The ancient world was full of signs and portents that the high and mighty ignored at their peril. When, for example, Xerxes set out on his campaign against Greece in 480 B.C., Herodotus tells us that “a great portent” appeared. ...I thought of that episode the other day when I read of the dramatic collapse of a bridge in Pittsburgh just before Joe Biden was due to arrive to rally his troops for a further assault on American independence and prosperity.
Read the whole thing.
Brendan O’Neil writes in “Spiked”
Hippies are the most disappointing subculture, aren’t they? They always let you down. They cut their hair, become therapists or corporate sustainability advisers, and before you know it these people who wanged on about Woodstock for 50 years are being paid a fortune by The Man to badger me and you. Just look at Neil Young. The one-time cocaine-stained hero of LA’s alternative scene, singer of angry songs about Vietnam and the Kent State massacre, participant with Crosby, Stills and Nash in the Freedom of Speech Tour of 2006, is now basically pleading with a huge corporation to silence people he doesn’t like. From protest singer to agitator for capitalist censorship? What a fall…..
But …because it confirms, perfectly and horribly, that to be countercultural today is to be on the side of fear, on the side of censure, on the side of madly believing that vast, unaccountable corporate machines have the right and the responsibility to determine what the rest of us may hear and see.
The problem with this formulation is that the so-called “counterculture” of the’50s and ‘60s was “the culture” by the 70s. The people were seduced. Sex, drugs, and rock & roll was the culture to which everyone aspired. Everyone wanted to be Neil Young. If you were male, you wanted the sex that Young got. If you were female, you wanted sex with Neil young. “Just do it” was the national motto. Sex became the official cultural sport. The culture’s airways were saturated with "the culture's" songs. Sobriety was out. Pot, coke LSD were everywhere. Neil Young – all the Neil Youngs – defined the culture to this day. They got rich preaching it.
That’s power.
There were stretches of the country where people voted for squares like Richard Nixon, but they were not the “culture.” The “culture” despised and destroyed Nixon and made sure no one ever admitted voting for him.
That’s power.
The culture redefined sex. The culture redefined marriage. The culture redefined race. The culture redefined good and evil. The culture redefined freedom and slavery. The culture redefined truth and lies. The culture tells you who to hate and who to love. The masters of the culture know who you are, what you say, what your see, what you think, what you like, where you are, and where you’re going.
That’s power.
The “culture” had so much self-assurance that they never imagined that Donald Trump could beat them and be President. Shocked to the core they attacked. They loaded the election dice and showed their power by installing a mentally impaired man who campaigned from his basement.
That’s amazing power.
They are using their power to outlaw anyone who voted for him. To control the culture, they will make anyone who does not agree with them disappear. Neil Young hasn’t changed. He’s always been part of the “culture.” The “counterculture” doesn’t pay you. Appealing to the culture is where the money is.
All of these cases highlight the alarming intolerance of the woke era. There is a puritanical zeal to the new censorship. These ‘platform’-depriving mobs, these weeping millennials, are not content with simply not listening to Joe Rogan, or not buying Jordan Peterson’s books, or not watching Dave Chappelle’s specials (your loss). No, they want to make sure that nobody else can access such scandalous material, either. They are so arrogantly concerned with preserving their own moral purity that even the knowledge that Rogan’s podcast exists makes them feel uncomfortable. They consider it a pollutant to their virtue. They consider having to share the world with Joe Rogan to be an intolerable affront to the pristine moral condition they believe they live in. This is why some people have sworn to stop using Spotify if it refuses to excommunicate Rogan – because lurking behind wokeness there is the staggeringly narcissistic and borderline medieval conviction that any belief system that runs counter to one’s own must be exterminated. They require the scalps of wrongthinkers in order to feed their own moralistic hubris. Rogan is the sacrifice this hungry, conceited mob yearns for the most. It would sustain them for decades.
Hippies are the most disappointing subculture, aren’t they? They always let you down. They cut their hair, become therapists or corporate sustainability advisers, and before you know it these people who wanged on about Woodstock for 50 years are being paid a fortune by The Man to badger me and you. Just look at Neil Young. The one-time cocaine-stained hero of LA’s alternative scene, singer of angry songs about Vietnam and the Kent State massacre, participant with Crosby, Stills and Nash in the Freedom of Speech Tour of 2006, is now basically pleading with a huge corporation to silence people he doesn’t like. From protest singer to agitator for capitalist censorship? What a fall.
But also because it confirms, perfectly and horribly, that to be countercultural today is to be on the side of fear, on the side of censure, on the side of madly believing that vast, unaccountable corporate machines have the right and the responsibility to determine what the rest of us may hear and see. I wonder if the Neil Young who once went on stage with an entire rock of cocaine protruding from his nostril could have imagined that he would one day be begging the powerful to protect the little people from ‘offensive’ ideas?
After months of nationwide shortages of COVID tests in the wake of the Omicron variant surge, the Biden administration scrambled to purchase hundreds of millions of tests to send directly to Americans. The implementation has been riddled with failures, ranging from long wait times for the tests to logistical hurdles when delivering to large apartment buildings.
In announcing the contract with iHealth and two other companies, the Department of Defense said the administration will purchase almost 400 million kits in a deal that totaled nearly $2 billion. Rep. Don Bacon (R., Neb.) called the arrangement with a Chinese manufacturer "ridiculous" given China has "not been transparent one iota on what happened at Wuhan." Prior to the Pentagon contract, the FDA in December approved iHealth’s request to manufacture at-home COVID-19 tests for Americans.
The State Department's notice to Congress was issued just days after a former top Iranian official bragged about the death threats against Hook in the Iranian media. Hussein Mousavian, a former member of Iran's nuclear negotiating team who works as a Middle East security and nuclear policy specialist at Princeton University, sparked a media firestorm when he was seen touting the threats against Hook in a documentary produced by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
"I went to America and an American told me that Brian Hook's wife can't sleep, she cries and trembles, she told Brian, ‘They'll kill you,' since Hook was a partner in the death of Haj Qassem [Soleimani], that's how much they were trembling," Mousavian said in the documentary 72 Hours, produced and released this month by a company tied to the corps.
Please share widely….on and off this forum. https://t.co/D0dyy5lkic
— Trudy Seivwright MD (@SeivwrightTrudy) January 24, 2022
Dr. Aaron Kheriarty explains why doctors are extremely hesitant to write mask and/or vaccine medical exemptions
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) January 24, 2022
Wow!!@akheriaty pic.twitter.com/kUzRW6VHNb
If you only watch one thing today make it this pic.twitter.com/kTmtuPpraj
— Yvonne Burton Ephesians 6:12 (@_YvonneBurton) January 24, 2022
Integrity. Dignity. Community.
Integrity is a commitment to truth, in what you say, how you live, and how you treat others.
Dignity flows from respect, for ourselves, for each other, and for the world we live in.
Community is what binds us together, to each other, and gives our lives purpose and meaning.
Saint Augustine, the doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, famously said “The truth is like a Lion. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself.”
Harry Truman, a warrior against war profiteering, famously said “I just tell the truth, and they think it’s hell”.
These are my truths, and I believe that they are self-evident.
We should not have politicized the public health response to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.
Regarding the genetic COVID vaccines, the science is settled.
They are not working, and they are not completely safe.
Now we have Omicron. These vaccines were designed for the Original Wuhan strain, a different virus. Whether they made sense for protecting our elderly and frail from the original virus is irrelevant. So let’s stop arguing about that. We must look forward.
These vaccines do not prevent Omicron infection, viral replication, or spread to others. In our daily lives, with our friends, with our families, we all know that this is true.
These genetic vaccines are leaky, have poor durability, and even if every man, woman, and child in the United States were vaccinated, these products cannot achieve herd immunity and stop COVID. They are not completely safe, and the full nature of the risks remain unknown. In contrast, the natural immunity which healty immune systems develop after infection and recovery from COVID is long lasting, broad, and highly protective from disease and death caused by this virus.
If there is risk, there must be choice.
This is the fundamental bedrock truth of modern bioethics.
All medical procedures, vaccines, and drugs have risks.
All of us have the right to understand those risks, and to decide for ourselves whether we willingly accept those risks.
To deny this is to deny human dignity.
Read the whole thing.
Peter Schweizer on Life, Liberty and Levin: "the Biden family, while he was vice president and continuing when he became president, received some $31 million from Chinese individuals who we're linked to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence"
Bernstein's parents were members of the Communist Party. But, in his memoir, the famed Watergate sleuth plays dodge with the extent of their involvement with the Party. He was called out for this not by conservatives, but by radical lefty Martin Duberman in “Bernstein’s Left-Wing Legacy,” a 1989 review in The Washington Post. Duberman chided Bernstein for not defending his parents’ Communism, and thus revealing that Bernstein may have been hiding something about his family’s true links to that murderous and evil false religion.
Would it bother you to find out that his parents were Nazis? Keep in mind that Communists killed more people than the Nazis.
You can see my full interview with @MarkSteynOnline on @GBNEWS here (beginning at 39:39):https://t.co/KoX7stgIch
— David Frost (@DavidGHFrost) January 21, 2022
Those who believed that Joe Biden was a good man and a calming influence have short memories.
Less than ten years ago Biden shouted to a crowd of Black Democrats in Danville, Virginia that Mitt Romney was going “to put you back in chains.”
He led the “high tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas during his nomination hearing.
Biden has always been a demagogue, simply not a very successful one until the Democrats decide to roll him out one more time to be a figurehead for a rigged election.
sorry, I cant get over this moment from the Texas synagogue briefing. The attacker literally walked into a synagogue and took Jews hostage and you think he wasn't focused on the Jewish community? He literally attacked a synagogue and you're not even calling it antisemitism? pic.twitter.com/EBXSMDW0v7
— Ayman (@AymanM) January 17, 2022
1. I've told this story before, but just before the pandemic hit I was at a fancy dinner party in a foreign country surrounded by some of the world's best and brightest. We began to openly speculate about the impact the virus would have on the United States...
2. Even in those days we knew the virus would be particularly deadly for the elderly, and so after verbalizing this concern, a colleague- who has since gone on to have an impressive career in a prestigious field- scoffed...3. He reminded me that the most susceptible were undoubtedly old, white Americans from "places that voted for Trump," and that their disappearance would do more for the country than attempts to prolong their lives.His comment was warmly received by several others.4. I was taken aback and didn't have much to say after that, but I've never forgotten that conversation and how it felt to listen to someone so educated and advantaged display such contempt for the people from back home- my people.
Never not true (courtesy of @exjon) pic.twitter.com/MSDJJ8Y6cW
— Kevin Creighton (@ExurbanKevin) January 17, 2022
Within hours of taking office, Virginia's newly sworn-in Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) cleaned house - firing dozens of lawyers, including those in the Civil Rights division - and announcing investigations into the Virginia Parole Board and Loudon County Public Schools.According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Miyares notified around 30 staff members they're being let go - including 17 attorneys and 13 staff members. The attorneys include the solicitor general, Herring's deputies, and reportedly Helen Hardiman - an assistant AG who worked on housing discrimination.
It appears that the new Republicans running Virginia have learned a lesson from the failures of the Trump administration. The biggest mistake that Trump made was failing to fire the bureaucrats who spent the entire four years of his term obstructing, undermining, and sabotaging his administration.
CHANGE:
● New Va. Gov. Youngkin issues executive orders on COVID mandates, CRT and more. “Executive Order Number Two delivers on his Day One promise to empower Virginia parents in their children’s education and upbringing by allowing parents to make decisions on whether their child wears a mask in school.”
● Winsome Sears to make history as first woman — and Black woman — to be Virginia’s Lt. Governor.
Stories you won't find in the Virginian Pilot
So the investigation which might reveal what happened and what various board members knew about what happened and what they did about it can’t be shown to parents…for the sake of the families. That’s what they’re going with. Unfortunately for the school board, one of those families has already released a statement demanding the report be released: “The question must be asked—how can an outside independent investigation, funded by the taxpayers, not be released and is instead kept secret from the public?” The statement ends, “…our lawyers will reveal the truth during the course of our Title IX lawsuit against Loudoun County.”
WUHAN—Well, this can't be good: an investigative journalist—a real one, not a "journalist" who complains about pronouns in videogames on Twitter—managed to infiltrate the Wuhan Institute of Virology. What they saw concerned them: for one thing, there appeared to be multiple vials of a mysterious substance, all of them labeled "Save for 2024 election."
Someone had scrawled the words on the vials in red marker, warning lab workers not to open the vials until they're needed in 2024.
"What's that?" the journalist asked in an audio recording from her phone.
"That? Oh, that is nothing!" replied one scientist.
"Then why does it say that on the vial?" she asked.
"Because we want nothing bad to happen in 2024 so we are going to release the bottle with nothing in it that year. For good luck."
She then narrowly escaped with her life as she saw the lab worker pressing the room's "release the monkeys" button.
"This, uh, doesn't seem good," said one political commentator. "I guess I shouldn't have thrown all those masks away."
At publishing time, sources had confirmed the handwriting was in English and matched Dr. Fauci's.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—The White House is releasing new details surrounding President Biden’s plan to send free facemasks to every American. In an effort to save time, the free masks will be shipped directly to landfills nationwide.“The science tells us that wearing a high-quality mask over your nose and mouth probably might possibly help prevent COVID maybe,” said press secretary Jen Psaki. “Therefore, the President is committed to making sure every American has access to a medium-quality government mask manufactured by the lowest bidder.”“That being said, we realize that anyone who wants to wear a mask probably owns several dozen already,” Psaki continued. “We also know that many others want your grandmother to die and thus refuse to wear masks at all. So, to save money, we’ll be shipping all masks directly to local landfills.”Joe Marsecci, chairman of the Masked Citizens Environmental Alliance, praised the Biden administration’s decision. “The decision to ship these masks directly to the landfill saves both time and money, as well as reducing carbon emissions from delivery and waste-hauling services,” Marsecci said. “The only thing more ecologically responsible would be dumping all the masks directly into the ocean.”At press time, the White House was denying reports that Biden’s plan to purchase 500 million facemasks was in any way related to his son Hunter being named chairman of the board of a large Ukrainian facemask conglomerate.
FBI official stonewalls when asked by Cruz if Ray Epps was an asset | FreePressers https://t.co/uyCm1VSlMC
— Ivan "Lovable, Tolerant, Hate Has No Home " Alaska (@Ivanalaska) January 14, 2022
Because we care (about our profits): Parody ad mocking Pfizer goes viral | FreePressers https://t.co/j2Cw96ZGR2
— Ivan "Lovable, Tolerant, Hate Has No Home " Alaska (@Ivanalaska) January 14, 2022
Report: Inflation Now Higher Than Biden’s Approval Rating https://t.co/vVIgK62ADU via @TheBabylonBee
— Ivan "Lovable, Tolerant, Hate Has No Home " Alaska (@Ivanalaska) January 14, 2022
FBI Promises To Make Hoaxes Less Obvious This Year https://t.co/1lSgWdfMCc via @TheBabylonBee
— Ivan "Lovable, Tolerant, Hate Has No Home " Alaska (@Ivanalaska) January 14, 2022
Even a blind pig, as the saying goes, can find a truffle once in a while. And when the porker in question is the Biden administration, including the president himself, any sign of acuity or even sentience is welcome. During last week’s orgy of Democrat schadenfreude over the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 “insurrection” of unarmed Americans wandering through the hall of the Capitol and taking selfies – when not being murdered by trigger-happy policemen – Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., delivered himself of this remark: “I’ve said it many times… we are in a battle for the soul of America.”
Well, it’s true – he has said it many times, especially near the end of the campaign in 2020. The phrase has been a staple of the Democrats’ repertoire of cliches, right up there with “good-paying jobs,” “build back better,” and promises to “shut down” Covid-19. And it’s also true that we are, indeed, a battle for the soul of America – although references to “soul” are pretty funny coming from the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition.
Let's go, Brandon! No joke.
Pretty funny coming from a party that traces its lineage back to slaveholder Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party, and whose first vice president, Aaron Burr, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers.
Pretty funny coming from the party that seceded from the Union upon the election of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln; took up arms against the United States; fought a bloody civil war; and assassinated Lincoln just a few days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in 1865.
The Headline: Adapting to the virus
The sudden swerve is enough to give the reader whiplash. Until Biden surrendered to Covid, the press (and that includes the Virginian Pilot) were all about eradicating the virus. Now suddenly, our press overlords tell us we have to live with it.
Better communication, guidance, testing, resolve all needed
to fight COVID-19.
Wait, are we going to fight it or learn to live with it? Think the common cold or the seasonal flu, both viral infections like Covid; do we constantly test for these?
Just as the start of the new year provides individuals an
opportunity for a fresh start, the omicron variant of COVID-19 should encourage
public and health officials to rethink how our nation and our communities
battle this disease from now on.
The hope for eradicating COVID is gone. We must find ways to
manage the disease, to protect the vulnerable and to live with the virus in the
safest, most workable way possible.
Biden gives the OK to admit that the virus will be with us and NOW the press decides that we must learn to live with it. Something that got you labeled a conspiracy theorist mere weeks ago is now declared common sense. Many prominent virologists said this a year ago but were branded “fringe” by the CDC , Dr. “I am SCIENCE” Fauci and their allies in the press .
That should begin at the top. One year ago, President Joe
Biden rolled out a comprehensive national strategy for battling the virus. It
emphasized vaccinations, testing and other mitigation strategies, use of the
Defense Production Act, and efforts to open schools and businesses.
The Pilot doesn’t explain how Biden’s “comprehensive national strategy” was any different from the plans developed by the previous administration. Vaccines were developed under the Trump administration who also recommend looking for drugs to treat those who got sick, used the Defense Production Act to build ventilators and personal protective gear and advocated opening schools. But that was in 2021 when the Pilot was blaming Covid on Trump and advocating closing in-person learning in schools.
That strategy worked — until it didn’t.
Forget the fact that more people died under Biden than Trump.
COVID variants — first delta, then omicron — opened new
fronts in the war on this virus.
Viruses mutate so the variants were totally expected, except to the Pilot’s editors. In fact, viruses often mutate because of vaccines developed to manage the original variant.
A stubborn reluctance to get the vaccine served as fuel for
that fire.
Blaming the unvaccinated is becoming more and more laughable as the vaccinated are getting Covid despite getting the shot plus one, two, many boosters. And it's begging to come out that the vaccinated are MORE likely to get the Omicron variant.
And political differences proved too polarizing for some
communities to overcome.
Right! Telling the people with natural immunity or who had medical doubts about the vaccines that they were killing grandma was not polarizing at all. Telling people who have their doubts about vaccinations that they would lose their jobs and could not leave their homes was not polarizing at all.
There are plenty of things the federal government should
have done better, especially when it comes to testing. It is also inexcusable
that Americans must translate instructions from the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control about proper testing and quarantine procedures, and Biden’s December
announcement that his administration would provide rapid tests to Americans
free of charge came months too late.
Having a test to see what’s making you sick is a good idea, but how testing is supposed to be THE key to adapting to the virus is never made clear. If you test positive for Covid but don’t get sick, what does that tell you? One thing it tells you is that Covid is not nearly as deadly as the hysterics in the press pretended.
The strain of those failures is evident in Hampton Roads.
On Friday, Sentara Healthcare announced it would postpone
“all hospital-based non-emergent [sic] surgeries, procedures and diagnostic
testing” in order to handle the growing influx of patients infected with omicron.
A Chesapeake testing event scheduled for Monday was postponed for lack of staff
(again, thanks to COVID infections).
A real newspaper would ask Sentara just how busy their facilities are with patients who are there because of the virus or because they are there for other reasons but tested positive. In New Yor City emergency hospital facilities were constructed, and hospital ships were deployed that were never used. That influx of Covid patients never happened even in the nation’s epicenter of Covid. Remember “two weeks to flatten the curve?” Incidentally, how many of the staffing problems were caused by firing staff who refused to get the shot?
It’s not just affecting health care. Schools are returning
to virtual learning because teachers or critical support staff — bus drivers,
in particular — are infected. Government agencies are shutting their doors
temporarily; Virginia Beach Department of Human Services was closed on Monday.
More will follow.
It’s simply not true that schools are closing because teachers are infected. Teacher unions are refusing to teach for a number of reasons. Children are simply not in serious danger because of the virus. Teachers are not in serious danger because they can be infected by students. European schools have been operating regularly all through this epidemic. But getting paid for not working seems to be something that teachers like.
Some have called this the “D.I.Y. wave” of COVID because
Americans have been left to determine for themselves when to get tested (and
how to find a test), when to quarantine (and for how long), when to get a
booster (and where), when to wear a mask (and where it’s required), and so on.
This was once called freedom. People decding things for themselves. Evidently, our overlords don’t like this.
Two years into the global pandemic, you might think that
we’d be better at this. You’d hope that the self-proclaimed “greatest country
in the world” could come together to battle a virus that’s claimed more than
835,000 American lives.
The Virginian Pilot continues to parrot this claim of deaths attributed to Covid. It's a lie and even the CDC is gradually forced to admit that dying of Covid and dying with Covid are not the same thing. Apparently, the Pilot employs hysterics who form their opinions by watching “The View.”
We should be capable of providing clear, straightforward
guidance so Americans know what to do when faced with another wave of
infections, at providing the tools so people can make smart decisions to limit
the spread of disease, and at demonstrating the collective resolve needed to help
health care workers and health systems endure yet another wave of illness and
death.
The virus has evolved but we have not evolved with it.
At this point, we should be worried about hospitalizations
and deaths rather than case numbers, to better focus our concern on the
problem.
Again: who is the “we” the Pilot talks about? Look at yourself in the mirror.
We should be making decisions about schools and businesses
based on factors such as community infection and vaccination rates, to make
every effort to keep them open and operational.
Who is the “we” the Pilot talks about? Is this the Pilot that every day advocates that schools should be closed and people wear masks indoors, outdoors and while driving alone in your car?
We should be focusing efforts on vaccination, testing and
mitigation measures (such as masks) but also improving ventilation and
rethinking how we use shared public spaces.
All efforts should be made to protect the vulnerable, but
our public policies will have to increase our capacity for risk.
We need better communication from elected officials — Biden,
yes, but also Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin as he prepares to take office and those
in local positions — as well as leaders in public health.
And we will need more from individuals, who shouldn’t need
government to tell them to wear a mask indoors, but who do it because it
protects themselves and others.
Another call for Covid theater. Masks, especially the masks people buy in the story, don’t work to stop the virus. It’s theater for the uninformed.
Thoughtful adaptation is our only way forward. All have a
role to play.
The role of the Virginian Pilot is to shut up and let people make their own decisions about their own health care and stop spreading fear and hysteria with fake data. How about setting up a Truth Commission to force the press to admit the lies they have spread, not just in the last two years but in the 4 years before that. That may be the way for the press to begin the long, slow road to rehabilitation in the eyes of the public. The nation needs a press it can trust, not a press that spreads lies.
