New findings about bureaucracy

Exciting new findings are shedding a light on the nature and structure of bureaucracy:

Dead Horse Theory

Dakota Native American tribal wisdom, passed on from generation to generation, says: “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount and get a different horse.”
However, in educative, corporate and governmental projects more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.
5. Lowering the standards so that the dead horse can be included.
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as “living impaired”.
7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
9. Providing additional funding, and /or training to increase the dead horses’ performance.
10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.
11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overheads and therefore, contributed substantially more to the bottomline of the economy than do some other horses.
12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
AND of COURSE….
13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position!

Happy New Year, why is the ceiling leaking?

 Finding a leak on New Year's Day is never good.  Finding any repairman 30 years ago was expensive on a holiday, and today in 2022, it's probably impossible to get anyone but an answering service. So, when my husband called up from his man cave and said the bathroom ceiling had a leak, I thought I knew the source.  The kitchen sink has a spray alternate inside the faucet.  I suspect that's not a good design.  Lately I'd noticed that the pull-out spray feature had a funny leak--it was spraying where it shouldn't.  And I'd notice some water gathering about the base of the faucet that shouldn't be there.  So, we began dragging everything out from under the sink. I began loading a bag with bottles of useless stuff or things damaged by water.   We found standing water.  "Quick.  Get me some old towels.  They are in the thingy next to the washer." I barked.   He rushed downstairs but didn't return.  When I went to investigate, he was in the bathroom with a towel and bucket.  My bad.  He didn't know what a thingy was.  So, I grabbed about four old towels and went back to the kitchen to mop up the water. I showed him my leaky spray and told him I was going to call Rod's Pretty Good Handyman service tomorrow.  Meanwhile, he figured out if we placed the pull-out feature in the sink and left it there, the water wouldn't run down the fixture into the cabinet.  Meanwhile, he got ahold of Rod, and he's coming tomorrow afternoon.

Is Fauci really Dr. Evil?

I believe Fauci has led two presidents into great error, particularly Biden, but when the Wuhan virus was fresh in January 2020, he also misled Trump who was really naïve about the depth of the swamp. Fauci had retained his position after his awful record for HIV, so was really swampy. Fauci has so much power now, historians assuming the USA survives, will marvel that this Rasputin was able to lead so many to their deaths with just a fragile mask mandate and never ending flip flopping. Although Biden and many governors (even Ohio’s) call for mandates which have ruined the economy and caused many deaths, in this Covid thing he’s really the puppet of Fauci. Saying he had a solution as a candidate was probably just the usual Democrat Biden lying—he’d done it all his career so it’s not just senility like some believe.

I was researching masks as soon as they were recommended/demanded and causing fights in retail stores and airplanes, and I know there was no peer-reviewed research on this--no masks, cloth, bandana, N95 or those pink, blue, or black things spun from polystyrene, polycarbonate, polyethylene, or polyester can protect from SARS-2 and they only filter dust and large particles. 90-100 million a month are produced—mainly in China (big surprise?) Masks were originally intended to protect the health care workers, and I suspect that hasn’t changed—that’s why I wear them in crowds—to protect me. Plus, I suspect we’re breathing in particles from masks made of fossil fuel products and our lungs won’t be happy later on (the classes of the 1950s won’t live to see it).

“It is difficult to keep up with the ever-mutating scientific consensus on masks. In the early days of the pandemic, White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci told the public not to bother with them before abruptly adopting a wear-a-mask-any-mask stance. After vaccines became widely available last winter and spring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the vaccinated no longer needed to wear them, and then reversed course after determining that the delta variant was much more contagious than the original strain. And the CDC's support for mask mandates in schools rests upon a study that has now been substantially debunked.

Enter Leana Wen, a medical analyst for CNN and former president of Planned Parenthood. Wen is one of cable news' most vigorous supporters of coercive COVID-19 measures: She previously suggested that the government should prohibit unvaccinated people from traveling (and, perhaps, from leaving their homes at all). During a CNN appearance on Monday, Wen made the provocative statement that the commonly used cloth masks are essentially useless at preventing the spread of the omicron variant.

"Don't wear a cloth mask," she said. "Cloth masks are little more than facial decorations. There's no place for them in light of omicron."

Huh? As Townhall's Spencer Brown points out, Wen's view of the science contradicts the guidance from the White House and the CDC, which holds that cloth masks are good enough. In fact, the CDC has specifically instructed people not to wear N95 masks.

Wen is a supporter of mandates, so perhaps she thinks the higher quality masks should be required in some settings. Yet if she's right, it means the masks that the overwhelming majority of people are wearing in order to comply with mandates—in public schools, on public transportation, in many workplaces, gyms, and even social settings—aren't doing any good. They represent another element of pandemic hygiene theater: a public health requirement that makes people feel safer without offering them much actual protection.”

CNN's Leana Wen: 'Cloth Masks Are Little More Than Facial Decorations' (reason.com)

Yes, it’s all about feeling safe. It’s the Democrat party go to—feelings instead of facts. That’s why on the news in 2020 we heard about deaths instead of cases and now we’re hearing only cases and not deaths. They are afraid someone knows math and might figure infection rate.

Covid--Omicron and some sanity

Nellie Bowles at Common Sense by Bari Weiss (the reporter who very publicly resigned from NY Times because Twitter had become the editor and started her own on-line column so she could tell the truth) writes on December 31, 2021:

"Hello and a very happy New Year! Here in California it’s been pouring rain for more than a week, which undermines all of my justifications for the taxes. It is the slow week between Christmas and New Years, but Omicron has meant a good bit of news.

→ Omicron shuts down the world: Almost everyone I know either has Omicron—or else they are stuck somewhere random because everyone else has Omicron. The numbers bear that out: On Wednesday, according to the CDC, 486,428 positive Covid cases were reported. It’s the highest number of reported cases in the U.S. at any point in this pandemic.

People are waiting in lines for many, many hours for Covid tests. Thousands of flights were cancelled. (Some of the passengers who did make it onto planes didn’t exactly seem grateful for the privilege.)

But amidst all the chaos, a bit of sanity, strangely, is prevailing. The CDC cut the quarantine time in half, from ten days to five, so society can keep functioning.

And mainstream liberal commenters are coming around to a new conclusion: “As we recognize that COVID-19 is not a deadly or even severe disease for the vast majority of responsible Americans, we can stop agonizing over ‘cases’ and focus on those who are hospitalized or at risk of dying,” writes the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin. We’re even getting Good News reports from Twitter-popular doctors. Are they a year late to these realizations? Yes. Do they deserve to be mocked for the delay? Probably. Will I celebrate their seeing the light anyway? Absolutely.

The White House is also pivoting hard on its messaging. “There is no federal solution. This gets solved at a state level,” President Biden said on Monday, prior to a gathering of governors. Just a little over a year ago, Biden was telling Trump that the death toll was somehow his fault or related to his coarse rhetoric: “It is what it is because you are who you are,” Biden had said.

→ Great news they won’t tell you on cable: The number of Covid deaths each week is dropping. A lot. On Wednesday, there were some 2,100 deaths reported. Compare that to more than 3,600 on this day in 2020. The point is: everyone is getting Covid, but thanks to the vax it seems markedly less dangerous. Which is perhaps why…

→ Even Covid religious totems are falling: Dr. Leana Wen, one of the regular public health voices on CNN and a former president of Planned Parenthood, went on the nightly news this week and said something entirely true: “Cloth masks are not appropriate for this pandemic. It’s not appropriate for Omicron. It was not appropriate for Delta, Alpha, or any of the previous variants either because we’re dealing with something that’s airborne.”

If you are vaccinated, healthy, and happy, you are probably already living life like someone sitting in a New York City restaurant (i.e., unmasked but vaguely waving one around as you walk).

If you just love the feel of fabric across your cheeks, by all means. If you really care about not getting COVID, wear an N95 for as long as you’d like. But it’s long past time to take life back from the hypochondriacs.

→Die-hards are not going to give up without a fight (masked, six feet away). Take Nicole Wallace, Host of Deadline: White House on MSNBC: “I’m a Fauci groupie. I’m a thrice-vaccinated mask adherent. I buy KN95 masks by the, you know, caseload. They’re in every pocket. I wear them everywhere except when I sit down.”

One area where the excesses are still unchecked is in schools. Colleges around the country are imposing draconian rules (making students truly miserable). And unions around the country are laying groundwork for more remote learning. In Chicago, the union is polling teachers on “a district-wide pause” and going back to remote."

Look for Bari  Weiss columns--I get the free one, but there's more on subscription.

He never became an old man

Blogs are strange creatures (writings, essays, memories).  There are methods to check up on the people "following" my blog, and from them, to look at the other blogs they are reading. Birds of a feather, apparently. You only do this if it's a slow day like New Year's Eve afternoon and the food is all prepared for dinner with friends, one of whom has dropped out due to quarantining for Covid.  So that's how I happened to read the final post of a blogger whose main fascination was the nitty gritty of writing--hyphens, semi-colons, commas, and citations.  He was a copy editor for the Washington Post and wrote things like this in his job, and then wrote about it in his blog. He didn't necessarily like the changes he had to use.

"mic
Not mike, in a change from long-standing Post style, as the short form for microphone. Try to avoid inflected verb forms, but use apostrophes and write mic’ed and mic’ing if they must be used." 

The last entry in his blog in 2017 was written by someone else--he had died of the cancer he'd been writing about for less than a year--Intrahepatic cholangio carcinoma, stage 4 (cancer of the bile ducts). On August 2, 2016 he wrote:

"And isn't it lucky to have some warning, at a relatively young age and with my mind intact? Not all causes of death work that way -- I could have been run over by a car. This way, I have time, maybe a little and maybe more than that, to take it all in. To savor the little things. I get weepy now when I see trees and cardinals and cardinals in the trees. Am I really missing all that much if I never get to be a doddering old man?

Speaking of smug boasts, have I mentioned that I can swing neither of my cats without hitting a world-class cancer center? I chose one of the very best: Johns Hopkins is less than an hour away, with a satellite even closer to home at Sibley Memorial Hospital (SMH, as in "shaking my head"). I've since learned that "my team of specialists" is a phrase that doesn't sound nearly as good as you think it's going to, but still, I have a team of specialists. And that team has a plan. I've started chemotherapy. Soon, there will be radiation, in the form of teeny-weeny little beads sent directly into the diseased area.

In other words, as lucky as I am to be escaping doddering-old-man status, maybe I'll be really lucky. Maybe I'll end up a doddering old man."

Bill died on March 27, 2017. Yes, he really did want to end up a doddering old man. He had the same hopes and trust Phil did in his "team" and I'm sure they said the same encouraging words, all the while knowing how grim the future looked. Phil was close enough to the east side Zangmeister center near St. Ann's he could drive himself (although it was very unsafe), in fact he did until they cut him loose and assigned him to hospice. He was so shocked he kept trying to call "chemo-doc" as he called her (difficult foreign name). He never got through.

Cleaning my silverplate to set a pretty table

 How to Clean Silver-Plated Items Without Chemicals (thespruce.com)

I scooped up all my daily silverplate and put them in the 9 x 12 baking dish which had the cleaning mix--aluminum foil, boiling water, baking soda and salt.  After a few minutes I dunked them all in sudsy water and rinsed.  The water was still hot, so I set some of my copper bottom Reviere Ware in it.  Some cleaned up immediately, others didn't budge or give up their dusky, dark appearance.

For our New Year's Eve dinner tonight with a couple from our church after the jazz concert/worship service at our church we're having soup and salad followed with cookies and ice cream. Today is our neighbor's birthday so we'd also invited her.  She just let us know that she and the other "funeral ladies" (serve desserts after funerals) were all invited to another woman's home for cookies and tea for the holiday.  Then a few days later, one of them let everyone know she had Covid (very mild), so now our neighbor is quarantining herself and won't be able to come.

Fitness memories

I went to Lifetime Fitness this morning. Rather sparse, and only 3 women. Not the usual older crowd I see later. Also, many people may be taking a holiday--from work and from effort. This memory from two years ago came up on Facebook. I may have included it in 2019 on my blog, but it's a good one for a repeat.

"You meet nice people at the gym. He looked sullen, tough and gruff, but I greeted him, he smiled and we began to talk (riding nowhere on our stationary bikes). I found out he was a plumber, then that he wasn't the type that comes to your home, he helps keep the James serving cancer patients. That's shorthand for Brain and Spine Tumor Center at Ohio State’s Comprehensive Cancer Center – James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute. That led to my former position in the Veterinary Medicine Library. That led to his story about his rescue, a black lab, that formerly was kept in a cage as a breeder, and she couldn't walk when they got her. His little cockapoo taught her to walk and play, and now he has the most wonderful dog. But the cockapoo is still the boss! It's easy to ride 6 miles with an interesting companion."

Masks, mandates and media

"All religions have their representatives. There are cardinals, bishops, imams and rabbi’s etc. They are perhaps the leading voices, but they aren’t the only representatives. There are envoys, missionaries, TV evangelists, religious correspondents and so on.

The State is no different. We have politicians and governmental advisers, as the leading voices, but there are also NGO spokespersons, union officials, the academic & scientific orthodoxy, lords and ladies, multinational CEO’s, central bankers, business leaders and more. Of these, the most powerful, in terms of their ability to shape public opinion are the mainstream media (MSM.)"

This article is from June 2020, when mask mandates, without a shred of science, were just being imposed. And with each mandate we've experienced more loss of freedom and the masks certainly haven't kept us safe. Even those with the 3 shots are getting Covid.

Face Masks Have Put Us In A State – OffGuardian (off-guardian.org)

It's warm for December, but January is coming

Our weather is quite mild right now, 58 degrees predicted for New Years Eve,  but the weather reporter on the local channel just reminded us January is coming. That's usually our snowiest month, and he recalled January 1978 (before he was born) when the total snowfall was 34.4 inches and the blizzard we had.  I just checked the predictions for January, and I don't see any daytime temp below 32 degrees.

Ice Melt vs. Rock Salt — Which Is Better for Your Business? Earth Development (earthdevelopmentinc.com)

Pandemic data, end of 2021

After claiming during the campaign, that the virus spread was Trump's failure, and saying he wouldn't trust the vaccine (Harris said it too), the Biden numbers for 2021 (at the same time of year and with the vaccine, and all the therapeutics and research) were higher than 2020. 

“The Spanish Flu” in 1918 infected roughly 500 million people—one-third of the world’s population—and caused 50 million deaths worldwide when the population was much smaller. The Asian flu (H2N2) of 1957-58 which I survived (with no lockdown) killed up to 4 million when the population was 2.9 billion instead of the 7.7 billion of today.

In the last 24 hours Ohio has reported 19,774 cases, 484 hospitalizations, and zero deaths.

The spirit of revolt--100 years ago

 JAMA (which is the journal of the American Medical Association) has an interesting feature called "JAMA Revisited," reprinting articles from the past.  In the October 12, 2021 issue it reprinted an article titled "The Spirit of Revolt" from October 8, 1921, 100 years ago.

"Psychologists today are more concerned with the changing spirit of mankind than with any other psychologic problem.  The literature on the spirit of revolt, of restlessness, of lawlessness and of radicalism is daily becoming greater.  The subject is engaging the attention of our greatest minds.  Thus James M. Beck, Solicitor-General of the United States, devoted the presidential address before the annual meeting of the American Bar Association, held recently at Cincinnati, to this subject. There is throughout the world today, he pointed out, a revolt against the spirit of authority.  Pending criminal indictments in federal courts have increased from 10,000 in 1912 to more than 70,000 in 1921.  The losses from burglaries repaid by casualty companies have grown in amount from $886,000 in 1914 to over $10,000,000 in 1920. [purchasing power of about $138,974,000 today]"   

After quoting some murder statistics from New York City and Chicago, Mr. Beck goes on to report the problem is worldwide.  He attributes it to the rise of individualism which began in the 18th century and which had steadily grown with the advance of democratic institutions, and also the growth of technology saying that man had become the tender of machines rather than a constructive thinker.  "The increase in potential of human power has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the potential of human character."

The article goes on to say that despite the current (following WWI) peace commissions and conferences,  "Radicals are advocating methods of government that are the expressions of primitive emotional and mental processes. . .  Prejudices, fixed ideas, suspiciousness, sentimentality and outbursts of passion are making more difficult the task of establishing law and order. . . The craze for speed dominates everything, speed in transportation, speed in thinking, speed in living and, as revealed in the war, speed in killing. . . mob spirit governs and the urge is uncontrolled." 

Well, that certainly sounds familiar, sort of like the evening news.  Much of the collapse and the coarsening of the general populace that the writer of the JAMA article describes can certainly be blamed on the "Great War" (estimates of 22 million deaths) which had killed so many in Europe and more civilians than military, and the worldwide pandemic of 1918. However, in the U.S. we had the most socialistic president, Woodrow Wilson, until Barack Obama claimed the honor in 2008. The eighteenth century was a period of "enlightenment" and the degrading of a Christian society and disrespect for Biblical authority. Then the nineteenth century gave the world Marx and Nietzsche.  Yes, we were well on the way to the Antifa and BLM riots of 2020, and the acceptance of them has been building for 100 years.

Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, a new Doctor of the Church

Bishop Robert Barron

WOF 306: The Genius of St. Irenaeus | The Word on Fire Show

Pope Francis just announced he’s planning to declare a new Doctor of the Church, St. Irenaeus of Lyon. Who was he? What were his key ideas? Why does he still matter? That's what Brandon Vogt and I discuss in today's episode. Topics include:

- What’s a Doctor of the Church, and why should Irenaeus be declared one?

- How did Bishop first become acquainted with Irenaeus?

- What was Irenaeus’ approach to battling Gnosticism?

- Irenaeus taught that God has no need of anything outside of himself. What does this mean, and why is it good news?

- How to understand Irenaeus’s pithy line, “The glory of God is man fully alive”?

- Irenaeus’ theology of recapitulation

- How Irenaeus remains a great spiritual and theological bridge between Eastern and Western Christians

- Why Irenaeus is still relevant today

A listener asks, how should I respond to the idea that nothing really exists because we can’t prove that it exists?

Thyroid nodules in the elderly

 My doctor referred me for a scan after my fall checkup because she found something on my thyroid with palpation. Then when I had my auto accident on November 26 the scan of my head found a good size nodule and the scan in December found two.  So now I have a consult in January.  Here's what I found when I checked out thyroid nodules in the elderly.

"Thyroid nodules are more frequent in elderly patients, with a linear increase with age in both the presence of nodules and the absolute number of nodules per patient (6). Approximately 50% of individuals aged 65 years have thyroid nodules detected by ultrasonography (7). A cross-sectional survey of asymptomatic adults in Germany using ultrasonography to detect thyroid nodules demonstrated an even higher prevalence of 80% in women and 74% in men over 60 years old (4). In a prospective study of 6,391 patients referred for thyroid nodules at a large academic center, Kwong et al. showed a linear increase in the number of thyroid nodules per patient with age, rising from an average of 1.55 nodules ≥1 cm in patients age 20–29 years old to a mean of 2.21 nodules ≥1 cm in patients ≥70 years old, demonstrating a 1.6% annual increased risk for multinodularity (6).

Another potential contributor to this rising prevalence of thyroid nodules is the increased use of high-frequency ultrasound, CT, and MR imaging in routine clinical care, leading to the detection of asymptomatic, or incidental, thyroid nodules (4,5,7,8). Lastly, changes in population demographics over time, specifically increased rates of obesity, may contribute. Data from several ethnically diverse cohorts has identified parameters independently associated with the development of thyroid nodules, including obesity, female sex, radiation exposure, iodine deficiency, and smoking. These should be noted when evaluating elderly patients for potential thyroid nodules (9).

Once identified, thyroid nodules should be evaluated to determine appropriate management. The differential diagnosis of thyroid nodularity includes benign and malignant solitary nodules, multinodular goiter, autonomous functioning nodules, cysts, and inflammation or thyroiditis (10). Nodules causing thyroid dysfunction, compressive symptoms, or harboring malignancy require attention."

Thyroid Nodules and Cancer in the Elderly - Endotext - NCBI Bookshelf (nih.gov)

If it weren't for doctors' visits I'd have no social life.

The best fairy tales of the media for 2021

 

I've graduated from PT, the good news and the bad

I had started physical therapy for balance and core strength before I was in an auto accident on November 26, and as of yesterday I have "graduated."  I had a few extra sessions to make sure all my injuries hadn't interfered with my balance. So, I was given two check off tests to determine my progress.  The vertigo is completely gone for now. She took care of that the first session with one of those magic head twists.  The balance and fear of falling test I scored much worse than when I started.  Megan, the DPT was baffled.  My explanation is that after learning all the things I was doing wrong and paying closer attention to my balance, I was more aware of how unsteady I am and am actually more afraid of falling than before! She calls it "perception," which I think she means it's all in my head that my balance is poor.  I don't think so. I've seen other old people walk, and I walk like a 92 year old, bumping into things and people and listing sideways.  It was my hope that I could avoid that, so I'll of course continue the exercises.  Megan says I need to develop muscle memory.

One of the more interesting is standing still for 30 seconds with eyes closed and feet together. I think I did get better at that.  

Then that is followed with eyes open looking at a distant object with one foot in front of the other, standing for 30 seconds.  

A seated hip abduction with resistance (a stretchy band) begins with sitting upright in a chair with the band secured around the legs and then moving the legs outward.  That one is very uncomfortable.

An easy one to do that I hope will protect me from another bursitis attack is sidestepping while holding on to the kitchen counter.  Step sideways along the length of the counter (while warming something in the microwave) then sidestep back. Be sure pick-up feet--this isn't a slide.

Difficult to do in the house is walking while turning my head.  Our hallways are very short, but Megan told me to do it even a short distance.

Awkward is learning to get out of a seated position hold a pole or cane against my back--the standing hip hinge with dowel. Then lightly bend my knees while rising.  This is to help with picking things up or loading the dishwasher so you don't hurt your back.

And so forth.  I hope I get better with practice.  

One bright spot of the season is my Christmas present from our daughter and son-in-law.  A new Schwin exercycle. Mark came over on Monday and put it together.  My old exercycle had developed a loud noise--probably and lose gear or bearing. It had about 15,000 miles. This one is silent, has a smaller footprint, and uses electricity not batteries, but like the old one, has some "programs" I'll never use (they also aren't explained in the manual).  Usually, I go to Lifetime Fitness nearby in the morning, but if the weather's bad or I get up later than usual, I can do this at home.

Is it Covid or the lockdown causing rise in mental problems in children?

Surgeon General alarmed by rise in child suicides triggered by pandemic – HotAir

"U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy is shedding some light on a growing crisis of child mental health issues brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic has produced an epidemic of mental health challenges for young people. As the second year of the pandemic ends, the state of children’s mental health has hospitals, teachers, and health professionals thinking an epidemic has already arrived."

Mike Huckabee has an alternative viewpoint.

"That headline, though, needs some rewriting. As Prof. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit pointed out, all those mental health issues weren’t “triggered by the pandemic,” they were triggered by the government’s authoritarian “lockdown everything” reaction to the pandemic, even when dealing with schools full of kids nearly all of whom are basically immune to the disease.

At least the incredible damage wrought by the “expert” class’s wrongheaded overreaction to COVID is finally starting to be recognized, even by someone from CBS News. It’s too bad that CBS felt it had to censor its own reporter for speaking the truth, but having someone from that network grasp the truth and speak up about it is at least a baby step in the right direction."

CBS Edits Out Own Reporter SLAMMING School Closures Causing Mental Health Crisis | Newsbusters According to this Newsbusters' article Jan Crawford "slammed our elected officials and public health experts for “the crushing impact that our COVID policies have had on young kids and children” and the subsequent mental health crisis."  Her comments were edited out of the Face the Nation panel.

Do you have an abortion story? tweeted the ABC reporter

"Within hours, the original Tweet thread received thousands of replies. It became an inspiring Christmas testimony to the beauty of life, the courage of parents who choose life, and the joy of children.

Hundreds of mothers and fathers replied to @FiveThirtyEight with stories of their brush with the abortion industry following a special needs diagnosis of their unborn child. Attaching a beautiful portrait of a smiling teenage girl, Sarah tweeted: “At the ultrasound for my 2nd pregnancy we were told our baby had Down Syndrome and her heart was incompatible with life. They encouraged us to end the pregnancy. She’s completely healthy.”

Women who chose to keep their baby in spite of family and cultural pressures to abort also shared photos and stories of their now-thriving children. Women like Lauren Bower raised voices of encouragement: “I got pregnant at 19 during the first semester of my sophomore year in college. I kept that baby and I now have a 6’3” 17 year old preparing to apply for West Point. He will change the world. Never kill your children.”

Roxanne wrote, “I was pregnant at 16 & was supposed to spend the summer in France as an exchange student. The baby’s dad’s family knew Dr.s who could ‘take care of it’. My dad said ‘we will help you if you want to have this baby’. That ‘baby’ turns 41 in Thursday. [sic]”

Their children also applauded mothers who kept them. Kenneth Landers knows he beat the odds: “Abortion was designed for ppl like me: low income, brown, fatherless. I’m 30 years old, helping my mother retire, thriving professionally and personally.” "

Fishing for Abortion Stories, News Outlet Receives Unexpected Response - CatholicVote org

Can Christians practice Yoga? No.

Alex Frank tells Matt Fradd of Pints with Aquinas (Australia) that he used to be very heavily into Yoga.  He was also not a Christian. The one good thing he did learn from Yoga was that the spiritual side of life is real. That led him eventually to Christ. 

https://youtu.be/UUOfp8Ssp3A

He grew up in an atheist home--nominally Jewish--but also lived in DC where leftist ideology and constant focus on politics were numbing.  He went away to college and found some relief in studying physics.  It was in the military where he became interested in Yoga, but also learned about servant leadership which helped lead him to an interest in Christ.  He explains in detail what happens when you do/imitate the poses. If you think you need Yoga as exercise, he now suggests pilates--alignment and flexibility without the spiritual side. Buzz words that are red flags--uuuming, or the instructor speaking in an odd voice or touching, or referring to gods' names. He had hired an excellent Yoga teacher/spiritual director who began as a fitness instructor while he was at Yale (after military) and he began to face up to how he was living his life. The modern mindfulness movement is not secular but spiritual according to the founder and is based in Buddhism (Jon Kabat-Zinn) according to Alex. McMindfulness--Yoga is a big business.  Many of the claims are very commercial. 

Hatha yoga is the most common in the West.   Don't start, is Frank's advice. It's not harm free.

Weigh down and Way down--cult leader Gwen Shamblin

The New Year is always a time for resolving to lose the extra pounds packed on during the fall and holiday season.  That said, I was only casually familiar with the Gwen Shamblin diet plan called "Weigh Down." [established in the late 80s]   I have a vague memory of seeing her book [1997] about the diet plan on our church library shelves and maybe 20 years ago I believe there may have been a group of her followers/dieters at our church.  Gwen, her husband, her son-in-law and some friends died in a plane crash in Tennessee in late May.  It was completely off my radar (excuse the pun) and I hadn't heard about it.  I just found out that she had moved from diet planner and nutritionist to a prophet and leader of a cult that denied the Trinity and still claimed to be "Bible based" and a follower of Christ. She taught that the Father was physical being and the Son was created, and the Spirit was Christ's teaching.  She isolated her followers, and said her plan was the way to salvation. She said the teachings of grace were a license to sin. There is a documentary about her and the cult, called "Remnant Fellowship" Gwen Shamblin: The Documentary | Midwest Christian Outreach, Inc (midwestoutreach.org) 

 Al Kresta, a Roman Catholic (EWTN) recently did a monologue on his radio show about the difference between ignorance and arrogant.  Many Christians, he noted, are ignorant about church history and the Bible, but others become arrogant and decide they know better than 2000 years of church teaching and all the scholars and church leaders and believers of the past. Shamblin he put among the arrogant. He said her ignorance about church history was breath taking.

 Unfortunately, if they have even a smidgen of charisma or a few Bible verses to hang their teachings on, they can find followers.  If you think there are oppressed peoples among the intersectionality groups (LBGTQ, women, minorities), there's no group as oppressed as the obese and they are quite vulnerable to affirmation/manipulation and new ideas to retain their dignity and humanity in a world that ridicules them.

"On Aug. 10 [2000], Mrs. Shamblin disavowed the Trinity, the Christian belief that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are united in one Godhead. She also invited people to the Remnant Fellowship, an 80-member nondenominational church she and her accountant husband had formed.

Almost overnight, what slimmed down fastest were the ranks of Mrs. Shamblin's Weigh Down Workshop followers. Thousands of churches that embraced Mrs. Shamblin in their battle against gluttony have dropped the program." . . .  

"In eight years, Weigh Down became the biggest in a wave of Bible-based diets. It now operates in 70 countries and 60 denominations. Groups of five and more meet weekly, mainly at churches. They pay $103 apiece for a 12-week workshop, including workbooks.

"Diets made God look stupid," Mrs. Shamblin asserts. "He was the chef behind lasagna. He loves sour cream. He was not happy that broccoli became righteous while Haagen Dazs became sin."" 

Church Lady of Diet Weighs In On Trinity and Her Flock Flees (culteducation.com)  (Wall St. Journal article from October 2000)

Shamblin became another very wealthy religious celebrity selling deceit and lies, and according to an article I read, left nothing to Remnant Fellowship in her will.  Another story said her daughter (whose husband also died in the crash) will continue with the teachings of the cult.

‘This is a cult’: inside the shocking story of a religious weight-loss group | Documentary | The Guardian

Inside Gwen Shamblin Lara’s creepy weight loss cult - News Flash

Gwen Shamblin's will leaves nothing to Remnant Fellowship (newschannel5.com)

What's Up With Weigh Down? My Brush With A Dangerous Cult (spiritwatch.org)  (Personal testimony)

https://youtu.be/w5SA1yVrB6A  When her Trinity views alienated followers

https://youtu.be/FTvE1ICKFZA  (includes a video clip of her using the Covid lockdown to promote her church/beliefs/weight loss program)

Note: I'm not familiar with any of the websites or news channels that I've listed here. I don't claim they have any more authority than the cults they describe.  But making weight loss equal to salvation is certainly not Biblical.

Zuckerberg purchased the 2020 election for Joe Biden

"What happened in 2020 involved a highly coordinated and privately funded “shadow campaign” for Joe Biden that took place within the formal structure of the election system itself. Through the injection of over $419 million of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s money, laundered through the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), the professional left presided over a targeted, historically unprecedented takeover of government election offices by nominally nonpartisan, but demonstrably ideological, nonprofit organizations and activists in key areas of swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin."

The Wisconsin Purchase - The American Conservative

"Absentee Ballot Chaos Heavily Favors Joe Biden in 2020

CTCL won Wisconsin for Joe Biden, and they did it mainly with absentee ballots. Covid-19 was used as a pretext in many states to put a moratorium on election integrity laws, guidelines and ballot verification procedures that have been long standing and time tested. The result was chaos, especially in states that suddenly moved from very limited absentee voting toward near universal mail-in voting in a very short period of time, such as Wisconsin.

CTCL’s major objective, as set forth in all their internal documents and grant applications, was to promote absentee voting. This involved getting absentee ballots into the hands of reliably Democratic demographics, showing them how to complete them correctly, convincing them to submit them, and providing as many avenues as possible for those ballots to be returned and counted.

CTCL’s involvement in the 2020 election appears exceedingly complex on the surface, at times requiring a program to keep track of the major players, scandals, and institutional relationships that grew out of the CTCL Safe Elections Project. This aspect of CTCL involvement in Wisconsin has been extensively documented by Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist and M.D. Kittle of the Wisconsin Spotlight, among others."