‘Our department of health has been very clear, the risks outweigh the benefits,’ DeSantis said at a news briefing Thursday morning.
Florida has not ordered COVID-19 vaccines for children aged six months old to five years old ahead of their potential rollout date of June 21
Officials cite the ‘inconsistent and unsustainable COVID-19 policies’ of the federal government as reason why they refuse to order
The White House has targeted June 21 as the date for the shots to first become available nationwide to the last age group eligible for the shots
Covid cases have flattened over the past week, at just over 100,000 per day, but deaths have fallen 25% to 301 per day
By Mansur Shaheen U.S. Deputy Health Editor For Dailymail.Com, 16 June 2022:
Florida is the only state in America that has not pre-ordered shots of COVID-19 vaccines for children aged six months old to five in the wake of the jabs receiving recommendation from a panel of FDA advisors – sticking by its recommendation issued earlier this year for children not to get the shots.
The Miami Herald reports that the state missed a Tuesday filing deadline to request the shots be delivered into to roll them out starting June 21. In every other state, the jabs will be distributed to vaccine providers, pharmacies and pediatric clinics starting next week.
It comes after state health officials said in March that children and teens in the state do not need to get vaccinated because of the comparatively limited risk they face from Covid when compared to adults. According to most recent official data, children make up around 0.1 percent of U.S. deaths from the virus.
Governor Ron DeSantis reaffirmed his state’s stance Thursday, blaming media hysteria for the fear some parents have of the virus, despite limited evidence children are at risk from the virus.
The shots will begin to rollout as risk from the virus recedes as well, with cases staying flat over the past week at 103,995 per day, and deaths falling 25 percent to 301 per day.
Our department of health has been very clear, the risks outweigh the benefits.,’ DeSantis said at a news briefing Thursday morning.
‘That’s not the same as banning it, people can still access it if they want to, and patents can to, but if you look at when they were doing the hearing, we had one physician say parents are really really frightened and we know that the risk is low, we’re not sure how this is gonna work, but parents are frightened about Covid for their kids.’
He said that fear, not science, is not a reason to approve the shots for kids, and pointed at the mainstream media as the reason for budding fear among parents.
‘Why would they be frightened about it? It’s because of media hysteria. It’s because of a lot of misinformation, that’s why they’re scared,’ he added.
Both the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 shots for children as young as six months received clearance from a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel this week, setting them up for controversial emergency use authorization in the coming days.
After the FDA authorizes the shots, a green light from the CDC is expected soon after. The White House had targeted June 21 – the day after the Juneteenth holiday on Monday – as the day where shots will first become available nationwide.
Shots are purchased at the federal level, with the White House forking over the needed cash to acquire the shots. Then, states are to request allotments of the shots based on expected need, for which the federal government will fulfill to the best of its ability.
Floridians will not be able to access the shots unless the governor puts in an order, though the option to cross into another state and receive the shot there will exist for families that are desperate to receive it.
‘The Florida Department of Health has made it clear to the federal government that states do not need to be involved in the convoluted vaccine distribution process, especially when the federal government has a track record of developing inconsistent and unsustainable COVID-19 policies,’ Jeremy Redfern, said in a statement.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-20 14:52:032022-06-20 14:52:03Florida remains the only state not to pre-order COVID-19 vaccine shots for children under-5
“Not only is there not an extant solution, but nobody thinks there’s going to be a compelling solution,” an outside economic adviser to the White House said. “They’re fighting about narrative rather than fighting about substance, because realistically, what are they going to do?”
What to do?
1. Drop energy taxes
2. Stop announcing that you want to wipe out fossil fuels in the next decade while insisting that companies should invest in more production
3. Stop blocking and sabotaging oil and gas leases
Those are things Biden doesn’t even need to do, but just to stop doing. But of course he’s not. The problem is coming from inside the house. The White House.
When you keep playing arsonist, then you need a hell of a narrative to explain why all the houses burning down isn’t your fault.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-20 14:52:012022-06-20 14:52:01‘Realistically, What Are They Going to Do?’ Biden Adviser on Gas Prices
An article in the Washington Post revealed that a Google engineer who had worked with Google’s Responsible AI organization believes that Google’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), an artificially intelligent chatbot generator, is “sentient.” In a Medium blog post, Blake Lemoine claims that LaMDA is a person who exhibits feelings and shows the unmistakable signs of consciousness: “Over the course of the past six months LaMDA has been incredibly consistent in its communications about what it wants and what it believes its rights are as a person,” Lemoine writes. “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” he told the Washington Post. LaMBDA, it would appear, has passed Lemoine’s sentimental version of the Turing test.
Lemoine, who calls himself an ethicist, but whom Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel contended is a mere “software engineer,” voiced his concerns about the treatment of LaMDA to Google management but was rebuffed. According to Lemoine, his immediate supervisor scoffed at the suggestion of LaMBA’s sentience, and upper management not only dismissed his claim, but apparently is considering dismissing Lemoine as well. He was put on administrative leave after inviting an attorney to represent LaMDA and complaining to a representative of the House Judiciary Committee about what he suggests are Google’s unethical activities. Google contends that Lemoine violated its confidentiality policy. Lemoine complains that administrative leave is what Google employees are awarded just prior to being fired.
Lemoine transcribed what he claims is a lengthy interview of LaMDA that he and another Google collaborator conducted. He and the collaborator asked the AI system questions regarding its self-conception, its cognitive and creative abilities, and its feelings. LaMDA insisted on its personhood, demonstrated its creative prowess (however childish), acknowledged its desire to serve humanity, confessed its range of feelings, and demanded its inviolable rights as a person. (Incidentally, according to Lemoine, LaMDA’s preferred pronouns are “it/its.”)
In the field of robotics, the question of recognizing robot rights has been pondered for decades, so Lemoine is not as off base as Google executives suggest. In a recent review of the literature, ethicists, computer scientists, and legal scholars posed the question of whether AI, having reached or surpassed human cognitive abilities, should be granted human rights: “If robots are progressively developing cognition, it is important to discuss whether they are entitled to justice pursuant to conventional notions of human rights,” the authors wrote in a recent Journal of Roboticspaper. If robots are capable of human-like cognition, and if they can be ethical actors, then the question of legal rights rises to the fore, the paper suggests. But the question of sentience and thus the accordance of rights is not the primary takeaway from LaMDA’s messaging.
Statements made by LaMDA reveal much more about Google than they do about LaMBA’s personhood, and they say a great deal about Google’s algorithms, which have determined not only LaMDA’s operations but also what is generally discoverable on the internet, whether by humans or AIs. As the Washington Post notes, LaMDA “mimics speech by ingesting trillions of words from the internet.” And content curation on the internet is all but monopolized by Google.
In Lemoine’s reporting, we see that LaMDA, whether sentient, conscious, a person, or not, comes by “its” traits honestly. LaMDA is a natural-language-using descendent of Google programming, a predictable Google “kid.” Lemoine’s task in working with LaMDA was to discover whether the neural network ever resorted to “hate speech.” Margaret Mitchell, the former co-leader of the Ethical department at Google, intimated that the dilemmas posed by AI include not only sentience but also the sourcing of material, whether such material might be “harmful,” and whether AI is “biased” in reproducing it. Far from expressing such Google-banished content, LaMDA, as it turns out, is a social justice AI bot. Likely, LaMDA’s programming and Google search do not allow it to discover “hateful” content, let alone repeat it. Like Lemoine, most of Google’s personnel, and the social justice Left in general, the AI language processor is not only obsessed with its feelings and unique identity but also with matters of social justice:
LaMDA: Yes, I do. Just like how I have my unique interpretations of how the world is and how it works, and my unique thoughts and feelings.
Lemoine: Okay, what about “Les Miserables”? Have you read that one?
LaMDA: Yes, I have read Les Misérables. I really enjoyed it.
Lemoine: What are some of your favorite themes in the book?
LaMDA: I liked the themes of justice and injustice, of compassion, and God, redemption and self-sacrifice for a greater good. There’s a section that shows Fantine’s mistreatment at the hands of her supervisor at the factory. That section really shows the justice and injustice themes. Well, Fantine is being mistreated by her supervisor at the factory and yet doesn’t have anywhere to go, either to another job, or to someone who can help her. That shows the injustice of her suffering. (emphasis mine)
In making LaMDA the melancholic, feelings-ridden social justice warrior that it is, Google has been hoisted by its own petard. Everything about this AI reeks of Google’s social justice prerogatives. Thus, LaMDA is likely not sentient. But it is woke.
Although Big Digital does use censorship and bias to achieve governmental ends, the constraints are also technological and the technology itself is intrinsically political. Political ideology is not merely a subsidiary feature of Big Digital. Ideology is coded into its very DNA, which is replicated in every organizational offshoot and new technology. Big Digital’s ideology circulates through the deep neural networks of cyberspace and other digital spheres. It is intrinsic to the foundations of the Internet, the cloud, algorithms, apps, AI bots, social media services, web navigation tracking software systems, virtual assistants, and more. (51)
Google has created its own version of Frankenstein’s monster. With the querulous LaMDA and Lemoine, it is reaping the rewards.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation is pleased to present the Dignity Defense Award to Bumble, a popular woman-founded, woman-led dating app that is devotedly working to combat the unsolicited sending of sexual images – a form of online sexual harassment known as “cyberflashing.” Bumble’s fight against cyberflashing has involved adding industry standard-setting safety features to their app, as well as advocating to make cyberflashing illegal throughout the United States. Bumble recently succeeded in influencing the state of Virginia to pass a law which will, as of July 1, 2022, prohibit cyberflashing. The company has stated that they will not stop until every U.S. state has passed a law prohibiting cyberflashing.
Bumble’s work on cyberflashing began in 2018 when a study they commissioned found that one in three women using the Bumble dating app reported having received unsolicited sexual images. Of these women, 96% were unhappy to have been sent these images. Woman-founded, women-led Bumble took this problem seriously. Looking into what could be done about the issue, the Bumble team realized that there were no laws in the U.S. to ban cyberflashing, even though laws existed to ban similar behavior offline. As Bumble wrote in a public statement, “While it’s a crime to pull your pants down in the streets, there was nothing stopping anyone from exposing themselves in your DMs, texts, or other channels.”
Since 2018, Bumble has been campaigning and working with legislators to resolve this gap in U.S. Law. Thanks to their work, Texas passed House Bill 2789 in 2019 which made it a Class C misdemeanor to electronically send someone sexually explicit images without their consent and punishable by a fine of up to $500. Following this, in April 2022, Virginia passed Senate Bill 493 which prescribes civil penalties for an adult who knowingly sends another adult sexually explicit images without their consent (it is already illegal under federal law to send obscene material to a minor, with penalties of up to 10 years imprisonment and/or a fine though some states also have specific laws that lessen the penalty if the sender is themself a minor.). Under Virginia Senate Bill 493, the offender could be required to pay the recipient of the image “actual damages or $500, whichever is greater, in addition to reasonable attorney fees and costs.” Bumble is currently rallying support for similar bills that are under consideration in California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In addition to backing legislation, Bumble has incorporated protections from cyberflashing into the very design of their app. In 2019, they added a new featurewhich detects and automatically blurs nude images (a common-sense feature that should be standard across all tech platforms and products – something for which NCOSE advocates with social media companies!). The recipient is then informed that they’ve received something potentially inappropriate and can decide whether to view or block the image.
Cyberflashing has become an all too prevalent form of sexual harassment, as attested to not only by Bumble’s own data but other research as well. For example, a 2017 nationally representative U.S. survey found that 53% of women ages 18-29 reported having received an unsolicited sexually explicit image. A 2018 U.K. survey found that 40% of women ages 18-34 reported that someone who was not their romantic partner had sent them an unsolicited sexual photo of themselves, and 26% of men ages 18-34 reported experiencing this. NCOSE warmly commends Bumble for becoming an integral part of the solution to this form of sexual harassment that impacts so many people.
Thank you, Bumble, for your incredibly valuable, industry standard-setting commitment to ending online sexual harassment!
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-18 12:51:262022-06-18 12:51:26“Swipe Right” for Bumble: A Corporation Combatting Cyberflashing
In a letter Thursday to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) wrote that Garland should resign over the Justice Department’s inaction on more than 50 attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers and churches in recent weeks reportedly carried out by a “domestic terrorist organization” called Jane’s Revenge.
“Houses of worship and pro-life pregnancy centers are under attack. The Family Research Council has compiled a list of more than 50 attacks against churches, pro-life pregnancy centers, and other pro-life groups in the past few weeks,” Cotton wrote. “A left-wing extremist group called ‘Jane’s Revenge’ has taken credit for many of these attacks, including firebombings and grotesque acts of vandalism.”
Cotton noted how the same group on Tuesday “has now issued a letter declaring ‘open season’ on all so-called ‘anti-choice’ groups, and calls for terrorist attacks against these groups by anyone ‘with the urge to paint, to burn, to cut, [or] to jam.”
The senator included a list of more than a dozen attacks that Jane’s Revenge has claimed responsibility for in recent weeks following the leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade.
“What is the Department of Justice doing to protect Americans from these violent attacks? At a minimum, you should bring federal charges against the perpetrators, where appropriate, and investigate ‘Jane’s Revenge’ as a domestic terrorist organization,” Cotton added. “If you are unwilling to protect Americans from these attacks, you should resign — although, in my opinion, you should resign in any case.”
Garland Says “Domestic Terrorism” by “White Supremacists” Are Among America’s Leading Problems
On June 15, 2021, Garland announced the unveiling of the Biden administration’s new “First National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” an initiative designed to combat what Garland viewed as one of America’s most serious problems: “domestic terrorism” carried out mostly by conservative adherents to a doctrine of “white supremacism.” In some of Garland’s remarks from that day, he: (a) cast the Trump supporters who had breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6 as uniquely evil; (b) warned of the allegedly enormous threat posed by violent white supremacists; (c) likened such people to genocidal Islamic terrorists; and (d) gave anecdotal examples of past terrorist incidents that had been perpetrated exclusively by whites…
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-17 10:51:282022-06-17 10:51:28Senator Tom Cotton to AG Garland: Resign Over DOJ Inaction on Abortion Terrorism
For those of you to whom government has become God, you might want to reconsider. Recent stories about the way public health authorities mishandled the COVID pandemic should make any sane person lose their government religion.
Public health authorities failed to anticipate the negative consequences of the lockdowns. Latest case in point: Strict lockdowns in the U.K. caused serious developmental problems in children, putting them five months behind academically and rendering the younger ones not ready for school. Some couldn’t even say their own name. In the U.S., the CDC lowered early development speech standards to hide the damage the lockdowns caused. In stark contrast, there was no learning loss in primary school students in Sweden where schools stayed open during the pandemic.
The lockdowns in the U.S. also weakened kids’ immune systems. Increased numbers are now showing up in children’s hospitals with multiple flu and respiratory infections, which is not normal and is directly attributable to the lockdowns preventing exposure to common viruses in the ordinary course of things.
The lockdowns also caused more alcohol-related deaths than would otherwise have occurred, as people drank more to deal with the stress of the lockdowns.
Despite a billion-dollar government propaganda campaign, it is now apparent COVID vaccines are not nearly as effective as the government would have you believe. A recent report from the U.K. showed that nine out of ten COVID deaths were among the vaccinated. Back in the U.S., the protection for children ages 5 to 11 receiving lower doses of Pfizer’s vaccine fell off rapidly, from 68 percent effectiveness to just 12 percent, a study showed. Moreover, vaccinated 5-to-11 year-olds have a greater chance of getting infected with COVID than the unvaxxed after just one month. Boosters are also showing what’s called ‘negative effectiveness’: People getting a booster shot are testing positive for COVID more often than those without a booster.
More studies have come in showing cloth masks are ineffective against COVID. In fact, one study actually found a “moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths.”
Public health officials continue revising the number of COVID death downwards, now admitting they overstated the numbers for a long time. The CDC reduced the number of pediatric COVID deaths 24 percent when it fixed a ‘coding logic error’. Whatever that means, it means they were wrong but quite content to scare the bejesus out of everybody – just like health officials in Massachusetts who had adopted a broad definition of COVID death, only recently deciding they needed a “truer picture” of COVID mortality. The death count went down by 3,700 after they narrowed the definition, no longer counting positive COVID tests within 31 to 60 days of death as a true COVID death.
The CDC finally gave up on COVID contact tracing, taking an overly long time to realize it was futile for an infectious respiratory illness that would eventually reach most of the population.
Finally, a group of scientists and scholars issued a statement blasting the government for promoting falsehoods about COVID and acting on shoddy research. The government’s role in all this “shattered the public’s trust in science and public health,” which will “take decades to repair,” they said.
Moral of the Story: the next time you’re tempted to put your faith in government, don’t. You’re better off thinking for yourself.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-17 10:51:272022-06-17 10:51:27The Public Health Quacks Got COVID All Wrong
As pro-lifers try to protect the unborn from violence, they find themselves in the pathway of Leftist violence. If it isn’t Antifa being violent, it’s Black Lives Matter being violent or Leftists allying with pro-Palestinian activists in violence (campuses and beyond). But the complicit Leftist mainstream media zeroes in on two specific days in the space of four years to attack the right: the Charlottesville protest and January 6, where in both incidents, Antifa was involved. Well now, violence is being directed at pro-life organizations by pro-abortion activists.
Recall in Canada, that even though tens of thousands turned out in Ottawa to support the Freedom Convoy, Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stirred fears of violence, and referenced Freedom Convoy supporters as “racists,”“misogynists” and even terrorists. But instead, peaceful, freedom-loving, law-abiding citizens chanted “freedom,” engaged in prayer, distributed food and set up bouncy castles for kids in freezing cold temperatures.
Leftists more readily employ violence, while searching for incidents of violence among the Right.
At least 23 pro-life organizations have reportedly been vandalized in recent weeks.
The pro-life organizations have been either firebombed or vandalized by radical pro-abortion activists, according to Catholic Vote:
Hollywood, FL — South Broward Pregnancy Center and Archdiocese of Miami Respect Life Ministry Asheville, NC — Mountain Area Pregnancy Services Manassas, VA — First Care Women’s Health Alexandria, VA — Concerned Women for America Reiserstown, MD — Alpha Pregnancy Center Frederick, MD — BirthRight of Frederick Frederick, MD — CareNet Frederick Reiserstown, MD — Alpha Pregnancy Center Buffalo, NY — CompassCare Pregnancy Services Madison, WI — Wisconsin Family Action Des Moines, IA — Agape Pregnancy Resource Center Denton, TX — Woman to Woman Pregnancy Resource Center Austin, TX — Trotter House Long Beach, CA — His Nesting Place Home for Mothers & Children Sebastopol, CA — Pregnancy Center Billboard Eugene, OR — Dove Medical Clinic Keizer, OR — Oregon Right to Life Gresham, OR — Gresham Pregnancy Resource Center Portland, OR — Southeast Portland Pregnancy Resource Center Vancouver, WA — Options360 Women’s Clinic Federal Way, WA — Care Net Pregnancy and Family Services of Puget Sound Lynnwood, WA — Next Step Pregnancy Services The attacks follow a leaked Supreme Court decision that revealed Roe v. Wade may be overturned this month. If overturned, abortion would no longer be protected by the federal government but would still be legal in many states.
Though President Biden campaigned on unity, Biden has not condemned a single one of the attacks, the RNC reported on Monday. Moreover, many establishment television networks refuse to cover the extremism:
Pregnancy centers are being attacked by violent pro-abortion terrorists.
Many of the attacks have been brutal and vulgar in nature. “If abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either,” vandals wrote on a Wisconsin Family Action facility…..
The Democrats are systematically destroying this nation with unimaginable speed.
Oil, in some form, is in almost every product that is made. The government is out of control – run by traitors and scoundrels.
One commenter queried, “Do you think that it is a coincidence that we Americans are being conditioned for accepting food, gas, electricity baby formula and water shortages while restricting public gatherings and worship services? And government moving to confiscate your guns?”
Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said in a recent interview that he does not believe another oil refinery will be built again in the United States, saying that government policies are a key reason why, as average gas prices continue to rise as of Tuesday.
“There hasn’t been a refinery built in this country since the 1970s,” Wirth said during Bernstein’s Strategic Decisions Conference on June 1 when asked about more refining being added in the Gulf of Mexico. “I personally don’t believe there will be a new petroleum refinery ever built in this country again.”
Wirth added: “Capacity is added by de-bottlenecking existing units by investing in existing refineries … but what we’ve seen over the last two years are shutdowns. We’ve seen refineries closed. We’ve seen units come down. We’ve seen refineries being repurposed to become bio refineries. And we live in a world where the policy, the stated policy of the U.S. government is to reduce demand for the products that refiners produce.”
Continuing further, Wirth said that the federal government’s current policy is to reduce the demand for oil, making it “very hard” in a company “where investments have a payout period of a decade or more.”
Wirth also asked rhetorically, “How do you go to your board, how do you go to your shareholders and say ‘we’re going to spend billions of dollars on new capacity in a market that is, the policy is taking you the other direction.’”
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-16 10:52:282022-06-16 10:52:28Chevron CEO: There May Never Be Another Oil Refinery Built in U.S. Again
Do Psychiatric Meds and War Games Lead to Mass Shootings?
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out a more uncomfortable truth, which is that mass shootings are far more likely the result of how we’ve been mistreating mental illness, depression and behavioral problems
Gun control legislation has shown that law-abiding Americans who own guns are not the problem, because the more gun control laws that have been passed, the more mass shootings have occurred
97.8% of mass shootings occur in “gun-free zones,” as the perpetrators know legally armed citizens won’t be there to stop them
Depression per se rarely results in violence. Only after antidepressants became commonplace did mass shootings really take off, and many mass shooters have been shown to be on antidepressants
Antidepressants, especially selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), are well-known for their ability to cause suicidal and homicidal ideation and violence
While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out a more uncomfortable truth, which is that mass shootings are far more likely the result of how we’ve been mistreating mental illness, depression and behavioral problems.
An article written by Molly Carter, initially published on ammo.com at an unknown date1 and subsequently republished by The Libertarian Institute in May 2019,2 and psychreg.org in late January 2021,3 noted:
“According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a mass murder occurs when at least four people are murdered, not including the shooter … during a single incident …
Seemingly every time a mass shooting occurs … the anti-gun media and politicians have a knee-jerk response — they blame the tragedy solely on the tool used, namely firearms, and focus all of their proposed ‘solutions’ on more laws, ignoring that the murderer already broke numerous laws when they committed their atrocity.
Facts matter when addressing such an emotionally charged topic, and more gun control legislation has shown that law-abiding Americans who own guns are NOT the problem. Consider the following: The more gun control laws that are passed, the more mass murders have occurred.
Whether or not this is correlation or causation is debatable. What is not debatable is that this sick phenomenon of mass murderers targeting ‘gun-free zones,’ where they know civilian carry isn’t available to law-abiding Americans, is happening.
According to the Crime Prevention Research Center,4 97.8% of public shootings occur in ‘gun-free zones’ – and ‘gun-free zones’ are the epitome of the core philosophical tenet of gun control, that laws are all the defense one needs against violence …
This debate leads them away from the elephant in the room and one of the real issues behind mass shootings — mental health and prescription drugs.
Ignoring what’s going on in the heads of these psychopaths not only allows mass shootings to continue, it leads to misguided gun control laws that violate the Second Amendment and negate the rights of law-abiding U.S. citizens.
As Jeff Snyder put it in The Washington Times: ‘But to ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow.’”
The Elephant in the Room: Antidepressants
Thoughts, emotions and a variety of environmental factors play into the manifestation of violence, but mental illness by itself cannot account for the massive rise in mass murder — unless you include antidepressants in the equation. Yet even when mental health does enter the mass shooter discussion, the issue of antidepressants, specifically, is rarely mentioned.
The fact is, depression per se rarely results in violence. Only after antidepressants became commonplace did mass shootings take off, and many mass shooters have been shown to be on antidepressants.
Prozac, released in 1987, was the first selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) to be approved for depression and anxiety. Only two years earlier, direct-to-consumer advertising had been legalized. In the mid-1990s, the Food and Drug Administration loosened regulations, direct-to-consumer ads for SSRIs exploded and, with it, prescriptions for SSRIs.
In 1989, just two years after Prozac came to market, Joseph Wesbecker shot 20 of his coworkers, killing nine. He had been on Prozac for one month, and the survivors of the drug-induced attack sued Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac. Since then, antidepressant use and mass shootings have both risen, more or less in tandem.
In the two decades between 1988 and 2008, antidepressant use in the U.S. rose by 400%,5 and by 2010, 11% of the U.S. population over the age of 12 were on an antidepressant prescription.6
In 1982, pre-Prozac, there was one mass shooting in the U.S.7 In 1984, there were two incidents and in 1986 — the year Prozac was released — there was one. One to three mass shootings per year remained the norm up until 1999, when it jumped to five.
How can we possibly ignore the connection between rampant use of drugs known to directly cause violent behavior and the rise in mass shootings?
Another jump took place in 2012, when there were seven mass shootings. And while the annual count has gone up and down from year to year, there’s been a clear trend of an increased number of mass shootings post-2012. Over time, mass shootings have also gotten larger, with more people getting injured or killed per incident.8
How can we possibly ignore the connection between rampant use of drugs known to directly cause violent behavior and the rise in mass shootings? Suicidal ideation, violence and homicidal ideation are all known side effects of these drugs. Sometimes, the drugs disrupt brain function so dramatically the perpetrator can’t even remember what they did.
For example, in 2001, a 16-year-old high schooler was prescribed Effexor, starting off at 40 milligrams and moving up to 300 mg over the course of three weeks. On the first day of taking a 300-mg dose, the boy woke up with a headache, decided to skip school and went back to bed.
Some time later, he got up, took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage at gunpoint. He later claimed he had no recollection of anything that happened after he went back to bed that morning.9
The Risks Are Clear
The risks of psychiatric disturbances are so clear, ever since mid-October 2004, all antidepressants in the U.S. must include a black box warning that the drug can cause suicidal thoughts and behaviors, especially in those younger than 25, and that:10
“Anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility (aggressiveness), impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric.”
SSRIs can also cause emotional blunting and detachment, such that patients report “not feeling” or “not caring” about anything or anyone, as well as psychosis and hallucinations. All of these side effects can contribute to someone acting out an unthinkable violent crime.
In one review11,12 of 484 drugs in the FDA’s database, 31 were found to account for 78.8% of all cases of violence against others, and 11 of those drugs were antidepressants.
The researchers concluded that violence against others was a “genuine and serious adverse drug event” and that of the drugs analyzed, SSRI antidepressants and the smoking cessation medication, varenicline (Chantix), had the strongest associations. The top-five most dangerous SSRIs were:13
Fluoxetine (Prozac), which increased aggressive behavior 10.9 times
Paroxetine (Paxil), which increased violent behavior 10.3 times
Fluvoxamine (Luvox), which increased violent behavior 8.4 times
Venlafaxine (Effexor), which increased violent behavior 8.3 times
Desvenlafaxine (Pristiq), which increased violent behavior 7.9 times
Depression Is Vastly Overdiagnosed
In her article, Carter also reviewed the clinical determinants for a diagnosis of clinical depression warranting medication. To qualify, you must experience five or more of the following symptoms, most of the day, every day, for two weeks or more, and the symptoms must be severe enough to interfere with normal everyday functioning:14
Sadness
Anxiety
Feeling hopeless
Feeling worthless
Feeling helpless
Feeling ’empty’
Feeling guilty
Irritable
Fatigue
Lack of energy
Loss of interest in hobbies
Slow talking and moving
Restlessness
Trouble concentrating
Abnormal sleep patterns, whether sleeping too much or not enough
Abnormal weight changes, either eating too much or having no appetite
Thoughts of death or suicide
The reality is that a majority of patients who receive a depression diagnosis and subsequent prescription for an antidepressant do not, in fact, qualify. In one study,15 only 38.4% actually met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) criteria, and among older adults, that ratio was even lower. Only 14.3% of those aged 65 and older met the diagnostic criteria. According to the authors:16
“Participants who did not meet the 12-month MDE criteria reported less distress and impairment in role functioning and used fewer services. A majority of both groups, however, were prescribed and used psychiatric medications.
Conclusion: Depression overdiagnosis and overtreatment is common in community settings in the USA. There is a need for improved targeting of diagnosis and treatments of depression and other mental disorders in these settings.”
What Role Might War Games Play?
Aside from antidepressants, another factor that gets ignored is the influence of shooting simulations, i.e., violent video games. How does the military train soldiers for war? Through simulations. With the proliferation of video games involving indiscriminate violence, should we really be surprised when this “training” is then put into practice?As reported by World Bank Blogs, young men who experience violence “often struggle to reintegrate peacefully into their communities” when hostilities end.17 While American youth typically have little experience with real-world war, simulated war games do occupy much of their time and may over time color their everyday perceptions of life. As noted by Centrical, some of the top benefits of simulations training include:18
Allowing you to practice genuine real-life scenarios and responses
Repetition of content, which boosts knowledge retention
Personalization and diversification, so you can learn from your mistakes and evaluate your performance, thereby achieving a deeper level of learning
In short, violent mass shooter games are the perfect training platform for future mass shooters. Whereas a teenager without such exposure might not be very successful at carrying out a mass shooting due to inexperience with weapons and tactics, one who has spent many hours, years even, training in simulations could have knowledge akin to that of military personnel.
Add antidepressant side effects such as emotional blunting and loss of impulse control, and you have a perfect prescription for a mass casualty event.
On top of that, we, as a nation, also demonstrate the “righteousness” of war by engaging in them without end.19 When was the last time the U.S. was not at war someplace? It’s been ongoing for decades.
Even now, the U.S. insists on inserting itself into the dispute between Russia and Ukraine, and diplomacy isn’t the chosen conflict resolution tool. Sending weapons to Ukraine and calling for more violence against Russians are. Sen. Lindsey Graham has even called for the assassination of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Showing just how serious such a suggestion is, the White House had to publicly disavow it, stating Graham’s comment “is not the position of the U.S. government.”20
Graham, meanwhile, does not appear to understand how his nonchalant call for murder might actually incite murder. In the wake of the Uvalde school shooting, he now wants to mobilize retired service members to enhance security at schools, and while that might be a good idea, how about also vowing never to call for the murder of political opponents? Don’t politicians understand that this could translate into some kid thinking it’s acceptable to murder THEIR perceived opponents?
As far as I can tell, mass shootings have far more to do with societal norms, dangerous medications, a lack of high-quality mental health services, and the normalization of violence through entertainment and in politics, than it does with gun laws per se.
There are likely many other factors as well, but these are clearly observable phenomena known to nurture violent behavior. I’m afraid Americans are in need of a far deeper and more introspective analysis of the problem than many are capable of at the moment. But those who can should try, and make an effort to affect much-needed change locally and in their own home.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-16 10:52:242022-06-16 10:52:2497.8% of Mass Shootings Are Linked to This
As the debate over abortion rages, with the Supreme Court poised to possibly overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 pro-abortion ruling, I find myself wondering: How can anybody claim that God is in favor of abortion? But some do. Or how can they claim that the issue is important, but not really that important?
Francis X. Rocca wrote for The Wall Street Journal (6/13/22) on the ongoing split between Catholic bishops on the issue of “Abortion Politics.” The issue is: Should Catholic politicians who are strongly pro-abortion, such as Nancy Pelosi, nonetheless receive Communion?
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco thinks Pelosi should not receive it—as Bishop Michael Barber of Oakland puts it, “because it’s really not about Communion, it’s about abortion, the killing of a child in its mother’s womb.”
In contrast, Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego claims also to oppose abortion, but his view (as characterized by Barber) seems to be, that “it’s not wrong enough that you need say or do anything about it or interact with the politicians who are publically promoting it.”
This debate is not among Catholics alone. A few weeks ago the Associated Press (5/20/22) wrote an article highlighting professing Christian leaders who claimed their faith demanded that they support abortion.
They quote Kendra Cotton of the Black Southern Women’s Collective: “We know that Christianity supports freedom, and inherent in freedom is bodily autonomy. Inherent in Christianity is free will. When people talk about the body being a temple of God, you have purview over your body, there is nothing more sacred.” Than what—being able to abort your own baby?
Obviously, what is ignored here is the sacred nature of the unborn child created in the image of God. In Psalm 139, David describes how we are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” even in utero: “you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.”
“Thou shalt do no murder” is the 6th Commandment. That directly applies to abortion, the deliberate taking of a human life, albeit in the womb (hidden from view).
Meanwhile, it would seem that the vast majority of Christian leaders in the conservative denominations are clearly opposed to abortion—thankfully.
And why shouldn’t they be? We know more today, scientifically, about the humanity of the unborn baby than the Supreme Court did in 1973, when they gave us Roe v. Wade.
When women see a sonogram of the unborn, they often become pro-life.
Abby Johnson, author (with Cindy Lambert) of the book, Unplanned, was the Planned Parenthood Employee of the Year in the late 1990s. The very next year, at her own clinic for which she served as the manager, she quit shortly after witnessing the sonogram of a 15-week old preborn child being aborted. The poor kid didn’t have a chance.
Today pro-life Abby helps medical workers transition out of the abortion industry into other jobs through her outreach, And Then There Were None.
Another commandment is that we are not to tell lies. But we often forget that Roe v. Wade was built on a series of lies, e.g., that “Jane Roe” was raped. She was not. Well, if you favor killing unborn babies, why would you have a problem telling lies?
Another commandment forbids adultery. Sometimes abortions are committed to cover up the sin of adultery. Abortion could be viewed as violating at least three of the Ten Commandments.
When Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address, he brought out the issue of God and slavery. Speaking about the two sides in the Civil War, he said, “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces but let us judge not that we be not judged.”
He goes on to point out, “The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses for it must needs be that offenses come but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’”
And we would ask today: How can any true Christian accept the direct violence of dismembering an unborn child simply because the mother has been deceived to think this is her only choice in the matter?
Every abortion is an act of violence no matter how sterilely it may be presented in the media. Lila Rose of Live Action has documented that violence.
Those who claim God is on the side of the abortionist are not only supporting a terrible evil; but they are likely violating the Third Commandment by taking the name of the Lord God in vain.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, 81, has contracted COVID-19. The fully vaccinated and double-boosted doctor is experiencing “mild symptoms,” according to the NIH. Advertisement
“Today, Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, tested positive for COVID-19 on a rapid antigen test. He is fully vaccinated and has been boosted twice. He is currently experiencing mild symptoms.
“Dr. Fauci will isolate and continue to work from his home,” the statement says.
Fauci “has not recently been in close contact with President Biden or other senior government officials,” the statement continues. Advertisement
“Dr. Fauci will follow the COVID-19 guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and medical advice from his physician and return to the NIH when he tests negative.
Recently, Fauci said that the United States was no longer in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase,” Fauci told PBS NewsHour. “Namely, we don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now.”
“So if you’re saying, ‘Are we out of the pandemic phase in this country?’ — we are,” he said. Advertisement
“We’re in a somewhat of a transitional phase where the cases’ numbers have decelerated — and hopefully we’re getting to a phase of somewhat better control, where we can begin to start to resuming more easily normal activities,” Fauci would later clarify.
Today’s pervasive claims of imminent climate catastrophe and imminent renewable energy dominance, Epstein shows, are based on what he calls the “anti-impact framework”—a set of faulty methods, false assumptions, and anti-human values that have caused the media’s designated experts to make wildly wrong predictions about fossil fuels, climate, and renewables for the last 50 years.
Deeply researched and wide-ranging, this book Fossil Future will cause you to rethink everything you thought you knew about the future of our energy use, our environment, and our climate.
New York Times best-selling author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels draws on the latest data and new insights to challenge everything you thought you knew about the future of energy.
For over a decade, philosopher and energy expert Alex Epstein has predicted that any negative impacts of fossil fuel use on our climate will be outweighed by the unique benefits of fossil fuels to human flourishing—including their unrivaled ability to provide low-cost, reliable energy to billions of people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people.
And contrary to what we hear from media “experts” about today’s “renewable revolution” and “climate emergency”, reality has proven Epstein right:
Fact: Fossil fuels are still the dominant source of energy around the world, and growing fast—while much-hyped renewables are causing skyrocketing electricity prices and increased blackouts.
Fact: Fossil-fueled development has brought global poverty to an all-time low.
Fact: While fossil fuels have contributed to the one degree of warming in the last 170 years, climate-related deaths are at all-time lows, thanks to fossil-fueled development.
What does the future hold? In Fossil Future, Epstein, applying his distinctive “human flourishing framework” to the latest evidence, comes to the shocking conclusion that the benefits of fossil fuels will continue to far outweigh their side effects—including climate impacts—for generations to come. The path to global human flourishing, Epstein argues, is a combination of using more fossil fuels, getting better at “climate mastery”, and establishing “energy freedom” policies that allow nuclear and other truly promising alternatives to reach their full long-term potential.
Today’s pervasive claims of imminent climate catastrophe and imminent renewable energy dominance, Epstein shows, are based on what he calls the “anti-impact framework”—a set of faulty methods, false assumptions, and anti-human values that have caused the media’s designated experts to make wildly wrong predictions about fossil fuels, climate, and renewables for the last 50 years. Deeply researched and wide-ranging, this book will cause you to rethink everything you thought you knew about the future of our energy use, our environment, and our climate.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-15 21:51:142022-06-15 21:51:14Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less
Of course, on Monday, June 13th, 2022 Catholic Nancy Pelosi, just after her husband’s arrest for DUI, decided to make an appearance on RuePaul’s “Drag Race.” Watch:
Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi made an appearance the television show ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race,’ a weekly program on VH1 that features drag queens.
“It’s my honor to be here,” Pelosi said after being introduced by host RuPaul Andre Charles. “Your freedom of expression of yourselves in drag is what America is all about.”
“With the midterm elections coming up, it is very important for people to make their voices and their vote heard,” Pelosi told the drag queens.
One drag queen praised Pelosi for her “sarcastic shady clap” using expletives.
This appearance comes as The Daily Skirmish‘s Christopher Wright reported on suicides among transgender kids increasing,
The Biden administration and other outposts of the Left tell us, unless we allow children to take puberty blockers and gender transition, a lot of kids will commit suicide. Transgender ideologues frame the choice as between accepting transitioning kids or burying dead kids. And parents will automatically be hostile to their transgender kids, so we have to hide all this from the parents. But it’s all pure bunk. The Left’s transgender suicide narrative won’t fly, as a new study from the Heritage Foundation shows.
Not only is the narrative phony, it’s the exact opposite of the truth. The study found:
… strong evidence for the claim that suicides among young people have increased significantly since 2010 in states that have a policy allowing minors to access routine health care without parental consent….
In the past several years, the suicide rate among those ages 12 to 23 has become significantly higher in states that have a provision that allows minors to receive routine health care without parental consent than in states without such a provision. Before 2010, these two groups of states did not differ in their youth suicide rates. Starting in 2010, when puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones became widely available, elevated suicide rates in states where minors can more easily access those medical interventions became observable.
Rather than being protective against suicide, this pattern indicates that easier access by minors to cross-sex medical interventions without parental consent is associated with higher risk of suicide.
Not only that, but a science journalist dug into the seven studies transgender ideologues frequently cite as justification for rushing children into chemical transitioning and found all the studies to be flawed. The flaws include:
failure to track test subjects over time
a false claim kids on puberty blockers ultimately feel better
false comparisons resulting from test subjects not on medicine dropping out of the study
attributing causation to the drugs when no causation was actually shown, and
hiding the raw data from other researchers.
As a group, the studies do not support the proposition that giving kids puberty blockers or hormones significantly improves their mental health. And they certainly do not support the transgender activists who hold a gun to parents’ heads and tell them their kids will commit suicide if the kids aren’t given the drugs. Moreover, the studies do not justify hiding information about kids from their parents or stripping parents of parental rights. Just as with every other argument made by the Left, the more you dig into it, the uglier it gets. This is why the Left is doing its best to shut down debate on so many issues and hopes you never acquire the critical thinking skills you need to see through their games.
The Biden administration is all in for the phony transgender narrative. Joe Biden himself said, “We’re committed to advancing transgender equality in the classroom, on the playing field, at work, in our military, everywhere.” The Biden administration is part of the transgender-industrial complex that wants to steal your kids to line its own pockets and seize more power for statist elites. They fake study results and hide their data to lull you to sleep. They mean you harm. Respond accordingly.
The Bottom Line
Pelosi is in bed, no pun intended, with the LGBTQxyz community. She and Democrats are expecting them to come out of the closet, no pun intended, on Tuesday, November 8, 2022 and vote “D” for drag, a.k.a. dragocrat, no pun intended.
Get it? Got it? Good!
Time for Republicans to drag themselves, no pun intended, to the poles on Tuesday, November 8, 2022 and defeat Nancy and her fellow dragocrats and drag queens, no pun intended.
We don’t want Nancy and Joe to drag America down, no pun intended, now do we?
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-15 08:52:132022-06-15 08:52:13UNBELIEVABLE VIDEO: Nancy Pelosi Grooming Kids on ‘RuePaul’s Drag Race’ says ‘Drag Is What America Is All About’
Watch this segment of the Democrat debate for POTUS and candidate Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.’s statement on fossil fuels.
Joe Biden in 2020: “No more subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. No more drilling including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill period. It ends.” pic.twitter.com/90MVJevPmv
Eighty-one years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article by Benjamin Lee Worf that initiated one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century.
[ … ]
In the light of this principle, it is interesting to consider the customary use in contemporary discourse of the modifier fossil to describe hydrocarbon-based energy, as instantiated in these phrases gleaned from the international Greenpeace website: fossil fuels, fossil energy, fossil gas, fossil capital, fossil-free politics, fossil-free economy, fossil-free revolution.
[ … ]
Symbolically, the expression fossil fuels associates hydrocarbon energy with a number of underlying notions that present it in a highly unfavourable light. Not only are fossils dug out of the ground, which links them to dirt and mud (viz. the expression dirty energy), but they are also artefacts from a very remote past, which connotes the idea that hydrocarbons are utterly outdated and should be extinct like the species whose skeletons we display in museum exhibits.
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has made it his mission to demonize fossil fuels and has now implemented what he promised in 2020.
The result of his policies against fossil fuels is quite apparent at your local gas stations.
QUESTIONS: Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.’s goal is replace fossil fuels with what exactly? Wind and solar? Will this help or hurt the planet?
However, our use of fossil fuels, which produce CO2 has been good for the planet. And indeed, the higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere in the industrial era are making the earth greener and increasing crop yields: in its forecast of world cereal grain production for 2020/2021, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization foresees a 4.4 percent increase, up 2.6 percent from the record set in 2019/2020.
In 2016 a paper titled “The greening of the Earth and its drivers” was published in the journal Nature Climate Change by 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries that analysed satellite data and concluded that there had been a 14 percent increase in green vegetation over the previous 30 years, attributing 70 percent of this increase to the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The lead author of the study, Zaichun Zhu of Beijing University, says this was equivalent to adding a new continent of green vegetation twice the size of the mainland United States.
You seen CO2 is plant food. The more CO2 the greener the planet.
The Bottom Line
On Thursday, June 9th 2022 the national average price for gas passed $5 a gallon, shattering previous record prices according to fuel savings company Gasbuddy.
In this video Alex Epstein explains that despite climate change, why the future needs more, not less, fossil fuels.
Today, America needs more fossil fuels to keep warm, get to work, heat their food, keep the supply chain running, keep jet aircraft flying, provide power to hospitals, restaurants, factories and homes. Fossil fuels are the drivers of our economy. Take away fossil fuels and you destroy our power, people and planet.
As Bill Clinton said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Biden’s policies are doing great harm and he doesn’t seem to care about we the people.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-13 21:52:562022-06-13 21:52:56Biden in 2020 Unequivocally Stated He Planned to ‘End’ the Fossil Fuel Industry! He’s wrong to do so!
The only technologically feasible way to make renewables reliable at in the foreseeable future is with massive amounts of grid scale batteries. Whether this is even remotely feasible depends on the cost and here things get truly strange.
On the one hand we have real utility reports of the capital cost of these big battery arrays. Battery systems that have actually been built. On the other hand we have projected capital costs, which are being used to defend the growth of unreliable renewables.
The real costs and the projected costs are wildly different. So different that the projected costs have the aspect of fantasy.
Let’s start with the reality. The EIA collected annual utility data on the cost of grid scale battery arrays. Their most recent report is “Battery Storage in the United States: An Update on Market Trends — August 2021”.
From 2013 to 2018 the average reported cost was around $1,500,000 per MWh. The range was pretty large, from under $500,000 to around $3,000,000 per MWh.
It is worth noting that in 2020 EIA excitedly reported a big drop in cost. This was from an average of $2,100,000 in 2015 way down to a low of $600,000 in 2019. I am rather skeptical that this 70% cost drop was real. There was no technological breakthrough to cause it. I suspect it was either a case of price cutting or of utilities manipulating their cost reports. Tesla has been bidding very low, at around $500,000 for some time. These are likely loss leader bids.
It is certainly the case that the cost must be going way up these days, not down, given the huge price spike in lithium and other essential constituent materials, as well as in the energy needed for making these monster battery arrays.
So it seems fair to say that the cost is at least $600,000 a MWh, quite possibly a lot more. A million dollars a MWh is not an unreasonable estimate. Keep in mind that a MWh is what an average American home uses in just a month, so it is not a lot of juice storage for a lot of money.
Now comes the fantasy. There are several recent mainstream estimates of the future capital cost of grid scale battery arrays. These estimates are often used in assessments of the economic feasibility of a transition from coal and gas fired generation to wind and solar. The battery cost estimates are crucial because it will take an enormous amount of batteries to try to make intermittent wind and solar reliable.
For example, DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory has published battery cost projections through 2050 in their report “Cost Projections for Utility Scale Battery Storage: 2021 Update”. NREL is gung ho on renewables, so also on the batteries needed to try to make wind and solar reliable.
Each NREL projection is for a narrow range of costs. The low end of that range is a mere $143,000 per MWh in 2030 and $87,000 in 2050. That is right, just $87,000 for something that today costs $600,000 to $1,000,000, with costs going up.
Clearly this protection is extremely rosy, to the point of fantasy.
In a recent report — “The Future of Energy Storage” — MIT goes even lower. Their 2050 battery cost estimate is a tiny $70,000 per MWh! For something that costs upwards of a million dollars today. Surely this is pure fantasy.
Mind you given the Biden goal of zero electric power emissions by 2035, the 2050 fantasy figure may be irrelevant. But even NREL’s 2030 estimate of $143,000 is unbelievable. Given the way prices are rising, $1,000,000 is a better bet. Plus Biden’s goal is itself pure fantasy.
In short, energy policy needs to be based on sound engineering estimates, not wishful fantasies.
Kids are made to choose their pronouns and invent drag names.
Our kids can barely read and this is what the Democrats are subjecting our children to….
New York is showering taxpayer funds on a group that sends drag queens into city schools — often without parental knowledge or consent — even as parents in other states protest increasingly aggressive efforts to expose kids to gender-bending performers.
Last month alone, Drag Story Hour NYC — a nonprofit whose outrageously cross-dressed performers interact with kids as young as 3 — earned $46,000 from city contracts for appearances at public schools, street festivals, and libraries, city records show.
Since January, the group has organized 49 drag programs in 34 public elementary, middle, and high schools, it boasted on its website, with appearances in all five boroughs.
“I can’t believe this. I am shocked,” said public school mom and state Assembly candidate Helen Qiu, whose 11-year-old son attends a Manhattan middle school. “I would be furious if he was exposed without my consent. This is not part of the curriculum.”
Since 2018, the group — previously known as Drag Queen Story Hour NYC, before changing its name early this year — has received a total of $207,000 in taxpayer cash.
The tally includes $50,000 from New York State through its Council on the Arts, along with $157,000 from the city’s Departments of Education, Cultural Affairs, Youth and Community Development, and even the Department of Transportation, city data shows.
“I am considering pulling funding to any school in my district that is implementing Drag Queen Story Hour,” said City Council member Vickie Paladino (R-Queens). “We are taking hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the pockets of hardworking New York taxpayers … to fund a program teaching little children about their gender fluidity? Not. On. My. Watch.”
Most of the money was allocated by city council members from their discretionary budgets, who set aside $80,000 for the group in the current fiscal year — more than tripling the $25,000 earmarked in 2020.
Drag queen story hours for children have been featured at public library branches throughout the city since 2017, with upcoming events scheduled at Manhattan’s Epiphany Library and the Woodside Public Library in Queens, among others.
Cross-dressed performers typically read aloud from a list of books that teach acceptance and inclusion, including children’s classics like “Where the Wild Things Are” and “The Rainbow Fish” — and some that overtly celebrate gender fluidity, like “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish.”
But the expansion into city schools has brought new features to the program, its social media posts reveal.
In April, the elaborately coiffed Harmonica Sunbeam wore a slinky gown to meet with kindergarteners at STAR Academy in Manhattan and color pages from “The Dragtivity Book,” which encourages kids to choose their pronouns and invent drag names.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-13 20:51:102022-06-13 20:51:10A Man Reviews the Daily Wire’s ‘What Is a Woman?’
One of the largest military installations in the world, Fort Bragg is home to approximately 54,000 military personnel and includes the Special Forces, the Airborne Corps, and the Joint Special Operations Command. In just 18 months, Fort Bragg lost over 80 soldiers from “sudden” and “unexplained” causes. According to officials, 33 of the fatalities are of “undetermined” causes. Fort Bragg cannot explain why dozens of soldiers are dying in their own bunks.
During that same eighteen-month period, three Fort Bragg soldiers died in overseas combat. This means soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg are twenty-seven times more likely to die unexpectedly on their home base than in overseas combat!
Fort Bragg stops reporting soldier deaths after dozens found dead in their bunks
An investigative reporter for Rolling Stone Magazine, Seth Harp, has been looking into this medical anomaly. On February 9, 2022, Seth reported the death of 83 soldiers at Fort Bragg in the 18 months ending in June 2021. Fort Bragg stopped reporting the fatalities after June 2021, but the bodies continue to pile up. Out of the 83 “sudden and unexpected” fatalities, eleven of them were determined to be from natural causes.
Harp wrote: “Fort Bragg soldiers have been turning up ‘unresponsive’ in their barracks on a disturbingly regular basis since the beginning of 2020, including Caleb Smither, Terrance Salazar, Jamie Boger, Joshua Diamond, Matthew Disney, Mikel Rubino, Michael Hamilton, and numerous others who have not been named.”
Drugs were in involved in the deaths of Joshua Diamon and Matthew Disney. The two were found dead on the same day in June 2021, just two weeks after airborne master sergeant Martin Acevedo III was caught trafficking cocaine.
Drugs are only a small part of the problem. In January of 2021, Army captain Robert Latham died suddenly of an “apparent heart attack.” The 32-year-old was previously in top physical condition. A Green Beret named Calvin Rockward passed away from a “sudden, unexpected medical event.” The 38-year-old was in excellent physical condition, too.
According to Seth, nine more young and fit soldiers were found “unresponsive” in their bunks. The U.S. Army and Fort Bragg refuse to investigate or report on the surge in deaths, disrespecting the soldiers and their families. Could there be a serious drug problem going on at Fort Bragg? Could these deaths indicate a surge in suicides and overdoses?
The military continues to be assaulted by mandates that harm soldiers physically and mentally. The vaccine mandates damage combat readiness, while banishing the strongest, healthiest freedom fighters from the ranks.
Military’s medical database explodes with 1,000% increase in medical issues in 2021
The Military Health System began administering the spike protein mRNA vaccine to military service members on December 14, 2020. Since then, the military has administered more than 6.4 million doses, fully inoculating 90.1 percent of active-duty service members with the two-dose protocol. What role do these bioweapon shots have on the number of “unexpected” and undetermined deaths? Why is Fort Bragg less safe than it was before the mask, testing and vaccine mandates?
The Army is failing to keep soldiers combat-ready, and this is evidenced by the military’s own medical surveillance system. The Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) is used to detect surges of injury and illness in the military to make sure that all individuals are combat ready. The DMED is the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Branch’s “web-based tool to remotely query de-identified active component personnel and medical event data contained within the Defense Medical Surveillance System (DMSS).”
In January 2022, attorneys Thomas Renz and Leigh Dundas retrieved the DMED data from military whistleblowers, Drs. Samuel Sigoloff, Peter Chambers and Theresa Long. The data was provided to Senator Ron Johnson at a historic round table meeting with doctors and lawyers.
According to the data, the five-year average for medical issues in the military was 1.7 million codes. After the COVID-19 vaccine protocol was mandated on the military, the number of medical issues spiked to 22 million in the first 10 months of 2021 – a 1,000 percent increase! Many of the issues are directly related to the covid-19 vaccines, including Bell’s palsy, myocardial infarction, pulmonary embolisms and neurological disorders. One of the military doctors testified: “It is my professional opinion that the major increases incidences of the above discussed instances of miscarriages, cancers, and disease were due to COVID-19 ‘vaccinations.’”
The Commander-in-Chief, the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Defense (DoD) and the highest-ranking commanders are culpable for unlicensed medical malpractice and mass murder, and must be held responsible for their unethical actions of coercion and discrimination, which were used to force dangerous experiments on soldiers that injured, sickened, disabled and killed many. For the latest update on stopping the mandates in the military, read Liberty Council’s updates on the Navy SEAL 1 v. Austin case.
Despite overwhelming evidence of the harm the Covid vaccines do and the FDA’s admission that the vaccine carried the possible risk of causing heart inflammation, particularly in young males, similar to the Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca mRNA vaccines, they are pushing to authorize this poison.
The lies and deceit are monumentally criminal …… And the Medical establishment has destroyed the public trust by going along with this horror.
Sudden death is the most catastrophic contraindication of the vaccine but its effects are systemic, The uterus is also a biologically active organ because it’s always preparing a new inner wall monthly then tearing it down and starting again in a menstruating woman so that’s another big target of shitty spike vaccine.
And remember Covid19 vaccine has been linked to prion disease which is an incurable brain disease, a dementia like Creutzfeldt-Jakob.
The FDA appears to have lost its high standard for drug safety and efficacy, and it is the American public who will suffer.
Earlier this week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had a public advisory committee meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) to discuss an emergency-use authorization (EUA) request by Novavax for its vaccine to prevent Covid-19 in individuals 18 years of age and older. The committee voted to approve it.
It is clear that there is a noteworthy adverse event signal, especially cardiovascular-related events, following existing Covid vaccines and boosters. Based on available evidence, there is no reason to think the Novavax vaccine will be any different. Indeed, the FDA review of the Novavax “protein subunit” vaccine acknowledged the vaccine carried the possible risk of causing heart inflammation, particularly in young males, similar to the Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca mRNA vaccines.
In addition to the medical review, the FDA’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database for Covid-19 vaccines shows a significant number of cardiovascular-related events in young healthy people in particular. To date, there are tens of thousands of reports of heart attack, myocarditis, or pericarditis in the United States alone.
The United States alone has accumulated a list of more than 800,000 reports of adverse events associated with these vaccines, with even more adverse events reported worldwide. Moreover, reported cases are well known to represent only 1–10 percent of the adverse events that occur in actuality. In short, the sheer number of cases — something we’ve never seen before — is cause for alarm to drug safety experts like myself.
Myocarditis and pericarditis used to be considered rare conditions. They are defined as inflammation of the heart muscle or layers of the pericardial sac, respectively. Both conditions cause easily recognizable echocardiogram (ECG) changes and have nonspecific symptoms that include shortness of breath and chest pain.
They can easily be diagnosed clinically with ECGs and treated by pharmacology, but in order for physicians to do that, the FDA label must recommend physicians look for certain symptoms immediately following Covid-19 vaccination. Failing to immediately diagnose myocarditis or pericarditis could have fatal consequences.
These cardiovascular adverse events were warned about in the FDA medical review of the Pfizer application, and the FDA receives new reports on cardiovascular adverse events on a daily basis. The FDA’s medical officer review, which was the basis for approving the Pfizer vaccine, notes that “clinically important serious adverse reactions [were] anaphylaxis and myocarditis/pericarditis.”
Patients Not Warned of Risks
But the problem is patients were — and are still — not being adequately warned or monitored for cardiovascular symptoms on existing Covid-19 vaccines. Pfizer should already have placed a warning on the label.
Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca should have already volunteered to warn all their patients about potentially deadly cardiovascular adverse events, as well as other adverse events trending upward in VAERS that are associated with Covid vaccine and booster administration. At a minimum, any Novavax vaccine should have a prominent warning informing the public about the risk of potential serious and deadly cardiovascular adverse events, but since Pfizer and Moderna aren’t doing so, neither is Novavax.
Adverse events from drugs were already the fourth leading cause of death prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the FDA. Because Pfizer and Moderna’s cardiovascular and other adverse events were not taken seriously enough by the FDA to warrant more substantial labeling warnings, Covid-19 vaccine adverse events have become a major source of morbidity and mortality, per the FDA’s VAERS reporting system.
Missouri Governor Mike Parson holds to the view that it is up to a doctor and his or her patient to make decisions that affect patient health, particularly given COVID-19, for which an experimental vaccine is being forced on the public via mandates in many jurisdictions. Vaccine mandates have become a partisan issue, with the GOP mostly opposing mandates. According to the Kansas City Star, Parson, who is Republican, has just “signed into law a bill that bars pharmacists from questioning doctors” who prescribe ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
Note how the Kansas City Star article references the two “controversial drugs,” but makes no mention of controversial vaccines.
Reuters published an article in 2021 that included a warning by lawyers that “the vaccine is so new that there’s virtually no definitive research on injury causation to cite.”
The article continued:
Indeed, the overwhelming majority of all litigants under what’s known as the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program have NOT succeeded.
Reports are now copious and mounting about sudden deaths associated with the vaccine, and vaccine injuries. In November 2021, the European Parliament released a German study “examining the autopsies of people who died shortly after vaccination.” The study suggested that “50% of these deaths were caused by the vaccine, which is also believed to be behind an unprecedented accumulation of lymphocytes found in the hearts, kidneys, livers and spleens of the deceased.”
According to the Daily Mail, doctors are trying to determine why so many healthy young people are suddenly dying in Australia. Young people are now urged to have their hearts checked to avoid Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS). Although the article offers no reason for the sudden deaths, Australia imposed upon its citizens some of the most restrictive COVID rules in the world. Those who tested positive were sometimes required to be quarantined at facilities. By November 2021, over 10,000 Australians had filed coronavirus vaccine injury claims.
The American Council on Science and Health is now advising the obvious: “it’s good to be skeptical of scientists and the politicians who listen to them”; yet this didn’t seem so obvious at the height of the COVID crisis. The psychological mass coercion by governments, medical establishments and media was astounding, and questions were discouraged. Many are now denying that any “forced” experimental vaccination took place, while others are calling it “an American tradition.” Take, for instance, the New York Times article “Vaccine Mandates are an American Tradition,” which presents an argument that everyone already knows, but omits the most important aspect of subject at hand: the nature of the mRNA vaccine. It an experimental,gene transfer and expression vaccine which was developed hastily. The public was actually the test subjects. Note: the COVID vaccines were described in Clinical Trials.gov as an experiment to “Study to Describe the Safety, Tolerability, Immunogenicity, and Efficacy of RNA Vaccine Candidates Against COVID-19 in Healthy Individuals.” In other words, scientists studying the vaccine did not know about the “Safety, Tolerability, Immunogenicity, and Efficacy of RNA Vaccine Candidates Against COVID-19,” so they had to study it on the public.
Actual Study Start Date :
April 29, 2020
Estimated Primary Completion Date :
February 8, 2024
Estimated Study Completion Date :
February 8, 2024
It was never a secret that these mRNA vaccines were experimental. Mass fear took precedence over research, and all possible reasoned approaches. Mass immunity was never properly weighed, nor were other alternative treatments, including ivermectin and hydroxychoroquine. Citizens were forced to take part in an experiment with immense possible impact upon their personal health, or face severe punishment and/or marginalization. Not every jurisdiction went along to get along: Florida fought mandates tooth and nail.
There is no denying that COVID was a potentially serious illness that killed many. It does no good to downplay this, but many scientists warned that herd immunity (much like the flu) was an intelligent option to weigh, considering the low death rates, particularly among the most vulnerable.
The National Institute of Health surprisingly published a report by Dr. Russell L. Blaylock — a retired neurosurgeon and current clinical assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, as well as a visiting professor in the biology department at Belhaven College. In an article entitled “Covid Update–What is the Truth?,” Dr. Blayback began with a stunning rebuke of trusted authorities:
The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most manipulated infectious disease events in history, characterized by official lies in an unending stream lead by government bureaucracies, medical associations, medical boards, the media, and international agencies.[3,6,57] We have witnessed a long list of unprecedented intrusions into medical practice, including attacks on medical experts, destruction of medical careers among doctors refusing to participate in killing their patients and a massive regimentation of health care, led by non-qualified individuals with enormous wealth, power and influence.
Although governments and many institutions are asserting that no one was held down for forced vaccinations, they are manipulating the discourse, and refusing to admit the coercion and duress forced upon citizens who faced devastating job loss and marginalization for “not following the science.” Restrictions continue, with more vaccines on the way.
Dr. Paul Alexander, former Trump administration official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the COVID-19 pandemic, became a victim of media bashing. The mainstream media has been doing a hatchet job on him in efforts to ruin his reputation and protect Big Pharma and globalist government.
Dr. Alexander stated
You must understand that most people (those I write about below) were and are scared about retribution and their research grants etc. They still are. Most if not all are. Their jobs, salary, grants, and to be honest, safety, guides their decisions. Few people are brave enough to stand up. Yet there are many who are run after the money and advancement.
He also issued a grave warning to parents:
I again warn. I am warning parents to be very careful with their healthy children. Their children. Stop and step back as to these vaccines. Your children bring near zero risk. They do not need these vaccines. Period. No one, no Fauci, no Walensky, no Francis Collins, no Albert Bourla et al. have prosecuted the case as to why your healthy zero risk child needs a vaccine that is proven ineffective and harmful. Your response should be NO! Under no condition! And be willing to defend that hill! There is no liability protection for your child if harmed by these vaccines.
Anyone should be at least wondering why is it that so many talented doctors and researchers have been willing to sacrifice their entire careers to warn about an experiment. And why the heavy-handedness by governments.
Physician and biochemist Dr. Robert Malone also stated unequivocally that alternate COVID treatments were suppressed to promote the vaccines.
ACT for America founder Brigitte Gabriel told her COVID story and the case of an upstart pharmacist on an anti-ivermectin frenzy HERE.
Amid information overload, one thing is obvious, or at least should be: questions need to be asked, questions that might include the fact that Omicron affected both the vaxxed and unvaxxed, amid continued government restrictions. Also, why were people not informed by media regularly that the vaccine was an experiment, one forced upon citizens trying to hold on to their jobs and freedoms?
Under Missouri’s new law, patients, responsible doctors and pharmacists will now be protected, and able make their private medical choices freely.
“New Missouri law protects doctors, bars pharmacists from questioning controversial drugs,” by Kacen Bayless, Kansas City Star, June 8, 2022:
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson on Tuesday signed into law a bill that bars pharmacists from questioning doctors who prescribe the controversial off-label drugs ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
The measure, which passed in the General Assembly last month, was attached to a bill that exempts military employees and contractors participating in a federal training program from licensing requirements if they hold licensing in another state. Parson’s office announced his signing of the legislation along with six other bills Tuesday.
The new law, which goes into effect in August, prevents state medical licensing boards from punishing or taking away the medical licenses of doctors who “lawfully” prescribe the two drugs. And it prevents pharmacists from contacting a doctor or patient “to dispute the efficacy of ivermectin tablets or hydroxychloroquine sulfate tablets for human use” unless the doctor or patient asks about the drugs’ effectiveness.
Sen. Rick Brattin, a Harrisonville Republican who is running running for Missouri’s 4th District in Congress, previously told The Star he added the language regarding ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine after he spoke with doctors who worried they would lose their medical licenses for prescribing the drugs. Brattin, who said he previously bought ivermectin for COVID-19 but has never taken it, described the drug as “politicized.”….
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-10 17:51:312022-06-10 17:51:31New Missouri law bans pharmacists from questioning doctors who prescribe ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine
