Biden and buddies in Google--ban virus information

Google owns YouTube, so by analogy, owns President Biden. This is a clear definition of Fascism. Where government uses private businesses to control its citizens. It's definitely not sending mean tweets or making deals with Israel or asking Mexico to keep illegals behind the border which some of my Democrat friends got hysterical about and drew moustaches on cartoons of Trump . While allowing some of our most serious enemies abroad, and vicious Leftists who claim to be Americans to keep a platform to spew lies and violence, YouTube has removed 130,000 videos which they claim are "misinformation" about vaccines. Even Robert Kennedy Jr.

YouTube bans all anti-vax content, not just COVID-19 related (nypost.com)

Why 80 million Americans like Trump

I posted this a year ago, and nothing has changed, except the man in the White House is a puppet and a bumbling fool who took us all down in August over Afghanistan. We have sunk so far since January.

"Some people are with Trump because he's the only president who has ever been strongly pro-life. (me)
Others support him because he's the only president who has come through with solid, constitutionalists for all the courts (plural).

Others support him because he won't steal their legally owned guns.

Others support him because they want their good health insurance back which Obama stole from them.
Others love that he has done what no others have been bold enough to do with Israel and her enemies that surround her.

Others realize he's right to call out identity politics, critical race theory and the racists on the Left. It's systemic Marxism.

Others like him because they didn't elect the administrative state (aka deep state) to run the country.

Others know he doesn't judge by skin color or ethnicity but looks at skill, character, and quality.

Others love that he isn't wasting our tax dollars on international agreements that never benefit the U.S.

Others like him because he pushes back on behalf of the little guy."

More money for failed Head Start in the budget bill

"Since 1965, Head Start has been a sinkhole for taxpayer dollars and an ineffective education program for children. And yet, proponents—hand in glove with Congress—want to model hundreds of billions of dollars in the $3.5 trillion tax-and-spending package on it."

It now costs more than $10,200 per participant.

Pre-K Funding in $3.5T Spending Bill Is Modeled After Failed Head Start (dailysignal.com)

One of the problems I see in all Biden's programs is the "no legacy" legacy of Barack Obama.  If there were ever evidence for this administration being Obama 2.0, it is the trillions now being thrown at Obama's failures in the Build Back Better spending bill.  It includes a $3 billion “tree equity” outlay for planting saplings and $25 million on “anti-discrimination and bias training” in the healthcare industry — as well as nearly $79 billion for the Internal Revenue Service to step up its enforcement of tax laws. (Don't spend more than $600 or you might get audited.)  And now this boondoggle.  The belief apparently is that it was lack of money, not lack of history, of common sense, and his own racism.

September 30 is the feast day of St. Jerome, patron saint of librarians and libraries as well as archivists, translators and encyclopedists. It is celebrated in the Catholic Church for this canonized saint and Doctor of the Church and as a day of commemoration in Lutheran churches. I was aware of this since I was a librarian, but it was not until 2009 and we were on a tour of the Holy Land that I visited his cave where it is said he translated holy scripture into the language of the people, which was then Latin. It took him 30 years. According to St. Augustine, St. Jerome had a remarkable knowledge not only of Latin and Greek, but also of Hebrew and Chaldaic, and had read almost every author. He translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew, and, at the command of Pope Damasus, the New Testament from the Greek. Besides this, he translated into Latin the writings of many learned men, and enriched Christian learning from his own pen.

 
He wrote many letters over 50 years which document the history of religious controversies and squabbles among Christians about scripture (imagine that!) and also his own sarcastic and sharp temperament.

 
And today we think we've accomplished something if we send a text or hit send on a blog or Facebook post. Even librarians, who should know better.

https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/saints/jerome-625

Our medical ethics, rules and Covid

In 1974 President Nixon signed the National Research Act which established the National Commission for the Protection of Human subjects, requiring Public Health Service to promulgate regulations for the protection of human subjects. This was necessary because until the 1970s, our government was engaged in some pretty dicey research, like experiments on living aborted humans removed from the womb by c-section, testing products and procedures on mentally challenged adults, and perhaps the most famous, the Tuskegee syphillis study on black males. But in over 40 years, we haven't moved the needle that far. Primarily, because academics and bureaucrats are so smart and devious.

I am vaccinated, and will wear a mask if the venue requires it or if there are crowds. (Even though I know the research on masks is contradictory and confusing and almost useless outside a medical setting.) That said, I believe the mandates, passports and cancel culture attacks on anyone who suggests treatments rather than vaccines is in violation of laws already on the books.

 
You see, elected Democrats (they believe stealing our rights is "progressive") and some very unethical Republicans are willing to go around all our protections, and the unelected bureaucrats (like Fauci) and lobbyists (Big Pharma, Big Tech) don't seem to be constrained by any code of ethics, laws, regulations or even common sense. And we have no way to get rid of them.

Biden's record of disaster

Earlier this year, Twitter expelled President Trump from its platform, citing the danger that he would incite violence. As Kabul fell in mid-August, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid tweeted updates on the progress of his comrades. His account has been active without interruption since 2017. R. R. Reno, First Things, Oct. 2021.

This makes Twitter a supporter of the Taliban, and Biden a fascist. Fascism is a form of government which rules through private businesses to achieve socialist goals.

As the MSM get a bit squeamish wondering who is in charge, the real reporters like Lara Logan are taking the pulse of Afghanistan and noting the slaughter of minor tribes and an underground railroad to help those who Biden left behind that is quickly running out of food and water.

 
Bush made a terrible mistake thinking he could infuse democracy into a medieval state controlled by fundamentalist Muslim warring tribes. Obama made it worse by increasing the troops to 100,000. Trump ran on getting out, and we know from his love of country and his Christian values he would have never left Americans behind.

 
Then Biden jumps in, he creates a hasty exit, leaving a disaster not only for Americans, those Afghans who helped us, all the nations who worked with us, but also all those other vulnerable countries in the Middle East.

If there was ever a President who wanted to tear down the United States, its reputation and its values, it is Biden--or whoever is pulling the stings of the puppet government with his demented persona as spokesperson.

The big reveal

 

He's mad at the people destroying America, and there are many

Michael Smith has a good analysis of the footsteps we're walking in.  From Facebook post.

"I've been reading and studying a number of economic collapses from history - from the crash of tulip bulbs to Venezuela - there are certain aspects, certain markers, that were easily recognizable before each of the collapses.

The US has a lot of those markers, three of of the most significant are an incautious, incestuous involvement between government and industry, a national leadership who chose to ignore the markers and an opposition party that simply stood by and did little to nothing to change direction.

The Biden administration is building upon the rotten foundation of the Obama years to create some real structural deficiencies in our economy and are building in crises for the future - and there are giant corporations who have signed on to help.

Electric car mandates are an example. The auto industry is killing the internal combustion engine at the behest of government. The fossil fuel sector is being dismantled - both at the same time when electricity generation is predicted not to be able to keep up with demand. This guarantees future shortages of electricity - and likely rolling blackouts, something more common in third world countries than in a nation that has led the world for over a century.

It's not just Biden, there are many powerful forces (foreign and domestic) that have been cheering for decades for America to fail.

The next 18 months are going to be bad, I fear.

The fall can be stealthy - you may have the same job and a paycheck, but each week that pay will buy less and less (that same theft by erosion will happen to your savings). You may be able to do most of what you used to do, but over time, more will be forbidden to you.

Look, 9/11 shut down our national transportation systems. The mortgage bubble burst and collapsed our financial systems. The reaction to Covid 19 shut down our supply chains, shut down a national economy and locked us behind closed doors. Cyber attacks and ransomware are in the news weekly for shutting down hospitals, agricultural and energy transmission businesses.

Imagine all of those happening at the same time.

I get accused of being pessimistic - and that is a fair assessment, because I am - but it isn't a violent pessimism, it is more of a resignation, a "better get ready" sort.

 
Better have enough space for a garden, better have a few critical things stocked up, better know a few basic SHTF (sh*t hits the fan) skills, better be ready to protect yourself and your family and have the equipment and supplies to do it, better transfer your investments into hard assets, better know where your loved ones are and how to communicate with them when cell phones no longer work.

I wake up every morning with a burning anger toward the people who destroyed my America and stole the good life I have had from my children and their children.

But more than that, I'm like one of those movie characters that has been shifted in time. I can see the explosion about to happen but nobody can hear me yelling at them.

My Spidey Sense is tingling, telling me there is something wrong. I can't put my finger on it, but it sure feels that something wicked this way comes.

The Durham Report and Hillary Clinton

"We already know about Hillary Clinton’s attempted takedown of the Donald Trump candidacy and presidency in the Russia hoax. We know a government lawyer lied to the FISA court in order to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. We know about Christopher Steele’s fake “dossier,” the spying on the Trump campaign by the FBI, and the deployment of Democrat apparatchiks to conscript their Leftist media transcribers to plant or amplify the fake news in the service of The Party."

Latest Durham Indictment May Make Russiagate the Most Corrupt Scandal in U.S. History – PJ Media

No wonder the Democrats and their henchmen in the media want to keep you focused on a protest on January 6, calling it an insurrection. The biggest scandal in our history is their candidate and former FLOTUS. No wonder they want to scare the daylights out of you with Climate Change and Covid and buy you off with a $3.5 trillion "infrastructure" bill, which is totally unneccesary. Democrats in Congress are crooks and the Republicans in Congress are enablers and wimps.

An old, old story

 Social media--e-mail and Facebook and Instagram--will never give you joy in memories 80 years later--those pixels will be long gone (unless you've printed them), and the next time I get a new computer, most of what I saved from my sister, cousin, and friends will be gone. But generations before this had the post office. I've seen the letters that my great-grandfather received from his parents in Pennsylvania after he settled in Illinois in 1848. And until recently when I repacked all my old letters, I had a birthday card from my mother written in 1995 that I would re-read. She died in 2000 so I loved looking at her handwriting.

Sept. 18, 1995

Dear Norma--This card will probably be late for your birthday, so we can look at the date this way.  You were born several days--one or two--early.  Dr. Dumont gave me the hurry-up treatment of castor oil and something on the evening of the 19th so the baby would come quickly and allow him to go on the fishing trip scheduled for the next day.  There was no harm done and one or two minutes before midnight you were on the scene.

Of course, that quick journey  left you a most beautiful baby, not red and wrinkled.  So you became "Peachy" at a very early age and you probably would have had September 20th or 21st as a birthdate!

Who trusts government when Biden is in charge?

I was reading through the comments of yet another expert, Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Virus Expert Just Issued This "Sobering" Warning (yahoo.com)  He is baffled by 2 things--the fast increase in cases among children, and the distrust of the government mandates. I have no idea either why it is increasing among children, but have an opinion on the federal mandates.

 
During the Trump administration, the media and "experts" were insulting and lying about him, and his supporters. Trump supporters were called deplorable racists, white supremacists and stupid. That transfers to the entire country. You can't expect a complete turn around when for four years Democrats have been telling people they can NOT trust the government! The flip flopping by Dr. Fauci, who after all did advise Trump as well as Biden, has been stunning.

 
The mismanagement at the border and the disaster in Afghanistan certainly haven't caused Americans, even Democrats, to trust Joe Biden! Renaming "infrastructure" and slapping a $3.5 trillion bill (our money) to build up the Democrat party doesn't help. Saying Climate Change is the no. one problem when other things are more pressing and more difficult is also a terrible mark against federal mandates. That ill will that Democrats have seeded for years is bearing fruit, and it just may be costing lives. It's bleeding into the minds and hearts of the American people.

Perhaps this is a charity that can help save NYC

New York City, spends $28,000 per student -- half-a-million dollars per classroom! Private charities step up to the challenge to send kids to charter schools. John Stossel features Student Sponsor Partners, or SSP, a nonprofit that helps low-income students go to Catholic schools.  Not only scholarship money, but mentorship.

Jeniffer Gutierrez, a parent in the Bronx, was ecstatic to get SSP's acceptance letter. "I cried so hard when I received that letter because I knew it was an opportunity for my son. ... High schools in the Bronx are violent. There's no discipline. There's no education."

https://youtu.be/-qPSxp7Fy-g  Stossel explores the issues--he has been a mentor and donor for SSP, a way out for poor children.

India battling Covid with Ivermectin

"With a combined population of 241 million [Uttar Pradesh] there are only 199 active cases and the positive test rate is 0.01% – statistically zero." Too bad that in the U.S. it's forbidden to speak of an alternative treatment. Big Tech and Big Pharma and Big Joe are killing Americans. Even peer review studies are being blocked.

The “Pandemic” Has Ended for Much of India, How Did They Do It? – Not With Covid Injections but a Drug That Costs Less Than £2 Per Person: Ivermectin – The Expose

Clean up your own neighborhood first

 

  

My mother's famous words: I can't save the world, but I can clean up these 4 acres (her garden and orchard).

Motion is lotion for the joints

I just heard a marathon runner, age 69, who started running because his father died at 55, say that on the radio show, "Doctor, doctor" EWTN. We know that obesity is a big factor in Covid deaths. What about sports? Are marathon runners doing better than joggers? Hockey better than tennis? Swimmers better than bikers? I did find research comparing athletes with couch potatoes in the Covid survival race. I get about 30 minutes a day.

 
Also, I learned that knee injuries are the most common for runners, but runners that land on the mid-foot have half the injuries.

 
Kaiser Permanente (California) did a study including 48,000 of its clients, not by type of sport, but by level of activity. "Even after correcting for all of those characteristics (age, sex, race, smoker, etc) , people who were consistently inactive had a significantly higher risk of hospitalization, ICU admission, and death after getting COVID-19 than those who were active for at least 150 minutes per week. Additionally, those who were active for over 10 minutes per week had some protection against severe illness or death from COVID-19 — though not as much as those who got the full 150 minutes. The highest rates of COVID-19 were among those who were Latinx: 65% compared to 18% (whites), 7% (Blacks), and 6% (Asian or Pacific Islander). It’s worth noting that people who were white were somewhat more likely to meet physical activity guidelines — a discrepancy that should be acknowledged and addressed."

Does exercise help protect against severe COVID-19? - Harvard Health

So my friends (on Medicare), time to check to see if your insurance plan includes Silver Sneakers.

Christmas is coming--advice from Joan

Christmas is coming, so again: if your last name ends in s (or a letter that makes a sibilant sound - x, z, ch, sh) then, to identify your family, add “es” and collectively you are “the Coxes” or “the Adamses” or “the Lopezes”. If your name ends with any other letter (even a “y” or an “e”) then just add an “s”. You are “the Smiths” or “the Prices” or “the Macys”. No apostrophe is used to make plurals of any name. Just a friendly reminder! Class dismissed.

Joan Shaw Turrentine, retired English teacher and pastor's wife, blogging friend since 2003

Exercise and cognitive benefits

FNDC5, Fibronectin type III domain-containing protein 5, the precursor of irisin, is a type I transmembrane glycoprotein that is encoded by the FNDC5 gene. Irisin is a cleaved version of FNDC5, named after the Greek messenger goddess Iris.

 
Researchers found that irisin, an exercise-induced hormone, improves cognitive performance in mice.
The hormone, which is identical in people, could potentially be used to treat cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Hormone links exercise with cognitive benefits | National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Related links:

Exercise-Induced Protein May Reverse Age-Related Cognitive Decline
Exercise and New Nerve Cell Growth in Alzheimer’s Disease
Shivering Triggers Brown Fat to Produce Heat and Burn Calories
Moderate Exercise May Improve Memory in Older Adults
A Well-Aged Mind: Maintaining Your Cognitive Health
Dealing with Dementia: When Thinking and Behavior Decline
Exercise and Physical Activity
Alzheimer’s Disease & Related Dementias

Mean girls--today and 68 years ago

I just watched a Fox News story on the damage social media is doing to young teen girls and their body images. I used to be a young teen girl who hung out with other teens, caring about every word and piece of gossip. We didn't have social media like Instagram or TikTok (the focus of this story). We didn't have personal phones (most of us were on a party line). We didn't have organized sports (against the law in those days). If we took a photo it was on film and it was 2 weeks to get it developed. We all went to church and almost no one had divorced parents. But we still found all the ways to be mean girls and make snide remarks about bodies and tease anyone who didn't fit the mold or current fashion. Can I get an Amen or am I the only one who remembers "the good old days?"

  

Black Lies Matter

“For every Trayvon Martin killed by someone not black [whether white, Asian, or Latino], nine other blacks were murdered by someone black,” wrote John W. Fountain, an award-winning journalist, and professor at Roosevelt University. . . . [Fountain continues,] Imagine Soldier Field . . . filled beyond capacity, brimming with 63,879 young African-American men, ages 18-24—more than U.S. losses in the entire Vietnam conflict. Imagine the University of Michigan’s football stadium—the largest in the U.S.—filled to the limit of 109,901 with black men. Now add 28,233 more—together totaling more than U.S. deaths in World War I. . . . The national tally of black males 14 and older murdered in America over a 30-year period from 1976-2005, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics: 214,661 [roughly 192,000 of which were killed by blacks]. (30)" From Black Lies Matter by Taleeb Starkes, 2016

This book was written before Donald Trump became president, and the point of view and statistics have nothing to do with the current riots and destruction (which were on their way). But it does supply some detail on the narrative that if we just got rid of cops everything hurting or killing blacks would be over. It was building as an issue long before Minneapolis and George Floyd.

 
Most murders are intra-racial, so you could also fill up a few stadiums with whites killed by whites--however, white Americans do not riot when a policeman, black or white, shoots a white criminal resisting arrest when wanted for rape (Blake) or addled by drugs with a long rap sheet and resisting arrest (Floyd).

BLM is a relatively new organization (created by 3 radical feminists when Martin, a black teen, was shot by a neighborhood private security guard who was Hispanic), but has built up its wealth on the efforts of other groups that came before them going back decades.

(written a year ago)

Lunacy on the Left must be attacked with logic and reason

Michael Smith of Utah writes:

"I just can't get past the idea that our most significant problem is the superficiality of our society.
So, few people on either side think deeply about anything before opening their cake holes to illuminate the world with the light of their ignorance.

Last night I read about what Jenn Jackson, a political science professor at Syracuse University, said about 9/11. I understand that the left never misses a chance to crap all over everything, and it is sort of a leftist tradition to pull out the stops on 9/11 anniversaries, but this one was spectacular.

She (I assume her pronoun is "she”) sparked a major uproar after tweeting: "We have to be more honest about what 9/11 was and what it wasn't. It was an attack on the heteropatriarchal capitalistic systems that America relies upon to wrangle other countries into passivity.”

OK.

 
If you have ever spent any time in corporate America – and have been stuck a meeting that was really a portal to PowerPoint Hell, you have heard this kind of statement before. It happens when the presenter: 1) doesn’t know what she is talking about, 2) knows but her data is so weak, he thinks he needs to pump it up with smart sounding words or 3) she is trying to bury the facts in a cacophonous word salad because they do not support her goals.

Those meetings are filled with the unintelligible corporate jargon that qualifies for business newspeak: “The new normal forces us to pivot and circle back to thinking out of the box and creating synergies by listening to thought leaders and being agile in our alignment.”

It is like living in a live action version of a Dilbert cartoon.

Superficial thinking is the order of the day, and this superficiality prevents theoreticians and their audience from thinking past their initial conceptions and applying the bounds of their own theories to, unsurprisingly, their own theories.

For example, any form of Critical Race Theory (LatCRT (Latino/Latina Critical Race Theory), etc.) cannot survive critical examination of itself. For example, LatCRT proposes that people of Spanish extraction were present in North America before White Europeans, so they have a more valid claim to be “Americans” and control America than do whites. They are the “original” Americans.

We are witness to the hyperbolic reasoning of every hysterical “activist”, how every “subjugated class” presumes to claim their little slice of the pie due to some presumed “wrong” done to them by someone, somewhere, at some point in the revisionist version of their history. That’s all the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, the Derrick Bell version of Critical Race Theory and the LatCRT of Tara J. Yosso are.
I always marvel at both the “reparations” crowd wailing about slavery like only American blacks were subject to that reprehensible institution and the “multitud enojada” (angry mob) of La Raza claiming that the Southwest is really “Azteca” – their “ownership” probably would come as a great surprise to the Apache, Comanche, Havasupai, Hopi, Jemez, Kiowa, Kiowa Apache, Lipan, Maricopa, Mohave, Navaho, Paiute, Papago, Panamint, Pecos, Pima, Pueblo, Shoshoni, Sobaipuri, Tewa Pueblos, Ute, Walapai, Yavapai, Yuma and Zuñi and the Anasazi, who predated all of them.

And the modern proponents of LatCRT never seem to address their own Spanish heritage of conquest and the fact that South America saw more slavery (including black Africans) and genocide that did North America (actually, most of the black Africans from the Atlantic slave trade – 97% - went to South and Latin America, not North America).

The same with slavery – the Critical Race Theorists claim that 1619 is the date white Europeans created slavery in the New World, when, for centuries, the native civilizations of the Western Hemisphere had been taking slaves (usually entire tribes the had defeated in war) for centuries. CRT proponents completely ignore slavery in Africa prior to the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade and the fact that slavery was a common part of the civilizations inhabiting the continent.

All forms of Critical Race Theory deny the existence of the millions of white Americans who are below the poverty line. If the only explanation for the lack of socioeconomic status is race, these people should not exist.

When theoreticians pick a convenient point in history or a convenient action as a basis for their claims, that “theory” is not based in reality.

 
The proponents of these theories know their positions cannot withstand examination under their own rules – that is why the use the Kafkaesque retort that even criticism proves their theories, that for a white person to say they are not a racist just proves they are. It is why Larry Elder, a conservative black man from South Central LA can be labeled, by a major newspaper, as the “black face of white supremacy”.
It is lunacy. Pure, unadulterated insanity.

And yet the people who should know better – academicians, teachers, and scientists – are promoting this idiocy and impregnating our public-school curriculum with it.

People make a mistake by attacking CRT from the perspective of race or social science. Attack it from a logic and reason angle.

 
Saul Alinsky’s Rule #4 destroys all variants of the Derrick Bell form of CRT: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.""