Don’t let them get away with it, especially the ones with professional misinterests. Try to red pill friends that were calling you a tin hat three years ago, but now may see the light. I would say the number who went along, and now deeply regret it, and are even embarrassed by it, is in the millions. Never tire of being right. I attended a professional sports game yesterday, in a dark blue city which earlier this year had a vaccine mandate to enter restaurants. To travel from the city center to the stadium, we took the subway, as one does. Seats full, strap-hangers crammed in nose-to-nose, at a social distance of 10 inches. Nobody masked, nobody afraid. They all know. – nvp

“when we were in the dark about covid” is not a useful excuse for bad behavior

by el gato malo

brown university econ professor emily oster is out with a new missive in the atlantic (where else?) and it seems to be generating quite a lot of heat.

perhaps this is because it is so seemingly self-serving and tone deaf.

after all, this is quite the spicy take from the woman who did so much to gather so much useful data on masking in schools only to disavow the obvious conclusions it led to because the orthodoxy of those around her at brown U would not allow “masks don’t work to stop covid” to be reported.

just to be clear, emily is not advocating forgiving “those who deliberately spread misinformation” (though she does seem a bit confused about just who that might be) but her “we were all in the dark and people said lots of things and some wound up right and some wrong and we all just need to get over it and move on as recrimination is not useful” take rings hollow and false here.

what does this serve?

why should we forgive those who through stupidity, cupidity, and fear spent 3 years denying 100 years of evidence based science to attack our lives and livelihoods?

oh, no worries! i’m sure you had your reasons?

you were “just following orders”?

you were just doing what the authorities said?

because i seem to remember a whole pile of excuses that sounded an awful lot like that being rejected back in the late 40’s.

and i must agree with that take and take issue with emily.

it is precisely BECAUSE following vicious, evil orders is so easy in times of fear and that humans break and bow to authority with such ease that there must be sharp penalties, reputational and otherwise for so doing.

otherwise, you’re just greasing the rails for next time.

it’s the low energy path of submission and freeing it from consequence serves only to render it a path more followed.

ignorance of the law is not excuse. neither is ignorance of ethics or epidemiology.

in the end, we all stand culpable for what we choose to do based on whatever information we have and this is why, to my mind, those with little information should so stringently avoid doing radical and dramatic things.

isn’t that just basic sense?

so why would we seek to reduce the penalties for having violated such a simple tenet?

even if we accept this “we were in the dark” line of reasoning it still makes no sense.

1. we were not in the dark. we had 100 years of evidence based pandemic and epidemiological guidance and guideline upon which to rely. some tried to follow these bodies of canon and were shouted down by those seeking to do exactly what that guidance admonished against. that is lack of knowledge abrogating actual knowledge and panic driven superstition superseding evidence. equating those two viewpoints as “equivalent” is pure nonsense.
2. even if truly no one knew anything, then this is a reason for humility, not stridence. the base case is always “respect others and their rights. do not panic. don’t do anything crazy or drastic without a very sound reason.” that’s not what happened. a bunch of terrified anti-science loons got loose with global government and pushed literally unprecedented in human history programs of societal and economic upheaval that flat out broke the world while, predictably, having zero effect on the pandemic. guys, you took you lead from china. china.the precautionary principle does not state “every time you get scared, do the most radical thing you can think of it if feels like safety” that is precisely what it warns against. such excursions into superstitious supplication of pseudoscience are not evidence based epidemiology. they are not even sanity. and again, calling that an equivalent viewpoint to “we need strong, data-driven evidence to take such outlandish actions” (presuming they are permissible at all, itself deeply questionable) is pure nonsense.
3. the presumption of prerogative to force upon others the unfounded desires of “those in the dark” fails inherently on every metric germane to sustaining a free society. “we didn’t know, so we took your rights away just in case” is not much of justification. this lays claim to “emergency powers” of dictatorial nature and is exceedingly dangerous as a societal foundation. it’s also incompatible with the basic idea of a republic in which the rights of the individual stand paramount to the whims of the state or the mob. this ought be especially so in emergencies with low information for what could be more likely to work vast harm than great power to coerce usurped and wielded by “those in the dark”? again, this is not a viewpoint that can be granted equivalence to a system that respects rights. doing so is, yet again, pure nonsense.

so, this all fails in epic fashion. this idea of “we didn’t know so how about a little amnesty for all the crazy and damaging things we did to you in direct opposition to your own desires” is just not going to wash.

that laundry is too dirty.

this is especially so coming from emily because in her case it’s so clearly not even true. it feels an awful lot like the desperate play of someone who has realized just how far on the wrong side of the line she wound up despite knowing full well what the right side was.

“let’s not pull any more threads to see where they go” said the lady whose sweater was rapidly gathering around her feet…

oster gathered and published the very data (linked above and here) that shows the utter inefficacy of masks in schools and then cravened out of reporting it honestly for fear of social and career consequences it was bringing down.

this makes it seem odd that she so champions “those in the dark” as she herself was clearly not one so blinded.

she claims to be “data driven” but, in the event was, in fact, driven from the data and back into alignment with orthodoxy.

and this is a high status, large platform player. if she cannot stand up to the sorts of panic pressure to conform to regimes of misinformational messaging then what hope have many others?

of all the people who should have had the confidence to follow data over diktat, should not a trained professor of data handling rise to the fore?

but this failed. and if we would avoid such failure in the future, perhaps a bit of culpability ought be spread around.

as an economist, surely ms oster must understand incentives. if there is no cost to having acted poorly, rashly, and without consideration or information despite the ill effects it had on others, are we not just subsidizing more such antisocial activity in the future?

Readers of this site will recall my extensive coverage of the destruction of the Philadelphia Carmelite monastary, first in 2021 and continued early 2022. Maike Hickson at Lifesite News published startling new revelations yesterday that I suggest you read here:

‘They are profiting from the closure of the monastery’: Rome suppresses Carmel in Philadelphia

BY TYLER DURDEN

As Bloomberg just reported, the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy rejects limits on using nuclear weapons long championed by arms control advocates (and, in the not too distant past, by Joe Bide) citing burgeoning threats from Russia and China.

“By the 2030s the United States will, for the first time in its history face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries,” the Defense Department said in the long-awaited document issued Thursday. In response, the US will “maintain a very high bar for nuclear employment” without ruling out using the weapons in retaliation to a non-nuclear strategic threat to the homeland, US forces abroad or allies.

In yet another stark reversal for the senile occupant of the White House basement, in his 2020 presidential campaign Biden had pledged to declare that the US nuclear arsenal should be used only to deter or retaliate against a nuclear attack, a position blessed by progressive Democrats and reviled by defense hawks. But, like with every other position held by the pathological liar who even trumps Trump in the untruth department, this one has just been reversed as well as “the threat environment has changed dramatically since then” and the Pentagon strategy was forged in cooperation with the flip-flopping White House.

In a stunning move that should – or rather “should” – spark outrage among the so-called progressives but will at best prompt some very sternly retracted letters, the nuclear report that’s part of the broader strategy said the Biden administration reviewed its nuclear policy and concluded that “No First Use” and “Sole Purpose” policies “would result in an unacceptable level of risk in light of the range of non-nuclear capabilities being developed and fielded by competitors that could inflict strategic-level damage” to the US and allies…

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/stunning-strategy-reversal-pentagon-will-no-longer-rule-out-use-nuclear-weapons-against-non

As reported at  THE PILLAR

A working document for the continental phase of the Church’s global “synod on synodality” has called for institutional and structural reform of the Church at all levels, to better incorporate synodality into ecclesiastical life.

The text, issued Oct. 27 by the Vatican’s Permanent Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops, praised the local and national phases of the synodal process as a success, saying that “participation exceeded all expectations.”

…

The working document also noted several calls for the Church to adopt a “more meaningful dialogue” with and “more welcoming space for” particular groups who said they feel unwelcome in the Church. Among those groups, the report said, are people who feel “a tension between belonging to the Church and their own loving relationships, such as: remarried divorcees, single parents, people living in a polygamous marriage, LGBTQ people, etc.”

It added that episcopal conference reports also “give voice to the pain of not being able to access the Sacraments experienced by remarried divorcees and those who have entered into polygamous marriages,” and that “there is no unanimity on how to deal with these situations.”

pillarcatholic.com/vatican-synodality-document-calls-for-structural-reforms/

Joe Biden just said that fees on airplanes for extra leg room in front mostly affect people of color 🧐
pic.twitter.com/UmRQnlRQOR

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 26, 2022

Police not called until 2pm the next afternoon and no report of how break-in was missed nor details of items taken, Okay? READ KATIE’S STATEMENT!

Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’ Phoenix campaign office burglarized ahead of election

PHOENIX ABC15 — The office of Secretary of State Katie Hobbs was burglarized overnight Monday into Tuesday morning, according to a statement from her representatives.

According to Phoenix police, officers were called to the area near Virginia and Central avenues Tuesday around 2 p.m., reporting that items were taken from the office sometime overnight into Tuesday morning.

No suspects have been identified in the burglary. It’s unclear what items were taken from the office.

Detectives are checking security cameras in the area in an attempt to identify and locate the subject(s) involved.

Officials with Katie Hobbs’ campaign released the following statement:

“Earlier this week, a break-in occurred at our campaign headquarters. We continue to cooperate with law enforcement as they investigate, and we are thankful to the men and women of the Phoenix Police Department for their work to keep us safe. 

“Secretary Hobbs and her staff have faced hundreds of death threats and threats of violence over the course of this campaign. Throughout this race, we have been clear that the safety of our staff and of the Secretary is our number one priority. 

“Let’s be clear: for nearly two years Kari Lake and her allies have been spreading dangerous misinformation and inciting threats against anyone they see fit. The threats against Arizonans attempting to exercise their constitutional rights and their attacks on elected officials are the direct result of a concerted campaign of lies and intimidation. 

“It won’t work. Katie is running for governor to ensure the safety and security of every Arizona family. She will win this race.”

The Media’s Cover-Up of John Fetterman

By Peter Savodnik

It should now be crystal clear why Democrat John Fetterman refused to take part in more than a single debate with his Republican Senate rival, Mehmet Oz, and why Fetterman insisted on pushing that debate to just two weeks before Election Day—after at least 500,000 Pennsylvania voters had already voted.

Last night’s debate was an unmitigated disaster.

A disaster for Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor—who appeared confused and could barely manage a coherent sentence, let alone a complete paragraph.

And a disaster for Pennsylvania voters, who didn’t get the tough, substantive debate they deserved, one that would have pushed Oz to explain, among other things, why he was distancing himself from Donald Trump (without whom he wouldn’t be the nominee); his position on abortion; China; and how he plans to bring down gas prices.

Oz had some solid talking points, but they were just that—talking points. But Fetterman lacked even those.

You can watch the whole debate here:

A few examples of what went down:

There was Fetterman’s confusing opening statement.

His refusal to share his medical records.

His simplistic and, at moments, cheerleader-sounding celebration of Roe v. Wade.

And, in perhaps the most baffling moment of the night, his inability to explain his position on fracking:

The Pennsylvania Senate race is among the most important in the country. So, the Fetterman campaign—which seriously limited the candidate’s interaction with constituents and put the kibosh on press gaggles—granted some interviews. Almost all of them were conducted remotely, over Google Hang, with closed captioning. None that we can recall focused on the most important thing about John Fetterman: The fact that the candidate, who suffered from a stroke five months ago, does not appear fit to serve.

Until last week.

Last week, NBC reporter Dasha Burns had the temerity to observe the obvious: John Fetterman has trouble with chit chat. Here is what she said: “In small talk before the interview without captioning, it wasn’t clear that he was understanding our conversation.”

She got crucified for it by any number of journalists with blue checks.

From Kara Swisher: “Sorry to say but I talked to @JohnFetterman for over an hour without stop or any aides and this is just nonsense. Maybe this reporter is just bad at small talk.”

From New York Magazine’s Rebecca Traister, who profiled the candidate: His “comprehension is not at all impaired.” The problem, she explained, is “a hearing/auditory challenge.” She added: “He understands everything.”

Molly Jong-Fast came to Fetterman’s defense, tweeting that, in a recent interview, the candidate “understood everything I was saying and he was funny.”

Connie Schultz, a USAToday columnist and the wife of Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, observed: “As he continues to recover, @JohnFetterman used technology to help him answer a reporter’s questions. How we as journalists frame this reveals more about us than it does him.”

The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson suggested that the problem wasn’t Fetterman but, well, us. “Part of our culture’s ongoing stigmatization of disability stems from our profound lack of understanding about the variability—and spectrum—of physical and mental challenges.”

And so on.

The NBC reporter was also attacked by Fetterman’s wife, Gisele. She suggested that Burns should be punished for reporting honestly. “I mean, there are consequences for folks in these positions who are any of these isms,” Gisele Fetterman said. “I mean, she was ableist. That’s what she was in her interview. It was appalling to the entire disability community and I think to journalism.” (The Second Lady of Pennsylvania seemed unconcerned with the First Amendment.)

If anything, Burns, who has covered the race extensively, understated just how bad Fetterman’s condition is…

www.commonsense.news/p/the-medias-cover-up-of-john-fetterman?

“Because thou wast acceptable to God, it was necessary that temptation should prove thee.”

Today is the Feast of St. Raphael the Archangel. He is the heavenly physician, and he wants to help. The temptations aren’t going away. They need to be used as a tool to advance in holiness.

COLLECT
O God, who sent the blessed Archangel Raphael to accompany Your servant Tobias on his journey, grant that we, Your servants, may also be guarded by him always and strengthened by his assistance.

LESSON Tob. 12:7-15
In those days, the angel Raphael said to Tobias: “For it is good to hide the secret of a king: to reveal and confess the works of God. Prayer is good with fasting and alms more than to lay up treasures of gold. For alms delivereth from death, and the same is that which purgeth away sins, and maketh to find mercy and life everlasting. But they that commit sin and iniquity, are enemies to their own soul. I discover then the truth unto you, and I will not hide the secret from you.
“When thou didst pray with tears, and didst bury the dead, and didst leave thy dinner, and hide the dead by day in thy house, and bury them by night, I offered thy prayer to the Lord. And because thou wast acceptable to God, it was necessary that temptation should prove thee. And now the Lord hath sent me to heal thee, and to deliver Sara thy son’s wife from the devil. For I am the angel Raphael, one of the seven, who stand before the Lord.”

GRADUAL Tob. 8:3; pS. 146:5
Raphael, the angel of the Lord, took the devil and bound him.
V. Great is our Lord, and great His power!

The following text is attributed to a Fr. Sálesman:

So powerful and terrible are the enemies of our purity, that when they fight us, all the lights of our spirit are extinguished, and we forget all the meditations and holy resolutions that we had made, and it does not seem, but that in those moments we despise the great truths of faith, and we lose the fear of divine punishment. And it is that impure temptations feel supported by the strong inclination that the body feels towards sensual pleasures. Whoever does not turn to the Lord with humble and trusting prayer in those moments is lost. It is necessary to convince ourselves that no one will be able to overcome the impure temptations of the flesh, if he does not entrust himself to the Lord many times, but especially at the moment of temptation. 

And those temptations will not go away while we are on earth. God wants to save us, but he wants us to be saved as overcomers. That is why all our lives we will be at war against our passions, and only those who have fought bravely will receive the crown of triumph. (Saint Alphonsus Maria). The temptation will be tenacious (very difficult to push away) and alive and aggressive, even violent. That is why each one must prepare to resist it, and this throughout life until old age. If we seek perfection, we must prepare ourselves to resist temptation, which is why St. Paul says: “Faithful is God who will not allow temptations beyond our strength to come. And by allowing temptations to come to us, it will also provide us with the way to be able to resist and overcome them” 1 Cor. 10;13 

Achieving purity is not a made reality that someone can preserve without struggle and without danger… it is a work in progress. It demands never making peace with our defects, neither with passions nor with sensual attractions. Maintaining purity demands a response of fidelity every day because every day we have the possibility of betraying Christ by sinning, but also every day we have the possibility of showing him our fidelity by rejecting impure temptations. Winning in the fight for chastity is one of the greatest demonstrations of love for Our Lord.

Remember when there were bishops and pastors who forbade the sacraments to the unvaccinated? Remember the antipope video where he and a bunch of Cardinals sold SOLD the vaxx as an “act of love?”

I remember.

Full crosspost from Father David Nix:

The Speed of Science and Superstition

Many of you have already seen the above 45 second clip where Mr. Roos, a conservative member of the European Parliament, asks a Pfizer representative named Mrs. Small if Pfizer even tested their Covid-19 vaccine on stopping the transmission of the Covid-19 virus before its international rollout.  Mrs. Small replies, “No [laugh]… We had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.  And from that point of view, we had to do everything at-risk.”

So, notice that the Dutchman Mr. Roos is not asking about a certain amount of studies.  Rather, he is simply asking if Pfizer did any testing to make sure their Covid-19 vaccine actually stopped the Covid-19 virus before peddling it.  Nope. The answer was a big no, from Mrs. Pfizer, herself, as she laughs.  She laughs at a now admittedly-untested vaccine that made billions and killed thousands (or maybe millions.)  Actually, we’ve known for a long time that the safety of their vaccine has been untested, hence the countless people dying of blood-clots and miscarriages.  But the above video is a new revelation:  Not only does Pfizer harm your heart, but it actually never stopped Covid.  How do we know this?  Because it wasn’t even tested on people with covid-19!  She admits that in the above clip with a laugh, implying they had to take a big pharmacological risk on the little people to make billions of dollars for the big people.

Regarding this international roll-out of an untested injection, Mrs. Small (officially speaking for Pfizer to the European Parliament) said it had to be done “at the speed of science.”  I think she means “at the speed of lucrative population-control poisons being rolled-out before getting caught.”  Really, what exactly is “the speed of science”?  We’ve known for a long time this “speed of science” was to dupe people into the most fatal injection in the history of modern medicine.  But even I thought at one point, “Well, maybe even if the jab kills many people, it may have saved a few.”  Nope.  She basically admits the big-bad Pfizer vaccine was no vaccine at all.  How do we know that?  Because Pfizer didn’t have time to test it on anyone with Covid-19.  Why? Because they were moving at the “speed of science. ” She even adds that they had to do everything “at-risk.”  At risk to whom?  Everyone who took it, many of whom died of it.  So, the vaccine truly did nothing…except kill people.

Why did people believe it?  It’s found again in her three words “speed of science.”  What she really meant is the “speed of superstition.”  Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said, “An age without faith is an age of superstition.  Religious belief is so essential to the heart of man that once it is cast aside, some false form is called to fill the void.  Every epoch of materialism has been followed by an era of superstition in which minds believe everything as fanatics and quacks become shrines of worship and adoration.”

All the Catholics (from laymen to bishops) who called me “crazy” for resisting the covid-19 vaccine, look at how many have already died of the vaccine:  My friend who is a clinician on the East Coast told me this week that she believes more have now died of the vaccine than covid itself.  It seems to me that the bishops who put up public pictures of themselves getting the jab two years ago were nothing more than lackeys of government, flunkies for the witch-doctors at Pfizer.  As I said on a video nearly two years ago, the US bishops have no indemnity against pharmacological malpractice lawsuits. If you lost someone due to their coercion, I wish you could sue them but right now it wouldn’t do anything.

Nevertheless, since no member of the clergy (especially one with no medical training) had any right to tell you that a completely experimental injection was “an act of love,” I hope you keep them accountable if one of your loved ones died of the vaccine at the coercion of your local clergy.

Why did the bishops and priests of the US and Europe push the vaccine?  I don’t see how you could have done that if you had any adherence to true religion or true science.   The Catholic hierarchy (from the Vatican downwards) who pushed the DeathVax to lay Catholics now seem to me to be the “fanatics and quacks,” bowing before an injection-site as a “shrine of worship” found only in “an age of superstition.” Such quacks lightly took jobs in the highest echelons of the Catholic Church, thinking it would be easy, that their judgment might be easy, “since probably nearly everyone goes to heaven.”  No, we should not be surprised that a diabolical injection supported by not only no supernatural faith, but even no science would kill so many, and help so few.

tldr: Wyoming, Florida, Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, West Virginia, Montana, Indiana, and Oklahoma.

By Reagan Reese 

At least 11 states have rejected or are expected to reject a recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that pediatricians give COVID-19 shots to children along with other vaccines.

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices unanimously decided Thursday to add COVID-19 shots to the children’s immunization schedule, which some schools and states use to create vaccination requirements. Many states, however, have laws in place that prohibit schools from requiring a COVID-19 vaccination for students.

The Wyoming Department of Health said it will not add the COVID-19 vaccine to the school vaccine schedule for children following the CDC recommendation, according to the Cowboy State Daily. The office of Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, reinforced the decision, announcing that Wyoming would not be listening to the CDC guidance.

“Wyoming has no plans to pursue adding [a] COVID vaccine to its required list,” Gordon’s spokesman, Michael Pearlman, told the Cowboy State Daily. “The governor has not mandated vaccines for adults or children, and believes that COVID-19 vaccination is a personal choice.”

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, announced in a Thursday tweet that his state would not be taking the CDC’s guidance, citing laws against such a measure. In July 2022, an Iowa law went into effect exempting students in K-12 schools from vaccine requirements until 2029, The Des Moines Register reported.

Reynolds’ office referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to that law when asked for comment.

“Regardless of what the CDC says, as long as I am governor, we will never force kids to get a COVID vaccine to go to school,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, also a Republican, wrote in a Thursday tweet…

More: https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/10/21/at-least-11-states-say-no-to-mandatory-covid-19-shots-for-kids/?