Lulled by a false sense of security . . .

"The world is a harsh and violent place. Sometimes we forget that and must be reminded. On October 6, Israel in outward appearance resembled a normal country. The military threat from its Arab neighbors had long been reduced to manageable levels. A high-tech boom had generated unprecedented prosperity. Carefree young people danced until morning in the night spots of Tel Aviv. Israelis felt safe enough to invest their considerable energies on sterile political controversies, American-style. These mostly swirled around the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a sometimes Trumpian figure, who, like Trump, inspired wild apocalyptic predictions and acts of symbolic resistance."

And then came Saturday, October 7, a holiday . . . Was Israel Lulled Into a False Sense of Security? | City Journal (city-journal.org)

Biden can't protect Israel's borders or Ukraine's borders or ours

"THE BIDEN BORDER CRISIS: NEW DATA AND TESTIMONY SHOW HOW THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION OPENED THE SOUTHWEST BORDER AND ABANDONED INTERIOR ENFORCEMENT"

Interim Staff Report of the Committee on the Judiciary and Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security and Enforcement

• Between January 20, 2021, and March 31, 2023, there were over 5 million illegal alien encounters. Of these encounters, at least 2,464,424 had no confirmed departure from the United States.
• During the same period, DHS released at least 2,148,738 illegal aliens into the United States.
• Only 5,993 illegal aliens encountered at the southwest border and placed in removal proceedings before an immigration judge were actually removed from the United States during this time.
• A mere six percent of illegal aliens released into the United States were even screened for fear of persecution for purposes of asylum.
• As of March 2023, DHS had removed only 874 of the illegal aliens found to have a credible fear of persecution and whose claims were adjudicated on the merits and denied by an immigration judge.
• An additional 205,473 aliens were released into the country through illegal categorical parole programs.

2023-10-09-New Data and Testimony Show How the Biden Administration Opened the Southwest Border and Abandoned Interior Enforcement.pdf (dropbox.com)

Let me count the ways the Biden regime is a threat to the whole world

1) Used a pandemic to take back the White House using fear, lies and the deep state.

2) Biden bug-out from Afghanistan left behind billions of military weapons and technology,
3) which enriched the Taliban and
4) demoralized our troops,
5) which in turn sent a message to Putin that Biden is a paper tiger controlled by unnamed political forces,
6) which led to the deaths of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian people,
7) and threatened all of Europe.
8) Then he gave a 6 billion dollar deal to Iran for "humanitarian aid"
9) a country which has sworn to destroy Israel,*
10) which in turn funded an invasion of Israel's borders (why not since Biden has proven he can't protect our own borders).

I'm a former Democrat. I know the game. I was fooled too. Democrats are the party of the KKK and Jim Crow, the party that coaxes women into killing the next generation while bringing in outsiders to take their place, and then evangelizes them for careers in government and business. The party that can't define "woman" will be happy to send their sons and daughters into another war.

Democrats never waste a crisis. They used the Covid crisis to destabilize our economy, our schools, our health system, our military, and with the help of Big Pharma and Big Tech, our constitutional government putting in place a puppet regime worse than any totalitarian rule in modern times.

So many Democrats have been red-pilled** by their party's lust for power and insane treatment of Trump and they are looking anywhere for a political home (probably not to the weak, sniveling Republicans). They need to open their eyes and assess the damage. Yes, Biden has betrayed Israel, but he betrayed us first.

*"In Tehran yesterday [Oct. 7], members of Parliament chanted, “Death to Israel.” The Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh made a televised speech warning Arab countries that Israel could not protect them—an apparent threat against countries that had signed the Abraham Accords, such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which has been considering normalizing ties with Israel. Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s armed wing, said that his group’s action would at last put an end to Israeli air raids against Iranian and Hezbollah assets in Syria." (The Atlantic, Oct. 8, 2023)

** dramatically transformed, especially by introducing them to a new and typically disturbing understanding of the true nature of a particular situation

Mask research by the CDC--inaccurate

"The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is widely cited but not externally peer-reviewed, serially exaggerated the evidence for mask-wearing among 77 such outside studies it published, according to an independent review by epidemiologists at the University of California San Francisco, the system's health sciences campus.

Just 14% of MMWR studies reached statistical significance and 30% actually studied mask effectiveness. Yet three-quarters concluded that masks were effective, authors Tracy Beth Hoeg, Alyson Haslam and Vinay Prasad wrote in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Medicine, the official journal of a consortium of five associations in academic internal medicine.

 
None of the 77 was randomized, the strongest form of evidence, and just one study each "used causal language appropriately" ("particle filtration on mannequins") or "cited conflicting evidence" (mostly about influenza), they wrote. "The level of evidence generated was low and the conclusions were most often unsupported by the data." "

This is not called science it's called an agenda.

CDC repeatedly misrepresents mask research, mask mandates worsen depression: studies | Just The News

Ellsworth Wareham gives advice on nutrition and long life

https://youtu.be/FX58PyQwrcI?si=3hYjhqTW0FSe6SI9

He was 98 when he made this video, but lived to be over 104.  He's got some good advice on heart disease (his cholesterol was 117) and being a vegan, but most people wouldn't find it acceptable.  I came across this reading about Blue Zones. 

From Wikipedia: Ellsworth Edwin Wareham (October 3, 1914 – December 15, 2018)^[1][2] was an American cardiothoracic surgeon and centenarian from Loma Linda, California who promoted the health benefits of plant-based nutrition.^[3][4]

Queer Theory is big in anthropology

It's shocking how stupid educated people can be. Maybe it's because women outnumber men in college degrees (since 2008). And you can't compromise with them. It's gone way beyond using the correct pronoun with a colleague or not dead naming people, now they must foist their insane beliefs on people dead for thousands of years. We lost the battle when we agreed to use the word "gender" as a biological thing instead of a sick fantasy. Leftists have created a new tower of Babel in attempting to be god. It won't end well.

"We used to say there’s sex, and gender. Sex is biological, and gender is not. Then it’s no, you can no longer talk about sex. Sex and gender are one, and separating the two makes you a transphobe, when of course it doesn’t. In anthropology and many topics, the goalposts are continuously moved. And, because of that, we need to stand up and say, “I’m not moving from my place unless there’s good scientific evidence that my place is wrong.” And I don’t think there is good scientific evidence that there are more than two sexes." Elizabeth Weiss, a professor of anthropology at San José State University, whose panel discussion for the November Toronto conference was deep-sixed as not being "settled science." https://www.city-journal.org/article/dis-empaneled?

There is much to respond to in this portion of AAA’s statement. First, it’s ironic for the organization to accuse scientists of committing the “cardinal sin” of “assuming the truth” of something, and then to justify cancelling those scientists’ panel on the grounds that the panelists refuse to accept purportedly “settled science.” Second, the panel was organized to discuss biological sex (i.e., the biology of males and females), not “gender roles”; pivoting from discussions of basic biology to murkier debates about sex-related social roles and expectations is a common tactic of gender ideologues. Third, the AAA’s argument that a person’s “gender role” might not “align neatly” with his or her reproductive anatomy implies the existence of normative behaviors for members of each sex. Indeed, this is a central tenet of gender ideology that many people dispute and warrants the kind of discussion the panel intended to provide.  (Colin Wright, author of the CJ article)

More on Issue one and the Ohio Constitution

Planned Parenthood, supported primarily by Democrats/Progressives, is a cash only lucrative business for abortion and has a special program (funded by Warren Buffet) for poor and minority women to kill their babies. Its other programs are supported by the government, including contraception. Among the young, contraception has a high failure rate and thus they create a market for the abortions. Clever.

Abby Johnson, a former PP employee, says the Ohio bill (Issue 1) to enshrine abortion in Ohio's constitution has all the earmarks of having been drafted by Planned Parenthood. The slick ads we're seeing on TV are manipulative and contain inaccurate information. (Thepublicsquare.com podcast, 60)

The abortion battle in Ohio

I've been watching all the classy pro-abortion ads on TV (trying to enshrine abortion up to the day of birth in our Ohio Constitution). Excellent production values and heart-rending stories. Mega doses of outside money. It has caused me to wonder about all the rights and choices the babies being aborted won't have in their future.

No, women will still be able to get treatment for miscarriages.

No, it will not affect removing a deceased unborn child.

When a woman's life is at risk and the baby is pre-term, medical intervention can possibly save both.

Ectopic pregnancy (embryo implants outside the uterus) interventions are still necessary.  This is not an abortion.

Don't forget, abortion is the direct and intentional killing of a baby in the womb.  In the past, both parties were champions of the weak and helpless.

What Jesus never said

 

Welfare statistics for 2023 in U.S.

 50 Important Welfare Statistics for 2023 | Lexington Law

There were 70 million people on the Social Security Administration (SSA)’s welfare programs in the United States in 2021 which includes SNAP, housing assistance, unemployment programs and Medicaid. It is higher than military spending. It is estimated welfare spending in 2023 will account for around 14 percent of the federal budget.

How and why we lost confidence in the public health system

"In the end, it took some grandstanding Republicans in Congress to break the logjam of information. In July 2023, the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a trove of emails, text messages, and other interactions between Fauci, Collins, other health officials, and leading virus experts. Other messages were leaked to independent reporters, including Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger. These communications reveal a stunning contrast between those experts’ confident public statements and the doubts and fears they expressed privately.

In dozens of interviews, dating to the start of the pandemic, Fauci, Collins, and others expressed bland assurances that the new virus must have spilled into the human population from a wild animal. The idea that the Wuhan Institute might have been involved was dismissed as “just a conspiracy theory,” in Fauci’s words. But the recently disclosed communications reveal that behind the scenes, many of the world’s top virologists worried that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had leaked from the Wuhan lab. Worse, some feared that its terrifying transmissibility might be due to genetic manipulation."

The Covid Cover-up | City Journal (city-journal.org)

Hurricane Ophelia and Robbie Robertson

AI generated story: "Tropical Storm Ophelia formed on Friday afternoon [September 22, 2023] and quickly strengthened close to hurricane strength1. The storm is set to drench the East Coast this weekend, bringing heavy rain in addition to strong gusty winds, rough surf, and coastal flooding1. Tropical storm warnings are in effect from Cape Fear, N.C., to the Delaware-Maryland border on the Delmarva Peninsula, with storm surge warnings blanketing a similar area1.

The National Hurricane Center reported that tropical storm conditions have the possibility of developing over portions of the U.S. southeast and mid-Atlantic coasts2. The storm will bring danger of life-threatening storm surge, high surf, and rip currents to the mid-Atlantic3. More than 7 million people are under tropical storm warnings as of Friday afternoon3.

Please stay safe and follow the instructions of local authorities."

One of my favorites, Ophelia by The Band. If I had a middle age crush, it was Robbie Robertson. https://youtu.be/xe7y7ByOrwQ?si=eSkqMRUltdO5moMY  He died in August, 2023. Robbie Robertson, guitarist and songwriter of The Band, dead at 80 - YouTube

https://youtu.be/ph1GU1qQ1zQ?si=r1-F8EsESUykKZWm  The Weight.

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

I recently came across the podcast, "The illusion of Consensus" with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Rav Arora. Ep. 13 was an interview with Dr. Aaron Kheriaty whose outstanding career and service as a bio-ethicist at UC Irvine was torpedoed by the censorship of Big Tech and Big Pharma on behalf of the Biden Administration. He's written a book in his "free time," The New Abnormal." The unholy alliance of (1) public health, (2) digital technologies of surveillance and control, and (3) the police powers of the state, the Biomedical Security State. What surprised me was he took a look back to a 1989 conference where the enemy in a pandemic changed from the virus or pathogen to the whole human population who could be vectors. The conference was organized/planned by Dr. Fauci! He's written about that at Substack. He's one of the plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden. It will probably go to the Supreme Court.

The Illusion of Consensus: Episode 13: Dr. Aaron Kheriaty On The Violation Of Bioethical Principles During The Covid Pandemic on Apple Podcasts

Dr. Fauci's Amnesia - by Aaron Kheriaty, MD (substack.com)

The New Abnormal: A Review (catholicexchange.com)

The 1950 census, Forreston, Illionois

I recently received a notice from Family Search about the 1950 U.S. census. So, I looked at my mother, p. 27--interesting to see the details from 1950--names of our neighbors, their kids, professions etc. I remember so many of these people. I didn't know our street had a name! However, my brother and I weren't on the list (we were 10 and 8), so I moved to the next page. No, we weren't there. Then I went backwards and there we were on p. 26 not attached to a family (at least not that I could discern). Maybe the paging goes down instead of up?  I also noticed that in 1950 49.51% of women over 14 were married, so I checked for current data, and found that in 2022 49.9% of women over 15 are married. When I looked at the 1920 census for my grandfather, I see that young children (under 3 or 4) also were listed with months.  My aunt Muriel was 2 and 11 months. That wasn't done for older children.

Thomas Sowell on famous American Racists

 Thomas Sowell TV provides a lecture on famous American racists, most of whom were academics, economists, socialists, journalists, progressives and leftists, just like today. https://youtu.be/Cbq145xnaSs?si=hKO--kj3WU6fXKeT

Edward A. Ross, Roscoe Pound, Francis A. Walker, Richard T. Ely, Madison Grant, George Horace Lorimer, George Creel, H.L. Menken, H. G. Wells, and Jack London.

Bidenflation and Trump

The numbers for household median income since the pandemic illustrate how American families have lost ground: Income in the United States: 2022 (census.gov)  Table A-2

• 2019: $78,250
• 2020: $76,660 ($1,590 below 2019)
• 2021: $76,330 ($1,920 below 2019)
• 2022: $74,580 ($3,670 below 2019)

Although I have nothing good to say about Biden, I think he's the biggest criminal ever to live in the White House, Trump made mistakes too with the pandemic. I think he, along with everyone else, was totally unprepared, because how would he know? It's not encountered in business. However, he's a good judge of character--usually trusts his gut.

 
1) He should have let Fauci go as soon as he noticed his fascist tendencies, double speak and switcheroo speechifying.

 
2) He should have made sure his own advisors he put on that Covid advisory group were able to have their say.

 
3) Even if he was unfamiliar with the concept of peer-reviewed scientific research, I'm sure someone told him that those speaking for the CDC and Big Pharma could be balanced by outstanding researchers who were advocating for better treatment options and not just an experimental "vaccine" begun after the disease had already spread.

 
4) As a businessman familiar with the cut-throat capitalist model, Trump should have sniffed out the demonization, deplatforming, and cancel culture methods of the Democrat party and figured out they'd use it to their advantage in the election.

5) Trump was failed by his advisors and those he selected to be close to him or his vanity prevented him from listening. If ordinary non-scientific, non-political citizens figure out this was as much ideological as viral, then he should have also. If he wants our vote in 2024, he'll have to do a better job in that department.

Now in addition to the numbers above listed for household income one has to add to those losses, what it is costing every household to bring into our country 230,000 border jumpers each month from many nations with many languages and cultures--Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South America, Central America, Mexico, China, Russian, Ukraine and India. Those expenses are local--schools, emergency housing, benefits, more police, displacement of local low-income citizens, etc. If Trump can't convince the Republicans to get off their butts and do something, then he should step aside and let someone else do the job. Having been a Democrat for 40 years, I am still shocked at the lazy, good for nothing Republicans who can't agree on where to do lunch, let alone legislation, that we elect year after year.

Your thoughts? I'm running out.

The cost of natural disasters compared to . . .what?

"Since 1980, billion-dollar natural disasters have resulted in nearly 16,000 deaths and cost $2.5 trillion (after adjusting for inflation). "

I haven't checked this USAFacts story. It's probably OK, but is the intent to cause fear and blame, with the aim of taxing you more for a non-existent climate change threat?

16,000 deaths in 43 years? 2022 had 466 deaths from natural disasters--cyclones, fires, earthquakes, blizzards and cold waves, floods, etc., but 42,795 traffic fatalities. Technology and warning systems have drastically reduced dangers from disasters as has reduced poverty. 2.8 million Americans die of obesity related diseases, and 80% of the Covid deaths were due to weight related problems.

 
100 years ago this natural disaster figure would have been in the thousands with a smaller population. If it weren't for bad environmental policies established by federal and state governments in the 80s and 90s, the wildfire problems would go away. A lot of hurricane damage costs and deaths could be reduced if the population didn't want to build in risky, beautiful places--especially the wealthy. Denying people government insurance might reduce that.

2020 Income Taxes, updated

I still see a lot of "interesting" interpretations of tax rates, percentages, quintiles, etc., and of course, greed. I admit, the top 1% made out well with the lockdowns and pandemic in 2021 and 2022. Probably own a lot of stock in pharmaceuticals. And with new war expenses, and Biden shoveling all he can to Zalenskyy anyone invested in war materiel is doing well. But here's the latest I could find on 2020, the last full year of Trump's term.

 
"Average tax rates for all income groups remained lower in 2020, three years after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, than they were in 2017 prior to the reform.

In 2020, taxpayers filed 157.5 million tax returns, reported earning nearly $12.5 trillion in adjusted gross income (AGI), and paid $1.7 trillion in individual income taxes.

The average income tax rate in 2020 was 13.6 percent. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 25.99 percent average rate, more than eight times higher than the 3.1 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers.

The top 1 percent’s income share rose from 20.1 percent in 2019 to 22.2 percent in 2020 and its share of federal income taxes paid rose from 38.8 percent to 42.3 percent.

The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97.7 percent of all federal individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 2.3 percent.

The 2020 figures include pandemic-related tax items such as the non-refundable part of the first two rounds of Recovery Rebates and the $10,200 unemployment compensation exclusion."

Who Pays Federal Income Taxes? | IRS Federal Income Tax Data, 2023 (taxfoundation.org)

Fall Fest at UALC

Our church had a party to welcome autumn and invited the neighbors. We didn't go--it's difficult for us to stand for long periods of time, but it sounds like everyone had a good time on September 17. Here's Becki Bork's note:

"We give thanks and praise to God for a wonderful Fall Fest! The weather was perfect and the Mill Run property was filled with people both from the congregation and the surrounding community! Kids were bouncing on inflatables, running through a mountain of bubbles, making and flying kites, playing miniature golf; adults filled the pickleball courts and euchre tables in friendly competition; all ages were enjoying popcorn, cotton candy and sno-cones, and many took time to sit down for dinner from the food trucks, talking with friends and meeting new people. It was a beautiful time of being a welcoming Oasis. Praise God! "

Remember Joe's promises about the pandemic control

Reminder: The pandemic killed nearly 1 million Americans in 2020-2021 according to the CDC. "Tragically and remarkably, a majority of those deaths happened after we announced the authorization of COVID vaccines, which means that they were particularly concentrated in 2021." (Atlantic, March 2022)

During the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden blamed the pandemic's spread on President Trump's poor leadership, and denied that the vaccine he was fast tracking could be worthwhile if Trump was behind it. He said he had a plan to stop the spread. After Biden was in office, more people died from the virus in his first 10 months after the vaccine (which had great compliance the first year) than in 2020 before the vaccine, plus he became a dictator about using it, demanding it for federal employees (the rest of us were stuck with our governors' decrees).

 
No one ever holds old Joe accountable for his lies or his promises or his business crimes or his sexual fantasies about children.