La Resistance - One by One

Unmask America

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Authored by Jeff Deist via The Mises Institute,

Enough is enough. It is time to stop wearing masks, or at the very least to eliminate mask mandates in all settings.

This is especially urgent for children in schools and universities, who suffer the effects of masks for long hours each day despite being at exceedingly low risk for death or serious illness from covid.

We have a responsibility, once and for all, to reject the ludicrous, ever-shifting narratives underpinning masks as effective impediments to the spread of covid infections.

Seriously people – STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus

– former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams in February 2020.

The story changed from “masks don’t work,” to “masks may work,” to “masks work and you must wear one.” Now the narrative switches yet again: “cloth masks don’t work, so you should wear a surgical or ‘well-fitted’ mask,” or even wear two!

Note that even as covid evolves into a less dangerous omicron variant, we are supposed to increase the hysteria level by wearing masks intended for surgeons maintaining a sterile environment over open wounds. We are told this by the same political, medical, and media figures who have been “frequently wrong but never in doubt” about all things covid over the past two long years. And they spoke with just as much bogus certainty then as they do now.

Perversely, the Biden administration recently ordered 400 million surgical N95 masks for distribution across the country. Since N95 masks are considered disposable, and meant to be worn at most perhaps 40 hours, it is unclear what happens in a week or two when 330 million Americans run out of their “free” personal protective equipment.

The UK has sensibly ended its mask mandates, both in public places (offices and other workplaces, bars, restaurants, sporting events, theaters) and thankfully schools. One young university student broke down in tears at the news, lamenting the inhumanity of her experience over the past two years. As British Health secretary Savid Javid stated, “We must learn to live with covid in the same way we live with flu.”

Amen.

The arguments against masks are straightforward.

  • Masks don’t work. Or at least cloth masks don’t.

Even the CDC now admits what Dr. Anthony Fauci told the world in February 2020: cloth masks don’t work and there is no reason to wear one:

“The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you.”

I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location.

CNN’s dubious medical expert Dr. Lena Wen, previously an uber-masker, now tells us cloth masks are “little more than facial decorations. And heroic skeptic Dr. Jay Bhattacharya cites both a Danish study and a Bangladeshi study which found cloth masks show little efficacy in preventing covid.

Are we seriously prepared to wear tight and uncomfortable surgical masks all day to evade omicron?

  • Masks are filthy.

Humans lungs and our respiratory system are designed to inhale nitrogen and oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is literally a waste product, removed from the blood via our lungs. Masks may not trap injurious levels of carbon dioxide against our nose and mouth, but they certainly get filthy very quickly unless changed constantly. They also encourage mouth breathing, which can cause “mask mouth” symptoms including acne, bad breath, tender gums, and lip irritation.

Why would we ever interfere with natural breathing unless we felt sick, displayed symptoms, and were worried about infecting others? And in that case, why not just stay home?

  • Masks are dehumanizing.

Humans communicate verbally and nonverbally, and masks impede both forms. Masks muffle and distort our words. Our facial expressions are important cues to everyone around us; without those cues communication and understanding suffer. Infants and toddlers may be most affected, as a lack of facial engagement with parents and loved ones impedes the human connections and attachments formed during childhood.

Perhaps most disturbing, however, are the symbolic effects when millions of Americans dutifully wear masks based on flimsy evidence provided by deeply unimpressive people. Facelessness–the lack of individual identity, personality, and looks– is inherently dehumanizing and dystopian. Like prison or military uniforms, masks reduce our personal characteristics. Mask are muzzles, symbols of rote acquiescence to an ugly new normal nobody asked for or voted for.

  • Risk is inevitable.

Risk is omnipresent, and heavily subjective (e.g., covid risk varies enormously with age and comorbidities). Nobody has a right to force interventions like masks onto others, just as nobody has a right to a hypothetical germ-free landscape. Exhalation is not aggression, short of purposefully attempting to sicken others. People wearing masks arguably shed slightly fewer covid virus particles than those not, but this does not justify banning the latter from public life. As always, the overwhelming burden of justification for any intervention—including mask mandates—must rest on those proposing it, not those opposing it.

In sum, Americans are not children. Tradeoffs are part of every policy, whether government officials admit this or not. We know how to coexist with flu, just as we live with countless bacteria and viruses in our environment. We will similarly coexist with covid. The goal is not to eliminate germs, and zero covid is an absurdity. A healthy immune system, built up through diet, exercise, and sunlight will always be the best frontline defense against communicable disease. But diet, exercise, and sunlight cannot be outsourced to health officials or mandated by politicians.

Whatever slight benefits masks may provide are a matter for individuals to decide for themselves. People who feel sick with symptoms should stay home. We can all wash our hands frequently and thoroughly. Otherwise it is time for Americans to assert themselves against the dubious claims and non-existent legality of government covid measures.

It is time to get back to normal life, and that starts with visible human faces.

La Resistance - One by One

British Medical Journal Demands Immediate Release of All COVID-19 Vaccine, Treatment Data

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Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) has demanded the full and immediate release of all data related to COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, saying it is in the public’s interest to do so.

BMJ, a weekly peer-reviewed medical trade journal published by the trade union the British Medical Association, called for the release of the data in an editorial published on Wednesday.

“Today, despite the global rollout of COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, the anonymized participant-level data underlying the trials for these new products remain inaccessible to doctors, researchers, and the public—and are likely to remain that way for years to come,” BMJ said.

“This is morally indefensible for all trials, but especially for those involving major public health interventions.”

BMJ also accused pharmaceutical companies of “reaping vast profits without adequate independent scrutiny of their scientific claims,” pointing to Pfizer, whose COVID vaccine trial was “funded by the company and designed, run, analyzed, and authored by Pfizer employees.”

New York-headquartered Pfizer still holds that trial data and has indicated that it won’t begin considering requests for such data until May 2025—24 months after the primary study completion date of May 15, 2023, which is listed on ClinicalTrials.gov.

Meanwhile, The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had asked a judge to give it 75 years to produce all the data concerning the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine.

However, a judge earlier this month ordered that the FDA make public 12,000 pages of the data it used to make decisions regarding approvals for the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the month. The FDA must also release Pfizer’s vaccine data at a rate of 55,000 pages a month until all of the requested pages are public.

BMJ also noted that AstraZeneca has indicated that it may be ready to entertain requests for data from a number of its phase III trials. However, the Cambridge-headquartered company says that the timeline for such data can “vary per request and can take up to a year upon full submission of the request for analysis, decision, anonymization, and sharing of the requested data or documents.”

The Epoch Times has contacted spokespersons for Pfizer and AstraZeneca for comment.

“We are left with publications but no access to the underlying data on reasonable request,” BMJ said.

“This is worrying for trial participants, researchers, clinicians, journal editors, policymakers, and the public. The journals that have published these primary studies may argue that they faced an awkward dilemma, caught between making the summary findings available quickly and upholding the best ethical values that support timely access to underlying data. In our view, there is no dilemma; the anonymized individual participant data from clinical trials must be made available for independent scrutiny.”

BMJ added that regulators are not there to “dance to the tune of rich global corporations and enrich them further” but to protect the general public’s health and for that reason, they said, we need “complete data transparency for all studies, we need it in the public interest, and we need it now.”

In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was also sued by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) over claims that it is improperly withholding COVID-19 vaccine safety data from the American public.

ICAN is asking the CDC to provide de-identified post-licensure safety data for the COVID-19 vaccines in the CDC’s v-safe system so as to assure transparency with the general public regarding claims by both the CDC and the Biden administration that COVID-19 vaccines are “safe and effective.”

The British Medical Journal is one of the world’s oldest general medical journals, having been founded in 1840, and has editorial freedom from the British Medical Association.

It's All About Jews

The Truth About The Conflict With Russia

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By Biblicism Institute

Excerpts – published in 2015

“The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.” – Winston Churchill

The current conflict between the US and Russia is due to one simple reason: the Ashkenazim. They have a debt to settle with Russia.

Allow us to forward a bit of chronological tables as we delve into the nitty-gritty behind the conflict.

The Ashkenazim are the descendants of the Gentile (Goy) Ashkenaz, the Japhetite.

“The sons of Japheth were Gomer, Javan… The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah.” Genesis 10:2,3

“By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands.” Genesis 10:5

They are a resilient, roaming Turkic people. They have a knack for reinventing themselves. They first surfaced in world annals as the notoriously barbaric Scythians or Sakadeans, depending on regional phonetic.

“Here there is no Gentile or Judahite, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.” Colossians 3: 11

The word Scythian or Sakadean comes from the word Saka – with its Iranian verbal root Sak, meaning to roam.

The Scythians settled Central Eurasia which they conquered with their Gentile brother Togarmath and various other cousins, expanding across a vast track of land that encompassed but was not limited to parts of present-day Turkey and Iran. Their Gentile brother Riphath along with their uncle Javan’s descendants settled in Greece.

Later on, they reinvented themselves and settled a land they would call Khazaria – from the word Qasar, with its Turkic root Qaz, meaning to roam – following the break-up of the western Turkish Steppe Empire. Then the country converted en masse to Judaism/Pharisaism, sometime between 740 and 920 AD, just so they could remain independent of the two competing empires of that time, Christianity and Islam.

“Judaism was the most actively proselytizing religion,” explained Jewish historian Shlomo Sand. “The most significant mass conversion occurred in the 8th century, in the massive Khazar kingdom between the Black and Caspian seas.”

Khazaria

Then, Sviatoslav I of Kiev destroyed Khazaria around 1048 and absorbed it into Kievan Rus’, a territory that would later become part of the Russian Empire.

In Imperial Russia, [following the inclusion of Poland’s Pale of Settlement Jews – n.Ed.] the Ashkenazim were [continued to be – n.Ed.] kept under tight control and enclosed in the Pale of Settlement. Something the Ashkenazim never forgave Russia [and Poland – n.Ed.]

Khazar Jews 1878

Khazar Ashkenazi Jews 1878

Biding their time, they nurtured their hatred and plotted their revenge along with a new reinvention. They became the power behind the heinous Bolsheviks who took over the Russian government in the 1910s, killed 66 million Christians, [number disputed – n.Ed.] including 200,000 members of the Christian clergy, and destroyed 40,000 churches.

“You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians,” revealed famed Christian Russian writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. “They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators.”

solzhenitsyn-with-putin

Solzhenitsyn with Putin

The great majority of these vicious Bolsheviks were Ashkenazi Jews such as Vladimir Lenin [disputed – n.Ed.] Leon Trosky, Lev Kamenev, Gregory Zinoviev, Yakov Sverdlov, Grigory Sokolnikov, etc.. They were financed by Ashkenazi bankers from New York and London, such as Rothschild Bank and Jacob Schiff of Kuhn and Loeb & Co., who themselves championed the […] ideology of the Ashkenazi Karl Marx.

Revenge Round 1. Done.

Khazaria Map

Khazaria overlapped Ukraine & Crimea

Today, Russia is under fire for the conflict in Ukraine. A conflict that was started by the neocon Ashkenazi Victoria Nuland in the US State Department, with her neocon Ashkenazi husband Robert Kagan working in the background via powerful organizations such as Project for a New American Century, the Brookings Institution, and Council on Foreign Relations. The Ashkenazi George Soros also contributed financially to the Ukrainian Maidan “Revolution.”

“Many of the participants in Kiev’s ‘EuroMaidan’ demonstrations were members of Soros-funded NGOs and/or were trained by the same NGOs in the many workshops and conferences sponsored by Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation (IRF), and his various Open Society institutes and foundations,” wrote William F. Jasper in The New American. “The IRF, founded and funded by Soros, boasts that it has given ‘more than any other donor organization’ to ‘democratic transformation’ of Ukraine.”

In other words, the Ashkenazim or the Jewish neocons are goading the Russian bear by wagging the American dog. The dog can’t really decline because AIPAC has it by the groin, bribing equally both the Republicans (Trump included) and the Democrats, who are nothing but political whores willing to betray their country and risk the peace of the world. And remember, AIPAC is controlled by powerful Ashkenazi-American business leaders. See How the Ashkenazi Jews conquered the West.

Their sole purpose is to destroy Russia once again by starting a fire in its underbelly, Ukraine. A fire they’re planning to spread into Russia proper via economic and military warfare – not unlike what they did to Germany with the economic boycott of 1933 followed by all out military conflict. Why?

Because Russia has had the gall to rise from its still warm Ashkenazi-induced ashes. [Twice – n.Ed]. And because Russia has had the temerity to arrest their well placed thieving agents known as “oligarchs,” with some fleeing the country. And because Russia has had the audacity to impede the American war on Syria, which was orchestrated by AIPAC for the benefit of Israel.

Revenge Round 2. In progress.

After the destruction of Khazaria, a great number of Ashkenazim scattered East and West throughout Europe and reinvented themselves as Errant Jews or Wandering Jews – meaning Roaming (Khazarian/Sakadean or Scythian) Jews. That label had nothing to do with a longing for Palestine but a longing for Khazaria or perhaps a longing for a new land, any new land. Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia:

In 1903 Theodore Herzl presented the British Uganda Program at the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel.

In the late 1930s, the British Zionist League considered a number of other places where a Jewish homeland could be established. The Kimberley region in Australia was considered until the Curtin government (in office: 1941–1945) rejected the possibility.

With the support of the then Premier of Tasmania, Robert Cosgrove (in office from 1939), Critchley Parker proposed a Jewish settlement at Port Davey, in south west Tasmania. Parker surveyed the area, but his death in 1942 put an end to the idea.

The Jewish Autonomous Oblast set up in the Russian Far East in 1934, represented a Soviet approach to providing a Jewish homeland.

Jewish Autonomous OblastBirobidzhan Main Square

In the wake of World War 2, a great number reluctantly assimilated themselves throughout the Americas. However, the great majority migrated to Palestine where they created many terrorist groups such as the Irgun, the Stern gang, and Haganah. They terrorized the Palestinian population, killed thousands upon thousands, and forced hundreds of thousands out of their homes and into neighboring Arab countries. Consequently, they stole Palestine and renamed it Israel in order to reinvent themselves as Hebrews and hoodwink gullible Christians in the West.

“It is certain that there is no ethnic or racial continuum between the Biblical Israelites and the (Ashkenazic) Khazarians who lead the Jewish state,” wrote Gilad Atzmon, Jewish writer and musician.

In their adoptive countries outside of Israel, including the US and Europe, the Ashkenazim have become financial and influential powerhouses, not because they’re Jews – at heart the majority of them are really not religious at all and couldn’t care less – but because they’re a shrewd people. They have learned much from their roaming throughout history, and they assimilate themselves fast and hard. They’re the ultimate Nomads.

Khazaria Map

Was this on Putin’s mind?

Now could it be that, after two successive ideological failures in the forms of Communism and the current slow-motion destruction of Zionism in Israel, somewhere deep inside the minds of die-hard Ashkenazi leaders lies a plan for a new reinvention?

Will that reinvention be the re-conquest of their Khazar Khaganate – a land that is situated deep inside Russia and encompasses Ukraine and Crimea? Is that why Putin suddenly reattached Crimea to Russia?

Could it be that the Ashkenazim’s plan is to take back and re-settle their ancient Khazaria after the Downfall of Apartheid Israel? Is it why the duly elected President of Ukraine was forcibly removed in order to install a puppet government of two subsequent Jewish presidents, Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky.

Will they be okay with just Ukraine?

Revenge Round 3? If so, prepare for .

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

Texas Judge Blocks Biden’s Vaccine Mandate For Federal Employees Nationwide

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via ZeroHedge

While President Biden was occupied Friday trying to take credit for a new factory for the production of semiconductors (and all the jobs – construction-related and otherwise – that he said it would create), a federal judge in Texas was issuing an injunction to put the second major piece of Biden’s vaccine mandate on ice.

After SCOTUS last week rejected the administration’s attempt to force corporations to abide by the mandate via OSHA, a federal court in Texas has issued an injunction against Biden’s jab mandate for federal workers, the other part of his administration’s attempts to force vaccines on reluctant Americans – a strategy that Biden has already abandoned in favor of providing at-home COVID tests to all Americans.

Biden issued both mandates by executive order back in September.

Trump-appointed Judge Jeffrey Brown of the US Court for the Southern District of Texas said the case was not about whether individuals should be vaccinated or even about federal power more broadly. Instead, he said it’s about “whether the president can, with the stroke of a pen and without the input of Congress, require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of their employment,” Brown wrote.

“That, under the current state of the law as just recently expressed by the Supreme Court, is a bridge too far.”

The order that SCOTUS struck down last week would have mandated all private sector employers with more than 100 workers, as well as the US Postal Service, to test or vaccinated their employees.

The case against the mandate for federal workers was brought by Feds for Medical Freedom, which has filed three different lawsuits against the mandate, according to a report from Government Executive.

Most federal agencies have already started implementing the mandate requiring vaccination or testing, and some had already started ordering suspensions for workers who failed to meet the requirements.

This latest ruling will forestall (at least temporarily) those suspensions from moving forward. Although there’s still a possibility that the injunction granted could be overturned, given SCOTUS’s conservative majority and its previous ruling on the other federal vaccine mandate, any workers who were facing suspension can probably breath a sigh of relief.

Cultural/Ideological Divide

Looking Forward After Biden, 2024

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by Graham Hryce

Given the crisis-ridden, dysfunctional state of contemporary American politics, it is probably foolhardy to make any kind of prediction about Donald Trump’s political future. But recent events – together with an appreciation of American political history – suggest that his political demise may already be under way.

Trump’s downfall will not occur immediately – in fact, his exile to the right-wing fringe of US politics (where he always belonged) will be a protracted and difficult process. Nevertheless, it is still likely to happen for a number of reasons – but chiefly because Trump’s January 6 coup last year failed dismally. The investigative process and findings of the Select Committee into the riot will be seriously damning of him. We should also take into account that in the past, the American political system has often defaulted to a bipartisan compromise when it has been plunged into an acute crisis.

It should not be forgotten that Trump’s inept coup attempt failed because the basic institutions underlying America’s liberal democratic political regime held firm. Vice President Mike Pence and the Republican leadership (notably Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and Lindsey Graham) – despite being staunch Trump supporters – ultimately refused to acquiesce in his bid to prevent Joe Biden from assuming office.

In this, they were supported by the Supreme Court – which, despite the fact that three Trump appointees sat on it, firmly rejected his spurious claim that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” – the upper echelons of the military and the administration (in particular the Justice Department and state electoral officials) and, finally, Congress itself.

The ham-fisted coup attempt ultimately collapsed into nothing more than a violent, grubby riot by a few thousand of Trump’s more deluded supporters, who he had cynically manipulated for his own purposes. The outcome could have been different – but the fact remains that Trump’s effort to subvert American liberal democracy failed completely and, paradoxically, this failure may have actually strengthened the US political system.

It cannot be denied that Trump’s coup attempt had – and still has – widespread voter support, and that he still personally controls a substantial portion of the Republican Party voter base. That is why most prominent Republican politicians refuse to attack Trump openly, even now.

His continuing popularity, however, cannot alter the fact that his actions in late 2020 and early 2021 have probably rendered him unelectable as president in 2024.

Those crucial swinging voters (many of whom had been Obama supporters) who opted for Trump in 2016 – because they were justifiably disenchanted with the Democrats and simply could not contemplate voting for Hillary Clinton – deserted him in 2020. It was their votes that elected Biden, and they have now been lost to Trump forever, as a result of the events of January 6.

Astute Republican power brokers, even those still beholden to Trump, are aware of this. They also know that he would behave in precisely the same way in 2024 as he did in 2020, if given half a chance. Trump, nevertheless, remains a powerful force in American politics – feared both by Democrat and Republican politicians alike.

The Democrats’ main problem is that Joe Biden cannot possibly run for office in 2024. Leaving aside issues regarding his age, health, and capacity, his presidency to date has been a failure – and the Democrats have no other credible candidate. No matter how damaged Trump may be, the Democrats do not want to face him in the battle for the presidency in 2024.

Nor can there be any doubt that the Republicans are likely to obtain majorities in both the Senate and the House in the mid-term elections to be held in November. Even so, they have an additional problem, quite apart from Trump’s probable unelectability – namely, his vindictive determination to destroy all those Republican politicians who he believes, quite correctly, prevented his attempted coup from succeeding.

Not only has Trump publically denounced Pence and McConnell and others, but he is actively campaigning to disendorse a number of sitting Republican senators and congressmen, including the 10 who voted to impeach him.

It is this curious circumstance – namely, that Trump poses a serious threat to both the Democratic and Republican parties – that opens up the possibility of a bipartisan compromise designed to destroy his political influence forever. And there are now indications that such a compromise – driven primarily by the political self-interest of both major parties – may be taking place.

Trump’s cancellation of a speech that he planned to give on the anniversary of the riot suggests that even he may have belatedly come to realise his support for those involved seriously damaged his political credibility. His dilemma, though, is that he cannot back away from his support for the rioters without alienating his voter base. When he recently tried to hypocritically pose as a champion of Covid vaccination at an event in Dallas, his mostly rabid anti-vaxxer supporters actually booed him.

Any bipartisan compromise will involve the Democrats meekly accepting their losses in the upcoming mid-term elections, together with the probable election of a Republican president – other than Trump – in 2024. This means that Biden’s entire legislative program will effectively be put on hold – including, most importantly, his voting rights legislation – and traditional conservative Republicans will control American politics for the foreseeable future. This is perhaps a relatively small price to pay for the elimination of Trump from the scene and the preservation of liberal democracy.

US political history also suggests that a compromise of this kind is very likely. The infamous disputed presidential election of 1876 created an acute political crisis for the American political system. Congress was deadlocked for months, until a compromise was reached between the Republican Party leadership and Southern Democrats.

The Democrats allowed the nondescript Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, to become president – and in return, the Republicans agreed to dismantle reconstruction in the South, and give Southern Democrats carte blanche to disenfranchise southern blacks and introduce the odious Jim Crow regime.

African Americans paid a terrible price for this political compromise – one that has haunted US politics ever since. Nevertheless, the immediate political crisis was averted, and liberal democracy (albeit, in a debauched, racially discriminatory form) survived. Republican and Democrat political elites brokered a similar compromise at the end the Watergate crisis, whereby Republican leaders forced the disgraced President Nixon to resign, thereby ending that ongoing political debacle.

It cannot be disputed that Donald Trump has created an acute political crisis for American liberal democracy. His actions following his election loss in 2020 have shocked many politicians from both parties – some of whom bear responsibility for empowering him in the first place – as well as a significant segment of the American people. It is to be hoped that political compromise is now being put in place that will bring about Trump’s political demise, and restore the basic integrity of the American political system – insofar as that is possible – at least for the immediate future.

The alternative simply doesn’t bear thinking about.

via RT

Cultural/Ideological Divide

Having Pets or Children? – A Woke’s Dilemma

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by Fr. Michael P. Orsi via Life Site News
Excerpt

Carli Pierson, an attorney and member of the USA TODAY editorial board, recently revealed in an op-ed essay that she’s “someone who occasionally goes to Mass.” Like many such intermittent Catholics, she feels empowered to criticize the Church for being out of touch with the realities of life today.

Speaking with the boundless spiritual confidence of someone who went to Catholic school and had two daughters baptized, Carli offered the usual litany about sex abuse, rejection of women priests, refusal to recognize so-called “marriage” between same-sex couples, and other alleged institutional failings.

But of all her reasons why “the Catholic Church runs the risk of becoming obsolete” she focused on its “continued insistence on contradictory and outdated views on families.”

Carli was particularly offended by Pope Francis’ recent comment about how many people these days are opting to have pets instead of children. The Pope called such “denial of fatherhood or motherhood” an expression of selfishness that “diminishes us” and “takes away our humanity.”

Carli confessed to being someone whose “lips still tremble as I quietly recite the Lord’s Prayer in unison with other parishioners.” Nevertheless, she was firm in her criticism of the Pope’s preference for human offspring over animals.

“As a person who has both dogs and kids,” she wrote, “I fully endorse being a pet parent over a kid parent.” (One wonders how her two daughters feel about their mother’s preference.)

Cultural/Ideological Divide

600 Austrian Police Demand Govt To Cancel Vaccine Mandate

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600 Austrian law enforcement officers have written to the Austrian Interior Minister, requesting that proposals for forced vaccination be withdrawn and that prejudice against the unvaccinated be ended.

The letter, written on January 10, was signed by three law enforcement personnel who purport to representing nearly 600 of their coworkers and was written to Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner.

“We do not want to face the population in a threatening manner during what are predominantly peaceful demonstrations which were organized due to the increasing dissatisfaction of the people with politicians,” wrote the authors of the letter.

Numerous protests were held around Austria last weekend, which would include Vienna, wherein approximately 20,000 protesters came to the streets on Saturday to denounce proposals to declare vaccination mandatory for all citizens over the age of 18.

In response to the letter, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior stated that “the people who signed [it] can be assigned a clear political orientation.”

“85% of the 32,000 Austrian police officers have already been vaccinated, that is a clear statement,” the ministry added.

The letter’s authors, on the other hand, refuted this, claiming that they are not affiliated with any political party.

“We are not far-right or far-left extremists, we are not anti-vaxxers … we are a group of several hundred police officers from the whole of Austria … united by our concern for the rule of law, freedom of thought, our fundamental rights, as well as our health,” they wrote.

The authors then issued a series of demands on Interior Minister Karner, the first of which was for him to “ensure that no vaccine mandate, either professional or general, or any other form of indirect forced vaccination be introduced in Austria.”

They subsequently requested that the so-called 3G policy at work be suspended, which restricts accessibility to only those who have gotten immunized against COVID-19, have tested negative for it, or having healed from the disease. Alternatively, the authors advocated for the rule’s abolition or modification into a 1G rule requiring simply a negative test for everybody to assure that “discrimination against unvaccinated colleagues comes to an end.”

Ultimately, the writers requested that they be regarded as allies rather than adversaries of the public.

“We want to be there for the people, as friend and helper,” they wrote.

Since proposals for obligatory vaccination were disclosed, anti-vaccine rallies have been occurring every Saturday in Austria, and they have been mostly peaceful, with only a few incidents of clashes involving policemen and protesters.

La Resistance - One by One

Czech Republic Abolishes Plan To Mandate COVID-19 Vaccines

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by Isabel van Brugen via The Epoch Times,

The new Czech government on Wednesday threw out the previous administration’s plan to mandate COVID-19 vaccines for over-60s and people in key professions.

Under the former government, older adults, health care workers, firefighters, police officers and medical students would have been required to be vaccinated against COVID-19, effective March.

But Prime Minister Petr Fiala scrapped his predecessor Andrej Babis’s decree, which was issued in early December. He told reporters Wednesday that his new center-right government did not see the need for mandatory vaccination.

“We’ve agreed that vaccination against COVID-19 won’t be mandatory,” Fiala said. ”This does not change our stance on vaccination. It is still undoubtedly the best way to fight COVID-19 … however, we do not want to deepen fissures in society.”

Opponents of a vaccine mandate had staged several protests in Prague and elsewhere in the country.

So far, 62.9 percent of Czechs are considered fully vaccinated, below the European Union average, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control. Almost 3.4 million people in the nation of 10.5 million also have received a booster shot.

Fiala said about 90 percent of people who would have been covered by the mandate have already received vaccines.

The new government’s decision came as the Czech Republic is facing a surge in COVID-19 infections largely fueled by the highly contagious Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus.

The seven-day infection rate was 950 new cases per 100,000 residents on Tuesday compared to 799 a day earlier.

Despite the record numbers, the number of COVID-19 patients in hospitals dropped to 1,635 on Tuesday with 252 needing intensive care.

Researchers and health experts are hopeful that the Omicron variant, while highly transmissible, is less severe, and poses milder symptoms in infected people, compared with other strains such as the Delta variant.

Elsewhere, in Austria residents are set to be fined if they flout a COVID-19 vaccine mandate the country is aiming to introduce in February for all residents aged 14 and over.

Last month, Austria’s health minister announced that those who flout the vaccine mandate will face fines of up to 3,600 euros (around $4,000).

And in Greece, a vaccination mandate has been imposed on all over-60s. Those who refuse to be vaccinated will be fined by the government, health minister Thanos Plevris said. Fines start this month at 50 euros ($57), followed by a monthly fine of 100 euros ($114).

Plevris said the penalties would be collected through the tax office and used to fund state hospitals.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

Russia Shelves National QR Codes After Massive Pushback From the Outraged Narod

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by Edward Slavsquat via https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/

The State Duma has dropped legislation that would have created a national QR code system—arguably the most unpopular proposed law in recent Russian history.

The unanimous decision was announced by Chairman of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin on his Telegram channel.

Notably, even state media acknowledged the bill was dropped after massive push-back from outraged Russians:

The chairman of the lower house also thanked people for the feedback received while discussing the draft law. Earlier, Volodin’s post relating to the bill on the COVID-19 certificates with QR codes gained 1 mln views and over 700,000 comments. The Russian parliamentarian noted that the deputies received more than 120,000 official appeals concerning this initiative.

“It is essential to listen to each other. This will help to avoid mistakes and hammer out the right decisions based on dialogue,” the State Duma’s chairman emphasized.

Our friends at Katyusha have described this development as a clear victory and evidence that the federal government was “afraid to be left alone, with the people enraged by its actions”—especially as Washington & Co. continue to raise the stakes with the Kremlin.

Capitalism in Decay

US Youth Mortality Rate 2x That of Other Wealthy Nations

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A new report by Population Reference Bureau on the disproportionate death rate found that accidents, suicides, and homicides kill twice as many young people in the US as in other wealthy nations.

While youth and infant mortality rates have declined across the developed world, they’ve remained stagnant or even increased in the US, according to a new report by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), a Washington-based nonprofit. Among older youths, violent death is alarmingly more common in the US than in other developed nations.

A baby born in the US in 2019 was nearly three times as likely to die as a baby born in Japan, Finland, or Slovenia, the report states. The researchers attribute this disparity to the high rate of preterm births in the US, as well as racial and economic inequalities, which affect access to healthcare.

Growing up, other hazards come into play. Unintentional injuries (a category that includes drug overdoses), suicides, and homicides account for about half of all deaths among people aged 10 to 14, and about three quarters of all deaths among those aged 15 to 24.

Several factors significantly increased the likelihood of early death. Males were 134% more likely to die young than females and more than twice as likely to die from homicide or suicide than females, with researchers blaming their tendency toward risk-taking behaviors. Youths living in the American south were also more likely to die, as were black children, children from families with lower education levels, and ones from households without a mother and a father.

Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among 10- to 24-year-olds, and while the PRB’s report used data collected before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, suicide figures likely increased during the last two years of lockdowns and school closures. Statistics for this period have yet to be published by the National Institute of Mental Health, but depression and substance abuse did increase dramatically during 2020.

Of the nearly 60,000 young people who died in the US in 2019, 7,580 were killed with firearms, with 39% of these deaths suicides and 61% homicides. Almost a third of Americans who died from homicide by firearm in 2019 were under the age of 25.

The PRB recommends a host of policy solutions to lower America’s youth death rate, from hiking welfare payments to funding child care, preschool, housing, nutrition, and health care. Some of these policy solutions would be a difficult sell in Washington, however. For example, the researchers suggest banning so-called “assault weapons,” and setting up a licensing system and a government database of gun-owners. This could prove difficult in a country where firearms ownership is enshrined in the Constitution.