A Texas court ruled that it would be unconstitutional for the US Navy to punish service members seeking a religious exemption from President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate.
District Judge Reed O’Connor issued a preliminary order on Monday blocking the Navy and the Department of Defense from enforcing their vaccine rules.
“The Navy service members in this case seek to vindicate the very freedoms they have sacrificed so much to protect,” the judge wrote in his decision. “The Covid-19 pandemic provides the government no license to abrogate those freedoms. There is no Covid-19 exception to the First Amendment. There is no military exclusion from our Constitution.”
The judge was acting on a lawsuit filed by 35 service members, including SEALs and Navy crewmen and divers, who wanted to refuse the vaccine on religious grounds. According to court documents, the plaintiffs are Catholic, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and Protestants.
The plaintiffs faced disqualification for refusing, which would make them “permanently non-deployable,” the judge wrote.
The judge noted that 99.4% of active-duty Navy service member had been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 by early November.
For months now, I’ve been getting complaints about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where I’ve worked as a TV and radio producer, and occasional on-air columnist, for much of the past decade.
People want to know why, for example, non-binary Filipinos concerned about a lack of LGBT terms in Tagalog is an editorial priority for the CBC, when local issues of broad concern go unreported. Or why our pop culture radio show’s coverage of the Dave Chappelle Netflix special failed to include any of the legions of fans, or comics, that did not find it offensive. Or why, exactly, taxpayers should be funding articles that scold Canadians for using words such as “brainstorm” and “lame.”
Everyone asks the same thing: What is going on at the CBC? Subscribe
When I started at the national public broadcaster in 2013, the network produced some of the best journalism in the country. By the time I resigned last month, it embodied some of the worst trends in mainstream media. In a short period of time, the CBC went from being a trusted source of news to churning out clickbait that reads like a parody of the student press.
Those of us on the inside know just how swiftly — and how dramatically — the politics of the public broadcaster have shifted.
95% of living Americans will be fully vaccinated. America will then see the Covid-19 virus not disappear completely, but become relatively harmless, very much like the flu.
JOHN KNEFEL, TRUTHOUT Conservatives are calling Biden’s federal vaccine mandate authoritarian and dictatorial. What else is new?
From Amy Goodman (1):
Happy News Year!
As 2021 draws to a close, I want to thank you for helping to make our daily independent global news hour possible.
I really do believe that those who are concerned about issues like the widening gap between rich and poor, Medicare for All, global vaccine equity, racial justice and the climate crisis are not a fringe minority, not even a silent majority, but the silenced majority—silenced by the corporate media.
[So the corporate media is not also promoting “vaccine equity”?]
As COVID cases skyrocket, we speak to Dr. Peter Hotez at Texas Children’s Hospital about the Omicron surge, as well as his groundbreaking work developing an affordable patent-free coronavirus vaccine. Last week the Indian government gave emergency approval to the new low-cost, patent-free vaccine called Corbevax, which Hotez co-created. He says it could reach billions of people […] Read more →
A January 6 defendant being held in Virginia is extremely ill and at risk of dying because the jail refuses to provide proper medical care and a special diet for his celiac disease, New York attorney Joseph McBride alleges.
“They’re starving the guy out,” McBride told The Epoch Times. “They have moved him six times since he’s been detained. We can’t send him to a facility that’s not going to be able to take care of him.”
Quaglin’s case is the most recent in a series of allegations that January 6 defendants have been beaten, tortured, and denied food and proper medical care in federal custody. A group of 14 lawmakers on Jan. 3 sent a letter (pdf) to Michael Carvajal, director of the federal Bureau of Prisons, demanding “you use your authority to investigate this abuse or we will use our authority to investigate your failure.”
“Many instances of physical and psychological abuse, denial of medical care, 24-hour solitary confinement, denial of basic personal hygiene, denial of access to legal counsel, destruction of records, and general abuse of rights and mandated standards for prisoners have been brought to our attention,” the lawmakers wrote. The letter was organized by Rep. Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia).
Christopher J. Quaglin of New Jersey is charged in federal court with assaulting multiple law enforcement officers during rioting at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He is being held pending trial at the Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Va., the sixth facility to house him since he was charged in April.
McBride said the jail has not provided the gluten-free diet Quaglin needs to survive, and exposed him to inmates and guards with coronavirus that caused him to develop COVID-19. He was then placed in solitary confinement, McBride said.
Amid the 2020 global covid lockdowns and economic dislocations it has caused, Klaus Schwab, a previously low-profile founder of a Swiss-based business forum, emerged on the world stage calling for what he called a Great Reset of the entire world economy, using the pandemic as driver. He even published a book in July 2020 outlining his blueprint. It has been rightly called a technocratic society with global top-down central planning. Schwab uses global warming fears and the plight of the world’s poor to justify what is in effect a plan for global totalitarianism where, as the Davos website puts it, nobody will own anything. What is not well-known is the fact that the inspiration for Schwab’s dystopian plans comes from a Catholic bishop whom he met in Brazil in the 1970’s. That bishop links Schwab’s vast globalist network with the powerful political influence of the present Pope Francis .
Far from a traditional Catholic priest, this bishop was known as the “Red Bishop” and endorsed Castro’s Cuba model, as well as the Mao Cultural Revolution in which millions of Chinese were killed or destroyed in a purge of the enemies of Mao. His name was Archbishop Dom Helder Camara of Brazil, the leading early figure spreading the Church movement known as “Liberation Theology” during the 1960s and 1970s.
From Nazi to Communist?
Helder Camara made a transition from the two extremes of the political spectrum. In 1934 Camara was a leading figure in a pro-Mussolini Brazilian clerical fascist movement, Brazilian Integralist Action or Acao Integralista Brasileira (AIB). It was no casual involvement. As a young Catholic Priest Father Camara became part of the Supreme Council of the AIB. By 1936 Camara had become personal secretary of AIB founder, Plinio Salgado, and National Secretary of the AIB. Similar to Mussolini’s fascist Blackshirts or Hitler’s Brownshirts in the 1920s, Brazil’s AIB were the Greenshirts, fielding paramilitary groups who actively and violently attacked communists on the streets during the 1930s in Brazil. When Camara was ordained a priest in the early 1930s he reportedly wore the Greenshirt under his cassock. Later when a Brazilian author wrote a biography of Camara, by then a Bishop, Helder Camara and the Church intervened to prohibit mention of the now famous leftist as an earlier pro-fascist activist, one of the many curious parts of Camara’s history.
By the end of the war, in 1946, Helder Camara had somehow managed to transition from the pro-Mussolini and pro-Hitler fascism of the AIB to a pro-Marxist “progressivism” as Assistant General of the Brazilian Catholic Action, whose youth group, JUC, openly embraced the Castro Cuban Revolution in 1959. In 1963 a faction of the JUC with whom Camara was supportive, the Ação Popular (AP), defined itself as socialist and declared their support for the “socialization of the means of production.” The Catholic group AP adopted statutes which contained praise for the Soviet Revolution and a recognition of “the crucial importance of Marxism in revolutionary theory and praxis.” Dom Helder became Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in the Northeast of Brazil from 1964 to 1985.
Having shared that photo “quoting” her endorsement of the booster, I am obliged to share this news that, according to her agent, that photo is a fake, and Betty White did NOT get that third jab.
Do I have that right? Is that what he says? Or is he saying that the booster, though she DID have it, didn’t kill her?
Which is it? This matters, since, if she did NOT get the booster, the “vaccinated” (that is, those who still believe in “vaccination”) have a right to know that Betty White was selfish, reckless, and probably a secret white supremacist.
And if she DID get that third jab, maybe EVERYONE will want to know….
Thank you for your clear and tenacious voice in these days. It’s deeply important and I (amongst countless others) am so very grateful for you.
To your writing below [My Substack on Medea Benjamin]: I’ve served more than two decades as a peace worker in, amongst or on behalf of genocide-impacted communities of East and Central Africa. I love this work and the local people I serve beside so much. When I inadvertently began the work years ago, I hadn’t yet realized ‘peace’ was politically charged, and oddly, a sometimes-cover to accomplish what I came to learn and witness as its inverse. I also had no clue the should-be guilelessness of peace was internationally charged with massive economic and political opportunities. Gullible me! Who knew?
I completed grad studies in peace and conflict, have done advocacy work in genocide intervention and prevention here in the US, and some of my published work is used in U.K. beacon schools as genocide education. I lead a little faith-based organization focused on empowering local people in divided communities (of genocide and war-impacted regions of East and Central Africa) to build a God-centered peace from grassroots-up. Grassroots because top level agreements rarely translate into accessible, transformative peace that changes local lives and communities. High ranking arbiters of ‘peace’ decide direction (or devolution) of its form and reality. Mid level actors and players, NGOs, agencies and the like, while having roles as stabilizing and equipping agents, drive peace from outside-in. They arrive to impart. But rarely do they invite, evoke, and welcome participation of the local people. They can forget to remember why they’ve arrived to their post in a post-war or war-impacted society.
So over the years, by the grace of God, it’s become clear that’s it’s ordinary-extraordinary people who build peace. At the end of the day, local people are the ones who form, build upon, practice and protect peace in their lives and communities. Just as the human body is brilliantly wired to heal itself post-trauma and amidst infection, and needs only optimal conditions to assist it in doing so, so it is with authentic peace. When the things that make for peace become clear, accessible, and therefore ‘practice-able’ to local citizenry often battered by war and its countless deceptions, everything begins changing. From within and led by the local people themselves! So long story super-short, that’s been — and continues to be — my work, work that’s taken me to places, circumstances and to be with people I couldn’t have ever imagined.
I wanted to share this because in our now-Orwellian context, the word and work (peace) I cherish most, work I believe is intrinsically connected to the very nature and character of God, is upside down in the breathtaking, divisive ways you articulate. And I wanted you to be encouraged by an imperfect counter-story of what’s witnessed and articulated below.
In the very name of peace, there are people deeply committed to bringing its unalloyed presence into hard places. There are still those who understand the mysterious tension of peace-justice-truth and how they interlock, another kind of trinity. We know impartial truth sits at the heart of justice because to do what’s authentically right or just, we must learn what is true. And justice is central to peace, isn’t it? There is not the wholeness of shalom in the presence of broken justice. So in all, the pursuit of peace means once truth’s light clarifies what is wrong, ‘getting to’ peace requires justice’s scales set it back to right — even if it’s imperfectly so and the work is hard and requires the full measure of our lives.
I thought I’d share in light of your detailed peace activist below to whom peace is upside down and tragically celebratory of its opposite. I, too, am a champion of peace, a worker of it. But the peace to which I’m devoted begins, continues and soars in learning what is true so as to do what’s imperfectly right and reconciliatory. It is centered in God, His ways, and in His love for this world and its people He created.
Again, thank you for your incredibly important work! It, too, is the work of peace, every article you write, an act of peace. I pray you’re deeply encouraged.
“Sure enough, the rate of global warming since the end of the Second World War has been equivalent to about 1.1 K per century, or about a third of the 3.3 K/century-equivalent medium-term warming confidently predicted by IPCC in 1990. What is more, as has been widely unreported, there has been no global warming at all for approaching eight years (see below), and no statistically-significant warming for about a decade.”
A new climate panic is gripping the far-Left profiteers of doom. Those few of Them who are climate scientists have made fame and fortune by telling us the world is toast unless the once-free West (though responsible for only a fifth of the world’s sins of emission) commits economic hara-kiri. The cost of placating climate Communism is already in the quadrillions.
However, They are becoming aware that Their official climate narrative is rooted in a grave error of physics – an error so elementary that it can be described here. At a vital point in Their calculation of how much warming we may cause, They forgot the Sun was shining.
By 1850, before we had any measurable impact on global temperature, direct warming from naturally occurring greenhouse gases other than water vapor was about 8 degrees absolute (Kelvin). Yet the total natural greenhouse effect by that year was 32 K – the difference between the measured global temperature of 287 K and the sunshine-only emission temperature of 255 K.
The 24 K difference between the 8 K direct and 32 K final greenhouse-gas warming up to 1850 was temperature feedback response, a knock-on, additional warming chiefly caused by more water vapor in warmer air.
Thus, They imagined, the system-gain factor – by which direct warming before feedback response is multiplied to give final warming including feedback response – was about 32 / 8, or 4. Since direct warming by doubled CO2 is little more than 1 K, they imagined that final doubled-CO2 warming – roughly equivalent to all the final warming we may cause throughout the 21st century – would be about 4 K.
That was Their mistake. They had forgotten that the water-vapor feedback (all others broadly self-cancel) must respond not only to direct warming, such as greenhouse-gas warming, but also to the surely observable fact that the Sun is shining.
After correction to take account of the feedback response to the 255 K sunshine temperature that would subsist on Earth if there were no greenhouse gases in the air at all, the system-gain factor in 1850 was not 32 / 8, or 4, as They had imagined, but (255 + 32) / (255 + 8), or 1.09.
After that strikingly simple correction to allow for the fact that very nearly all feedback response in 1850 was a response not to preindustrial greenhouse gases but to the sunshine, if the feedback regime today is as it was in 1850 we can expect not 4 K warming this century but a net-beneficial 1.1 K. That ends the “climate emergency”.
Sure enough, the rate of global warming since the end of the Second World War has been equivalent to about 1.1 K per century, or about a third of the 3.3 K/century-equivalent medium-term warming confidently predicted by IPCC in 1990. What is more, as has been widely unreported, there has been no global warming at all for approaching eight years (see below), and no statistically-significant warming for about a decade.
What global warming?
But what if feedback strength is greater today than it was in 1850? After all, the influence of the Sun is so dominant that an increase of little more than 1% in feedback strength compared with that year would push up the 1.1 K final warming to be expected from greenhouse-gas warming this century by 250% to Their officially predicted 4 K.
Their problem is this. When James Hansen, the far-Left agitator at NASA, first published the error in 1984, he imagined the system-gain factor was somewhere between 2 and 4 – a tacit admission that we do not know the feedback strength to within 100%, let alone 1%.
The uncertainty in feedback strength in IPCC’s leaden, prolix Assessment Reports is still greater. It ranges from little more than zero to not far short of infinity. It is one of the least well-constrained quantities in the whole of physics.
That means climatology has not the faintest idea how much – or, rather, how little – global warming we may cause. All those multi-thousand-page reports are pure guesswork. There is very little reason to suppose the feedback regime today is not exactly as it was in 1850.
The error arose when Hansen, copied by all climatologists since, borrowed feedback math from control theory, a mature branch of engineering physics, without understanding what he had borrowed. That is the curse of interdisciplinary compartmentalization in science.
Correcting the error removes Their near certainty of large and dangerous anthropogenic warming. It destroys Their pretext to shut down the West.
Here is why. In the past 30 years, notwithstanding the increasingly hysterical rhetoric at the UN’s interminable annual climate gabfests, anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing – our influence on temperature – has increased in a near-perfect straight line by one-thirtieth of a unit per year. With no mitigation, that increase would continue for another 30 years till 2050.
If the whole world were instead to go in a straight line to net-zero emissions by 2050, about half the 1 unit of forcing that would otherwise have arisen between now and then would be abated.
Misled by Their error, They imagine that each unit of forcing abated would abate global warming by 3/4 K. Thus, abating half a unit of forcing would cut global warming by 3/8 K. Since the West accounts for just 20% of global emissions, even if all Western countries achieved net-zero by 2050 (which we won’t), the warming abated would be less than 1/13 K.
After correcting Their error of physics, make that just 1/50 K – far too small to be measured. Yet the cost would be in the quadrillions. That is why the profiteers of doom are panicking.
A year ago the Argonauts, my distinguished team of ten climate scientists and researchers, including a former head of the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program, a tenured professor of control theory and an expert on the global electricity industry, submitted a paper explaining climatology’s error to a leading climate-science journal whose editor has said that those whom he calls “climate deniers” have no credible argument against the Party Line.
In all that time, he has not been able to find any reviewer who can refute our result. That, gentle reader, is why the climate Communists are trembling with fear. It’s game over, and They know it.
Christopher, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, is a British peer and a well-known expert on the fallacies of climate-change pseudo-science. He is the author of some 20 learned papers on climate sensitivity and mitigation economics.
Cape Cod children aged one and six are left orphaned after their married teacher mom and project manager dad both die days after Christmas because of ‘medical conditions’
