The Author Who Warned Us Against Blindly Trusting ‘The Science’

Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 work “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” revealed why we should not confuse scientists with science.


“Attacks on me are, quite frankly, attacks on science,” said Anthony Fauci to widespread ridicule or approval, depending upon which side you are on. If you doubt his judgment personally, you must not believe in “the science.” Fauci went on to claim that all of the “things he’s talked about” were “fundamentally based on science.”

Let’s put the weasel words aside and recognize that what he wants you to believe – that all his official policy recommendations (“all the things I’ve talked about”) were firmly proven effective through application of the scientific method – is demonstrably false. The most rigorous, most scientific studies show precisely the opposite.

Fauci was a proponent of what has become to be known as “lockdowns,” the widespread closure of businesses and/or stay-at-home orders for the general population. Dozens of studies show this had no demonstrable effect on the spread of Covid-19. As one after another came out, Fauci went on talking about lockdowns as if this evidence did not exist.

Now, there are studies being conducted every day on this or that aspect of Covid-19 and I’m sure Fauci and his supporters can produce links to some that support lockdowns. While there are no absolutes, here is a general observation: the most scientific studies – the randomized controlled trial studies with large sample sizes measuring results in the real world – tend to point towards the inefficacy of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). NPIs include (anti)social distancing, masks, and lockdowns.

Less scientific studies – those with small sample sizes or based on laboratory experiments rather than experience in the real world – tend to point towards efficacy. Remember the experiment on mannequins wearing masks? You get the picture.

Let’s not forget that early in 2020 Fauci said a study based on a single case of asymptomatic spread of Covid-19 “lays the question to rest.” And guess what? It turned out the patient documented in the case had never been asked if she had symptoms. When it turned out she was symptomatic at the time of transmission, the study was unpublished. Subsequent studies failed to prove asymptomatic spread was significant. A December 2020 study looking at secondary attack rates within the same household – published right on the NIH (Fauci’s agency) website – says it’s miniscule if it exists at all.

Yet, Fauci goes on talking as if this study doesn’t exist. He has no choice. Without asymptomatic spread, there is no justification for lockdowns or mandating masks for asymptomatic people.

On a rare occasion where the largely useless national media confronted Fauci with a question about how Texas could be doing so well four weeks after abandoning all Covid restrictions, he had no answer. “Maybe they’re doing more outside,” he mused. Then, he went on recommending the same policies as if the question had never been posed.

Fauci wasn’t alone. When White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Slavitt was asked why locked down and masked California and restriction-free Florida were having similar results in terms of Covid spread, he began his answer with perhaps the only honest words that have escaped a public health official’s mouth: “There is so much of this virus that we think we understand, that we think we can predict, that is just a little bit beyond our explanation.” But then, in literally the same breath, he said we do know masking and social distancing work.

Now, you don’t have to be a trained journalist for the obvious follow-up question to occur to you: “No, Mr. Slavitt, the question I just posed to you suggests we don’t know masking and social distancing work because we are seeing equivalent results in states that are and are not following those policies.”

Of course, that follow-up was not put to Slavitt. And you really have to ask yourself why.

The failure of scientists to be scientific is not a new phenomenon. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) dealt directly with the tendency of scientists to reject evidence that contradicts the prevailing theory or “paradigm.”

“Part of the answer, as obvious as it is important,” wrote Kuhn, a Harvard educated philosopher of science, “can be discovered by noting first what scientists never do when confronted by even severe and prolonged anomalies. Though they may begin to lose faith and then to consider alternatives, they do not renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis.”

Kuhn’s overall thesis challenged the prevailing understanding at the time that science proceeds in a linear fashion, with new discoveries incrementally adding to the accumulated knowledge that preceded them. Instead, argued Kuhn, science throughout history has featured a series of revolutions, where paradigms like the geocentric theory of the solar system or Newtonian physics collapsed under the weight of “anomalies” (evidence which contradicted the theory) and made way for new paradigms like the heliocentric theory of the solar system and Einsteinian physics.

There is much nuance in Kuhn’s argument which his critics have tended to ignore, but one takeaway that we’re seeing proved in real time is that these scientific revolutions are only revolutionary because of the tendency for scientists to cling to a theory regardless of evidence that refutes it. Kuhn argues that scientists will not abandon a disproven theory until a new theory is presented that they are convinced explains the evidence better than the old.

What makes the New Normal so strange is that a scientific revolution occurred with no anomalies. It was firmly established by a century of scientific research that suggested nonpharmaceutical interventions weren’t effective in combating respiratory viruses. Indeed, Fauci himself initially repeated the established scientific consensus that lockdowns and mask mandates were not effective policy responses. He even discouraged people from voluntarily wearing masks.

Then, he and the rest of the government scientists did a complete about face. There was no new evidence that motivated this. They simply abandoned the prevailing scientific consensus based on a desire to do something – even though the scientific evidence before, during, and after the outbreak of Covid-19 said what they wanted to do wouldn’t work. As a result, there is now a New Normal paradigm based on…nothing.

It should be noted that there were plenty of non-government scientists protesting vehemently right from the beginning. The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were already loudly protesting lockdowns as early as April 2020. Others contested asymptomatic spread, the mortality rate initially reported (they were right), and the efficacy of masks.

Here is the problem. This New Normal paradigm can’t collapse in the face of anomalies, no matter how numerous they are, because the anomalies are now simply ignored. Anyone who calls attention to them, no matter how credentialed or qualified, is systematically discredited.

In such an environment, unsubstantiated assertions like “Covid-19 spreads asymptomatically” and “lockdowns and mask mandates work” continue to form the basis of policy. The same goes for vaccine mandates.

It’s not that evidence against New Normal science can no longer be found. Much of it is available right on the websites of the government agencies denying it. It is simply a matter of saying “no” when governments and media demand you refuse to believe your lying eyes and obey.

Obedience has a price. We will be feeling the economic effects of lockdowns for many years. An entire generation of children will suffer psychological damage from being forced to wear masks during their most formative years. The damage to society as a whole from lockdowns, mask mandates, and (anti)social distancing policies may be immeasurable.

Neither can you simply go along to get along until things “get back to normal.” If and when the COVID Crisis finally ends, there is a Climate Crisis already teed up to begin as surely as night follows day. It will feature the same breathless media propaganda and ignoring of contrary evidence as did the COVID Crisis. The cost this time will be a significantly and permanently lower standard of living for you and your children.

That’s the price of obedience. Are you willing to pay it?

This article was reprinted with permission from tommullen.net.

AUTHOR

Tom Mullen

Tom Mullen hosts the Tom Mullen Talks Freedom podcast and is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? and A Return to Common  Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America. His podcast episodes and writing can be found at www.tommullentalksfreedom.com.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden Poised To Declare Climate Emergency To Ram Through Green Agenda: REPORT

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

Lia Thomas’ ‘Woman of the Year’ Award Is More of the Left’s War on Women

There is a real war on women, and it’s by feminists and the Left. This is the real war on women: Fox News reported Friday that “the University of Pennsylvania nominated swimmer Lia Thomas for the NCAA ‘Woman of the Year’ award.” The award is supposed to recognize female student athletes who have done great things. The NCAA nomination page says: “Established in 1991, the award recognizes female student-athletes who have exhausted their eligibility and distinguished themselves in their community, in athletics and in academics throughout their college careers.” In announcing the award, UPenn said that NCAA member schools “are encouraged to celebrate their top graduating female student-athletes by nominating them for the NCAA Woman of the Year Award.” Amid all this self-congratulation, one important fact has been overlooked: Lia Thomas is not a woman. Lia Thomas is a man.

Women must realize: the left is stripping us of everything that is uniquely ours. Women are being robbed of every good thing in our lives. First and foremost? Motherhood, our greatest joy and source of happiness. Our marital rights are being stripped, masculinity is rendered “toxic” (trust me, that hurts women), romance has been demonized, and femininity has been rendered politically incorrect (for proof of that, see how Victoria’s Secret has been killing its own brand).

Young women are being robbed of the greatest gifts life has to offer. And they don’t know it. But they’re unhappy and they don’t know why. It’s overwhelmingly depressing, these poisonous fruits of “women’s liberation.” The epidemic of single motherhood, the breakdown of the American family, the street vernacular of “bitches and hos,” the emasculation of men, the bone-crushing responsibility of one woman being mother, father, breadwinner, chief cook and bottle washer we owe to the feminists.

The destroyers have been at war against American values for forty years, and Lia Thomas, “Woman of the Year,” is just the latest proof that they have succeeded. Women have been diminished and dehumanized, all under the guise of “liberation” and “feminism.” All this shows the power of the art of propaganda.

The family is the basic building block of any successful society. Children born out of wedlock are more likely to struggle in school or suffer emotional and behavioral problems. Yet today, over fifty percent of births in this country to women under thirty are outside marriage. And an astronomical forty percent of women are not married when they have children. Back in 2016, Child Trends reported that “40 percent of births in the United States occur outside of marriage, up from 28 percent in 1990.” Since then, the percentage of births outside of marriage has only increased.

In the documentary, Oral Sex Is the New Goodnight Kiss, Sharlene Azam, a Canadian filmmaker, says, “If you talk to teens [about oral sex], they’ll tell you it’s not a big deal. In fact, they don’t consider it sex. They don’t consider a lot of things sex.” In the documentary, teenage girls talk casually about their sexual experiences and even their forays into prostitution. One girl sums up the new attitudes: “Five minutes and I got $100. If I’m going to sleep with them anyway because they’re good-looking, might as well get paid for it, right?”

This is how the phony feminist movement empowered women. More like enslaved women. Those men-hating parasites have ruined the glorious exaltation of women in 20th-century America.

I know. I grew up in it. All one has to do is watch movies from the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties (before the left’s rout of American culture) to catch a glimpse of the status of women and see the seismic change in the dynamic between women and men. In those films, women were treated with respect and equality. We were then formidable, respected, treasured, and above all… revered. It was as good as it gets. Relationships had depth and were serious stuff. Look at today’s films. There is no dynamic between the sexes. It’s two people playing with sex toys.

The Femarxist movement uses “equalization” as a means of empowering castration by the female at the top while emasculating males at the bottom. The transgender craze is the apotheosis of this movement.

All this is no surprise, of course. A breakdown of sexual mores and a flouting of convention is part and parcel of the agenda in every society to which socialism has come. And here we are.

AUTHOR

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

Judge Blocks Biden’s LGBTQ Guidance that Allows Transgender in Girls’ Sports and Bathroom Access

Pushback. Finally.

Judge Blocks Biden’s LGBTQ Guidance that Allows Transgender in Girls’ Sports and Bathroom Access

By Jim Hoft, July 17, 2022:

A Trump-appointed judge in Tennessee temporarily blocked Biden’s woke LGBTQ policy on Friday, including transgender workers and students to use gender-appropriate bathrooms, and participate in sports teams, Reuters reported.

U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley Jr. ruled in favor of the 20 state attorneys general who sued the Biden administration saying the directives infringe on states’ freedom to establish laws governing transgender.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Knoxville by Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery last August and was joined by Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia.

In the ruling, Judge Atchley prohibited the federal agencies from enforcing the orders issued by the Biden regime regarding the treatment of LGBTQ people.

More from Reuters:

A coalition of 20 Republican attorneys general brought a lawsuit last year against the federal government, noting that they stood to lose significant federal funding as the Biden directives were in conflict with their own state laws.

Atchley agreed with that, writing in his order that the states “cannot continue regulating pursuant to their state laws while simultaneously complying with Defendants’ guidance.”

AUTHOR

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

‘Peak climate insanity’ — Manchin Rejects $2 Trillion Pork Barrel Climate Spending Bill

Morano: “I liken it to they compare the climate crisis to having cancer and the green energy transition, the Green New Deal is their version of chemotherapy. Yeah, you’re gonna be sick, you’re gonna be vomiting, you’re gonna be laid up, but just when you get to the other side of that, you’re gonna be cancer free or in this case, climate crisis-free. So in their minds, this is the necessary bitter medicine that we have to go through — that the Netherlands is going through. What Sri Lanka is going through. What Germany and England are going through, as they’re facing blackouts and energy shortages and economic devastation and inflation.”


Morano on Fox & Friends:

‘We’ve reached peak climate insanity’ as Sen. Manchin kills Biden’s bill – ‘Completely unhinged’ activists claim a pork barrel fed spending bill will alter Earth’s geologic history!

Broadcast July 16, 2022 – Fox News Channel

Morano: “The New York Times quoted a University of California professor who said she was ‘sobbing’ at this news.  (Dr. Leah C. Stokes on Twitter: “Manchin says he won’t support the climate bill. I’m holding my children and sobbing.

Morano: Sen. Chuck Schumer is ‘shell-shocked’The House Budget Committee Chairman said ‘we’re all going to die’. We have a climate activist Bill McKibben actually saying that Joe Manchin’s name is going to be a geologic era in the Earth —  that Manchin is altering the geologic history of the earth. They are completely unhinged because one politician is not going to support a pork barrel spending bill, which they somehow think is going to save the planet. Just another pork barrel spending bill in Washington somehow has this power. We’ve reached peak climate insanity.”

[ … ] 

Green energy transition so worth it?!

Morano: “I liken it to they compare the climate crisis to having cancer and the green energy transition, the Green New Deal is their version of chemotherapy. Yeah, you’re gonna be sick, you’re gonna be vomiting, you’re gonna be laid up, but just when you get to the other side of that, you’re gonna be cancer free or in this case, climate crisis-free. So in their minds, this is the necessary bitter medicine that we have to go through — that the Netherlands is going through. What Sri Lanka is going through. What Germany and England are going through, as they’re facing blackouts and energy shortages and economic devastation and inflation.”

By: Marc Morano – Climate Depot – July 17, 2022 8:07 AM

Climate activists are ‘completely unhinged’ after Manchin decision: Climate publisher – Fox News Channel – Broadcast July 16, 2022

Climatedepot.com publisher Marc Morano praises Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., for rejecting a climate spending bill and slams climate activists for pushing ‘necessary bitter medicine’ solutions to the climate.

Rough Transcript:

Will Cain: Climate spending bill potentially doing any major green legislation before the midterms…So does (W.VA) Sen. Manchin make a good case here with reaction is Marc Morano, publisher of ClimateDepot.com. Marc, great to see you this morning. You know, I think it’s unavoidable. It’s interesting what happens overseas what is happening across the world. You know, we’re seeing precursors of it right here back home when not that’s food shortages in Sri Lanka, climate change proposals in the Netherlands. And here’s Joe Manchin, seemingly standing in the way at least in part of some of this stuff, making it back to the United States.

Marc Morano: Yes, I’ve already said Europe is much further ahead with the insanity of their energy policy than the United States. So if you want to know what’s going to happen in the US, look to Europe, and we’re seeing devastating energy news in Europe. And what Joe Manchin did — what he did was phenomenal. It reveals that just insanity of the current climate energy movement, Green New Deal movement if you will, he pulled out of this deal that they were trying to push on him with all sorts of bribes on the climate bill that President Biden is pushing the build back better $2 trillion.

And the New York Times quoted a University of California professor who said she was ‘sobbing’ at this news. (Dr. Leah C. Stokes on Twitter: “Manchin says he won’t support the climate bill. I’m holding my children and sobbing.

Sen. Chuck Schumer is ‘shell-shocked’The House Budget Committee Chairman said ‘we’re all going to die’. We have a climate activist Bill McKibben actually saying that Joe Manchin’s name is going to be a geologic era in the Earth —  that Manchin is altering the geologic history of the earth.

They are completely unhinged because one politician is not going to support a pork barrel spending bill, which they somehow think is going to save the planet. Just another pork barrel spending bill in Washington somehow has this power.

We’ve reached peak climate insanity.

Kudos to Joe Manchin for withstanding the pressure he’s under. He’s had activists and events surrounding him in the street chanting, ‘We want to live’ surrounding him not even letting him walk this video footage. They have targeted him, the climate activists, the Green New Deal activists, and he has stood strong and not given into their demands.

Will Cain: So Marc, how do you explain the insanity? Do you think that the likes of Chuck Schumer and others look across the world and see what’s going on with hyperinflation and food shortages and think it’s disconnected from climate policies or do they think that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet that it’s worth, you know, it’s worth a little human suffering to save the habitat?

Marc Morano: You’re spot on Will. That’s exactly what they think. When you hear everyone from Transporation Sec. Pete Buttigieg to Treasury Sec. Janet Yellen. They believe this is going to be a painful transition, but it’s necessary.

I liken it to they compare the climate crisis to having cancer and the green energy transition, the Green New Deal is their version of chemotherapy. Yeah, you’re gonna be sick, you’re gonna be vomiting, you’re gonna be laid up, but just when you get to the other side of that, you’re gonna be cancer free or in this case, climate crisis-free.

So in their minds, this is the necessary bitter medicine that we have to go through — that the Netherlands is going through what Sri Lanka is going through what Germany and England are going through, as they’re facing blackouts and energy shortages and economic devastation and inflation.

It’s all worth it because we’re going to solve the climate crisis, which is nuts because even John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy said if the US and Europe zeroed out our emissions the Earth wouldn’t even notice in terms of CO2 emissions because China, India, the developing world’s economies are ramping up so fast that global CO2 emissions are going up. So if we were trying to save the planet, just hamstringing our economy and punishing our people has no impact on global emissions.

Will Cain: You know what I would love to see Marc, and we’ll leave it here. But I would love to see their description of the planet post — in your analogy, chemotherapy. What is their description because we have that they have told us piecemeal, it’s fewer humans on this earth? So it’s less population. I’m sure it’s not going to apply to them and their families. You know, it’s less impact on the earth. So whatever that means shorter lifespans, fewer people, less human flourishing. I’d like to know Bill McKibben, his description of a healthy planet because I think we wouldn’t all agree with the picture of health.

Marc Morano great to talk to you this morning.

Marc Morano: Thank you Will.

“We’re all going to die”: Dems irate at Manchin for tanking climate change part of new BBB bill – “We’re all going to die,” House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth, D-Ky., told reporters when asked about the consequences of Congress failing to act… “Unfortunately, we have one Democrat who thinks he knows better than every other Democrat,” he said…

New York Times GUEST ESSAY: What Joe Manchin Cost Us – By Leah C. Stokes – Dr. Stokes is an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. – Excerpt: “Like other young people, Mr. Manchin’s grandchildren will grow up knowing that his legacy is climate destruction.  …  Hold your children close tonight. Leave some water out for the birds. And make a plan to call your elected leaders to demand climate action, to rip out your fossil fuel furnace or to buy an e-bike. The climate crisis is getting worse, and Congress is one vote short of saving us.”

Rolling Stone: ‘Joe Manchin Just Cooked the Planet’ by not supporting Biden’s massive federal spending bill — ‘Condemned virtually every living creature on Earth to a hellish future of suffering, hardship, & death’

JEFF GOODELL of Rolling Stone: West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin just cooked the planet. I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense. I mean that literally. Unless Manchin changes his negotiating position dramatically in the near future, he will be remembered as the man who, when the moment of decision came, chose to condemn virtually every living creature on Earth to a hellish future of suffering, hardship, and death.”

New York Times: John Podesta, former senior advisor to President Obama: “It seems odd that Manchin would choose as his legacy to be the one man who single-hadedly doomed humanity.”  …

“Privately, Senate Democratic staff members seethed and sobbed on Thursday night, after more than a year of working and weekends to scale back, water down, trim and tailor the climate legislation to Mr. Manchin’s exact specification, only to have it rejected from the finish line.”

Politico Editor On Manchin’s No To Biden’s BBB: ‘Objectively devastating for the planet. The last best chance at climate change legislation is gone’

The Sunrise Movement, a youth movement to stop climate change, said in a post on Twitter that “Joe Manchin and the fossil fuel industry don’t care if we make it out of this climate crisis dead or alive. This is #PeopleVsFossilFuels.”

Michael Mann: “Joe Manchin just launched a hand grenade at [UN climate summit in] Glasgow,” Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University, tweeted. “W/out a clean energy standard in the reconciliation package, Biden admin cannot meet pledge of 50% reduction in U.S. carbon emissions by 2030. And international climate negotiations begin to collapse.”

‘Build Bank Bankrupt’: Watch: Morano’s 30 min speech in Glasgow at climate skeptic forum – ‘How many times do we have to save the planet?’

Marc Morano joined the Ezra Levant Show to discuss Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin single-handedly throwing a wrench in Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, halting his climate and tax plans.
U.S. cannot fulfill climate change pledges if Manchin won’t vote for clean energy, experts say

Economic chaos is GOOD for climate?! NYT praises inflation as way ‘to drive welcome change for the planet’ – ‘Adjust what we eat to save both our pocketbooks & our planet’

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano: “The New York Times seems bent on updating Gordon Gekko’s phrase from the 1987 film Wall Street: Chaos, for lack of a better word, is GOOD. Climate activists in academia, the Biden admin. and the media seem to think the more humans suffer, the more the planet will benefit. This is more evidence that economic calamity, debt, inflation, supply chain issues, and skyrocketing meat and energy costs are not the unintended consequences of the climate agenda, but the INTENDED consequences. Chaos conditions the public to accept more centralized control of their lives. Vladimir Lenin reportedly once said, ‘worse is better’ or ‘the worse, the better’ to cheer on chaos and the destruction of the existing order to impose his ideology.”

Also see: Climate Depot News Round-Up: 

Watch: Morano on Tucker Carlson on energy & food chaos: ‘This is a war against modern civilization’ – World Economic Forum & UN seek ‘controlling humans’

Media Matters calls Morano a ‘notorious climate denier’ & ‘a proponent of the Great Reset conspiracy theory’

Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels RIP
https://www.climatedepot.com/2022/07/17/watch-morano-on-fox-friends-weve-reached-peak-climate-insanity-as-sen-manchin-kills-bidens-climate-agenda-completely-unhinged-activists-claim-a-pork-barrel-fed-spendin/

©Marc Morano. All rights reserved.

Natural Immunity Offered More Protection Against Omicron Than 3 Vaccine Doses, New England Journal of Medicine Study Finds

Importantly, the Cornell University-funded study found that both natural immunity and vaccines offer “strong and durable protection” against Covid-related hospitalization and death.


News reports say the Biden administration is currently weighing a plan that would allow all adults to receive a second Covid-19 booster, citing concerns from White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci about the spike in hospitalizations “fueled by the extremely contagious omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5.”

Currently second booster shots are only offered to individuals over the age of 50.

Meanwhile, discussion of a potential fifth shot is already underway. During a recent television appearance, CNN host Don Lemon asked CNN medical analyst Jonathan Reiner if such a scenario is likely.

LEMON: “That was my next question, I’m giving away my age because I’ve already had four shots, I’ve had two boosters, so I’m over 50.”

REINER: “Me too.”

LEMON: “So are we going to get a fifth shot? We’re going to have to have a fifth shot?”

REINER: “Yeah, probably.

The discussions highlight certain realities of Covid immunization.

“Immunity wanes,” Fauci said during a White House briefing on Tuesday, “whether that’s immunity following infection or immunity following vaccine.”

While it’s true that immunization wanes, new scientific research from The New England Journal of Medicine suggests natural immunity lasts longer than immunity acquired from vaccines.

The study, a case–control analysis based on data from Qatar collected from December 23, 2021 through February 21, 2022, involved millions of people, including 1,306,862 who received at least two doses of the Pfizer vaccine (BNT162b2) and 893,671 people who received at least two doses of the Moderna vaccine (mRNA-1273), as well unvaccinated individuals.

The results of the study are a mixed bag for the vaccines.

The best news is that “any form of previous immunity, whether induced by previous infection or vaccination, is associated with strong and durable protection against Covid-19–related hospitalization and death.” (In other words, both vaccines and natural immunity reduce the risk of hospitalization or death from Covid.)

Also good news is that both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines “enhanced protection among persons who had had a previous infection.”

“The combination of prior, full vaccination and prior infection was maximally protective,” researchers said in a summary of the study’s findings released last month by the Weill Cornell Medicine Newsroom. “Individuals with prior infection and three doses of either mRNA vaccine were, overall, nearly 80 percent protected from symptomatic infection during the omicron wave.”

But the study also found that two doses of vaccines offered “negligible” protection against Omicron infection.

“A key finding was that a history of vaccination with the standard two doses of either the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccine, but no history of prior infection, brought no significant protection against symptomatic omicron infection,” researchers said.

In regards to the Pfizer vaccine, three shots offered considerably more protection. But the protection was still lower than natural immunity, which offered stronger and more sustained protection from infection than vaccination. (Researchers noted that “people with a prior-variant infection were moderately protected from omicron with little decline in protection even a year after their prior infection.”)

The findings are not unlike those out of Israel published last year, which found that natural immunity offered more robust protection against the Delta variant than vaccines.

“The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine,” Science reported in August 2021 in a piece exploring the Israel findings.

More than a dozen other studies also found that natural immunity offered powerful protection against Covid, equal to or stronger than vaccination.

Even absent these findings, vaccine mandates were dubious from the beginning. The morality of violating bodily autonomy through government coercion is a serious and dangerous matter. In light of these findings, however, vaccine mandates also appear nonsensical.

While many institutions now consider Covid infection a form of immunization—including the NCAA, which in January changed its policy to accommodate athletes who’d had Covid—many have not. Thousands of soldiers have been discharged because of their vaccination status. Healthcare workers continue to face vaccination mandates in many places.

It’s time for all institutions—especially governments—to recognize vaccination choices should remain with individuals. The idea that freedom over one’s own body is the most basic and essential freedom is one embraced not just by libertarians like Ron Paul but by international leaders like Natalia Kanem, a physician who leads the United Nations Population Fund.

“Bodily autonomy is the foundation on which all rights exist,” Kanem bluntly states.

All efforts to compel people to get vaccinated (or else) are coercive, and therefore wrong. But when the government, in particular, violates bodily autonomy for an alleged greater good, it betrays its very reason for being.

“The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights,” the philosopher Ayn Rand noted.

As more studies like the research published by The New England Journal of Medicine come out, it becomes more and more clear that vaccine mandates were not just immoral. They were senseless.

Fortunately, many are beginning to realize just that.

 

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

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.

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

No Safe Space: Chemical Abortion and Trafficked Daughters

“My strategy was to be unseen. I became numb. Most abuse victims don’t know they are victims. We just know that this is life.” — Darlene, survivor


Darlene was 13 when she was first molested. To this day, she remembers running and hiding under the bed, desperate to disappear. “It just sort of flipped a switch in me, because I had no safe place anymore.” Fatherless, she watched her mom go from one abusive relationship to the next, until one day Darlene just stopped going to school. “That was when my world seemed to completely spiral out of control,” she admits. “[A] guy came to my neighborhood who was so jovial and so friendly to everybody. He was so magnetic is the only thing I can think of. All the kids in the neighborhood gravitated to him — and I had no idea that I was his target.”

By her 14th birthday, she was a commodity. “The first time he sold me was to a businessman,” Darlene thinks back. “He was a bouncer at an illegal gambling ring, and he’d bring me to that back alley — and he’d leave me in the car and men would use me there, over and over and over. And then when he opened the door, he said, ‘Gee, you look like hell.’ … I was beaten, gang-raped, drugged, dragged, and bruised in a sick game of dehumanization.” No one, not even her mother, stopped it. “Sometimes I was out on the streets for days at a time, sometimes weeks.” Her buyers were businessmen, city councilors, professionals, criminals.

After she’d been passed around for five years, she was sold to a man who told her, “in graphic detail how he’d forced other girls to have an abortion.” By that point, Darlene had been trafficked so long, she thought she couldn’t get pregnant. “I didn’t think it would happen,” she said. Until she did. When her abuser found out, he threatened to kill her if she tried to escape without having an abortion. “He even threatened to do it himself.” Terrified, she threw herself at his feet, begging him not to force her. He threw the phone in her lap and waited until she called and made an appointment. “In my mind, I had no choice,” she remembers.

Years have passed, but there are thousands of other Darlenes trapped in horror stories like hers. This very second, there are men online, in malls, walking through neighborhoods, luring girls away from unhappy homes with one goal: to sell them and use them for sex. Like Darlene, they’ve been kicked, beaten, starved, punished, and forced to subject themselves to a level of brutality and humiliation most of us can’t comprehend. Most of these young girls end up pregnant — as many as 71% according to one report. And not just once. Multiple times. “A third of women trafficked ‘underwent numerous abortions as victims of trafficking’” — most against their will.

Now, with Roe v. Wade gone, and abortion activists frantic to protect their biggest business, the plot has become more sinister: abortion pills, through the mail, where no one has to know. The new back-alley method that gives predators like Darlene’s an even easier way to inflict harm.

Before the abortion industry invented chemical killing, there was at least a good possibility that abused and hurting girls would see an adult face to face, a nurse or health care worker in a safe place where they could tell the truth and get help. And while abortion centers like Planned Parenthood’s were notorious about covering up these nightmarish crimes, there was a better chance of teenagers breaking their silence and getting rescued — than removing all supervision and forcing them to go through this dangerous abortion process alone.

As so many doctors have warned, these are lethal drugs. The Left tells women that it’s a simple, safe, natural, and private process. What they don’t tell them is stories like Solome’s. “I had blood all over my legs and went in the tub to wash them. The cramps got so bad I couldn’t even move. I couldn’t even cry…” she testified to the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus. “I couldn’t get to my phone to dial 911 and go to the emergency room…” There was so much pain and blood, she thought she might die. “I haven’t really healed from my experience, and I don’t know if I ever will.”

Imagine the harm rapists and other predators could do if these drugs were as available as the Biden administration is demanding. Children, innocent women, and sex victims of all kinds would be in an endless cycle of violence — with no guarantee that they would survive the complications. Because the last place a serial abuser is going to rush his victims is an emergency room where the girls would have easy access to law enforcement.

And yet, President Biden, controlled by the radicals in his party, has decided to take the side of those monsters, demanding that states make it easier for everyone to get their hands on these deadly drugs. In a term that has redefined extremism, he has decided to become the president of predation. “As our nation faces another significant health care crisis, this guidance is to remind the roughly 60,000 retail pharmacies in the United States of the unique role pharmacies play in ensuring access to comprehensive reproductive health care services,” according to Health and Human Services.

This, Dr. Ingrid Skop warns, despite the fact that chemical abortions have four times as many complications as surgical abortions. The Biden administration, she explained on “Washington Watch,” took away all in-person supervision.

“They can get it delivered by mail without ever encountering a doctor. … [And] these medications work by cutting off hormonal support and then causing contractions. The further along a woman is, the more likely it is to fail. When it fails there, the woman is at risk for infection. She’s at risk for hemorrhage. And that tissue that does not pass out has to be removed surgically. Even under the prior recommendations, using it up to 10 weeks gestation, about 5-8% of the time it does fail and the woman needs surgery. But in this new world where nobody’s even checking to find out how far along she is, it’s going to fail more frequently.”

For any woman, those are inhumane odds. For a woman trapped in a life of sex abuse, it’s a death sentence. The idea that anyone — let alone the leader of the free world — would try to push this poison on innocent mothers and children is abhorrent. What he’s telling the desperate, hurting girls like Darlene is that there’s no way out. That there is no safe place. “Women who are in this situation,” she tells people now, “need healing. They need guidance, they need compassion. But they don’t need abortion.”

She should know. The night Darlene begged her captor for her baby’s life, she had a dream — of a little face, part of a hand “with those distinct stubby fingers,” part of a ribcage. Looking back, she knows it was supernatural, a window into a womb she didn’t know. She woke up, raised her arms in the air in an act of desperation, and said, “God, if you’re real, I need you to show up.” He did, hatching a plan for her to escape with the help of a social worker assigned to track her as a runaway. She faked her abortion and found her freedom.

Darlene was saved by heroes — people who valued her life and her baby’s. Girls everywhere deserve a government and a president who does the same.

AUTHOR

Tony Perkins

EDITORS NOTE: This FRC column appeared in The Washington Stand is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

New Cause for Concern over Chemical Abortion and Data Privacy in the wake of Dobbs

The concept of privacy lies mostly in tatters anyway …


With the June 24 Dobbs decision overturning of Roe v. Wade and Casey, the US Supreme Court withdrew the nationwide blockade against the intention of many states to ban abortion to a greater or lesser degree. Depending on where you live, abortion may already be illegal or will shortly become so.

Texas, where I live, is one of the more aggressive states, having effectively banned most abortions since last fall by authorizing private citizens to sue anyone who assists in an abortion. To the best of my knowledge, the penalties for performing abortion focus mainly on the providers. But any woman who wants an abortion now faces a new forest of legal complications, including the possibility that law enforcement agencies may obtain extremely private information such as data from period apps in building a case that an abortion was performed.

In a recent Vox online piece, Sara Morrison pointed out that although women concerned about keeping their possible pregnancy status private should probably get rid of their period apps, that is not the only way you can be spied on, although period-app companies have a rather poor record when it comes to data privacy anyway.

Most media companies have a boilerplate clause as part of that agreement everybody pretends to read (and nobody does), which allows them to share information with legally constituted law enforcement agencies that have a reason to obtain it. So even if a woman sent a private text message to her closest friend saying that she thought she was pregnant, and a state police investigation thought it was relevant in prosecuting an abortionist, they could legally obtain that message.

The concept of privacy lies mostly in tatters these days for anyone who spends any amount of time online, which is pretty much everybody. While the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees the right to be secure in one’s “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” it does allow searches (presumably including online ones) in cases where a crime is suspected and a warrant for the search can be justified.

What is so different today from the circumstances in 1792, when the Bill of Rights was enacted, is that all of us leave electronic trails that are in legal grey areas in many cases. Simply being on social media and using one’s mobile phone creates gobs of data that clever analysts with adequate resources and access to commercial databases by means of search warrants can use to create an incredibly intimate portrait, including one’s pregnancy status or attempts to obtain an abortion.

Morrison says the ultimate solution is better data-privacy laws. And she may be right. The problem with this is that the entire economic basis of social media relies on the violation of the kind of privacy that data privacy laws would protect. So unless the Big Tech giants figure out an entirely new revenue model, their heavy hands on the scale of justice will outweigh any desire on the part of the general public to be more private online.

This is not an easy column for me to write, because I am personally opposed to abortion. At the same time, I realize that trying to enact (or revoke) a law that creates a situation which is hugely unpopular among a large segment of the public leads to situations in which law either loses respect or unduly harsh measures are used to enforce it. Probably some of both will happen in the coming months as the nation readjusts to the new circumstances surrounding abortion.

Judging from the way Morrison wrote her article, she seemed to take the point of view of a woman who finds herself pregnant against her intention and wants to get an abortion, but lives in a state where abortion is now illegal. What are the options?

Over half of current abortions are achieved by means of medication, which means the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol taken to induce a spontaneous abortion. Many states are or will shortly take steps to make such medications illegal for use in abortion, and the natural first thought of many—to order them online—leaves one open to surveillance as explained above.

The next option would be to travel out of state to a place where abortions are still performed. But in a state like Texas, even helping someone with travel arrangements could be grounds for a lawsuit—remote grounds, maybe, but who wants to do something that leaves their friends liable to be sued? And everyone’s whereabouts are being tracked 24/7, or at least the whereabouts of your phone, unless you turn it off. So as things stand, there are really not many places to hide.

Far from solving the problem, the Dobbs decision has brought abortion into the spotlight of public consciousness and debate in a way that perhaps hasn’t been equaled since the original 1973 decision that legalized it by judicial fiat nationwide. The real problem, the one that lies deeper than online privacy, or legal decisions or codes, is a cultural one.

We live in a hypocritical culture which both promises untrammelled freedom and withholds from nearly everyone the means to realize that freedom, which is illusory in any case. The culture has convinced millions of women that pregnancy and childbirth is simply not an option compared to all the other treasures of the world, and if a woman becomes a mother without meaning to, she must correct the error even if it means the death of an innocent being.

This is a serious distortion of how the world is, and correcting it is going to take more than the passage or revocation of a few laws or judicial rulings. But if Dobbs and its fallout get us to thinking about these things, there is at least hope that the truth will eventually emerge. And it is only the truth that makes people truly free.

This article has been reposted with permission from the Engineering Ethics Blog.

AUTHOR

Karl D. Stephan

Karl D. Stephan received the B. S. in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1976. Following a year of graduate study at Cornell, he received the Master of Engineering degree in 1977… More by Karl D. Stephan

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

Responding to the Risk Protection Article in The Lakeland Ledger

Reference the article below on Risk Protection Orders in the Lakeland Ledger. While I don’t subscribe to the Lakeland Ledger—this article was sent to me by a friend.  I think it was published on July 15th, 2022.  It illustrates several points we  have been making about the unconstitutional Florida’s Risk Protection Order (RPO) or Red Flag Law codified within SB 7026, Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Act signed into law in June 2018 following MSDHS, school shootings in Parkland, FL.

See our points in BOLD letters below. As always, your comments are welcomed.

Florida judge denies ‘red flag’ request over gun at Polk County

Polk Sheriff’s Office makes first appeal of RPO denial

by Gary White  –  The Ledger

Three weeks before the slaughter at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, a school resource deputy at Kathleen High School received an anonymous tip that a student had brought a gun to campus.

The deputy found the student, a senior, in a reading class on the afternoon of May 4. He asked the student to give him his backpack, and the student replied, “Why?”

When the 18-year-old student finally handed over the backpack, the deputy found another pack inside it that contained a Glock 42, a subcompact, semi-automatic pistol, loaded with four rounds, according to an arrest affidavit. The deputy also discovered two boxes of ammunition holding 43 rounds, the report said.

The student, Terrance Broome, made the unprompted statement, “I’m scared. Someone is trying to kill me,” according to the deputy’s report. He didn’t elaborate.

After the arrest of the student on multiple charges, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office decided that the circumstances fit the state’s guidelines for seeking a risk-protection order. Under a law passed in 2018 in response to the killing of 17 people at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, law-enforcement agencies can petition a court to have weapons temporarily removed from someone deemed to be a danger to themselves or others.

Two weeks after the incident, the request for a risk-protection order went before Judge Ellen Masters, the chief judge for the 10th Judicial Circuit, based in Bartow. Masters denied the petition, writing that the allegations the PCSO presented were “insufficient to establish by clear and convincing evidence that the Respondent poses a significant danger of committing personal injury to himself or others by having in his custody or control or by purchasing, possessing or receiving, a firearm or any ammunition”

The Sheriff’s Office has appealed the denial to Florida’s Second District Court of Appeal, which has administrative offices in Lakeland and holds hearings in Tampa.

The case illustrates the limits that law-enforcement agencies face in seizing weapons from citizens under the 2018 legislation, often described as a “red-flag law.” All petitions for risk-protection orders, or RPOs, must be approved by a judge, and judges don’t automatically concur with the arguments agencies make.

Not So – the power of the RPO is almost unlimited including ignoring Due Process.  Shows how bias Gary White is.

The Polk County Sheriff’s Office reported filing for 984 RPOs since the law took effect in 2018, with 858 petitions granted. That means that 12.8% have been denied or dismissed.

This means that 126 of those respondents accused of being a threat had to go thru the nightmare of  receiving a no notice ex parte seizure without Due Process and were later found not to be a threat. 

 It also means they most likely incurred the personal expense of hiring an attorney to represent them at the Hearing which took place 2 weeks post-seizure  to counter the evidence presented by the PCSO attorney before the Judge.  LE attorneys have a definite edge without private attorney’s present to defend the respondent.  White is mistaken when he implies they get to attend the “compliance hearing”.

 The accused person (“respondent”) also must go thru a bureaucratic procedure to be removed from state and federal criminal data bases and retrieve their property without any guarantee in the law that their property be returned in same condition found.

126 people having their property seized without Due Process is far too many law abiding citizens having to go thru this stressful process which implies one or more of the following conditions:  e.g.  those accusing them of being threats lied; a faulty investigation was performed and/or the reviewing judge rubber stamped these petitions. 

 The law allows 3rd degree misdemeanor charges to be filed against an accuser who deliberately lied about the respondent being a threat.  To our knowledge this part of the laws has not been prosecuted.\

Nothing was stated in this article that other existing means to legally seize firearms and ammunition already were in place in FL law e.g. Baker Act, Marchman Act; Court Injunctions.

A spokesperson for Polk County Public Schools said confidentiality rules prevented the district from disclosing whether Broome had been expelled after the incident.

Broome did not appear for the court hearing, just as he had missed a previous compliance hearing after being released on May 5. John W. Lees, a lawyer for the Sheriff’s Office, sought a default order. Lees did not present any testimony, saying the petition was based on an arrest affidavit and witness statements. Masters, who has been a judge since 1999, was not persuaded of the need for an RPO.

“I don’t think I can enter this one, Mr. Lees, based on those facts, even though it’s a default, which is pretty rare,” Masters said during the hearing, according to a court transcript.

Lees added that the student had been arrested in January 2021, while a minor, on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon. That case is still pending.

Masters acknowledged that it was “a serious violation” for the student to bring a weapon to school but said she didn’t see grounds for issuing a risk-protection order.

“I cannot make a finding based on those facts that the Sheriff’s Office has presented clear and convincing evidence that the incident or the circumstances involving this respondent indicates that there is a significant danger of personal injury to the respondent or to some other person,” Masters said.

Agree with Judge Masters.  This is exactly the kind of decisions which should be made.  Clear and convincing evidence is very subjective and is used because the RPO is a civil and not a criminal law.  However, evidence beyond a reasonable doubt should be the standard before these seizures occur.

The judge declined a request from The Ledger to discuss her decision.

Reached by phone, Broome ended the call without answering any questions.

He is charged with carrying a concealed firearm without a permit, possession of a firearm on school property and disrupting a school function, as well as possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia.

These charges are grounds for seizing firearms using a regular Court Arrest Order – why was an RPO even necessary.

The Sheriff’s Office filed a notice of appeal with the Second District Court of Appeals on May 26. Judd said it is the first time his office has appealed a denial of a risk-protection order.

Judd emphasized that he respects Masters but said he found the denial difficult to understand. He noted that Broome did not even appear in court to contest the request for an RPO.

“Certainly, we believe that an 18-year-old high school student with a fully loaded handgun, semi-automatic, and two boxes of ammunition is a danger to all of the students in the school,” Judd said. “So we were shocked to see that the RPO was denied.”

Judd said that in some other situations a student has made a direct threat against others when the Sheriff’s Office sought to have weapons removed. He acknowledged that Broome claimed to fear for his own safety but said personal protection did not require a loaded gun and two boxes of extra ammunition.

“I’m shocked because I don’t believe she nor any other judge would want it on her conscience if he would have taken that handgun and those two boxes of shells and shot up a school,” Judd said. “Fortunately for us, another student saw something and said something and we were able to intervene before a potential shooting occurred.”

One of main arguments against using Risk Protection Orders to seize firearms is they are based on what “might occur in the future” or in Sheriff Judd’s words above “if he had taken” based on “reasonable suspicion” and not what has actually occurred.  This is not  a good standard to be using to take away 2nd Amendment rights or any rights for that matter.

Further, there is no evidence that any school shooting which has occurred or one that might occur in the future would be prevented by use of Red Flag Laws.  This certainly was not the case in any School Shootings of the recent past. Existing laws including the Baker Act, Marchman Act and Court Injunctions should be used instead. 

School shootings are a societal problem based on grossly deteriorated morals; insensitivity to violence brought on by the entertainment industry; lack of mental health intervention and; in some cases, including the FL MSDHS and TX Uvalde school shootings, a failure of LE, school districts and school administrations to take actions to either prevent or at least marginalized these active shooting events by performing their jobs. .

Some lawmakers in Florida and elsewhere have criticized red-flag laws as an infringement on Americans’ Second Amendment rights. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, speaking privately to supporters at a Polk County restaurant in April, said he would have vetoed the law if he had been governor when it passed under his predecessor, fellow Republican Rick Scott.

Rick Scott was under pressure to sign this bill into law and knew he was leaving office soon.  He should have declared a special session to give legislator’s more time other than the 3 weeks remaining in regular session to consider the Bill and all its consequences before signing it.  Although outgoing FL Senate President RINO Wilton Simpson has taken credit for writing this bill the fact is the 48 pages covering the Risk Protection Order are almost an exact lift from the existing laws of Blue States like Oregon.

A caveat is that not all of this law is bad.  We fully support the part establishing Sheriff Judd’s Sentinel or Guardian Program requiring a trained, armed LE officer or security guard in every school.  We further support the follow on Law signed by Gov DeSantis, SB 7030 which authorized trained school officials/teachers to be armed as additional security.  Unfortunately, few school districts including PCPS have availed themselves of this opportunity to even better protect our children.

Judd has repeatedly defended the use of RPOs as a way to prevent potential violence and said he doesn’t know what to expect from the Second District Court of Appeals.

“We need to find out what the courts believe is the parameters of the RPO,” Judd said. “And I think that will give either direction to us or it will give direction to the Circuit Court judge.”

We are hopeful the 2nd District Court of Appeals will rule in favor of Judge Master’s decision.

©Royal A. Brown, III. All rights reserved.

RELATED TWEET:

AWED MEDIA BALANCED NEWSLETTER: We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections.

Welcome! We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections.

Here is the link for this issue, so please share it on social media.

Particularly note the *** asterisked *** items below…


— This Newsletter’s Articles, by Topic —

Ukraine:

Germany Labels Journalist ‘Criminal’ And Seizes Her Bank Accounts For Reporting From Ukraine

Putin Offers Full Citizenship To All Ukrainians

Ukraine — What You Can Do:

*** Pray for the safety of the Ukrainian people

*** A well-rated source to make a Ukraine donation

COVID-19 — Repeated Important Information:

My webpage (C19Science.info) with dozens of Science-based COVID-19 reports

*** World Council of Health: Early COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines

*** COVID-19: What You Need To Know (Physicians for Informed Consent)

*** If you have received a COVID-19 injection, here’s how to Detox

*** Place Your US Order for Free At-Home COVID-19 Tests

COVID-19 — Injections:

*** Are the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines Safe?

*** Pfizer Asks Court to Dismiss Whistleblower Lawsuit Because Government Was Aware of Fraud

*** New Study finds Natural Immunity to Covid-19 does not wane by even 1% but the Vaccinated are developing Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome

*** It’s Time to Stop the Shots

*** Five Reasons Why NOT to get the new NOVAX Vaccine

The “safe and effective” narrative is falling apart

Fauci admits that COVID-19 vaccines do not protect ‘overly well’ against infection

Study: Pfizer’s COVID-19 Vaccine Goes into Liver Cells and is Converted to DNA

Austrian Ministry of Health to Fine Doctors Nearly $15,000 for Unreported COVID-19 Vaccine Injuries

U.S. Public Health Agencies Aren’t ‘Following the Science,’ Officials Say

COVID-19 — Injection Mandates:

*** Judge Sides With Parent, Strikes Down Los Angeles School Vaccine Mandate

*** Canada’s Health Minister: “You Will Never Be Fully Vaxxed”

So You Are Still Thinking About Taking the Vaccine to Please Your Employer?

COVID-19 — Data:

The Feds Pile Up Vaccine ‘Adverse Event’ Reports as They Decry Scaremongering Elsewhere

Excess mortality update

Cumulative All-Cause Excess Mortality – United States

COVID-19 — Masks:

*** How Face Masks Make You Sick Instead Of Protecting You

COVID-19 — Misc:

*** After month-long COVID bout, Fauci claims quad vaxxed status prevented ‘severe’ disease. No mention of why he also took Paxlovid, or its effect.

*** Tucker Carlson: Biden Ignores Report from his own Agencies

*** Reviews of three powerful COVID-19 books (Kennedy, Atlas and Navarro)

*** Health experts are quitting the NIH and CDC in droves because they’re embarrassed by the lack of Science

Court strikes down NYS’ forced quarantine regulation as unconstitutional

COVID Fearporn

A Mostly Peaceful Depopulation

Families Unite to Call Out Questionable Hospital Protocols that Led to Deaths

Endemic Covid Will Kill Us All Reasonably Quickly

Renewables (General):

*** Paved with good Intentions

*** Energy Crises In Germany and Texas Are Exposing The Folly of Renewable Energy

*** Mining Industry Warns Energy Transition Isn’t Sustainable

*** Germany went all in on green energy. Now its economy is on brink of collapse

Wind and Solar Cannot Solve High Power Prices, and Inflation

Wind, Solar And Pipelines All Fail Germany

Wind Energy:

*** Texas Wind Power Failing When State Needs It Most

*** Texas wind power is failing amid a scorching US heat wave

*** New York must balance climate mandates with declining reserve margins to ensure reliability: ISO

*** Kansas State Senator’s Testimony about industrial wind energy

Opponents question science, motivations of putting wind turbines in Lake Erie

Offshore Wind Turbine Threat to Whales is Next Big Argument

GE Shelves Wind Turbine Blade Plant as Renewable Energy Has Been a Tough Go

Solar Energy:

*** Unprecedented IEA report: There’s a huge problem for the clean energy shift and it comes from China

*** LA Times report warns about ‘environmental danger’ in solar transition

It’s Not Working

Nuclear Energy:

*** Nuclear Power Gets New Push in U.S., Winning Converts

*** Environmentalists Stunned by EU’s Parliament’s Decision That Nuclear and Gas Power are Now ‘Green Energy’

*** No power technology can do the job of nuclear energy today Duke Energy CEO

Soaring demand for electricity and coal shows why we need nuclear energy

Greenpeace co-founder, ex-director calls nuclear safest energy

Nuclear Power Could Heat Your Home

Fossil Fuel Energy:

*** Mike Rowe’s superior response regarding climate catastrophe

*** Natural gas now rivals oil as the fuel that shapes geopolitics

The unravelling of Germany’s green agenda

Europe at risk of civil unrest unless it returns to fossil fuels

France restarts coal plant mothballed in February

A role for Coal? Low-cost, negative emissions Blue Hydrogen from “MAWGS” Coal/Biomass co-gasification

Canada Sends Gas Pipeline Repair To Germany

Biden reportedly sold nearly 1M barrels of US oil RESERVES to Chinese oil company with ties to Hunter

Electric Vehicles (EVs):

*** Electric Vehicles Are a Tool of Tyranny

*** Studies Show The Electric Vehicles Democrats Insist You Buy Are Worse For The Environment And Lower Quality

*** EVs are Not the Future

The EV transition in the eyes of the Beholden Part 1

EVs Are Now Targeted for Overloading the Electric Grids During an Energy Crisis

Misc Energy:

*** China, Russia, Biggest Winners in Biden’s War on Energy — While Greenhouse Gases Rise

*** Study: Europe’s Green Experiment is a Costly Climate Policy Failure

*** The Global Search for Energy Security

*** Federalism Is The Key To Demonstrating The Disaster Of Green Central Planning

*** GOP Gambit Could Help U.S. Energy Producers Build Back Better

Deep Geothermal — can it make coal, gas, nuclear redundant?

The End of Private Car Ownership

World Energy Mix Data

Wholesale prices shoot up near-record 11.3% in June on surge in energy costs

Manmade Global Warming — Some Deceptions:

*** The theory of anthropogenic climate change has no reliable scientific basis

*** Climate Change: a religion built on blind faith

*** The Anthropogenic Global Warming Hypothesis and the Causality Principle

*** Short video: Putting the Heat on Climate Dogmatism

*** NASA admits climate change occurs because of changes in Earth’s solar orbit, not because of SUVs and fossil fuels

*** Nature doesn’t give us a clean environment

*** Study: Surface Solar Radiation Dataset Appears to Expose a Major Manipulation of Global Temperature Records

The Nonexistent Nitrogen “Crisis” In The Netherlands

Manmade Global Warming — Misc:

*** Manchin says he won’t support climate, tax provisions in proposed Democratic bill

*** Is a Carbon Tax the Only Way to Stop the Climate Activists?

*** EPA now stuck between a rock and a hard place on CO2

*** LinkedIn Bans Scientist for Presenting Inconvenient Truths About CO2

State judge blocks Pennsylvania RGGI plan

Russia Gives Climate Obsessed Europe the Heisman!

Report: Counting Carbon Molecules

All-time Cold Records Fall in Australia; Solar Activity Controls the Climate

Spokesperson Explains How Climate Change Goals Will Reduce Farm Production

The Global Warming Golden Goose

Huge number of new signatories of World Climate Declaration (CLINTEL)

US Election:

Election-Integrity.info (10 major election reports by our team of experts, plus much more!)

*** US Election Integrity Poll: 50% Think Cheating Likely in Midterms

*** ERIC Investigation, Part 3

*** Good Government Groups Ask State Officials To Stop Biden’s Federal Takeover Of Elections

*** Data Supporting the Reported Results of the 2020 Election Does NOT Reconcile with Data in Voting Machine Files

*** Google Spam Filter Cost Republicans $2± Billion In Lost Donors

*** 21 confirmed illegalities, irregularities from 2020 election

The Game Plan for Stealing Elections?

The Push for Permanent Vote by Mail

Court Requires DOJ to Turn Over Documents

US Election — State Issues:

*** Citizen’s Guide to Building and Election Integrity Infrastructure

*** Become a Poll Watcher in your State

*** Wisconsin Court says unattended absentee ballot drop boxes are illegal

*** Judge upholds limits on mass mailings of Georgia absentee ballot forms

*** PA Victory: Anti-Corruption Election Legislation Banning “Zuckerbucks” Scheme Passes on Bi-Partisan Basis, Signed into Law

DOJ sues Arizona over proof of citizenship voter law

Democrats Tried to Sabotage North Carolina Election with Aggressive Methods

Sample US Arrests for Election Fraud

US Politics and Socialism:

*** Left Wing Elites — Our New Antoinettes

*** California Throws 70,000 Truckers in Work Legal Limbo, Risking Supply Chains

*** The Big Lie of Woke Capitalism

*** The Deep State Is Sadistic

How the Federal Government Buys Our Cell Phone Location Data

Democrats Want to Tax Working Americans into Recession

US Politics and the J6 Committee:

*** The J6 Show Trial Is Lying About Election ‘Fraud’

*** Dr. Simone Gold Sentenced to Two Months in Prison

Freedom Has Departed the Western World

Where Jan. 6 prosecutions stand, 18 months later

Other US Politics and Related:

*** We Outnumber Them: “If We Don’t Submit, They Have No Chance”

*** We’ll Be Back, But Will Trump?

*** Immigration and World Poverty Explained

*** Judge blocks Biden admin’s transgender school bathroom rule, athletes

The private email Obama sent his former physician after he questioned Biden’s cognitive health

The Rise and Fall of Boris Johnson

Ruling in West Virginia v. EPA Scores Win for Representative Government

Collapse of Sri Lanka Is a Failure of Leftism

Globalism:

*** Successfully Facing an International Mob of Globalists

*** HSBC banker quits and declares ‘cancel culture destroys wealth and progress’

A Popular Uprising Against the Elites Has Gone Global

Vatican Goes Full Technocracy With ‘Council For Inclusive Capitalism’

Religion Related:

*** Don’t downplay violent attacks on Catholic churches

The Most ‘Post-Christian’ Populated Cities in the US

Celebrities speak on faith: How religion affects Hollywood careers

Education Related:

*** Our kids’ schools told us to ‘cease and desist’ but we’re fighting back

*** The Origins and Impact of Racially Divisive Curricula

How the Best of Intentions Created Today’s Academic Disasters

Science and Misc Matters:

*** ‘Disturbing’: weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

*** The #1 Reason for Clutter (It’s Not What You Think!)

*** Pat Michaels, RIP

China crushes mass protest by bank depositors demanding their life savings back

In NC the GOP has the numbers, but the Dem Gov runs the state


Please use social media, etc. to pass on this Newsletter to other open-minded citizens…If at any time you’d like to be added to (or taken off) the distribution of our popular,  free, worldwide Media Balance Newsletter, simply send me an email saying that.


Note 1: We recommend reading the Newsletter on your computer, not your phone, as some documents (e.g. PDFs) are much easier to read on a large computer screen… We’ve tried to use common fonts, etc. to minimize display issues.

Note 2: For recent past Newsletter issues see 2020 Archives & 2021 Archives & 2022 Archives. To accommodate numerous requests received about prior articles over the twelve plus years of the Newsletter, we’ve put together   since the beginning of the Newsletter — where you can search by year. For a detailed background about the Newsletter, please read this.

Note 3: See this extensive list of reasonable books on climate change. As a parallel effort, we have also put together a list of some good books related to industrial wind energy. Both topics are also extensively covered on my website: WiseEnergy.org.

Note 4: I am not an attorney or a physician, so no material appearing in any of the Newsletters (or any of my websites) should be construed as giving legal or medical advice. My recommendation has always been: consult a competent, licensed attorney when you are involved with legal issues, and consult a competent physician regarding medical matters.

Copyright © 2022; Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (see WiseEnergy.org).

GODLESS ENCLAVES: The Most ‘Post-Christian’ Populated Cities in Florida

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams, Founding Father

“Once faith dies, the death of hope follows hard on its heels.” ― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Author

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” — Karl Marx, founder of Communism, July 10, 2018

“If you fully obey the LORD your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country.” — Deuteronomy 28 : NIV.


We recently learned about the Barna Group which has been for 38 years surveying the populations of one-hundred cities across America and measuring how Godless, individuals without faith, religion or morals, their people are.

According to the Barna Group website:

The Barna Group is a private, non-partisan, for-profit organization under the umbrella of the Issachar Companies.

Located in Ventura, California, Barna Group has been conducting and analyzing primary research to understand cultural trends related to values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors since 1984.

One of the areas studied is the loss of the populations of certain cities of their Christian beliefs which they call “Post-Christian” enclaves. We like to refer to the populations in these cities as part of a “Godless Enclave.”

Barna Group looks at these Post-Christian Metrics:

  • Do not believe in God
  • Identify as atheist or agnostic
  • Disagree that faith is important in their lives
  • Have not prayed to God (in the last week)
  • Have never made a commitment to Jesus
  • Disagree the Bible is accurate
  • Have not donated money to a church (in the last year)
  • Have not attended a Christian church (in the last 6 months)
  • Agree that Jesus committed sins
  • Do not feel a responsibility to “share their faith”
  • Have not read the Bible (in the last week)
  • Have not volunteered at church (in the last week)
  • Have not attended Sunday school (in the last week)
  • Have not attended religious small group (in the last week)
  • Bible engagement scale: low (have not read the Bible in the past week and disagree strongly or somewhat that the Bible is accurate)
  • Not Born Again

To qualify as Post-Christian “the citizens in the cities studied had to meet nine or more of the above factors. To be classified as ‘Highly post-Christian’ individuals must meet 13 or more of the factors (out of these 16 criteria).”

Florida’s Post-Christian Populated Cities

Here are the Florida cities rated “Post-Christian” with their ranking (out of 100 cities in America) and percent of Godlessness:

  1. #14 Ft. Myers-Naples, FL (52%)
  2. #44 Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, FL (45%)
  3. #49 Orlando-Daytona Beach-Melbourne, FL (44%)
  4. #56 West Palm Beach-Ft. Pierce, FL (42%)
  5. #62 Tampa-St. Petersburg-Sarasota, FL (41%)
  6. #85 Jacksonville, FL (34%)
  7. #93 Mobile, AL-Pensacola-Ft. Walton Beach, FL (33%)

To view the full chart and see if you and your city is listed as Post-Christian click here.

The Bottom Line

Religion and religious beliefs are based upon two critical social and cultural constructs:

  1. A belief in a monotheistic and all powerful God.
  2. A set of rules by which one must live their lives (i.e. The Ten Commandments contained in Exodus 20:3)

The Ten Commandments are the fundamental basis of Western Civilization’s laws and beliefs. With out these Commandments mankind can literally do anything to anyone without any ultimate punishment, such as certain people always getting away with murder and the glorification of criminals and criminality. In some cases for political gain.

For those who forget, here’s what is in Exodus 20:3:

  1. “You shall have no other gods before me.
  2. “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
  3. “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
  4. “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
  5. “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
  6. “You shall not murder.
  7. “You shall not commit adultery.
  8. “You shall not steal.
  9. “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
  10. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

We believe that the most egregious sin is coveting for it leads to all other sins, which are:

  1. Lust
  2. Gluttony
  3. Greed
  4. Sloth
  5. Wrath
  6. Envy
  7. Pride

Godlessness and sin are opposite sides of the same coin called life.

Live the good life under God with faith, religion and morals and you will have blessing in this life and the promise of life everlasting in heaven.

If you live a godless life you will succumb to the seven deadly sins and be damned both in this life and for eternity.

BTW, isn’t it ironic that there are seven godless populations in Florida and seven deadly sins?

And thus ends the lesson on Florida’s Godless Enclaves.

About Barna

In its nearly 40-year history, Barna Group has conducted more than two million interviews over the course of thousands of studies, and has become a go-to source for insights about faith and culture, leadership and vocation, and generations. Barna Group has carefully and strategically tracked the role of faith in America, developing one of the nation’s most comprehensive databases of spiritual indicators.

Barna Group has worked with thousands of business, nonprofit organizations and churches across the U.S. and around the world, including many protestant denominations, Catholic parishes, and faith leaders. Some of its notable clients have included the Salvation Army, World Vision, Compassion, the American Bible Society, and Habitat for Humanity. It has also served mainstream business and non-profit leaders at organizations like Sony, Walden Media, Easter Seals, CARE, the ONE Campaign, the Humane Society, the Gates Foundation, and NBC Universal.

The firm’s studies are frequently cited in sermons and talks, and its public opinion research is often quoted in major media outlets such as CNN, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, the New York Times, Dallas Morning News, and the Los Angeles Times.

© Barna Group, 2019. All rights reserved.

RELATED VIDEO: The Transgender Threat

RELATED ARTICLES:

Federal Court Bars Biden Admin From Forcing Radical Gender Policy On States

Godless! Atheism and the Texas Church Shooter

DECADENT DEMOCRATS: From the Party of Abortion and Allah Akbar to the 2020 Right to Life March and death of terrorist Soleimani

Climate-Related Deaths Are at Historic Lows, Data Show

Since the 1920s, atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased from about 305 parts per million to more to more than 400 ppm.


The latest talking point of progressive politicians, pundits, and activists is that America cannot afford not to spend trillions of dollars to “solve the climate crisis” because global warming is an existential threat. As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) put it, “You cannot go too far on the issue of climate change. The future of the planet is at stake, OK?”

That is sham wisdom even if climate change were the terror Sen. Sanders imagines it to be. The resources available to public and private decision makers are finite. Resources allocated to “climate action” are no longer available to make mortgage payments, pay college tuitions, grow food, fund medical innovation, or build battleships. Prudent policymakers therefore not only consider the costs of policy proposals but also compare the different benefit-cost ratios of competing expenditures. As it happens, the benefit-cost ratios of carbon suppression policies are abysmal.

For example, just the direct expense of the electric sector portion of the Green New Deal would, conservatively estimated, cost $490.5 billion per year, or $3,845 per year per household, according to American Enterprise Institute economist Benjamin Zycher. Yet even complete elimination of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would avert only 0.083°C to 0.173°C of global warming 70 years from now—a policy impact too small to discernibly affect weather patterns, crop yields, polar bear populations, or any other environmental condition people care about.

The climate “benefit” over the next 10 years would be even more minuscule. Yet during that period, Zycher estimates, the annual economic cost of the GND electric sector program would be about $9 trillion. It is unwise to spend so much to achieve so little.

The doomsday interpretation of climate change is a political doctrine, not a scientific finding, as Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg shows in a recent series of tweets and University of Alabama in Huntsville atmospheric scientist John Christy explains in a new paper titled “Falsifying Climate Alarm.”

In the aforementioned tweets, Lomborg rebuts an op-ed by Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, who advocates spending trillions of dollars annually to combat climate change, which he calls “our World War III.” As evidence, Stiglitz claims that in recent years weather-related damages cost the U.S. economy 2 percent of GDP—a figure for which he gives no reference.

Lomborg deftly sets the record straight. Aon Benfield reinsurers estimate that during 2000-2017, weather-related damages cost the United States about $88 billion annually, or 0.48 percent of GDP per year, not 2 percent. More importantly, extreme weather is a natural feature of the Earth’s climate system. The vast majority of those damages would have occurred with or without climate change. “Does Stiglitz believe there is no bad weather without climate change?” Lomborg asks.

Click here for United States Economic and Insured Losses chart.

In the United States, hurricanes are the biggest cause of weather-related damages. Hurricanes have become more costly over the past 120 years but not because of any long-term change in the weather. Once historic losses are adjusted for increases in population, wealth, and the consumer price index, U.S. hurricane-related damages show no trend since 1900.

Click here for Continental US Landfalling Normalized Total Economic Damage (1900-2017) chart.

The past three decades are generally agreed to be the warmest in the instrumental record. Yet during that period, damages due to all forms of extreme weather as a share of global GDP declined. In other words, despite there being many more people and lots more stuff in harm’s way, the relative economic impact of extreme weather is decreasing. It is difficult to reconcile that trend with claims that ours is an “unsustainable” civilization.

Click here for Global Weather Losses as Percent to Total GDP 1990-2018 chart.

Lomborg provides an even more telling rebuttal point in a previous Tweet. Since the 1920s, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations increased from about 305 parts per million to more than 400 ppm, and global average temperatures increased by about 1°C. Yet globally, the individual risk of dying from weather-related disasters declined by 99 percent.

Click here for Deaths from Climate and non-Climate Catastrophes 1920-2017 chart. 

Stiglitz claims we cannot afford not to spend trillions to mitigate climate change because “our lives and our civilization as we know it is at stake, just as they were in World War II.” Lomborg notes that in the peer-reviewed literature, unchecked climate change is estimated to cost 2-4 percent of global GDP in 2100. That “is not the end of the world,” especially considering that, despite climate change, global per capita incomes in 2100 are expected to be 5-10 times larger than today.

Ironically, in the “socio-economic pathways” (SSPs) literature, the richest SSP is the one that relies most on free markets and fossil fuels.

Click here for Socio-Economic Pathways Chart.

Source: Keywan Rhiahi et al. 2017. “This world [SSP5] places increasing faith in competitive markets, innovation and participatory societies to produce rapid technological progress and development of human capital as the path to sustainable development. . . . At the same time, the push for economic and social development is coupled with the exploitation of abundant fossil fuel resources and the adoption of resource and energy intensive lifestyles around the world.”

John Christy’s new paper, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, summarizes two of his recent peer-reviewed studies. In 2017, Christy and fellow atmospheric scientist Richard McKnider examined 37.5 years of satellite data in the global troposphere (bulk atmosphere). Christy and McNider factored out the warming effects of El Ninõ and the cooling effects volcanic aerosol emissions. The underlying greenhouse warming trend—the dark line (e) in the figure below—is 0.095°C per decade, or about one-fourth the rate forecast by former NASA scientist James Hansen, whose congressional testimony launched the global warming movement in 1988.

Click here for The Updating the Estimate chart.

Christy and McNider estimate that when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations double, global warming will reach 1.1°C—a quantity called “transient climate response.” Christy comments:

This is not a very alarming number. If we perform the same calculation on the climate models, you get a figure of 2.31°C, which is significantly different. The models’ response to carbon dioxide is twice what we see in the real world. So the evidence indicates the consensus range for climate sensitivity is incorrect.

In 2018, Christy and economist Ross McKitrick set out to test the accuracy of climate models. They examined model projections in the atmosphere between 30,000 and 40,000 feet, in the tropics from 20°N to 20°S. The atmosphere warms fastest in that portion of the atmosphere in almost all models used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), such as the Canadian Climate Centre model, shown below.

Click here for the Hotspot in Canada Model chart.

In 102 model runs, the average warming in the “hot spot” portion of the tropical atmosphere is 0.44°C per decade, or 2°C during 1979-2017. “However, the real-world warming is much lower; around one-third of the model average,” Christy reports.

Click here for Tropical mid-Tropospheric Temperatures, Models vs. Observations chart.

Christy sums up the test results:

You can also easily see the difference in warming rates: the models are warming too fast. The exception is the Russian model, which has much lower sensitivity to carbon dioxide, and therefore gives projections for the end of the century that are far from alarming. The rest of them are already falsified, and their predictions for 2100 can’t be trusted. If an engineer built an airplane and said it could fly 600 miles and the thing ran out of fuel at 200 and crashed, he wouldn’t say ‘Hey, I was only off by a factor of three’. We don’t do that in engineering and real science. A factor of three is huge in the energy balance system. Yet that’s what we see in the climate models.

Statements like the following are increasingly common in popular media, academic journals, and political discourse: “The evidence that anthropogenic climate change is an existential threat to our way of life is incontrovertible.” Not so—not even close.

This CEI article was republished with permission.

AUTHOR

Marlo Lewis Jr.

Marlo Lewis, Jr. is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Lewis writes on global warming, energy policy, and public policy issues. Marlo has been published in The Washington TimesInvestors Business Daily, TechCentralStation, National Review, and Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. He has appeared on various television and radio programs, and his ideas have been featured in radio commentary by Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy.

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

“It’s In-Your-Face Capitalism.” Low-Paid ‘Virtual Cashiers’ Provoke Outrage among Labor Activists

Virtual cashiers may be coming to a restaurant near you.


A new start-up called Percy is based on a simple yet revolutionary idea: virtual cashiers. Essentially, a video calling device is set up at the cash register of your local restaurant or shop. When you want to buy something, you are connected with someone in a remote location, sometimes thousands of miles away, and they take your order. That way, if a store is having trouble finding local workers, or if staff members call in sick, stores can simply outsource the cashier job, often at a fraction of the cost.

Sounds brilliant, right?

The founders of Percy certainly think so. CEO Matthew Corrin and his co-founders Angela Argo and Ali Aqueel have been working on this project for months after initially trying it out at their Canadian restaurant company Freshii.

“The pandemic created this mass exodus of workers in the restaurant industry,” said Argo in a recent interview. “It made us start thinking about what roles in a restaurant can be done without a human being physically present. How can a restaurant owner capitalize on the virtual world?”

“The demand for fast-food workers far outweighs supply right now,” Argo continued. “You can look on Indeed.ca and you’ll see for yourself that everyone is offering more than minimum wage for restaurant workers — and they still can’t get staff.”

Percy’s track record so far is making a good case that Argo is on to something. The company already has more than a dozen clients in North America, including several fast-food chains.

“We’re growing quickly,” said Argo. “We tried [Percy] out at a few Freshii locations, and the response from restaurant owners, again and again, was: ‘this is a lifesaver.’”

But while restaurant owners may be celebrating, not everyone is thrilled about this new idea. Labor activists in particular have taken issue with the low wages being offered to workers in developing countries. The company currently employs about 100 workers in Nicaragua, Pakistan, and Bolivia, and a recent investigation revealed that some of the Nicaraguan workers are paid as little as $3.75 USD an hour. By comparison, an Ontario worker is guaranteed a minimum wage of $15 CAD an hour (~$11.43 USD).

“This … moves entirely in the wrong direction,” said Ontario labor minister Monte McNaughton in April. “I expect better from a Toronto-based company and know customers will vote with their feet.”

“They can keep their outsourcing jobs pilot project away from our province,” said British Columbia’s labor minister Harry Bains in a tweet.

Retail analyst and author Bruce Winder also had harsh words for the company.

“It’s in-your-face capitalism,” said Winder. “It reminds the customer, while they’re ordering food, that the company is taking away a live person and replacing them with a video of someone earning much less money.”

The concerns raised by labor activists are unsurprising, but the activists miss a key piece of the puzzle. Yes, the workers in developing countries are getting paid low wages by our standards, but think about it from their perspective.

If you’re a poor person living in a Third World country, a job that pays $3.75 USD an hour is an opportunity. Sure, it’s not the best, but it’s probably far better than the alternatives, which could range from sifting through trash to prostitution.

The point is, by choosing this job, these employees are demonstrating that, in their opinion, this job is better than any other alternative available to them. By coming into these countries, Percy is expanding these workers’ options, giving them opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have. In short, Percy is helping them, not hurting them.

Now, some may want to ban this kind of outsourcing out of compassion for these workers, but a ban would only leave them worse off. By taking away the best opportunities these workers have, a ban on this practice would force them to take other, less appealing jobs.

Another option would be setting a minimum wage for this kind of labor, but that runs into similar problems. With higher wages, fewer businesses will buy into the program, which means fewer workers will be hired. With a wage of $3.75 USD an hour, a restaurant might be induced to hire a worker. But if that wage has to be at least, say, $10 USD an hour, restaurants will very likely avoid hiring them. Thus, instead of making $3.75 an hour, many potential workers will be left sifting through trash. It’s a textbook example of making perfect the enemy of good.

Aside from helping workers in third world countries, Percy is also helping restaurants deal with their labor problems. This, in turn, helps consumers, who will get better service and lower prices thanks to these initiatives.

It’s really a win-win.

This is the magic of capitalism. When we have economic freedom, we can come up with all sorts of creative ways to help each other. We can create jobs for poor people in developing countries while solving our own labor shortage problems at the same time. They need jobs. We need workers. Everyone is better off as a result.

Once we understand this, we can start to see why government interference in the market creates problems. By getting in the way of these win-win transactions, government prohibitions take away mutually beneficial opportunities that would otherwise have been pursued. “The minimum wage law provides no jobs,” Rothbard reminds us, “it only outlaws them; and outlawed jobs are the inevitable result.”

With this in mind, it becomes clear that the labor-activist paradigm is not just wrong, it’s actually backwards. They say companies like Percy are hurting poor people in Third World countries and that government rules will help these people. But in reality, these companies are being incredibly helpful, and it is government restrictions that are causing problems.

The best thing we can do for workers in poor countries is to bring them into the global economy, and the easiest way to do that is by giving them the freedom to make the best arrangements they can. Companies like Percy should be celebrated for helping these people by facilitating mutually beneficial arrangements. Instead, they are vilified as exploiters.

But guess what, all trade is exploitative, at least in a sense. The buyer is exploiting the fact that the seller wants his money, and the seller is exploiting the fact that the buyer wants his product. And there’s nothing wrong with that, we do it every day. Free-market transactions are all about this mutual “exploitation.” That’s what makes them mutually beneficial.

In this case, Percy may be “exploiting” workers who have limited options, but these workers are just as much “exploiting” the labor shortage in richer countries to their advantage. And I say, good for them.

So, does this initiative qualify as “in-your-face capitalism?” Absolutely. And that’s precisely what makes it so beautiful.

This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.

AUTHOR

Patrick Carroll

Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

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

Prominent Pro-Abortion Group Appears To Be Front For Radical Revolutionary Communists

A prominent pro-abortion activist group downplaying its association with the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) shares significant infrastructure and leadership with the radical outfit’s other offshoot groups, a Daily Caller analysis has found.

Although RiseUp4AbortionRights seems like most other pro-abortion groups at first glance, other pro-abortion activists released a statement in late June asserting that RiseUp is a front for a “pyramid scheme” and cult of personality. The Daily Caller’s examination of the organization’s leaders, online presence, and fundraising platforms lend credence to the claim that RiseUp is an offshoot front group for the RCP.

“Support for communism in the U.S. is incredibly low, so one way for these individuals to jump-start is to ride the coattails of something that has much more acceptability” in mainstream discussion of current political events, Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, told the Daily Caller.

RiseUp shares leadership with the RCP and several of its related organizations. Sunsara Taylor is a prominent RCP spokeswoman and a co-founder of RiseUp. Taylor founded RiseUp in January 2022 to protest for “abortion on demand and without apology.” An earlier pro-abortion group Taylor founded, Stop Patriarchy, used the same slogan and also attracted scrutiny from other pro-abortion activist organizations, the Austin Chronicle reported in 2014. Stop Patriarchy has not posted any new tweets to its Twitter feed since 2020, but the organization’s website features more recent footage of an interview in which Taylor discusses the consequences of the Dobbs decision.

Taylor also founded The World Can’t Wait, Inc., (TWCW) alongside another RCP devotee in 2006 to oppose the Bush administration, particularly its policies in the Middle East.

Taylor went on to co-found another organization, Refuse Fascism, in 2016 to resist the incoming Trump administration. At the time, the RCP took credit for helping create Refuse Fascism on its website. The “what you can do now” quick links section at the bottom of the RCP website still links directly to the Refuse Fascism homepage.

Another leading RiseUp activist, Sam Goldman, is a prominent spokeswoman for Refuse Fascism. In a Jan. 2022 episode of the Refuse Fascism podcast featured on the organization’s website, Goldman stated that she has “been busy helping launch RiseUp4AbortionRights.”

The RCP website promotes digital content from RiseUp and Refuse Fascism. Similarly, Refuse Fascism’s website features digital content from RiseUp and the RCP. All three organizations generally promote each others’ digital content on their websites without making clear the nature of their association.

On its main fundraising portal, RiseUp states that it is sharing certain “tools” with Refuse Fascism until RiseUp “establishes infrastructure” for fundraising of its own. RiseUp’s PayPal fundraising account also includes the name of TWCW. Refuse Fascism and TWCW share a New York City mailing address.

RiseUp’s website claims that the group spends donated funds on protest materials and logistics. Amid accusations of financial impropriety from other pro-abortion groups, RiseUp released a statement promising that it “has never used any funds it has raised for any purposes other than exactly what the funds were raised for.”

The RiseUp statement derided criticism of Taylor and Avakian as “scurrilous and false.” The RCP added that the accusations from other pro-abortion groups “smack strongly of the tactics of the right wing fascist forces in this country and the political police (the FBI, etc.) who create pretexts to go after revolutionary groups” in its own statement. The RCP flatly denied ever having used RiseUp funds in any capacity in its statement.

Taylor refused to say if RiseUp would submit to an independent audit of its financial dealings in order to clear up the accusations, and referred the Daily Caller to previous statements on the matter. Neither RiseUp nor the RCP disclosed documentation in response statements to definitively disprove the allegations of impropriety.

VIEW THEIR INSTAGRAM PAGE HERE

The RCP centers on Avakian’s revolutionary ideology, which RCP materials refer to as “new communism.” Critics, including those who signed the June statement against RiseUp, have claimed that the RCP is a Maoist group that elevates Avakian and his teachings as messianic. The late June statement from pro-abortion groups opposed to RiseUp asserted that the RCP established RiseUp as a front to divert funds and people towards the growth of its ideology rather than earnestly supporting the pro-abortion cause.

“There will be individuals who use this division and deep and wide disappointment with the Dobbs decision to not only stake claim with regard to abortion rights, but also to make their overall failed political worldview an attractive option” to naive demonstrators, Levin said.

RiseUp has become one of the most visible pro-abortion groups in the United States. Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined RiseUp demonstrators in protest the day of the release of Dobbs. Taylor held a megaphone to Ocasio-Cortez’s face while the congresswoman led chants calling the Supreme Court illegitimate. Several protesters, including Taylor, have been spotted and photographed wearing RCP merchandise at RiseUp demonstrations.

The group has appeared at many demonstrations across the country since its inception, and has received attention from the press and celebrities. Hillary Clinton promoted a RiseUp protest on Twitter in early May. Hollywood social justice warriors Mark Ruffalo and Rosanna Arquette have publicly supported RiseUp, according to its website. MSNBC even broadcast an interview with two young RiseUp activists.

RiseUp protesters deploy unique tactics, including smearing red paint over their private parts. They also paint green handprints over the chests of protesters wearing white. Doing so represents “a facsimile of what would happen to actual living women, hemorrhaging to death from unsafe abortions,” one RiseUp activist explained to the Daily Caller at a recent protest in front of the Supreme Court.

“These are opportunists who are trying to take advantage of people of good will who have deeply held, sincere beliefs with regard to the right to abortion,” Levin concluded.

None of the signatories of the statement in opposition to RCP that were contacted returned the Daily Caller’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

NICHOLAS POPE

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Pro-Life Groups Sound The Alarm Over Repeated Attacks, Call Out FBI, DOJ For Not Doing Enough

School District: Berkeley Riot Organizers Tried To ‘Brainwash’ Students Into Left-Wing Activism [VIDEO]

Why A Famed Liberal Scholar Is ‘Running Screaming From The Left’

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

UK Government Report: Vaccinated account for 94% of all COVID-19 Deaths Since April, 90% of Which Were Triple/Quadruple Jabbed

We know it’s bad. But as data, (deliberately withheld by the Democrat-media-axis) becomes available its worse than we thought.

Despite the danger, the Democrats are ramping up totalitarian edits and mandating our children and babies get injected with this poison.

Whilst you were distracted by Boris resigning, the UK Gov. quietly published a report confirming the Vaccinated account for 94% of all COVID-19 Deaths since April, 90% of which were Triple/Quadruple Jabbed

With the most recent figures showing the vaccinated population in England accounted for a shocking 94% of all Covid-19 Deaths in April and May, and 90% of those deaths were among the triple/quadruple vaccinated population.

CHART #1

On the 7th July, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, announced he was resigning. Since then the Mainstream Media in the UK have distracted the public with 24/7 news on that announcement and speculation on who could replace him.

It’s times like these that you ought to watch what bad news is being quietly published in the background in the hope that it won’t receive much attention, and it just so happens that hours before Boris announced his resignation, his Government published new data that proves things have been terrible for the vaccinated population in England over the past couple of months.

Back in March 2022, the UK Health Security Agency announced that from April 1st 2022, they would no longer publish the vaccination status of Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths in England.

At the time, the UKHSA claimed this was because the UK Government had ended free universal Covid-19 testing and this therefore affected their “ability to robustly monitor Covid-19 cases by vaccination status”.

However, this was a lie.

The UK Health Security Agency had been looking for an excuse for months to stop publishing the data because it clearly showed the vaccinated population were suffering immense immune system damage, with case, hospitalisation, and death rates per 100,000 highest among the fully vaccinated population.

The following chart shows the real world Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness among the triple vaccinated population in England in the Week 3Week 7 and Week 13 UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance reports of 2022 –

CHART #2

This was nowhere near the claimed 95% effectiveness by Pfizer was it?

But now we have more evidence to both prove the UKHSA was lying, and that the current mainstream media storm surrounding the resignation of Boris Johnson is just a distraction.

This is because another UK Government agency, known as the Office for National Statistics (ONS), has just published data on deaths by vaccination status.

The latest dataset from the ONS is titled ‘Deaths by Vaccination Status, England, 1 January 2021 to 31 May 2022‘, and it can be accessed on the ONS site here, and downloaded here.

CHART #3

Table 1 of the latest dataet contains figures on the mortality rates by vaccination status for all cause deaths, deaths involving Covid-19, and deaths not involving Covid-19. And it is here that we are able to ascertain the vaccination status of everyone who has died of Covid-19 since the beginning of April 2022, when the UKHSA claimed they could no longer reliably report the figures.

Here’s how the ONS presents the figures for the month of April 2022 –

CHART #4

Keep reading….

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLES:

Governor demands ALL Washington state employees be subject to Covid vaccine, booster requirements in perpetuity

COVID Vaccines Increase Menstrual Irregularities Thousandfold, Fetal Abnormalities Hundredfold: Doctors’ VAERS Analysis

3-year-old girl dies of heart attack one day after taking COVID vaccine

Here’s Why Officials Are Desperate to Get COVID Vaccine on Childhood Schedule Before ‘Emergency’ Ends

CDC Caught Using False Data To Recommend Kids’ COVID Vaccine

Vaccines for 6-Month-Olds ‘Makes Absolutely No Sense’: Dr. Jeffrey Barke

Uruguay Judge Orders Pfizer And Government to Disclose Covid Vaccine Ingredients Immediately

Publix Publicly Announced Its Refusal To Offer Vaccinations For Children Under 5

MIT: COVID Vaccines ‘Significantly Associated’ with Spike in Heart Attacks in Young People

Data Proves ‘Sudden Adult Death Syndrome’ Fiction Is Death by Covid Vaccination

FDA Authorizes Emergency Use COVID Vaccine Boosters for Children Ages 5 -11

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

CDC Directs youth to secretive chats about sexuality, sex changes, occult practices and ‘finding a chosen family’

Parents beware. The American government is not only teaching children (in secret chats that they could easily access on their mobiles) about sex, gender, any kind of sexuality, and the occult, they are also being coached on how to avoid their parents and view their families as enemies when they view the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) harmful internet chats. The platform Q Chat Space is advertised on the CDC’s LGBT Health Youth Resources page.

The CDC is teaching children how to avoid detection by their parents, reject their families and embrace a “chosen family” consistent with whatever lifestyle choices they may be interested in. The truth is that children are being led into a life of confusion, mental health maladies, and dependency on psychoactive drugs to help them cope.

If someone, as recently as only two years ago, alerted parents that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) was behind this shocking corruption of children, that person would be deemed a crazy conspiracist.

The CDC is self-described as “the nation’s health protection agency, CDC saves lives and protects people from health, safety, and security threats.” But who is protecting the nation’s children from the CDC?

The David Horowitz Freedom Center and others have been warning about the “progressive” agenda for decades, but have been dismissed by Leftist apologists and mainstream media as “far right” and hateful.

“CDC Directs LGBT Children to Secretive Chats About Sex Changes, the Occult,” Fox Metro News, July 14, 2022:

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is promoting to youth an online chat space that discusses sex, polyamorous relationships, the occult, sex change operations, and activism, and is specifically designed to be quickly hidden while being used. It also mixes LGBT adults and children and is run in part by Planned Parenthood.

Called Q Chat Space, the platform is advertised on the CDC’s LGBT Health Youth Resources page, archived here. The chat service, which describes itself as “a community for LGBTQ+ teens,” is available for those ages 13-19, can be hidden from parents, and focuses on a number of mature themes.

Q Chat hosts conversations on a number of different mature and sexual topics, including “Drag Culture 101,” “Sex and Relationships,” and “Having Multiple Genders,” intended for ‘Bi/Pan Youth.”

One chat celebrates Ru Paul’s Drag Race while another is called “Queer Youth Activism,” which is intended for “youth of color.”

Q Chat also features conversations on “Gender Affirmation Surgeries,” as well as on hormone replacement therapy. The chats are used in part to tell children “where you can find resources” related to their transition.

There are also chats on astrology, including “self discovery in astrology” and one titled “Queering Tarot,” a reference to tarot cards commonly used in occult practices.

The sexually, politcally, and even spiritually charged material is intermixed with content that appeals to young children, such as conversations on video games, Pokemon, and StarWars.

One meme posted on Q Chat’s Instagram page displays a Trojan horse, explaining that children may realize they’re queer after “learning about queerness” from their friends.

The chat seems specifically designed to be concealed from parents and family members. Each section of the website has a large button on the bottom of the screen that says “Click/Tap here for a quick escape …” and shows a stick figure running towards an exit. When clicked, the button takes users to the Google homepage, hiding the site.

The site also notes that users can get reminders that obscure the name of the chat, explaining, “There are 2 text message reminder options: Discreet or Detailed,” going on to explain that “Discreet text reminders are private, they do not include ‘Q Chat Space’ or the name of the chat.”

One of the rules of Q Chat is to “Keep confidentiality” and agree that “what’s shared here, stays here.”

An academic article about Q Chat, published on the National Library of Medicine website, praised the service for its ability to be hidden from parents, saying that “The platform’s chat-based nature likely helps youth avoid concerns about family members accidentally overhearing their conversations.”

But while the chats are designed to be hidden from parents and family members, one chat session was called “Finding Chosen Family,” while another was titled “how to deal with family during the holidays.”…

Q Chat is run in part by Planned Parenthood, which Breitbart News recently revealed offers hormone replacement therapy to minors and has claimed that transgender identity can be “cemented early in elementary school.” Planned Parenthood has also promoted Q Chat in a video posted to their Tumblr account….

AUTHOR

RELATED TWEET:

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