HHS Director Xavier Becerra Mentions Vaccines Kill?

Having lightly followed Xavier Becerra’s career a bit via 790AM (John and Ken, and John Phillips – who cover more local issues)… since he had his political career in California. So, the best thing you could afford Becerra is that he mis-spoke. He is known ta do that. There are two other options one can glean from this admission as well. One being that the Left will always plague conversation with racial politics, and so he was using this as a shout out or political wedge issue to get more legislation passed for said racial politics. Another school of thought is that he knows this to be the case, and wants to CYA by at least stating the truth once… knowing the stats like we have access to. However, the all-cause mortality rates are even keeled across society for those that got vaccinated. All that said, here is Xavier Becerra’s comments that I was put in FB Jail for:

  • “By the way, we know that vaccines are killing people of color — blacks, Latinos, indigenous people — at about two times the rate of white Americans,” — Becerra explained during a digital “White House Convening on Equity” seminar on April 14. (GATEWAY PUNDIT)

 

Checking Facebook Factcheckers (and More Dammit!)

JUMP TO….


(These are articles and excerpts — with some additional edits here — from my SITE’S FACEBOOK PAGE)

Okay, I have been doing posts here-n-there with a montage of recent articles about the Covid-1984 gang and what I call “vaccine wars.” In this edition I will start out with a fact check of Facebook’s (FB) “fact check” of a linked article. This is the article with a slight excerpt, followed by my fact check (with a couple additional article links in it for my readers here). The article is titled, “COVID-19 Vaccines: Scientific Proof of Lethality,” and all it is is links to journal articles or papers by specialists calling for caution in whatever aspect they studied of the vaccines. Some are mild observations, others are potentially lethal. But they link mainly to medical journal articles.

FACT-CHECKING FACEBOOK FACT-CHECKERS

Here is the “Fact Check” — on my site’s wall they blurred the links graphic, and when you press “See Why” it brings you to a pop out window where you can link to the article refuting what you (I) put on your FB wall:

Here is my own fact/fact check” if you will. Again, I will add articles for my readers to have more resources:

RUSHED

FACEBOOK says FALSE: because clinical trials under emergency use authorization showed them to be safe.

THREE THINGS.

First is that the trials were not nearly as long or under years long watch before fully approved, they were rushed. (CNN | WEB MD | HISTORY CHANNEL)

And nothing says “we trust these products” like not being able to sue or be compensated for severe side effects (CNBC | NEWS18)

55-YEARS

Two, the FDA has actively tried to block the “clinical trials” paperwork and studies from becoming public.

  • IN FACT: in November of 2021 the FDA has asked a federal judge to give them 55 years to release data related to the Pfizer COVID vaccines (ISRAEL NATIONAL NEWS); and later Pfizer ditched 55-years and asked for 75 years of secrecy (WASHINGTON EXAMINER)

These are from MEDIA’ITE

So for FACEBOOK to say this without the public having any insight into the clinical trials is itself FALSE. (SEE: WINNING: A Court Victory for Transparency on Pfizer Covid Vaccine Data | First 500-Pages Released In December Showed Problems [PDF])

And I will add a third. We do know that there have been many — publicly verified — issues with perfectly healthy people on a sports field that just drop dead or healthy young persons within days of the vaccine having major medical issues. One example is a young teen who was part of the clinical trials: https://tinyurl.com/yc6ehybj

(See also Pfizer Whistleblowers [RPT] | See more stories: 1000 COVID STORIES)

Nathan Emmanuel Esparza

HERE IS A STORY ABOUT A LOCAL KID

Nathan Emmanuel Esparza – Pfizer July 2021

Died 13th July 2021 – Heart Attack Aged 16 Years Old

Nathan was a young healthy 16 year old who was newly vaccinated with Pfizer.

Nathan Esparza, a Castaic High School student and football player, tragically and passed away in his home of a Heart Attack on the evening of Tuesday, July 13th.

Mauro Esparza (Nathan’s Dad) said “As I sit here and grieve for the loss of my best friend, and continue to hear my son, he left a great lasting impression on so many amazing souls….. this brings me some sort of comfort”.

Castaic, California, USA

I can personally confirm through neighbors he had just received the Pfizer vaccine. (More at NO MORE SILENCE)

JOHN STOSSEL

MORE EXAMPLES OF FB CHECKS:

(See more at REASON)

  • The 11 Worst Fact-Checks By Facebook’s New Fact-Checkers (DAILY WIRE, December 2016)
  • Here’s Where The ‘Facts’ About Me Lie — Facebook Bizarrely Claims Its ‘Fact-Checks’ Are ‘Opinion’ (NEW YORK POST, December 2021)
  • Facebook Fact-Checkers Caught Making Wrong Fact Checks, Exposing Liberal Bias (LIES.NEWS, July 2020)
  • Facebook’s Lab-Leak Censors Owe The Post, And America, An Apology (NEW YORK POST, May 2021)
  • Facebook Fact Checkers Just Censored Peer Reviewed Science (WATTS UP WITH THAT, September 2021)
  • Candace Owens Sues Facebook Fact-Checkers For Defamation: ‘I’m Sick Of The Censorship’ (WASHINGTON EXAMINER, November 2020) ||| Candace Owens Challenges Fact-Checker, And Wins (DAILY WIRE, November 2020)
  • Covid-19: Researcher Blows The Whistle On Data Integrity Issues In Pfizer’s Vaccine Trial — Open Letter From The BMJ To Mark Zuckerberg (BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL, Decmber 2021)
  • Medical Journal Blasts Facebook For Using Fake ‘Fact Checks’ To Justify Censorship (THE FEDERALIST, December 2021)
  • Facebook VP Concedes ‘Fact Checkers’ Have Own Agenda (VISION TIMES, June 2021)
  • et cetera, et cetera, et cetera

…MOVING ON…

I found this interesting… I came across info regarding FDA “approval” that shows the swarmy nature of government run procedures.

VACCINES ARE FDA APPROVED (LOL)

Here is the intro to the story via JUST THE NEWS:

Pfizer’s vaccine against COVID-19 has been fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration, yet the pharmaceutical giant is still providing distributors across the country with an earlier version of the vaccine that predates FDA’s full approval.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine allowed under federal Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in December 2020 and the Comirnaty vaccine approved by the FDA in August are identical, according to Pfizer and several experts.

However, the two vaccines are legally distinct, raising questions over the legality of vaccine mandates….

SEN. RON JOHNSON

Here is Senator Ron Johnson’s key claim from the above interview:

  • SEN. RON JOHNSON: We do not have an FDA-approved vaccine being administered in the U.S. The FDA played a bait and switch. They approved the Comirnaty version of Pfizer drugs. It’s not available in the U.S. They even admit it. I sent them a letter three days later going “What are you doing?” What they did is they extended the emergency use authorization for the Pfizer drug vaccine that’s available in the U.S., here that’s more than 30 days later, they haven’t asked that very simple question. If you’re saying that the Pfizer drug is the same as the Comirnaty, why didn’t you provide FDA approval on that? So, there’s not an FDA-approved drug and, of course, they announced it so they could push through these mandates so that people actually think, “Oh, OK now these things are FDA approved.” They are not and again, maybe they should be, but the FDA isn’t telling me why. 

Another posting on this notes the BAIT-N-SWITCH aspect of this whole thing via Jordan Schachtel at his SUBSTACK: Shell Game? There remains no FDA approved COVID vaccine in the United States

I fact checked the fact checkers and couldn’t believe what I found. Despite the corporate press, Big Pharma, and the federal government telling us otherwise, it is absolutely true that there is no FDA approved COVID-19 vaccine available in the United States today. And there are no plans to make one available any time soon.

I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s 100% true. And this reality hints at an incredible scandal within both Big Pharma and the U.S. Public Health bureaucracy.

On August 23, the FDA granted full approval for a COVID-19 vaccine to Pfizer-BioNtech for a specific product sold under the brand name Comirnaty. The landmark moment — the “full approval” endorsement from the FDA — was heralded by the Biden Administration and countless states, and quickly leveraged to coerce millions into taking the shots. This product, Comirnaty, was fully authorized for the “prevention of COVID-19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older.”

Yet Comirnaty itself has never made its way into the United States. The fully-approved version is nowhere to be found within our borders.

A separate product, which remains under emergency use authorization (EUA), is the only “Pfizer shot” available in the United States.

Early on, Pfizer and its government allies seemed to have a reasonable explanation for this issue. They claimed that Comirnaty was not yet available because the EUA shots were still lining the shelves, and claimed that the FDA-approved version would be available to all soon.

Now, it’s been over 4 months since full approval, and Comirnaty is still not being distributed…..

There is this story as well that I posted on my site’s Facebook that caught my eye, and it starts out by noting “There is a tectonic shift underway in the medico-scientific establishment: they are starting to walk back boosters.”

BACKING AWAY FROM BOOSTERS?

AMERICAN THINKER continues:

The first indication of this dramatic change of attitude came from the United Kingdom last week.

On January 7, Reuters ran a wire titled UK Says 4th COVID Jabs Not Needed for Now As Booster Effect Lasts. That piece featured the following sentence in its opening paragraph: “there is no need for now for people to have a fourth shot, British health officials said on Friday.”

Three days later, the UK Mirror published a piece titled What Is ‘Living With Covid’? Boris Johnson Drawing Up Plans ‘To Be Rolled Out In March. The article quoted Dr. Clive Dix, the former head of the UK’s vaccine task force, who said:

“It is pointless keeping giving more and more vaccines to people who are not going to get very ill. We should just let them get ill and deal with that.”

A mere day later, Bloomberg put out an article titled Repeat Booster Shots Spur European Warning on Immune-System Risks. The piece opened as follows:

European Union regulators warned that frequent Covid-19 booster shots could adversely affect the immune system and may not be feasible. Repeat booster doses every four months could eventually weaken the immune system and tire out people, according to the European Medicines Agency.

The piece goes on to quote Marco Cavaleri, the Head of Biological Health Threats and Vaccines Strategy at the European Medicines Agency (EMA), who said that boosters “can be done once, or maybe twice, but it’s not something that we can think should be repeated constantly.”

Cavaleri then went on to say something we had not yet heard from a high-level public health official:

“We need to think about how we can transition from the current pandemic setting to a more endemic setting.”

Around the same time, the World Health Organization (WHO) put out a statement which included this astounding sentence:

“[A] vaccination strategy based on repeated booster doses of the original vaccine composition is unlikely to be appropriate or sustainable.”

This was a truly startling development since until a week before medical authorities world over were speaking about the need for the fourth (and even subsequent) shots. In fact, some countries like Britain and Israel have already started their administration.

This sudden change of course indicates that there is something in the data that has the powers that be seriously worried. When it came to the Covid vaccines, the medical authorities have displayed an astonishing level of tolerance for side effects and collateral damage. So much so that they were even willing to let some children die unnecessarily for the sake of their vaccine agenda…….

If true, then this IS BIG NEWS. Maybe this is why??

The vaccinated population in the UK account for nearly 75% of alleged Covid-19 deaths, according to the UK Health Security Agency.

Out of the over 3700 deaths reported from Dec. 6 to Jan. 2, over 2600 of them were fully vaccinated – over 70%, according to the data, and an additional 130 deaths attributed to the “partly vaccinated” brings the total up to nearly 75%.

(PDF: COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report [Week 1] 6 January 2022)

…TO WIT:

The NEW YORK POST says that the “UK Health Security Agency said people who received three doses of Pfizer’s vaccine saw their protection drop from 70 percent to 45 percent within 10 weeks.” CNBC notes the fact that:

Albert Bourla (PFIZER’S CEO and veterinarian)

Two-doses of Pfizer’s or Moderna’s vaccines are only about 10% effective at preventing infection from omicron 20 weeks after the second dose, according to the U.K. data.

A booster dose, on the other hand, is up to 75% effective at preventing symptomatic infection and 88% effective at preventing hospitalization, according to the data.

However, Bourla said it’s unclear how long a booster dose will provide protection against Covid. The U.K. Health Security Agency also found that boosters are only 40% to 50% effective against infection 10 weeks after receiving the shot….

 

CONSPIRACIES BECOME REALITY

MRNA CHANGES DNA

BLOOMBERG has an article touching on this once “conspiracy” becoming reality. (The full article is HERE):

….In the biggest of the trio, the drug giant agreed to pay as much as $1.35 billion, including $300 million upfront, to Beam Therapeutics to partner on a technique for editing DNA. Two other deals will give Pfizer access to technology for synthesizing genetic material and delivering it to cells.

“Clearly this is one of the top priorities that Pfizer and I myself have for this year,” said CEO Albert Bourla in an interview with Bloomberg Television. The New York-based drugmaker will “invest a lot of capital that has accumulated” through the sales of its Covid-19 vaccine back into this space, Bourla said.

Developed with German partner BioNTech, Pfizer’s Covid vaccine has become one of the biggest-selling and most important pharmaceutical products of all time. While relatively difficult to ship and store because of temperature requirements, the messenger RNA shot is expected to bring in more than $36 billion for 2021, far outselling inoculations from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson that use other means to raise antibodies against Covid.

Producing an mRNA-based Covid vaccine gave Pfizer expertise to apply to other mRNA opportunities, such as base editing, Beam CEO John Evans said Monday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Pfizer and Beam plan to use mRNA to deliver edits that, if successful, would change a person’s DNA to fix or possibly even cure genetic disease….

WITH OR OF COVID

RED STATE brings us this gem:

Since the beginning of the pandemic, a debate over the accuracy of the COVID-19 death totals has existed, with the attempt being to delineate who died directly from the virus vs. who died while having an incidental infection.

That debate emerged because there have been numerous examples of people wrongly labeled as dying of the coronavirus when they clearly died by other means and would have done so regardless of infection. Typically, when a limited dive into the data produces such results (such as just looking at Palm Beach County), you can bet there are a lot more examples out there that just haven’t been discovered.

Yet, for the better part of two years, any discussion of such miscategorizations resulted in a litany of derogatory responses. Either you were a conspiracy theorist, weren’t taking the pandemic seriously, or both. The press wrote countless articles insisting that the totals were completely accurate, especially during the Trump administration. The Washington Post even managed to call Sen. Joni Ernst, who is about as milquetoast of a Republican as you can get, a conspiracy theorist for asking questions. Meanwhile, social media companies would ban people for suggesting the totals were inaccurate.

But as has been the pattern the last few months, from the admission that the lab leak theory is probable to revisions about the vaccines not stopping the spread of COVID-19, another major shift is taking place. Per CDC Dir. Rochelle Walensky, the government is preparing to release revised COVID death figures that will show those who died from the virus instead of the broader total of those who died with it.

When taken in a vacuum, this announcement is a very good thing. Who wouldn’t want more accurate data regarding the pandemic? Especially when our inflated COVID death numbers are used to disparage the United States worldwide while other countries undercount their death totals.

Yet, I can’t help but notice how politically convenient this is. Literally, just a few days after Joe Biden took the mantle of presiding over the most COVID deaths from Donald Trump, the government suddenly decides now is the time to revise the numbers? Yeah, there’s no way that’s a coincidence.……

More and more evidence is showing what was called a conspiracy theory or xenophobia shows to be in fact reality.

COVID ENGINEERED IN LABORATORY 

TECHNO FROG has an excellent post on the matter — of which I will excerpt a portion from, but the ENTIRE article is worth your time:

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, NIAID Director Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins have decried the theory that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a conspiracy theory.

Back in March 2020, Collins said claims that COVID-19 was engineered in a lab were “outrageous.” He pointed to a new study that “debunks such claims by providing scientific evidence that this novel coronavirus arose naturally.” Notably, one of the study’s authors, Kristian Anderson, had previously informed Fauci that some features of the virus “look engineered.”

Never to be outdone, in May 2020, Fauci told National Geographic that this virus “could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.” Could not. He left no room for doubt:

Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species

Today, Congressional Republicans released e-mails revealing scientists and researchers – people who are certainly not conspiracy theorists – informing Fauci and Collins of their beliefs that the virus was man-made.

Notes from a February 1, 2020 conference call were forwarded to Fauci and Collins on February 2, 2020. Here are the excerpts from the Republican release.

Regarding the same February 1, 2020 phone conference, notes (likely communicating the position of Collins) state that experts needed to be convened to support the theory of “natural origin” or the “voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great harm to science and international harmony…” There was no concern for actually getting to the truth.

Another February 2 email (to which Fauci and Collins were copied) from Dr. Andrew Rambaut states “from a (natural) evolutionary point of view the only thing here that strikes me as unusual is the furin cleavage site.” Importantly, he observed the insertion “resulted in an extremely fit virus in humans.”

Then there were efforts to completely shut down debate. Dr. Ron Fouchier remarked that debate on the origins of the virus would be a distraction and cause harm to science.

And then in April 2020, we see Collins again asking government officials at NIH to “put down” the “very destructive conspiracy” that the virus was engineered…….

(READ IT ALL!)

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)

  • “If the American people put us back in charge, we are definitely going to do this because we now know without a doubt that Dr. Fauci knew on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 that this thing [the COVID 19 virus] came from a lab,” said Rep. Jordan. (POST MILLENNIAL)

And PROJECT VERITAS had a huge release of what is weightier than The Pentagon Papers.

  • Military documents state that EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018 seeking funding to conduct gain of function research of bat borne coronaviruses. The proposal, named Project Defuse, was rejected by DARPA over safety concerns and the notion that it violates the gain of function research moratorium.
  • The main report regarding the EcoHealth Alliance proposal leaked on the internet a couple of months ago, it has remained unverified until now. Project Veritas has obtained a separate report to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense, written by U.S. Marine Corp Major, Joseph Murphy, a former DARPA Fellow.
  • “The proposal does not mention or assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research,” a direct quote from the DARPA rejection letter.
  • Project Veritas reached out to DARPA for comment regarding the hidden documents and spoke with the Chief of Communications, Jared Adams, who said, “It doesn’t sound normal to me,” when asked about the way the documents were buried.

[WASHINGTON, D.C. – Jan. 10, 2022] Project Veritas has obtained startling never-before-seen documents regarding the origins of COVID-19, gain of function research, vaccines, potential treatments which have been suppressed, and the government’s effort to conceal all of this.

The documents in question stem from a report at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, which were hidden in a top secret shared drive.

DARPA is an agency under the U.S. Department of Defense in charge of facilitating research in technology with potential military applications.

Project Veritas has obtained a separate report to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense written by U.S. Marine Corp Major, Joseph Murphy, a former DARPA Fellow.

The report states that EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018, seeking funding to conduct gain of function research of bat borne coronaviruses. The proposal, named Project Defuse, was rejected by DARPA over safety concerns and the notion that it violates the basis gain of function research moratorium.

According to the documents, NAIAD, under the direction of Dr. Fauci, went ahead with the research in Wuhan, China and at several sites across the U.S.

Dr. Fauci has repeatedly maintained, under oath, that the NIH and NAIAD have not been involved in gain of function research with the EcoHealth Alliance program. But according to the documents obtained by Project Veritas which outline why EcoHealth Alliance’s proposal was rejected, DARPA certainly classified the research as gain of function. 

“The proposal does not mention or assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research,” a direct quote from the DARPA rejection letter.

Major Murphy’s report goes on to detail great concern over the COVID-19 gain of function program, the concealment of documents, the suppression of potential curatives, like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, and the mRNA vaccines……

FEMINIST FATALE, NAOMI WOLF

And GATEWAY PUNDIT covers Steve Bannon’s WAR ROOM discussion about this with the old guard feminist Naomi Wolf:

On Tuesday morning Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA vaccine, and Dr. Naomi Wolf, a former Clinton adviser and democracy activist, joined Steve Bannon on The War Room to respond to the Project Veritas bombshell.

Dr. Malone called it “bigger than the Pentagon Papers.”

Dr. Wolf called it “manslaughter of millions of people coordinated at the highest levels.”
Boom!

NAOMI WOLF: The fact that Dr. Fauci grossly perjured himself is hugely apparent. It is the least of the crimes if indeed these are verified documents… I can’t overstate this, this is a premeditated kind of manslaughter of millions of people coordinated at the highest levels according to these documents. Treatments that would have saved lives were intentionally or reportedly intentionally suppressed.

Via The War Room:

[….]

READ THE DOCUMENTS

The DAILY WIRE joins the mix as well with an excellent article documenting “Top U.S. and British scientists reportedly thought that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, likely escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.” Continuing with their article, the reason they kept quite about it was due to international relations: “but some were hesitant to let the debate play out in the media because they were concerned about ‘international harmony.'”

THEY KNEW

“An email from Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, on February 2 2020 said that ‘a likely explanation’ was that Covid had rapidly evolved from a Sars-like virus inside human tissue in a low-security lab,” The Telegraph reported. “The email, to Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins of the US National Institutes of Health, went on to say that such evolution may have ‘accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans.’”

However, a top Dutch scientist and a top U.S. public health official warned that discussing the lab leak theory could cause serious geopolitical issues and could harm China.

Dr. Francis Collins, the then-director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), replied to Farrar, writing: “I share your view that a swift convening of experts in a confidence-inspiring framework is needed or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.”

Another scientist, Dr. Ron Fouchier, a Dutch virologist and Deputy Head of the Erasmus MC Department of Viroscience, responded to Farrar, “Further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”

The report added:

In the emails, Sir Jeremy said that other scientists also believed the virus could not have evolved naturally. One such scientist was Professor Mike Farzan, of Scripps Research, the expert who discovered how the original Sars virus binds to human cells.… The emails also show that Bob Garry, of the University of Texas, was unconvinced that Covid-19 emerged naturally.

Viscount Ridley, co-author of Viral: the search for the origin of Covid, said that the emails showed “a lamentable lack of openness and transparency among Western scientists who appear to have been more interested in shutting down a hypothesis they thought was very plausible, for political reasons.”….

BABYLON BEE’S PROPHECY

And here is a WEASEL ZIPPER’S story regarding hospital shortages due to laying workers off due to no vaccinations:

Science science and more science.

Via Politico:

Hospitals and long-term care facilities are so short staffed that many are compelling Covid-positive doctors and nurses to return to work, arguing that bringing back asymptomatic or even symptomatic staff is the only way they can keep their doors open amid a spike in hospitalizations.

The practice, allowed by the most recent CDC guidance, underscores the dire situation in which many facilities find themselves as more than 120,000 people nationwide are now hospitalized with the virus — almost three times the total from Thanksgiving when Omicron was first detected.

Keep reading

See more at: 5 Recent Babylon Bee Headlines That Were Surprisingly Believable

Hospital beds in some of the largest cities have cut beds:

And seemingly another political move to protect Biden, and that is to….

STOPPING REPORTING OF COVID-CASES

The WORLD SOCIALIST WEBSITE has the story:

The US federal government will no longer require hospitals to report the number of people who die from COVID-19 every day, according to new guidelines from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

On January 6, the HHS published updated guidelines on which information hospitals provide to the agency. The guidelines note the “retirement of fields which are no longer required to be reported,” among which is “Previous day’s COVID-19 deaths.”

The guidelines note, “This field has been made inactive for the federal data collection. Hospitals no longer need to report these data elements to the federal government.” This change goes into effect February 2.

Another Biden Admin CYA was the hospitalization rates, which I dealt with just last week. ELECTION CENTRAL 

If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that Covid-19 hospitalizations appear to be skyrocketing to new heights around the country. Hospital after hospital is suddenly once again filled with Covid patients, or so it seems. As it turns out, the numbers are not only lying, they’re being distorted in such a way that further lessens public trust in agencies like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to accurately and objectively provide information.

The issue has to do with what types of hospital admissions actually get counted as Covid-19 patients. Obviously, patients suffering from severe illness due to Covid are included in this count. However, so are patients who visit the hospital for a scheduled procedure or another acute emergency, yet then test positive for Covid-19 while they’re there. They could be asymptomatic, having no Covid issues, but suddenly they become a “Covid hospitalization” and greatly inflate and exaggerate the numbers.

[….]

In a recent interview, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted that hospitalization numbers are greatly exaggerated, and the actual number of attributed Covid-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic may be exaggerated as well, but she doesn’t know by how much:

CNN anchor Jake Tapper has criticized as “misleading” the admission by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that it counted COVID patients who had been admitted to hospital for something else.

Tapper was reacting to comments CDC director Rochelle Walensky made on Fox News on Sunday that “up to 40 percent” of patients had been admitted to hospitals with another medical emergency but had been later detected as having COVID.

When asked by Fox News anchor Bret Baier if there was a breakdown of how many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. were “from COVID” or “with COVID,” Walensky gave a non-committal answer in which she said “our death registrytakes a few weeks to collect,” and that “those data will be forthcoming.”

The numbers are repeating around the country, with at least 40%, perhaps higher, of non-Covid hospital admissions in New York City being incorrectly included in the count:…..

MEDIA BIAS TO PROTECT BIDEN

AMERICAN GREATNESS has an article about the Associate Press ordering “its staff to stop covering the total number of coronavirus cases in the country and around the globe.” Saying it is a “dramatic shift in focus… apparently shifting the parameters of what a ‘case’ truly means.” CONTINUING:

Fox News reports that the sudden change can be seen in a recent article from the AP titled “Omicron wave prompts media to rethink which data to report,” by author David Bauder. In the article, published on Wednesday, Bauder claims that, while the number of positive coronavirus cases and hospitalizations had previously been “barometers of the pandemic’s march across the world,” the ongoing spread of the Omicron variant from South Africa “is making a mess of the usual statistics, forcing news organizations to rethink the way they report such figures.”

“The number of case counts soared over the holidays, an expected development given the emergence of a variant more transmissible than its predecessors,” Bauder wrote. “Yet these counts only reflect what is reported by health authorities. They do not include most people who test themselves at home, or are infected without even knowing about it. Holidays and weekends also lead to lags in reported cases.”

As a result, the AP speculates that if every single positive test was included, then the total number of cases would be “substantially higher” as a result of dramatic inflation and exaggeration of many instances.

“For that reason, The Associated Press has recently told its editors and reporters to avoid emphasizing case counts in stories about the disease,” Bauder continued. “That means, for example, no more stories focused solely on a particular country or state setting a one-day record for number of cases, because that claim has become unreliable.”…..

LEFTIE MOMS RAGE AGAINST THEIR MACHINE!

This first article is via THE ATLANTIC: Why I Soured on the Democrats: COVID school policies set me adrift from my tribe.

MOM #1

Until recently, I was a loyal, left-leaning Democrat, and I had been my entire adult life. I was the kind of partisan who registered voters before midterm elections and went to protests. I hated Donald Trump so much that I struggled to be civil to relatives on the other side of the aisle. But because of what my family has gone through during the pandemic, I can’t muster the same enthusiasm. I feel adrift from my tribe and, to a certain degree, disgusted with both parties.

I can’t imagine that I would have arrived here—not a Republican, but questioning my place in the Democratic Party—had my son not been enrolled in public kindergarten in 2020.

Late that summer, the Cleveland school system announced that it would not open for in-person learning the first 9 weeks of the semester. I was distraught. My family relies on my income, and I knew that I would not be able to work full-time with my then-5-year-old son and then-3-year-old daughter at home.

Still, I was accepting of short-term school closures. My faith in the system deteriorated only as the weeks and months of remote-learning dragged on long past the initial timeline, and my son began refusing to log on for lessons. I couldn’t blame him. Despite his wonderful teacher’s best efforts, online kindergarten is about as ridiculous as it sounds, in my experience. I remember logging on to a “gym” class where my son was the only student present. The teacher, I could tell, felt embarrassed. We both knew how absurd the situation was.

Children who had been present every day the year before in preschool, whose parents I had seen drop them off every morning, just vanished. The daily gantlet of passwords and programs was a challenge for even me and my husband, both professionals who work on computers all day. About 30 percent of Cleveland families didn’t even have internet in their home prior to the pandemic.

I kept hoping that someone in our all-Democratic political leadership would take a stand on behalf of Cleveland’s 37,000 public-school children or seem to care about what was happening. Weren’t Democrats supposed to stick up for low-income kids? Instead, our veteran Democratic mayor avoided remarking on the crisis facing the city’s public-school families. Our all-Democratic city council was similarly disengaged. The same thing was happening in other blue cities and blue states across the country, as the needs of children were simply swept aside. Cleveland went so far as to close playgrounds for an entire year. That felt almost mean-spirited, given the research suggesting the negligible risk of outdoor transmission—an additional slap in the face.

Things got worse for us in December 2020, when my whole family contracted COVID-19. The coronavirus was no big deal for my 3- and 5-year-olds, but I was left with lingering long-COVID symptoms, which made the daily remote-schooling nightmare even more grueling. I say this not to hold myself up for pity. I understand that other people had a far worse 2020. I’m just trying to explain why my worldview has shifted and why I’m not the same person I was.

By the spring semester, the data showed quite clearly that schools were not big coronavirus spreaders and that, conversely, the costs of closures to children, both academically and emotionally, were very high. The American Academy of Pediatrics first urged a return to school in June 2020. In February 2021, when The New York Times surveyed 175 pediatric-disease experts, 86 percent recommended in-person school even if no one had been vaccinated.

But when the Cleveland schools finally reopened, in March 2021—under pressure from Republican Governor Mike DeWine—they chose a hybrid model that meant my son could enter the building only two days a week.

My husband and I had had enough: With about two months left in the academic year, we found a charter school that was open for full-time in-person instruction. It was difficult to give up on our public school. We were invested. But our trust was broken.

Compounding my fury was a complete lack of sympathy or outright hostility from my own “team.” Throughout the pandemic, Democrats have been eager to style themselves as the ones that “take the virus seriously,” which is shorthand, at least in the bluest states and cities, for endorsing the most extreme interventions. By questioning the wisdom of school closures—and taking our child out of public school—I found myself going against the party line. And when I tried to speak out on social media, I was shouted down and abused, accused of being a Trumper who didn’t care if teachers died. On Twitter, mothers who had been enlisted as unpaid essential workers were mocked, often in highly misogynistic terms. I saw multiple versions of “they’re just mad they’re missing yoga and brunch.”

Twitter is a cesspool full of unreasonable people. But the kind of moralizing and self-righteousness that I saw there came to characterize lefty COVID discourse to a harmful degree. As reported in this magazine, the parents in deep-blue Somerville, Massachusetts, who advocated for faster school reopening last spring were derided as “fucking white parents” in a virtual public meeting. The interests of children and the health of public education were both treated as minor concerns, if these subjects were broached at all.

Obviously, Republicans have been guilty of politicizing the pandemic with horrible consequences, fomenting mistrust in vaccines that will result in untold numbers of unnecessary deaths. I’m not excusing that.

But I’ve been disappointed by how often the Democratic response has exacerbated that mistrust by, for example, exaggerating the risks of COVID-19 to children. A low point for me was when Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe inflated child COVID-hospitalization numbers on the campaign trail. It was almost Trumplike. (If I lived in Virginia, I admit I probably would have had to sit out the recent gubernatorial election, in which the Republican candidate beat McAuliffe.)

(READ IT ALL!)

MOM #2

And another Leftie mom wrote about an almost identical experience[s] in POLITICO: How School Closures Made Me Question My Progressive Politics: I’ve never felt more alienated from the liberal Democratic circles I usually call home.

June 26, 2020, was the day I went public with just how angry I was about my son’s school closing down for Covid, and my life hasn’t been the same since.

I had begun to sense a difference between my own feelings and those of my mom’s text group, which included nine of us whose kids had gone to preschool together since they were 2 years old; the kids were 8 at the time. These were the parents of my son’s closest friends. We even had a name for our group, the “mamigas”— as most of us were either Latinas or married to Latinos and shared a commitment to bilingual education.

I tweeted, “Does anyone else feel enraged at the idea that you’ll be homeschooling in the fall full-time? Cuz my moms group text is in full-blown acceptance mode and it bugs the shit out of me.” I didn’t know it yet, but this would be my first foray into school reopening advocacy, which eventually included helping lead a group of Oakland parents in pushing the school district to be more transparent about the process of reopening (particularly in negotiations with the teachers union) and writing several pieces on the topic.
I probably should have inferred that becoming a school-reopening advocate would not go over well in my progressive Oakland community, but I didn’t anticipate the social repercussions, or the political identity crisis it would trigger for me. My own experience, as a self-described progressive in ultra-lefty Oakland, is just one example of how people across the political spectrum have become frustrated with Democrats’ position on school reopenings.

Parents who advocated for school reopening were repeatedly demonized on social media as racist and mischaracterized as Trump supporters. Members of the parent group I helped lead were consistently attacked on Twitter and Facebook by two Oakland moms with ties to the teachers union. They labelled advocates’ calls for schools reopening “white supremacy” called us “Karens,” and even bizarrely claimed we had allied ourselves with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s transphobic agenda.

There was no recognition of the fact that we were advocating for our kids, who were floundering in remote learning, or that public schools across the country (in red states) opened in fall 2020 without major outbreaks, as did private schools just miles from our home. Only since last fall, when schools reopened successfully despite the more contagious Delta variant circulating, have Democratic pundits and leaders been talking about school closures as having caused far more harm than benefit.

Some progressive parents now admit they were too afraid of the blowback from their communities to speak up. And they were right to be wary. We paid a price.

So did Democrats, even if they didn’t realize it until later, or still don’t. Glenn Youngkin’s surprise gubernatorial win in Virginia in November was a wake-up call for the party. As has been recognized, Youngkin’s focus on school-related issues, especially after Terry McAuliffe made a dismissive remark about parents, was an effective tactic. Still, all over Twitter I saw progressives denying that parent anger at prolonged school closures was a major issue in that election — they claimed it was all about anti-critical race theory sentiment, despite research showing school pandemic policies were more to blame. Even more disturbing, as evidenced in the comments on a recent tweet by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), is that many still believe shutting down schools for a year or more was justified.
Some progressive parents now admit they were too afraid of the blowback from their communities to speak up. And they were right to be wary. We paid a price.

So did Democrats, even if they didn’t realize it until later, or still don’t. Glenn Youngkin’s surprise gubernatorial win in Virginia in November was a wake-up call for the party. As has been recognized, Youngkin’s focus on school-related issues, especially after Terry McAuliffe made a dismissive remark about parents, was an effective tactic. Still, all over Twitter I saw progressives denying that parent anger at prolonged school closures was a major issue in that election — they claimed it was all about anti-critical race theory sentiment, despite research showing school pandemic policies were more to blame. Even more disturbing, as evidenced in the comments on a recent tweet by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), is that many still believe shutting down schools for a year or more was justified.

Some unions and districts are now using last year’s closures as a precedent. Recently, with the Omicron surge, several major school districts announced they were switching to remote learning for a week or more, including Newark and dozens of other New Jersey districts, Ann Arbor and Cleveland. Then last week, the Chicago teachers union voted for a sickout, followed by teachers in San Francisco and Oakland engaging in similar actions.

Spring 2020 had been a disaster for my son when his school in the Oakland Unified School District switched to emergency remote learning. He had recently been diagnosed with ADHD and did not do well with me at home — he often flatly refused to do any work. Although I saw a range of reactions by teachers to emergency remote learning that spring, and know that some went to great lengths to keep their students engaged, my son’s teacher only met with the kids one-on-one on Zoom for 15 minutes a week. Beyond that, parents were given worksheets to do with our kids; there was no actual instruction that spring.

When the new school year began in August 2020, Oakland provided only fully remote instruction. My incredibly bright but impulsive son found the temptation of having a computer screen in front of him irresistible — and would often open other windows or try to surf the internet.

By January 2021, with my son increasingly disengaged as Zoom school dragged on and no hope of an imminent return to school in Oakland, I promised him I wouldn’t make him go through another year like this. I knew that he desperately needed to learn alongside other kids.

I had until then resisted my dad’s suggestion that I consider sending him to private school. I was a proud alumna of San Francisco public schools and planned for my kids to attend Oakland public schools, despite their reputation for behavioral and academic problems. As an interracial, bilingual/bicultural family, what we wanted was for our son to attend a dual-language immersion program with plenty of other kids of color. My family was also in no way able to pay for private school.

But I began to fear that even in-person school in fall 2021 was at risk because of the impossible demands of the teachers union (that schools remain fully remote until there were “near-zero” Covid cases in Oakland) and apathy of the school board and district; even after teachers were prioritized for vaccination, there was no urgency to get kids back to the classroom. My dad offered to help pay for private school, and we applied. In March we were notified that my son was admitted to a private dual-language immersion school, and that we had been granted a 75 percent scholarship. There was still no deal in place between Oakland’s school district and the union to return to in-person school. I had lost all faith in the decision-makers to do what was best for my kid. So I made the only logical decision.

Even then, I feared what fellow parents might think of me. I’m well aware of the stereotypes of white parents choosing the private-school option when the going gets tough at public schools. I told myself that prioritizing being a “good leftist” at the expense of my son’s well-being wasn’t good parenting, but as a red-diaper baby myself, the white guilt dies hard. My own parents had sent me to an elementary school with a huge majority of Black and Pacific Islander students; while many might assume the white parents documented in the New York Times podcast “Nice White Parents” were pioneers, my parents reverse-integrated me into a “failing” school 40 years ago. Sending my kid to private school was accompanied by a lot of angst.

My fears were amplified by the backlash I and other school reopening advocates had faced throughout the school year, particularly on social media. There were a range of insults lobbed at us: We were bad parents who didn’t care about our own kids or teachers dying, we only wanted our babysitters back and our frustrations about school closures were an example of “white supremacy.” Los Angeles teachers union head Cecily Myart-Cruz stated that reopening schools was “a recipe for propagating structural racism.”

(READ IT ALL!)

CNN FAILS THE #SCIENCE TEST

The Government Continues It’s Case Against Religious Freedom

Three main points from the brief, via Westword:

  1. The brief lays out three main complaints about the procedure. The first? Since the form “designates, authorizes, incentivizes, and obligates third parties to provide or arrange contraceptive coverage in connection with the plan,” the brief contends that “once the Little Sisters execute and deliver the Form, the Mandate purports to make it irrevocably part of the plan by forbidding the Little Sisters to even talk to the outside companies that administer their health plan, ‘directly or indirectly,’ to ask them not to provide the coverage.”
  2. In addition, the brief allows that “regardless of whether the government sincerely believes EBSA Form 700 is morally meaningful, the relevant legal question is whether the Little Sisters do. And on that point, there is no dispute: the Little Sisters cannot execute and deliver the contraceptive coverage form without violating their religious conscience. The government may think the Little Sisters should reason differently about law and morality, but their actual religious beliefs — the beliefs that matter in this case — have led them to conclude that they cannot sign or send the government’s Form.”
  3. Finally, the government’s so-called “scheme” is said to violate the First Amendment, because it has “exempted a large class of religious organizations based on unfounded guesswork about the likely religious characteristics of different religious organizations. The government has no power to discriminate in this fashion, allowing some religious organizations to survive while crushing others with fines for the identical religious exercise. This violation of the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses is compounded by a clear violation of the Free Speech Clause: the Mandate both compels the Little Sisters to engage in government-required speech against their will, and prohibits them from engaging in speech they wish to make.”

Another short commentary on what took place just a couple days ago via The Daily Signal:

Some organizations are fighting back against the accommodation because it simply shifts responsibility for purchasing coverage away from the employers, and it is still the employer’s action that triggers the objectionable coverage. This bureaucratic tweak to the accommodation, issued this past August, still does not adequately protect the religious freedom of many charities, schools and other religious organizations.

Writing for the court, Judge Cornelia Pillard found that CUA and Priests for Life failed to show that the accommodation substantially burdens their religious exercise. Instead, Pillard concluded that the only harm was Priests for Life’s feelings of being genuinely “aggrieved by their inability to prevent what other people would do….” Pillard recognized that though the accommodation may violate the challengers’ conscience, it allows the challengers to “wash their hands of any involvement in providing insurance coverage for contraceptive services.”

Essentially the court determined that the accommodation is fine because it doesn’t directly force the groups to violate their conscience.

Yet a regulation can still be a substantial religious burden even if the effect is only indirect.

The U.S. Supreme Court said as much in Thomas v. Review Board over 30 years ago. In this case, a Jehovah’s Witness steelworker was denied unemployment benefits after quitting his job because he was transferred to a part of his company that made weapons. Because of his belief in non-violence, Thomas could not participate in the manufacture of weapons. In siding with Thomas, the Supreme Court noted that “[I]t is not within the judicial function and judicial competence to inquire whether [Thomas] correctly perceived the commands of [his] faith. Courts are not arbiters of scriptural interpretation.” Instead, the Court would defer to a religious believer’s interpretation unless the claim was so bizarre or had a non-religious motivation, elements even the government concedes do not apply to Priests for Life or the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Thus, what Judge Pillard calls “a bit of paperwork” is exactly what Priests for Life find morally wrong.

What may seem trivial to one person may give rise to a serious religious dilemma for another. For example, Orthodox Jews may not flip light switches or press buttons on the Sabbath.

In short, courts should not be in the business of line-drawing when it comes to theological questions. Though the Obama administration won the round in the battle over the abortion-inducing drug mandate before the D.C. Circuit, the fight continues with the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Headed Into the New Year Divided (Updated)

Divided We Stand

The Supreme Court case is Little Sister of the Poor v. Sebelius, 13A691. The other cases are Priests for Life v. U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, 13-05368, and Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington v. Sebelius, 13-05371, U.S. Court of Appeals for District of Columbia (Washington).

I posted about the Little Sisters a while ago, and we will be entering into a new faze of this issue soon:

The Obama administration was temporarily blocked by a U.S. Supreme Court justice from forcing an order of Catholic nuns to comply with a federal requirement to provide free contraceptive coverage for employees.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s two-sentence order will last at least until Jan. 3, the deadline she gave the administration to respond to a bid by the Denver and Baltimore chapters of the Little Sisters of the Poor for an exemption to the mandate. The Supreme Court released the order last night, a half hour before the mandate took effect.

The request by the nuns was one of four lodged with the court yesterday by groups claiming the administration isn’t doing enough to accommodate religious objections to the contraceptive rule. The requirement stems from the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act….

[….]

Tatel was appointed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, while the other judges on the panel that granted yesterday’s order, Karen Henderson and Janice Rogers Brown, were nominated, respectively, by George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, both Republicans. Jackson was named to the bench by Obama, a Democrat….

…read more…

Meet the Sisters

Via Gateway Pundit:

The Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic religious group for women who have dedicated their lives to the service of the elderly, is concerned that after more than a century of service the Obama Administration will force them out of the United States. The order was previously banned in China and Myanmar. The Obama Admininistration may force them out of the United States.

The religious order claims the so-called contraception mandate in ObamaCare will make it impossible for them to continue their work in the United States.

Does Sotomoyer see the dangers in this? Gateway Pundit Updates:

Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor blocked the Obama administration from forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide free contraceptive coverage to employees. The Little Sisters of the Poor serve the elderly poor in over 30 countries around the world.

`The beginning of January is going to be a train wreck [for Democrats]` ~ That Hammer

Via Gateway Pundit:

Meanwhile, via Moonbat, “$348,000 Apiece for ObamaCare Enrollees in Obama’s Alleged State of Birth“!

Only 574 Hawaiians have signed up for Obamacare – at a cost to the federal government of roughly $348,000 apiece.

Well, maybe not quite 574 Hawaiians…

[T]he Hawaii Reporter quotes sources familiar with the exchange’s website saying that enrollment figure is an overstatement, because the site doesn’t always properly transfer information to insurers. Insurers thus haven’t processed all the enrollments, and applications can be submitted multiple times.

However many people signed up, they had better like their one-size-fits-all socialist medical insurance, because it didn’t come cheap.

The Hawaii state government paid CGI Federal — the same contractor that built the disastrous HealthCare.gov — $53 million to build the website, which didn’t launch till October 15. The federal government gave the state $200 million in total to set up the exchange, including money to be spent on marketing and outreach.

The Media vs. Jon Stewart ~ Via Congressman Sean Duffy

What Democrats are doing is arguing for special treatment for corporations and for government employees (like the President and Congress). Republicans are asking for equal treatment under the law. Here is NewsBusters on the matter:

Wisconsin Congressman Sean Duffy slammed the press for not doing its job in pointing out the hypocrisy of ObamaCare being delayed for certain groups but not for all Americans: “…the media won’t even ask the question about, ‘Why are you [the Obama administration] treating families different than big businesses?’…That’s how pathetic, I think, news reporting has become, when we won’t ask tough questions to the administration.”

Continuing, Congressman Duffy presses the obvious point:

Duffy pointed out what a joke media coverage of ObamaCare had become:

You need Jon Stewart on Comedy Central to ask [Health and Human Services] Secretary [Kathleen] Sebelius, ‘Hey, why won’t you treat these two equally?’ And she can’t answer it….’Why do you want your own health care and you won’t join us in ObamaCare?’ That question I haven’t seen anybody ask on MSNBC. Please ask it, because they don’t have a good answer for it.

Mitchell argued: “Well, we’ve asked questions to both sides. That’s not fair. We have asked the question…”

In reality, no such question was ever put to Sebelius in an interview with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Monday. In addition, the question was left out of an NBC interview with the Health and Human Services Secretary on September 30.   

Perhaps realizing that fact, Mitchell was forced cite Sebelius on The Daily Show: “Well, I think the response would be – the response that Kathleen Sebelius gave to Jon Stewart was, ‘If we had gotten what we wanted, which was a single-payer plan, this wouldn’t be the problem.'” Duffy noted: “That’s right, you say, ‘I think this is what they would say,’ but you don’t know what they would say because you haven’t asked.”

…continue…

Take note that the White House KNOWS this won’t work and use this failure as an argument FOR single-payer. Here is the full interview by Jon Stewart.

Six-Time All-Pro NFL Player Matt Birk a No-Show At White House Congrats

Via Gateway Pundit:

Baltimore Ravens’ Lineman Skips Trip to White House Due to Obama’s Radical Abortion Agenda

Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman Matt Birk is pro-life — so when it came time for the Ravens to visit President Barack Obama for the annual congratulations to the Super Bowl winners, he decided not to go.

The pro-life NFL player explained his decision:

“I wasn’t there,” Birk told The Power Trip. “I would say this, I would say that I have great respect for the office of the Presidency but about five or six weeks ago, our president made a comment in a speech and he said, ‘God bless Planned Parenthood.’”

…read more…

“Bigot!” – Discussing Same-Sex Marriage with a Leftist

In all my discussions with people about the “hot-button issue” of today, same-sex-marriage, I see a theme. And that is, bias. Not an admitted bias, or a healthy bias, one flirting with fascism. “FASCISM! How can you say that Papa Giorgio!?” Easy, a position is taken not on the reasonableness of the argument taken, but by painting the other side as bigoted, in a sense, evil, one wields power (through legislation) over a person who disagrees with such a proposition:

“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition….  If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity….  From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.” — Mussolini

Mussolini, Diuturna pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist (Ignatius Press; 1999), by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.

(Moving on) I came across a great short post to start out my example of an actual discussion where I and others on my Facebook (gay or straight) are painted as bigots if they disagree with the liberal-progressive view of the debate. Here it is, and it comes from Kevin Halloran’s site:

So what does unteachabilty look like?

  • Don’t take notes, don’t read books, or learn anything unless it’s the bare minimum or what’s essential for exam purposes.
  • Don’t ask questions or attempt anything that might reveal your ignorance or risk you looking stupid.
  • Don’t accept responsibility for your failures but blame anyone and everyone else.
  • Don’t seek or accept one-to-one personal guidance or mentoring from parents, teachers, pastors, elders, etc.
  • Don’t listen, but talk, talk, talk about yourself, especially when you’re with someone you could learn a lot from.
  • Don’t take criticism or correction without resentment or retaliation.
  • Resist moving out of personal comfort zones in work, study, ministry, or relationships, but always look for the easy and familiar route.
  • Don’t read, listen to, or learn anything that challenges existing presuppositions, practices, and prejudices.

The stubbornness of the other side can also be exemplified in a conversation with two young people “A Tale of Two Conversations w/Younger Persons On FaceBook.”

In this conversation, I tried to give examples, explain, analogize, and the like. Finally I just had to point out that the person involved was acting like a child in name-calling. I will post the two conversations going on with the same person, separately. Two separate issues engendered conversation via a linked article posted to my Facebook wall, Gay Marriage Is the Media’s Vehicle, Destination Is to Destroy the Church.” I will post the shorter of the two conversations so one can get a feel for what I am dealing with.

The first subject challenged from within the article dealt with this sentence:

  • If anyone wants to argue that the same government currently forcing religious institutions to purchase the abortion pill through ObamaCare will not eventually use civil rights violations in order to attempt to force the Church to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies — good luck with that. (emphasized)

Here is her first challenge:

DEB

What’s an abortion pill? The morning after pill is not an abortion pill- don’t be ignorant.

ME

“Also known as mifepristone, mifeprex, RU486, or medication abortion, the abortion pill is an FDA-approved medication which results in abortion. In most cases, the abortion pill ends pregnancy safely and privately in the comfort of your own home…. Mifepristone, taken orally, blocks the action of the pregnancy hormone progesterone. This causes the pregnancy to detach from the uterine wall and stop growing. Misoprostol, a prostaglandin medication, is also used to cause uterine cramps which expel blood and the pregnancy tissue from the uterus.”

I will repeat: ...the abortion pill ends pregnancy…. This causes the pregnancy to detach from the uterine wall and stop growing.” It is the ending a boy/girls life during a stage of their growth.

    • Using 2 different medicines to end your pregnancy: mifepristone and misoprostol.
    • Using only misoprostol to end your pregnancy.

(PLANNED PARENTHOOD)

    • A step-by-step look at how these drugs end pregnancy

(SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN)

    • The abortion pills work to end the pregnancy over 98% of the time. Around 2% of people will still need a uterine aspiration after using the pills if their pregnancy doesn’t end or if they have heavy bleeding.

(NATIONAL ABORTION FENEDERATION)

DEB

The morning after pill is not an abortion- that is ridiculous

ME

I quoted a medical website Deb in regards to RU486. It ends, in the beginning stages what is — IS — a viable human life.

DEB

Completely untrue- the medical site is not legitimate.

At this point I went to the makers website and grabbed from their “facts” section the following (again, directly from their website):

ME

From Mifeprex’s own website Deb:

Q: Is Mifeprex used to prevent pregnancy?

A: No. Mifeprex is used to end an early pregnancy. It is not indicated for use to prevent pregnancy. Emergency contraception drugs are indicated to prevent pregnancy.

Q: At what point during pregnancy is Mifeprex approved for use?

A: Mifeprex is FDA-approved for ending early pregnancy. Early pregnancy means it is 49 days (7 weeks) or less since your last menstrual period began.

Okay, she didn’t respond after that. Maybe the corner seemed too tight, because she came out swinging on another issue. She basically used a tactic very popular on the Left nowadays. That is, paint your opposition as evil, or as Prager would say in his acronym: S.I.X.H.I.R.B.Bigot” is the “B” in that acronym, in case you were wondering.

Here we go:

DEB

Black people and white people weren’t allowed get married years ago either… if small minded, bigoted people had their way it would still be that way. Gay marriage Is NO different

just my opinion.

To be clear, she just equalized the belief in the traditional definition of marriage with prejudice and racism. (Moral equivalency is the track record of the Left.) Thus, the person removes the need to deal with a response. I mean, who would want to argue with a racist and a bigot? This has caused a laziness in the liberal community and interferes with the intellectual growth and learning curve. In fact, a liberal professor says this hurts the youth he see’s going through his class. Yet, this same harmful egalitarian name-calling is what is the bulwark of the Democrat Party.

SIXHIRB Hurts Intellectual Growth

A liberal professor interviewed in Indoctrinate U explains that protecting and teaching from one ideological viewpoint insulates students who are liberal to properly defend and coherently explain their views in the real world — outside the classroom. This excerpt is taken from two parts, Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here

Continuing with my response:

ME

(Topic change. Like when I answer the challenge about the Bible not being changed over a 2,000 year period, and instead of camping out and seeing if their own challenge was correct… the skeptic will bring up how a good god could exists if there is so much evil around. Never doing the hard work of regulating their thinking to see if it comports to truth.)

DEB, you are using a non-sequitur argument (“an argument in which its conclusion does not follow from its premises”). It is fallacious thinking, and whether it is your opinion or not has no bearing on the sloppy logic involved. In other words, your personal truth is incoherent.

Being black/white/asian/etc is immutable. A black man cannot cease being a black man, his characteristic is unchangeable, and thus fit under the 14th amendment. People change their sexual preference all the time, there are many cases of gays and persons who even have gone all the way through a sex change that deal with their core issues and renounce being gay, or the opposite gender. In other words it is a mutable characteristic.

The other point is that there is scientific differences between the genders (male/female). There is not between a male black man and a male white man….

[QUOTE]

The argument, repeated so often that it sounds incontestable, is this: Just as parts of American society once had immoral laws that forbade whites and blacks from marrying, so, today, society continues to have immoral laws forbidding men from marrying men and women from marrying women. And just as decent people overthrew the former, decent people must overthrow the latter.

[….]

But the equation is false.

First, there is no comparison between sex and race.

There are enormous differences between men and women, but there are no differences between people of different races. Men and women are inherently different, but blacks and whites (and yellows and browns) are inherently the same. Therefore, any imposed separation by race can never be moral or even rational;

On the other hand, separation by sex can be both morally desirable and rational. Separate bathrooms for men and women is moral and rational; separate bathrooms for blacks and whites is not.

The second reason the parallel between opposing same-sex marriage and opposing interracial marriage is invalid is that opposition to marriage between races is a moral aberration while opposition to marrying a person of the same sex is the moral norm. In other words, none of the moral bases of American society, whether religious or secular, opposed interracial marriage — not Judaism, not Christianity, not Judeo-Christian values, not deism, not humanism, not the Enlightenment. Yes, there were religious and secular individuals who opposed interracial marriage, but by opposing interracial marriage, they were advocating something against all Judeo-Christian and secular norms, all of which saw nothing wrong in members of different races intermarrying (members of different religions was a different matter).

On the other hand, no religious or secular moral system ever advocated same-sex marriage.

[….]

But as objectionable as hubris is, false comparisons are worse. And there is no comparison between different races and the different genders. There are no inherent racial differences; there are significant differences between the sexes. To the extent that racial groups are different, they are only because their cultures differ. But a black man’s nature is not different from that of a white man, an Asian man, an Hispanic man.

The same is not true of sex differences. Males and females are inherently different from one another. We now know that even their brains differ. And those differences are significant. Thus, to oppose interracial marriage is indeed to engage in bigotry, but to oppose same-sex marriage is not. It simply shares the wisdom of every moral system that preceded us — society is predicated on men and women bonding with one another in a unique way called “marriage.”

Comparing the prohibition of same-sex marriage to prohibiting interracial marriage is ultimately a way of declaring the moral superiority of proponents of same-sex marriage to proponents of keeping marriage defined as man-woman. And it is a way of avoiding hard issues such as whether we really want all children to grow up thinking it doesn’t matter if they marry a boy or a girl and whether we really want to abolish forever the ideal of husband-wife based family.

(COLUMN)

DEB

Geez- how great your opinions are and your quotes- you must be right? And those religious folks who believe and support same sex marriage ?? They must not be real religious people.

Hours before the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments Tuesday over California’s ban on gay marriage, hundreds of same-sex marriage supporters will gather a block away from the courthouse at an interfaith church service to ask for God’s “love and justice” and to pray for “the dignity of all souls as a religious value,” according to organizers. Afterwards, the coalition of Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Mormons and Buddhists, among other religious and secular representatives, will march to the courthouse steps to rally in support of gay marriage, with thousands of attendees expected.

Again, I want to point out what Deb is saying. The logical conclusion of her above statement is essentially this: “religious people believe in same-sex marriage, therefore, either you are saying they cannot be religious [true Buddhists, true Christians, etc], or religion and same-sex marriage are not in conflict.” She has accused me, essentially, of judging whether someone is (of my faith) is saved or not. Truly religious or not. I have never said such a thing in this or previous conversations. Although, I can show the inherent self-refuting aspect of non-Christian religions. But that is neither here-nor-there. We continue:

ME

I know religious gay people Deb? That has nothing to do with the conversation? What does a gay man or woman being a Christian have to do with anything? Please, answer this statement you made, that is — AGAIN — a non sequitur: “…religious folks who believe and support same sex marriage ?? They must not be real religious people.”

How does the argument you made follow from the premise? Do you think that changing law and culture of all mankind and religious faith is followed from such an argument? An argument that is fallacious and emotionally rooted? Painting those who do not agree as calling others inauthentic? You really should spend a few minutes and listen to this whole 16-minutes. I mean listen — don’t verbalize out loud, walk away, etc. Sit down and listen, for 16-minutes:

You are saying if one is religious and supports something, then they must be authentic and what they support must be healthy for society. Have you connected the dots yet that this tact you use, like this from a previous conversation, “don’t believe in abortion, don’t have one,” is merely an emotional plea. “Religious” folk yell “God hates fags!!!!” ~ because they are “religious” they must also base their conclusions on the sound understanding of Scripture? Right? Your reasons that you have intimated as to how you vote are a great marker to how most vote:

“don’t believe in abortion, don’t have one,”
“don’t believe in slavery, don’t own one”

This does nothing to deal with the baby being human or not.

You seem to be saying that because religious people support SSM, it is therefore (ergo; walla; alakazam) good for society to put its stamp of approval on. So I can say, USING YOU LOGIC DEB, that,

“Because religious people smoke, society should accept it as a healthy lifestyle.” People who disagree with you you would deride thusly: “religious folks who believe and support smoking?? They must not be real religious people.”

(Argumentum ad passiones: is a logical fallacy which uses the manipulation of the recipient’s emotions, rather than valid logic, to win an argument.) Do you see Deb? I am asking you a serious question right now. “Do you see how your appeal to emotion is not an argument at all?” It makes no sense. So when the media talks about “low-information voters” ~ well.

[….]

I expect you to be an adult and answer AT LEAST that last question Deb. At some point in one’s life, hiding behind the facade of adulthood doesn’t protect one from dealing with real, important, issues… and how one comes to conclusions and changes society with those resources. Jusssst mayybee… this is a clarion call for you to become serious with that thing rattling around up there. Move to “stage two thinking” in other words. Put down the romance or mystery novels, and pick up a book. This is class time here on my FB.

And for those reading this exchange, a good person can be against SSM: “Why a Good Person Can Vote Against Same-Sex Marriage” (COLUMN)

…. The history of left-wing policies has largely consisted of doing what feels good and compassionate without asking what the long-term consequences will be; what Professor Thomas Sowell calls “Stage One Thinking.” That explains, for example, the entitlement state. It sounds noble and seems noble. But the long-term consequences are terrible: economic ruin, a demoralized population, increasing selfishness as people look to the state to take care of their fellow citizens, and more.

By redefining marriage to include same sex couples we are playing with sexual and societal fire. Just as the entitlement state passes on the cost of our good intentions to our children and grandchildren – unsustainable dependency and debt — so, too, same-sex marriage will pass along the consequences of our good intentions to our children and grandchildren – gender confusion and the loss of motherhood and fatherhood as values, just to cite two obvious consequences.

It is not enough to mean well in life. One must also do well. And the two are frequently not the same thing.

There are reasons no moral thinker in history ever advocated same-sex marriage.

DEB

Shaun [she misspells my name] – your comments and attitude are a bit rude and bully like- in my opinion. You are pushing me further away. Maybe it is just your superior brain? Lol

ME

Deb, your arguments you make, here, are arguments that are fallacious. You chase yourself away.

Have you never

never[?]

had your ideas challenged in a cogent way before? Do you think persons that understand proper thinking, argumentation internalize their hearing you talk about important topics in the manner you do and wag their head? You came here and expressed yourself, I cannot explain how this expression is incoherent? Would you just stop saying such loosey-goosey things here and continue to make them (non-sequitur/argumentum ad passiones) elsewhere to others. Maybe even in public? You should take the above as an opportunity to hone your arguments… or continue in non-thought/incoherence.

If being shown how your arguments are fallacious, and this angers you, I cannot help you in this. The onus is on you in how you respond or take correction. Taking correction well in our relativistic society is tough, granted. I applaud you for wading into my FB, but when you do come here ~ good, rational, linear thinking is often required… especially for changing the meaning of something for the first time in mankind’s history, and thinking there will be no societal consequences.

So you are saying correction to bad arguments chases you away? Making incoherent statements brings you closer?

DEB

I don’t want an argument… I would enjoy a discussion maybe that’s the difference

ME

You have to make points in a discussion that are coherent. You are making statements that make no sense… literally? You are tugging on peoples heart strings without engaging their mind. People should vote with the later by-the-by. Too many people vote with their emotions.

You accused me (and others) of something, but you didn’t catch it apparently. Which is fine, when you talk in the language of post-modern thought, many do not realize what they are logically concluding. Maybe you can tell me what the logical conclusion of YOU (@Deb) were telling people (really, half of the United States citizens) they believe — tell me, please:

QUOTING DEB:

“Black people and white people weren’t allowed get married years ago either… if small minded, bigoted people had their way it would still be that way. Gay marriage Is NO different…. religious folks who believe and support same sex marriage ?? They must not be real religious people.”

Please explain why I am being — how did you put it — rude and bully like — and you are not?

[….]

In other words, a discussion to you is calling me and other readers here “bigots,” and impugning the character of religious gays by creating straw-man arguments of what I (we) say/mean? And when I politely point this out by not pointing out how you name call and use “cards” (sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted ~ S.I.X.H.I.R.B.), you are being chased away?

[….]

DEB? Can you see how you are encapsulating discussion wrongly? You can answer with a simple “yes” or “no.”

DEB

NO

ME

So, Deb, calling me a bigot, and saying Jesus, Moses, Buddha, and other major world religious founders, texts, great moral thinkers are ALL bigots… is NOT rude. But me pointing out that in those statements are things learned your first semester in philosophy (how to think properly) at any university (non-sequiturs, straw-men, and argument from emotion) is rude and borderline bullying?! What a crazy world we live in. Talk about elitist thinking.

Take note as well that Deb is calling Tammy Bruce (a lesbian), Paul Nathanson (a gay man), and someone like Walt Heyer (a man who was surgically changed into a woman [mutilated], and now lives as a man again) bigots as well. Oh the twisted thinking involved in the left. (*Dramatic back of hand to the forehead pose*)

Maybe they (the gays mentioned above) just don’t know better and they need people like Deb and other elitist thinking progressives to change their mind for them… not with sound argumentation and linear thinking… just by calling them names. And painting them as bullies if they disagree.

Can you believe this?

What came to mind next is all the leftist clap-trap that Republicans are creating an atmosphere of dissent and polarization, which is my next point in the conversation:

In case you didn’t know Deeez, it is Republicans polarizing and dividing the American political landscape.

DEB

Main Entry: big·ot
Pronunciation: \ˈbi-gət\
Function: noun
Etymology: French, hypocrite, bigot
Date: 1660
: a person who is or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices ; especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance
— big·ot·ed \-gə-təd\ adjective
— big·ot·ed·ly adverb
It’s not for me to say… Everyone can decide for their self if the are or are not a bigot.

ME

Again, you are calling gay men and women bigots, not me. You are calling the majority of religious people bigots, not me. No one is treating a race or ethnic group (immutable characteristics), or in this case gays (mutable characteristics) “with hatred and intolerance.” You are inferring this via fallacious — emotional — argument to win a point in your own mind and to paint the opposition because you cannot answer them.

Most of the people I have dinner with (that are gay) are ones who would want judges (all judges) to stay out of the decisions states make. And these gay men (and women) would want exceptions made for religious institutions and organizations. The Democratic Party does not.

Again, to be clear, YOU have called all major world religious founders and religious leaders and great moral thinkers as well as gay men and women BIGOTS, simply because they disagree with you.

If you had answered “Yes” earlier, you would have shown some humility in understanding what you have done // are doing.

I myself do not hang around with racists, bigots, or the like. Why on God’s green earth would you argue, call names to, discuss, anything with one? Deb? Unless you don’t believe your own rhetoric.

[….]

And to be clear Deb, you did call me, other gays, and a large swath of religious people bigots. You *DIDN’T* let others make up their own mind. So you were not truthful when you said, “It’s not for me to say.”

Again, you said: “Black people and white people weren’t allowed get married years ago either if small minded, bigoted people had their way it would still be that way. Gay marriage Is NO different”

Ergo, people who disagree with you, are bigots. No wiggle room. And now I firmly believe you when you said, “I don’t want an argument“, I know. You would rather paint others as bigots, racists, and ignorant. And if someone shows you how your “discussion” is fallacious with any semblance of intelligence, they are bullies.

DEB

Not sure why you care what I think since my ideas are so fluffy and I get them from romance novels or whatever. I think the people who protested inter racial marriages where bigots and the same can be said of those whose protest gays right to wed. My opinion… Which is not allowed is Sean’s world – right?

ME

Just because you have a right to an opinion does not mean you have a right to whitewash people as bigots by making (*echo chamber noise effects to make the point clear*) NON-SEQUITUR, EMOTIONAL APPEAL, AND STRAW-MAN statements about people. It is fallacious thinking/speaking. So you are saying that your opinion is wrong (incoherent) and damn all others for even pointing that out.

Another analogy, it is like you are saying, “what does the color green smell like.” It doesn’t make sense. And, not only that, your opinion is a form of bigotry itself.

The conversation has effectively stalled here. She refuses to “discuss” any more the topic… just go on making statements that have nothing to do with the topic. Living in a bubble of rhetoric and opinion, with a flare for bumper sticker verbiage. Its sad, really, because you know this is how a large portion of the voters think. What is referred to as the “low-information” voter. There is no understanding of our great history, culture, and the like. Just how one feels at this moment. Again, sad.

Hobby Lobby Responds to Slanted Media with Public Statement

From Libertarian Republican:

From Eric Dondero:

Being passed around the right-o-sphere. As far as we know, we here at LR are the first explicitly libertarian group to join the effort. (Where ya at Cato, Reason, Libertarian Party?) We urge libertarian Republicans to shop Hobby Lobby. And use this latest case against any Democrats and Obama supporters you may know. Especially those who like to shop at Hobby Lobby.

Support Hobby Lobby in The Fight for Religious Liberty. The Green family isn’t only fighting for its right to religious liberty, but ours, too. Send a thank you note to the Greens (Becketfund.org) letting them know you’re standing by their side. Government forced Hobby Lobby to choose: Violate your conscience and stay in business or remain faithful to your conscience and be penalized up to 1.3 million dollars per day. Hobby Lobby chose to sue the government for their right – and ours – to operate their business in full accord with their faith.

h/t Public Catholic

Obama Admin May Do What Only China and Myanmar Have Done ~ Ban (through legislation) `Little Sisters of the Poor`

Via Gateway Pundit:

The Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic religious group for women who have dedicated their lives to the service of the elderly, is concerned that after more than a century of service the Obama Administration will force them out of the United States. The order was previously banned in China and Myanmar. The Obama Admininistration may force them out of the United States.

The religious order claims the so-called contraception mandate in ObamaCare will make it impossible for them to continue their work in the United States.

FOX News reported: