Politico leaked a draft version of a Supreme Court decision for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization late on May 2. It would uphold a Mississippi law protecting unborn children when they can feel pain—15 weeks of pregnancy—and overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
Dated Feb. 10, the draft decision is not final. Pro-life Americans are feeling more hopeful than ever that the Supreme Court may soon correct a grave error and leave Roe in the dustbin of history. But the leak is a nakedly political attempt to get the justices to back down. The court must issue its Dobbs decision without delay.
Roe v. Wade was a poorly reasoned, wrongly decided decision that legalized abortion on demand across the country in 1973. Sixty-two million lives and half a century later, it has poisoned our laws, our courts, and our country.
But a new day might soon be dawning. Here’s what you need to know about the shifting policy landscape on abortion and what to watch for in the days and weeks to come.
Quick Facts: Abortion in America
To set the stage for discussions about the leaked draft and the fallout, here are some key facts to keep in mind.
The United States is an outlier when it comes to abortion policy, thanks to Roe. We’re one of only a handful of countries that allows elective late-term abortion—in the company of human rights violators like China and North Korea.
Despite charges to the contrary, the law at issue in the Dobbs case, which protects unborn children after 15 weeks gestation, isn’t remotely extreme compared to the rest of the world. In fact, 47 out of 50 European countries restrict elective abortion before 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Take polls purporting to show strong support for Roe v. Wade with a grain of salt. Most Americans don’t realize that a) Roe permits abortion at any time and b) overturning Roe doesn’t prohibit abortion overnight, but returns the issue to the American people.
Most Americans don’t support Roe’s radical regime that permits abortion on demand. Rather, Americans support key protections for unborn children.
Overturning Roe has never been the final goal of the pro-life movement. When that day comes, hopefully soon, the next phase of work—especially in state legislatures—will begin in earnest. Freed from the shadow of Roe, policymakers can protect many more women and unborn children from an abortion industry that profits from their deaths.
The Radical Left’s Response
Leaking the draft opinion was a shameless act of intimidation, coercion, and destruction. It was clearly meant to try to get one or more justices to change their mind. But the left won’t stop there.
Already, activists—and senators—are calling for the Senate to eliminate the filibuster, which is the Senate’s rule for extended debate. In the Senate, a 60-vote threshold is required to end debate on a piece of legislation. Doing away with this proud tradition of extended debate—which in previous years has been praised by some of the very members who today want to end it—would mean the Senate could pass radical pro-abortion legislation by a simple majority vote.
Many of the left are happy to change rules and norms when it doesn’t suit them or frustrates efforts to impose a deeply unpopular policy. Thus, they’re renewing their calls to “pack” the courts. Under this scheme, Congress would create new judicial vacancies so that President Joe Biden could nominate activist judges.
The goal, of course, would be for activist judges, once approved by the Senate, to impose the left’s abortion policies. Such a scheme of course amounts to a “hostile takeover of the judiciary.” It would politicize the courts and undermine the fundamental principle of separation of powers.
The left is also renewing its attempts to “codify” Roe v. Wade. What it really means is legislation like the so-called Women’s Health Protection Act. This act is far more radical than Roe, which itself permits abortion for any reason throughout pregnancy.
The Women’s Health Protection Act would repeal existing state laws, expressly prohibit future laws that regulate abortion and the abortion industry and place at risk long-standing federal policies that reflect more than 40 years of bipartisan consensus.
It also would threaten policies that disentangle tax dollars from abortion, conscience-protection laws, and state-level pro-life laws such as informed consent requirements, reflection periods, parental involvement laws, and more.
Beyond Congress, abortion advocates are turning to the Biden White House. They’re urging the Food and Drug Administration to argue that its regulations permitting telemedicine abortion preempt state laws to the contrary. This would mean that abortion providers would be able to circumvent laws in over a dozen states that prohibit telemedicine abortion.
They’re also calling for the federal government to lease land to abortion clinics. This could mean that an abortion clinic could operate on federal land even within a pro-life state.
What Next?
Our laws should reflect the simple truth that every life, from the moment of conception, has inherent dignity and should be protected.
For too long, Roe has been a barrier to enacting laws that protect women and unborn children from the brutality of abortion. The Supreme Court justices in the majority must refuse to cower to the left’s appalling tactics of intimidation. They should issue their opinion without delay, allowing a new day to dawn in our country.
States can then revive old laws. These include unenforced pre-Roe statutes, conditional laws in the event Roe is overturned, and laws like “heartbeat” bills that had been blocked by lower courts. They can also enact new laws that protect the youngest and most vulnerable.
Congress, for its part, must use all its constitutional authority to protect innocent unborn children in states that refuse to protect them from abortion after their heartbeats can be detected. It must continue the work to protect babies who survive abortions, stop the interstate flow of abortion drugs, and stop taxpayer dollars from funding the abortion industry.
Congress must also ensure that nobody is forced to violate his or her moral or religious convictions by participating in abortion.
Finally, policymakers at all levels of government must commit to the central goal of the pro-life cause: to see the day when every person, from the moment of conception, is protected in law and welcomed in life.
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.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-05-05 04:05:002022-05-05 04:05:00Here’s What to Watch Following Dobbs Draft Leak
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis slammed the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion revealing that justices would likely overturn Roe v. Wade, which he viewed as an attempt to influence the Court’s final decision.
“I think It was really an attack on a lot of the justices. I think it was an intentional thing to try to whip up a lot of the public to try to make it very political, potentially try to bully them into changing one of their positions,” DeSantis said at a Tuesday press conference. “That is not something that’s appropriate for the judicial branch.”
“They need to figure out who did that and they need to hold them accountable because that’s a real significant breach of trust. You want to talk about an insurrection, that’s a judicial insurrection, to be taking that out and trying to kneecap a potential majority through extra constitutional means,” DeSantis said.
#BREAKING: Gov. Ron DeSantis responds to Supreme Court leak: “You want to talk about an insurrection — that’s a judicial insurrection.” pic.twitter.com/2ObpHkM7pz
Politico published a draft version of the court’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Monday. The leaker was attempting to pressure justices and intervene in the constitutional process, according to DeSantis.
Liberalsresponded to the leak with calls for dramatic actions in congress including abolishing the Senate filibuster to ram through court-packing and the codification of the Roe precedent into federal law.
According to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, more than 1 million excess deaths — that is, deaths in excess of the historical average — have been recorded since the COVID-19 pandemic began two years ago, and this cannot be explained by COVID-19. Deaths from heart disease, high blood pressure, dementia and many other illnesses rose during that time
Across the world, death rates have also risen in tandem with COVID shot administration, with the most-jabbed areas surpassing the least-jabbed in terms of excess mortality and COVID-related deaths
According to Walgreens data, during the week of April 19 through 25, 2022, 13% of unvaccinated persons tested positive for COVID. Of those who received two doses five months or more ago, 23.1% tested positive, and of those who received a third dose five months or more ago, the positive rate was 26.3%. So, after the first booster shot (the third dose), people are at greatest risk of testing positive for COVID
U.K. government data show the all-cause mortality rate is between 100% and 300% greater among people who got their first COVID shot 21 days or more ago. The risk for all-cause death is also significantly elevated among those who got their second dose at least six months ago, and mildly elevated among those who got their third dose less than 21 days ago. As of January 2022, all who got one or more doses at least 21 days ago were dying at significantly elevated rates
Other data also show that COVID mortality rates are far higher in areas with high vaccination rates, and risk-benefit analyses reveal the jabs do more harm than good in most age groups
According to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data,1 more than 1 million excess deaths — that is, deaths in excess of the historical average — have been recorded since the COVID-19 pandemic began two years ago, and this cannot be explained by COVID-19.
Deaths from heart disease, high blood pressure, dementia and many other illnesses rose during that time.2 “We’ve never seen anything like it,” Robert Anderson, CDC’s head of mortality statistics, told The Washington Post in mid-February 2022.3
According to University of Warwick researchers, “the scale of excess non-COVID deaths is large enough for it to be seen as its own pandemic.”4 A number of explanations have been offered, including the fact that lockdowns and other COVID restrictions discouraged or prevented people from seeking care. But another, less discussed factor may also be at play.
Across the world, death rates have risen in tandem with COVID shot administration, with the most-jabbed areas surpassing the least-jabbed in terms of excess mortality and COVID-related deaths. This flies in the face of official claims that the shots prevent severe COVID infection and lower your risk of death, be it from COVID or all causes.5
Boosted? You’re Now at Highest Risk of COVID
Ever since the announcement that the COVID “vaccines” would be using novel mRNA gene transfer technology, I and many others have warned that this appears to be a very bad idea.
Numerous potential mechanisms for harm have been identified and detailed in previous articles, and we’re now seeing some of our worst fears come to bear. “Fully vaccinated” individuals are both more likely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 and more likely to die, whether from COVID or some other cause.
As reported by investigative journalist Jeffrey Jaxen in the April 22, 2022, Highwire video above, data from Walgreens’ COVID-19 tracker6 reveal that COVID-jabbed individuals are testing positive for COVID at higher rates than the unjabbed. What’s more, people who got their last shot five months or more ago have the highest risk.
As you can see in the screenshot below, during the week of April 19 through 25, 2022, 13% of unvaccinated tested positive for COVID (with Omicron being the predominant variant). (The data reviewed by Jaxen are from the week of April 10 through 16.)
Of those who received two doses five months or more ago, 23.1% tested positive, and of those who received a third dose five months or more ago, the positive rate was 26.3%. So, after the first booster shot (the third dose), people are at greatest risk of testing positive for COVID.
A deeper dive into the data7 reveals that two doses appear to have been protective for a short while, but after five months, it becomes net harmful. The group faring worst of all is the 12 to 17 cohort, where no one with one dose tested positive, but after the second dose, cases suddenly appear, and get higher still after five months. After the third dose, positive cases drop a bit, but then shoot up higher than ever after five months.8
Deaths by Vaccination Status in the UK
Data sets from the U.K. government reveal an equally disturbing trend. The raw data from the Office for National Statistics9 is difficult to interpret, so Jaxen had data analysts create a bar graph to better illustrate what the data actually tell us. A screenshot from Jaxen’s report is below.
Bars going upward are a good thing, as it indicates the risk for all-cause mortality based on vaccination status is either normal or reduced. Bars that dip below zero percent are indicative of increased all-cause mortality, based on vaccination status.
As you can see, the all-cause mortality rate is between 100% and 300% greater among people who got their first dose 21 days or more ago. The risk for all-cause death is also significantly elevated among those who got their second dose at least six months ago, and mildly elevated among those who got their third dose less than 21 days ago. As of January 2022, all who got one or more doses at least 21 days ago were dying at significantly elevated rates.
Everywhere we look, we find trends showing the COVID shots are resulting in higher death rates. Above is an animated illustration10 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,11 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 the excess mortality rate.
Risk-Benefit Analysis Condemns the COVID Jabs
At this point, 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. For example, a risk-benefit analysis12 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.
They looked at publicly available official data from the U.S. and U.K. for all age groups, and compared all-cause mortality to the risk of dying from COVID-19. “All age groups under 50 years old are at greater risk of fatality after receiving a COVID-19 inoculation than an unvaccinated person is at risk of a COVID-19 death,” Seneff and Dopp concluded. And for younger adults and children, there’s no benefit, only risk.
“This analysis is conservative,” the authors note, “because it ignores the fact that inoculation-induced adverse events such as thrombosis, myocarditis, Bell’s palsy, and other vaccine-induced injuries can lead to shortened life span.
When one takes into consideration the fact that there is approximately a 90% decrease in risk of COVID-19 death if early treatment is provided to all symptomatic high-risk persons, one can only conclude that mandates of COVID-19 inoculations are ill-advised.
Considering the emergence of antibody-resistant variants like Delta and Omicron, for most age groups COVID-19 vaccine inoculations result in higher death rates than COVID-19 does for the unvaccinated.”
The analysis is also conservative in the sense that it only considers COVID jab fatalities that occur within one month of injection. As demonstrated by the U.K. data above, the risk of all-cause death is nearly 300% greater for those who got a second dose at least six months ago.
Teens Are at Dramatic Risk of Death From the Jabs
Similarly, an analysis13 of data in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) by researchers Spiro Pantazatos and Herve Seligmann suggests 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 whopping 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. In the 60 to 69 age group, the shot will kill one person for every person it saves from dying of COVID, so it’s a tossup as to whether it might be worth it for any given person.
How Many Are We Willing to Sacrifice?
We also have a risk-benefit analysis by researchers in Germany and The Netherlands. The analysis was initially published June 24, 2021, in the journal Vaccines.14 The paper caused an uproar among the editorial board, with some of them resigning in protest.15 In the end, the journal simply retracted it — a strategy that appears to have become norm.
After a thorough re-review, the paper was republished in the August 2021 issue of Science, Public Health Policy and the Law.16 The analysis found that, “very likely for three deaths prevented by vaccination we will have to accept that about two people die as a consequence of these vaccinations,” the authors wrote in a Letter to the Editor17 of Clinical and Translational Discovery. Defending their work, they went on to note that:18
“The database we based our analysis on was a large naturalistic study of the BioNTech vaccine in Israel. This was the only study at the time that allowed for a direct estimation of an absolute risk reduction (ARR) in mortality.
Admittedly, the ARR estimate was only available for a short observation period of 4 weeks after the first vaccine dose, a point raised by critics. One might have wanted a longer observation period to bring out the benefit of vaccinations more clearly, and our estimate of a number needed to vaccinate (NNV) of 16 000 to prevent one death might have been overly conservative.
The recently published 6-month interim report of the BioNTech-regulatory clinical trial now covers a period long enough to let us look at this risk benefit ratio once again. In Table S4 of this publication, 14 deaths are reported in the placebo group (n = 21 921) and 15 in the vaccination group (n = 21 926).
Among them, two deaths in the placebo-group were attributed to COVID-19, and one in the vaccination group was attributed to COVID-19 pneumonia. This leads to an ARR = 4.56 × 10–5, and conversely to an NNV = 1/ARR = 21 916 to prevent one death by COVID-19. This shows that our original estimate was not so far off the mark.
The most recent safety report of the German Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI) that covers all reported side effects since the vaccination campaign began (27 December 2020 until 30 November 202119 … reports 0.02 deaths per 1000 BioNTech vaccinations or 2 per 100 000 vaccinations.
We had gleaned four mortality cases per 100 000 vaccinations (all vaccines) from the Dutch pharmacovigilance database LAREB. Using the data of Thomas et al., a liberal NNV = 20 000, we can calculate that by 100 000 vaccinations we save five lives.
Using the PEI pharmacovigilance report for the same product, we see that these 100 000 vaccinations are associated with two deaths, while using the LAREB database back in June 2021, they were associated with four deaths across all vaccines and are associated with two deaths in the most recent reports concerning the BioNTech vaccine … In other words, as we vaccinate 100 000 persons, we might save five lives but risk two to four deaths.”
The risk-benefit ratio may be even worse than that, though, as these calculations do not take into account the fact that passive pharmacovigilance data “are notorious for underestimating casualties and side effects,” the authors note, or the fact that severe side effects such as myocarditis are affecting young males at a staggering rate, which can reduce lifespan in the longer term.
We Do Not Have a Functioning Pharmacovigilance System
In an August 2021 editorial, editor-in-chief of Science, Public Health Policy and the Law, James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., wrote:20
“There are two messages from those who hold appointed offices or other influential positions in Public Health on long-term vaccine safety.
The first message is that long-term randomized double-blinded placebo-controlled clinical trials are not necessary for the long-term study of vaccine safety because we have ‘pharmacovigilance’; i.e. long- term post-market safety surveillance that is supported by widely accessible, passive vaccine adverse events tracking systems.
The second message is that any use of those very same vaccine adverse events tracking systems that leads to the inference or conclusion that vaccines might cause serious adverse events or death is unsupported by such systems …
When those seeking support for public health initiatives, such as a new vaccination program, offer evidence that long-term vaccine safety studies are well in hand due to the possibility of detecting adverse events that happened following vaccination, they are either:
(a) unaware that the vaccine adverse events tracking systems upon which they are basing their confidence about society’s ability to detect and track vaccine adverse events are alleged to be unable to be used to infer causal links between health outcomes and vaccination exposure, or:
(b) participating in a disinformation campaign to end scrutiny over the absence of properly controlled long-term randomized clinical trials to assess long- term vaccine safety. Neither of these is sufficient empirical basis for the knowledge claim of long- term safety …
There must be room for disagreement in science; otherwise, science does not exist. It is sad to bear witness to the fact that science has degenerated into a war against unwanted and inconvenient results, conclusions and interpretations via the process of post-publication retraction for issues other than fraud, grave error in execution, and plagiarism.
The weaponization of the process of retraction of scientific studies is well underway, and it induces a bias that could be called “retraction bias”, or, in the case in which a few persons haunt journals in search of studies that cast doubt on their commercial products, a ‘ghouling bias,’ which leads to biased systematic reviews and warped meta-analyses.”
In his editorial, Lyons-Weiler specifically criticized the Vaccine journal for its retraction of the risk-benefit analysis cited above, and mocked the editorial board members who quit in protest, noting that “Rage-quitting is not science.”
“The resigning editorial board members’ knowledge claim is that no deaths have occurred due to the vaccination program. As helpful as that claim might be to a prescribed narrative, it is not based on empirical evidence, and it is, therefore, unwarranted,” Lyons-Weiler wrote.21
“From a Popperian view of science, one can see the fatal flaw in the editorial board members’ knowledge claim: if, as they insist, passive vaccine adverse events tracking systems cannot test the hypothesis of causality, then how can editorial board members, resigning or otherwise, know that the events were NOT caused by the vaccine? …
It is logical to conclude that since passive vaccine adverse event tracking systems do not lend themselves well to testing hypotheses of causality, they do not provide the opportunity to design and conduct sufficiently critical tests of causality, and therefore a replacement system is needed … one that is suitable to detect risk.”
While we may indeed need better pharmacovigilance, there’s really no doubt at this point that the COVID jabs are ill-advised for most people. I believe that in the years to come, people will look back at this time and vow to never repeat it. In the meantime, all we can do is look at and assess the data we do have, and make decisions accordingly.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-03 13:51:112022-05-03 13:51:11VIDEO: Why the Boosted Are Now at Highest Risk of COVID
A new scientific research paper published in TheGazette of Medical Sciences on April 21, 2022 showed an alarming, unprecedented spike in reported cases of a previously extremely rare gynecological condition called membranous dysmenorrhea, or “decidual cast shedding” (DCS).
This trend began in 2021, as Covid vaccines were being widely distributed to the U.S. population, according to the paper.
The uterus disorder DCS occurs when the entire lining of the uterus sheds and exits the body in one piece, say scientists. They say the process can be extremely painful.
Prior to Covid, there were fewer than 40 cases of the uterus disorder reported in the medical literature over the previous 109 years, according to researchers.
The authors of the paper conducted the MyCycleStorySM study in which 292 women reported having a DCS uterus disorder event over 7.5 months in 2021.
Three of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Brian Hooker, Dr. Sue Peters and Ms. Heather Ray, are part of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) science and research team.
The study was designed after an extraordinary number of women began sharing their experiences of menstrual irregularities on various social media platforms following the wide-spread distribution of the COVID vaccinations, resulting in a survey with over 150,000 participants that suggested a remarkable increase in menstrual irregularities starting in 2021.
MyCycleStorySM was created and conducted by thirteen scientists and physicians to follow up on previous reports and to gather more extensive data on the unusual increase in menstrual issues after the Covid vaccines were introduced into the population.
The MyCycleStorySM study collected detailed data from 6,049 survey participants between May 16 – December 31, 2021, all of whom described having abnormal menstrual symptoms.
In addition to the survey data, the study authors looked at Google metadata during 2021 and found that there was a 2,000% increase in the search terms “decidual cast” and “decidual cast covid vaccine” during the first two quarters of 2021.
AUTHORS NOTE: These are my views as a woman living in England, on how the culture and spirit of my country has changed over 50 years. Why the country does not feel protected or strong any more, how it has lost, and is losing it values and decency, and how we are daily losing our free speech.
“But don’t be afraid of those who threaten you. For the time is coming when everything that is covered will be revealed, and all that is secret will be made known to all. What I tell you now in the darkness, shout abroad when daybreak comes. What I whisper in your ear, shout from the housetops for all to hear!” Matthew 10:26-28
I have a very guilty secret. I have been watching the Johnny Depp versus Amber Heard court case on a daily basis. It is intriguing. I have also followed it up with an analysis by body language experts to see if I agree with their observations. One of whom schools the G7 participants! I have been late for appointments and late going to bed. One could say it has been a massive ‘distraction’. It has certainly been exhausting.
It is a fascinating insight into how lies and abuse can be so manipulated that an innocent person can be become the villain, and vice-versa. I am now wondering how many people who having watched this have made the correlation of this drama being conducted, into the experiences that we go through in life, and have especially related it to the drama we are all going through now?
Are you a perpetrator, a victim, or a survivor in life from abuse? Or just an innocent bystander? What is the truth? They are hard questions we should all ask ourselves.
After listening to the exhaustive testimony of Johnny Depp without any interruption or cross examining, I thought how fortunate he was to have had the privilege of being able to tell his story. Some people just don’t get the opportunity. It was painful to listen to and yet insightful. Yes, so called ‘fact checker’s’ were on hand, and some tried to trip him up and silence him, but on the whole free speech was allowed.
I identified with some of his stories and his mannerisms. His lazy left eye, his stumbling over words, wrong accusations, the injustice and the bullying and the shame. I also remembered how at some periods in life those childhood resentments had manifested in me and I had inflicted them on others. However, as in all scenarios I think the one thing which I really identified with is that there somewhere there is always ‘Truth’ and above all else this is something we strive and long for regardless of the pain of our own mistakes. Maybe this is why I am watching this so intently.
Truth is light on a dark day. It is clean and decent. It requires no guessing, no prompts, no acting. It possesses common sense. It sets you free.
Mutiny on the Bounty
Truthfully, loving others, or loving your neighbor, as the Bible would instruct, has been particularly difficult these last few years, as I am sure it has been for many readers.
Although I am not a nurse, working in the health service, for me, has been particularly challenging to say the least. It has been disturbing to know the harm that may have been caused to both adults and children alike, both physically and psychologically.
Exposing the sheer hypocrisy on what has been promoted as a world-wide ‘health initiative’ to protect our health, minus any risk assessment, long term data, or any type of acknowledgement to the damage that may be caused by an mRNA injectable, together with the long term use of plastic face masks, has seen some staff persecuted in my work environment, discriminated against, bullied and also accused of being selfish in their failure to comply or even quietly question some of the orders being forced upon them.
I would like to say that in witnessing this I have been like the pirate Jack Sparrow, and taken my sword, my eye-liner and boots, and stamped out the evilness of the one-eyed masters of lies and treachery, who with a ‘common-purpose’ mission, together with some neuro-linguistic programming, have seen themselves as the new and more insightful leaders of our society bullying my colleagues into submission.
The most I have done is refuse to walk the plank, worn a bit of concealer, and now with a bitter-sweet smile stand divided alongside thousands of unseen others in our health service who don’t want to cause a mutiny, but no longer feel loyal to the system who recently threatened to throw them overboard for questioning a vaccination, based on the orders of the actor Captain Johnson, the Prime Minister, who certainly likes to party.
I am very aware that for light relief, many succumbed to the pressure of not being able to stand firm or alone in what can only be considered coercive and ‘abusive’, and that there are some who feel proud at having become fully compliant into a belief they are now more competent and somehow more caring. It is a crazy mix. There are also many others who now also feel isolated themselves and regret having fallen to the oppressor.
We must always remember that.
How do you love or trust someone who has used you but then tells you to do as you are told otherwise there will be consequences?
Because of this, many have distanced themselves. The have jumped ship from the National Health Service. It is my personal belief it was that they have been unable to take the injustice and no longer feel motivated by the system they have been loyally serving. For six months prior to April 2022, health care workers had been told to take the vaccination, or else lose their job, although the terminology used was ‘deployed’ to a non-patient facing role. However, this requirement was also extended to non-patient facing staff who had been ‘scoped’ as potentially coming into contact with a patient. GP’s and doctors have also moved on, left or retired.
In responding to the latest GP workforce Data, January 2022. Dr Farah Jameel, GPC England chair at the BMA, is quoted as saying,
“At a time of significant upheaval, long waiting lists and increasing sickness in our communities, it is a terrible indictment of the current state of the NHS that highly qualified GPs are leaving the profession in such large numbers. The latest data show that over the last year England has lost the equivalent of 279 fully qualified full-time GPs, with 91 having left in the last month alone. This loss of 91 GPs works out as the equivalent of more than 200,000 patients having lost their family doctor between December and January”
Unvaccinated nursing staff who have remained and have always dedicated their lives into caring for others who were told they would now not lose their jobs, have also discovered that the re-validation requirements that they require to practice may in the future require evidence of a vaccination. From personal experience I am aware that applying for a job in the NHS, whatever it might be, also requires revealing your vaccination status.
The National Health Service, known as the NHS which the British were once so proud of is apparently sinking.
Founded in July 1948, in the UK, it has been one of the biggest employers in the world. Employing over 1.3 million staff it has been promoted as being a government funded medical and health care service which anyone can freely use. However, contrary, to the narrative of it being a free health service, the NHS is actually publicly funded for by the taxpayer, and in some areas, such as in the case of prescriptions or private consultations; patients do have to pay for that service. In some areas such as dentistry or ophthalmology, payments are also made, albeit at a reduced rate in comparison to private care in those fields.
In 2019, prior to the pandemic it was announced by Boris Johnson that there was a bounty of gold amounting to £34 billion being put into the NHS to save it. I’m sure it won him some favor, but in light of how the money has been mis-used, the continual cry of the NHS needing even more money to still save it is becoming tiring in the face of what we have now witnessed and experienced.
The mental health of people is a real world-wide epidemic which is now taking place. The harm we have inflicted upon children has always outweighed the risks of a virus.
It is also reported that whistleblowing by care home staff was up by 66% during Covid 19. Vulnerable adults should have always had a family member or guardian to physically visit and support them. Elderly patients who were discharged from hospital were also placed in care homes across the UK and were not tested for Covid 19.
Former minister Baroness Altmann said the “shocking rise” in whistleblowing complaints was “clear evidence” of a “broken social care system”.
Jayne Connery, founder and director of Care Campaign for the Vulnerable, said she was “saddened” but not surprised by the rise in complaints. Jayne said the corresponding fall in safeguarding reporting was because local authorities and the CQC were not visiting care homes
Dr Cathy Gardener, whose father died from Covid in a care home after untested patients were sent there from hospital, also took legal action against Health Secretary Sajid Javid, NHS England and Public Health England.
Despite the request by the government to throw the case out, in a ruling made in April this year, it was concluded that the government indeed acted unlawfully.
Knowingly, or unknowingly, this is the abuse which has been inflicted upon us. Various spokespersons including thousands of professional and qualified health professionals and scientists world-wide have tried to warn others. They have even exposed the abusers to the detriment of their own livelihood. Missiles were thrown at them. The isolation and the division that has now been created in the workplace is heartbreaking. I don’t believe it can be repaired.
Working in the health service I have witnessed some very dedicated staff. Some of them I have known for over 17 years. They are like family to me. I am aware that some have been vaccinated and some have not. I am much more aware of those who have been vaccinated as they still have much more freedom to talk about it. Sometimes I notice they seem indifferent to the fact that others are not afforded the same freedom or respect. There is sometimes a silence now as I watch from a distance not knowing what will happen long term to those who are still part of this psychological trial and the experiment which has taken place upon us, but I am encouraged that more people are coming forward to talk about the adverse reactions that have been experienced from the vaccination and that people are becoming more aware of the yellow card system where doctors should record side-affects.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-02 10:52:002022-05-02 10:52:00Guilty Secrets and The Fall of the National Health Service in the UK
Research indicates that the federal government is actually responsible for the vast majority of animal cruelty in the country.
Animal rights groups like PETA raise millions of dollars per year and spend their time dumping fake blood on celebrities’ fur coats. Even more radical groups like the Animal Liberation Front set restaurants that sell meat on fire and torch research labs.
But a new report from the White Coat Waste Project (WCW), a free-market based animal rights group, indicates these organizations should probably be directing their fury at a much bigger culprit: the government.
That’s right. Research indicates that the federal government is actually responsible for the vast majority of animal cruelty in the country. According to WCW, the government spends millions of taxpayer dollars every year on animal laboratories that carry out unethical testing on animals through grants, contracts, and experiments within its own labs.
In a new report, Up In Smoke, WCW exposes even more of these corrupt practices. In particular, they detail millions of taxpayer dollars the government recently spent on cannabis and e-cigarette animal experiments—and rampant violations of federal spending transparency law that were committed in the process.
In one experiment, “pregnant mice were confined to a chamber, where they were forced to breathe e-cigarette vapor for hours.” According to the report, “After giving birth, their pups underwent behavioral tests, and were then killed and their brains analyzed. However, experimenters openly acknowledged significant differences between rodent brain development and human brain development.”
Another experiment forced mice to breath a variety of flavored e-cigarette vapors to “study the effects of vaping on the heart.” But notably, the authors said that “caution should be exercised when extrapolating the findings in the mouse heart to the human heart due to the presence of many obvious differences including those related to important species differences.”
So, in short, our government has been hotboxing mice for no apparent reason—they aren’t even producing research that could improve human health.
There are other problems detailed in the report as well. For instance, the Stevens Amendment is an old federal policy that requires public disclosure of taxpayer monies spent, yet WCW reports that not one experiment detailed in their report was in compliance with that law.
A Perennial Problem
This is the second time in under a year that abusive animal testing by our government has come to light. Just a few months ago it was revealed that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided a grant to a lab in Tunisia to torture and kill beagle puppies for scientific experiments.
These revelations are chilling. But they really won’t surprise anyone who is even vaguely familar with the practices of our government.
While our Founders intended the US to be a bastion of human rights and ethics, decades of rampant spending with little accountability have spawned a sprawling federal system that is anything but this. We see this leviathon bombing innocent civilians in other countries, persecuting journalists and whistleblowers who tell the truth about the government’s actions, and condemning thousands of innocent Americans to life behind bars for nonviolent offenses. Is it any wonder they also do not value the lives of animals? Hardly.
There’s a cruel irony here, too. While the government locks American citizens in jail for cannabis use with its right hand, it’s turning around and drugging animals with the same product with its left.
As economist Ludwig von Mises once said, “The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.”
This report is yet further proof of what many in the libertarian camp have long known: government is the real source of most of the evil in this world. But unlike when individuals do something wrong, there is little to no accountability for government actors when they carry out actions that would land the rest of us in jail.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-01 21:51:172022-05-01 21:51:17ANIMAL CRUELTY: New Report Reveals the Federal Government Is Spending Millions To Get Animals High
The Shanghai Composite and Hang Seng fall to where they’d first been in 2007 during the run-up of the bubble.
The Shanghai Composite Index plunged 5.1% to 2,928 on Monday, the biggest one-day drop since February 2020, during the Wuhan crisis. The index is now down 20% year-to-date and down 14% from a year ago. And for folks promoting buy-and-hold: The index has now returned to a level it had first reached in February 2007 during the run-up of the ridiculous stock market bubble just before the Beijing Olympics.
Also gone is the hype-and-hoopla bump that Chinese stocks got in mid-March when Vice Premier Liu He, in order to stem the slide then in progress, came out with promises of market-friendly measures.
The CSI 300 index, which tracks the biggest blue-chip stocks trading in Shanghai and Shenzhen, dropped 4.9% on Monday, to 3,933, is down 23% year-to-date, and is down 25% from a year ago.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index, where many Chinese companies are listed, plunged 3.7% on Monday and is down 31% year-over-year. At 19,869, the index has regressed to a level first seen in January 2007.
The offshore yuan, after dropping 2% last week against the dollar, fell as much as 1.3% on Monday to 6.60 per dollar, the lowest since November 2020.
When it hit that level, the People’s Bank of China came out to support the currency and said it would cut the foreign-exchange reserve requirement ratio for banks next month to 8%, from 9%, thereby “increasing banks’ capabilities of forex fund use,” the PBOC said, according to Bloomberg. This announcement caused the currency to recover some from the losses earlier today, and it ended down 0.7%.
Last year, the PBOC raised the foreign-exchange reserve requirement, from 5% to 9%, to tamp down the appreciation of the yuan against the dollar.
Crude oil prices fell globally, with WTI now down 5.1%, at $96.87 a barrel, on fears of demand destruction resulting from further supply chain chaos due to prolonged lockdowns in Shanghai and potentially in Beijing, which would trigger broader and even bigger inflation that will hit demand.
Suddenly forgotten are the factors that had powered the spike in oil prices to begin with, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which has made Russian oil toxic on parts of the global markets. Markets are kind of funny about these memes that suddenly do U-Turns.
What rattled markets on Monday was the fear of a draconian lockdown in Beijing, similar to the draconian lockdown in Shanghai that is now entering its fifth week and entailed measures such as fences around some residential buildings so people couldn’t get out, mass testing, and forced quarantine in massive quarantine centers.
America is on to the LGBTQ…., transgender, gender fluidity, sexualizing agenda the Walt Disney Company is openly grooming our nation’s children with. It is timely and imperative that we inform Disney of our rejection of their indoctrinating, far leftist and godless attempt to sexually groom our youngest generation…
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-05-01 03:55:002022-05-01 03:55:00Stock Markets in China & Honk Kong Dive, Yuan Slides, Crude Oil Drops on Confidence Crisis in China
The Shanghai Composite and Hang Seng fall to where they’d first been in 2007 during the run-up of the bubble.
The Shanghai Composite Index plunged 5.1% to 2,928 on Monday, the biggest one-day drop since February 2020, during the Wuhan crisis. The index is now down 20% year-to-date and down 14% from a year ago. And for folks promoting buy-and-hold: The index has now returned to a level it had first reached in February 2007 during the run-up of the ridiculous stock market bubble just before the Beijing Olympics.
Also gone is the hype-and-hoopla bump that Chinese stocks got in mid-March when Vice Premier Liu He, in order to stem the slide then in progress, came out with promises of market-friendly measures.
The CSI 300 index, which tracks the biggest blue-chip stocks trading in Shanghai and Shenzhen, dropped 4.9% on Monday, to 3,933, is down 23% year-to-date, and is down 25% from a year ago.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index, where many Chinese companies are listed, plunged 3.7% on Monday and is down 31% year-over-year. At 19,869, the index has regressed to a level first seen in January 2007.
The offshore yuan, after dropping 2% last week against the dollar, fell as much as 1.3% on Monday to 6.60 per dollar, the lowest since November 2020.
When it hit that level, the People’s Bank of China came out to support the currency and said it would cut the foreign-exchange reserve requirement ratio for banks next month to 8%, from 9%, thereby “increasing banks’ capabilities of forex fund use,” the PBOC said, according to Bloomberg. This announcement caused the currency to recover some from the losses earlier today, and it ended down 0.7%.
Last year, the PBOC raised the foreign-exchange reserve requirement, from 5% to 9%, to tamp down the appreciation of the yuan against the dollar.
Crude oil prices fell globally, with WTI now down 5.1%, at $96.87 a barrel, on fears of demand destruction resulting from further supply chain chaos due to prolonged lockdowns in Shanghai and potentially in Beijing, which would trigger broader and even bigger inflation that will hit demand.
Suddenly forgotten are the factors that had powered the spike in oil prices to begin with, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which has made Russian oil toxic on parts of the global markets. Markets are kind of funny about these memes that suddenly do U-Turns.
What rattled markets on Monday was the fear of a draconian lockdown in Beijing, similar to the draconian lockdown in Shanghai that is now entering its fifth week and entailed measures such as fences around some residential buildings so people couldn’t get out, mass testing, and forced quarantine in massive quarantine centers.
America is on to the LGBTQ…., transgender, gender fluidity, sexualizing agenda the Walt Disney Company is openly grooming our nation’s children with. It is timely and imperative that we inform Disney of our rejection of their indoctrinating, far leftist and godless attempt to sexually groom our youngest generation…
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-05-01 03:55:002022-05-01 03:55:00Stock Markets in China & Hong Kong Dive, Yuan Slides, Crude Oil Drops on Confidence Crisis in China
For the past 20 years, medical practitioners (nurses and doctors) were ranked the most trusted professions by the Gallup Honesty and Ethics poll. When a patient visits a doctor, he or she can assume that the doctor will only consider treatments benefiting the patient. This is because hundreds of years of medical practice have established a tradition of trust in which the patient believes that the doctor adheres to the ancient Hippocratic Oath (first do no harm) and the modern-day Declaration of Geneva, the ethics of medical practice published by the World Medical Association.
The Declaration of Geneva’s Physician’s Pledge states in part: “I will not permit considerations of age, disease or disability, creed, ethnic origin, gender, nationality, political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, social standing or any other factor to intervene between my duty and my patient.”
Political affiliation should not be a consideration when a doctor sees a patient.
Of course, things are seldom as simple as they seem. Politics and medicine have been around as long as human civilization, and the two have been intermingled at the individual level since ancient times. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the Western world particularly, we have started to see the politicization of medicine at the institutional level, and this should worry us all.
About 1,800 years ago, in ancient China’s Three Kingdoms era, warlord Cao Cao invited renowned doctor Hua Tuo to treat his chronic headaches, thought to be caused by a brain tumor. Hua wanted to open up Cao’s skull to remove the tumor, but Cao suspected that Hua was hired by his political enemies to kill him, so he had Hua imprisoned. Eventually, Hua died in prison, and Cao died from the tumor that Hua had sought to remove.
When politics intersect with medicine, the trust between doctor and patient breaks, and both parties suffer.
Fast forward to 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) became the ruling regime in China. Under the CCP, suspicion such as Cao’s became policy, and everything was politicized. They took control of every aspect of people’s lives, from the cradle to the grave.
Amid COVID, authorities in the West have been making medical decisions for millions of its citizens, some even without solid scientific support. As a Chinese Canadian who grew up in communist China, I would like to warn people of the dangers of this unprecedented approach.
My Body, the CCP’s Choice
The CCP even makes a woman’s womb political.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when Mao wanted to increase the Chinese population so that he would have more people to fight American imperialism, women were encouraged to have more babies. I was born during that time, the ninth child in my family.
But in the 1970s, the CCP decided that Mao was wrong, and China had too many people, so they implemented the brutal one-child policy, with forced abortions killing millions each year. That went on for four decades.
Then in 2016, when the regime saw population decline as a threat to China’s economy and to its own power, it wanted women to have more babies again and changed the one-child policy.
The CCP’s flip-flop “family planning” practice is not only inhumane, but it also failed to achieve the intended goal in some ways. In my case, I was born as part of Mao’s desire to have more people fighting the Americans, but here I am siding with the Western democracies against the CCP’s authoritarian policies.
COVID: a Political Opportunity for the CCP
Similarly, when SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, the CCP immediately treated the outbreak as political. Facts became irrelevant; Beijing’s political narrative was paramount.
On Dec. 30, 2019, when Dr. Li Wenliang took to his personal social media platform to alert a few friends and colleagues about this new pneumonia he was seeing in Wuhan, he was punished by the authorities as what he wrote was not politically correct. He later tragically died from COVID-19 himself.
The politically correct narrative at that time was that the new pneumonia cases in Wuhan did not exist. A couple of weeks later, when the CCP could not deny the existence of the cases, they told everyone, including the World Health Organization, that the virus was not transmissible from human to human.
Then, from late January 2020 to March 2020, the CCP’s lies became so crazy that their narratives would contradict one another. On one hand, they locked down Wuhan and prevented domestic travel from the city to the rest of China; on the other hand, they continued to allow international travel from Wuhan to the rest of the world, while accusing anyone suggesting a travel ban from Wuhan as being racist.
Many now believe it was the CCP’s political intention to spread the virus to the rest of the world while trying to control it in China.
The question must be asked: If an international travel ban had been implemented, could the virus have been contained inside Wuhan, thereby avoiding the pandemic and the deaths of more than 6 million people worldwide?
In any case, the CCP’s behavior cannot be explained scientifically—it only makes political sense. And it was aligned perfectly with the regime’s global view. The pandemic could serve as an opportunity to prove to the Chinese people and the world that the CCP system is superior to Western democracy. Through stringent and even draconian lockdowns, and through lies and total media control, the CCP was able to convince the Chinese people that it had stopped the spread of the virus in China. At the same time, the media played up the inefficiency of western democracies as being incapable of controlling the spread of the virus, leading to millions of deaths.
Zero Omicron, Lots of Xi
It has been two and a half years since the start of the pandemic, and during that time the CCP has boosted its model of pandemic control. Up until last month, it seemed that the CCP was able to control the spread of the virus—even with the fast-spreading Omicron variant and holding a big international event like the Beijing Winter Olympics. Xi Jinping claimed that the achievement was made possible under his personal vision and leadership. The core of his strategy is zero COVID—eliminate the virus with all of the mighty power of the CCP.
Then late last year, COVID appeared in Xi’an, a city of 13 million people. The city was locked down from Dec. 23, 2021, to Jan. 24, 2022, with a total of only 2,053 COVD cases detected. Although there is no official statistics on the deaths caused by the lockdown, individual cases of death were reported due to a lack of access to health care. It was clear that the damage of the lockdown was more severe than the disease itself.
In early March 2022, COVID arrived in Shanghai, China’s biggest city. As no deaths were reported at that time, top scientist Dr. Wenhong Zhang, head of the city’s COVID task force, advocated coexistence with the virus. Given the lessons learned from Xi’an, one would think a lockdown, with all the hardship it brings for people, would not be implemented in Shanghai. Unfortunately, the whole of China is under Xi’s personal leadership, and Shanghai is no exception.
Starting April 3, more than 20 million residents in Shanghai were barred from exiting their homes, leaving many struggling to obtain food, water, and medical care. Stories of deaths occurring as a result of the hardline measures were circulated online. By April 12, at least 15 million residents were still being locked in their homes.
We have no way of knowing how many lives were lost due to the lockdown, but it’s probably in the thousands given the size of the population. Here is one example. Professor Larry Hsien Ping Lang, a Wharton graduate, well-known economist, and TV host in Shanghai who openly endorses Marxist ideology, could not help his mother. She died outside a hospital as she waited for hours for her COVID test result, which she needed to enter the hospital for her routine treatment. The brutal lockdowns affect everyone, including the CCP elites.
Just as Mao’s policy didn’t succeed in forcing me to become a CCP-loving anti-American soldier, Xi Jinping’s lockdowns lack common sense given that the measure has now proven to be useless in fending off Omicron. As a result, we are witnessing another man-made catastrophe happening in Shanghai and possibly other Chinese cities. One can only hope that the zero-COVID lockdown madness stops before more people die. The Chinese people have suffered enough.
Stop Politicizing Medicine in the Free World
With most of the population vaccinated or naturally immune from having been infected by SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19 has become a manageable disease in the United States and Canada. Although it can still be deadly, this now-endemic flu-like disease could be managed with minimal deaths, while society returns to normal life.
In some jurisdictions and sectors, however, masking and vaccination are still mandatory. But why? It doesn’t make any sense at this stage of the pandemic.
In fact, it was the CCP’s tactics that fueled the politicization of COVID, not only in the United States and Canada but pretty much worldwide. This led to the lockdowns, dividing people against one another, governments strong-arming their mandates, and public health officials having far too much control.
We also had the Donald Trump factor. Americans seemed to be divided into two opposing camps: Trump supporters and never Trumpers. With the legacy media in the never Trumper camp, anything Trump supported became controversial, particularly advocating for drug therapy to treat COVID-19.
How far are we from the CCP’s complete politicization of everything in our lives? Warlord Cao’s suspicious approach was passed on to generations of Chinese, but it never became an institutional practice to completely destroy the trust between doctor and patient. When the CCP took control, however, they proceeded to politicize everything and destroyed the doctor-patient trust in just a few short years, because they did it with state power.
If the authorities in the West make politicizing medicine a policy, it could quickly destroy the doctor-patient trust beyond repair. We should never allow what the CCP did in China to happen in the free world. We still have some time. We should remain aware and be willing to fight to preserve the integrity of modern medicine.
America is on to the LGBTQ…., transgender, gender fluidity, sexualizing agenda the Walt Disney Company is openly grooming our nation’s children with. It is timely and imperative that we inform Disney of our rejection of their indoctrinating, far leftist and godless attempt to sexually groom our youngest generation…
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-04-30 03:55:002022-04-30 03:55:00The Grave Dangers of Politicizing Medicine
The invasion crisis on our southern border is baffling. How could this outrage be happening?
The White House wants you to believe that they’re powerless to stop it. They’re willing to appear negligent and/or stupid to keep the wheels turning.
But there’s only one possible explanation that holds water: it’s a plan.And it’s working, as the border zone is flooded with millions of illegal immigrants, almost all of whom will stay permanently and lay the groundwork for an invincible voting bloc in the future.
If they sincerely wanted to do something about it, officials wouldn’t have to do any complicated thinking. Just stop egging on illegal immigrants to come and reinstate the Trump-era policies that were at least somewhat helpful.
You have to almost admire the masterminds of this catastrophe for persevering in the face of growing bipartisan revulsion at this inhumane tragedy. They are playing the long game even at the price of taking short-term political hits.
In contrast to the helpless-to-resist image they’re trying to peddle, they’re contemplating the revocation of Title 42, a Trump-era rule allowing migrant crossings to be turned away for public health reasons. Homeland Security projects ending Title 42 would result in an inconceivable 18,000 migrant crossings daily, up from our already unmanageable 7000. At that rate, by the end of Biden’s term, one in five American residents would be here illegally.
Americans don’t need to be told the results of massive illegal immigration. We live it daily. Illegal immigrants by law have access to our emergency rooms. Over half of the newborns at LA County Hospital are newly minted American citizens born to illegal immigrant parents at taxpayer expense.
Illegal immigrants crowd our schools, forcing our already stressed educational system to divert focus to ESL instruction. Moreover, they undercut unskilled American workers and drive down their wages.
They also contribute to our burgeoning crime problem. The number of criminals who have evaded Border Patrol is obviously unknown but over 40 migrants on the terror watchlist have been apprehended in addition to those who have slipped through. Enough fentanyl has been imported for every single American to have taken a fatal overdose.
But America’s greatest threat from massive illegal immigration isn’t the effect on our safety, our education nor our healthcare. It’s not the welfare and correctional services illegal immigrants consume. The greatest danger is losing our nationhood.
America is uniquely a nation based not on geography nor blood but on its values and ideals. We have amply demonstrated our ability to absorb large numbers of immigrants who love America, who come because they want to be Americans and share our values and ideals, established in our Declaration and Constitution.
Illegal immigrants, by contrast, begin their relationship by defying a foundational principle that has made the US a magnet for immigrants since its creation: the Rule of Law. This is the belief that we are ruled by laws, not men (people), and that each of us stand as a free and equal individual before the law.
Unfortunately, this tsunami of immigration from socialist autocracies where corruption is the norm is occurring at a time wherein America is struggling with growing levels of tribalism. E Pluribus Unum is fading as many Americans now identify primarily as members of a political, racial or other groups that competes for favors from government.
Assimilation is now scorned as a micro-aggression. America is regarded by its own citizens as oppressive and bigoted.
Tens of millions of illegal immigrants who neither know nor care about America’s defining values don’t bode well for our future. In a decade or two, we’ll undoubtedly begin to hear about how they “deserve“ citizenship, they’ve been here a long time, don’t have any other home, and so on. Our unity as Americans will become more fractured.
Americans are historically compassionate and resilient. But it is past time for Americans to reinforce the crucial distinction between illegal and legal immigrants.
It’s not racist or xenophobic to protect our borders from those who ignore our principles but want to enjoy the fruits of our success. It is crucial to the survival of America as we know it.
*****
Thomas C. Patterson, MD is a retired Emergency Medicine physician, Arizona state Senator and Arizona Senate Majority Leader in the ’90s. He is a former Chairman, Goldwater Institute.
TAKE ACTION
America is on to the LGBTQ…., transgender, gender fluidity, sexualizing agenda the Walt Disney Company is openly grooming our nation’s children with. It is timely and imperative that we inform Disney of our rejection of their indoctrinating, far leftist and godless attempt to sexually groom our youngest generation…
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-04-29 04:05:002022-04-29 04:05:00The Border Invasion is an Existential Crisis for America
In 2014, Democrat John Morgan decided that he wanted to legalize the use of marijuana in Florida. His first attempt in 2014 failed. However, on December 17th, 2015 the Florida Supreme Court approved a constitutional amendment, drafted by John Morgan and United for Care, that called for the legalization of medical marijuana. The state ruled it valid for placement on the Florida 2016 ballot.
Because of John Morgan and United for Care on November 8th, 2016, Floridians voted in favor of Amendment 2.
Today a variety of Cannabis Based Products (CBP) are now available in most Florida supermarkets and pharmacies including CVS, Walgreens, Publix and Walmart.
Marijuana as Gate-Way Drug
Many studies have looked at marijuana to determine if it is a “gateway drug” that leads to the use and abuse of other drugs, both legal and illegal.
[O]ne study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics documents findings from one analysis that adolescents who use cannabis are 104 times more likely to use cocaine than adolescents who never use cannabis. There are significant differences between these two populations of adolescents predating the onset of cannabis use. These observations are often used by proponents of cannabis legalization to disregard the possibility that the adolescent use of cannabis may, in and of itself, create de novo risk for the use of opioids or other drugs that otherwise would not exist. This review discusses recent scientific discoveries that address neuropathophysiological mechanisms whereby cannabis use could biologically introduce additional risk for the likelihood of opioid initiation, dose escalation, and OUD that otherwise might not occur within the same individual.
Nearly 68% of the 4,698 reported drug overdose deaths in Florida involved opioids in 2018—a total of 3,189 fatalities (and a rate of 15.8) (Figure 1).
Deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone (mainly fentanyl and fentanyl analogs) remained stable but high with 2,091 in 2018 (a rate of 10.7).
Deaths involving heroin and prescription opioids also remained steady with a respective 689 (a rate of 3.5) and 1,282 (a rate of 6.0) reported in 2018.3
If you look at Figure Figure 1 you will find the following:
Since 2015 heroine deaths have risen from less 500 in 2015 to 2,091 in 2018.
Prescription opioid deaths have risen from under 1,000 in 2015 to 1,282 in 2018.
Synthetic opioid deaths have risen from under 500 in 2015 to 2,091 in 2018.
Overall opioid deaths have doubled from 1,500 in 2015 to 3,189 in 2018.
The State of Florida’s Bureau of Vital Statistics reported 243,088 deaths in Florida during 2020. Of the 44,577* deaths investigated by Florida’s medical examiners, toxicology results determined that the drugs listed below were present at the time of death in 14,708 deaths. The medical examiners assessed whether the drug(s) identified was the cause of death or merely present at the time of death. The data were then submitted to the Medical Examiners Commission (MEC) for presentation in this report. It is important to note that each death is a single case, while each time a drug is detected represents an occurrence. The vast majority of the 14,708 deaths had more than one drug occurrence.
Florida has a serious drug problem and the legalization of marijuana (cannabinoids and synthetic cannabinoids), has not helped Floridians but has in fact killed Floridians.
In 2018, Florida providers wrote 53.7 opioid prescriptions for every 100 persons, compared to the average U.S. rate of 51.4 prescriptions.
On March 16th, 2022 Attorney General Ashley Moody warned Floridians of a new, deadly synthetic opioid found in Florida called Isotonitazene—commonly referred to as ISO. According to reports, ISO is approximately 20 to 100 times stronger than fentanyl—an already incredibly dangerous opioid. Similar to fentanyl, this new synthetic opioid is being mixed with other drugs and appearing in the illicit drug market—possibly in powder or pill form. Often, users have no idea that a lethal synthetic opioid is mixed into a drug until it is too late. Attorney General Moody is sounding the alarm and asking people to never take an illicit drug because just one pill can kill.
Attorney General Ashley Moody said,
“For years, we have been warning about the dangers of fentanyl and how just one pill laced with this synthetic opioid can kill. Now, there is a new, deadlier drug being found in Florida. Isotonitazene, also known as ISO, is so strong that it can kill just by coming in contact with someone’s skin or being accidentally inhaled. ISO has already been linked to overdose deaths in Florida, so please, never take any illicit drug and know that using just one time could cost you your life.”
Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco said,
“ISO is a dangerous substance that we have, unfortunately, seen in Pasco County. As law enforcement continues to have to address the healthcare crisis of substance abuse, our goal remains to save lives and protect our community, which is why we have highlighted and brought awareness to the impact this dangerous substance has in our community.”
Since 2015 more and more illegal drugs are flowing into the Sunshine State and harming our youth, all thanks to the efforts by John Morgan and United for Care to legalize marijuana!
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-27 18:51:222022-04-27 18:51:22FLORIDA: Illegal Drug Deaths Have Skyrocketed in the Sunshine State Since Legalizing Marijuana
Teen cannabis use has been reported as a risk factor for psychotic experiences as well as schizophrenia.
Cannabis has been used by humans for thousands of years and is one of the most popular drugs today. With effects such as feelings of joy and relaxation, it is also legal to prescribe or take in several countries.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that, in 2018, approximately 192 million people worldwide aged between 15 and 64 used cannabis recreationally. Young adults are particularly keen, with 35% of people between the ages of 18 and 25 using it, while only 10% of people over the age of 26 do.
Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the main psychoactive compound in cannabis. It acts on the brain’s “endocannabinoid system”, which are receptors which respond to the chemical components of cannabis. The cannabis receptors are densely populated in prefrontal and limbic areas in the brain, which are involved in reward and motivation. They regulate signalling of the brain chemicals dopamine, gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and glutamate.
We know that dopamine is involved in motivation, reward and learning. GABA and glutamate play a part in cognitive processes, including learning and memory.
Cognitive effects
Cannabis use can affect cognition, especially in those with cannabis-use disorder. This is characterised by the persistent desire to use the drug and disruption to daily activities, such as work or education. It has been estimated that approximately 10% of cannabis users meet the diagnostic criteria for this disorder.
In our research, we tested the cognition of 39 people with the disorder (asked to be clean on the day of testing), and compared it with that of 20 people who never or rarely used cannabis. We showed that participants with the condition had significantly worse performance on memory tests from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB) compared to the controls, who had either never or very rarely used cannabis. It also negatively affected their “executive functions”, which are mental processes including flexible thinking. This effect seemed to be linked to the age at which people started taking the drug – the younger they were, the more impaired their executive functioning was.
Cognitive impairments have been noted in mild cannabis users as well. Such users tend to make riskier decisions than others and have more problems with planning.
Although most studies have been conducted in males, there has been evidence of sex differences in the effects of cannabis use on cognition. We showed that, while male cannabis users had poorer memory for visually recognising things, female users had more problems with attention and executive functions. These sex effects persisted when controlling for age; IQ; alcohol and nicotine use; mood and anxiety symptoms; emotional stability; and impulsive behaviour.
Reward, motivation and mental health
Cannabis use can also affect how we feel – thereby further influencing our thinking. For example, some previous research has suggested that reward and motivation – along with the brain circuits involved in these processes – can be disrupted when we use cannabis. This may affect our performance at school or work as it can make us feel less motivated to work hard, and less rewarded when we do well.
In our recent study, we used a brain imaging task, in which participants were placed in a scanner and viewed orange or blue squares. The orange squares would lead to a monetary reward, after a delay, if the participant made a response. This set up helped us investigate how the brain responds to rewards. We focused particularly on the ventral striatum, which is a key region in the brain’s reward system. We found that the effects on the reward system in the brain were subtle, with no direct effects of cannabis in the ventral striatum. However, the participants in our study were moderate cannabis users. The effects may be more pronounced in cannabis users with more severe and chronic use, as seen in cannabis use disorder.
There is also evidence that cannabis can lead to mental health problems. We have shown that it is related to higher “anhedonia” – an inability to feel pleasure – in adolescents. Interestingly, this effect was particularly pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.
Cannabis use during adolescence has also been reported as a risk factor for developing psychotic experiences as well as schizophrenia. One study showed that cannabis use moderately increases the risk of psychotic symptoms in young people, but that it has a much stronger effect in those with a predisposition for psychosis (scoring highly on a symptom checklist of paranoid ideas and psychoticism).
Assessing 2,437 adolescents and young adults (14-24 years), the authors reported a six percentage points increased risk – from 15% to 21% – of psychotic symptoms in cannabis users without a predisposition for psychosis. But there was a 26-point increase in risk – from 25% to 51% – of psychotic symptoms in cannabis users with a predisposition for psychosis.
We don’t really know why cannabis is linked to psychotic episodes, but hypotheses suggests dopamine and glutamate may be important in the neurobiology of these conditions.
Another study of 780 teenagers suggested that the association between cannabis use and psychotic experiences was also linked to a brain region called the “uncus”. This lies within the parahippocampus (involved in memory) and olfactory bulb (involved in processing smells), and has a large amount of cannabinoid receptors. It has also previously been associated with schizophrenia and psychotic experiences.
Cognitive and psychological effects of cannabis use are ultimately likely to depend to some extent on dosage (frequency, duration and strength), sex, genetic vulnerabilities and age of onset. But we need to determine whether these effects are temporary or permanent. One article summarising many studies has suggested that with mild cannabis use, the effects may weaken after periods of abstinence.
But even if that’s the case, it is clearly worth considering the effects that prolonged cannabis use can have on our minds – particularly for young people whose brains are still developing.
Professor Barbara J Sahakian is based at the University of Cambridge Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute. Sahakian is also an Honorary Clinical Psychologist at… More by Barbara Sahakian
Dr. Christelle Langley is a Cognitive Neuroscientist, she received her PhD from the University of Bristol in 2018. Her PhD focused on understanding the relationship between fatigue and cognition in Multiple… More by Christelle Langley
Martine Skumlien is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge Department of Psychiatry, supervised by Professor Barbara J Sahakian. Her research aims to understand the potential impact of cannabis… More by Martine Skumlien
I had my PhD training in Computational Genomics at the University of Birmingham and then joined the IMAGEN project at King’s College London as a bioinformatician. From Dec 2017, I returned to Fudan University… More by Tianye Jia
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-27 04:52:092022-04-27 04:52:09Cannabis: How it affects our cognition and psychology
Four times as much fentanyl is flowing across the United States-Mexico border under President Joe Biden compared to two years prior when former President Trump was in office.
During the launch of Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Ken Calvert’s (R-CA) congressional caucus dedicated to the fentanyl crisis, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Mark Dunbar of the Murrieta Station in southern California noted that the level of fentanyl seizures has skyrocketed in the last year.
“Across sectors, we’re seeing the amount of fentanyl coming across the border almost doubling,” Dunbar said. “What we’re seeing coming across is equal to the amount of Americans who are dying from it in the U.S.”
In Fiscal Year 2019, about 2,800 pounds of fentanyl was seized at the border. The following year, that figure capped out at 4,800 pounds of fentanyl seized. By Fiscal Year 2021, which represents most of Biden’s first year in office, fentanyl seizures skyrocketed to about 11,200 pounds.
Already, in Fiscal Year 2022 that began October 1, 2021, about 5,300 pounds of fentanyl have been seized at the border.
The figures indicate that fentanyl seizures under Biden, last year alone, have quadrupled since Fiscal Year 2019 when Trump was in office.
As Dunbar noted, fentanyl is primarily flown into Mexico from China before the Mexican drug cartels then traffic large quantities across the southern border. Only a fraction of the fentanyl trafficked across the border is seized by the Department of Homeland Security.
“For cartels, it is all about making money,” Dunbar said…..
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-04-26 03:55:002022-04-26 03:55:00Flow of Fentanyl into American Communities Quadruples Under Biden
In 2021, McKinsey & Company, one of the largest consultants to corporations and governments worldwide, settled a lawsuit brought by 47 state attorneys general over its role in the U.S. opioid crisis
A U.S. House investigation reveals McKinsey was advising the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on the safety of opioids, while at the same time advising Purdue how to maximize sales
Jeff Smith, a senior McKinsey consultant, worked on a risk evaluation and mitigation strategy (REMS) for OxyContin while simultaneously advising the FDA about the drug’s safety
McKinsey promoted its FDA connections when pitching services to its pharmaceutical clients. The FDA, meanwhile, claims it had no idea McKinsey was working with Purdue
Purdue knew the dangers of its drug, covered it up, and hired FDA insiders to advise its sales strategy and how to influence the FDA. They also hired Publicis to manage its marketing. Publicis, the world’s largest PR company, funds and partners with “fact checking” organizations to suppress and censor the truth
In 2021, McKinsey & Company, one of the largest consultants to corporations and governments worldwide, settled a lawsuit brought by 47 state attorneys general over its role in the U.S. opioid crisis. The firm agreed to pay $573 million in fines1 for driving up sales of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin painkiller, even as Americans were dying in droves.
Between 1999 and 2019, nearly 500,000 Americans died from overdoses involving opioid drugs,2 and false advertising and bribery were at the heart of this tragedy. As reported by The New York Times:3
“McKinsey’s extensive work with Purdue included advising it to focus on selling lucrative high-dose pills, the records show, even after the drugmaker pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal criminal charges that it had misled doctors and regulators about OxyContin’s risks. The firm also told Purdue that it could ‘band together’ with other opioid makers to head off ‘strict treatment’ by the Food and Drug Administration.”
Worse Than We Thought
We now find out that the situation is even more corrupt than we previously thought. A U.S. House investigation4,5,6 into McKinsey, based on materials obtained through the discovery process of this and other lawsuits, has revealed McKinsey was advising the FDA on the safety of opioids, while at the same time advising Purdue how to maximize sales.
In one instance, McKinsey wrote “scripts” for Purdue to use in its meeting with the FDA to discuss the safety of OxyContin in pediatric populations. In another, Jeff Smith, a senior McKinsey consultant, worked on a risk evaluation and mitigation strategy (REMS) for OxyContin while simultaneously advising the FDA about the drug’s safety.7
As noted by investigative journalist Paul Thacker,8 “Just think about that for a moment — for years McKinsey played both cop and robber.” As reported by The New York Times, April 13, 2022:9
“Since 2010, at least 22 McKinsey consultants have worked for both Purdue and the FDA, some at the same time, according to the committee’s 53-page report …
The firm provided no evidence to the committee that it had disclosed the potential conflicts of interest as required under federal contracting rules — an ‘apparent violation,’ the report said.
McKinsey also allowed employees advising Purdue to help shape materials that were intended for government officials and agencies, including a memo in 2018 prepared for Alex M. Azar II, then the incoming secretary of health and human Services under President Donald J. Trump.
References to the severity of the opioid crisis in a draft version of the memo, the documents show, were cut before it was sent to Mr. Azar.
‘Today’s report shows that at the same time the FDA was relying on McKinsey’s advice to ensure drug safety and protect American lives, the firm was also being paid by the very companies fueling the deadly opioid epidemic to help them avoid tougher regulation of these dangerous drugs,’ Representative Carolyn Maloney, the New York Democrat who chairs the committee, said in a statement
[ … ]
A bipartisan group of lawmakers last month introduced legislation10aimed at preventing conflicts of interest in federal contracting, citing McKinsey’s experience with Purdue and the FDA.”
The FDA, in response, has stated that it “relies on its contractors to assess and report potential conflicts of interest,” The New York Times reports.11 In other words, it’s just pointing fingers and refusing to take responsibility for working with advisers that clearly could, and should, be suspected of having ulterior motives, based on their client base.
Isn’t it obvious that McKinsey, working to improve sales for its opioid-making clients, might give the FDA biased advise on behalf of those clients? Remarkably, in October 2021, the FDA wrote12 to senators claiming they had no idea McKinsey was even working for Purdue, and didn’t find out about it until media reported it in early 2021.
It seems beyond irrationally foolish that the press could find out about it, but not the FDA — somewhat like the head of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, going on CNN and quoting Pfizer press releases as factual data.
McKinsey Advised FDA on Opioid Safety
The FDA hired McKinsey as an adviser in 2011. The company worked with the FDA office overseeing drug companies plans to monitor safety of risky products such as opioids, and internal documents show that, on multiple occasions, McKinsey promoted its FDA connections when pitching services to its pharmaceutical clients.13
For example, in a 2009 sales pitch, McKinsey wrote that it provided direct support to regulators, “and as such have developed insights into the perspectives of the regulators themselves.”14
In a 2014 email to Purdue’s chief executive, McKinsey consultant Rob Rosiello wrote, “We serve the broadest range of stakeholders that matter for Purdue. One client we can disclose is the FDA, who we have supported for over five years.”15
Evidence also suggests McKinsey took “steps to limit material that could be subpoenaed” once Purdue was sued, The New York Times reports.16 In one instance, printed hardcopies of slide decks were sent to Purdue instead of being emailed because they knew Purdue staff would be deposed and didn’t want their email correspondence to “get sucked into it.”
Did McKinsey Influence FDA Commissioner?
The Interim Majority Staff report17 by the Committee on Oversight and Reform, titled “The Firm and the FDA: McKinsey & Company’s Conflicts of Interest at the Heart of the Opioid Epidemic,”published April 13, 2022, also includes emails in which McKinsey employees claim to have influenced an opioid safety speech by then-FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb.
Gottlieb denies the accusation, but the fact that McKinsey was working so intimately with the FDA means they certainly would have been capable of such influence. Gottlieb also has financial ties to the opioid industry, having received $45,000 in speaker’s fees from companies that manufacture and distribute opioids.18
In 2012, Gottlieb also wrote a Wall Street Journal essay, attacking the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for pursuing the criminal activity of opioid distributors, saying it would burden patients, “including those with legitimate prescriptions who may be profiled at the pharmacy counter and turned away.”19
Intent to Harm
What we have here is a picture of gross conflicts of interest with an apparent intent to harm. Purdue Pharma was as crooked as they come, conducting sham studies and bribing doctors to prescribe its highly addictive opioid, while its consultant, McKinsey advised the FDA on the drug’s safety.
At the same time, Purdue also worked with the Publicis Groupe — the largest PR company in the world as of November 202120 — which funded the startup of NewsGuard, a “fact checking” group that rates websites on criteria of “credibility” and “transparency.” In April 2021, Publicis partnered with NewsGuard specifically “to fight the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation about COVID-19 and its vaccines.”21
NewsGuard’s health-related service, HealthGuard,22 is also partnered with the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a progressive U.K.-based cancel-culture leader23 with extensive ties to government and global think tanks that has labeled people questioning the COVID-19 vaccine as “threats to national security.”
At the beginning of May 2021, the Massachusetts attorney general filed a lawsuit24,25 against Publicis Health, accusing the Publicis subsidiary of helping Purdue create the deceptive marketing materials used to mislead doctors into prescribing OxyContin.26,27,28,29
Like Purdue, Publicis also cashed in on the opioid addiction it helped create by pitching its services to organizations working to end addiction. As reported by Forbes,30 the agency “won the account to work on drugfree.org after touting how it’s been ‘immersed in the evolving national opioid medication dialogue going on between pharma companies, the government and FDA, and the public via inside access as a trusted and informed consulting partner.’”
So, to summarize, Purdue knew the dangers of its drug, covered them up, hired FDA insiders to advise its sales strategy and influence the FDA, and is connected with a PR company that had the ability to suppress and censor negative news to manage its marketing. It’s hard to describe this scheme as anything but intentional mass murder.
The Spin Doctors
The reality may even be worse, and much larger, than that, seeing how Publicis is also a partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF),31 which is leading the call for a “reset” of the global economy and a complete overhaul of our way of life.32
As detailed in the featured video, Publicis’ fingerprints can be found throughout the net of censorship and misdirection that is now being cast across the digital landscape. As the No. 1 PR company in the world, Publicis has just the right credentials and influence to pull off a deception of this size.
It’s part of an enormous network that includes international drug companies, fact checkers and credibility raters, Google, Microsoft, public libraries, schools, the banking industry, the U.S. State Department and Department of Defense, the World Health Organization and Disney, just to name a few. As noted by investigative reporter David Marks in “How PR Giant Publicis Promotes Greed, Deception on Behalf of World’s Most Powerful”:33
“The essential skill of these expert spin doctors is their ability to fabricate a favorable interpretation of damaging information or activity or diminish the impact of the truth.
Through tried and true psychological ploys, repetition of false information or casting doubt on factual realities, ad agencies and PR firms target those who need to be influenced on behalf of their clients …
An examination of one of the largest entities neck-deep in managing these mass psychological operations reveals the depth of the dysfunction afflicting the planet. The vast activities of the Publicis Groupe demonstrate how the tentacles of greed, profit and privilege connect the catastrophic agendas of the most powerful enterprises on Earth …
Using sophisticated social psychology and incorporating the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, Publicis PR experts are masters of damage control, the manipulation of words and people, and of selling the unsellable. Publicis is organizing influential activities worldwide, overtly revealing its mission and priorities.
… [Its] website reveals who actually benefits from the company’s services: ‘The entire Publicis Groupe transformation was designed to put clients at the center of all we do. Their needs and objectives drive the solutions we provide in order to help them win and grow’ [ … ]
In considering the range of activities Publicis engages in, the dots are so close there is no need to connect them. The PR giant’s methodology is transparent.
Whether promoting opioids or pushing vaccines, rebranding status quo profiteering as a Great Reset, supporting cigarette sales, disguising the true nature of the fossil fuel industry, increasing soft drink consumption or covering for assassinations — Publicis has all the skills and facilities to create whatever fabrications are needed to sell products and influence how their wealthy collaborators are viewed.
The Publicis Groupe and its allies are at the hub of a worldwide insidious, destructive disinformation campaign, relying on the duplicitous ways of advertising and public relations in the loyal service of clients.”
A Plan to Drug the Useless Eaters?
As a WEF partner and global PR machine for some of the most powerful industries on the planet, it seems reasonable to assume Publicis is helping to coordinate the WEF’s Great Reset agenda. Sadly, that includes not only the management and control of the peoples of the earth, but also the elimination of “undesirables.”
In a 2015 interview (video above), Yuval Noah Harari, a history professor and adviser to WEF founder Klaus Schwab, discussed what Schwab refers to as The Fourth Industrial Revolution (i.e., transhumanism), noting that we’re now learning to “produce bodies and minds” (meaning augmented bodies, and cloud and artificial intelligence-connected minds) and that one of the greatest challenges we face will be what to do with all the people that have become obsolete in the process.
How will unaugmented people find meaning in life when they’re basically “useless, meaningless”? How will they spend their time when there’s no work, no opportunity to move up in some kind of profession? His guess is that the answer will be “a combination of drugs and computer games.”
This raises a disturbing question. Was the opioid crisis the result of an intentional plan — a conspiracy in the literal sense of the word — to hook the masses on an addictive drug? This is purely speculative, of course, but it surely fits in with The Great Reset agenda as a whole.
If people are addicted, the drug and medical industries make money (and they’re without doubt part of The Great Reset network), and if people die, well, that’s in accordance with The Great Reset plan too, as they insist there are too many “useless eaters” on the planet, and they either must be managed or eliminated.
Publicis Is Part of the Global Monopoly
In closing, it’s worth noting that Publicis is partially owned by the Vanguard Group,34 one of the two largest asset management firms in the world. Together with BlackRock, Vanguard has a hidden monopoly on global asset holdings and exerts control through their ownership of some 1,600 American companies.35
Combined, BlackRock and Vanguard own nearly 90% of all S&P 500 firms.36 To learn more about how Vanguard and BlackRock own just about everything in the world, and have monopoly control over all industries, check out the 45-minute video above, “Monopoly — Follow the Money.”
In short, the idea that there is competition in the marketplace is a cleverly disguised illusion. In reality, everything is controlled by a small group of asset managers that win no matter what. The end goal is to own and control all the world’s assets, which includes people.
The WEF slogan “You’ll Own Nothing and Be Happy” really summarizes The Great Reset plan for mankind. They will own everything; you will own nothing, not even your own body, and you’ll be too drugged up and lost in a make-believe computer game world to realize you’re a slave. If they can somehow make a profit from your useless existence, they’ll let you live. If they can’t, you’ll be eliminated. That’s really what the plan comes down to.
The plan for global authoritarianism is advancing with each passing day, but all is not lost yet. By informing ourselves and sharing what we know with others, we can reach the critical mass needed to end their plan and take back control.
It’s going to require standing together, unified in favor of freedom and liberty. It’s going to require legal and legislative efforts to weed out the corruption and infiltration that has occurred throughout the corporate world and our governments. It’s going to require honest men and women to step into positions of power that they never wanted. It may take a lot of time and effort, but if we want our descendants to experience freedom, no price can be too great to pay.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-25 16:51:302022-04-25 16:51:30Popular Pill Exposed; Was This Intentional Mass Murder?
Whenever government rolls out a system to track its citizens those citizens must we wary of its purpose. Of course we have IDs like: driver’s licenses, passports and voter IDs to be able to drive our cars, travel and legally vote.
While Democrats hate voter IDs but it appears that Biden, his administration and the Democrat party is launching vaccine passports, a.k.a. “SMART Health Cards” or Digital IDs.
No voter IDs but mandated SMART Health Cards? Since when does government have the right to track my personal healthcare actions?
What happened to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) signed into law by Bill Clinton?
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a federal law that required the creation of national standards to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued the HIPAA Privacy Rule to implement the requirements of HIPAA. The HIPAA Security Rule protects a subset of information covered by the Privacy Rule.
As people are breathing a sigh of relief at the easing up of vaccine and mask mandates, the vaccine passports – called “SMART Health Cards” or Digital IDs — are being quietly rolled out across our nation and internationally. Especially when combined with a cashless society, these can be used to usher in a system similar to China’s “Social Credit Score [SoCS],” placing us under surveillance and taking away our freedoms.
“What if every action that you took in your life was recorded in a score like it was a video game?” … “If your score drops to 950, you will be subject to re-education.” … “It is the beginning of slavery, complete control, and the disappearance of all freedoms … In China, they call it social credit.” These are just some of the statements made in parliamentary debates in Europe and online commentaries about China’s Social Credit System.
[ … ]
The SoCS, which first emerged in China in the early 2000s, was inspired by credit scoring practices elsewhere in the world, such as FICO in the United States and Schufa in Germany. In the main blueprints for the system there was no reference to large-scale scoring of individuals. It did, however, spawn tangentially-related initiatives like Alibaba’s Sesame Credit, but this was only indirectly related to the SoCS and, in any case, the People’s Bank of China eventually denied the company a credit license. Only in late 2016 did the State Council – China’s top governmental body – formally refer to the idea that it would “explore the establishment of a personal integrity score management system”.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-24 15:51:122022-04-24 15:51:12WARNING: Biden quietly rolling out ‘digital vaccine passports’ — Big Brother will be watching you!
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” –George Orwell
They say crises bring out the best and the worst in people. They also often inspire a few gallant men and women to rise to the occasion at great cost to themselves—whether that involves risking their livelihoods, reputations, or even their lives—to fight for the rest of us.
Dr. Scott Atlas, Senior Fellow in Health Policy at Stanford’s highly acclaimed Hoover Institute, former professor and Chief of Neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center, Founding Fellow of Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom in Washington, D.C., is one such hero, as he sounded the alarm over the nation’s disastrous lockdown/shutdown policies to fight a microbe.
When President Trump got wind of Atlas’ scientific and rational approach to keeping the vulnerable safe while sending everyone else back to school or work, he invited the doctor to come to the White House to enlighten the Task Force and the public as to how to proceed for the good of all.
Predictably, Atlas was subsequently roundly condemned in our national Pravda media, and perhaps even more disgracefully, by no fewer than ninety-eight of his colleagues at Stanford, who couldn’t wait to virtue signal by distancing themselves from one of their peers who dared to challenge the group think Covid narrative by speaking the truth.
Dr. Atlas Goes to Washington
Like the iconic Mr. Smith before him—played unforgettably by Jimmy Stewart in the classic film—Dr. Atlas was in for a rude awakening in the halls of government. His quickly became the lone voice crying in the wilderness, urging a reasonable, demonstrably scientifically valid, common sense way to save our quickly crumbling nation while lowering fatalities among our elderly—the most vulnerable to Covid.
One would think the Task Force members, none of whom was a health policy expert, would have welcomed his presence, advice and professional opinion. However, they didn’t take kindly to someone correctly pointing out that the Emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes. After all, they’d been pursuing the same disastrous course of action for some six months, and though it had been a gargantuan failure on every level, insisted on keeping it going strong. How rude of this interloper to point this out! Atlas quickly became a barely tolerated pariah in the Task Force meetings.
In fact, upon Dr. Atlas joining the Task Force for the first time, Dr. Smirx, I mean Birx, asked him point blank how long he’d be attending their meetings. And later, Dr. Faustus told CNN that everyone on the Task Force was in agreement, except for one “outlier.” That would be the one telling the truth.
In his riveting account of his time in Washington, A Plague On Our House, Atlas chronicles how the members of the Coronavirus Task Force and assorted team players conspired to neuter him and his valiant attempts to provide the American people with the truth and thus to end the insanity and destruction of the lockdowns, and to open schools and colleges again.
Time and again, the Task Force members and associated Deep Staters closed ranks and drowned out Dr. Atlas’ message with their loud chorus of soundbite inanities to preserve the narrative of the Plandemic psy-op:
“Lockdowns work!” “You’re on the fringe!” “Masks work!” “Don’t rock the boat!” “They don’t even know they’re sick!” (That gem from Dr. La Scarf ). “We need more testing!” “Cases are rising!” “Don’t rock the boat!” “What if we’re not sure?” (Dr. Fraudster) “Schools are at risk!” “Super-spreader events!” “Slow the spread!” “Don’t rock the boat!”
INTENTIONALLY SINKING THE SHIP OF STATE
Dr. Atlas recounts being repeatedly stunned by the absence of logic, science and data at every meeting of these supposed public health “experts” who also seemed impervious to facts that disproved their cherished narrative.
What he may not have realized at the time is that, contrary to appearances, these people are not just stupid—they’re evil. They knew what they were doing was wrong. They were taking orders, following a plan: the globalist cabal’s plan to weaken and gut America by decimating the middle class, disrupting nearly every sector of our society, and enabling an enormous wealth transfer from We the People and our beloved neighborhood Mom-and-Pop businesses, to the vast corporate pockets of Jeff Bezos’ Amazon and the Big Box stores, among other colluding profiteers, not to mention Big Pharma’s deadly boondoggle waiting in the wings.
Tragically, one can also readily imagine a cohort of Trump’s trusted inner circle after November 4th, many of the same people, urging the President to step down, though he knew he’d won the election, and singing a similar refrain to the tune of “Think of the optics!” and “Don’t rock the boat!”
ATLAS TRUMPS FAUCI
For a brief and glorious moment, Scott Atlas triumphed over the deadly duo, Dr. Fraudster and Dr. Smirx.
Largely due to Atlas pointing out the flaws with testing low-risk populations and the many issues with PCR tests, Drs. Giroir (Testing Czar) and Redfield (CDC Dirctor) agreed that the CDC testing guidelines should be revised. Redfield circulated his revised draft among the Task Force members, including Dr. Atlas, so they could add their own edits. The resultant sea change in CDC guidelines restored the testing decision to the individual and his/her physician. Testing would increase for nursing homes, and decrease for he general population. Bravo!
Only one problem.
The American Propaganda Machine, aka mainstream media, pundits, talking heads, etc. pushed back hard. Outrage echoed across all platforms. Governor Newsom of California, never one to miss an opportunity to be on the wrong side of any major issue, declared: “I don’t agree with the CDC guidance period, full stop, and it’s not the policy in the state of California.”
Why was the Woke Left suddenly abandoning their idolized CDC? They screamed there must have been “top-down” (as in Trumpian) pressure on the agency to change the rules! After all, the new ones directly interfered with the “contact tracing” surveillance program and continuing fearmongering so central to the Plandemic agenda.
After two weeks of media meltdowns—not to mention a whopper by Dr. FauxChi, who claimed he was in the hospital undergoing surgery when the changes were made—Redfield quietly removed all the revisions to the CDC guidelines, which fell predictably back into the corrupt, destructive status quo. No wonder Dr. Atlas used the term Kafkaesque to describe his D.C. experience.
The brouhaha over this short-lived victory for common sense underscores that it was never about “the science” or the CDC—it was always about the larger agenda: the takedown of America.
DEATH BY BUREAUCRACY
What does it take to destroy a presidency? To destroy a country?
In our case, it may have only taken a crabby, scarf-clad killjoy named Birx flying from state to state to spread bad tidings—partially of her own making—to convince mainly Dem Governors to wreck their states. After all, there was a virus on the loose! So let’s undo Trump’s economic miracle, shut down the small businesses that are the engine of American prosperity and the heart of their communities, close the schools to further dumb down and traumatize our kids, and pretend our hospitals are overflowing in order to frighten people to death. Then force people to cover their mouths and noses with toxic synthetic masks from Communist China, so we can’t see each other’s faces, can’t relate normally, and have to breathe in our own ‘exhaust’ air, while dramatically curtailing the amount of oxygen we get with every breath.
Brilliant! But only if you wanted to make people sick, scared, and bankrupt—or at least poorer—and to destroy their country.
THE FAUCH AND THE GROUCH
For millions of Americans, myself included, Dr. FauxChi quickly became the face of the “Pandemic”—that is, of the overweening and catastrophic governmental response to the 2020 flu. Granted he had a knack for depressing an entire nation with just a sentence or two as he played his infamous role of the Emperor of Covid.
But one of the shocks I got from reading Scott Atlas’ eye-popping first-person account of the sausage-making apparatus of the Covidian Huddle and Task Force, was that Dr. Deborah Birx, aka Scarf Lady, really ran the show! In fact, she absolutely controlled the Task Force and nearly all the messaging that eventually reached the public.
Astonishingly, the entire Task Force along with nearly everyone involved in the Trump Administration’s Covid response lived in mortal fear of upsetting the notoriously thin-skinned, ill-tempered Birx.
But by October, as the political winds began blowing favorably for Trump’s reelection, Seema Verma, head of CMS/Medicare, told Scott, “… we need to get rid of Birx. She is a disaster! She keeps saying the same things over and over; she’s incredibly insecure; she doesn’t understand what’s going on. We need to eliminate her moving forward.” (A Plague Upon Our House, p. 237). This after months of Birx nixing everything Scott had recommended.
Remember when La Birx, after insisting that we give up Thanksgiving and just twiddle our thumbs under virtual house arrest rather than getting together with our families, actually flew home to spend Thanksgiving with hers? Seems the Newsom, Pelosi, Birx types understand full well that the rules they make are for us peons—not for themselves.
Dr. Deborah Birx traveled with family out of state over Thanksgiving weekend — disregarding her own advice to stay home and not gather during the holidays… Birx — who has a home in Washington, DC, and another in Potomac, Maryland — defended the trip, saying she needed to take care of winterizing the property before a potential sale.
Interestingly, once Birx tasted a morsel of well-deserved public fury, she headed for the door, suddenly announcing her retirement. Poor thing—she said the criticism was “very difficult on my family.”
Um, Deborah, how do you think your endless pushing for business and school closures has been on the families of countless numbers of the American people? I guess that’s been a bit more difficult than having your feelings hurt by being called out for rank hypocrisy, eh?
THE BUCK STOPS…NOWHERE
From my point of view, the most painful sentence in Dr. Atlas’ entire exposé of the inner workings of the Trump Administration’s Coronavirus Task Force turned out to be a quote by the President himself. During a tête-à-tête between the two men, Dr. Atlas explained the need for strategically focused testing, and Trump agreed but remained frustrated, adding, “You’ll have to convince my son-in-law of that.”
Hold on there! Who’s in charge? Who’s the President? Where does the buck stop?
This was the problem. As I see it, Trump had already lost the country to Establishment hack doctors, entrenched bureaucrats, and out-of-their-depth novices, including his own son-in-law who arguably should never have been brought into his fledgling administration.
In an American Thinker article, Dr. John Dale Dunn quotes Dr. Paul Elias Alexander’s personal account of his brief, tumultuous stint for the Trump Administration in the spring of 2020. He’d had the temerity to criticize the insanely unscientific and destructive policies of Fauci/Birx/Collins, who unceremoniously informed him:
‘Trump is powerless‘ they told me, he has zero power. Nothing he says matters to them in the deep state bureaucracy…As they told me, ‘he is only visiting, we run things’. . . .
This is largely what Dr. Atlas discovered as well. The Deep State—career bureaucrats on board with the takedown of America in favor of the elites’ One World Government agenda—along with other quislings and clueless neophytes, consistently undermined the President of the United States, and thus, the American people.
We owe a large debt of gratitude to men like Canadian Dr. Paul Alexander and our own Dr. Scott Atlas, for doing their utmost to rescue America from the stranglehold of the Faucian/Birxian/Redfieldian catastrophic Covid agenda. They paid a high price for their outspokenness. We can only imagine how much better off we’d be today had they, and others like them—the real scientists and adamant truth-tellers—prevailed.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-23 12:51:382022-04-23 12:51:38Dr. Scott W. Atlas: An American Hero
So, the witches’ brew in summary is sky-high stock valuations, extraordinarily high debt burdens, rising interest rates, rising inflation rates, inverting yield curves, a bond bear market, supply chain crisis caused by lockdown, energy price shock, food price shock, war, radical social change, monetary regime upheaval, and poor political leadership.
Having spent almost all of a professional career in financial services dealing with clients, it is easy to attest that almost all periods of time have hazards for the investor. It was always worthwhile to remind investors, who longed for what they thought were the “good old days” that it always has been difficult.
There are always adverse trends and perverse political developments. But within that, there continues to be human progress. Much of it has been technological, but unfortunately little of it has been social or moral progress.
Living through this period was instructive, but if you are younger, you will need to read some history to fully understand.
Just a brief history should remind us all that the “good old days” were full of difficulties such as raging inflation and war in the 1960s and 1970s. Remember how unsettling The John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy assassinations were? You can add to that race riots, Watergate, defeat in Viet Nam, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Crash of ’87?
Or how about the Russian default, the Thai-Baht crisis, the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, the tech bubble of 1999, or the crash of 2007?
Along the way, we had several large wars in the Persian Gulf.
You might remember we got a twofer in 2007-2008, the dual pleasure of a housing bust and banking crisis, followed by a stock market bear crash.
Go back even further and you have Sputnik, the U-2 incident, the Suez Crisis, Hungarian Revolt, the Korean War, and two World Wars.
The stock market peaked in 1966 and did not return to those highs in inflation-adjusted constant 1966 dollars until 1995. Much of this occurred in what many regard as a better time in the country’s life.
In an earlier period, if one had purchased stocks in 1928, it took until 1956 to break even in inflation-adjusted terms.
Since the crash of 2008, we have had an uncommonly good run in stock values, including inflation-adjusted levels. The last few incredible years are not even shown on the chart.
The point is the “triumph of the optimists” has always carried both the stock market and economy eventually higher, although the progress was uneven. Sometimes there is a pause for years, even decades. Only in hindsight does it seem easy.
Thus, in the long term stocks, and the nation, have persevered. But there can be setbacks that take years to mend. This is particularly dangerous for older people who don’t “have the long term.”
Markets cycle. That is what they do. They go up and down, but generally more up than the down. The same is true of the economy in general.
Having set the context, we admit it would be hard to think of a similar period that had more toxic trends to deal with than the one we face today. And remarkably, almost all of them are the product of deliberate policy choices.
The question before us then is this: will this toxic brew of problems seriously set back the stock market?
What is truly scary is that any one of the trends we are about to mention, by themselves, has often caused a recession. But rarely do we see such a cluster of such potentially powerful adverse trends together, reinforcing one another when just one of these is dangerous enough on its own.
Right now, investors face a historically overvalued stock market and real estate market. Yes, expensive markets can surprise and just get more expensive. But expensive markets are also vulnerable and once they turn, the downside risk is magnified because of the gross departure from reasonable historic value.
If there is one “iron law” in market history, it is a reversion to the mean. Remarkably, so far the stock market still hovers not far from its highs and has taken only a mild correction.
Rapidly rising interest rates, especially when accompanied by inversion of the yield curve (short-term rates move above long-term rates), have reliably signaled recession. We are now seeing that as the FED must regain some credibility after uncorking the worst inflation in 40 years. Either they raise rates sufficiently high to kill off inflation by reducing demand (a recession), or we let the inflation fires burn uncontrollably for years. This is not a very good set of choices.
The rise in rates has been so far been largely disregarded by the stock market but the bond market is being hit hard. The bond market is much larger than the equity market so this loss is certainly just as important as what goes on in the stock market. But, it does not get the attention of the public.
Debt levels are far worse than they were 40 years ago. In 1980-1982 when Reagan and Volker were driving rates to nose bleed levels, Federal debt as a percentage of total output was about 30%.
Today, debt to GDP is 130%, or more than four times greater relative to output, and in many countries, it is substantially higher than that.
The cost of debt service is a function of two things: the amount of debt and the interest rate paid to borrow. Today the amount of debt is so much higher than before that interest rates well below the 1980 peak could clobber the economy and the Federal budget. How high do they go before they hurt? Who knows?
Whether the borrower is a government or a business, or a homeowner, rising rates on a huge pile of debt normally create default at the margin. Credit spreads (the interest rate between secure paper and speculative paper), are widening, indicating rising rates are beginning to bite and induce distress.
So far one country, Sri Lanka, has gone bankrupt. We fear they won’t be the last or the biggest.
During the prior periods previously mentioned, the world went through several flu epidemics and the polio crisis. The government never quarantined the healthy, such as the lockdown policies we have seen over the past two years. We also never saw the government print $7 trillion dollars and hand out money to anyone who could fog a mirror.
Lockdown has royally screwed up the world’s supply chain because except for perhaps Sweden, most of the world followed the U.S. model, which in turn, followed the model of China. As the West now emerges from lockdown, China, the manufacturing hub of the world, is once again going back into lockdown in their most populous city. That is not going to help the supply chain crisis.
Then along came Russian aggression in Ukraine, which is upending the world’s energy and food markets, and increasing defense spending. Usually, a rapid rise in energy costs alone can cause a recession. Now we get to add to that a food crisis.
For reasons cited in previous articles, the West’s response to Russia, the sanctions but particularly the seizing of central bank assets, is likely to induce a change in the international monetary structure. Once again, simply this painful adjustment, has often by itself, been sufficient to cause a recession. The monetary crisis of 1971, preceded the 1973-1974 stock market crash, which was the worst at the time since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Again, it is not surprising that these difficulties came during a time of political upheaval (Watergate). Weak political leadership often occurs during economic crises. Inflation raged under Carter, a weak and indecisive President.
Clearly, political leadership is weak today, or perhaps even worse, it is senile.
We won’t even go into social and moral upheaval although many students of history point to 1966-1968 as a similar period. As mentioned before, the stock market peaked and did not recover to its previous highs for almost 30 years. We seem to be moving from men and women wanting to have sex without restraint (the sexual revolution born in the late 60s) to the abolition of what male and female even mean. Where will this trend end and how much damage will it do to society?
The changes in social conditions in “The Roaring Twenties”, also gave birth to the sober 1930s with the onset of the Depression.
Do social and moral upheaval cause these economic problems? It is unlikely they are the cause, but moral confusion does seem to accompany economic upheaval. We will leave that one to the social historians but that the two trends tend to come together is of concern.
So, the witches’ brew in summary is sky-high stock valuations, extraordinarily high debt burdens, rising interest rates, rising inflation rates, inverting yield curves, a bond bear market, supply chain crisis caused by lockdown, energy price shock, food price shock, war, radical social change, monetary regime upheaval, and poor political leadership.
If that list is not sufficient, we have one more to add that seems unique to economic history. In the past, when faced with difficulties, political parties tended to compromise for the benefit of the country and its citizens. After all, people elect politicians and politicians often are pragmatic.
Today’s Democrats are such harsh ideologues, especially the fanatical environmentalists, that things we could normally do as a society to ease the pain (such as drill for more energy while Russia is using energy as a weapon), cut more timber to lower construction costs, plant more acreage to grow food, and mine more metals to reduce our dependence on hostile sources like Russia and China, are taken off the table. They simply can’t be considered for ideological reasons.
Today’s Democrats would rather starve the world than bend at all on their quasi-religious belief that all climate change is caused by man’s activities. There is a strong anti-human element that has converted reasonable conservation into a religion that puts the earth first and mankind second.
Their central planning instincts have gone manic. Hubris has run amok. Unable to even clean up homeless encampments or keep the streets safe, or stop the spread of Covid, they earnestly believe they can actually change the climate of the earth in 100 years. That the earth’s climate is always changing for a variety of reasons is lost on them. They believe that they, and they alone, are responsible for altering something as complex as the earth’s temperature cycles.
Their false belief that our economic activity is an existential risk to the earth is now a real existential risk to our safety, freedom, national security, and standard of living.
Can you imagine during World War II, a political party arguing that we should not produce more energy because losing to Hitler is better than increasing carbon emissions? But indeed, Democrats are maneuvering us into energy and mineral dependence on both Russia and China, which will sacrifice our freedom and standard of living, to their earth god.
Whether they intend this policy straight jacket or even realize this, is immaterial. But their heated and fervent resistance narrows greatly possible responses to problems.
This development imposes a paralysis on possible policy options that transcends political disagreement and gets into the realm of religious war. It is hard to compromise on religious beliefs especially when they become government policy and are thus forced on others by law. Indeed, that is what has caused religious wars.
What is also baffling is that their religious practice is imposed on us, while giving rivals like China, Russia, and India a free pass. Why is Chinese carbon better than ours?
This is hardly helpful in dealing with the toxic brew of negative trends that we must respond to. Dealing with inflation has always been difficult enough without the complication of religious war over the earth god. The price of energy is being deliberately driven higher, and thus inflation higher, to force the world to adopt the policy proscriptions of the rabid environmentalist.
If the stock market can get through recent highs, and the nation avoids recession, it will be remarkable. The question remains: is that a bet we are willing to make?
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Media consolidation and interlocking directorships are the reasons.
If you want to know why Big Media on the left and right is so unoriginal and shallow, a couple of left-leaning sources have the answer.
The sources also explain why the residents of most cities and towns across the country no longer have locally-owned news outlets and thus have to rely on media conglomerates headquartered elsewhere. In-depth investigative reporting on local issues is not in their corporate DNA.
My adopted hometown of Tucson is an example. In a metro area of nearly 1.1 million people, Tucson’s major newspaper, the Daily Star, is owned by out-of-state Lee Enterprises (which will be covered more extensively later in this commentary).
It was the same when I lived in Phoenix and had a column in the Arizona Republic, which is owned by Gannett. And when I had a Texas newspaper as a client of my strategic planning consulting business, the most pressing strategic issue facing the 100-year-old family-owned newspaper was whether it could survive without selling to an out-of-state conglomerate.
There are two reasons for these negative developments: media consolidation and interlocking directorships.
A lengthy article on these developments can be found at the following link. Click here to open the link.
Excerpts:
. . . whereas 50 companies dominated the media landscape in 1983, that dwindled to nine companies by the 1990s. It got worse from there.
Today, just six conglomerates — Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Sony, Fox, and Paramount Global (formerly known as ViacomCBS) — control 90% of what you watch, read, or listen to. To put this into perspective: that means about 232 media executives have the power to decide what information 277 million Americans are able to access. In 2021, the “big six” banked a total of more than $478 billion in revenue. That’s more than both Finland’s and Ukraine’s GDP combined.
The issue extends to print media and radio giants, too: iHeartMedia owns 863 radio stations nationwide, while Gannett owns more than 100 daily U.S. newspapers and nearly 1,000 weeklies.
As the pool controlling the media keeps shrinking, so does the breadth of the information reported. Hence why today’s thousands of news outlets often churn out embarrassingly duplicative content.
Nowadays, there are entire cities and towns across the country with no local coverage. According to a 2018 study, more than 2,000 U.S. counties (63.6%) have no daily newspaper, while 1,449 counties (46%) only have one. Meanwhile, 171 counties — totaling 3.2 million residents — have zero newspapers whatsoever.
But this consolidation of power extends beyond just monopolies and mergers galore — compounding the issue are shared board members. All media corporations have a board of directors, which is responsible for making decisions that support the interests of stakeholders.
When someone sits on the board at multiple companies, that creates an “interlock.” Scroll through The New York Times board of directors, for example, and you’ll find a certain member is also on the board for McDonald’s and Nike and is chairman of Ariel Investments. Up until last year, a Disney chairwoman happened to be on the board for private equity giant The Carlyle Group.
A 2021 study published in Mass Communication & Society (MCS) revealed that publicly traded American newspaper companies were interlocked by 1,276 connections to 530 organizations. The data showed that about 36% of these connections were to other media organizations, 20% to advertisers, 16% to financial institutions, 12% to tech firms, and 2% to government and political entities.
More specifically, a 2012 list compiled by FAIR revealed the following interlocks:
CBS/Viacom: Amazon, Pfizer, CVS, Dell, Cardinal Health, and Verizon
Fox/News Corp: Rothschild Investment Corporation, Phillip Morris, British Airways, and New York Stock Exchange
ABC/Disney: Boeing, City National Bank, FedEx, and HCA Healthcare
NBC: Anheuser-Busch, Morgan Chase & Co., Coca-Cola, and Chase Manhattan
CNN/TimeWarner: Citigroup, American Express, Fannie Mae, Colgate-Palmolive, Hilton Hotels, PepsiCo, Sears, and Pfizer
The New York Times Co: Johnson & Johnson, Ford, Texaco, Alcoa, Avon, Campbell Soup, Metropolitan Life, and Starwood Hotels & Resorts
The aforementioned 2021 academic study examined whether interlocking directorships have an influence on news coverage and determined that they do. A link to the study and the study’s abstract are pasted at the end of this commentary. The abstract mentions Lee Enterprises.
My final thought is that the study misses a larger point. As I know from a lot of personal experience, the boards of directors of America’s largest companies tend to think alike, see the world alike, and look alike, regardless of their race or gender. Most directors are cut out of the same mold and interchangeable unless they were founding entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk. If you doubt that, pull up the websites of the biggest companies in America and read the platitudes, banalities, and blather about race, gender, community, the environment, and other subjects du jour. They all sound the same. When a CEO of one of the companies joins the board of another company, the executive has basically gone from one echo chamber to another. Such uniformity is bad enough in the industry but particularly harmful to a free press.
Today’s media companies seem to be more intertwined than ever. But are they? Do these “interlocks” affect editors and the content journalists produce? This study uses a three-method design to examine the connections among newspaper organizations and corporations. The network analysis examined the interlocks among news-paper companies’ directors. The second phase surveyed editors of newspapers owned by these companies to assess the influence on the newsroom from the board and parent company. In the third phase, news coverage of directors and their affiliated organizations was con-tent analyzed for newspapers whose editors perceived pressure “from above.” The network analysis results suggest a monolithic interlocking structure that previous scholars feared. For one-third of survey respondents, corporate parents and the boardroom were seen as influencing the newsroom. These “pressured editors” perceived significantly stronger pressures from the boardroom, “ownership/upper management,” and business interests than editors who did not indicate pressure from above. So, how did pressured newsrooms cover ownership and directors? Routine coverage of directors and their affiliated organizations was lacking. Disclosure of a relationship between a director or affiliated organization and the newspaper was disclosed half of the time and traditional journalistic scrutiny was applied less than half of the time.
Lee Enterprises, for instance, had 20 directors connected via their membership on other boards or work histories to 196 other organizations such as the Associated Press (AP). The AP, unlike Lee Enterprises which was on the seed list of media and parent companies, was connected to 12 organizations. As Figure 1illustrates, directors on the AP’s board were also on the board (solid line) of New Media Investment Group, The New York Times, and News Corp, and some directors had employment ties (dashed line) to Lee Enterprises. Organizations with more connections are more central in the interlock network. Connections among the organizations created a network with four distinct components. The main component included 430 organizations such as Lee Enterprises, Tronc/Tribune, The McClatchy Company, News Corp, and The New York Times. This component illustrates news media organizations’ reach to others and the concentration of ties among media organizations. The three other distinct components were isolated from the main component and centered around Digital First Media, hedge fund Alden Global Capital, and Civitas Media, respectively. Alden’s predatory business“ strategy” for its news organization investments is notorious in professional journalism (Doctor, 2019; Pickard, 2020). RQ2 directed attention to the composition.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-04-23 04:02:002022-04-23 04:02:00Why Big Media Is so Unoriginal and Shallow
When talking points are created or written, they seem to be automatically rejected by the opposition.Using the term “Deep State” will set a liberal’s hair on fire and cause them not to listen.The question is whether federal employees act in a manner of their choosing as opposed to following the wishes of the President and the presidential appointees. If there are government employees who act as though they are “above” supervision (by the person for whom you voted) you should be steamed. There are and it happens frequently.
I previously wrote about the Federal Government’s Senior Executive Service (SES).The government website states: “Members of the SES serve in the key positions just below the top Presidential appointees. SES members are the major link between these appointees and the rest of the Federal workforce. They operate and oversee nearly every government activity in approximately 75 Federal agencies.”Think Dr. Fauci. Not stated, however, is that they make a lot of money and cannot be fired.If they do not like what the presidential appointee says they can just nod their head, smile, walk away and do what they wish.
The study details how our public employees decided to do what they want.If you are a “never-Trumper” you may be celebrating this, but then you are just deluding yourself regarding how much of this goes on during Democrat administrations.Yes, most Washington federal employees are Democrats. Mostly they believe they are smarter and more knowledgeable than those of us in the big wasteland of America and we should follow their lead.
The relationship between the number of positions that an administration can control versus the overall workplace is minuscule.There are estimated 3,800 positions under presidential control out of 2.2 million federal employees.This situation is made worse by the Senate confirmation process, which regularly drags on as operated today.As of this column’s timing, President Biden has named 516 appointments with 332 confirmations out of a total of 1,200 requiring Senate approval. This is over a year into his term.
Though the report repeatedly states that many of the staff “diligently and impartially” do their jobs, there are still a substantial number of miscreants.Their tactics are outlined as follows
Withholding information.
Refusing to implement policies.
Intentionally delaying or slow-walking priorities.
Deliberately underperforming.
Leaking to Congress and the media
Outright insubordination.
There are many tales in the report supporting the above points.The personnel in two areas were significantly hostile.The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and the EPA are the most obstreperous.As the reports cites, career employees treated Trump Administration appointees not as their bosses, but more “like an occupying army to be resisted.”
Under the category of withholding information, the report states this is a common tactic.“Career staff have agency-specific expertise. Career employees can frustrate that agenda simply by withholding their expertise or knowledge.”During the Trump years this was done frequently. National Labor Relation Board (NLRB) career staff presented case precedents to support their own positions as opposed to presenting cases supporting the Administration’s position or cases for both sides or the argument.
As a tangent to this there are documented cases of staff misrepresenting facts causing political appointees to circumvent them and do their own research.The report cites a particularly egregious case of the FDA doing this about COVID.
Then there are staff who just will not work on projects they ideologically disagree with.The report cites a case during the Obama Administration where DOJ staff refused to work on a case looking into Ivy league schools discriminating against Asians.Some perceive their employment positions are to advance their own political ideology.
Another trick up the sleeve of employees pursuing their own agenda is to produce a report that is so deficient it is junk.As stated in the report, “Draft regulations are complex documents with many legal facets. Sophisticated career staff can draft regulations that formally comply with their directives but are unlikely to withstand judicial review.” They waste our money in multiple ways pursuing their own needs.The report cites a case where experienced staff lawyers and top-level staff spent 30 days producing a report that had to be junked resulting in political appointees having to draft their own document.
Leaking information is a frequently used technique that a compliant press eats up, then refers to the source as “government experts.”Though the report identifies many cases of this, you lived through it yourself.Whenever reporters write “experts say,” whatever follows should be perceived as suspect.
And then there is the last bastion of the disloyal employee – outright intransigence or insubordination. If you cannot be fired and you think the department is your domain to be manipulated with your own political agenda, you resort to just saying “take a leap into the ocean” to your political appointee superior.Or simply ignore them.
The best case of this is that President Trump issued a hiring freeze when he came into office.At HHS, some staff just erased hire dates and changed them to January 19, 2017, the day before Trump took office.
We can go on and on and on, but you get the point.The report is easy to read and not that long.It is essential to understand how some federal employees have taken over major swathes of our government for their own means.Major civil service reform is in order, but doubtful, because Democrats receive so much money from federal employee unions.The idea of these being “public servants” has been thrown out the window.
*****
This article was published by FlashReport and is reproduced with permission from the author.
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Awful. The Biden Administration has opened up America’s Southern boarder to change the electorate of the United States. This is the result. And you ain’t seen nothing yet. Just wait until Title 42 is repealed next month.
If the Democrat regime cared half as much about our young as they do about Ukraine’s borders, they would halt the mass importation of drugs and human trafficking at the US/Mexico border.
“Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that more than 100,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in the prior 12 months. Nearly two-thirds of those deaths were linked to fentanyl.”
RIVERSIDE COUNTY, California — Four times as much fentanyl is flowing across the United States-Mexico border under President Joe Biden compared to two years prior when former President Trump was in office.
During the launch of Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Ken Calvert’s (R-CA) congressional caucus dedicated to the fentanyl crisis, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Mark Dunbar of the Murrieta Station in southern California noted that the level of fentanyl seizures has skyrocketed in the last year.
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https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-22 12:51:312022-04-22 12:51:31Flow of Fentanyl into American Communities Quadruples Under Biden, Deaths Skyrocket
