Author: tortminder

Is the media the enemy of the American People?

An enemy media would undermine the government, publish its national security secrets, portray the people in the worst possible light and advocate policies meant to leave America poorer and weaker.

Is the media the enemy of the American people?

President Trump had referred to the New York Times, CNN and NBC News as “the enemy of the American people” shortly after taking office. At CPAC, soon afterward, he declared, “I called the fake news the enemy of the people, and they are — they are the enemy of the people.”

Trump’s comments inspired Washington Post and New York Times pieces comparing him to Stalin. Every marginal political figure looking for 15 seconds of slobbering media coverage, from Senator Jeff Flake to Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter, joined in with the silly Stalin analogies.

CBS and NBC vet Marvin Kalb wrote a book ponderously titled, “Enemy of the People: Trump’s War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy.” Despite the media’s outrage at being called names, it’s not at all shy about calling the President all sorts of apocalyptic names.

“Mr. President, will you stop calling us the enemy of the people, sir? CNN’s Jim Acosta demanded during a recent tax anniversary reform event.

That’s not too likely.

In a USA Today poll, 34% of voters agreed that the media was the enemy of the people. Other polls also showed a sizable amount of agreement that the media was innately hostile to the American people.

Is the media really the enemy of the American people? Let’s tackle the question objectively.

Enemies hate you and want to destroy you. Do the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS, and the whole alphabet soup of organizations with corporate headquarters in major cities really want to destroy the people who watch their programs, buy their papers and serve them soup after hours?

It seems implausible. But so did the Communists of the Khmer Rouge shooting everyone who wore glasses. Or North Korea’s multi-generational concentration camps, Nazi Germany diverting crucial resources from the war effort to kill Jews, or Venezuela shipping oil to Cuba while its people starve.

Plausibility is a poor measure of what fanatical ideologues might do. Let’s start with what they do, do.

While Jim Acosta was demanding a retraction for being called an “enemy of the people”, the media had thrown every effort into opening the border. The American people are defined by their physical possession of the territory. And that territory and its possession is defined and measured by a border.

You can’t advocate the destruction of the American people and then object to being called their enemy.

Without a border, there is no America and no American people. The territories formerly known as the United States fill up with various peoples who claim the entitlements of citizenship but not its responsibilities, whose identity is not of their current country of residency, but of their country of birth.

You don’t need to be an American to watch CNN, MSNBC or serve soup to one of their reporters. They would rather you weren’t. That’s what replacing Americans with cheap labor and cheap votes is about.

The media’s first allegiance is to the left. Not to America. Its people are not Americans. They’re leftists. The politics of the left are geared at replacing Americans with leftists through a combination of indoctrination, demographic replacement, economic warfare and voter suppression.

Destroying the American people would be an act worthy of an “enemy of the people”.

The media is offended by being referred to as the “enemy of the people”. But does it believe that the American people have the right to exist and maintain their existence? And if so, on what terms?

The media has opposed every war that against Communism or Islamism that the United States has fought. It has sought to undermine our country and our soldiers in these conflicts on various pretexts.

The media has covered up numerous acts of violence by Islamic terrorists. It has sided with Islamic terror networks such as the Muslim Brotherhood. It has urged our government to arm Islamic terrorists. It has supported Iran’s push for a nuclear bomb. It has spread disinformation about the links between Islamic terrorists and their domestic support networks. It has worked to silence law enforcement and intelligence officials who attempted to warn about the threat of Islamic terrorism.

If the Muslim Brotherhood controlled the media, would the news look any different than it does now?

This isn’t a shocking new development. The media repeatedly sided with Communist nations, guerrillas, spies, terrorists and superpowers against our own government. It covered up atrocities by the Soviet Union, glamorized Communist spies, urged that we arm and aid Communist nations, and undermined allied governments, and even our own government and its soldiers when they fought Communism.

There has never been a time in the last century when enemy propaganda wasn’t on the front pages of the major newspapers of America. After the fall of the USSR, the media traded the red for the green. Its collusion with the Islamic conspiracy is a sequel to its collusion with the Communist conspiracy.

Is this the behavior of an American institution or an enemy institution out to destroy America?

On the domestic stage, the media has repeatedly advocated for policies that have cost countless American lives and jobs. Its pro-crime advocacy has empowered gangs and thugs. Its economic programs have devastated cities, agricultural and industrial areas.

The media’s broadcasts claim that America is evil. It empowers the hateful voices of black nationalists and Islamist activists that want to destroy America. It calls for the eradication of the major historical figures. It cheers when Christopher Columbus and George Washington are removed from public places.

Any foreigner watching and reading the media comes away with the impression that America is a racist country whose institutions and populace are utterly despicable, and who have no right to exist.

If an actual foreign enemy were in charge of our news coverage, how different would it be?

There’s really not that much difference between how the media covers America, and how Al Jazeera, RT, Xinhau and other enemy state media cover America.

An enemy media would undermine the government, publish its national security secrets, portray the people in the worst possible light and advocate policies meant to leave America poorer and weaker.

How is that any different from what the New York Times and the Washington Post already do?

Godspeed Dragon

I reflect on the dreams and aspirations of that self-proclaimed nerd…

On October 4, 1957 Sputnik was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time from the Tyuratam launch base in the Kazakh Republic. On the following day an eleven year old “nerd” heard the news and excitedly turned on the family floor model Philco multi-band radio to scan the short wave bands and hear the new baby moon go da-da-da.

On February 20, 1962, a fifteen year old high school junior was enthralled when John H. Glenn, Jr., became the first American to orbit Earth. An Atlas launch vehicle propelled a Mercury spacecraft into Earth orbit and enabled Glenn to circle Earth three times. It was the stuff teen-aged dreams were made of.

On July 20, 1969, a twenty-three year old married father of two was awestruck when Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon, a short six years before the martyred president John F. Kennedy has promised the world that we would go to the moon in a decade.
After many years the excitement and wonder of space travel tended to slip from pubic sight with the space shuttle becoming seemingly commonplace with the exception of the loss of the shuttle crew carrying Christa McCauliff.

Today, May 30, 2020, sixty-three years after Sputnik, the United States returned to launching American astronauts from American soil riding American rockets. As a seventy-four year old man I reflect on the dreams and aspirations of that self-proclaimed nerd and dare to hope that somewhere there is eleven year old excited and inspired to perhaps be a part of the American adventure to the stars and beyond.

Godspeed Dragon, may your flight be glorious and a beacon for the new generation of space dreamers.

Prayers for Saturday, May 30, 2020

How amazing is this? Mere coincidence? Hardly! Everything in creation declares God’s wonders, awesomeness, beauty, wisdom, and plan.

“‘Come now, and let us reason together,’
Says the Lord,
‘Though your sins are as scarlet,
They will be as white as snow;
Though they are red like crimson,
They will be like wool.’”
(Isaiah 1:18)

What an amazing promise and offer from God! No matter how foul and filthy we are and how horribly we have sinned, God is willing to forgive, forget, and wipe our slate clean! What kind of love is this? What kind of mercy? He even bids us come and reason with Him. What a reflection of the patience and compassion of God.

I looked up the meanings of the words for crimson and scarlet. Believe it or not, the Hebrew definitions are pretty much the same, and they are not so much about the colors scarlet and crimson as they are about worms. Worms?

What do worms have to do with being cleansed by God? If we take a closer look at the meanings from which the names of these colors –– both deep red like blood –– are derived, we see that they come from the worm or grub from which scarlet and crimson dyes were obtained during biblical times. This particular type of worm, the coccus illicis, would climb onto a tree, or wooden post, attach itself to the wood in a way that it could never be removed, and there give birth to its young. Right after she gave birth, the mother would die and secrete the crimson or scarlet fluid from her body which would then stain the wood. As she gave birth, her body would also form a protective covering over her young, and they would feed on her body to sustain them with nourishment and give them life. Once they were able, the larvae came out from under her body, and from the tree which was now stained crimson from her dying blood, her body would turn into a powder which would then fall like snow from the tree.

“But now ask the beasts, and let them teach you;
And the birds of the heavens, and let them tell you.
Or speak to the earth, and let it teach you;
And let the fish of the sea declare to you.
Who among all these does not know
That the hand of the Lord has done this,
In whose hand is the life of every living thing,
And the breath of all mankind?”
(Job 12:7-10)

How amazing is this? Mere coincidence? Hardly! Everything in creation declares God’s wonders, awesomeness, beauty, wisdom, and plan. One thousand years before Jesus laid down His life, was crucified on the cross to shed His blood to cleanse and forgive us, and to give us new life, this is what King David prophesied of the coming Messiah:

“But I am a worm and not a man,
A reproach of men and despised by the people.
All who see me sneer at me;
They separate with the lip, they wag the head, saying,
‘Commit yourself to the Lord; let Him deliver him;
Let Him rescue him, because He delights in him.’
Yet You are He who brought me forth from the womb;
You made me trust when upon my mother’s breasts.
Upon You I was cast from birth;
You have been my God from my mother’s womb.
Be not far from me, for trouble is near;
For there is none to help.
Many bulls have surrounded me;
Strong bulls of Bashan have encircled me.
They open wide their mouth at me,
As a ravening and a roaring lion.
I am poured out like water,
And all my bones are out of joint;
My heart is like wax;
It is melted within me.
My strength is dried up like a potsherd,
And my tongue cleaves to my jaws;
And You lay me in the dust of death.
For dogs have surrounded me;
A band of evildoers has encompassed me;
They pierced my hands and my feet.
I can count all my bones.
They look, they stare at me;
They divide my garments among them,
And for my clothing they cast lots.”
(Psalm 22:6-18)

By the way, the word illicis in the Latin name for this worm means “finished.” When Jesus bore our sins on the tree, He said, “It is finished.”

Coincidence? Hardly! Jesus, the King of all creation, became that worm so that we could become His sons and daughters and live with Him forever. He didn’t just take on or cover our sin, but He actually became our sin so that we could become the righteousness of God in Him, the just for the unjust, the godly for the ungodly. And He gave us a picture of what He would do and did for us in this lowly coccus illicis worm.

If you had a Bible, and somehow all the pages or verses got ripped out except for one or two, these few verses could sum up the gospel in a nutshell, just like that grub sums up the gospel in a worm. If it’s all you had, this would pretty much explain the amazing love and mercy of our God and Jesus who came to give His life and shed His blood to make us clean and new:

“For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.”
(Titus 3:3-7)

A Pandemic…or not?

James Madison once said, “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.”

A typical flu season is about 4 months, and we’re now 5 months into this. And if you’ve been following the information here on the board, the actual number of deaths directly attributed to the WuFlu virus is about half the number the media have been throwing around. Half of those deaths are nursing home deaths in NY, and a large fraction of the total deaths in the rest of the country are the very elderly as well.

James Madison once said, “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.” The coronavirus fascists have succeeded in cementing their illogical, immoral, and illegal policies through the prism of false information about the timing of the virus, the specific nature and severity of the overall fatality rate, the number of actual deaths, and the utility (or perhaps harm) of lockdown policies in actually mitigating deaths – all the while obfuscating the much higher collateral deaths and damage caused by the lockdown itself.

Every day we learn new information demonstrating the lies driving lockdown.

1) The shocking inflation of COVID-19 death numbers: From day one, we were warned that states are ascribing every single death of anyone who happens to test positive for the coronavirus — even if they are asymptomatic — to the virus rather than the clear cause of death. Now, thanks to a lawsuit in Colorado, the state was forced to revise its death count down by 23 % over the weekend — from 1,150 to 878. The state is now publishing numbers of deaths “with” COVID-19 separate from deaths “from” COVID-19. County officials started accusing the state’s department of health of reclassifying deaths of those who tested positive for the virus but died of things like alcohol poisoning as COVID-19 deaths just to insidiously inflate the numbers. This revision in Colorado is a bombshell story that, of course, will remain unknown to most Americans. Every state needs to do this, and if they did, we would find an across-the-board drop in numbers by at least 25%, the same percenage by which Dr. Birx reportedly believes the count is being inflated, according to the Washington Post. For example, in Minnesota, state officials are now admitting that every single person who dies in a nursing home after testing positive is now deemed to have died from the virus, never mind the fact that 25% of all natural deaths in a given week occur in nursing homes and that most cases of COVID-19 are asymptomatic, which means more often than not, they died exclusively of other causes.

2) States with longer lockdowns had worse results: Kyle Lamb posted a solid analysis on Twitter, grouping states by how long they implemented a lockdown and averaging out the deaths per 100,000 people by each grouping. The results are astounding, as there is a perfectly inverse relationship between how long a state implemented a lockdown and how successful it was in keeping the deaths down.

While this doesn’t necessarily prove that lockdowns cause more COVID-19 deaths (although they definitely cause other deaths), it’s nearly impossible to assert the other way around – that lockdowns prevent deaths – if we see zero correlation in the data. This is especially true given that Florida is the third most populous state and has the highest concentration of seniors, yet deaths and hospitalizations are way down since the state reopened on May 4. Florida is more densely populated than Michigan and Pennsylvania, yet has one-sixth and one-fourth of the deaths per capita, respectively. The same holds true for Georgia, which is a fairly densely populated state. Infections are down over 40% and deaths are down 31% since reopening. As Secretary of Health Alex Azar said, “We are seeing that in places that are opening, we’re not seeing this spike in cases. We still see spikes in some areas that are, in fact, closed.”

3) Outside nursing homes, the fatality rate never warranted such action, even if it would work: Every day we find more hard data showing that the overwhelming majority of cases are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic, and outside nursing homes, the chance of dying is very low and very limited to a population we can more efficiently shield. For those who are younger and healthier, deaths are almost nonexistent. Spain was one of the hardest-hit countries and has a higher overall fatality rate than others, yet its age-stratified fatality rates mirror what we have seen in the Netherlands, Denmark, France, and elsewhere. One Twitter commentator has broken down the age-based fatality rates of the comprehensive Spanish antibody study, and the results are similar to what we’ve seen elsewhere.

Remember, Spain was one of the hardest-hit countries, but even there, 57% of all deaths and the overwhelming majority of deaths of those above age 80 were in senior care facilities. When you take them out of the equation, the death rates are shockingly low. Yet the same politicians who focused on locking up an entire country failed to care for those in nursing homes.

4) Outside New York, this is barely worse than bad flu seasons: While Europe is opening its schools, almost every U.S. state continues to keep schools shut. Yet according to the CDC’s latest weekly report, “For children (0-17 years), COVID-19 hospitalization rates are much lower than influenza hospitalization rates at comparable time points during recent influenza seasons.” Even the World Health Organization’s top scientist just admitted that children “seem less capable of spreading the virus.” As for everyone else, if you look at the bump in overall deaths for most states (outside the tristate area), they are either at, slightly below, or slight above the 2018 flu season. But at this point, everything is way below a typical flu season in the winter, yet you wouldn’t know it from listening to the media. According to the CDC, hospitalizations and deaths have been declining in all 10 designated regions for the past 3-7 weeks. Still, we are now being more fascist that even Italy in violating civil rights.

5) Excess deaths are from the lockdowns, not the virus: While there is zero evidence that lockdowns saved any lives of coronavirus patients, there is clear evidence they cost other lives. It has been observed in a number of states that there are excess deaths being detected, primarily from people dying at home. The CDC is predicting 21,462-40,097 excess deaths NOT due to COVID-19, likely from those too scared to come to the ER because of the exaggerated risk being associated with COVID-19. Also, a recent analysis of excess deaths in England shows that they are seeing thousands of people dying at home from other symptoms because of the lockdown.

6) Social distancing was invented by a high-school kid and politicians, not scientists: Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic research reports that the origin of this cult of “social distancing” being used for totalitarian lockdowns was the brainchild of a high schooler’s sociology paper in 2006, promoted by the Bush administration during the avian flu. It was widely mocked by the epidemiological community, including by Johns Hopkins, for “causing the potential for a ‘serious adverse outcome,’” thereby ensuring that “a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.”

How have we allowed such an illogical approach to crush our liberties, economy, hospitals, education, and criminal justice? How have we lost our freedoms?

The answer is that the public is not getting the right information. This is why the political class is doing everything in its power to censor anyone who dares question the idolatry of this lockdown cult. YouTube has censored the videos of Knut Wittkowski, who was a top epidemiologist in Germany and then served as the head of biostatistics, epidemiology, and research design at Rockefeller University. One would think we’d want to hear his opinion, but there is only one view that is allowed to gain traction. Why is it that only one side is scared of the information of the other side?

As James Madison warned, “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

Justice?

Let that sink in for a moment: members of the Justice Department and Intelligence community did not witness any crimes, they just didn’t think the elected President of the United States had any right to change US policy.

Of all the officers of the Government, those of the Department of Justice should be kept most free from any suspicion of improper action on partisan or factional grounds, so that there shall be gradually a growth, even though a slow growth, in the knowledge that the Federal courts and the representatives of the Federal Department of Justice insist on meting out even-handed justice to all.

  • Theodore Roosevelt, letter to Attorney General William H. Moody (August 9, 1904)

The most shocking thing to come out thus far is confirmation that no matter who is elected President of the United States, the permanent government will not allow a change in our aggressive interventionist foreign policy.

According to testimony, the Justice Department and DEA was concerned over “influencers promoting a false narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency.”

“Consensus views of the interagency” is another word for “deep state.”

Let that sink in for a moment: members of the Justice Department and Intelligence community did not witness any crimes, they just didn’t think the elected President of the United States had any right to change US policy.

And who gets to decide US foreign policy objectives in Europe? Not the US President, according to government bureaucrat Fiona Hill. In fact, Hill told Congress that, “If the President, or anyone else, impedes or subverts the national security of the United States in order to further domestic political or personal interests, that is more than worthy of your attention.”

Who was Fiona Hill’s boss? Former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who no doubt agreed that the president has no right to change US foreign policy. Bolton’s the one who “explained” that when Trump said US troops would come home it actually meant troops would stay put.

Meanwhile, both Democrats and Republicans in large majority voted to continue spying on the rest of us by extending the unpatriotic Patriot Act. Authoritarianism is the real bipartisan philosophy in Washington.

Soft Civil War?

Donald Trump has caused the Shadow Government to come out of hiding: Professional government is a guild. Like medieval guilds. You can’t serve in it if you’re not a member. If you haven’t been indoctrinated into its arcane rituals. If you aren’t in the club.

This is a fascinating (and scary) read.  One of the best nutshell descriptions of our current political situation that I’ve seen.

Dr. Jack Devere Minzey, born 6 October 1928, died 8 April 2018, was the Department Head of Education at Eastern Michigan University as well as a prolific author of numerous books, most of which were on the topic of Education and the Government role therein. (Editor’s note) This was the last of his works:

Civil War:  How do civil wars happen?

By Dr. Jack Devere Minzey

Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country.  And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge.  That’s the basic issue here  Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country.  When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.

The Mueller investigation was about removing President Trump from office and overturning the results of an election.  We all know that. But it’s not the first time they’ve done this.  The first time a Republican president was elected this century, they said he didn’t really win.  The Supreme Court gave him the election.  There’s a pattern here

What do sure odds of the Democrats rejecting the next Republican president really mean?  It means they don’t accept the results of any election that they don’t win.  It means they don’t believe that transfers of power in this country are determined by elections. That’s a civil war.

There’s no shooting.  At least not unless you count the attempt to kill a bunch of Republicans at a charity baseball game practice.  But the Democrats have rejected our system of government.

This isn’t dissent.  It’s not disagreement.  You can hate the other party.  You can think they’re the worst thing that ever happened to the country.  But then you work harder to win the next election.  When you consistently reject the results of elections that you don’t win, what you want is a dictatorship.

Your very own dictatorship.

The only legitimate exercise of power in this country, according to Democrats, is its own.  Whenever Republicans exercise power, it’s inherently illegitimate The Democrats lost Congress.  They lost the White House.  So what did they do?  They began trying to run the country through Federal judges and bureaucrats.  Every time that a Federal judge issues an order saying that the President of the United States can’t scratch his own back without his say so, that’s the civil war.

Our system of government is based on the constitution, but that’s not the system that runs this country.  The Democrat’s system is that any part of government that it runs gets total and unlimited power over the country.

If the Democrats are in the White House, then the president can do anything  And I mean anything.  He can have his own amnesty for illegal aliens.  He can fine you for not having health insurance.  He can use the IRS as his own police force and imprison citizens who speak against him.  He can provide guns and money (Fast and Furious) (Iran nuclear deal) to other countries to support his own agenda, and watch while one of America’s Ambassador’s is dragged through the streets and murdered doing nothing to aid our citizens.  His power is unlimited.  He’s a dictator.  But when Republicans get into the White House, suddenly the President can’t do anything.  He isn’t even allowed to undo the illegal alien amnesty that his predecessor illegally invented.  A Democrat in the White House has ‘discretion’ to completely decide every aspect of immigration policy.  A Republican doesn’t even have the ‘discretion’ to reverse him.  That’s how the game is played.  That’s how our country is run. Sad but true, although the left hasn’t yet won that particular fight.

When a Democrat is in the White House, states aren’t even allowed to enforce immigration law.  But when a Republican is in the White House, states can create their own immigration laws.  Under Obama, a state wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom without asking permission.  But under Trump, Jerry Brown can go around saying that California is an independent republic and sign treaties with other countries.  The Constitution has something to say about that.  Whether it’s Federal or State, Executive, Legislative or Judiciary, the left moves power around to run the country.  If it controls an institution, then that institution is suddenly the supreme power in the land.  This is what I call a moving dictatorship

Donald Trump has caused the Shadow Government to come out of hiding: Professional government is a guild.  Like medieval guilds.  You can’t serve in it if you’re not a member.  If you haven’t been indoctrinated into its arcane rituals.  If you aren’t in the club. And Trump isn’t in the club.  He brought in a bunch of people who aren’t in the club with him.

Now we’re seeing what the pros do when amateurs try to walk in on them.  They spy on them, they investigate them and they send them to jail.  They use the tools of power to bring them down.

That’s not a free country.

It’s not a free country when FBI agents who support Hillary take out an ‘insurance policy’ against Trump winning the election.  It’s not a free country when Obama officials engage in massive unmasking of the opposition.  It’s not a free country when the media responds to the other guy winning by trying to ban the conservative media that supported him from social media.  It’s not a free country when all of the above collude together to overturn an election because the guy who wasn’t supposed to win did.

Have no doubt, we’re in a civil war between conservative volunteer government and a leftist   socialist Democrat professional government.

Well now Pilgrims and Patriots, having read the above, I suggest two things:  forward this very timely, very important analysis to those whom you believe think like you do (and those that don’t) and ask them to read it.

“Let all sides be fairly heard.”

Fudging the numbers?

Last month, New York funeral home directors blew the whistle about inflated coronavirus death numbers. Death certificates mark “COVID-19” as the cause of death even when the deceased hadn’t tested positive for coronavirus, much less actually died of the virus.

Thinking for yourself is hard, that’s why the “Powers that be” want you to let the State and the media do it for you.

Last month, New York funeral home directors blew the whistle about inflated coronavirus death numbers. Death certificates mark “COVID-19” as the cause of death even when the deceased hadn’t tested positive for coronavirus, much less actually died of the virus. This week, a San Diego county supervisor suggested the numbers are even more inflated.

“We’ve unfortunately had six pure, solely coronavirus deaths — six out of 3.3 million people,” County Supervisor Jim Desmond said on the radio show Armstrong & Getty Extra Large Interviews., The San Diego Union-Tribune reported. San Diego County had reported roughly 190 deaths at the time — the current number is 200.

Desmond went on to criticize California’s lockdown. “I mean, what number are we trying to get to with those odds. I mean, it’s incredible. We want to be safe, and we can do it, but unfortunately, it’s more about control than getting the economy going again and keeping people safe,” he said.

In short, Desmond was suggesting that while COVID-19 may have contributed to the 190 deaths, most of those deaths were due in part to previous, unrelated health concerns.

Indeed, the disease has proven most deadly for people with underlying health conditions, so it stands to reason that “pure, solely coronavirus deaths” would be the minority — perhaps even just 3.2 percent of the total recorded deaths, as Desmond suggested.

As of Friday afternoon, there have been 87,218 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the U.S. If Desmond’s claim is accurate and if that 3.2 percent rate holds across the country, and discounting the death certificate inflation, that would mean there are only 2,891 “pure, solely coronavirus deaths” in the U.S.

This is a rough estimate and it would be extremely difficult to confirm. Furthermore, there is little reason to dismiss a death when coronavirus has indeed contributed to it. If someone already had a serious case of asthma, got coronavirus, and died, it would be fair to say coronavirus contributed to the death.

However, the likelihood that “pure, solely coronavirus deaths” are so low does make a difference when analyzing the pandemic in terms of years of life lost, an important measurement. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) applies a principle that “the allocation of health resources must consider not only the number of deaths by cause but also by age.” Therefore, the CDC explains that the “years of potential life lost” is a useful figure — not because the lives of young people are more important than the lives of the elderly, but because humans can only delay death, not prevent it, and beause there is a difference between a disease that kills a 20-year-old in the prime of her life and one that kills a 90-year-old who would have otherwise died a month later.

Taking this figure, James Agresti and Andrew Glen at Just Facts compared the maximum years of life the lockdowns could possibly save and compared it to the years of life lost from the anxiety surrounding the pandemic, including lockdown anxiety. “The anxiety from reactions to Covid-19—such as business shutdowns, stay-at-home orders, media exaggerations, and legitimate concerns about the virus—will extinguish at least seven times more years of life than can possibly be saved by the lockdowns,” they concluded.

Since COVID-19 robs an average of 12 years of life from its victims, the lockdowns could save no more than 7.4 million years of life. Meanwhile, the anxiety and stress of the pandemic will cost 42.9 million Americans an average of 1.3 years of life, thus destroying 55.7 million years of life.

The coronavirus anxiety and stress cost at least 7.5 times more in terms of years of life than the lockdowns could possibly save, according to Just Facts.

If Jim Desmond is correct about the low rate of “pure, solely coronavirus deaths,” then COVID-19 may take even fewer years of life from its victims, thus bolstering the case against the lockdowns even further.

Americans would be wrong to only consider “pure, solely coronavirus deaths” in their analysis of the coronavirus pandemic. Even when COVID-19 only exacerbates a pre-existing condition and causes death that way, that death is tragic and rightly considered part of the pandemic. However, his claim raises two questions about reported deaths. If there are “pure” coronavirus deaths, are there “impure” ones? Did some people who tested positive for the virus nevertheless die of something else entirely?

There may be four types of recorded coronavirus deaths: (1) deaths only caused by COVID-19 (roughly 3 percent), (2) deaths in which COVID-19 ended the life of someone already struggling with health conditions, (3) deaths from other causes but after a patient had tested positive for the virus, and (4) deaths falsely marked “COVID-19” when there was not even a test. Deaths of type 1 and 2 are rightly considered coronavirus deaths, while deaths of type 3 are much harder to distinguish from type 2, and deaths of type 4 are completely inflating the numbers.

Americans cannot claim there have only been 2,891 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic, but they should be skeptical about the 87,218 number. The true number of coronavirus deaths is likely to be smaller.

The New Counter-Culture

…we are now the counter-culture. That our ideals and values now run counter to what is accepted as mainstream.

Received in an email from a friend:
THE NEW COUNTER-CULTURE

The counter-culture movement of the sixties and seventies has won. Not that that’s a bad thing, they just have. The movement, in those days, was mainly about social change, women’s rights, race relations, sexual liberation and anti-war.

It was a generations way of rebelling against the values of their parents, the generation that fought the Second World War. And by any metric, they won.

While the media would have us believe otherwise, the various races of this country have never been more equal and in some cases we are actually starting to see it shift in the opposite direction. Away from repression of the African Americans and towards evil whitey.

A prime case in point is the Ahmaud Arbery shooting. A young black man killed by two white men is newsworthy today as an example that the race war still exists. But the intentional hunting and execution of an elderly white man and woman in a veteran’s cemetery gathers barely a mention. In case you haven’t heard about this, you can read about it here, https://justthenews.com/government/local/couple-their-mid-eighties-murdered-during-daily-visit-their-sons-grave

And while neither of these cases appear to be justifiable, it is clearly evident that one of them is more justified than the other. Just as the #MeToo movement has sent misogynists running for cover, entertainment is full of examples that sexual exploitation or representation is totally acceptable. Where the counter-culture stood on the fact that a woman has the right to choose what happens to her body is now a mainstream view, if not hotly contested. But the counter-culture won the war and what was once counter to our existing culture is mainstream to it.

All the things the counter-culture stood for were absorbed into mainstream culture and as a result there was no longer anything to counter and radicals of the day were absorbed and assimilated.

There is no better proof for this statement than the example of Bill Ayers. Once the leader of a radical anti-war movement that committed acts of terrorism like bombing buildings. He became a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, at one point holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar. An admitted Communist, Ayers was fully accepted into mainstream life, even though he was a known terrorist.

It could be argued that the current social activists are still carrying the counter-culture torch, but that would incorrect. Because what has become mainstream cannot be counter to it.

However, that does not stop these social justice warriors from claiming they are fighting the good fight. Let’s take a minute and look at that.

While the current Progressive Leftists, arguably what became of the original counter-culture, claim they are still fighting for racial equality, they are doing more damage to the idea than their previous generation undid.

Racial relations are at historic lows. A wedge far worse than anything that existed in the 60’s has been driven between law enforcement and minorities. While every shooting of a black man is held up as evidence of this, it does a terrible disservice to the ideal. Jim Crow laws are long gone. Young black men are not really in danger of being arrested and beaten on any given day for no reason, despite what the media portrays. A black man was elected president of the nation, a move Martin Luther King probably didn’t dare hope for in such a relatively short time frame.

Inversely, now every police officer has to be worried should they be forced to defend themselves or others with lethal force should the criminal in question be among the more equal classes. With near certainty the officer in question will be considered guilty until proven innocent. And even if they are, with enough pressure applied by various activist groups, they can essentially find themselves facing double jeopardy having to defend themselves yet again in a Federal Court.

And I’m not saying every shooting is justifiable. Many are not and if not, the officer should face the full weight of the law. But the race of the victim should be of no concern whatsoever. The law should be colorblind and yet it is not.

Do not mistake this for what is often incorrectly referred to as reverse-racism, for no such thing exists. Something is either racist or it isn’t. The race in question is not the qualifier but the act itself being committed based on the race of the victim.

Women’s rights were championed as well and a cornerstone of this was about abortion and the right of a woman to have the final say of what can and cannot happen to her body. And yet these same people are the ones now supporting a mandatory, even forcible vaccination from a virus with extremely low mortality rate. What happened to my body, my choice?

What about the anti-war stance? Hilary Clinton was very much pro-war when she was Secretary of State and running for president. I firmly believed that had she won we would have quickly been in conflict with Russia. Ukraine was cast into turmoil in her efforts to destabilize Russia. The Left is very much pro-war, so long as Russia is the target. But you better not look at China as a threat.

Universities were a breeding ground for the counter-culture revolution of the 60’s and 70’s and many of those revolutionaries never left. Going from student to professor and never holding any real job outside of the university echo chamber. Whereas freedom of speech and open exchange of ideals were championed and even the use of psychedelic drugs was promoted as a path to enlightenment, today they are free speech dead zones.

Today the counter-culture doesn’t want new ideas or to create a place one feels safe to express themselves, though that is the very reason they use to repress it! Universities are echo chambers of uni-thought where differing ideas are to be stamped out at the first occurrence. Where the counter-culture fought for equality, and won it, they now fight for inequality.

The idea of equal morphed into Animal Farm. Some animals are more equal then others. Why? They essentially achieved their goals. Then, they themselves, moved the goalpost. Maybe because they did so well they just figured they could keep on going.

Maybe looking back on this you’ll come to the same realization I did today in a conversation with my friend. That we are now the counter-culture. That our ideals and values now run counter to what is accepted as mainstream.

The New Counter-Culture Yes, I am part of the counter-culture. But I’m not wearing tie-dye and growing my hair out, well, just my beard. This is what the new counter-culture looks like. It’s full of people that want to live their lives the way we see fit. We want to worship in the method we choose. Or not. Counter-cultures are typically anti-religion, we are about the freedom to decide.

We want to be able to speak our minds, freely, whether people agree with what we have to say or not, that’s liberty.

I am not a Nazi, racist, bigot or homophobic. But I am routinely labeled one because I use the wrong pronoun or didn’t check the bulletin board for that day’s list of acceptable New Speak words. Or to worry what electronic device was listening to us.

During the original counter-culture movement surveillance was a time consuming and manpower heavy job. People would have to physically access your phone line or break into your home to plant a listening device. Today, we’re dumb enough to actually pay for them ourselves and willingly bring them into our homes! Why must I wonder who’s listening, because someone is always listening. And we accept the fact!

We want to provide for our families. To work, endeavor and achieve and we want to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Why are we selfish that we do not want to share what we’ve earned or created with the lazy? I’ve spent decades of my life, lost time with family and friends, broken my body to achieve what I have. I paid all the costs, no one helped me. Where was my white privilege when I was breaking concrete slabs with a sledgehammer in the Illinois winter cold? And how can anyone think they are owed any part of the reward? Meager as they were back then.

And I include the Federal Government, who always has their hand out.

We want to be free to associate with whoever we want, where and when we want. The chosen can gather in mass and commit criminal acts of looting, arson, assault and general mayhem. But let twenty or thirty thousand of us gather in defense of our rights and we’re called terrorists.

Let us openly display our keys to liberty, weapons, and we will be shouted at and called all manner of foul names. Yet the Black Panthers can stand outside a polling station and that is not called intimidation?

We want to be able to choose our medical treatment and insurance. Not be shoehorned into or priced completely out of the market. Medicare and Medicaid are bloated beasts rife with abuse and grifters. This is publicly acknowledged by Congress continually, though nothing is done. The VA is a pathetic healthcare provider, the idea of even placing it into that classification is disgusting use of the term. And yet, all these programs are ran by the same people that want to take over my healthcare?

We want the right to decide how to live our lives, every facet of it, down the seemingly insignificant. Is that really too much to ask? Isn’t that the very reason this nation exists in the first place? Did the founders of this country not leave their native land and risk everything in the hope they could lead their lives in the manner they see fit? Did they not want the opportunity, not the guarantee, of success? Were they not fully ready and willing to accept success or failure?

The new counter-culture is now the very ideals this nation was founded on. We’ve come full circle it seems. We are, once again, going to have to fight for the very principals the Constitution set forth as immutable. That, by my very existence, I have certain rights and I am entitled to the opportunity to attempt, to risk it all and reach for the stars. Other than that I am owed nothing.

You cannot be owed a right, you have it by your mere presence. They cannot be given and they cannot be taken away. They can be surrendered freely and that is the problem.

We’re surrendering our rights with nothing more than muttered sniveling.

Our government governs at the consent of the governed. I withdraw my consent. I am determined to become ungovernable. I will resist at every opportunity, no matter how trivial the issue. I will not obey, I will not yield. I damn sure will not ask permission.I will not go quietly into that good night and that is why I am a pissed off American. In case you have forgotten your history, allow me to remind you of one fact. This nation was founded by angry men with guns and it’s going to require angry men with guns to take it back.

Is the media the enemy of the American people?

If an actual foreign enemy were in charge of our news coverage, how different would it be?

President Trump had referred to the New York Times, CNN and NBC News as “the enemy of the American people” shortly after taking office. At CPAC, soon afterward, he declared, “I called the fake news the enemy of the people, and they are — they are the enemy of the people.”

Trump’s comments inspired Washington Post and New York Times pieces comparing him to Stalin. Every marginal political figure looking for 15 seconds of slobbering media coverage, from Senator Jeff Flake to Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter, joined in with the silly Stalin analogies.

CBS and NBC vet Marvin Kalb wrote a book ponderously titled, “Enemy of the People: Trump’s War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy.” Despite the media’s outrage at being called names, it’s not at all shy about calling the President all sorts of apocalyptic names.

“Mr. President, will you stop calling us the enemy of the people, sir? CNN’s Jim Acosta demanded during a recent tax anniversary reform event.

That’s not too likely.

In a USA Today poll, 34% of voters agreed that the media was the enemy of the people. Other polls also showed a sizable amount of agreement that the media was innately hostile to the American people.

Is the media really the enemy of the American people? Let’s tackle the question objectively.

Enemies hate you and want to destroy you. Do the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS, and the whole alphabet soup of organizations with corporate headquarters in major cities really want to destroy the people who watch their programs, buy their papers and serve them soup after hours?

It seems implausible. But so did the Communists of the Khmer Rouge shooting everyone who wore glasses. Or North Korea’s multi-generational concentration camps, Nazi Germany diverting crucial resources from the war effort to kill Jews, or Venezuela shipping oil to Cuba while its people starve.

Plausibility is a poor measure of what fanatical ideologues might do. Let’s start with what they do, do.

While Jim Acosta was demanding a retraction for being called an “enemy of the people”, the media had thrown every effort into opening the border. The American people are defined by their physical possession of the territory. And that territory and its possession is defined and measured by a border.

You can’t advocate the destruction of the American people and then object to being called their enemy.

Without a border, there is no America and no American people. The territories formerly known as the United States fill up with various peoples who claim the entitlements of citizenship but not its responsibilities, whose identity is not of their current country of residency, but of their country of birth.

You don’t need to be an American to watch CNN, MSNBC or serve soup to one of their reporters. They would rather you weren’t. That’s what replacing Americans with cheap labor and cheap votes is about.

The media’s first allegiance is to the left. Not to America. Its people are not Americans. They’re leftists. The politics of the left are geared at replacing Americans with leftists through a combination of indoctrination, demographic replacement, economic warfare and voter suppression.

Destroying the American people would be an act worthy of an “enemy of the people”.

The media is offended by being referred to as the “enemy of the people”. But does it believe that the American people have the right to exist and maintain their existence? And if so, on what terms?

The media has opposed every war that against Communism or Islamism that the United States has fought. It has sought to undermine our country and our soldiers in these conflicts on various pretexts.

The media has covered up numerous acts of violence by Islamic terrorists. It has sided with Islamic terror networks such as the Muslim Brotherhood. It has urged our government to arm Islamic terrorists. It has supported Iran’s push for a nuclear bomb. It has spread disinformation about the links between Islamic terrorists and their domestic support networks. It has worked to silence law enforcement and intelligence officials who attempted to warn about the threat of Islamic terrorism.

If the Muslim Brotherhood controlled the media, would the news look any different than it does now?

This isn’t a shocking new development. The media repeatedly sided with Communist nations, guerrillas, spies, terrorists and superpowers against our own government. It covered up atrocities by the Soviet Union, glamorized Communist spies, urged that we arm and aid Communist nations, and undermined allied governments, and even our own government and its soldiers when they fought Communism.

There has never been a time in the last century when enemy propaganda wasn’t on the front pages of the major newspapers of America. After the fall of the USSR, the media traded the red for the green. Its collusion with the Islamic conspiracy is a sequel to its collusion with the Communist conspiracy.

Is this the behavior of an American institution or an enemy institution out to destroy America?

On the domestic stage, the media has repeatedly advocated for policies that have cost countless American lives and jobs. Its pro-crime advocacy has empowered gangs and thugs. Its economic programs have devastated cities, agricultural and industrial areas.

The media’s broadcasts claim that America is evil. It empowers the hateful voices of black nationalists and Islamist activists that want to destroy America. It calls for the eradication of the major historical figures. It cheers when Christopher Columbus and George Washington are removed from public places.

Any foreigner watching and reading the media comes away with the impression that America is a racist country whose institutions and populace are utterly despicable, and who have no right to exist.

If an actual foreign enemy were in charge of our news coverage, how different would it be?

There’s really not that much difference between how the media covers America, and how Al Jazeera, RT, Xinhau and other enemy state media cover America.

An enemy media would undermine the government, publish its national security secrets, portray the people in the worst possible light and advocate policies meant to leave America poorer and weaker.

How is that any different from what the New York Times and the Washington Post already do?