodies — a finding they attributed to the protective benefit of the shot:

“These lower anti N responses in individuals with breakthrough infections (post-vaccination) compared to primary infections likely reflect the shorter and milder infections in these patients.”

However, this interpretation is likely flawed, because less severe infection is associated with lower viral load, and as the study above demonstrated, the “vaccinated” have lower anti-nucleocapsid antibody levels than the unvaccinated at all viral load levels, but especially so at the lowest viral loads. As noted by The Defender:22

“This is one of the most significant findings of the study because it overturns the heretofore unchallenged idea that decreased seroconversion in the vaccinated is due to less severe infection in this population — which is a benefit provided by the vaccine.

However, this new study shows that even at low viral loads, the unvaccinated are more likely to seroconvert than those who are vaccinated. In fact, the difference in seroconversion rates is the greatest at lowest viral loads. The decrease in conversion rates is not a result of a benefit from the vaccine. It is a consequence of it.”

Boosted Now Have Three to Four Times Higher Case Rates

The Defender also reviews other U.K. data showing the COVID case rate is three to four times higher among those who have received a booster shot, compared to the unvaccinated. This is true for all age groups with the exception of children under 18:23

“What could explain such a large increase in infection rates among the boosted? Interestingly, the authors … warn that the unvaccinated may have contracted COVID-19 prior to the observation period — in other words, they may have acquired natural immunity previously, giving them added protection …

But their own data tells the opposite story. The boosted are more likely to contract the disease — by a factor of 3 to 4. How do we know whether the larger infection rates in the boosted are due to more robust immunity in the unvaccinated because of prior infection or due to an immune deficiency in the boosted?

The question can be definitively answered by examining the trend of infection rates [using] … the equivalent table from two months earlier. There is still a greater infection rate among the boosted, but it is only two to three times higher. If the authors’ hypothesis was correct, the more recent data should have shown less of a difference, not more.

If anything, their data support the finding that the decreased seroconversion rates in the vaccinated may be causing a greater risk of repeated infections.”

Walgreens’ Data

Data from the pharmacy chain Walgreens in the U.S. also reveal the same trend — COVID-jabbed individuals are testing positive for COVID at higher rates than the unjabbed, and those who got their last shot five months or more ago have the highest risk.

As you can see in the screenshot from Walgreens’ COVID-19 tracker24 below, during the week of May 9 through 15, 2022, 21.4% of unvaccinated individuals who got tested for COVID got a positive result. Of those who had gotten just one COVID shot, the positivity rate was 26.3%.

Of those who received two doses five months or more ago, 31.3% tested positive, and of those who received a third dose five months or more ago, the positive rate was 32.7%. So, after the first booster shot (the third dose), people are at greatest risk of testing positive for COVID.

CLICK HERE FOR THE INFOGRAPHIC: POSITIVITY RATE BY VACCINATION STATUS 05/09/2022 – 05/15/2022

More Jabs, More COVID Deaths

Covid Deaths vs. Vaccination Status

🌍 Comparison of:

—Africa (Pop. ~1.37 Billion)

—Europe (Pop. ~748 Million)

—S. America (Pop. ~434 Million)

—N. America (Pop. ~596 Million)

Source: Our World In Data pic.twitter.com/srGwEkGKLF

— Lindsay (@TexasLindsay) April 23, 2022

Perhaps most disturbing of all are the data showing the COVID shots are raising mortality rates, both from COVID and other causes. Above is an animated illustration25 sourced from Our World In Data, first showing the vaccination rates of South America, North America, Europe and Africa, from mid-December 2020 through the third week of April 2022, followed by the cumulative confirmed COVID deaths per million in those countries during that same timeframe.

Africa has had a consistently low vaccination rate throughout, while North America, Europe and South America all have had rapidly rising vaccination rates. Africa has also had a consistently low COVID mortality rate, although a slight rise began around September 2021. Still, it’s nowhere near the COVID death rates of North America, South America and Europe, all of which saw dramatic increases.

Here’s another one,26 also sourced from Our World In Data, first showing the excess death rate in the U.S. (the cumulative number of deaths from all causes compared to projections based on previous years), between January 26, 2020, and January 30, 2022, followed by an illustration of the tandem rise of vaccine doses administered and the excess mortality rate. It clearly shows that as vaccination rates rose, so did excess mortality.

United States 🇺🇸

Source: Our World In Data pic.twitter.com/E2KCE9Si3o

— Lindsay (@TexasLindsay) April 25, 2022

Risk-Benefit Analyses

We also have the benefit of more than one risk-benefit analysis, and all show that, with very few exceptions, the COVID jabs do more harm than good. A risk-benefit analysis27 by Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., and independent researcher Kathy Dopp, published in mid-February 2022, concluded that the COVID jab is deadlier than COVID-19 itself for anyone under the age of 80.

Another analysis,28 which relied on data in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), concluded that in those under age 18, the shots only increase the risk of death from COVID, and there’s no point at which the shot can prevent a single COVID death, no matter how many are vaccinated.

If you’re under 18, you’re a shocking 51 times more likely to die from the jab than you are to die from COVID if not vaccinated. In the 18 to 29 age range, the shot will kill 16 for every person it saves from dying from COVID, and in the 30 to 39 age range, the expected number of vaccine fatalities to prevent a single COVID death is 15. Only when you get into the 60 and older categories do the risks between the jab and COVID infection even out.

A third risk-benefit analysis by researchers in Germany and The Netherlands was published in June 2021, in the journal Vaccines.29 The paper caused such an uproar, part of the editorial board resigned in protest.30 The journal retracted the paper, but after a thorough re-review, it was republished in the August 2021 issue of Science, Public Health Policy and the Law.31

These researchers concluded that, “as we vaccinate 100 000 persons, we might save five lives but risk two to four deaths.”32 A fourth, still preliminary, analysis — based on more than 1,700 death reports collected by Steve Kirsch — shows the shots do more harm than good in anyone under age 60. Kirsch writes:33

“Figure 1 below is an analysis of survey data I collected. The analysis shows that the vaccines are harmful to those under 60. The red dots higher than the error bar means more vaccinated people observed dead than expected based on the population of vaccinated to all people.

In other words, if we vaccinated 60% of people (middle of the grey bar) and 70% (red dot) of the deaths are vaccinated, we have a serious problem. The precautionary principle of medicine suggests if you are under 60 and thinking of taking a vaccine, you shouldn’t. These preliminary results are both statistically significant …

The conclusion is very clear: nobody under 60 years old should get the vaccine because there is no evidence of a benefit. In fact, if you are between 40-60, it’s clear that vaccination makes it more likely you’ll die, not less likely.”

CLICK HERE TO VIEW FIGURE 1 – VACCINATED DEATHS

Figure 1. Red dot below error bar = vax works. Red dot above error bar = vax likely causes harm. Red dot inside the error bar = Insufficient evidence to justify taking a new, unproven vaccine. Conclusion: Vaccine shouldn’t be considered unless there is a clear benefit. 60 and older seems to justify use based on the data we have so far. Limitations: we are waiting for others to confirm / challenge the analysis. See text34 for more info. Joel Smalley did the analysis.

While some analyses present a direr picture than others, taken together, it’s clear that there appears to be no long term benefits to the COVID jabs. We’re consistently ending up with a higher cost than can conceivably be considered reasonable. The pro-pharma side will likely continue to lob flimsy excuses at the data, but at some point, the truth will be so clear that even the blind will see it. Until that day, continue to inform yourself and share what you find.

Sources and References

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

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WHO, WEF, SDG, JRB…WTF

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By Mark T. Cicero

This summer, the elites of the World Economic Forum (WEF) will convene in Davos Switzerland for Klaus Schwab’s annual confab of the Lear jet set. Part of this meeting is to ratify and endorse the World Health Organization’s (WHO) latest draft of the International Health Regulations (IHR). This treaty has had virtually no coverage and it deserves scrutiny at the most minute level.

Background: The WEF is determined to create a more ‘perfect world’ by advancing their “Great Reset” for the purpose of implementing the Sustainable Development Goals of 2030 (SDG). If you are not aware of this plan, you really need to get a better grasp of this. The SDG is the blueprint for global totalitarianism on a level never before seen on this planet. It was originally intended by Klaus Schwab et al. to be the Millennial Development Goals of 2000, but the world didn’t cooperate. Hence, the new 2030 deadline to make this happen. One of the key elements in their toolkit is the WHO. After all, who could object to an organization devoted to boosting global health?

WHO is run by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who is an Ethiopian administrator (noted for his Marxist activism) with questionable credentials to put it mildly. He is completely in the thrall of the Chinese and Xi Jinping. Tedros helped promote the notion that Covid 19 did not originate in China, he praised their transparency and candor in dealing with the virus. He doesn’t have the medical qualifications to manage this organization other than his willingness to kowtow to the Chinese and Bill Gates.

Back to the subject at hand: the IHR as amended by good old Uncle Joe and his new representative to the WHO, Anthony Fauci.

Here are but a few of the gems from this:

1. WHO’s latest release pushes new digital vaccine passports to be used on a global scale.

2. The WHO openly states these personalized digital documents could “be extended to capture vaccination status to protect against other diseases” and may “be used for continuity of care or as proof of vaccination for purposes other than health care,” such as employment, university education and international travel.

3. Empower WHO’s Director-General to declare health emergencies or crises in any nation and to do so unilaterally and against the opposition of the target nation.

4. According to the Forward to WHO’s regulations, there is no specific limit to what constitutes a health emergency, and it is certainly not limited to pandemics. WHO’s domain includes: “8. a scope not limited to any specific disease or manner of transmission, but covering “illness or medical condition, irrespective of origin or source, that presents or could present significant harm to humans… “5. The WHO will have the unilateral power to determine if any member country warrants their intervention, whether the target country agrees or not.

There is a lot more buried in this text but the net result is the same: if codified, the USA will have voluntarily given up its sovereignty to a Chinese puppet: Tedros. If you missed it this week, our vaunted head of the DHS, Mayorkas, has shelved his plan for a Disinformation Governance Board. This is less surprising now that the details of the new IHR become clearer: it has a far more stringent censorship program built into it.

If this is permitted to go forward, this country will have freely erased our Constitution and abandoned the Bill of Rights. Make no mistake, the first amendment will be suspended under this, the second amendment will be next. We begin an eighteen-month review countdown after this is ratified in Davos (which is when this becomes international law) so the time to act is now. Contact your Congressional representatives and let them know that this is not acceptable. This treaty will fundamentally change this country from the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” to the “Land of the Entitled Billionaires and the serfs who serve them”.

TAKE ACTION

America is now aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called disinformation a “threat” that needs to be addressed with federal law enforcement power. (Is it coincidental that Elon Musk will shortly take Twitter private and re-establish a free speech platform in America?)

This new DHS office is the Biden Speech Police and represents an existential threat to our First Amendment and our Republic. Please click the adjacent red TAKE ACTION link for the resources to inform your Senators and Representatives about this unconstitutional and tyrannical assault on American Free Speech and our fierce rejection of it.

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Who Is Seizing Control Over the Next Pandemic Plan?

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By MERCOLA Take Control of Your Health

In “The Corbett Report” above,1 independent journalist James Corbett reviews the contents of Bill Gates’ book, “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic.”

Another reviewer of Gates’ book, economist Jeffrey Tucker, offered similarly negative feedback:2

Corbett goes through Gates’ book chapter by chapter, so if you’re short on time, you can review the ones that interest you the most:

Chapter 1: Learn from COVID (timestamp: 12:58)

Chapter 2: Create a pandemic prevention team (timestamp: 18:23)

Chapter 3: Get better at detecting outbreaks early (timestamp: 26:21)

Chapter 4: Help people protect themselves right away (timestamp: 31:01)

Chapter 5: Find new treatments fast (timestamp: 37:26)

Chapter 6: Get ready to make vaccines (timestamp: 39:46)

Chapter 7: Practice, practice, practice (timestamp: 47:06)

Chapter 8: Close the health gap between rich and poor countries (timestamp: 50:49)

Chapter 9: Make — and fund — a plan for preventing pandemics (timestamp: 57:40)

Afterword: How COVID changed the course of our digital future (timestamp: 1:03:00)

Gates GERM Team

By now, you’ve probably heard that the World Health Organization is attempting to seize control over global pandemic monitoring and response, and ultimately, all health care decisions. But did you know Bill Gates, the largest funder of the WHO (if you combine funding from his foundation and GAVI), also intends to play a key part in this takeover?

As Gates explains in a video at the beginning of Corbett’s report, he’s building a pandemic response team for the WHO, dubbed the “Global Epidemic Response & Mobilization” or GERM Team. This team will be made up of thousands of disease experts under WHO’s purview, and will monitor nations and make decisions about when to suspend civil liberties to prevent spread of an illness.3

Alas, as noted by “Rising” host Kim Iversen in the video compilation above, if COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s that stopping the spread of a virus is more or less impossible, no matter how draconian the rules. Meanwhile, the side effects of lockdowns and business shutdowns are manifold.

People’s health has suffered from lack of health care. Depression and suicide have skyrocketed. Economies have gone bust. Violent crime has risen. Tucker also points out the false premise behind Gates’ pandemic prevention plan, stating:4

“This theory of virus control — the notion that muscling the population makes a prevalent virus shrink into submission and disappear — is a completely new invention, the mechanization of a primitive instinct.

Smallpox occupies a unique position among infectious diseases as the only one affecting humans that has been eradicated. There are reasons for that: a stable pathogen, a great vaccine, and a hundred years of focused public health work. This happened not due to lockdowns but from the careful and patient application of traditional public-health principles.

[T]he attempt to crush a respiratory virus through universal avoidance could be worse than allowing endemicity to it to develop throughout the population.”

Gates’ Destructive Greed

During COVID, we basically traded false protection against one thing for a multitude of other ills that are far worse in the long run. Now, Gates and the WHO want to make this disastrous strategy the norm.

Once again, we see Gates is basically paying the WHO to dictate what the world must do to make him a ton of money, because he’s always heavily invested in the very “solutions” he presents to the world. While he’s built a reputation as a philanthropist, his actions are self-serving, and more often than not, the recipients of his “generosity” end up worse than they were before.

Case in point: After 15 years, Gates’ Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) project has now been proven an epic fail.5 Gates promised the project would “double yields and incomes for 30 million farming households by 2020.”

That false prognosis was deleted from the AGRA website in June 2020, after a Tuft University assessment revealed hunger had actually increased by 31%. February 28, 2022, the first-ever evaluation report6 confirmed the failure of AGRA.

The Globalists’ Double-Prong Attack on National Sovereignty

But getting back to the globalists’ plan to seize global control through biosecurity governance, they are attempting to do this using two different avenues. If we fail to fight off both attacks, we’ll end up under totalitarian governance.

The first attack comes in the form of amendments7 to the International Health Regulations (IHR). The second attack comes through a new international pandemic treaty with the WHO.

Starting with the first takeover strategy, as you read this, countries around the world are in the process of voting on amendments to the IHR.8 By May 28, 2022, the World Health Assembly will have concluded their vote on these amendments and, if passed, they will be enacted into international law in November 2022.

The IHR, adopted in 2005, is what empowers the WHO to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).9 This is a special legal category that allows the WHO to initiate certain contracts and procedures, including drug and vaccine contracts. While the IHR grants the WHO exceptional power over global health policy already, under the current rules, member states must consent to the WHO’s recommendations.

This is one key feature that is up for revision. Under the new amendments, the WHO would be able to declare a PHEIC in a member state over the objection of that state. The amendments also include ceding control to WHO regional directors authorized to declare a Public Health Emergency of Regional Concern (PHERC).

In summary, the IHR amendments establish “a globalist architecture of worldwide health surveillance, reporting and management,” Robert Malone, Ph.D., warns,10 and we the public have no say in the matter.

We have no official avenue for providing feedback to the World Health Assembly, even though the amendments will give the WHO unprecedented power to restrict our rights and freedoms in the name of biosecurity. There’s not even a publicly available list of who the delegates are or who will vote on the amendments.

Summary of Proposed IHR Amendments

A summary of the proposed changes to the IHR was recently provided by Malone.11 In all, the WHO wants to amend 13 different IHR articles (articles 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, 48, 49, 53 and 59), the end result of which is the following:12

1.“Increased surveillance — Under Article 5, the WHO will develop early warning criteria that will allow it to establish a risk assessment for a member state, which means that it can use the type of modeling, simulation, and predictions that exaggerated the risk from COVID-19 over two years ago. Once the WHO creates its assessment, it will communicate it to inter-governmental organizations and other member states.

2.48-hour deadline — Under Articles 6, 10, 11, and 13, a member state is given 48 hours to respond to a WHO risk assessment and accept or reject on-site assistance. However, in practice, this timeline can be reduced to hours, forcing it to comply or face international disapproval lead by the WHO and potentially unfriendly member states.

3.Secret sources — Under Article 9, the WHO can rely on undisclosed sources for information leading it to declare a public health emergency. Those sources could include Big Pharma, WHO funders such as the Gates Foundation and the Gates-founded-and-funded GAVI Alliance, as well as others seeking to monopolize power.

4.Weakened sovereignty — Under Article 12, when the WHO receives undisclosed information concerning a purported public health threat in a member state, the Director-General may (not must) consult with the WHO Emergency Committee and the member state. However, s/he can unilaterally declare a potential or actual public health emergency of international concern.

The Director General’s authority replaces national sovereign authority. This can later be used to enforce sanctions on nations.”

Once the amendments are adopted by the World Health Assembly, nations will have only a limited time — six months — to reject them. That would put us into November 2022. Any nation which hasn’t officially rejected the amendments will then be legally bound by them, and any attempt to reject them after the six-month grace period will be null and void.

Attack No. 2: The WHO Pandemic Treaty

The second attempt to gain global control is through an international pandemic treaty with the WHO. An intergovernmental negotiating body (INB) was established as a subdivision of the World Health Assembly in December 2021,13 for the purpose of drafting and negotiating this new pandemic treaty.

In summary, the WHO wants to make its pandemic leadership permanent. It can then extend its power into the health care systems of every nation, and eventually implement a universal or “socialist-like” health care system as part of The Great Reset.

While a WHO-based universal health care system is not currently being discussed, there’s every reason to suspect that this is part of the plan. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has previously stated that his “central priority” as director-general is to push the world toward universal health coverage.14

And, considering the WHO changed its definition of “pandemic” to “a worldwide epidemic of a disease,”15 without the original specificity of severe illness that causes high morbidity,16,17 just about anything could be made to fit the pandemic criterion.

The problem with this treaty is that it simply cannot work. The whole premise behind this pandemic treaty is that “shared threat requires shared response.” But a given threat is almost never equally shared across regions.

Take COVID-19 for example. Not only is the risk of COVID not the same for people in New York City and the outback of Australia, it’s not even the same for all the people in those areas, as COVID is highly dependent on age and underlying health conditions.

The WHO insists that the remedy is the same for everyone everywhere, yet the risks vary widely from nation to nation, region to region, person to person. They intend to eliminate individualized medicine and provide blanket rulings for how a given threat is to be addressed, and this can only result in needless suffering — not to mention the loss of individual freedom.

Are You Ready to Cede All Authority to Gates-Led Group?

In closing, Gates’ GERM team would be the ones with the authority to declare pandemics and coordinate global response.18 Are you ready to cede all authority over your life, health and livelihood to the likes of Gates? I hope not.

In the video above, Del Bigtree with “The Highwire” provides poignant examples where Gates is now admitting what “The Highwire,” I and many others have been saying since the earliest days of the COVID pandemic, and getting censored and deplatformed for it.

Gates is two years behind everyone else, yet despite his apparent inability to interpret the readily available data, he now wants power to dictate health rules to the whole world. We can’t let that happen.

Join the Global #StopTheWHO Campaign

It’s going to require a global response to prevent these two power grabs, starting with the IHR amendments under vote by the World Health Assembly. To that end, the World Council for Health has launched a global #StopTheWHO campaign. Here’s how you can get involved:19

Speak — Raise awareness on the ground and online. Use articles, posters, videos
Act — Campaign through rallies, political mobilization, legal notices and cases and similar campaigns
Collaborate with health freedom coalitions such as the World Council for Health
Explore activist toolboxes such as: www.dontyoudare.info and stopthewho.com
Engage global indigenous leadership to take a united stand against the WHO’s IHR
Notify World Health Assembly country delegates to oppose the IHR amendments
Activate people’s parliaments, legislatures or referendums to oppose power grabs

Sources and References

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

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Three Mistakes about the Common Good

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By The Catholic Thing

Michael Pakaluk: The idea that the common good can be found in Roe v. Wade is gravely mistaken, since it subordinates the good of the unborn to the born.

Iwant to draw attention to three mistakes about Aquinas’ teaching on the common good which are encouraged by some presentations today of so-called “common good” jurisprudence. If we take Aquinas to represent “the classical view,” then these are mistakes, too, about classical thought.

Begin with Aquinas’s famous, four-part account of the essence of law: any law, he says, is:

(1) a precept of reason,

(2) directed to the common good,

(3) set down by a competent authority, and

(4) promulgated.

Because this is an account of the essence of something, you simply can’t have that thing at all, Aquinas thinks, unless all the parts of the account are somehow verified in it.

What this means is that anything that can in any way count as law, by definition – by its very essentia – is directed to some conception of a common good.  Aquinas remarks that even the laws of a tyrant promote a common good: they propose in effect that the citizens should together find their good in promoting the personal good of the tyrant.

This is the first mistake, then: it’s misleading for any party, or school of interpretation, to claim that they are offering something distinctive or different, because they favor connecting the law to the common good.  All law does that, of necessity.  Nothing can count as “law” unless it is ordered to a common good.

All the interesting questions, then, involve what conception of the common good is implicit in a law.  Does it promote what Aquinas calls “the true good” (verum bonum) or something else?  Is its implicit conception something we can really embrace?  Is it perhaps incoherent, or self-defeating, or calculated to lead to bad things despite someone’s good intentions?

Even Roe v. Wade contained conceptions of the common good, of course:  a conception of the autonomy of the professions (the inviolability of “a decision made in consultation with one’s doctor”); of the equality of women, and what is necessary for that; and a conception of the limits of government’s power to proscribe.

These conceptions were and remain gravely mistaken.  Certainly they are disputable by fair-minded persons and cannot be held to be built into the very social compact of the United States. Obviously, too, any “common good” implicit in Roe includes the good only of born human beings, subordinating the good of the unborn to the born. In that sense, Roe’s conception of the common good is tyrannical.

But the point is that both sides claim to promote the common good.  The debate hinges on what that truly is, not whether it is invoked.  To say that the master key is to introduce the premise that the law should be ordered to the common good is a mistake and a diversion.

The second mistake as regards “the classical view,” is to describe the common good of human law without reference to the virtues and to God, but to regard it as a social system of economic and political instrumentalities, even construing classical language such as “public peace” and “public order” in this way.

Aquinas does not do this.  In his discussion of human law specifically, he does not separate peace from virtue: “in order that man might have peace and virtue, it was necessary for laws to be framed.”  Indeed, making those subject to it good, he says, following Aristotle, is the goal of law: “if the intention of the lawgiver is fixed on true good, which is the common good regulated according to Divine justice, it follows that the effect of the law is to make men good simply.”

Again, because piety is a central human virtue for Aquinas, not surprisingly he approves of Isidore’s claim that a chief purpose of human law should be “to foster religion.”

On “the classical view” one cannot avoid these matters by saying, as Adrian Vermeule does, that it’s possible to confine one’s discussion to “the order of nature” and avoid “the order of grace.”  On Aquinas’s view, human beings precisely as natural creatures, cannot attain even “temporal happiness” except through exercising the virtues – and as rational creatures they are ordered to God, who is the ultimate common good of society.  As John Paul II liked to emphasize, it’s inherent in the human person to have a transcendent character, and the common good of human society must be framed correspondingly. Religion after all is a pagan virtue.

The great theologian, Johannes Messner, writing in his 1949 Social Ethics after the horrors of World War II, comments, “Only if a personal God is recognized as creator and lawgiver can the idea of the ‘might of right’ possess its quite definite authority; otherwise, there can be no compelling reason why the principle ‘might is right’ should not in one way or another prevail.”

This brings me to the third mistake, which is that current presentations of the common good seem to downplay the necessity of liberty, identifying liberty with libertarianism and individualism.

This third mistake follows from the second.  Liberty is necessary for genuine virtue and for our response to God.  Downplay virtue, and liberty is easily lost from sight.  Moreover, as James Madison emphasized in his Memorial and Remonstrance, the relationship which a human being has to his creator, prior to political society and government, is a fundamental safeguard of liberty.  Prescind from our relationship to God, and how else are fundamental liberties secured?

Let Messner have the last word here: “full humanity depends essentially on [man’s] personal responsibility and self-reliant activity in carrying out the demands of his being. . . .the common good means that social cooperation makes it possible for the members of society to fulfill by their own responsibility and effort the vital tasks set for them by their existential ends. . . .although a domestic animal is not harmed in its essential nature by being provided for, the ‘provider state’ does impair man’s natural status because it takes away from him a sphere of self-determination and personal responsibility.”

You may also enjoy:

+James V. Schall, S.J.’s Common Good/Uncommon Evil

Stephen P. White’s Catholic Schools and the Common Good

AUTHOR

Michael Pakaluk

Michael Pakaluk, an Aristotle scholar and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is a professor in the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. He lives in Hyattsville, MD with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their eight children. His acclaimed book on the Gospel of Mark is The Memoirs of St Peter. His new book, Mary’s Voice in the Gospel of John: A New Translation with Commentary, is now available.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2022 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.

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Pandemic Monkeyshines

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By Cherie Zaslawsky

While Bill Gates trumpeted his so-called “Decade of Vaccines” in 2010—apparently given a new lease on life with Covid—he’s been understandably quieter about his planned Decade of Pandemics. Of course the two go hand in hand, or perhaps hand in glove, as both are merely tools to further the Davos elites’ two-pronged attack on We the People: genocide and subsequent enslavement of those who survive.

Plandemics and their subsequent mRNA vaccines can maim and kill millions of people, while providing the psychopathic elites with plausible deniability. Here’s Gates’ disingenuous warning: “Also, related to pandemics is something people don’t like to talk about much, which is bioterrorism, that somebody who wants to cause damage could engineer a virus. “ [Italics mine.] Hmmm…now why would anyone want to do that, Bill?

In case you were wondering, Stephen Luby, professor of medicine and senior fellow at Stanford’s Wood Institute for the Environment, informs us that: There will be a Sars-CoV-3.

Not one to be outdone by pundits across the Pond,  Sustainable Prince Charles offers this gem: There will be more and more pandemics, if we don’t do ‘the great reset’ now.

It seems the WHO is planning for ten solid years of pandemics, from 2020 to 2030. How does WHO know what, why and when? Unless, of course, Gates’ minions—the WHO included—are feverishly planning and executing these pandemics. What better way to accurately predict the future than by controlling it?

LESSONS FROM FRANKENSTEIN

Among the dwindling numbers of literary classics students are assigned today, one often finds Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Written when Shelley was only eighteen, it is quite an achievement and brilliant in concept; although, in my view, far from a literary masterpiece and actually a bit of a slog to read. Nevertheless, students love it.

Unfortunately, they miss the point.

Instead of grasping what I consider to be the genius of the novel—its exposition of the truism that when man plays God, disaster inevitably follows—the kids derive the message that you should be kind to monsters. Many of them write essays to the effect that if only people had not rejected the poor monster—if only they had not hurt his feelings—he wouldn’t have gone on a killing rampage, which many students think was justifiable. I kid you not. This is how your children are being trained to think in public schools.

Perhaps their teachers also fail to point out the moral of this story. In fact, if it was clearly recognized and taught as a cautionary tale about hubris in schools today, I’d wager that the Common Core progressives who put together today’s pathetically weakened and subversive curriculum, would quickly remove it from the syllabi. After all, from man made viruses to gene-altering “vaccines” to transhumanism, we’re being besieged by legions of unleashed Dr. Frankensteins.

FAUCI’S STEALTH WEAPON: GAIN-OF-FUNCTION “RESEARCH”

Of special note among the legions of domestic Frankensteins must be our own Dr. FauxChi, whom one might describe as a modern-day amalgamation of Josef Mengele, the Nazi’s mad scientist who conducted cruel experiments on prisoners, and Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi’s Minister of Propaganda.

The Fauch’s organization NIAID has given millions of dollars to crazed scientists to bioengineer new and deadly GMO viruses and retroviruses that previously apparently did no harm in bats or other creatures, and couldn’t infect humans, but now can cause worldwide pandemics.

This begs the question: Why perform “Gain of Function” research at all, since the function you gain creates a bioweapon?

Here’s the logic: in case those viruses were ever to naturally jump from bats to people, say in a Wuhan wet market, and make people sick, scientists would be able to recognize the pathogens and presumably make vaccines against them for the huge benefit of… patent holders, like Fauci’s NIAID, and Big Pharma.  And if thousands or millions were to die in the process? That’s just collateral damage.

Of course there’s an even more nefarious possibility—dare I say likelihood: that these Frankensteinian viruses and the genetically modified “vaccines” we’re told we must have to combat them, are both designed for genocidal “depopulation” purposes. Pick your poison.

RAND PAUL VS. TEFLON TONY

Recently, Senator Rand Paul bravely stood up to Fauci, perhaps to make amends for having stabbed President Trump in the back along with the majority of his feckless fellow Senators on January 6th—but I digress.

Kudos to Rand for pointing out Dr. Fraudster’s lies and collusion with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to fund the dangerous, illegal and immoral viral-lethality-enhancing “research” that led to Sars-CoV-2 and Covid-19.

But Rand’s main concern, like that of so many others, is that these viruses could escape the lab and infect people. Well, accidents do happen.

Except, as FDR told us, in politics, where “…nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” And for those who refuse to believe Covid-19 was planned—in spite of Event 201 describing the precise scenario of the pandemic and worldwide lockdowns several months prior to the Wuhan outbreak, as well as the perfect timing of the “pandemic” to pull the plug on Trump’s economic miracle and pave the way for flagrant voter fraud through unprecedented national mail-in voting to keep, um, Biden voters “safe”—all I can say is I’m running out of bridges to sell.

Back to the bats.

THE NEW NORMAL: “ZOONOTIC” PANDEMICS?

Here’s the May 2021 cover of Stanford’s Alumni Magazine, illustrations by Catrin Welz-Stein:

The accompanying ghoulish article: Of Viruses & Vectors, by Deni Ellis Béchard, almost reads like a primer on Agenda 21/2030, full of warnings about global warming, climate change and the dangerous “edges where humans and animals come into contact” leading to “human-wild interface with less and less buffer between them.”  Who knows what dire diseases may emerge “…at the edge of human habitats.” Did you realize you live in a “human habitat” instead of a city or suburb or small town?

The passage quoted above obliquely refers to the Davos elites’ Wildlands Project, as they plan to make the “wildlands” as off-limits to us as our Capitol was for months after January 6th, while herding us into crowded high-density “districts” à la The Hunger Games.

In his article, Béchard  kills two bats with one stone: implying we should stay out of forests, etc., and presumably stop raising livestock (animals are “reservoirs” for “vectors” like mosquitos that spread viruses) though people have done this safely for millennia.  So what has changed? The addition of the elite cabal’s phony global warming/climate change psyop, along with their control of the media for propagandizing their mischief.

Referencing climate change and other spurious globalist claims, Béchard blithely assures us we’re in for more pandemics, sooner rather than later, and the next one could stem from the NIPAH virus, with a fatality rate of 75%. Yes, you heard that correctly. Seventy-five percent fatality rate. Compare that to Covid’s measly .1% for all but the frail elderly and those with serious co-morbidities who have a rate from about .2% to 2% or so.

And surprise, surprise, NIPAH is also bat-derived.

What is this fascination with bats?  The 2011 predictive-programming movie Contagion—and here’s your spoiler alert—featured a pandemic almost exactly like the one we’ve just endured, which was discovered to have originated from…you guessed it…a bat!

Here’s another unpleasant surprise for you: Look at the American quarter that came out in 2020, a year which should be rechristened by the Chinese as the Year of the Bat:

What a coincidence!

Perhaps the Globalist Cabal—billionaire Gates and Davos pals who can’t wait to depopulate, I mean vaccinate, the world—with their penchant for the occult and demonic, also had in mind the Mayan’s bat god, Camazotz, associated with death and sacrifice, as in the sacrifice of human beings.  Pretty remarkable that a spooky-looking pair of bats was the best that American Samoa could come up with in the way of an uplifting emblem.

Here’s another creepy picture of our dystopian virus-laden future by Catrin Welz-Stein from the same article Of Viruses & Vectors.

WHO’S MONKEYSHINES

But it looks as if the monkey may have beaten out the bat, as the WHO is reportedly convening an “emergency” meeting on the Monkeypox which it claims is going global. Hmmm… I don’t recall ever hearing about monkeypox, which sounds as if it affects only, well…monkeys. Does that mean the WHO seeks to make monkeys out of us? If so, it won’t be the first time.

After the manner of Hollywood producers who often follow up a mediocre film with a sequel that’s even worse, it seems the Powers-That-Be are following the same template they used for Covid: First they claim to find a few scattered cases of some exotic or “novel” virus but reassure us that we have no cause for alarm…as yet. This way they can slowly build up a crescendo of fear, then suddenly crank it up to full-blown panic with projections of millions of deaths—ultimately terrifying people into getting a brand spankin’ new mRNA Chimp-22 vaccine that will magically be rushed to market to keep us, you know, “safe.”

GAIN OF FUNCTION = LOSS OF BENIGNITY

Once laboratory scientists re-engineer a virus that has never infected people and/or is benign to humans, in order to make it malignant, they’ve engaged in bioterrorism research and development. There’s no polite way to say this—it’s evil.

On the one hand, as Mary Shelley showed us more than a hundred years ago, messing with nature to create new life forms is bound to be catastrophic.  On the other, since Dr. Faustus himself has both funded this kind of “research,” lied about having done so, and presumably gotten his co-conspirators at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to cover for him, we can take this as clear indication that FauxChi knew what he was doing was wrong. And like his fictional predecessor, Dr. Frankenstein, little Tony Fauci will surely pay the price for the hellishness he’s unleashed on the world.

But unfortunately, he’s not alone. Not only have a number of “scientists” been working on Gain-of-MalFunction “research,” some of these geniuses have been laboring to create bizarre new life-forms that have even more in common with Mary Shelley’s infamous doctor and his monstrous creation. In fact, transhumanists are busily remaking man in their own benighted image, as the globalist cabal’s plan is not only to do away with our liberty, economy and quality of life, but also with humanity as we know it. For these hubristic New World Order designers, We the Peons are already being described as “legacy humans.”  This is analogous to the heirloom tomatoes you may find at your local farmers’ market—the rare varieties from the good ol’ days.

The new human species they plan to create will be merged with AI and/or some form of technological machinery—that is, those who are slated to be the “smart ones,” a la Huxley’s Brave New World. The Epsilons—those at the bottom rung of the societal ladder—will be merged with animals as “chimeras.” Alex Jones was evidently right—these experiments have been going on for many years.

And now there’s a team of researchers at Tufts that supposedly successfully created… the first-ever, self-replicating living robots.

Perhaps it was inevitable that as man discovered more and more about the wonders of our universe and of our own bodies, some would trod this path. It seems there’s nothing new under the sun after all.  The Serpent’s promise to Eve in the Garden was if she’d eat the forbidden fruit, she—and her mate—would become “as gods.”

Perhaps the psychopathic Powers-That-Be and their malevolent university-trained cohorts have forgotten the upshot of a devil’s bargain. At the very least, they ought to reread Frankenstein. Either that or the Bible.

© 2022 Cherie Zaslawsky – All Rights Reserved

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TAKE ACTION: Discovery+ Promoting Drag Queen Lifestyle to Children

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By One Million Moms

Discovery+ is releasing Generation Drag. Produced by Tyra Banks, the show documents five young drag queens as they participate in a drag show, “Dragutante,” designed for LGBTQ kids ages 8-18. In celebration of Pride Month, Discovery+ plans to release the six-episode docuseries on June 1.

The Warner Bros.-owned streaming platform, Discovery+, is wrong to produce this type of program. Many would consider it child abuse to encourage these children to dress in drag, question their gender, and sexually exploit themselves.

The parents shown on camera who celebrate their child’s decision to become transgender should be ashamed. 1MM knows that God makes no mistakes. These children were designed in His image before they left their mother’s womb.

While normalizing the drag queen lifestyle, Generation Drag attempts to make the lifestyle appear glamourous by using young cast members to lure a young audience. The reality show depicts transgenderism as the way a person is born but then glorifies this lifestyle as a decision. Tolerance is one thing, but acceptance or affirmation is another.

Obviously, Discovery+ is attempting to desensitize America’s youth by airing programs starring young people. This docuseries covers the real life of young people and will attract both young and old viewers. Children and teens are being desensitized, but parents can do something about this hidden agenda.

Take Action

Please sign our petition urging Discovery+ to drop plans to air the docuseries ‘Generation Drag’ immediately.

Let Discovery+ know that you and your family will not be watching ‘Generation Drag’ or anything else on the streaming platform in protest of this new show.

©One Million Moms. All rights reserved.

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Transgender surfer trounces female competitors in surfing contest in Australia

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DHS: ‘Domestic violent extremists’ are ‘infiltrating’ the abortion debate

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By Center For Security Policy

What would we do without the Department of Homeland Security? Those intrepid defenders of our liberties are showing these days how richly they deserve our taxpayer billions, as DHS officials, ever on the watch, warned on Monday that “domestic violent extremists” are “infiltrating” the national debate over abortion, with nefarious plans to “incite violence amongst their supporters.”

Now, I must admit, I’m not as sharp as the all the knives in the drawer over at the DHS, and I don’t have my finger on the pulse of threats to “our democracy,” which Leftists are constantly telling us is in imminent peril from people who believe in the U.S. Constitution and the basic goodness of the American experiment. So I hope that Alejandro Mayorkas and his henchmen, that is, colleagues, at the DHS will forgive me for not realizing that domestic violent extremists have only recently infiltrated the abortion debate. I had the crazy idea that domestic violent extremists had actually infiltrated the abortion debate decades ago; in fact, I thought they had been there from the very beginning. After all, there are people out there who think that those who dismember babies in the womb are performing a decent and righteous act; if that’s not domestic violent extremism, what is?

But that is, of course, not the kind of domestic violent extremism that the DHS has in mind. To be sure, our intrepid defenders didn’t specify exactly what kind of domestic violent extremism they did have in mind. ABC News reported that the DHS official who disclosed this warning “did not specify which side, if any, the extremists were taking.” However, it’s not hard to figure out which side the DHS has in mind. The FBI, as well as DHS officials, have quite frequently repeated the claim that “white supremacists” are the most formidable “domestic extremist” threat that the nation faces today.

This is an administration that has likened parents who have protested at school board meetings against Communist indoctrination and transgender propaganda in public schools to terrorists, while not saying a thing about genuine Antifa violence and thuggery, so when the DHS warns that “domestic violent extremists” are infiltrating the abortion debate, it’s absolutely certain that the people they are tarring with this label are pro-lifers. And while there have been a handful of pro-lifers who were violent in the past, it’s far more likely that DHS is equating dissenting words with violence.

Why do I say that? Because it has happened to me. Last year, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), an organization created by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube to police terrorism on the Internet, bizarrely designated my organization Jihad Watch a “violent extremist” group, despite the fact that pretty much all we do is type and report on jihad activity in the U.S. and around the world. In response to a letter from my attorney demanding a retraction, the GIFCT refused to back down. Those who designated Jihad Watch as a “violent extremist” group explained that we reported on violent activity — terrorist bombings, murders, etc. — and that this in some way “dehumanized” Muslims.

How we did this was left unexplained; it would have been impossible to explain, as it was absurd on its face. If reporting news that puts some group in a bad light is “dehumanizing,” the GIFCT and DHS should go after the establishment media for “dehumanizing” Trump and his supporters. The response to my attorney’s letter was essentially the increasingly common Leftist argument that speech that dissents from its party line is violence, and hence must be shut down.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, fresh from defending his sinister and Orwellian new Disinformation Governance Board, promises that his department is right on top of this alleged “domestic violent extremist” threat: “Over the past year, we in the Department of Homeland Security have improved and strengthened our approach to combating this dynamic, evolving threat.”

How reassuring. Meanwhile, Leftist pro-abortion ideologues have been demonstrating at the homes of the Supreme Court Justices who are likely to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade in a naked attempt to intimidate them into changing their vote. Despite the fact that it is a felony to demonstrate at private homes, the Biden administration has applauded these protests. The government is presently in the hands of thugs who believe that bullying and frightening people into submission is an acceptable political tactic. Can the DHS, in such an environment, spare even a few agents to try to head off any possible Leftist violence regarding a possible overturning of Roe? After all, Leftists are much, much more likely to be violent than pro-lifers. This is true both historically and recently and is indicated by the nature of what they’re so avidly defending.

AUTHOR

Robert Spencer

Senior Fellow.

EDITORS NOTE: This Center for Security Policy column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Time For A New National Legion of Decency to stop the social and medical ‘massacre of the innocence of youth’

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By Dr. Rich Swier

Founded in 1933 by Archbishop of Cincinnati John T. McNicholas the National Legion of Decency was an organization dedicated to identifying and combating objectionable content, from the point of view of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, in motion pictures. Bishop Cicognani warned against the “massacre of innocence of youth.” The Legion originally included many Protestant and even some Jewish clerics. The National Legion of Decency caused the movie industry to create a rating system. To learn more read our column: Is it time for the Motion Picture Association of America to Add a “Q” Rating?.

Recently Bill Mahar did a monologue during his “New Rule” segment titled “Along for the Pride.” Mahar took a look at on what has happened to children identifying as gay overtime. Bill used a chart showing the increase in the number of Americans who self-identify as LGBTQ (click here to view the chart).

Bill’s concern, like that of Bishop McNicholas, is the “massacre of the innocence of youth” over time by social pressures, chemically and via medical procedures.  Watch:

Bill Mahar asked a key question about why trans children are more likely to be from Los Angeles, Californian rather than Youngstown, Ohio, “If this spike in trans children is all natural why is it regional?”

Mahar answers his own question stating, “Either Ohio is shaming them (gays) or California is creating them.”

Bill is spot on. America is creating gays and this is the goal of public schools, colleges and universities, corporations from Apple to Amazon to Disney to the Democrat Party.

Shaming versus Creating Homosexuals

The National Legion of Decency shamed the movie industry into creating a system to classify film based upon “objectionable material.” In 1968 the MPAA set up a rating board that classified films as G, M, R, and X. The MPA ratings are now as follows:

  • G, for general audiences;
  • PG, parental guidance suggested;
  • PG-13, parents strongly cautioned, because film contains material inappropriate for children under 13;
  • R, restricted to adults and to children under 17 accompanied by parent or guardian;
  • and NC-17, no children under 17 admitted.

Is it not feasible and reasonable to do the same with those who are encouraging, promoting and thereby creating more who self-identify as LGBTQ+? We agree with Bill Mahar that this conversion to LGBTQ+ is regional but its reach is both national and global.

It is national because the U.S. public schools are brainwashing American children into believing that be gay is good, when just the opposite is true.

In the 1830s Horace Mann,  a Massachusetts legislator and secretary of that state’s board of education, advocated for the creation of a national system of public schools with the focus on training students to become skilled workers while teaching them the traditional core academic disciplines (i.e. reading, writing, arithmetic and applied science).

Today public schools are under the microscope for teaching “objectionable material” children about the gay lifestyle, thereby creating more children who self-identify as gay.

According to the American Psychiatric Association,

LGBTQ individuals are more than twice as likely as heterosexual men and women to have a mental health disorder in their lifetime. They are 2.5 times more likely to experience depression, anxiety, and substance misuse compared with heterosexual individuals.

There has been a concerted effort to stop others from “shaming” those who act gay. Gay organization like GLSEN have called it bullying and many public schools have implemented programs to stop bullying. But these anti-bullying programs are as Bill Mahar said are creating more gays.

But you see that is the objective. They want to shame heterosexuals to become gay.

PEDOPHILE USA, INC

In April we wrote a column titled “PEDOPHILE USA, INC: List of the 73 Top Underage Children’s Sex Grooming Organizations in America.” Among the groups listed as grooming children for underaged sex were:

  1. The Democrat Party
  2. United States Department of Education
  3. Disney, Inc.
  4. Department of Homeland Security
  5. AFT – American Federation of Teachers

Perhaps it is time for a new National Legion of Decency dedicated to stopping the massacre of the innocence of our youth.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

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The FDA/WIC Role in the Baby Formula Debacle

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By Daniel Kotzin

There have by now been an acute shortage of infant formula in the United States for months. Despite government claims to the contrary, it is unlikely to end anytime soon.

This turn of events was utterly predictable. Indeed, it was all but inevitable, as the government agencies responsible for providing safe, readily available infant formula have been neglecting their mission for decades.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is a regulatory agency that exists for the purpose of ensuring the safety and availability of certain products. One of the products for which the FDA is responsible is infant formula.

If infant formula causes harm, both the maker of the formula and the FDA are responsible. However, if infant formula is unavailable, only the FDA is responsible. No private entity has a duty to produce or sell formula.

Along with the FDA, the other relevant agency is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service (FNS). Their self-described mission is “to increase food security and reduce hunger.”

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is one of the programs that the FNS administers. WIC was established almost exactly 50 years ago. Its remit is to help children under the age of 5, along with pregnant and nursing mothers, to meet their nutritional needs. Currently, over half of American infants participate in the program.

By the 1990s, pregnant women and mothers who came to WIC for help, advice, and support feeding themselves and their children were often confronted with intrusive, irrelevant questions about their personal lives and medical histories, and relentless pressure to vaccinate themselves and their children. Sometimes, access to food was directly tied to immunization status.

In December of 2000, an Executive Memorandum was issued indicating that immunization status should never be used as a condition of eligibility for WIC services, but that efforts should be focused on “increase immunization levels among children participating in WIC programs.”

Ever since WIC has shamelessly been using its position of power and trust to convince women who come seeking food that what they really need is vaccines. Why, if you go to WIC’s website, is there a “spotlight” on “COVID-19 vaccines for children ages 5 – 11”? No children ages 5 – 11 are served by WIC.

WIC does not seem to have devoted as much attention over the years to providing nutritional support as it did to providing vaccination support, but it did leverage its purchasing power and institutional influence to essentially grant 3 companies an oligopoly on the production of infant formula in the United States.

One of these companies is Abbott Laboratories. A 2011 report by the USDA pegged Abbott’s share of the market at over 40%.

In February, The FDA shut down Abbott’s largest plant for manufacturing infant formula. Obviously, this caused a major national formula shortage.

With an Orwellian flourish, the Biden Administration blames Abbott for the shortage, because it is not producing enough formula. But it is the Biden administration itself that is preventing Abbott from producing it.

And besides, Abbott Laboratories is a publicly held corporation that exists for the purpose of making money. WIC, on the other hand, is a government agency that exists for the purpose of feeding mothers and small children.

Furthermore, the government has not only granted an oligopoly to three companies, but has also burdened the entire industry with a myriad of gratuitous, often inscrutable regulations, and has effectively forbidden the importation of formula from abroad. A shortage was only a matter of time.

If the FDA can’t or won’t do its job, it should at the very least get out of the way and let market forces do theirs. Instead, the agency continues to prioritize maintaining its own power and influence and continues to pursue an agenda that is often at odds with its institutional mission, undernourished babies be damned.

If the FDA and WIC did what they were established to do, instead of devoting an inordinate amount of time, money, and energy to self-promotion and vaccine promotion, perhaps there wouldn’t be so many babies in America suffering from malnutrition. 

Perhaps there wouldn’t be so many small children going to bed hungry. Perhaps there wouldn’t be so many desperate mothers, crying themselves to sleep, wondering how they will feed their little one tomorrow.

*****

This article was published by The Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

America is now aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘Disinformation Governance Board’. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called disinformation a “threat” that needs to be addressed with federal law enforcement power. (Is it coincidental that Elon Musk will shortly take Twitter private and re-establish a free speech platform in America?)

This new DHS office is the Biden Speech Police and represents an existential threat to our First Amendment and our Republic. Please click the adjacent red TAKE ACTION link for the resources to inform your Senators and Representatives about this unconstitutional and tyrannical assault on American Free Speech and our fierce rejection of it.

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Is it time for the Motion Picture Association of America to Add a “Q” Rating?

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By Dr. Rich Swier

There is a growing concern, which has turned into a national movement, to warn parents about efforts to groom their children in public school classrooms, public school media centers, by corporations like Disney, Amazon, and Apple and other publishers and distributors of books, films and TV programs.

Add to this the calls to expose misinformation, disinformation and mal-information. We are witnessing a perfect storm to expose untruths and myths in every media format.

History of Movie Censorship

In 1907 Chicago became the first city to regulate and censor movies. The United States Supreme Court upheld Chicago’s right to do this. In 1909, New York City, by order of Mayor George B. McClellan, closed 550 theaters because the police chief claimed that “most movie material was reprehensible.” A 1915 United States Supreme Court landmark decision firmly established that censorship could be applied to film.

The MPAA was founded as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) in 1922 as a trade association of member motion picture companies. At its founding, MPPDA member companies produced approximately 70 to 80 percent of the films made in the United States. In 1930, the MPPDA set up the Motion Picture Production Code (also known as the Hays Code). It didn’t wield any real power until it joined forces with the Legion of Decency, an organization created by the Catholic Church  (as well as other religious organizations) dedicated to combating “objectionable material.” From that point forward, the MPPDA would only approve films that had the Catholic Church’s seal of approval. The Legion of Decency would also assign ratings to the approved films.

The MPPDA became the MPAA

In 1968 the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) established a system of movie ratings for parents to use as a guide to determine the appropriateness of a film’s content for children and teenagers. The ratings system is voluntary, and there is no legal requirement that filmmakers submit their films for rating.

In 1968 the MPAA set up a rating board that classified films as G, M, R, and X. After various changes the MPA ratings are now as follows:

  • G, for general audiences;
  • PG, parental guidance suggested;
  • PG-13, parents strongly cautioned, because film contains material inappropriate for children under 13;
  • R, restricted to adults and to children under 17 accompanied by parent or guardian;
  • and NC-17, no children under 17 admitted.

X-rated films are now considered pornography.

Should the MPAA add a “Q” to each of its ratings?

The use of and promotion of LGBTQ+ characters has grown since the release of the film The Best Man (1964), where a character, played by Shelley Berman, is accused of being homosexual. This was the first American film to use the word “homosexual”. Brock Peters played one of the first expressly homosexual characters in an American film in The Pawnbroker in 1964.

Since 1964 there have been a growing number of homosexual characters introduced into films by all of the studios, from Disney, to Marvel, to Sony. Some studios like Disney have made it their goal to increase the number of homosexual characters in films and cartoons. This includes online streaming services who produce films such as Netflix, HBOMax, Hulu, Amazon Prime and others.

Given the growing concern by parents, healthcare professionals, psychologists, psychiatrists, politicians and the general public, we suggest it is time that the MPAA add a new rating. This rating is “Q.”

This is not a stand alone rating but rather a rating added to the current ratings of films as follows:

  • G-Q, for general audiences;
  • PG-Q, parental guidance suggested;
  • PG-13-Q, parents strongly cautioned, because film contains material inappropriate for children under 13;
  • R-Q, restricted to adults and to children under 17 accompanied by parent or guardian;
  • and NC-17-Q, no children under 17 admitted.

We also suggest that we have a rating of X-Q.

The Bottom Line

We recently went to see the Disney Studios and Marvel film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The film was rated PG. One of the scenes is of the parents of the Marvel character America Chavez played by Xochitl Gomez. America Chavez’s parents are two lesbians.

After seeing the film we learned that Zara Phythian, the martial arts stuntperson and actress who appeared in 2016’s Doctor Strange, and her husband, had been sentenced to eight years of prison after being found guilty of sexually abusing a 15-year-old girl.

We also watched as a Corporate President Karey Burke of Disney, Inc. declare that she was determined to have 50% of Disney characters be homosexuals. Watch:

SCOOP: Disney corporate president Karey Burke says, “as the mother [of] one transgender child and one pansexual child,” she supports having “many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories” and wants a minimum of 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities. pic.twitter.com/oFRUiuu9JG

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022

Disney, Inc. alone owns the following franchises:

  • ABC
  • ESPN (80% stake)
  • Touchstone Pictures
  • Marvel
  • Lucasfilm
  • A&E (50% equity holding with Hearst Corporation)
  • The History Channel (50% equity holding with Hearst Corporation)
  • Lifetime (50% equity holding with Hearst Corporation)
  • Pixar
  • Hollywood Records
  • Vice Media (10% stake)
  • Core Publishing

It is past time for movie goers to understand what is in each film whether viewed in theatres or via online streaming services or on television.

Knowledge is power. Knowing before one goes to see a movie should be an individual choice but that choice must be based upon the truth of what the film contains. If the film contains any LGBTQ+ character or promotion of the LGBTQ+ agenda then it is up to the buyer to beware.

In the eyes of many Americans what is on the silver screen today is “reprehensible.”

Better safe than sorry by warning movie goers of “objectionable material.”

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Disney Corporate President Karey Burke Says Next Generation ‘Queerer, so Disney better get with it.’

Four Disney Employees Arrested in Human Trafficking Operation

The Qu’ran and Homosexuality

Murder Suspect And Alleged Sexual Molester ‘Transitions’ To Female In NYC Jail

War on Parents: Disney Update

Homosexuality: The countries where it is illegal to be gay

RELATED VIDEO: Who Invented the Movie Rating System?

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