non veni pacem

I wrote the following post not even four years ago. It’s all happening. As “gneisslady” noted in the combox this morning, “Am I the only one who feels like the wheat and chaff are starting to separate right in front of our eyes?”

They want you harassed, they want you fired, they want you in jail, and ultimately they want you dead.

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Do you have the courage to say these two words: “Bruce Jenner”

Originally posted on July 9, 2019

How much longer do you think it’s going to be before there are laws, with jail time attached, for so-called “mis-gendering,” “mis-pronouning,” or “trans-hate?” You know I’m not kidding, and you know I’m not wrong. Are we really destined to fight a war over this? Well, if you remember back to last week, Our Lady of Fatima, Sr. Lucia, and Cardinal Caffarra all had something to say on the matter, which I summed up thusly:

In a nutshell, Satan’s battlespace is anti-reality itself. All of these attacks coming at us from all sides are his attempt, since he is incapable of creating anything himself, to replace God’s creation, that is, REALITY, with an anti-reality. HERE

If you think we have hit peak wokeness, think again. Until you start to understand that for the now totally unhinged left, departure from reality IS NOT A BARRIER. In fact not only is it NOT a barrier, departure from reality is A FEATURE, NOT A BUG.

Out this morning on the website of the local ABC affiliate, as it’s lead story, is the headline, “Foster mom heartbroken after transgender son turned away by Payson summer camp.” HERE

PHOENIX — A Valley foster mother says she’s heart broken after her transgender son was told he could not attend a summer camp in Payson despite receiving a scholarship to go.
“I think summer camp is really a place where foster kids can go to simply be kids,” said Amber Checky. The foster mom says her son was supposed to go to Tonto Creek Camp in Payson.
Her nine-year-old transgender foster son was, as most children would be, excited beyond words to attend camp. “My child was looking forward to doing archery and kayaking and hanging out with other kids,” said Checky, who took the boy in when he was seven years old. With the help of Arizona Friends of Foster Care and the families Court Appointed Special Advocate, her foster son received a $400 scholarship to pay for the camp that began on July 14.

So this (lesbian) foster mom took the girl in 2017, when she was seven years old. Now she is “transgender,” and wants to go to a boy’s camp. I wouldn’t doubt she is a tomboy, which is something you grow out of, but no, she’s def trans, says mom.

Let’s have a look at mom’s LinkedIn profile:

“He was born female identified but feels in his brain and his heart that he is a boy,” said Checky. She says she and her partner have always embraced the person he wants to be, supporting him in every way.
The nine-year-old has become an advocate for the LGBTQ community and has thrived on every front.
He’s educated classmates and teachers about being transgender. Started recycling drives at his small charter school as well as excelled as a student.
But last month, just a few weeks prior to camp, Checky was informed her child would not be allowed to attend.
“We get an email from the chief executive officer saying sorry he’s not able to attend anymore and that the camp staff that they had, that has a degree in this, is no longer able to attend, so they would be refunding us,” said Checky.
The camp at first offered to keep him in a completely separate tent from everyone else attending, something Checky did not feel comfortable with.

Click the link to read the rest. The camp was clearly caught off guard and tried to make it work, confusingly. Trying to deal with Anti-reality can be a real bitch.

John Zmirak had a column back in March, re-posted on Independence Day, titled, “Freedom is the Freedom to say, ‘Bruce Jenner.’ If That is Granted, All Else Follows.” It is a really good piece and I encourage you to click and read it all HERE.

My title takes off from a famous passage in Orwell’s 1984, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Winston Smith doesn’t say it out loud, of course. He scribbles it in his journal. And makes sure that the telescreen which monitors his apartment cannot see him.
But of course, the Inner Party finds out his secret. In fact, when he’s caught and tortured, his inquisitor O’Brien makes it a point to force Winston to deny precisely this point. O’Brien tortures Winston until he’s willing to say that two plus two makes five. But that isn’t enough. An old-fashioned tyrant might settle for that, for mere compliance.
The totalitarian wants more. In fact, he needs it. He needs those whom he dominates to really believe the lies he has fostered. Of which he has first convinced himself. That’s because modern ideologies are something much more and worse than tribal bigotries or misguided political systems. As Eric Voegelin, a refugee from the Nazis, taught us, they are “ersatz religions.” To prosper, they must make the same kinds of demands as real creeds.
They must demand more. Religious faith based on sincere belief in the supernatural taps into profound, deep-seated impulses built into man. We are made, it seems, to believe in and order our lives by something both higher and older than nature. That’s true even of creeds that you and I know to be false, such as Islam. Even they evoke a kind of faith that works in harmony with our natures. It’s simply misdirected.

This is what is meant when we say it was never about tolerance. It was never about acceptance. It was never about celebrating it. It was in the beginning, is now, and forever will be (until we win the war) ABOUT PARTICIPATION. You WILL be made to participate in the madness, or else. They NEED you to believe it the same way they do. What exactly is so puzzling about Revelation 13:16?

WE MUST BELIEVE BECAUSE IT IS ABSURD

This, my friends, is the future the Left has in mind for us. Whether individual leftists realize it or not. And this is what lies behind the sudden and absolute demands of the Transgender movement. No, I don’t mean that it’s what motivates people who mutilate and poison themselves in pursuit of “gender reassignment.” Those people are mentally ill, as psychiatrists admitted until five minutes ago.
The truth is much more sinister. The left has taken up Transgender ideology not just despite the fact that it’s absurd and contrary to nature. They’ve chosen it because of that. Saying and meaning phrases like “female penis” and “pregnant men” is the absolute equivalent of asserting that two plus two make five — or whatever other number The Atlantic, the Harvard faculty, and the EEOC have most recently said that it makes. They don’t just want you to repeat that, of course. Like O’Brien, they need you to believe it.

Click the link and go read the whole thing. It’s going to get so much worse. Fast and pray.

LOS ANGELES, CA — After decades of total dominance, the Dallas Cowboys have been dethroned by the Los Angeles Dodgers as the gayest team in all of sports.

“It’s a real Cinderella story,” said Dodgers owner Mark Walter. “Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined us being this gay.”

Despite humble beginnings, the Dodgers have transformed into a gay juggernaut over the past several years. “We put in the hard, gay work,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. “Let me tell you–no one outside that locker room believed we could be more gay than the Cowboys. No one! But our players, our front office–we kept believing. We kept showing up, day after day, fully committed to gayness. Now here we are, kings of the gay mountain. This accomplishment belongs to every Dodgers player who laid the foundation. We stand on the shoulders of gay giants.”

As the Dodgers celebrated their stunning upset, the Dallas Cowboys organization was rocked by the news. “I’m speechless,” said owner Jerry Jones. “It’s going to be tough looking in the mirror at night and having to ask myself, ‘Could I have been more gay?’. We did everything we could–left it all out on the field. It just wasn’t gay enough.”

https://babylonbee.com/news/dodgers-surpass-cowboys-as-gayest-team-in-sports

They all had the same talking points, and it was war, because they admitted it was war. See if you can get all the way through this. It’s 11 minutes long, but it feels like an hour. And remember, there are tens of millions of people who backed up all of these lies, and still do, and still have no remorse.

By Brooke Singman , David Spunt , Jake Gibson , Bill Mears | Fox News

The FBI improperly used warrantless search powers against U.S. citizens more than 278,000 times in the year ending November 2021, according to an unsealed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) filing.

U.S. citizens covered in that improper effort included people involved in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021; George Floyd protesters during the summer of 2020; and donors to a failed congressional candidate, the filing said.

Section 702 of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows the government to conduct targeted surveillance of non-U.S. persons located abroad to acquire foreign intelligence information. When U.S. citizens are flagged as part of these investigations, the FBI takes over the process of querying them for possible security reasons.

The court filing, which spanned 127 pages, was unsealed Friday by the FISC…

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbi-improperly-used-warrantless-search-powers-278000-times-2021-fisa-court-filing-reveals

The headline comes to us from today’s Epistle for the Sunday after the Ascension.

“But before all things have a constant mutual charity among yourselves: for charity covereth a multitude of sins. Using hospitality one towards another, without murmuring.” 1Peter4:8-9

Without murmuring, indeed. Reminds me of this line from last Sunday’s Epistle:

“And if any man think himself to be religious, not bridling his tongue, but deceiving his own heart, this man’s religion is vain.” James 1:26

Terrifying, isn’t it? An unbridled tongue puts your salvation in danger. Not just blasphemy or taking our Lord’s name in vain, either. False witness, detraction, calumny. Look up the definitions if you need to.

But it doesn’t even take that much to damn yourself to Hell.

“But I say to you, that whosoever is angry with his brother, shall be in danger of the judgment. And whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council. And whosoever shall say, Thou Fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” Matt 5:22

St. Anthony, example of obedience, pray for us
St. Anthony, star of sanctity, pray for us
St. Anthony, model of conduct, pray for us

Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us

The more you know…

Going to the toilet is an act of white supremacy pic.twitter.com/yIyHV9BjSw

— David Vance (@DVATW) May 20, 2023

By ROBIN KOERNER 

Scott Adams is the creator of the famous cartoon strip, Dilbert. It is a strip whose brilliance derives from close observation and understanding of human behavior. Some time ago, Scott turned those skills to commenting insightfully and with notable intellectual humility on the politics and culture of our country.

Like many other commentators, and based on his own analysis of evidence available to him, he opted to take the Covid “vaccine.”

Recently, however, he posted a video on the topic that has been circulating on social media. It was a mea culpa in which he declared, “The unvaccinated were the winners,” and, to his great credit, “I want to find out how so many of [my viewers] got the right answer about the “vaccine” and I didn’t.”

“Winners” was perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek: he seemingly means that the “unvaccinated” do not have to worry about the long-term consequences of having the “vaccine” in their bodies since enough data concerning the lack of safety of the “vaccines” have now appeared to demonstrate that, on the balance of risks, the choice not to be “vaccinated” has been vindicated for individuals without comorbidities.

What follows is a personal response to Scott, which explains how consideration of the information that was available at the time led one person – me – to decline the “vaccine.” It is not meant to imply that all who accepted the “vaccine” made the wrong decision or, indeed, that everyone who declined it did so for good reasons.

1. Some people have said that the “vaccine” was created in a hurry. That may or may not be true. Much of the research for mRNA “vaccines” had already been done over many years, and corona-viruses as a class are well understood so it was at least feasible that only a small fraction of the “vaccine” development had been hurried.The much more important point was that the “vaccine” was rolled out without long-term testing. Therefore one of two conditions applied. Either no claim could be made with confidence about the long-term safety of the “vaccine” or there was some amazing scientific argument for a once-in-a-lifetime theoretical certainty concerning the long-term safety of this “vaccine.” The latter would be so extraordinary that it might (for all I know) even be a first in the history of medicine. If that were the case, it would have been all that was being talked about by the scientists; it was not. Therefore, the more obvious, first state of affairs, obtained: nothing could be claimed with confidence about the long-term safety of the “vaccine.”

   Given, then, that the long-term safety of the “vaccine” was a theoretical crapshoot, the unquantifiable long-term risk of taking it could only be justified by an extremely high certain risk of not taking it. Accordingly, a moral and scientific argument could only be made for its use by those at high risk of severe illness if exposed to COVID. Even the very earliest data immediately showed that I (and the overwhelming majority of the population) was not in the group.

   The continued insistence on rolling out the “vaccine” to the entire population when the data revealed that those with no comorbidities were at low risk of severe illness or death from COVID was therefore immoral and ascientific on its face. The argument that reduced transmission from the non-vulnerable to the vulnerable as a result of mass “vaccination” could only stand if the long-term safety of the “vaccine” had been established, which it had not. Given the lack of proof of long-term safety, the mass-“vaccination” policy was clearly putting at risk young or healthy lives to save old and unhealthy ones. The policy makers did not even acknowledge this, express any concern about the grave responsibility they were taking on for knowingly putting people at risk, or indicate how they had weighed the risks before reaching their policy positions. Altogether, this was a very strong reason not to trust the policy or the people setting it.

   At the very least, if the gamble with people’s health and lives represented by the coercive “vaccination” policy had been taken following an adequate cost-benefit analysis, that decision would have been a tough judgment call. Any honest presentation of it would have involved the equivocal language of risk-balancing and the public availability of information about how the risks were weighed and the decision was made. In fact, the language of policy-makers was dishonestly unequivocal and the advice they offered suggested no risk whatsoever of taking the “vaccine.” This advice was simply false (or if you prefer, misleading,) on the evidence of the time inasmuch as it was unqualified.

2. Data that did not support COVID policies were actively and massively suppressed. This raised the bar of sufficient evidence for certainty that the “vaccine” was safe and efficacious. Per the foregoing, the bar was not met.

3. Simple analyses of even the early available data showed that the establishment was prepared to do much more harm in terms of human rights and spending public resources to prevent a COVID death than any other kind of death. Why this disproportionality? An explanation of this overreaction was required. The kindest guess as to what was driving it was “good-old, honest panic.” But if a policy is being driven by panic, then the bar for going along with it moves up even higher. A less kind guess is that there were undeclared reasons for the policy, in which case, obviously, the “vaccine” could not be trusted.

4. Fear had clearly generated a health panic and a moral panic, or mass formation psychosis. That brought into play many very strong cognitive biases and natural human tendencies against rationality and proportionality. Evidence of those biases was everywhere; it included the severing of close kin and kith relationships, the ill-treatment of people by others who used to be perfectly decent, the willingness of parents to cause developmental harm to their children, calls for large-scale rights violations that were made by large numbers of citizens of previously free countries without any apparent concern for the horrific implications of those calls, and the straight-faced, even anxious, compliance with policies that should have warranted responses of laughter from psychologically healthy individuals (even if they had been necessary or just helpful). In the grip of such panic or mass formation psychosis the evidential bar for extreme claims (such as the safety and moral necessity of injecting oneself with a form of gene therapy that has not undergone long-term testing) rises yet further.

5. The companies responsible for manufacturing and ultimately profiting from the “vaccination” were given legal immunity. Why would a government do that if it really believed that the “vaccine” was safe and wanted to instill confidence in it? And why would I put something in my body that the government has decided can harm me without my having any legal redress?

6. If the “vaccine”-sceptical were wrong, there would still have been two good reasons not to suppress their data or views. First, we are a liberal democracy that values free speech as a fundamental right and second, their data and arguments could be shown to be fallacious. The fact that the powers-that-be decided to violate our fundamental values and suppress discussion invites the question of “Why?” That was not satisfactorily answered beyond, “It’s easier for them to impose their mandates in a world where people do not dissent:” but that is an argument against compliance, rather than for it. Suppressing information a priori suggests that the information has persuasive force. I distrust anyone who distrusts me to determine which information and arguments are good and which are bad when it is my health that is at stake – especially when the people who are promoting censorship are hypocritically acting against their declared beliefs in informed consent and bodily autonomy.

7. The PCR test was held up as the “gold standard” diagnostic test for COVID. A moment’s reading about how the PCR test works indicates that it is no such thing. Its use for diagnostic purposes is more of an art than a science, to put it kindly. Kary Mullis, who in 1993 won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing the PCR technique risked his career to say as much when people tried to use it as a diagnostic test for HIV to justify a mass program of pushing experimental anti-retroviral drugs on early AIDS patients, which ultimately killed tens of thousands of people. This raises the question, “How do the people who are generating the data that we saw on the news every night and were being used to justify the mass “vaccination” policy handle the uncertainty around PCR-based diagnoses?” If you don’t have a satisfactory answer to this question, your bar for taking the risk of “vaccination” should once again go up. (On a personal note, to get the answer before making my decision about whether to undergo “vaccination,” I sent exactly this question, via a friend, to an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins. That epidemiologist, who was personally involved in generating the up-to-date data on the spread of pandemic globally, replied merely that s/he works with the data s/he’s given and does not question its accuracy or means of generation. In other words, the pandemic response was largely based on data generated by processes that were not understood or even questioned by the generators of that data.)

8. To generalize the last point, a supposedly conclusive claim by someone who demonstrably cannot justify their claim should be discounted. In the case of the COVID pandemic, almost all people who acted as if the “vaccine” was safe and effective had no physical or informational evidence for the claims of safety and efficacy beyond the supposed authority of other people who made them. This includes many medical professionals – a problem that was being raised by some of their number (who, in many cases, were censored on social media and even lost their jobs or licenses). Anyone could read the CDC infographics on mRNA “vaccines” and, without being a scientist, generate obvious “But what if..?” questions that could be asked of experts to check for themselves whether the pushers of the “vaccines” would personally vouch for their safety. For example, the CDC put out an infographic that stated the following.“How does the vaccine work?

   The mRNA in the vaccine teaches your cells how to make copies of the spike protein. If you are exposed to the real virus later, your body will recognize it and know how to fight it off. After the mRNA delivers the instructions, your cells break it down and get rid of it.”

   All right. Here are some obvious questions to ask, then. “What happens if the instructions delivered to cells to generate the spike protein are not eliminated from the body as intended? How can we be sure that such a situation will never arise?” If someone cannot answer those questions, and he is in a position of political or medical authority, then he shows himself to be willing to push potentially harmful policies without considering the risks involved.

9. Given all of the above, a serious person at least had to keep an eye out for published safety and efficacy data as the pandemic proceeded. Pfizer’s Six-month Safety and Efficacy Study was notable. The very large number of its authors was remarkable and their summary claim was that the tested vaccine was effective and safe. The data in the paper showed more deaths per head in the “vaccinated” group than “unvaccinated” group…

Read the rest HERE.

“After months of U.S. insistence that Ukraine did not need F-16s to fight its war with Russia, Washington finally relented to pressure, agreeing not to stop allied nations from sending Kyiv the advanced Western fighter jets it has long desired. Ukraine now hopes to have U.S.-made F-16s flying as early as this fall, following U.S. agreement to allow third countries to transfer the aircraft, according to an adviser to Kyiv’s Ministry of Defense.”