PP NewsBrief: 2021-03-15

We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.

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Tanzania – The second Covid coup?

"John Magufuli, President of Tanzania, has disappeared. He’s not been seen in public for several weeks, and speculation is building as to where he might be.

The opposition has, at various times, accused the President of being hospitalised with “Covid19”, either in Kenya or India, although there remains no evidence this is the case.

To add some context, John Magufuli is one of the “Covid denier” heads of state from Africa.

He famously had his office submit five unlabelled samples for testing – goat, motor oil, papaya, quail and jackfruit – and when four came back positive and one “inconclusive”, he banned the testing kits and called for an investigation into their origin and manufacture.

In the past, he has also questioned the safety and efficacy of the supposed “covid vaccines”, and has not permitted their use in Tanzania.

In the Western press Magufuli has been portrayed as “anti-science” and “populist”, but it is not fair to suggest that the health of the people of Tanzania is a low priority for the President. In fact it’s quite the opposite.

After winning his first election in 2015 he slashed government salaries (including his own) in order to increase funding for hospitals and buying AIDs medication. In 2015 he cancelled the Independence Day celebrations and used the money to launch an anti-Cholera campaign. Healthcare has been one of his administration’s top priorities, and Tanzanian life expectancy has increased every year while he has been in office.

The negative coverage of President Magufuli is a very recent phenomenon. Early in his Presidency he even received glowing write-ups from the Western press and Soros-backed think tanks, praising his reforms and calling him an “example” to other African nations.

All that changed when he spoke out about Covid being hoax.

...

So, within two weeks of The Guardian publishing a Gates-sponsored article calling for something to be done about President Magufuli, he has disappeared, allegedly due to Covid. Funny how that works out.

Even if Magufuli miraculously survives his bout of “suspected Covid19”, the writing is on the wall for his political career. The Council on Foreign Relations published this article just yesterday, which goes to great lengths arguing that the President has lost all authority, and concludes:

   a bold figure within the ruling party could capitalize on the current episode to begin to reverse course.”

It’s not hard to read the subtext there, if you can even call it “subtext” at all.

If we are about to see the sudden death and/or replacement of the President of Tanzania, he will not be the first African head of state to suffer such a fate in the age of Covid.

Last summer Pierre Nkurunziza, the President of Burundi, refused to play along with Covid and instructed the WHO delegation to leave his country…before dying suddenly of a “heart attack” or “suspected Covid19”. His successor immediately reversed every single one of his Covid policies, including inviting the WHO back to the country."

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YouTube has deleted over 800,000 videos that contradict the World Health Organization

"YouTube has removed over 30,000 videos as part of its coronavirus misinformation polies in the last six months, the company announced.

YouTube started cracking down on dissenting coronavirus videos last February, and the censorship has intensified in recent months.

According to a report on Axios, YouTube has taken down more than 800,000 videos that violated its controversial coronavirus misinformation policy since February of 2020. The videos are first flagged by human reviewers or the content moderation AI systems.

Then they are re-reviewed and removed if they contain information that contradicts information provided by the World Health organization."

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New research reveals that you can, in fact, quite easily bullsh*t a bullsh*tter

"For the purposes of science, the researchers define “bullsh*t” as information deliberately crafted to persuade or ‘sell’ people on an idea with little or no concern for the truth of the matter. They also divide bullsh*t into two subtypes: persuasive and evasive. Persuasive bullsh*t is designed to impress an audience and win them over, whereas evasive bullsh*t, as the name suggests, is designed to bamboozle them with irrelevant nonsense so as to avoid inconvenient or uncomfortable truths in a given situation or context.

The University of Waterloo researchers took 800 participants from the US and Canada and tested their bullsh*tting prowess. They compared the participants’ self-reported engagement in both types of bullsh*tting with their take on a series of pseudoscience, fake news, and the other assorted forms of bullsh*t everyone is subjected to online on a daily basis.

The participants also underwent cognitive screenings and personality tests to determine their levels of introspection and self-confidence, and their ability to reflect on their own behavior. And, as the research proved, it turns out that, contrary to popular wisdom, one can indeed bullsh*t a bullsh*tter.

“Persuasive BSers seem to mistake superficial profoundness for actual profoundness. So, if something simply sounds profound, truthful, or accurate to them, that means it really is,” Littrell said, adding that the evasive bullsh*tters are the ones to look out for.

“[E]vasive bullshitters were much better at making this distinction.”"

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Canceling Dr. Seuss

"It was German poet Heinrich Heine who noted, “Where they burn books, they will also burn people.”

The real danger, then, in pointing out that “Mein Kampf” and other clearly offensive works are still available on eBay is that we are only baiting the ban-happy liberals who run this corporation to find more material that we shouldn’t be reading or shouldn’t even know exists. And when we don’t know something exists, when we select what sort of books and writings and films were produced in the past, we are literally changing history.

Civil rights attorney Leo Terrell made that point. One of my favorite political analysts, Terrell was a lifelong Democrat before embracing former President Donald Trump as a true populist leader who didn’t see racism lurking around every corner but encouraged an old value called equality. Terrell weighed in on the Dr. Seuss controversy and addressed the real issue: “You cannot ignore history, you cannot eliminate history,” Terrell continued. “They use this argument of racist as a gimmick, a talking point to basically cancel people out. I think it’s wrong as a teacher… We cannot eliminate our history. Some of our history is bad but the majority is great. Both sides need to be taught.”

That is precisely the point, “both sides need to be taught.” And that is precisely what the woke left doesn’t want. Material that is deemed offensive must be deleted, not discussed. Issues that are considered “settled” by the left. Abortion is one of those issues. For those who support abortion, there is no need to debate the issue because abortion is a human right, and any attempt to regulate that right is a direct assault on that right so there is no need to debate it. The matter is settled. There is no other contravening opinion worth noting.

Cancel culture is already removing people, books, and films from our lives. They will soon move on to ideas. There will be so many ideas deemed noxious by the woke left, and though it will be a large encumbrance to remove them all, you can bet they are up to the task. They know political victory is always a result of successfully promoting ideas, and when yours are the only ideas and beliefs allowed to be seen, the victory will be swift and certain and, perhaps, final."

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Lockdowns Wrecked Democracy Around the World

"While the number of fatalities attributed to Covid-19 is carefully tracked by governments, few people have recognized how pandemic-spurred crackdowns have devastated democracy around the world. Emergency proclamations have entitled presidents and other government officials to seize vast new powers previously forbidden to them. Government bureaucrats became a new priesthood that could sanctify unlimited sacrifices merely by invoking dubious statistical extrapolations of future perils.

In October, Freedom House issued a report, Democracy under Lockdown – The Impact of COVID-19 on Global Freedom, which warned that since the pandemic started, “the condition of democracy and human rights has worsened in 80 countries.” Sarah Repucci, co-author of the report, warned that “governments’ responses to the pandemic are eroding the pillars of democracy around the world.” Abuses of power have been propelled by a presumption that government officials are entitled to all the power they claim to need to keep people safe.

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“Government knows best” is the subtext for arbitrary decrees issued around the world. An Associated Press article in January explained why Californians were denied access to the information that determined the fate of their freedom: “State health officials said they rely on a very complex set of measurements that would confuse and potentially mislead the public if they were made public.” But many data-driven dictatorial policies relied on data that was either fraudulent, politically contrived, or laughably inaccurate. On the day that Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, the World Health Organization changed the test standard for defining Covid cases, guaranteeing that far fewer “cases” would be reported and thereby making a mockery of the previous 10 months data.

The pandemic’s precedents pose a long-term peril for liberty around the globe. Freedom House expects that “official responses to COVID-19 have laid the groundwork for government excesses that could affect democracy for years to come.” This was foreseeable from the start of the pandemic but the media in some Western nations were the biggest cheerleaders for obliterating limits on political power. The secrecy that proliferated during the pandemic will make it harder for citizens to recognize how badly they have been misgoverned.

Going forward, citizens in many nations might appreciate this old adage from American politics: “The Constitution isn’t perfect but it’s better than what we have now.” Federal judge William Stickman IV declared in September, “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.” But unless there is a similar stark ruling from the Supreme Court, shutdowns could return whenever politicians can panic enough citizens with some new threat.

Lockdown victims around the globe would be wise to heed Thomas Jefferson’s 1798 warning that the doctrine “that the general government is the exclusive judge of the extent of the powers delegated to it [is] nothing short of despotism; since the discretion of those who administer the government, and not the Constitution, would be the measure of their powers.” The pandemic painfully illustrated how government officials can always concoct the data to justify whatever decree they itch to issue. And regardless of the needless deaths and disruptions caused by government policies, it will be the opponents of lockdowns who will be labeled grandma-killers.

The Biden administration is reviving America’s proselytizing for democracy around the globe. But Covid-19 crackdowns are a warning for people to be wary of oppressive governments regardless of their purported mandate. The world doesn’t need any more Cage Keeper Democracies where citizens’ ballots merely designate who will place them under house arrest."

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YouTube censors Canadian doctors calling for an end to lockdown

"These medical practitioners from across the country say that their goal is to “protect the rights of our patients to access the highest quality healthcare available, continued freedom of choice, and autonomy through informed consent.”

They criticize Canada’s Covid policies as damaging to public health and society, and urge the government to end a number of those policies and bans on gatherings in places of worship and the like.

The doctors also take issue with what they see as “the use of fear and other psychological coercion techniques” and misrepresentation of the epidemic in the media.

Another video is available on the website of the Liberty Coalition Canada, that this group of doctors, nursers, pharmacists and other medical professionals has partnered with.

In the video, entitled, Canadian Doctors Speak Out, physicians are heard explaining why, in their opinion, the culture of fear and uncertainty that has developed around Covid is not supported by the latest medical facts."

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CDC: 1,524 Dead 31,079 Injured Following Experimental COVID mRNA “Vaccines”

"The CDC added more data today into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a U.S. Government funded database that tracks injuries and deaths caused by vaccines.

The data goes through March 5, 2021, with 31,079 recorded adverse events, including 1,524 deaths following injections of the experimental COVID mRNA shots by Pfizer and Moderna.

Besides the recorded 1,524 deaths, there were 5,806 visits to Emergency Room doctors, 630 permanent disabilities, and 3,477 hospitalizations.

The CDC also updated their Selected Adverse Events Reported after COVID-19 Vaccination page on March 9th this past week, and according to this report, VAERS has received 1,637 reports of death following COVID “vaccinations” – more than 100 deaths than are in the VAERS data dump released today.

The CDC continues to state that not one of these recorded deaths following experimental COVID injections are related to the shots.

   A review of available clinical information including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records revealed no evidence that vaccination contributed to patient deaths."

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In Defense Of Substack

"A few thoughts in response to what one Tweeter humorously described as “the Tipper Gore of 2021,” who incidentally went on to make sure everyone understood she wasn’t talking “about Substack for basket weaving or 30 Rock fandom or whatever.” No, Dr. Roberts was “talking about stuff purporting to be serious. Opinion can be serious but I believe lines are being intentionally blurred BY SUBSTACK.”

Roberts is making a “stolen valor” argument. As it’s abundantly clear she’s talking about people like myself and Greenwald in particular, she’s arguing that we made our names as reporters in the structure of traditional newsrooms, taking advantage of “norms and practices” like fact-checking and editing that, in her mind, is what first induced readers to trust us. Then we took that trust, that precious thing nurtured in the cradle of mainstream media oversight, absconded with it, and fled to Substack, to hoard unearned profits.

Roberts has things backward. Greenwald and I (as well as many other prominent Substack writers) got our start as independents. He was a blogger and I edited my own print newspapers. We both built substantial readerships on our own before being scooped up by “traditional” news organizations, in a process identical to the one Roberts denounces when done by Substack.

The experience of independent media — where I did feature reporting that ranged from participatory gigs like laying bricks in Siberia to wiretapping Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff — was where I first learned that audiences will read you or not based upon how careful and accurate you are. To imply that trust is a thing that can only be conferred by a mainstream newsroom is beyond insulting, especially since mainstream news organizations already long ago started to become infamous for betraying exactly those hallowed “norms” to which Roberts refers.

Why did a source like former NSA contractor Edward Snowden choose to come forward to Glenn Greenwald in particular? He surely wasn’t bothered by the fact that Glenn didn’t come up through the ranks of a paper like the New York Times or Washington Post.

The answer connects to one of the primary reasons audiences are moving to places like Substack: the perception that traditional news outlets have become tools of the very corporate and political interests they’re supposed to be overseeing. Roberts complains about lines between opinion and reporting being blurred at Substack (an absurd comment on its own, but that’s a separate issue), but the “blurring” problem at those other organizations is far more severe. Are newspapers like the New York Times checks on power, or agents of it?

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In the last four years especially, a rift has formed in the news business, an argument primarily about method and approach. Some of us were raised to think the reporter’s job is confined to gathering information and giving it to readers, who should then be free to do with it what they will. A lot of journalists raised in this school were trained to be terrified in the days (and, especially, the nights) after publication, in case a mistake surfaces, but to stop worrying after that.

A new approach, symbolized by a Times column four years ago called “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism,” stresses choosing and presenting information in such a way as to ensure that audiences make the “correct” political decision with the news they’re given. The fear there is more about impact: are people taking the news the right way?

This argument over method put many journalists in a bind. Some either had to get on board with what they considered a perversion of the job, or they had to find some other place to go. I didn’t have this problem to the degree that many of the other Substack writers did, but avoiding arguments on this score was certainly a factor in my decision to move here last year. The situation was a lot more overt with some of the other Substack writers, especially with Greenwald."

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WATCH: California ethnic studies students instructed to join anti-'Whiteness' rallies, worship Aztec god of human sacrifice

"The California Department of Education is recommending that schools have their students join anti-"Whiteness" pep rallies complete with chanting and praising of ancient deities, RealClearInvestigations reports.

At the Social Justice Humanitas Academy in Los Angeles, students attended a pep rally where they sang phrases in foreign languages in order to combat "White supremacy."

In the video, students can be seen and heard chanting led by R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, one of the authors of California's divisive ethnic studies curriculum, which was recently rejected by the state's legislature.

The California Department of Education also recommends that educators lead their students to chant "In Lak Ech," which invokes the names of Mesopotamian and Aztec deities, the latter of which was considered the god of human sacrifice. According to the DoE, the chant promotes "transformation, liberation, education, emancipation.""

This is either one of the greatest trolling attempts ever or just the pure insanity that results when you deem every criticism of your actions & beliefs as coming from the ignorant & irredeemable.

Though @themorrigan1973 may be closest to the mark:

"I believe they are attempting to stir up conflict.
Perhaps where none existed before.
Looking at this objectively they seem to be attempting to cause a national split.
It may not take much more to be honest."

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National Guard Association denounces extension of soldiers in DC: 'Inappropriate at best, illegal at worst'

"National Guard Association Chairman and Arizona Adjunct General Maj. Gen. Michael McGuire is calling for troops’ presence in Washington, DC to end following a two-month extension this week.

“This enduring requirement of having them around the city, I think it's completely inappropriate at best, illegal at worst,” Maj. Gen. McGuire told the Washington Examiner on Friday.

...

McGuire, who took over as the head of the national group representing and advocating for hundreds of thousands of citizen soldiers in February, has refused to authorize troops from his own state to be deployed to the Capitol.

“The National Guard specifically is the last line of defense for direct policing action only in the emergent period when it is life, limb, protection of property,” he explained.

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In a leaked internal memo, National Guard Bureau Chief Gen. Daniel Hokanson also said he disagreed with the continued deployment of Guard troops, saying it may “impede our ability to man future missions.” He cited individual state needs that should be a priority for the Guard, including Covid-19 vaccine distribution, natural disasters, civil unrest, and national disaster emergencies.

There are currently over 2,000 Guard troops guarding the Capitol in DC."

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Pointless Pain Is What We’re Enduring. And All for the Sake of Accepting That Money is Not a Constraint on Our Potential, and Never Will Be

"The last year has shown that the argument ‘we cannot afford it’ does not hold true. If there are resources available to use that need to be put to use then the reality is that there is nothing that this country cannot afford.

Money is not scarce. Money is a wholly artificial mechanism created to ensure that the necessary exchanges that put people to work in our economy can take place. That can be done. The money to make this possible can always be created.

...

When will we wake up and appreciate this is all just abuse? That we are all being collectively bullied by an elite who think we can get away without, just as easily as they think they can pay off senior civil servants?

The reality is that we too now need a settlement to compensate us for that abuse. We too need to be paid for the effort made, the contempt suffered, and the indignity endured as a result of the indifference thrown our way. And soon.

I hope soon. Because I can’t see how things can continue like this. Our society is already fragile enough. I worry about how much more it can take. And when I see people – in our government – choose to abuse it further, I worry.

I worry that people cannot survive this. Real, warm blooded, caring, loving people can be broken by this. And that’s what makes me angry. Because this is unnecessary. The money to deliver a decent society exists.

All that we need to make the lives of the vast majority of people in this country is a real understanding of economics, of money, of how it interacts with tax, and how we can use that for the common good.

But no political party seems to get that as yet. And until they do, this unnecessary suffering will continue. And that makes me very angry. Pointless pain is what we’re enduring. And all for the sake of accepting that money is not a constraint on our potential, and never will be."

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One Year Later, Vindication for Lockdown Skeptics

"My experience covering the hyperpartisan scientific community for years taught me to view coronavirus fearmongering and lockdown orders with skepticism. The credentialed class declared war on Donald Trump the night he won. Scientific “experts” cannot be trusted to separate their political agendas from their professional obligations, which they proved last summer when the “social distancing” dogma they foisted on the rest of us suddenly didn’t apply to mobs of “social justice” protestors and rioters enraged over George Floyd’s death.

Coronavirus hysteria and its cure—shutting down the national economy, including schools—quickly evolved into an explosive issue on the Right; longtime allies were at each other’s throats. Pundits and journalists who were compatriots during Trump’s tumultuous first term fought on social media in a very public feud. The battle, in some cases, became highly personal.

The tiny handful of us who denounced the lockdowns from the start found ourselves at odds with a president we routinely defended. I was stunned when the president, based on untested models using flawed data, complied with Drs. Anthony Fauci’s and Deborah Birx’s demand to keep the country shut down throughout April.

That month, I argued Trump should sideline Fauci, Birx, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams for constantly changing their guidance while insisting the country remain closed. “President Trump should let them go back to their desk jobs for now while he quickly devises a plan to restart this cratering economy, free Americans from house arrest, and get life back to as normal as possible. They had their chance—they have failed.” Staying six feet apart—the basis for keeping businesses, restaurants, and schools closed—is untested pseudoscience, as I reported in April.

It was a fraught time for everyone, of course, but early lockdown skeptics faced especially harsh condemnation from all sides since we bucked the clichéd “we’re-all-in-this-together” groupthink. The blinders were on for lots of otherwise smart people who were either ignorant or naïve about what the Left is capable of doing or perhaps too frightened of the virus to be honest with themselves.

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One year later, we are vindicated—yet there’s no cause for celebration. Only in time of war has this country endured more permanent economic damage, more reckless government spending, or more widespread human suffering. This has been an unnecessary self-inflicted wound from which millions of families will never fully recover. And it’s ongoing to this day.

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Even I underestimated the wickedness of the Left, how far they would go to exploit the crisis. I also underestimated the cowardice of so-called conservative leaders who not only refused to confront catastrophic, liberty-crushing lockdowns but went along with those authoritarian government orders. Republican governors, for the most part, have acted as badly as their Democratic counterparts.

President Trump, who wanted to open up the economy and the schools in April, was hamstrung by his own team of advisors and experts; the man famous for firing incompetents allowed proven incompetents to run the COVID show and drive a thriving U.S. economy into the ground. Trump warned the cure could not be worse than the disease—but by every measure, it was.

...

What’s truly alarming is how many Americans want this cruelty to persist despite its proven ineffectiveness at “stopping” the spread of the virus. According to a new Pew Research poll, 74 percent of Democrats would keep restaurants closed to in-person dining and 66 percent of Democrats would keep schools closed. The “party of science” continues to defy science, common sense, and compassion.

The only upside to the lockdown catastrophe is that the depravity of our ruling class has been fully exposed. Their crimes against Americans won’t be litigated in any courtroom, unfortunately, but we can hope the untold number of surviving victims will have the final word in the next election.

One year ago, the overwhelming majority of Americans acted in good faith to do what we were told was in the best interest of our country. That faith has been abused and squandered by people who didn’t deserve it in the first place.

This must never happen again."

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No Safety Data? No Problem!

"On March 4 and 5, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Switzerland and Singapore released identical guidelines for fast-tracking release onto the market of vaccines for the new variants.

The countries issued the recommendations under the banner of the ‘ACCESS Consortium.’ ACCESS is an acronym based on the first letters of the five countries’ names.

A few days earlier, on February 22, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a similar set of recommendations. They allow Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for “investigational” vaccines for new variants, letting them be used on the general public without first showing evidence of safety or effectiveness.

The recommendations all state that companies don’t need to conduct new clinical trials before putting the new-variant vaccines onto the market and potentially into millions of people’s arms. Requiring new trials, the ACCESS document asserts, would cause “considerable delay” and “bears the risk that the virus is evolving even further, potentially making a new vaccine version outdated at the time of approval again.”

Instead, the safety record of the currently used Covid vaccines can be used to judge the safety of the new ones, the countries’ regulatory agencies declare.

And they claim that the currently used vaccines are safe and effective: “[T]here is considerable safety experience accumulating as the pandemic progresses and vaccines are rolled out, and [in any case] efficacy has been established for the initial vaccine candidate [i.e., the original Covid vaccines] via large clinical Phase 3 studies,” the ACCESS document states.

This is despite the fact that many observers have documented significant safety problems associated with the Covid vaccines, including high death rates.

That helps explain why public-health officials and politicians around the world are bending over backwards to assert that Covid vaccines are very safe and effective. This gives the green light for all future forms of these vaccines to be used without safety testing.

...

This approach apparently is modeled on the approval of new flu vaccines every year. The flu-vaccine regulations were in turn, “developed based on ample experience gained through years of seasonal vaccinations, and the 2009 H1N1 pandemic,” the ACCESS guidelines state.

The latter claim is particularly alarming. The H1N1 swine-flu ‘pandemic’ never materialized. Hundreds of people were needlessly severely injured by the main vaccine for it, GlaxoSmithKline’s Pandemrix. Furthermore, Glaxo was not required to compensate victims; instead, the UK government paid tens of millions of pounds to people who were brain injured by Pandemrix.

The ACCESS and US FDA recommendations only require that companies measure the level of antibodies that people produce when they are given the vaccine. The regulatory agencies will accept this as a proxy for effectiveness."

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Prestigious nursing school docks students points if they fail to give their ‘preferred pronouns’ in mock examination - media

"Nursing students attending the University of Pennsylvania are required to refer to their “preferred pronouns” and ask those of an imaginary patient or be punished with point deduction in one course.

In an integrated human anatomy class for those looking to graduate UPenn’s nursing program, students must go through a mock examination of an imaginary patient. One of the requirements for this exam is that the student introduce themselves with their “preferred pronouns” and then get the preferred pronouns of the imaginary patient, according to a report from The Statesman.

If students fail to introduce themselves with their preferred pronouns and/or do not ask their patient the same, they are docked five points, which nearly equates to an entire letter grade on the test. Even if a student does not identify as transgender or non-binary, they still must say the pronoun they want to be referred by.

One student who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the requirement “just doesn’t make sense” and made her “especially uncomfortable.”"

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The Perversion of Law as Psychological Warfare

"For most of human history, self-indulgent thugs and petty dictators cared mainly about what people did, and not so much about what they thought. These despots could be cruel; many committed acts of random violence. But it was usually possible to stay out of their way. Such regimes, which still exist, typically are not “ideological.” The rulers want some semblance of order and a functional economy. Therefore they don’t interfere with strictly private matters of work, family, and religion—as long as these pose no threat to the people in charge. Still, life for the average citizen is precarious and limited.

A major step in human civilization was achieved when people managed to implement the rule of law—which is really no more than the idea of one set of rules that apply to everyone, including those running the government. This principle is so important for the higher purposes of human life that Aristotle thought “man, when separate from law and justice, is worse than any animal.”

Yet legalism becomes a problem when the law lapses into a mere pretense to justify atrocities. For example, the Spanish inquisitors of the 15th century employed torture to obtain confessions of heresy—because it was important that punishment be preceded by an admission of guilt. But even when horribly distorted in this way, we can see that the formality of a confession, if only for the sake of appearances, was an acknowledgment that following “procedure” was important. (Hypocrisy, according to the adage, is “the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”)

Much worse is when the law is not only manifestly unjust, but those in power openly flaunt this fact—boasting, in effect, that the system is rigged. Our own history, alas, provides an unfortunate example of this. The late professor of political philosophy Harry V. Jaffa explained that before the Civil War, under the 1850 fugitive slave law,

   "a man charged with being a runaway slave would be held without bail. A federal commissioner would be appointed to hold a hearing, in which the slaveowner could bring witnesses, but the accused runaway could not. If the commissioner decided in favor of the slaveowner he was paid $10, if in favor of the accused, $5. It is difficult to imagine any legislation, even in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR, more at war with the principles of civil liberty."

...

We have reached the point where federal law enforcement is like one of those pre-Civil War runaway slave commissions. The FBI has no interest in the $5 they get for investigating left-wing looting and violence because it gets $10 whenever agents find some supposed “white supremacist” on the Right guilty of “insurrection.” The bureau’s director apparently has no problem with this perverse incentive system.

There is nothing accidental about what’s happening now. Former CIA Director John Brennan recently referred to an “unholy alliance” of “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians” who he lumped together as suspects in “insurgency movements” properly targeted for monitoring by the Biden Administration.

Is it paranoia to note the clear pattern of psychological warfare—flaunting the rigged system—when we see it confirmed consistently with other examples?

One of the most striking of these confirmations is the demand for total, unquestioning acceptance of an almost divine purity surrounding the 2020 presidential election. It’s not sufficient to concede that there has been no solid proof of voter fraud. It is now required by America’s ruling class for everyone to deny, explicitly, there was anything suspicious or unusual at all."

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The Shameful Tragedy of Open Borders

"The open borders agenda massively empowers and enriches the smuggling rings that the media typically refer to as the “drug cartels,” but which are better understood as barbarous transnational criminal syndicates that sometimes even sync up with Chinese fentanyl exporters and internationally recognized terrorist outfits, such as Hezbollah. These are some of the most vicious organizations in the Western world and, as even the New York Times reported in 2019, are known for widespread murder, rape, and sexual violence committed against female migrants. Ranchers along the often-barren high deserts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona are imminently endangered by the cartels’ depredations in their own (literal) backyards.

Blue-collar workers of all races and backgrounds are hurt by an uncontrollable deluge of cheap, low-wage migrants who lack labor market bargaining power for the simple reason that they are not here legally. Pro-immigration enforcement states are perversely penalized in the U.S. Census—at least under the erroneous prevailing practice, which Trump sought to change, of counting both legal and illegal aliens—when they lose congressional representation to “sanctuary city”-enabling blue states that mollycoddle illegal aliens.

The true tragedy of this shameful ordeal is how foreseeable it all was. Trump’s immigration enforcement policies, especially those like Remain in Mexico, helped stanch illegal immigration inflows and restore order to our porous border. Much as with the Biden Administration’s kowtowing to the Iranian regime in the foreign policy arena, its reversal of Trump-era actions on immigration enforcement seems less motivated by genuine concern for the common good of the polity and more motivated by a blinkered case of “Orange Man Bad.” Such posturing might play well among the blue-checked Twitterati, but the American people pay the price."

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Pastor Coates has spent weeks in prison for a crime that is not punishable with jail time

"As I write this column, Pastor James Coates is still in the Edmonton Remand Centre awaiting his trial on May 3-5. He was arrested in mid-February for failing to comply with Jason Kenney's unscientific and unconstitutional health orders that restrict the freedom of Pastor Coates and his Grace Life Church to worship God as God calls them to worship.

Unless the Justice Centre secures his release from prison prior to trial, Pastor Coates will spend a total of eleven weeks in jail for a provincial infraction that is not punishable by jail time.

Are health orders scientific? The Alberta government–and governments around the world–continue to restrict our rights and freedoms based on their belief that healthy, asymptomatic people are significant spreaders of COVID. Hence the laws mandating masks and prohibiting normal and healthy social interactions between people. The politicians' belief in asymptomatic spread is unfounded.

A meta-analysis of 54 studies from around the world, published by the National Library of Medicine found that within households (which lack the safeguards applied by restaurants, businesses and churches) symptomatic patients passed on the disease to household members in 18 percent of instances, while asymptomatic patients passed on the disease to household members in 0.7 percent of instances.

...

Restricting the rights and freedoms of the entire population for 12 months (and counting), and preventing millions of people from earning a livelihood, has never been tried in human history as a way to beat a virus. Moreover, Covid's survival rate is 99.7 percent, and this virus poses no threat to roughly 90 percent of people. Why not focus our efforts on protecting the vulnerable 10 percent, and do so without harming the physical, mental, emotional, social and financial well-being of the entire population?

...

Fortunately, the Alberta government cannot rely on press releases at the trial of Pastor Coates in May. The health orders themselves will be on trial, accused of unjustifiably violating fundamental Charter freedoms. The Charter places the onus on government, not on Pastor Coates, to show that it is truly necessary and beneficial to violate citizens' rights and freedoms.

In court in May, for the first time since lockdowns were imposed, the Alberta government will have to provide compelling evidence to support its theories. The government will have to show that COVID is an unusually deadly killer, when Statistics Canada tells us it is not."

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Storming the Bill of Rights

"The Right has long been unfriendly to civil liberties, at least where civil liberties clashed with the will of law enforcement. This needs to change.

As soon as police secured the Capitol building on January 6, only a few hours after rioters had entered, the gears at the Department of Justice began grinding out tactics and strategies to investigate and charge the rioters.

Having downplayed riots instigated by Black Lives Matter and Antifa in Washington, D.C., and across the country throughout 2020, the Left, the media, and the FBI immediately inflated the events at the Capitol from a riot to an attempted coup d’etat, an armed insurrection, sedition, and domestic terrorism.

None of these terms are used in good faith, at least not as they are broadly applied to the group of rioters, whatever may have been the state of mind of a few isolated individuals. Compare the actual terrorism of the 1954 shooting in the House of Representatives by members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. Planned. Calculated with political goals. Deadly. Yet the Capitol was not made a castle then.

No matter. The deployment of these terms in the media, by Democratic (and some Republican) politicians, and by FBI Director Christopher Wray means there is continuing, newly agitated, broad, and dangerous political will among our elites⁠—people who have the power to make this happen⁠—for the prosecution of political crime, aimed primarily at the Right.

...

The American criminal justice system, purposefully, is not a great tool to punish people en masse for political crimes. But today our criminal justice system is strained by a strong will to do so. Our leaders are old, imprudent, confused, and vindictive. Knowing who they are, we can predict some things to come.

For one, there will be widespread efforts to abridge the right against self-incrimination. In order to obtain convictions, law enforcement and prosecutors will induce suspects to make false or incriminating statements which can be used to convict them for obstruction where they are not sufficient to convict them of the underlying crime. The Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination will be bent if not broken.

Second, federal prosecutors will try to punish targets without a trial. The first way to do this is to seek to have the accused denied bail. This has already happened in the case of Jake Angeli, Richard Barnett, and 18-year-old Bruno Cua, as well as others. The Eighth Amendment, which prohibits excessive bail, will be trampled.

Third, prosecutors will overcharge not just primary targets, but related parties, such as family members, in order to induce the primary targets to accept plea bargains. Prosecutors may also encourage potential defendants to testify against other persons present at the Capitol in exchange for reduced sentences. Sedition requires the cooperation of two or more people. It would be unreasonable to expect prosecutors to be scrupulous about whether testimony on cooperation is founded in fact.

Fourth, law enforcement will seek avenues around the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure. The FBI has already obtained information from Bank of America regarding the location of its customers and their purchases. That the FBI obtained appropriate warrants for these searches is doubtful. Wray in his testimony last week did not deny that the FBI was obtaining geolocation data without a warrant. He simply did not know. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said. In his hours of testimony, he showed almost no interest in civil liberties and a high interest in a crackdown on “domestic terrorism” which he clearly thinks preponderantly resides in the body of Trump supporters.

...

The Right, historically, with its “law and order” tendencies, has not been good for civil liberties. On matters such as the right against self-incrimination and exclusionary rules, the Right has been naïvely interested in the power of police to lock up small-time criminals with relaxed constabulary standards assuming they had no need for the protection of these rights. The ordinary middle-class man or woman would never be a target, right? Big mistake.

These rights in origin were never principally about constabulary behavior, but about the use of criminal justice for political persecution.

It’s time for the Right to rethink its view on civil liberties."

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Family of Woman Shot, Killed at Capitol Considers Lawsuit

"The family of the unarmed woman who was shot and killed during the Jan. 6 protest at the U.S. Capitol is considering a lawsuit against the Capitol Police and the officer who shot her, The Epoch Times reported.

Attorney Terrell Roberts told the publication that the lawsuit would claim excessive use of force and constitutional violations.

“That will be filed against the officer, the Capitol Police,” Roberts said.

Thirty-five-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed as she attempted to climb through a window in the Speaker’s Lobby inside the Capitol. She was the only one shot during the breach.

A preliminary investigation determined no charges should be brought against the officer, who remains unidentified and supposedly in hiding for fear for his safety.

Roberts justified his claim of excessive force noting that Babbitt was 5-foot-2, weighed 110 pounds and could easily have been arrested with a pair of handcuffs.

“However, the officer who shot Ashli never attempted to arrest her,” he said. “Nor did he call on his fellow officers to arrest her. Instead, he fired a shot into her chest."

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Before COVID, Gates Planned Social Media Censorship of Vaccine Safety Advocates with Pharma, CDC, Media, China and CIA

"Over the last two weeks, Facebook and other social media sites have deplatformed me and many other critics of regulatory corruption and authoritarian public health policies. So, here is some fodder for those of you who have the eerie sense that the government/industry pandemic response feels like it was planned — even before there was a pandemic.

The attached document shows that a cabal of powerful individuals did indeed begin planning the mass eviction of vaccine skeptics from social media in October 2019, a week or two before COVID began circulating. That month, Microsoft founder Bill Gates organized an exercise of four “table-top” simulations of a worldwide coronavirus pandemic with other high-ranking “Deep State” panjandrums. The exercise was referred to as Event 201.

Gates’ co-conspirators included representatives from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum (Great Reset), Bloomberg/Johns Hopkins University Populations Center, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, various media powerhouses, the Chinese government, a former Central Intelligence Agency/National Security Agency director (there is no such thing as a former CIA officer), vaccine maker Johnson & Johnson, the finance and biosecurity industries and Edelman, the world’s leading corporate PR firm.

At Gates’ direction, these eminences role-played members of a Pandemic Control Council, wargaming government strategies for controlling the pandemic, the narrative and the population. Needless to say, there was little talk of building immune systems, off-the-shelf remedies or off-patent therapeutic drugs and vitamins, but lots of chatter about promoting uptake of new patentable antiviral drugs and vaccines.

But the participants primarily focused on planning industry-centric, fear-mongering, police-state strategies for managing an imaginary global coronavirus contagion culminating in mass censorship of social media.

Oddly, Gates now claims that the simulation didn’t occur. On April 12, 2020, Gates told BBC, “Now here we are. We didn’t simulate this, we didn’t practice, so both the health policies and economic policies, we find ourselves in uncharted territory.”

...

Gates’s Event 201 simulated COVID epidemic caused 65 million deaths at the 18-month endpoint and global economic collapse lasting up to a decade. Compared to the Gates simulation, therefore, the actual COVID-19 crisis is a bit of a dud, having imposed a mere 2.5 million deaths “attributed to COVID” over the past 13 months.

The deaths “attributed to COVID” in the real-life situation are highly questionable, and must be seen in the context of a global population of 7.8 billion, with about 59 million deaths expected annually. The predictions of decade-long economic collapse will probably prove more accurate — but only because of the draconian lockdown promoted by Gates.

Gates’ Event 201 script imagines vast anti-vaccine riots triggered by internet posts. The universal and single-minded presumption among its participants was that such a crisis would prove an opportunity of convenience to promote new vaccines, and tighten controls by a surveillance and censorship state.

...

Read the attached transcript to see how Gates and his government, pharma and intelligence apparatus telegraphed their plans to censor and control the media during the pandemic. In yet another uncanny coincidence, COVID-19 began circulating among global populations within days of Gates’ meeting."

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WATCH: Black woman slams Ohio school board for critical race theory indoctrination of students

"Through her required face mask, the woman identified herself as Ms. Taylor, a Beachwood resident for over 20 years, and said that she raised her children in the community. Her children are successful professionals.

She said that many school districts in Ohio "are now hiding their curriculum from its residents because they're teaching students to become bigots toward their peers, adults, and law enforcement. Many school districts within this congressional district [Ohio-11] are on board for allocating funding and teaching young students the how-to about changing your gender, child pornography, and pedophilia, and where to find those websites, what sex toys to purchase, and how to use that which is purchased."

The meeting was held on March 8, and followed the announcement by the Beachwood school district that March 11 would see students subjected to "mandatory" critical race training. Parents were urged to attend the preceding school board meeting, and they did.

...

"Regarding the educational equity piece, it appears that the superintendent and you and school board members grew up so white that you don't even know the damage that your decisions have caused previous, current, and future generations of Beachwood students whose parents just wanted them to qualify to attend great universities.

"Instead, you convince yourselves that blacks are oppressed and that it is your job to stop that oppression. How have you not looked at the results to realize that what you did was immoral and had the opposite effect?

"Within Beachwood Schools, black kids are turning against white people of all ages. And white kids are hating their parents and their success and their heritage and calling them racist only because you don't understand the black race.

"You attempted to fix something that for all intents and purposes, years ago was in reality not even broken. You just convinced yourself that it was broken. It was never your job, you got out of your lane. Your job was to provide students with the environment to be well-rounded and educationally successful.

"Now, the residents with kids who did find out about your deviant curriculum, they pulled their kids out as fast as they could. More are withdrawing their kids because the school has lost control of the classroom environment," she said.

She took a moment to collect her thoughts, and then went on to say that "in the document for critical race theory, the stated goal is to make children activists in their own home. What does that mean?" She asked.

"Why are you trying to create an adversarial relationship between parents and child when that is the relationship that needs to be strengthened? This school-parent relationship and you intrinsically just advocating the kids to just be adversarial to their parents is nuts. This is nuts!

"And one other thing, let me tell you something," she said, going off her prepared remarks, "I'm a professional as well, I grew up in corporate America. I met people like y'all every day. Y'all don't know nothing about black people but still you think you can make rules for black people. Black kids at Beachwood Schools, when they were growing up, all these decades, until you all came along: They didn't look at race or gender. Very successful black people. Very successful.

"But what did you do? You decided that instead of looking at Beachwood data, you decided to put us up in with George Floyd and everybody else who got killed that had nothing to do with Beachwood. Nothing! So what do you do? You put in stuff like critical race theory, and all this other garbage that first of all is none of your business—""

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Translator of Biden’s inauguration poem says he was kicked off project because he’s not black & female

"Víctor Obiols, a renowned English-Catalan translator, said his Spanish publisher refused to use his already completed translation of Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘The Hill We Climb’, ostensibly because his skin color and gender were not appropriate for the task.

Barcelona-based publisher Univers said they commissioned the translation to Obiols because they considered him to be the best qualified. Obiols is well-known for translating the works of Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde into Catalan.

However, after the translation was already finished, Univers was contacted by Gorman’s US publisher, Viking Books, and asked to find a translator who is a woman and an activist, preferably of African American origin, instead.

...

Obiols said he was flabbergasted by the US publisher’s stance.

“If I cannot translate a poet because she is a woman, young, Black, an American of the 21st century, neither can I translate Homer because I am not a Greek of the eighth century BC. Or could not have translated Shakespeare because I am not a 16th-century Englishman,” he told the media.

Shortly after being given the boot, the translator posted several tweets, calling himself the “victim of a new inquisition.” He later deleted the posts because he didn’t want them to be misinterpreted, he told the media."