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.
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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.
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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"
