Biden: I Did That!

 Another fun meme from Patriot Post: 

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Politics Descends Upon American Medicine

 

image credit:  mikelweisser.org

Robert Graboyes has a disturbing piece at Discourse Magazine, “A new guidance document for medical professionals emphasizes critical race theory and social justice at the expense of patient care.”  Here are some extracts:

In October, two of the most powerful medical organizations in America—the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Association of Medical Colleges—released “Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts,” or AHE. Its 54 densely packed pages admonish American physicians to regiment their speech to conform with woke terminology. The document implores doctors to abandon ordinary expressions in favor of politically charged, politically correct circumlocutions.

Medical professionals are now expected to traverse a linguistic minefield, abandoning hundreds of familiar expressions and replacing them with tortured academic cadences. Failure to conform, the document implies, is a severe moral failing.

This is not merely replacing the simple with the sesquipedalian. The doctor’s every utterance must contain an air of accusation. When someone is ill, it is because someone else is to blame. Previously, a caring doctor might have told an African American patient that his lineage makes him especially vulnerable to diabetes. No more. In woke-speak, the word “vulnerable” is verboten. Now, the doctor must refer to the patient as “oppressed,” “made vulnerable” or “disenfranchised.” Someone, or some grotesque societal failing, is to blame for the patient’s higher-than-average risk of diabetes. The explanation for this particular lexical shift is representative of AHE’s tone and worldview. . .

. . .

The entire document reads like final exam essays written by a student who forgot to study—endless strings of half-remembered vocabulary words assembled randomly in hopes that the professor will count the words but not read them. Every med student, every doctor in America must endure hundreds of such homilies and conform or be weighed in the balance and found wanting. Doctors must abandon the notion that a patient bears some individual responsibility for his or her health status. Whatever ails you, somebody out there did it to you. In the search for scapegoats, AHE taps into the fashionable academic catechisms of critical race theory and intersectionality and swears fealty to both.

. . .

In “We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage: Say No to the Woke Revolution,” Bari Weiss masterfully describes the wokeness phenomenon. While she does not specifically address AHE, her descriptions provide a valuable lens on the document. Woke ideology “begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. . . . [P]ersuasion . . . is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings. . . . Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.”

. . .

Public health exhibits a recurring pattern: (1) Declare that X is now a public health issue. (2) Declare that X is in crisis. (3) Flout legal and constitutional norms to quell said crisis. During the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared that housing evictions were within the realm of public health and that evictions in high-infection areas constituted a crisis. The CDC therefore assumed authority to ban residential evictions, nullifying state property laws nationwide. (The U.S. Supreme Court eventually curtailed the CDC’s presumed authority.)

Full article is here.

RELATED:  Ted Noel, MD:  "The NIH Is Going Full Gestapo" at TruthBasedMedia. 

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Dr Scott Atlas Exposes The Real COVID Disaster

 

Jeffery A. Tucker at the Brownstone Institute reviews Dr Scott Atlas’s book chronicling his time as an advisor in the Trump White House, and his analyses of the COVID hoaxes (h/t Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge):

A President Betrayed by Bureaucrats:
Scott Atlas’s Masterpiece on the Covid Disaster

I’m a voracious reader of Covid books but nothing could have prepared me for Scott Atlas’s A Plague Upon Our House, a full and mind-blowing account of the famed scientist’s personal experience with the Covid era and a luridly detailed account of his time at the White House. The book is hot fire, from page one to the last, and will permanently affect your view of not only this pandemic and the policy response but also the workings of public health in general. 

Atlas’s book has exposed a scandal for the ages. It is enormously valuable because it fully blows up what seems to be an emerging fake story involving a supposedly Covid-denying president who did nothing vs. heroic scientists in the White House who urged compulsory mitigating measures consistent with prevailing scientific opinion. Not one word of that is true. Atlas’s book, I hope, makes it impossible to tell such tall tales without embarrassment. 

Anyone who tells you this fictional story (including Deborah Birx) deserves to have this highly credible treatise tossed in his direction. The book is about the war between real science (and genuine public health), with Atlas as the voice for reason both before and during his time in the White House, vs. the enactment of brutal policies that never stood any chance of controlling the virus while causing tremendous damage to the people, to human liberty, to children in particular, but also to billions of people around the world. 

For the reader, the author is our proxy, a reasonable and blunt man trapped in a world of lies, duplicity, backstabbing, opportunism, and fake science. He did his best but could not prevail against a powerful machine that cares nothing for facts, much less outcomes. 

. . .

Throughout the book, Atlas points to the enormous cost of the machinery of lockdowns, the preferred method of Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx: missed cancer screenings, missed surgeries, nearly two years of educational losses, bankrupted small business, depression and drug overdoses, overall citizen demoralization, violations of religious freedom, all while public health massively neglected the actual at-risk population in long-term care facilities. Essentially, they were willing to dismantle everything we called civilization in the name of bludgeoning one pathogen without regard to the consequences. 

The review does include some criticism, but it nevertheless concludes with this:

We all owe Atlas an enormous debt of gratitude, for it was he who persuaded the Florida governor to choose the path of focused protection as advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration, which Atlas cites as the “single document that will go down as one of the most important publications in the pandemic, as it lent undeniable credibility to focused protection and provided courage to thousands of additional medical scientists and public health leaders to come forward.”

Atlas experienced the slings, arrows, and worse. The media and the bureaucrats tried to shut him up, shut him down, and body bag him professionally and personally. Cancelled, meaning removed from the roster of functional, dignified human beings. Even colleagues at Stanford University joined in the lynch mob, much to their disgrace. And yet this book is that of a man who has prevailed against them.

In that sense, this book is easily the most crucial first-person account we have so far. It is gripping, revealing, devastating for the lockdowners and their vaccine-mandating successors, and a true classic that will stand the test of time. It’s simply not possible to write the history of this disaster without a close examination of this erudite first-hand account. 

The full review is here.  Highly recommended.

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Top 5 Reasons NOT to Get a Covid Booster Shot

 

S.D. Wells has the latest updates on COVID boosters (published at NOQ Report).  If most of what Wells reports is true, then everyone should think twice before considering getting a booster shot:

Top 5 Reasons NOT to Get a Covid Booster Shot, Ever

Some people dove right in, and others waded into the vaccine “underworld.” Now, the undertow of vaccine “boosters” is dragging everyone further into the immunocompromised abyss. Tens of millions of Americans who believe in vaccines got snookered and thought there was just going to be the one vaccine, or a short series, but now they’re all starting to see the deep, dark “waters” of gene therapy injections, and it’s looking really gloomy.

The plan is for every person to take booster after booster after booster, and for America, like many other countries around the world, the plot thickens and the damage to major body systems is already rearing its ugly head, including vascular clots, antibody-dependence enhancement syndrome and sudden “unexplainable” deaths.

There are many reasons to never, ever get booster shots for Covid, but we’ve boiled it down to the top five.

1. It’s not really a vaccine, but rather a gene therapy shot that causes blood clots, myocarditis and cancer.
2. You’ll have to keep getting them every 4 to 6 months for the rest of your shortened life.
3. Each one increases your antibody dependence enhancement syndrome (ADE) that began with the first dose, weakening your immune system more and more each time.
4. Actual “safe” and “effective” vaccines take years to create, test and get a true and complete approval, so each booster is a total “shot in the dark,” like playing Russian roulette.
5. The CDC keeps changing the “facts” about Covid vaccines, including how they work, how long they work, which viruses they work for, and the scary warning labels.

If you or some loved ones have been vaccinated for Covid, you may still have a good chance of escaping the deadly “currents” that await everyone else. Fraudulent Fauci, Mr. Covid himself, recently admitted on a New York Times podcast that the vaccines are wearing off very fast, losing their ability to protect people against infection, hospitalization and death. . . .

Read the rest here.  Report includes sources. 

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Victor Davis Hanson: The Pillars of Our Civilization

 

Victor Davis Hanson is not optimistic.  He concludes his American Greatness essay “Losing Confidence in the Pillars of Our Civilization”:

In the current crime wave, brazen lawbreakers enjoy de facto immunity. Mass looting goes unpunished. Indictments are often aimed as much against those who defend themselves as against criminals who attack the innocent.

Conservatives now have lost their former traditional confidence in the administration of justice, in the intelligence and investigatory agencies, in the nation’s military leadership, in the media, and the criminal justice system. 

No one yet knows what the effect will be of half the country losing faith in the very pillars of American civilization.

His full article is here.  

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What Thanksgiving means To Americans

 

Image credit: en.wikipedia.org

Re-posted from earlier Cleveland Tea Party Thanksgiving blogs:

What Thanksgiving really means To Americans

A couple of years ago, Jerry Bowyer, writing in Forbes Magazine, recounted the real significance of Thanksgiving, a significance that is too often lost among the turkey dinners, football games, and stories about Indians who befriended the early settlers. 

In 1620, the Plymouth pilgrims based their original community on Plato’s Republic, a collective model that appealed to their religious convictions and morality. But the communal model didn’t work for them. After two years of failing harvests and resulting malnutrition, disease, starvation, and deaths, the pilgrims replaced the communal model with a model based on private property. The ensuing harvest was abundant, with surpluses available for trade.

Their Thanksgiving celebrated the triumph of the individual, private property, and incentive, over collectivism. At first, the pilgrims felt guilty because they were putting self-interest over the seeming altruism of socialism. Yet the devout survivors had learned two lessons: 1) that a theoretical and Utopian collective society fails, and (2) in real life, private property and capitalism produce prosperity. For them, God, not Plato, knew best. Accepting the principles of private property and self-interest was God’s way of harnessing self-interest to the greater good. We know all of this because an elder and Governor of the Plymouth plantation, William Bradford, kept a journal and it survives today. Mr. Bowyer’s earlier article, with additional historical background, is here.) 

Here’s Bowyer's “How A Failed Commune Gave Us What is Now Thanksgiving.”

It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom. One of the earliest and arguably most historically significant North American colonies was Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. As I’ve outlined in greater detail here before (Lessons From a Capitalist Thanksgiving), the original colony had written into its charter a system of communal property and labor. 

As William Bradford recorded in his Of Plymouth Plantation, a people who had formerly been known for their virtue and hard work became lazy and unproductive. Resources were squandered, vegetables were allowed to rot on the ground and mass starvation was the result. And where there is starvation, there is plague. 

After 2 1/2 years, the leaders of the colony decided to abandon their socialist mandate and create a system which honored private property. The colony survived and thrived and the abundance which resulted was what was celebrated at that iconic Thanksgiving feast.

As my friend Reuven Brenner has taught me, history is a series of experiments: The Human Gamble. Some gambles work and are adopted by history and some do not and should be abandoned by it. The problem is that the human gamble only works if there is a record of experimental outcomes and if decision makers consult that record. For many years, the story of the first failed commune of Plymouth Bay was part of the collective memory of American students. But Progressive Education found that story unhelpful and it has fallen into obscurity, which explains why (as I alluded to before) a well-educated establishment figure like Jared Bernstein would be unaware of it.

I’m often asked why our current leadership class forgets the lessons of the past so often. They are, after all, very smart men and women. Don’t they know that collectivism will fail?

No, they don’t. Not anymore. For much of our history, our leaders were educated in the principles which were to help them avoid errors once they have joined the ruling class. They studied to learn how to not misuse power. Now our leaders learn nothing of the dangers of abusing power: their education is entirely geared to its acquisition.  All of their neurons are trained on that one objective – to get to the top. What they do when they get there is a matter for later. And what happens to the country when they’re done with their experiments is beside the point: after all, their experiments will not really affect them personally. History is the story of the limitations of human power. But the limits of power is a topic for people who doubt themselves and their right to rule, not the self-anointed.

That’s how it is now, and that’s how it was in 1620. The charter of the Plymouth Colony reflected the most up-to-date economic, philosophical and religious thinking of the early 17th century. Plato was in vogue then, and Plato believed in central planning by intellectuals in the context of communal property, centralized state education, state centralized cultural offerings and communal family structure. For Plato, it literally did take a village to raise a child. This collectivist impulse reflected itself in various heretical offshoots of Protestant Christianity with names like The True Levelers, and the Diggers, mass movements of people who believed that property and income distinctions should be eliminated, that the wealthy should have their property expropriated and given to what we now call the 99%. This kind of thinking was rife in the 1600s and is perhaps why the Pilgrim settlers settled for a charter which did not create a private property system.

But the Pilgrims learned and prospered. And what they learned, we have forgotten and we fade.  Now, new waves of ignorant masses flood into parks and public squares. New Platonists demand control of other people’s property. New True Levelers legally occupy the prestige pulpits of our nation, secular and sacred. And now, as then, the productive class of our now gigantic, colony-turned-superpower, learn and teach again, the painful lessons of history. Collectivism violates the iron laws of human nature. It has always failed. It is always failing, and it will always fail. I thank God that it is failing now. Providence is teaching us once again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Rittenhouse Verdict and “Funded riots”

 

image at cartoonmovement.com

A contributor to TheAmericanSun named Fred Watson Jr. posted a column in the aftermath of the not-guilty verdict for Kyle Rittenhouse.  Mr. Watson begins:

On August 25, 2020, a seventeen year old young man shot and killed two convicted felons to death and shot and disarmed another. It was all caught on livestream. Within two days, charges were filed against that young shooter for a flurry of offenses. On November 19, 2021, a jury acquitted that young shooter of all charges. The trial, both actual judicial proceedings and broader media persecution, of Kyle Rittenhouse was complete. Society now has to live with the consequences of our new era of political trial spectacles.

. . .

Who did answer? A seventeen year old, doughy faced kid. He protected where his family lived, where he worked. He went and cleaned up the mess rioters made. He showed amazing cool under pressure and marksmanship to take out multiple attackers. He did it all alone with a mob chasing him. He shamed an entire group of people: right wingers. Someone finally stood up to the months’ worth of mobs and it was a kid. He became a folk hero overnight and energized an entire faction of America. Someone had finally said enough. Someone had finally stood their ground. He was the right’s boy, and they would defend his actions. It was all on tape, and he had defended his community and self. His instincts were all right and intentions were from the heart yet he was persecuted by our warped regime for it.

And he concludes:

This is going to repeat itself. Funded riots are a way of life for the left now. The procedure is in place for more instances like Kenosha because the upper echelons of the right allow them to happen. When Sen. Romney marches with BLM, there is no leadership. White America, right wing America, is on its own. The events of 2020 made that clear. The post-verdict outrage from the left, from top to bottom on social media, makes it clear that there is no de-escalation. The events of the 2020s will only ramp up the tension. The riot indulgence will not go away. Will the self-defense veto remain?

This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end or even the end of the beginning. This is the beginning of the show trial era. Low level civil conflict is already here. America will see more of these flashpoints. The right needs to become fully aware of the stakes and circumstances so that these situations do not arise, and when they do, whatever protective powers are available, are still available for its people. Laws must be enacted. State power must be wielded. Consequences must be real for the left’s random soldiers spread throughout our nation at every level and institution. There were too many structural features geared towards a left wing victory. It seemed God was on Kyle’s side and a competent defense team. God? How else to explain the one surviving assailant being the one to testify and bolster Kyle’s case? How else to explain Kyle shooting three ex-cons and missing the one black who attacked him. The right will have to get off its ass and realize no man on a white horse is going to clean everything up. It’ll have to stop relying on a system thoroughly dominated by the left. The right is going to have to stop letting one boy watch the wolves.

Read the rest here. Sobering.

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