The tearing down phase is well on its way. The re-building stage will never occur. There is also this as well but that’s just local. It is the anti-capitalist ignoramus envy that will create the disasters, of which this is just one example.
In 1994 the ANC inherited the strongest economy in Africa, with excellent infrastructure, including cheap, reliable electricity. The ANC has wrecked it all. We have continual blackouts; the passenger railways are crumbling into ruin; most of the municipalities are dysfunctional, with appalling water supply and sewage running in the streets; South African Airways is bankrupt; the economy is crippled; deep poverty is widespread, and unemployment is at 43 per cent (including many who have given up looking for work). This tragedy has been caused by systematic corruption, a bloated government, ruinous racial laws and a relentless assault on private enterprise. Violent crime alarms the rich and terrifies the poor. The ANC government responded to Covid-19 with a clumsy and callous lockdown. A team of actuaries showed that many more South African lives would be lost by the lockdown than by the virus. The ANC ignored them. The country was a tinderbox waiting for a spark.
Covid may be the excuse but the underlying mission to destroy our wealth-creation process and become the New Cuba is everywhere. With the Soviet Union, its fall was encouraged by the existence of the United States. Now there will be nothing around to show the way.
“The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) declares that all human beings have the right to liberty, which they do not forfeit when they serve the sick or the disabled. The ethical commitment to protect others does not require workers to surrender their bodily integrity and self-determination….
“Risks and benefits differ in individual patients and differing circumstances. Achieving a stamp of approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—premature because studies are not scheduled to be complete before the end of 2022—does not confer safety or effectiveness. FDA-approved products have frequently been withdrawn….
“The Joint Statement recognizes only a medical exemption, and omits mention of a religious exemption though many workers object to receiving these products based on their religious beliefs. Medical exemptions are virtually never recognized for the COVID vaccines because there is improper denial that they cause harm to anyone.
“Long-term effects of these novel, genetically engineered products cannot possibly be known at this point. These could include autoimmune disorders, antibody-enhanced disease, infertility, cancer, or birth defects….
“AAPS favors insistence on fully informed, truly voluntary consent for all medical intervention. This includes full disclosure of all risks, and a diligent effort to identify and track risks…. Our medical organizations should be advocating for free and open discussion and opposing censorship….
“Without freedom, there is no safety for either workers or our patients.”
AAPS president Paul Kempen, M.D., Ph.D., adds the following observations:
As of mid-July, 30 million people have recovered from COVID-19 in the U.S. and have natural immunity. Vaccination of these persons confers only risk with little to no benefit, yet these mandates do not exempt them.
Serious side effects have been identified, including paralysis and inflammation of the heart muscle, which may not resolve and may cause death.
As variants multiply, “booster” shots may be required, with increasing risk of allergic phenomena.
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons has represented physicians in all specialties since 1943. Its motto is omnia pro aegroto, everything for the patient.
Breathless headlines featuring ‘the Virus” are beginning to fade into a chronic undercurrent of fear thy neighbor for he might be bearing the gift of Covid. What you won’t see in the headlines are stories about a more pervasive and ultimately more lethal virus: a growing disregard for others and devaluation of life. Rampant homicides are disheartening enough, but more shocking is the shifting morality in medicine.
News headlines gave the impression that the newly instituted Covid rules were designed to save lives, yet we soon learned the lockdowns, masking, school closures did more harm than good. Meanwhile—in plain sight—government-sanctioned sacrifice of the elderly was taking place. In 5 “progressive” states, Covid-positive patients were discharged from hospital isolation units and returned to their nursing homes where they comingled with uninfected residents. Of course, many more residents became ill. It didn’t make the headlines that half of Covid deaths were in nursing homes and 80 percent of deaths were in those over 65. This might have encouraged more policies that protected our elders and allowed the younger folks to carry on with their lives. To date, the news has not reported any apologies to the families of the victims of government and medical incompetence.
In 2020, many hospitals in the United States considered guidelines that would allow doctors to withhold CPR from Covid patients, ignoring the patient’s wishes. Our neighbor to the north, Quebec had actually issued such an order lasting from April to September 2020. Bless the paramedics on the front lines who complained and had the order lifted.
Age-related rationing is alive and well. The ethics advisor to 78-year-old President Biden, Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, author of the utilitarian “Complete Lives System” of medical care, chose age 75 as his personal benchmark for ending life. This is so wrong. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.” Whether mentally sharp or in declining health, older people give texture and context to our lives. Reflecting on older folks reminds us that in their lifetime innovations have gone from puttering around in a car to rocketing to the moon. And Dick Tracy’s comic book two-way wrist radio is now a commonly worn Apple watch.
The behavior of bureaucrats and the medical establishment during the Covid “crisis” laid bare the dismissive treatment of elders. And an uncomfortable question hangs in the air: was the nursing home debacle a conscious attempt to cull the herd? After all, Medicare chews up 15 percent of the federal budget and 25 percent of Medicare dollars are spent in the last year of the patient’s life. According to the 2019 Medicare Trustees report, the Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund will be depleted in 2026—a short 5 years away.
If this form of population control sounds un-American, remember that our country seriously engaged in eugenics, marked by 75 years of Supreme Court-approved forced sterilization. The abortion industry has devolved from a time when a woman was mortified to have an abortion to where clinics are advertised on highway billboards. The quest for clean air has gone from encouraging recycling and renewable energy to suggesting that human depopulation is the only way to save the planet.
Human concern in medicine has taken a back seat to marginal scientific ethics and perhaps, secret agendas. We have become numb to the experiments using fresh aborted fetal tissue to create “humanized mice” that sprout various human organs. This slow walk to the edge of medical ethics has allowed science to go in grotesquely anti-human directions. Jointly with Chinese government funding, United States researchers created viable embryos that are a mix of human and monkey cells (a “chimera”). With funding from the Chan Zuckerberg [Mr. Facebook] Initiative, researchers tinkered with male rats so they could deliver live babies via Cesarian section.
Sadly, physicians have become willing participants in the government’s borderline coercion by not informing themselves about early treatments for Covid or the side effects of the experimental vaccine. Federal and state governments are bribing, cajoling, and subjecting us to door-to-door pressure to take an injection of a product that could be killing us in numbers not seen before. Serious reactions include miscarriages, Bell’s palsy, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, blood clotting disorders (including brain clots), and anaphylaxis. Bizarrely, the White House is challenging colleges to vaccinate its entire campus, despite sometimes fatal heart inflammation after vaccinations in young adults (who have infinitesimal risk of significant Covid illness).
It appears we are guinea pigs in a grand experiment. The elderly were the casualties of Phase I. As the post-vaccine bodies pile up, the Nuremberg Code’s principle is being ignored: The experiment must be stopped if continuation would result in injury and death.
The problem is we have not yet identified is just what experiment exactly is in progress and who the subjects of this experiment are.
From Quora: Why was nihilism a problem for Nietzsche, when there are other people who don’t think it’s a problem at all? This is the answer from a Professor of Philosophy at Berkley.
That there are people who don’t think nihilism is a problem, and that a time may very well come when no one feels nihilism is a problem, is precisely why nihilism was a problem for Nietzsche.
Nietzsche prized human greatness above all else. To achieve human greatness, he thought, there must be problems and there must be people who care about them. That’s because greatness results from overcoming problems.
What all problems have in common is suffering. Suffering, therefore, is good, not in itself, but because it’s a necessary condition for greatness. But the modern world, Nietzsche thought, is in the process of eliminating suffering by creating a world of abundance, security, and comfort.
For reasons I won’t go into, Nietzsche believed that eliminating suffering requires the elimination of meaning as well. However, eliminating both meaning and suffering requires human beings for whom the absence of meaning isn’t a problem – since otherwise they’d suffer from it, and then suffering wouldn’t have been eliminated.
Under those conditions, there would be no more human greatness, because no one would suffer and there would be nothing to overcome. Nietzsche hoped that a certain type of person will continue to suffer from the absence of meaning, approach it as a problem, and achieve greatness by overcoming it.
In short, nihilism is a problem for Nietzsche because if we become used to it, there will be no more human greatness. The question then becomes: Why is the absence of human greatness a problem?
That, I think, is something Nietzsche believes you just either get or don’t get, depending on your personality. To someone with a robust love of life at its most intense, the value of human greatness is self-evident. To someone who prefers security to intensity, the absolute value of human greatness is somewhat less than self-evident.
The 45th President of the United States addressed the Turning Point Action Convention over the weekend when he weighed-in on the Democratic Party’s platform for the country; saying America is quickly “becoming communist.”
“Like it or not, we are becoming a communist country. That’s what’s happening. We are beyond socialism. When you have no press, when you have no press that you can talk to, that’s how a communist country begins. They have no press,” said the former President.
A communist society where the largest businesses hand in glove with governments seek to control both production and communication. You will be free to conform with their dictates. Other than at the periphery – we are the periphery – nothing else will be allowed.
Numerous epidemiological experts have argued that cycle thresholds are an important metric by which patients, the public, and policymakers can make more informed decisions about how infectious and/or sick an individual with a positive COVID-19 test might be. However, as JustTheNews reports,health departments across the country are failing to collect that data.
Here are a few headlines from those experts and scientific studies:
2. The Wadworth Center, a New York State laboratory, analyzed the results of its July tests at the request of the NYT: 794 positive tests with a Ct of 40: “With a Ct threshold of 35, approximately half of these PCR tests would no longer be considered positive,” said the NYT.“And about 70% would no longer be considered positive with a Ct of 30! “
4. A new study from the Infectious Diseases Society of America, found that at 25 cycles of amplification, 70% of PCR test “positives” are not “cases” since the virus cannot be cultured, it’s dead. And by 35: 97% of the positives are non-clinical.
5. PCR is not testing for disease, it’s testing for a specific RNA pattern and this is the key pivot. When you crank it up to 25, 70% of the positive results are not really “positives” in any clinical sense, since it cannot make you or anyone else sick.
So, in summary, with regard to our current “casedemic”, positive tests as they are counted today do not indicate a “case” of anything. They indicate that viral RNA was found in a nasal swab. It may be enough to make you sick, but according to the New York Times and their experts, probably won’t. And certainly not sufficient replication of the virus to make anyone else sick. But you will be sent home for ten days anyway, even if you never have a sniffle. And this is the number the media breathlessly reports… and is used to fearmonger mask mandates and lockdowns nationwide.
Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report talks about the insane coronavirus restrictions put in place to deal with the delta variant in Australia. The other day Gladys Berejiklian, the Premier of New South Wales announced their no regrets policy. This COVID response may be the most extreme in the world. The Sydney lockdown will force almost a million people to stay in their homes, but wait till you hear the numbers to justify it. Dave also shares a clip from Chief Health Officer of New South Wales, Australia, Dr. Kerry Chant, where she actually advises people to not even talk to their neighbors or people you see at the grocery store.
Personally I’m glad I do live here since I think everywhere else is worse. We may well be the least crazy people on the planet, Daniel Andrews notwithstanding.
More than half the population — including those in state capitals Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide — are again living under lockdown measures following dozens of new cases.
While other Western countries surge ahead with their vaccination rollouts and begin to reopen, Australia’s has been achingly slow. Just over 11% of Australians are fully vaccinated — the lowest of the OECD’s 38 countries.
“Fortress Australia” is now facing uncomfortable questions about just how far this island sanctuary is willing to go to protect itself from external threats — including raising the drawbridge to its own citizens.
Australians have been willing to “put up with restrictions which elsewhere in the democratic world would have been entirely politically impossible,” said Marc Stears, director of the Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney.
That’s because these restrictions speak to “quite a deep cultural sense that danger lurks overseas, and the best thing that Australia can do in these moments is cut itself off from the world,” Stears added.
The challenge now is how to rejoin it.
Not a fan of lockdown myself, but who would trade life in Melbourne or Sydney for life in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles or Minneapolis? As for Covid deaths, we have had fewer than a thousand while in the US there have been, according to the official statistics, 35,184,671 cases and 626,713 deaths. The American numbers are obviously exaggerated but it’s a worldwide frenzy of fear mongering that has caught on here. But seriously, where would you rather be?
Jackie Mason Dies: Rabbi Who Later Rose To Fame As A Comedian, Actor & Author Was 93. Remember him from his first spat with Ed Sullivan back in the early 1960s. There used to be many people I knew at the time who spoke with the same accent. Now there are virtually none. He is part of the passing of an entire generation of Yiddish-speaking migrants to English-speaking countries – the US, Canada, Australia – who once represented what it meant to be Jewish – he was, of course, born in the United States so may even have had a typically American accent when not before an audience. I am sad to see him go, but I also miss that generation of Judaism who truly knew how sometimes fatal it might be to maintain your religion.
Jackie Mason, the rabbi who later cultivated careers as a comedian, actor and author, died in a Manhattan hospital on Saturday, according to the New York Times. He was 93.
Mason’s longtime friend, attorney Raoul Felder, confirmed his passing to the Times. A cause of death was not disclosed.
Mason was born Yacov Moshe Maza in Sheboygan, Wisconsin on June 9, 1931 1928. While the son of Belarusian immigrants would ultimately earn fame and accolades for his work on stage, he initially looked to pursue the path of a rabbi, at the behest of his family. He was ordained after completing his rabbinical studies at Yeshiva University, working as a rabbi in both North Carolina and Pennsylvania. He decided to pursue a career as a writer and performer following the death of his father in 1959.
Mason was also well known his work on Broadway. He wrote and starred in a number of plays and one-man shows including The World According to Me, which earned him a Special Tony Award, as well as an Outer Critics Circle Award, an ACE Award, an Emmy and a Grammy nomination.
Mason featured on the film side in titles such as The Stoolie (1972), Steve Martin’s The Jerk (1979) and Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I, also appearing in TV series including his own 1992 talk show, The Jackie Mason Show, 30 Rock and The Simpsons. On Fox’s long-running animated series, he voiced Rabbi Hyman Krustofski, the father of Krusty the Clown. The role brought him his second Emmy in 1992, for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance.
Over the course of his career, Mason also penned a number of books including 1999 autobiography Jackie, Oy!, on which he collaborated with Ken Gross.
Mason is survived by his wife Jyll Rosenfeld, as well as his daughter, the comedian Sheba Mason. Plans for a memorial have not yet been revealed.
And then there is this which is the best of all: Remembering Jackie Mason by Tevi Troy. Here is his take on the Ed Sullivan episode.
Unfortunately for Mason, the potentially career-making Sullivan show nearly became career-ending in 1964, when the program was about to be preempted by a Lyndon Johnson speech. Sullivan held up fingers to indicate how much time Mason had, and an irritated Mason responded by displaying fingers to the audience, saying, “I’ve been getting lots of fingers tonight. Here’s a finger for you, and a finger for you, and a finger for you.” The prickly Sullivan felt Mason had given him the finger and banned him from the show for two years. Worse, Sullivan privately vowed, “I will destroy you in show business.” He largely did. In later years, Mason—who denied deploying the middle digit in the way Sullivan saw it—believed he had been blacklisted more broadly in the entertainment world. He hit a further setback in 1969, when CBS cut some of his jokes from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. He sued CBS, arguing that the deletions fostered the perception of him as a “censored comedian.”
Sullivan later apologized to Mason, and Mason did eventually return to the show, but the reputational damage was done. For two decades, he labored largely as a has-been rather than the rising star he had been in 1964, even declaring bankruptcy in 1983. “It took 20 years to overcome what happened in one minute,” Mason complained.
He did overcome it, though, with a triumphant return in a 1987 one-man Broadway sensation, The World According to Me. His timing was perfect: Borscht-belt jokes, which had gone out of style in the 1960s with the rise of the hippies and the Me generation, had come back into favor. Mason’s act was not unlike that of the fictional Austin Powers—frozen in time and reappearing a few decades later exactly as it was. Jokes that Mason told on The Ed Sullivan Show in the early 1960s had them rolling in the aisles in late 1980s New York. He was on top of the world again and loving it, appearing on magazine covers and hanging out with celebrities, including a young Donald Trump, whom he visited numerous times in Trump Tower and for whom he emceed a book release for The Art of the Deal in 1989. He also got involved with politics, which both elevated his profile and gave him new headaches.
Everyone’s success looks easy from the outside but it’s always a roller coaster. To die at 93 still beloved and remembered is a sign of a life well lived. I hope he enjoyed himself while he was amongst us, at least most of the time. Let me end with this:
He described his transition from rabbi to comedian via a fictionalized but typically humorous bit, noting that he started telling jokes to keep the congregation interested. Word got around, and gentiles started coming just to hear his jokes. Eventually, he joked, his congregation was all gentile, and he started charging an entrance fee.
One of my dearest closest friends is about to go into palliative care. Mortality is one of life’s certainties. Another certainty is that for the vast majority of us, life does not last long enough.
Law of Markets 