On April 19th, Project Veritas released a recording of the CEO of AstraZeneca claiming back in December of 2020 that certain individuals who are immunocompromised – which he said could be in the “millions” – should avoid getting the COVID shots.
A source from within AstraZeneca provided Project Veritas with the December 2020 recording where company CEO Pascal Soriot was discussing how the COVID shots could adversely impact the immunocompromised population.
“If you have an immune disease, lupus, or some other immune condition, you cannot – or multiple sclerosis, you can’t be vaccinated. So, there are millions of people in the world that will need a protection that cannot be coming from a vaccine. So, the long-acting antibody has enormous potential.”
Despite Soriot mentioning the aforementioned during a Zoom call in late 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) asserted that the AstraZeneca iteration of the COVID shots were safe for immunocompromised persons back in March of 2022……
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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 12:51:302022-04-22 12:51:30VIDEO: Recording Of AstraZeneca CEO Saying How ‘Millions Of People’ Should Avoid COVID Shots
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-22 11:52:182022-04-22 11:52:18VIDEO: There Never Was A Mask Mandate — Only Anti-God Capitulation
Instead of rebuking Sweden and states such as South Dakota who exposed the failure of lockdowns, we should be thanking them.
When people think of polarizing countries, Sweden rarely leaps to mind. At least that was the case before 2020.
Sweden’s decision to take a “lighter touch” to the coronavirus pandemic—foregoing strict lockdowns and relying primarily on social responsibility to encourage social distancing—has made it a lightning rod for criticism.
Many commentators claimed Sweden was behaving recklessly and selfishly by refusing to enforce an economic lockdown like most other nations around the world.
Though its per capita death rate remained well below European neighbors such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Spain—each of which enforced strict lockdowns—Sweden became, as one CBS report claimed, “an example of how not to handle COVID-19.”
As I previously observed, however, the fact that Sweden was coming under fire had less to do with the results of its policies than the nature of its policies. There were far better “cautionary tale” examples than Sweden—such as Belgium, a nation with a similar population whose per capita death toll is 50 percent higher than Sweden’s.
Unlike Sweden, however, Belgium had a strict lockdown that, as the BBC reported back in May, was enforced with “drones in parks and fines for anyone breaking social distancing rules.” But nobody cared about Belgium because they had followed the lockdown script.
Months later, Sweden’s decision to avoid lockdowns only looks better. While much of Europe is experiencing a second wave of the virus, Sweden’s numbers are a stark contrast. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization and thousands of physicians and public health officials are now arguing against the use of lockdowns as a method of taming the virus.
The reason for this is obvious. While the harms of lockdowns are clear—trillions of dollars in economic losses, widespread mental health deterioration, and social decay—there is no compelling evidence that lockdowns reduced COVID-19 deaths or the spread of the virus.
Musk: Sweden Was Right
The results of Sweden’s strategy become clearer with every passing week. And more people are beginning to notice.
“Sweden was right,” Tesla founder Elon Musk recently tweeted.
Musk, of course, has been suspicious of the efficacy of lockdowns for months.
In May, he took the bold step of restarting production of Tesla’s car plant in Fremont, California, in defiance of orders from government officials that the plant remain closed.
“Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules,” Musk tweeted. “I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”
Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.
Musk’s act of civil disobedience paid off. Alameda County health officials caved, reversing the shutdown order and providing provisional approval for the plant to reopen.
The Results of the Lockdown Experiment
The toll of COVID-19 has been severe. As of mid October, nearly 1.1 million people worldwide have died, according to Johns Hopkins University data, including 216,000 Americans.
Unlike previous pandemics, however, the human costs have been accompanied by a global recession and an economic collapse unprecedented in modern history. (This would seem to confirm Musk’s early assessment that the danger of panic posed perhaps a greater threat than the virus itself.)
As Harvard economist David M. Cutler and former World Bank chief economist Lawrence H. Summers noted in a new study, the toll of the Pandemic of 2020 is unlike anything the modern world has seen before.
“Output losses of this magnitude are immense. The lost output in the Great Recession was only one-quarter as large,” the authors write. “The economic loss is more than twice the total monetary outlay for all the wars the US has fought since September 11, 2001, including those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.”
The economic results of the lockdown experiment are undeniable. Meanwhile, evidence is scant that they saved lives. In fact, new research suggests the lockdowns exacerbated the spread of the virus.
Unfortunately, many people still want to deny the data and the science. As one commentator recently put it in the Washington Examiner, the better Sweden’s numbers get, the angier people seem to become.
This is the danger of allowing a virus to become politicized. It obscures reality. Many seem intent on defending lockdowns because they were designed to help people (or perhaps because President Trump has resisted them), but such thinking should be avoided.
“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously observed.
Instead of rebuking Sweden and states such as South Dakota who exposed the failure of lockdowns, we should be thanking them.
Without them, we may never have learned a truth that is becoming more obvious every day: the lockdowns failed.
Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-22 11:52:162022-04-22 11:52:16Elon Musk on Lockdowns: ‘Sweden Was Right’
Todays blog comes from an article in LifeSiteNews.com. It seemed pretty important that you all realize the total disregard this administration has for our military. It disgusts me and I honor this U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who is an Oathkeeper. God bless him.
Here’s the Truth for Health Foundation video, about 1.5 hours long, with U.S. Army LTC/Dr. Peter Chambers’ story.
A U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and combat physician has described how fellow medics in the Army were told not to enter records of COVID jab adverse reactions into official databases.
“They either look the other way or they just say, ‘Well, I can’t do that. It doesn’t exist’,” said Dr. Peter Chambers, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, Special Forces Green Beret, and combat physician.
Chambers made the comments as part of the Truth For Health Foundation’s ninth online conference, which saw the announcement of the Foundation’s new global reporting system for COVID jab injuries.
Dr. Chambers’ jab reactions
Discussing the armed forces COVID jab rollout along with Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet, the Foundation’s president and CEO, Chambers shed light on his recent experience as a taskforce surgeon for Operation Lone Star, a border security mission of the Texas military at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Chambers, a veteran of 39 years and a Purple Heart recipient, received Moderna’s COVID jab in January 2021, unaware of the potential side effects. He now counts himself as an advocate for the “vaccine wounded” due to the adverse reactions he experienced afterwards.
He swiftly developed “brain fog” of a kind which he had not experienced even while suffering aftershock from rockets while on active duty, and experienced loss of eyesight.
Following an eventual MRI scan, after bouts of vertigo, dizziness, and nausea which caused him to crash a truck while returning from night patrol, Chambers was diagnosed withdemyelination, a disease which affects the nerve tissue.
Army medics ‘told not to enter’ adverse events into database
He recounted how he had seen “multiple soldiers” also suffering similar side effects from the injections, along with “six soldiers that have been in the ICU,” and one soldier who was forced to take a second jab despite having suffered micro-clotting after her first.
Dr. Chambers took down the details from these service personnel and entered them into the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). However, he revealed to Dr. Vliet that “surgeons at the military hospitals were not letting them in. They were told not to enter people into VAERS.”
“Doctors told me personally in the active duty system that worked at Fort Sam Houston, that they were not to enter people into the VAERS system,” he added.
Due to the COVID jabs’ collective nature of being experimental vaccines, Chambers noted how “we can’t even enter it [COVID jab injuries] into our own defense, medical, epidemiological database.”
“We can’t even interpret that as a true diagnosis,” he said. “So when you try to speak to other positions, they won’t. They either look the other way or they just say, ‘Well, I can’t do that. It doesn’t exist’.”
Told to ‘pack bags’ over attempt to give informed consent
As taskforce surgeon for Operation Lone Star, Chambers had to fill out informed consent forms, as per Army regulations, for soldiers taking the COVID shots. Chambers noted how he had to “reinforce or confirm” whether soldiers needed the shot, while at the same time, his knowledge of the dangers of the COVID jab was growing.
Of the 3,000 soldiers he briefed, only six took the injection.
Challenged by a senior medical officer over this, Chambers said he was “told that I was to pack my bags and leave the border.”
As LifeSite has reported, Dr. Chambers later testified at a March 10 federal court hearing in Tampa in the Navy SEAL 1 v. Austin case. Chambers said he had been pressured into getting soldiers vaccinated and presented as an exhibit an instruction on religious exemptions that read: “Soldiers will try. Soldiers will fail.”
Praise for new vaccine reporting system
Having faced stern resistance against entering COVID jab reports into VAERS, Dr. Chambers warmly welcomed Truth for Health Foundation’s new vaccine reporting system – the Citizens Vaccine Injury Reporting System (CVIRS)™. “If the system that we have now in the government that they provide for us doesn’t work, then we the people have to provide something, because we still have to treat people,” he said.
Doctors “can’t just quit,” he added. “Not everything is COVID related.”
Chambers was the first person to use and register his vaccine injury on the Foundation’s new system, which is designed to be user-friendly and able to be completed in under 20 minutes. “This system was perfectly created for that, and I am honored to be the first person,” he added.
Help support our brave doctors and medical experts who are putting their livelihoods at risk simply by speaking the truth about COVID-19 here.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-21 12:51:342022-04-21 12:51:34U.S. Army Doctor Reveals Medics Were Told Not to Report Adverse COVID Jab Reactions
The United States is facing a mental health crisis, experts say, noting we’re in dire need of more mental health professionals
Nearly 1 in 3 — 27.3% — of American adults now struggle with depression and/or anxiety
This is the price society is paying for ill-conceived, irrational pandemic measures and nonstop fearmongering
To treat everyone, each of the 33,000 practicing psychiatrists in the U.S. would have to see approximately 3,000 patients a year — a patient load that simply isn’t feasible
Those of us who have not succumbed to irrational fear (or worked our way out of it) can act as a lifeline to others by sharing information that empowers rather than enforces fear, and by being role models in the way we live our lives
The United States is facing a mental health crisis, experts say, noting we’re in dire need of more mental health professionals. Christin Drake, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, writes:1
“Every day, people call my office looking for help: A loved one has not left their bed in a week. A father is experiencing panic symptoms while preparing his children for school. A young woman is using substances in a way that feels dangerous to her. These are not the worried well. They are people in crisis.
Their conditions are complex and acute, and require the expertise of a psychiatrist who can talk with them, assess possible medical causes for their problems, manage withdrawal, prescribe medications when needed, and connect with other providers … Before the pandemic, I could almost always help. I would be able to find time to meet someone for a consultation, or make a few calls to secure the right referral.
But now, my every available hour — even those that jut into my ability to meet my obligations to my family — is full. My colleagues tell me the same. They are starting work earlier, working later, contending with long waitlists and their own limits. All the while, patients in crisis are going without psychiatric help.”
Depression and Anxiety Are at All-Time Highs
According to the most recent Household Pulse Survey,2 conducted by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, 27.3% of American adults now struggle with depression and/or anxiety, and that’s in addition to the 40 million Americans who report substance use disorders3 and the 14 million who have more serious mental illnesses.4
“There are about 33,000 practicing psychiatrists in the U.S.5 By my back-of-the-napkin math, if all of us were treating only people with depression or anxiety, each of us would have to see more than 3,000 patients a year,” Drake notes.6
In short, there aren’t enough practicing psychiatrists to handle the burgeoning tsunami of mentally unwell Americans. There also aren’t enough residency positions available to significantly expand the profession any time soon.
The Price of Fearmongering
While Drake doesn’t go into the causes behind the mental health crisis, it’s fairly obvious that this is the price society is paying for our government’s ill-conceived and irrational pandemic measures and the nonstop fearmongering. NPR contributor Kat Lonsdorf describes the constant fear of kidney transplant patient Jullie Hoggan:7
“While the surgery was successful and Hoggan is now vaccinated and boosted, she is still severely immunocompromised and has to take significant safety measures.
‘I’m so nervous. Like, my heart rate is through the roof when I’m out for anything,’ she said. ‘And I wonder if I’m ever able to be out safely again and be normal and go out to a store. Am I going to be feeling that forever?’
Hoggan works from home, rarely leaves the house, and when she does, it’s incredibly stressful. Her husband and college-age daughter both wear masks at home and have to be extremely careful about who they see and what they do.
Hoggan’s pandemic experience carries no violence and there have been no explosions or assault, which is why she has a hard time calling it trauma. But Arthur Evans, CEO of the American Psychological Association (APA), says viewing the world as unsafe can be a symptom of trauma.”
A Nebulous and Hard-to-Define Trauma
As noted by Lonsdorf, trauma typically involves some kind of life-threatening event or something that leaves you feeling fearful and/or helpless. Many who have religiously followed mainstream news over the past two years have clearly been traumatized, feeling as though death is imminent and there’s no escape. The death-dealing blow — in the form of an invisible virus — could come from anyone, including loved ones. No one was “safe” to be around.
What’s more, the pandemic wasn’t an isolated incident that could be processed and recovered from. Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychologist with expertise in collective trauma, likens the pandemic to a “slow-moving disaster” that “escalated in intensity over time” — and to this day doesn’t have a clear endpoint.8
Not everyone agrees that what we’re seeing is the result of collective trauma, though. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of “The Body Keeps the Score” — one of the most-sold books on Amazon during the pandemic — is hesitant to categorize the pandemic as a collective trauma.
He tells Lonsdorf,9 “We need to be very precise … because if we don’t know what we are treating, we may give the wrong treatment.” He believes we need “a new term, a new language” to accurately define our circumstances. “That’s really what I’m encouraging us to do — to really identify what is making us all feel like we’re barely hanging on,” he says.
Officials Are Unwilling to Let Go of the Fearmongering
Whatever we end up calling it, it’s clear that our government’s and media’s response to the pandemic has been a key causative factor behind this mental health crisis. It’s also notable that even though COVID-19 has become endemic in most parts of the world, causing few deaths, the pandemic has not officially been declared “over.”
In early March 2022, the World Health Organization said discussions about when and how to declare an end to the pandemic were underway, but that “we are not there yet.”10
Denmark, the Netherlands and the U.K. have functionally declared an end to their national emergencies by lifting all or most restrictions, but other countries, such as New Zealand and Hong Kong, are moving in the opposite direction, renewing lockdown orders amid fresh surges in COVID cases (i.e., positive PCR tests, which doesn’t mean people are dying or even getting seriously ill).11
Meanwhile in the U.S., April 13, 2022, the CDC extended for another 90 days the public health emergency that’s been in effect since the pandemic began. In tandem, President Biden extended the mask mandates for airplanes and public transportation until May 3.12
In alternative media circles, fear of the virus has been tempered by more clearheaded analyses of statistics and data, showing that the real-world risk is actually quite limited, and that there are highly effective early treatments available even if you do get infected.
My guess is that those who now, two years in, are still struggling with overwhelming feelings of fear and anxiety about the virus are the ones who for whatever reason weren’t exposed to these comforting data, or chose to dismiss them (which is what mainstream media told them to do).
And, if they persist in following the legacy media, there’s really no relief in sight for them. While many now accept COVID-19 as another version of, or addition to, the seasonal flu, and are going about their lives more or less as usual, the mainstream media are trying to pump up the fear level yet again with — you guessed it — another variant.13
This one is called “Xe.” It’s said to be a combination of two previous subvariants of Omicron and the most contagious form yet. “COVID-19 Could be Surging in the U.S. Right Now and We Might Not Even Know It,” a headline for Time magazine announced April 11, 2022, adding:14
“… as the country tries to move on from the pandemic, demand for lab-based testing has declined and federal funding priorities have shifted. The change has forced some testing centers to shutter while others have hiked up prices in response to the end of government-subsidized testing programs.
People are increasingly relying on at-home rapid tests if they decide to test at all. But those results are rarely reported, giving public health officials little insight into how widespread the virus truly is.”
Truth Is a Big Part of the Remedy
This fearmongering is again based on the lie that the PCR test can identify an active infection (it can’t), and the false idea that asymptomatic spread is a driver of infection (it’s not). Time magazine also promotes the false idea that the COVID shot is “extremely effective at preventing severe disease” and that Omicron causes milder symptoms only in “healthy, vaccinated people,” even though real-world data suggest otherwise on both accounts.
There’s no mention of the fact that the COVID shots may be responsible for more than 1.2 million injuries15 and are, by any metric, the most dangerous drugs ever to be released. There’s also no mention of the fact that most people are likely immune to Xe at this point, as it arose right on the heels of a major Omicron surge.
Even questions about remasking have popped up again. “Is It Time to Start Masking Again?” The Atlantic asked April 8, 2022.16 According to The Atlantic, in the face of new variants, we ought to prepare “by having good masks on hand — and being mentally ready to put them on again.”
It’s that kind of mental preparation to face death every day and the useless ritual of donning a mask that is driving people to the brink of their mental endurance. Masking was futile from the start, but that doesn’t stop the mainstream media — which gets its talking points from those trying to figure out how to shove The Great Reset down our collective throats — from pushing this worn-out and wholly unscientific narrative.
Totalitarianism Is Built Through Fear
Let’s face it, they need us to be fearful because, otherwise, they know we won’t comply with what’s coming next — digital identities, biosensors and emotional monitors, vaccine passports, the green new deal (which will virtually eliminate your ability to travel any significant distance), programmable central bank digital currencies (which will give the issuers complete control over your spending) and much more.
For The Great Reset and Fourth Industrial Revolution to come to pass, the great masses must be willing to give up their freedoms and submit to more invasive surveillance and control, and for that, their fear of imminent death must eclipse all other concerns. For a description of how large swathes of society can be made mentally ill, on purpose, see the After Skool production above.
The good news is about half the population (in my estimation) have worked their way through the propaganda and no longer fret unnecessarily. Around the U.S., people are standing up to tyrannical and irrational COVID measures, be it mask and vaccine mandates or inhumane COVID rules in the hospitals.
In Tennessee, for example, a new state law will force hospitals to allow end-of-life visitations for COVID patients, so that they won’t have to face death alone.17 As noted by Dr. Jason Martin, an ICU doctor who’s been on the frontlines since the beginning of the pandemic, “End-of-life care in an ICU with COVID is terrible,” and watching patients die all alone, separated from their families “is a life-changing experience.”
Be a Role Model
There are no simple answers to the mental health crisis facing us, but putting an end to unnecessary fearmongering, I think, is a task that needs to be shouldered by those who still chose to work in mainstream media. On an individual level, it may mean shutting off MSM news altogether.
Those of us who have not succumbed to irrational fear (or who have worked our way out of it) can also act as a lifeline to untold numbers of people by sharing information that empowers rather than enforces fear, and by being role models in the way we go about our lives.
Don’t wear a mask to appease people’s fears. Let people see you smile. Be friendly and optimistic when in public. You never know how seeing you enjoy life might benefit someone who feels the world has become an unsafe and scary place.
In the long term, we need additional solutions — we need more qualified psychiatrists and therapists, for example — but in the meantime, we must do what we can, on an individual level, to ease the collective pressure, and we can begin by simply demonstrating that a different reality is possible.
The collective has been squeezed, mangled and brought to the precipice by a few in power. Many have been broken down in this process. It’s now time for the rest of us to take the reins and steward our fellow humans back to reality, back to sanity, by being firm yet kind, principled, ethical, truthful, rational and optimistic.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-21 12:51:332022-04-21 12:51:33The COVID ‘Side Effect’: Almost 1 in 3 Now Suffer Mental Health Crisis Driven by Public Health Policy Trauma
Population decline is coming to America. Radical change is on the way.
Before the 1965 Immigration Act, the US was approaching zero population growth. The “land of the free and home of the brave,” as we call ourselves, has had below-replacement fertility since the early 1970s. We now see that fifty years of importing a new people merely delayed the inevitable. Immigration, which has slackened of late, is no longer a viable solution to either population decline or our mounting economic woes. Those of recent immigrant background have clambered aboard the below-replacement fertility bandwagon. Besides, there are not enough jobs to go around. Bottom line: Americans are having fewer children every year. In the 2020 year of Covid, twenty-five of fifty states had more deaths than births.
This is nothing new to demographers. But the New Normal has rocketed to public attention with a report titled Births: Provisional Data for 2020 from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The report has once and for all discredited a smug commentariat’s early predictions that the Covid-19 lockdown would lead to a baby boom. In fact, it has been just the opposite. Births were down significantly in December 2020, nine months after the lockdowns began. There is no doubt about it – the virus, the lockdown and its resulting economic shock caused millions of couples to delay having children.
From 2019 to 2020, the number of US births decreased 4%, from 3.75 million to 3.6 million. For the past six years (2015-2020) births have declined an average of 2% per year.
No ethnic or racial group was spared. In the same 2019-2020 period, the number of births declined among all: 8% for Asian-Americans, 6% for American Indian/Alaskan Natives, 4% for non-Hispanic Whites, 4% for non-Hispanic Blacks, 3% for Hispanics, and 2% for Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders.
The corresponding decline in general fertility rates among these groups was 9% for Asian-Americans; 7% for American Indian/Alaska Natives; 4% for non-Hispanic Whites, non-Hispanic Blacks, and Hispanics; and 3% for Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders.
There was a precipitous decline (8%) in the teenage birthrate (ages 15-19). Births to teenagers have been falling since 1991 and have declined 80% in the last 20 years. The government has long considered teen pregnancy a public health issue, as teenage births are usually out of wedlock, with subpar prenatal care and dim prospects for a stable family to rear children.
Most of these teenagers are scarcely getting by, with low skills and limited incomes, so this particular trend is not due to any improved economic status. Surveys show that today’s teens are less sexually active than their predecessors, have easy access to contraception and abortion, are ceaselessly tethered to their digital devices, vulnerable to a toxic popular culture centered on self-gratification and crushing peer pressure, while bedeviled by drug abuse, pornography, and a host of other distractions. Things have changed a bit since yours truly came of age!
In 2010, the average age of females at the time of the birth of their first child was 23. In 2020 it was 27.
In that 10-year span, there was a 6% birthrate decline for ages 20-24 and a 4% decline for ages 25-29. These are record lows. The 30-34 demographic declined 4%; ages 35-39, 2%; and ages 40-44, 2%. The birthrate for those aged 45-49 remained the same. As couples delay having children, the 45-49 window is where the biological clock runs out.
University of New Hampshire demographer Kenneth Johnson has stated the obvious, saying: “The [US] birthrate is the lowest it’s ever been.”
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the overall US birth rate has fallen almost 20%. Yes, the population continues to grow, though in the last half-decade growth is at the slowest rate since the Census began in 1790. As the baby boom generation passes from the scene, there will be successively smaller generations to replace them. Slow growth will yield to no growth, then negative growth.
So America is ageing. Its population will start to decrease. While the elderly do not yet outnumber the young, we are ineluctably headed for that inverted demographic pyramid. Every day there are more elderly to take care of and fewer workers to support them.
Something’s got to give. The ageing of America is upon us just when decades of fiscal profligacy are coming home to roost. The US debt-to-GDP ratio is 127% and rising. In fiscal 2020 the US government collected $3.5 trillion in revenues, or $10,457 per person, while spending $6.6 trillion, or $19,962 per person. The US National Debt is $27.7 trillion and counting.
This fiscal madness is a grave threat to American family life. How? The US dollar is the world’s dominant reserve currency, so all countries hold dollars for trade. Reckless US spending inevitably weakens the dollar. Consequently there is a budding global dedollarisation movement.
Should that prevail and the dollar is replaced as the dominant reserve currency, dollar purchasing power will collapse. It’s called inflation. That, coupled with a shrinking workforce due to below-replacement fertility, will mean crunch time. An economic downturn? We ain’t seen nothing yet. The title of Pat Buchanan’s superb 2011 book Suicide of a Superpower comes to mind.
If you want to start a family, you should do so as soon as possible.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-21 11:51:162022-04-21 11:51:16Vaxtermination: The Deliberate Culling Of The Human Population?
Legacy media outlets published several articles this week criticizing sex change treatments for transgender children.
One transgender individual told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the media is opening up to critical perspectives because reporters are discovering that transgender medicine is experimental.
A New York Times columnist predicted that in the near future, both liberals and conservatives would view child sex change procedures as a politically-motivated medical scandal.
Mainstream media outlets are publishing articles challenging the “gender-affirming” method of medical treatment for transgender children, which emphasizes speedy biomedical intervention over psychotherapy.
“As more reporters investigate the motives of legislators, I’m sure they’re discovering that pediatric transition is experimental medicine and that some regulatory framework is needed when children are involved,” Corinna Cohn, who identifies as a transgender woman and wrote a Washington Post op-ed expressing regret over receiving a sex change surgery at 19, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times each published articles Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday respectively on the sudden, sharp uptick in transgenderism in young people and the speed with which medical practitioners give them irreversible treatments such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries.
Cohn pointed to increased exposure to the issue of childhood transitions and conservative efforts to regulate the procedures to account for the media opening up to more critical perspectives on sex change procedures.
“Professionals who set the standards of care for pediatric transition are becoming more cautious due to a lack of evidence in the efficacy of the treatments,” Cohn told the DCNF. “For example, the Swedish Karolinska Hospital which pioneered pediatric gender transition has decided to discontinue prescribing hormone blockers and cross-sex hormones as a standard practic
Cohn wrote that medically transitioning did not resolve the issues that motivated the decision in the first place: anxiety and confusion about experiencing same-sex attraction.
“Surgery unshackled me from my body’s urges, but the destruction of my gonads introduced a different type of bondage,” Cohn wrote. “From the day of my surgery, I became a medical patient and will remain one for the rest of my life.”
Cohn regretted losing the ability to have children and losing sexual function before having ever had sex. Cohn was also concerned about youths undergoing medical procedures without having the chance to grow into their natural bodies and explore their identities through the process of growing up.
“I shudder to think of how distorting today’s social media is for confused teenagers. I’m also alarmed by how readily authority figures facilitate transition,” Cohn wrote.
Another transgender individual agreed with Cohn that teen social pressure plays a role in prompting childhood transitions. Erica Anderson, a transgender psychologist who claims to have helped hundreds of youths transition, told the LA Times in a Tuesday article that the surge in transgenderism among young people was related to its trendiness and that young people were being rushed through sex change treatments without undergoing therapy.
Anderson also pushed back on the idea that soaring rates of transgenderism among young people are strictly the result of more widespread acceptance in the Tuesday article.
“To flatly say there couldn’t be any social influence in formation of gender identity flies in the face of reality,” Anderson told the LA Times. “Teenagers influence each other.”
Conservative columnist Ross Douthat pointed out that some liberals stifle debate about the treatments by claiming that critical discussion of the issue puts transgender youths at an increased risk of suicide in a New York Times opinion piece Wednesday.
“Within not too short a span of time, not only conservatives but most liberals will recognize that we have been running an experiment on trans-identifying youth without good or certain evidence, inspired by ideological motives rather than scientific rigor, in a way that future generations will regard as a grave medical-political scandal,” Douthat wrote.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-04-21 04:00:002022-04-21 04:00:00Mainstream Media Finally Recognizes There Might Be Something Wrong With Child Sex Changes
The most frequent question I get about the ongoing lockdown in Shanghai involves the potential motives of the Chinese Communist Party.
As someone who has covered COVID Mania for over two years, and has taken an unconventional approach to the motives and outcomes behind the continuation of the pandemic narrative, I remain undecided on the dominant motive for the situation in Shanghai. However, there are lots of clues available for us to survey the possibilities.
One thing is for sure: the Wuhan lockdown of early 2020 was a lot different. It was certainly a barometer for lockdown extremism, but it occurred on a much smaller scale. And it appeared, in my view, that the government was putting on more of a Hollywood production than a real attempt to quash a virus. I wrote about that extensively in The Dossier.
This time, however, the Shanghai situation appears to be a different animal.
There are several possibilities that I think are worth exploring.
Germ Freaks
First and foremost, consider the possibility that Chinese authorities have become maniacal hypochondriacs, and, like most top-down authoritarian regimes, have engaged in irrational and destructive policymaking.
In the Chinese governmental system, there are very few guardrails to authoritarian behavior, so virtually nothing would be too extreme if the ends justify the means. China’s continuing ideology contends that individual rights are not of a concern. In fact, according to the CCP, this ideal of human freedom should be actively suppressed for the “greater good” of the state.
Yes, the Chinese government is engaged in complete pseudoscientific behavior, but that is the norm for world governments, not the aberration.
This virus may genuinely terrify the ruling class atop the CCP. Similar to the True Believers of COVID Mania in the West, they could be freaked out by the prospect of catching a cold, and are ready to use any and all instruments of power with the hopes that the virus can somehow be stopped in its tracks.
It’s a psyop
The data on lockdowns are quite clear: they don’t work, and they only cause problems in addition to the virus problem. Everywhere lockdowns were tried, they failed in catastrophic fashion. But that wasn’t the story of Wuhan, the location of the first COVID lockdown, where there was no benefit of hindsight.
The short term hard lockdowns in Wuhan in early 2020 were falsely advertised as an astonishing scientific success, but were most effective as an information operation to shut down the world, while seeding the idea that lockdowns would help to crush the virus.
This left some coming to conclude that China locked down Wuhan as part of an information operation to cripple the societies and economies of its adversaries, using the virus as a kernel of truth to advance their campaign. China, notably, remained almost completely open for years following the Wuhan lockdown, while the West went through an endless series of restrictions and rolling lockdowns.
Is China readying another targeted campaign against the West by locking down Shanghai?
National Hubris/Believing their own press
It’s possible that at some point down the line, Chinese authorities became convinced that their Wuhan lockdown actually worked, and that an aggressive level of nationalistic superiority was the reason that China justifies its position as the only country in the world to “eliminate” the virus through lockdowns.
China’s lockdown was routinely praised in the corporate press and through academic circles. Every country modeled their lockdowns, a novel concept that did not exist prior to 2020, after the Wuhan lockdown. This level of admiration may have acted to affirm China’s well-known, baked in superiority complex, and convince the Communist Party that it alone has the technocratic authoritarian capacity to wage a successful war on a virus.
Don’t disregard nationailstic hubris as the chief motivating factor behind the madness in Shanghai.
Internal politics
Although China is a one-party state, there remains tremendous infighting in the ranks of the Communist Party. Shanghai is perceived as one of the more “liberal” cities in China, and the lockdowns may have been motivated by competing political factions desperate to win over influence and power.
CFTV explains: “The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) often comes across as a homogenous group to those studying China. This united front, however, is a carefully cultivated image that the CCP portrays – both to the world and its domestic audience. Beneath the surface, however, there exist “factions”, which is a combination of informal politics, relationships, and networks that jostle to dominate politics in China.”
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-04-21 03:55:002022-04-21 03:55:00What Is Motivating the Shanghai Lockdown?
We came across an interesting tweet from Roland S. Martin, a journalist and former CNN contributor. Here’s the tweet:
I don’t give a damn what some grossly unqualified Donald Trump judge said, I’m double masked and wearing goggles on this Nashville to DC flight. I had COVID in December. Y’all can KISS MY ASS about me not wanting it again. And any fool saying they don’t matter is a damn liar. pic.twitter.com/cHJ9oUYWo4
We wanted to dissect Roland’s tweet to better understand who he really is.
Roland: “I don’t give a damn what some grossly unqualified Donald Trump judge said…”
Analysis: Roland hates Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle who was indeed appointed by President Donald J. Trump. Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle followed the U.S. Constitution and her ruling limited the powers of the federal government over we the people. Roland uses the word “unqualified” for U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle for the Middle District of Florida who ruled against the CDC.
NOTE: We are wondering what Roland would say about the qualifications of Ketanji Brown Jackson who couldn’t or wouldn’t define the word “woman” during her Senate confirmation hearing.
Roland: “I’m double masked and wearing goggles on this Nashville to DC flight.”
Analysis: Research reveals that prolonged use of Covid masks, homemade or N95, can cause anywhere from five percent on up to 20 percent loss of oxygen, leading to hypercapnia (excessive carbon dioxide in the bloodstream typically caused by inadequate respiration), panic attacks, vertigo, double vision, tinnitus, concentration issues, headaches, slowed reactions, seizures, alterations in blood chemistry and suffocation due to air displacement. According to Amesh A. Adalja, MD, and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Maryland, “wearing a mask day in and day out can lead to alterations in blood chemistry,” and that leads to “changes in level of consciousness.” A German neurologist, Dr. Margarite Griesz-Brisson, MD, PhD (in pharmacology), who specializes in neurotoxicology and environmental medicine, warns that oxygen deprivation from prolonged Covid-mask wearing can cause permanent neurological damage. She states in her research, “The re-breathing of our exhaled air will without a doubt create oxygen deficiency and a flooding of carbon dioxide. We know that the human brain is very sensitive to oxygen deprivation. There are nerve cells for example in the hippocampus, that can’t be longer than 3 minutes without oxygen – they cannot survive. The acute warning symptoms are headaches, drowsiness, dizziness, issues in concentration, slowing down of the reaction time – reactions of the cognitive system.” An article titled “Do masks actually work? The best studies suggest they don’t“, appeared in The Washington Examiner on August 12, 2021 stated: “Of the 14 Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless — whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone — or actually counterproductive. Of the three studies that provided statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis that was not contradicted within the same study, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.”
NOTE: Roland is double masked and wearing goggles. This mean Roland is risking double hypercapnia (excessive carbon dioxide in the bloodstream typically caused by inadequate respiration), panic attacks, vertigo, double vision, tinnitus, concentration issues, headaches, slowed reactions, seizures, alterations in blood chemistry and suffocation due to air displacement.
Roland: “I had COVID in December.”
Analysis: On Instagram Roland on August 14th, 2021 posted this comment, “This ain’t hard, y’all. Get the damn vaccine!!!!” Our guess is that Roland was vaccinated before December and he still got Covid in December.
Roland: “Y’all can KISS MY ASS about me not wanting it again. And any fool saying they don’t matter is a damn liar.”
Analysis: It’s interesting to see a journalist tell his Facebook followers to “KISS MY ASS” and calling them fools and damn liars. Roland seems over the top and too emotional.
We thank Roland for setting the standard of being double masked and wearing a goggles. We’re guessing that the next time we fly we’ll be able to immediately recognize the Democrats because they will be, interestingly, exercising their freedom of choice by ignoring the judges ruling to not wear a face masks on aircraft.
That, as they say, is their choice.
BTW. Here’s Roland on April 3rd, 2022 without a mask in a very large auditorium:
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-21 00:51:382022-04-21 00:51:38How to recognize a Democrat on your next airline flight? Their the ones wearing a mask.
“I have this intense rage in me over the harm that was done to me…” — Julie, 27
When Julie woke up from her double mastectomy in the children’s hospital in Syracuse, she expected to feel elated. Instead, she only felt numb. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, she thought. Years later, she looks back with anger at the “collaborative idiocy” that crushed her spirit, permanently scarred her body, and left her feeling empty, betrayed, and alone. Like so many victims of the mutilating treatments this White House calls “livesaving,” Julie will never fully get her life back. We’ve gone too far, the survivors of this movement are crying out. And no one, not even the president, is listening.
For Suzy Weiss, who tells their stories, the emotions must be difficult to contain. In a powerful piece called “The Testosterone Hangover,” Weiss is a witness to the pain of these trusting souls — women who were pushed along a path that would ultimately destroy their young adulthood.
Chloe was only 15 when her mother sat nervously in the waiting room, waiting for word on her daughter’s breast removal. Like so many of the teenagers sucked into this world, she was unhappy with how she looked and spent a lot of time on Tumblr, immersed in trans messaging. She remembers sitting on her bed at the tender age of 12, wondering if she was meant to live as a boy. Two years later, Weiss recounts, she was taking puberty blockers and testosterone injections. By June of 2020, she was wheeled into an operating room for a drastic surgery that she would regret for the rest of her life.
Eleven months later, she was still confined to her bed, struggling with the restrictions of “nipple grafts” and other side effects. She started to miss “being pretty” and made the brave announcement that she was going to detransition — a move that made her even more of an outcast at school. Today, she misses the feminine body that she left behind. “I was looking for a niche to fit in and a sense of fulfillment.” Now, she tells Weiss, “I don’t really believe in gender identity at all.”
Meanwhile, people at the highest levels of government seem fixated on casting our sons and daughters in these horror stories — even going so far as to force taxpayers to fund the harm. Congresswoman Mary Miller (R-Ill.), one of the many Republicans appalled by HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra’s insistence that children are “entitled” to these treatments, pushed back. She demanded to know if it was “child abuse,” as the American College of Pediatricians has labeled it, to perform sterilizing surgeries on kids as young as 12. He refused to answer. “[The Biden administration is] doing nothing but engaging in extreme woke politics with children being their victims,” she said angrily on “Washington Watch.” “I can’t even think of enough bad adjectives to describe this. It’s evil, it’s insane.”
And the mainstream press is enabling it. Just this past week, the much-maligned PolitiFact, whose obvious political agenda has made its “fact-checking” a punch line, weighed in on the exchange between Miller and Becerra. “Miller said the Biden administration is ‘encouraging children to take chemical castration drugs and undergo surgeries,’ and ‘are lying to children by telling them puberty blockers are reversible…’ We rate this claim as FALSE.”
That’s news to the medical community, groups of which have openly admitted that puberty blockers are not “fully reversible.” The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) has warned repeatedly that “[l]ittle is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria.” As experts repeatedly point out, several of these hormones are off-label drugs that haven’t been studied for their impact on children. But there are plenty of things experts do know about the side effects, including: “When puberty blockers are administered in early puberty and followed by cross-sex hormones,” SEGM notes, “sterility is expected.”
Even transgender activists — many of whom blazed this trail and underwent radical operations themselves — have been horrified at the rush to transition children. One, a doctor, is speaking out publicly — sounding the alarm that this wave is rooted in social influence, not genuine gender dysphoria. “I have these private thoughts: ‘This has gone too far. It’s going to get worse. I don’t want any part of it,’” said Erica Anderson, who, until recently was “on the forefront of transgender care.” He underwent dramatic surgery in his late 50s but believes strongly that the pendulum has swung “to an extreme.”
“A fair number of kids are getting into it because it’s trendy,” he told the Washington Post. “I think in our haste to be supportive, we’re missing that element… Teenagers influence each other.” Anderson thinks kids are leaning into gender treatments, hoping it helps with other psychological problems — and then struggle to dig out of the depression when it doesn’t. “I have a dictum: When in doubt, doubt,” she told the LA paper. “Questioning is a good thing. How are you going to find out if you are lockstep with whatever conclusion you come to first?”
Helena Kerschner, an outspoken detransitioner with one of the biggest platforms, is grateful for anyone who raises a red flag. “I had a ton of issues with my academics and my mental health, but I never really got help with that,” Helena said. “As soon as I said I was trans, it was all-hands on deck.” But after a year and a half on drugs, she started to cut herself. “The reality I was living was not lining up with the fantasy I’d had as a teen… It was a crushing and terrifying feeling.”
To her, this White House’s obsession with gender treatments is terrifying. “The fact that there [are] adults as high up as in the Biden administration putting out these claims that young people need to medically transition is really dangerous. There’s no logic to it.”
Fortunately for this generation, there are leaders like Mary Miller who will lay it all on the line to stop more Julies, Chloes, and Helenas from living this nightmare. When PolitiFact and the rest of the Left’s bullies come after her, she says, “I’m going to fight back. If they want to fight, they can bring it on. Because… I’m not backing down.” Thank goodness.
For more on the mountain of facts the Biden administration is covering up to force this issue, check out FRC’s paper by Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, “Transgenderism Has a Science Problem.”
Monday afternoon, airline passengers whooped and hollered when flight crews informed them the federal mask mandate was finally over. Crews and passengers responded to the news by ripping off masks mid-flight. Most commercial airlines and Amtrak quickly followed suit to drop their masking policies, as did rideshare services Uber and Lyft. Airlines “were urging that the mandate be lifted sooner,” said Dr. Andrew Bostom, clinical trial epidemiologist at Brown University.
The president who promised to shut down the virus has a strange way of showing it. “Had he been smart, Joe Biden could have owned that glee,” notedNational Review‘s Charles Cooke. “Instead, it came in spite of him, courtesy of a Republican-appointed judge.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki called the decision “disappointing” but when asked why airplane cabins should be subjected to harsher rules than the White House briefing room, she could only retort lamely, “I’m not a doctor. You’re not a doctor.” Who knew advanced medical degrees were required to form opinions on questions of law, justice, and public policy?
Meanwhile on “Washington Watch,” Bostom, who is a doctor, laid out the science. Since 2008, 14 studies (12 for influenza and two for COVID) have used randomized, controlled trials, which are “the gold standard [for] evidence,” to study whether “mass masking is an intervention which works” for airborne viruses. Bostom said the results of those studies are “uniformly negative.” Nevertheless, “public health authorities have managed to push through mandates,” he continued, essentially turning “the whole evidence-based paradigm on its head.”
Other science opposing the mask mandate concerns the airplanes themselves, which are armed with “highly efficient filtration systems” and “biocidal technology to kill a virus,” explained Bostom. For comparison, “in a restaurant, the air may recirculate through a filter about every 15 minutes. In an airplane, that’s every 30 seconds,” said Ken Klukowski, the attorney representing FRC Action in its own lawsuit against the mask mandate. According to a Defense Department study conducted last year, he said, “it would take 54 hours on an airplane to get infected” with COVID — three times longer than the world’s longest flight.
However, the basic question in the judge’s opinion was legal, not scientific. Klukowski explained, “the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)… sets forth the requirements that agencies need to meet when they’re putting legal obligations or restrictions on you and me.” “A broad body of Supreme Court precedent” holds administrative agencies to a standard of “reasoned decision making,” which the judge found was not met. Thus, “forcing people to wear masks on airplanes meets the definition of what the law calls arbitrary and capricious…. The judge did the right thing,” Klukowski concluded.
The mask mandate was soundly thumped by the gavel, but it’s not quite dead yet. The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced plans to appeal, “subject to CDC’s conclusion that the order remains necessary for public health.” Of course, given the CDC’s preference for political science, they may calculate that opposing the overwhelming weight of medical data is worth it to ingratiate the president with his base. The White House’s continued insistence on encouraging mask-wearing is “consistent with their zealotry, but it’s not consistent with the data,” noted Bostom, nor “with the desires, as you can see by the popular reaction, of the vast swath of the population.”
However, the DOJ has avoided requesting a temporary stay on the ruling, an unusual move which allows the judge’s decision to remain in effect for now. That could indicate the DOJ is tired of getting pummeled in court and wants to rest its sore ribs, that they expect to lose on appeal, and that they’re only appealing on their doubly-boosted boss’s orders. So too, the CDC could, as it has done before, stick its finger into the political winds and then “discover” that “the science has changed.”
In the meantime, honest citizens won’t get kicked off a plane because they can’t keep a two-year-old’s mask on, or struggle to read a book that’s half obscured by a cloth mask serving only to virtue-signal. Americans can board their flights with all the comfort their economy-class ticket allows. You are now free to breathe about the country.
Residents screaming from windows? Children taken from parents? What is going on?
According to official reports, over 25 million Shanghai residents were placed under strict lockdown from March 27, due to rising cases of the Omicron variant of Covid-19. And when they say “lockdown,” they don’t just mean, “essential travel only.” They mean, do not leave your apartment even to purchase food. Shanghai residents must wait inside their apartments for food supplies to be delivered to them. According to a BBC report, Shanghai authorities have admitted that there have been problems with the food supply chain, corroborating complaints of food shortages made by residents.
Day 17 of my Shanghai Covid lockdown and food remains the priority
As usual, I woke up at 6am to try ordering deliveries
I have 10 apps that I cycle through repeatedly from various stores/platforms for several hours trying to find anything
The city has set up testing sites to implement mandatory mass testing, shuttling off Covid-positive residents to hospitals and makeshift quarantine facilities. Loudspeakers blare out, “Get tested now.” Isolating at home is not an option.
One particularly disturbing aspect of the Shanghai lockdown is the separation of parents from children who test positive and are sent off to quarantine facilities. It must be pretty heart-wrenching to see one’s child carted away to a quarantine facility, completely deprived of the support of family and loved ones.
One of the scenes that seems to encapsulate the hopeless plight of Shanghai residents, trapped in their apartments by their own government, is the sound of residents screaming in protest from their windows. This scene was captured on social media, and picked up by many mainstream media, such as The Guardian, as well:
What the?? This video taken yesterday in Shanghai, China, by the father of a close friend of mine. She verified its authenticity: People screaming out of their windows after a week of total lockdown, no leaving your apartment for any reason. pic.twitter.com/iHGOO8D8Cz
Shanghai authorities announced on Monday, April 11, that they would implement a “limited easing” of restrictions. But this comes two full weeks into one of the strictest and most far-reaching lockdowns since the pandemic began. Who knows how many people will by now have been deprived of access to essential medical services, or have gone hungry due to broken supply chains, or have been sunk in depression due to prolonged isolation from friends and loved ones?
Most of the world has by now come to accept that we must live with Covid-19 for the foreseeable future, and that all hopes of a “zero Covid” future were a naïve pipe-dream that will never come to pass. Yet China seems to cling to the fantasy of a zero-Covid world, refusing to accept that such a fantasy has lost every shred of credibility in this endemic phase of the virus.
The severe two-week lockdown in Shanghai has not been successful at containing the virus. Even if it were successful, this success would not be sustainable, since you cannot just keep locking down a large population every time a highly transmissible virus pops its head above the parapet.
To indulge a fantasy privately is one thing; to allow public officials to inflict that fantasy, come hell or high water, on a population of 25 million citizens is quite another.
But as we survey Shanghai from Western nations that have, at least for a while, recovered most of the liberties we were stripped of in the name of public health, we cannot afford to be complacent. For the Orwellian nightmare that we see unfolding before our eyes in Shanghai is just the logical consequence of the very same sort of Covid containment absolutism that ruled the roost across much of the West during a large part of the pandemic.
And this cruel, inhumane, and absolutist approach to disease control, though it has been significantly tempered in most Western nations in the latter months of the pandemic, has only been explicitly disavowed by a fraction of Western governments. So the new public health absolutism unleashed in 2020 has certainly not been laid to rest in the West.
Furthermore, the notion of a WHO-led pandemic “treaty,” now being publicly mooted by the WHO, raises the spectre of an even more tightly coordinated international pandemic response, in a world in which many political and scientific elites, with a limited appreciation for the principles of liberal constitutionalism and individualised medicine, have yet to publicly distance themselves in a principled way from the recklessness and inhumanity of lockdowns and medical coercion.
The Covid containment absolutist fancies himself as a humanitarian, who just wants to save lives, but in reality, embraces a bizarrely selective form of humanitarianism, fixing his attention almost exclusively on lives endangered by Covid infections. Indeed, he is so single-mindedly preoccupied with reducing infections that virtually every other dimension of public health and societal well-being seems to disappear from view.
The Covid containment absolutist is like a grand Chess Master, who has crafted a Master Plan for his army of chess pieces to faithfully follow. If a chess piece protests or resists, it must be put back in its place. At least, in theory.
The trouble is, human beings are much more than chess pieces. They are living, breathing persons with hopes, fears, desires, aspirations, loves, and aversions. They are equipped by nature to be masters of their own destinies, not just pawns on a chessboard.
To shove people around, ship them off to quarantine camps, mandate them to test repeatedly even when they are in perfect health, punish them for not vaccinating, order them to stay at home, confine them within a two-kilometre radius of their homes, or restrict the number of visitors they may receive in the privacy of their own home, is essentially to treat them as cattle, or as pawns on a chessboard, not as autonomous individuals with valid life plans and choices of their own.
To treat people as mere disease vectors, or utility functions in a Covid Containment Plan, is to trample on their dignity and to make their liberties contingent on the questionable musings of an “expert class,” a class that has, for the most part, exhibited a blinkered and impoverished social imagination, and proved itself hopelessly inept at managing a complex public health problem. The disproportionate faith this expert class has placed in containment measures like universal masking, vaccine passports, and lockdowns, has proved delusional.
Shanghai may appear to us now as a distant Orwellian nightmare. But in reality, it is just a slightly accentuated version of the Orwellian nightmare Western governments needlessly inflicted on their own citizens in 2020 and 2021, in the face of a virus that poses no serious threat to young and healthy people and has an estimated Infection Fatality Rate in the range of 0.2-0.3%.
Shanghai’s current lockdown shares with its Western counterparts an inhumane and reckless approach to disease control characterised by dehumanising attitudes toward citizens, a mono-dimensional vision of public health and well-being, and a manifest contempt for human rights. Sadly, this infelicitous approach took root among many leaders of the international public health establishment soon after it was first put on display in Wuhan back in January 2020.
If we are shocked by the way Chinese authorities imprison their citizens in their homes and ship infected citizens off to makeshift isolation camps, then we should probably take a long, hard look in the mirror.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 12:51:582022-04-20 12:51:58Shanghai’s Orwellian Nightmare is a Reminder of the Inhumanity of Absolutist Approaches to Disease Control
The sickening revelations from the Rochdale sex abuse scandal are a reminder that abortion and abuse go hand in hand.
In the UK, Police have issued an apology and paid substantial damages to three women now in their 30s, who as children were repeatedly sexually abused and raped by organised gangs.
Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable Stephen Watson apologised the failings of the police under his predecessors. They had “failed to protect them or investigate their abusers”. Mr Watson told the three victims, referred to as Amber, Daisy and BXW: “GMP could and should have done much more to protect you and we let you down.”
This lawsuit will set a precedent for dozens of other survivors whose lives were ruined by the Rochdale child sex abuse scandal, say campaigners. The revelations of the scale of the abuse in Rochdale and Rotherham was front-page news in the British media for months. The grooming gangs targeted young girls who were in government care because of behavioural problems or dysfunctional home situations.
The stories related by the three women are sickening.
Legal documents show that Amber was 14 years old when the abuse started. According to the Daily Express: “She was first raped while intoxicated and thereafter raped and sexually assaulted by numerous men. She was threatened with a gun and a knife on separate occasions when she refused to comply.” Daisy was only 12 when the abuse began and it continued for another five years.
BXW said she was happy that the police had acknowledged their responsibility for their ordeal. In her case, she said that the abuse began when she was 12 and continued for four years, during which “she was passed ‘like a ball’ between ‘thousands’ of men for rape and sexual abuse. She was impregnated by one man, Adil Khan, when she was 13 and had an abortion”.
The Manchester Police did worse than nothing about this terrible situation. Subsequent investigations showed that they dismissed complaints from the victims and ignored warnings about the abuse.
A police operation to tackle the gangs stopped in 2004 — and just eight years later, nine men ended up being convicted for sexually abusing children in Rochdale.
The Police apology is the result of a legal challenge launched by the three women assisted by lawyers from the Centre for Women’s Justice charity. They contended that “from the early 2000s there was growing evidence that gangs of men were grooming, trafficking and sexually abusing girls” in Rochdale, Lancashire. The case was clear and the Police settled out of court.
Much of the controversy which surrounds the Rochdale grooming gang and the even bigger Rotherham grooming gang is related to the racial background of the offenders. Most were British Pakistanis and there were strident allegations of racism.
But this overlooks a central feature of these crimes – abortion. This appalling story shows once again how abortion for under-age girls has facilitated vicious and organised sexual abuse of minors, not just in Rochdale but all over the country, many of them supposedly in state care.
As Sara Rowbotham, a health worker and local politician who blew the whistle on the abuse, commented to the Daily Express: “This is good news for the three girls involved, but what about all the others? There are at least 180 other survivors of the Rochdale grooming gangs. They should also be apologised to and compensated.”
The government itself has been found guilty — sadly, only in the court of public opinion — for breaking its own law. Children cannot legally consent to sexual relations – but they can get abortions.
No wonder, seeing so little respect for the law from those at the top, the very dregs of society, in the shape of those opportunistic paedophiles, exploited it.
As Canadian journalist Jonathon van Maren observed: “The evidence of these crimes just happens to be babies. So often one repulsive crime is entwined with another, and robbing one of innocence so often means snuffing out another innocent just a little further down the road. Evil men use violence against pre-born children to cover up their violence against girls.”
The men responsible for these crimes have demonstrated by their own vile conduct — treating children as worthless playthings — that they themselves are worth very little. Some have been jailed. But this kind of abuse will not end until the governing elites stop ignoring that the state uses abortion, the so-called “right to choose”, as the perfect cover-up for rape and even for organised crime.
Ann Farmer, mother of three, grandmother of five and permanently disabled, is based in Woodford Green, Essex. She is a poet, illustrator, writer and pro-life feminist devoted to defending the natural family… More by Ann Farmer
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 12:51:562022-04-20 12:51:56Abortion: The Perfect Cover-Up for Rape
Murder: Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human with malice aforethought. This state of mind may, depending upon the jurisdiction, distinguish murder from other forms of unlawful homicide, such as manslaughter. – Wikipedia
One of the questions I get asked the most these days is when the world will be able to go back to the way things were in December before the coronavirus pandemic. My answer is always the same: when we have an almost perfect drug to treat COVID-19, or when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.
More and more information is coming from the CDC, FDA and multiple scientific studies about the ill and deadly effects of taking the Covid vaccine or booster shots. These ill and deadly effects are becoming crystal clear.
With nearly six months of data since the unconstitutional Food and Drug Administration provided emergency use authorization for Pfizer’s deadly COVID shots for kids aged 5-11, we’re seeing it is even more deadly in the kids than the adults. Those who continue to peddle the lie that these are “safe and effective” are clearly complicit in the deaths of those taking them.
So far over 10,000 cases have been filed to VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) of deaths and injuries among children in this age group following the experimental COVID-19 vaccines. (Source.)
By way of contrast, there have been 939 cases of vaccine adverse events during this same time period for all of the FDA approved vaccines for children in this age group. (Source.)
That means there has been an increase of over 1000% of vaccine injuries and deaths for this age group following the COVID-19 vaccines.
As of April 19th, 2022 the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VEARS) database showed more than 1.2 million Covid vaccine injuries. Remember, the (VAERS) reporting is voluntary.
Megan Redshaw from the The Epoch Times on April 17th, 2022 reported:
VAERS data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention included a total of 1,226,314 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 26,976 deaths and 219,865 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today released new data showing a total of 1,226,314 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022, to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.
The data included a total of 26,976 reports of deaths — an increase of 277 over the previous week — and 219,865 serious injuries, including deaths, during the same time period — up 2,564 compared with the previous week.
QUESTION: How many vaccine injuries and deaths remain unreported by a gravely compromised medical establishment?
Because products failed and were never pulled off the market when deaths began to occur. No investigation, no safety review, no disclosure to the govt or coerced consumer. Pre-purchased products was the gravy train that drove large-scale bio-pharmaceutical corporate fraud. pic.twitter.com/fYoEdtiU38
— Peter McCullough, MD MPH (@P_McCulloughMD) April 18, 2022
Covid’s Serial Killers
Have governments turned our medical professionals into serial killers? Is administering the Covid vaccine a short and long term danger to all of mankind?
Nine out of 10 deaths in England were reportedly those people who have been fully vaccinated with COVID-19 vaccines, according to reports.
While England recorded 9 out 10 deaths from those who received two COVID-19 vaccines shots, 4 out 5 deaths also came from people who triple-vaccinated. This is according to the data published by the U.K. Health Security Agency.
The Expose site an independent British news outlet reported on February 22, a table that would show a confirmation the vast majority of deaths were among the vaccinated on page 41.
This report revealed that about 73.5% of the population of England has been fully vaccinated, and 56.9% have received a booster shot, as of Feb. 28.
We have witnessed four pandemics during our lifetime. The last two were H1N1 and SARS under the Obama administration.
Former Senior Advisor to the President and current Ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel said,
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
Covid gave Biden, the Biden administration, politicians from the city, to county, to state and in Washington, D.C. an unprecedented opportunity to do things that they or no-one before could do – shutdown an entire nation!
It’s the 800-poundgorilla in the pandemic. The debate over forced vaccination with an ever-waning vaccine is cresting right around the time when the debate should be moot for a lot of people. Among the most fraudulent messages of the CDC’s campaign of deceit is to force the vaccine on those with prior infection, who have a greater degree of protection against all versions of the virus than those with any of the vaccines. It’s time to set the record straight once and for all that natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is broader, more durable, and longer-lasting than any of the shots on the market today. Our policies must reflect that reality…
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
Watch this tweet on the reason for lockdowns was to force people to get jabbed:
WOW: “You use lockdowns to get people vaccinated.” ~ Dr. Fauci
Fauci is essentially admitting that lockdowns were used to condition and control the public—putting people in such a heightened state of desperation for freedom as to compel us to take the vaccine. pic.twitter.com/PNIOqngVog
The world is experiencing a deep seated form of vaccine “doublethink” in which many believe their governments are telling the truth about Covid, the vaccines and effects of getting jabbed. They believe that what their governments are telling them is scientifically true.
But science demands truth, while Covid lockdowns and mandates demand obedience.
Hence Covid Doublethink = Obedience.
Our bodies are the best and longest lasting defense against Covid and its variants.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 10:52:392022-04-20 10:52:39Are those who administer any of the Covid vaccines or booster shots serial killers?
Project 21 co-chair Horace Cooper and former Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek join ‘Fox News @ Night’ to discuss the rise in violent crime across the U.S.
Support of Black Lives Matter and calls to defund the police reverberated across America in 2020 following the death of George Floyd, igniting social justice protests and riots at a time when the coronavirus and lockdowns upended society in unprecedented ways. What was left in 2020’s wake was a massive increase in the number of murders, dealing a disproportionate blow to Black Americans.
“Certainly, the protests and riots mid-2020 after the death of George Floyd followed a pattern of spiking violence that we’ve seen following past viral police incidents, such as the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. This pattern has been termed the ‘Ferguson Effect’: police pull back while violent crime spikes precipitously,” Hannah Meyers, director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News Digital.
Murders across the board spiked by nearly 30% in 2020 compared to the year prior, according to FBI data, marking the largest single-year increase in killings since the agency began tracking the crimes. Among Black Americans, the number of deaths spiked by more than 32% compared to 2019.
In 2019, at least 7,484 Black Americans were murdered. That number shot up to at least 9,941 murders in 2020, meaning there was an increase of 2,457 Black Americans murdered over the previous year.
The number of Black murders was also far higher than White murders in 2020. The FBI data shows there 7,043 White people murdered that year, meaning 2,898 more Black people were killed compared to Whites.
Between 2010 and 2019, there was an average of 5,954 White murders, which is roughly 16% lower than the 10-year average of Black murders. During that same time period, an average of 6,927 Black Americans were murdered each year, meaning Black murders shot up by 43% in 2020 compared to the previous 10-year average.
The figures are more staggering considering White Americans make up 76% of the population compared to Black Americans representing only 13%, according to Census data.
Murders in the 2010s first broke the 7,000 murder benchmark in 2015 after the high-profile deaths of Freddie Gray that same year and Michael Brown in 2014, jumping by nearly a thousand in one year. Brown was fatally shot by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer and Gray died after he sustained injuries in the back of a Baltimore police van. Their deaths sparked protests and riots similar to the ones following Floyd’s death.
Prior to Brown’s death, Black murders had fallen the previous four years.
Fox News Digital reviewed murder data from 2014 and 2015 and found a spike of 15% in year over year data. At least 7,000 Black Americans were killed each year thereafter without ever exceeding the 8,000 mark……
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-20 10:52:372022-04-20 10:52:37BLM’s Defund Police Movement Cause of Massive Increase in Black Americans Murdered
And remember, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reporting is voluntary. How many vaccine injuries and death remain unreported by a gravely compromised medical establishment?
Because products failed and were never pulled off the market when deaths began to occur. No investigation, no safety review, no disclosure to the govt or coerced consumer. Pre-purchased products was the gravy train that drove large-scale bio-pharmaceutical corporate fraud. pic.twitter.com/fYoEdtiU38
— Peter McCullough, MD MPH (@P_McCulloughMD) April 18, 2022
VAERS data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention included a total of 1,226,314 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 26,976 deaths and 219,865 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today released new data showing a total of 1,226,314 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022, to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.
The data included a total of 26,976 reports of deaths — an increase of 277 over the previous week — and 219,865 serious injuries, including deaths, during the same time period — up 2,564 compared with the previous week.
Foreign reports are reports foreign subsidiaries send to U.S. vaccine manufacturers. Under U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, if a manufacturer is notified of a foreign case report that describes an event that is both serious and does not appear on the product’s labeling, the manufacturer is required to submit the report to VAERS.
Of the 12,471 U.S. deaths reported as of April 8, 17% occurred within 24 hours of vaccination, 21% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination and 59% occurred in people who experienced an onset of symptoms within 48 hours of being vaccinated…..
A Wall Street executive whose analysis of CDC data shows an alarming rise in deaths among Millennials over the past year amid the COVID vaccine rollout said he’s hoping to start a national conversation that will penetrate an establishment media “blackout” by emboldening people across government and private industry to speak out.
Former portfolio manager for the multinational investment firm BlackRock, Edward Dowd and a Wall Street insurance analyst with whom he has teamed conclude the CDC data show the Millennial generation suffered a “Vietnam War event,” with more than 61,000 excess deaths from March 2021 to February 2022.
There was a particularly significant “spike” in mortality in the fall of 2021, he said, that cannot be explained by the delta variant, opioids, suicides or other causes. He said his partner in the project, who has actuarial training, analyzed the insurance industry on Wall Street for seven years. The insurance expert, Dowd said, currently is presenting the data to a financial group and will eventually reveal his identity.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking. This is the most important announcement I’ve ever made. The federal mask mandate is over. Take off your mask if you choose!”
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https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-19 09:52:062022-04-19 09:52:06CDC Data Shows More Than 1.2 Million Covid Vaccine Injuries
Editor’s Note: This article is based on Mr. DeMuth’s opening address at theEuropean National Conservatism Conference in Brussels, Belgium, on March 23, 2022.
February 2020 turned out to be the last month to date of normal life in most of the world. Early in the month, a few cases of what came to be known as Covid-19 were identified in Rome, in individuals recently arrived from Wuhan, China. Soon Italian hospitals were overwhelmed and the government locked down the entire nation. Cases began popping up in other well-traveled parts of Europe and the United States, and local, state, and national authorities—with little understanding of the spread or seriousness of the disease, but terrified by the news from Italy—began locking down their populations. The global pandemic was upon us.
Two years later, in February 2022, the worst of the pandemic was receding; its wounds and disruptions were being repaired and life was springing up again. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and commenced killing its people, destroying its cities, and threatening the world with nuclear war. A natural disaster was replaced by a man-made disaster of horrifying savagery and stupidity.
The free nations of the prosperous West that have been under sustained assault constitute a great and admirable civilization. Vladimir Putin and the dictators of China and Iran are right to fear not only the allure of freedom but also its power. One of the first lessons of the Ukraine onslaught is that authoritarians are as bad at military organization as they are at economic and political organization. Our far-flung interconnectedness made the novel coronavirus an instant global killer—but was also key to the rapid invention of equally novel, miraculous vaccines that have saved millions of lives.
The Free World has also, however, fallen prey to certain soft conceits, which Putin and his ilk are right to see as weaknesses. We had imagined that the world’s troubles were amenable to rational management and apolitical expertise. We could leave them to specialized agencies somewhere up there in the cloud, or maybe in Brussels, if only politicians would “follow the science” and accede to the arc of global progressivism. That would free modern man to cultivate his individuality—his personal pleasures and grievances, his likes and dislikes. The fantasy that hard problems can be wished out of our lives has been an important source of decay in our culture, political rhetoric, and institutions of government.
But the last two years have been disenthralling. Experts claimed they could specify the path of global temperatures for a century hence within a few degrees—and it turned out they could miss the path of global disease for one month hence by an order of magnitude. Experts claimed that nation-states and borders were barbaric vestiges and that global bureaucracies could usher in peace and harmony—and it turned out we had barbarians at the gates in the here and now and that nations with borders were essential to peace and harmony. Experts claimed that global markets would bring prosperity and democracy—and it turned out they could also bring domestic division and imperial domination.
Into the breach came, willy nilly, the nation-state. It is unnecessary to argue that the United Nations and the World Health Organization proved useless in the crises at hand, for everyone could see that they mainly got in the way, or yakety-yacked while others took urgent action.
Managing a pandemic—a quintessential global emergency—fell inescapably to individual nations, with their diverse demographics, healthcare, and hospital systems, public attitudes, structures of government, and leaders accountable to actual electorates and fellow citizens. When the European Union asserted authority over vaccine procurement and distribution, it badly mishandled them—even the New York Times called it a “fiasco.” Nations that didn’t have EU insider privileges had to come up with workarounds. When the going gets tough, democracy loses patience with technocracy.
Russia’s latest war has been analyzed in terms of spheres of influence, the return of great-power competition, dictatorship versus democracy. But the heart of the matter is the integrity of the nation. An imperial power invaded a peaceful self-governing nation for conquest, aiming to seize its territory and farms and industry, to subjugate its people, and to extinguish its traditions and institutions. That is why Ukraine has become a popular cause around the world. The Ukrainians cry out, this is our land, our home, our country. President Zelensky compares his countrymen’s struggle and heroism to the historic struggles and heroes of other nations; he is even gauche enough to name names at a time when other nations are toppling their heroes. You don’t have to have taken a course in political science to understand this war. Nor to be overwhelmed by the bravery and determination of the Ukrainians and to reflect on your responsibilities for your own national home.
And the response has been a rallying of sovereign nations that few living people have seen before. In the order of nation-states, each nation defends the overall order as its own interests require or permit. Some nations have been constrained by their existential reliance on Russian energy; others have judged that they may play a useful role as diplomatic intermediaries; plus, we are going to need a delegation to inform Putin that he has lost. Close to the fray, fears that one’s own nation may be next on Putin’s hit-list, or that in desperation he may introduce nuclear or chemical weapons into the military theater, have produced a spectrum of reactions both among and within nations. But the total response has been the provision of stupendous defensive armaments and intelligence, logistical, and humanitarian support, and repudiation of Putin and isolation of the Russian economy. Most striking of all has been the many reversals of national defense, energy, and financial policies that would have been inconceivable the day before the invasion.
All of this has been spontaneous collaboration, each nation bringing its unique assets to the cause without the benefit of direction by any supernational body. The EU has been helpful as a convening body, but it has disgraced itself by imposing heavy financial penalties on Hungary and Poland, for patently partisan and ideological reasons, just as those nations were struggling to welcome and care for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees. No self-respecting nation would have behaved in this manner in a time of war. Let us hope that Ukraine’s victory and EU membership will bring Brussels to a new policy of liberality towards the nations of Central Europe.
It is surely a positive development that, from terrible events, we are directing our hopes and expectations at the performance of the nation-state constrained by a renewed sense of realism.
The newly engaged nation-states came to the crises of the past two years woefully unready, following a long period of desuetude, self-indulgent politics, and, for many, mediocre leadership. Sovereignty needs to be earned continuously—through prudent finance and low public debt, diversification in energy and other requisites of national independence, and ample provision to prepare for natural disasters and military defense. Lacking these fundamentals, we have faced many tragic choices that were more painful and costly than they needed to have been. Having witnessed a display of national self-determination that will ring through history, we may be inspired to greater political seriousness in our own nations.
In the pandemic response, the diversity of national approaches, and within the United States the diversity of state approaches, yielded continuous policy competition and learning-by-doing. Among the free Western nations, the sharing of real-time data on infections, hospitalizations, and morbidity and mortality, and the rigorous criticisms of independent physicians and immunologists, contributed powerfully to policy realism. The climate-change mantra of “the science is settled” never got traction in a genuine crisis.
We are now coming to understand, better late than never, that comprehensive lockdowns and school closures were largely ineffective in controlling Covid-19 but fabulously costly to our economies and social well-being. We have gained this understanding precisely because of the knowledge generated by nation-led responses, which would have been obscured by uniform responses directed by the WHO, EU, or the federal government in the United States. For now, government restrictions are being lifted much faster than skeptics were predicting just a month ago. We will come to the next pandemic less confused and perhaps better equipped.
In the Ukraine response, it is disheartening that the German government has stuck with its plans to decommission perfectly good nuclear power plants, and that the U.S. government is still zealous to obstruct the development and use of fossil fuels. Nor has the war inspired Americans to set aside our bad habits of performative politics, personal positioning, and incessant scoring of ideological debating points. But the most striking development in the United States is that Congress has seized the initiative from the foreign policy elites, repeatedly forcing the Biden administration to revise and strengthen its assistance to Ukraine. Congress’s more representative, populist response has displayed Americans’ instinctive support for the underdog, but also a keen appreciation of the constraints and complications that attend American action.
The situation is highly dynamic, with many national elections in-store and adjustments underway in party positions and electoral strategies. Among intellectuals, the new thinking and Left-Right-Radical alignments that began with Donald Trump and Brexit in 2016 are shifting dramatically. Where government is concerned, a good rule of thumb is to Expect the Worst and Hope for the Sufficient. But it is surely a positive development that, from terrible events, we are directing our hopes and expectations at the performance of the nation-state constrained by a renewed sense of realism.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-04-19 03:55:002022-04-19 03:55:00The Nation is the Heart of the Matter
When school nurse Kathleen Cataford wrote on a ‘mom’s page’ that 11 students were identifying as gender non-binary – 9 without parental consent – she was suspended within a week at Richard J Kinsella Magnet School in Hartford, Connecticut.
She did not disclose the names or ages of the children, only the fact the school was keeping this life-changing, dangerous information a secret from their parents.
Throughout the country, schools are coercing children into deciding whether to accept their biological birth or switch to the opposite sex.
The writing is on the wall for parents to clearly see:
Schools will soon begin counseling children how to receive “gender-affirming medical care” – that is, hormone treatments, puberty blockers and actual genital mutilation – without parental knowledge, much less consent.
In this episode of Shout Out Patriots, we examine parents’ options if they discover their school is funneling puberty blockers – or other ‘gender-affirming-medical-care’ – to their child without expressed permission.
Be warned, however. The law is likely on the side of schools rather than the parent.
In an arguably similar case regarding parental rights, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that it was perfectly legal for a school guidance counselor to help a 15-year-old girl obtain a secret abortion.
Now, parents are faced with a new danger as they confront an orchestrated movement to dismiss parents regarding their child’s ‘gender welfare.’
In fact, a school district in Wisconsin made this abundantly clear last month.
Teachers at the Eau Claire School District were told NOT to inform parents if their child no longer identifies with their biological sex.
Parents need to ‘earn’ that right, the school district declared.
Teachers were shown a slide that read:
‘Remember, parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned.’
Parents are ‘not entitled’? Parents have to ‘earn’ that right? Schools are positioning themselves as ‘lifeboats’ to protect children from angry, backward-thinking, gender-conforming parents.
So, what would you do upon finding out your school helped coerce your child into their changing gender identity without permission or your knowledge? Or even given puberty blockers?
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-18 22:51:262022-04-18 22:51:26PODCAST: School Nurse Suspended for Exposing 11 Students Who Changed Their ‘Gender Identity’
A federal judge struck down the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) mask mandate for public transportation Monday.
District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle of Florida’s middle district ruled that the mask mandate exceeds the CDC’s statutory authority under the Administrative Procedure Act, according to court documents. The lawsuit challenging the mandate was initially brought in July 2021 by the Health Freedom Defense Fund.
*MASK MANDATE FOR PLANES, TRAINS OVERTURNED BY FLORIDA JUDGE
Mizelle, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, ruled that the CDC’s order “violates the procedures required for agency rulemaking under the APA” and remanded the mandate order back to the CDC.
The Biden administration has continued to extend the temporary mask mandate order throughout the pandemic, most recently announcing last week that the order would be extended at least 15 more days into May. With all 50 states and most localities having dropped their indoor mask mandates earlier this year, the federal mandate forcing Americans to mask on planes, trains and other public transit is one of the last remaining COVID-19 restrictions still in place.
Earlier this year, 21 states sued the Biden administration in an attempt to end the mandate. Biden’s CDC has come under further scrutiny for continuing to apply the public transportation mask mandate, citing the threat of the BA.2 Omicron subvariant of the coronavirus, while ending Title 42 and relaxing immigration enforcement, citing the reduced impact of the pandemic at this time.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-18 21:51:212022-04-18 21:51:21Federal Mask Mandate For Public Transportation Overturned By District Judge
It’s difficult to see it getting any lower than the Brazilian Butt Lift
This might not be news to many Americans, but being an oddball disconnected from the pop culture and trends du jour, it was news to me—and shocking and distressing news at that.I’m speaking of the Brazilian Butt Lift and other medical procedures that have been developed to make women’s butts the size and shape of two side-by-side beach balls.
It might have something to do with the Kardashians.I don’t know their claim to fame but know they are trend-setters and have seen photos of them and their heavy makeup, greasy hair and beach balls.
Mariana van Zeller recently exposed the big business of big butts on her show “Trafficked.”My wife and I had our mouths agape while watching the episode.
Given his natural interest in rear ends, our dog was also fascinated by the show.Thank goodness we don’t have a bull as a pet, for he would’ve eloped with the TV.
The Brazilian Butt Lift entails the surgical removal of fat from some parts of the body and reinserting it in the buttocks.The center of this industry is in Miami, where the procedure is done in surgery storefronts in strip malls, for both American and foreign customers.It’s a bloody, dangerous procedure.Women have died during the operation.
Another procedure for blowing up butts like a beach ball is silicone injections, which are popular in many cities.Like the Brazilian Butt Lift, the injections can have medical complications.They also can lead to severe scarring that requires expensive corrective operations by skilled surgeons.
One scene was filmed inside a high-end strip club in Atlanta, where the dancers pay $1,000 per night to the club and can get ten times as much in tips.According to the dancers interviewed for the show, nine of ten of them have gotten the silicone injections.New dancers have to be inspected in the nude before being allowed to dance at the club, to make sure that they have butts of the proper size and shape.Meat inspectors at a meat-packing plant come to mind.
To use the silly-sounding lingo of the times, all of the women featured on the segment were “people of color.”
One of the women was a former man, who was shown with her naked butt being injected with silicone.Using a popular word of the day, she said that like a lot of people in the transsexual “community,” she had always wanted a curvaceous body.
Maybe some of the featured women were naturally pretty, but with their heavy makeup, fake eyelashes the size of brooms, grotesque tattoos, corpulence, and inarticulateness, there was nothing attractive about them.They oozed shallowness and insecurity.No doubt, the men who find them attractive are even shallower.
Of course, in keeping with journalistic protocols, van Zeller was careful to tell the women that she wasn’t passing judgement on them.After all, being judgmental is a taboo in America among the commentariat, literati, and intelligentsia.
Fortunately, it’s not a taboo in my family.If I were to tell my wife that I wanted to get silicone injections in my Roman nose to make it even larger, she’d tell me that I should get psychiatric help.The same if I were to announce one day that I was Henry the Eighth and began parading around in sixteenth century outfits.For sure, she would have me institutionalized if I started to call her Anne Boleyn and practiced splitting open watermelons with a sword on a chopping block in the backyard.
A glaring societal contradiction can’t be explained.On the one hand, the demeaning of women is tolerated—not only by means of the Brazilian Butt Lift but also in popular entertainment.Take a song by a female “artist” that won a Grammy last year.The lyrics are so disgusting that they won’t be quoted here, but suffice it to say that the song is about a wet and large female body part.
On the other hand, there has been the equal rights movement, the #MeToo movement, the push to get women into positions of power, and the canceling and firing of powerful and influential men who couldn’t keep their hands off women.Having been at the vanguard of the equal rights movement, I know that the goal wasn’t to bring women down to the locker-room standards of adolescent males.
Perhaps the trend of butt injections will run its course and eventually lose air, like a punctured beach ball.But if other trends are a guide, it will first metastasize into something worse.Tattoos are an example.They began as a small personal expression on an arm or leg but spread into sleeve tattoos, neck tattoos, and face tattoos.What was seen as a sign of individuality and rebelliousness has become a sign of groupthink and conformity.Even more inexplicable, people who are compulsive about not consuming chemicals with their food are okay with having chemicals injected in their skin to draw permanent tattoos.
Now women are having chemicals injected in their butts, similar to Thanksgiving turkeys being injected with chemicals by turkey companies to make them plumper.
Has the American culture hit bottom with butt injections?Don’t count on it.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-04-18 15:00:002022-04-18 15:00:00Has the American Culture Hit Bottom?
