theatlantic | strange thing has happened on the path to marijuana legalization. Users across all ages and experience levels are noticing that a drug they once turned to for fun and relaxation now triggers existential dread and paranoia. “The density of the nugs is crazy, they’re so sticky,” a friend from college texted me recently. “I solo’d a joint from the dispensary recently and was tweaking just walking around.” (Translation for the non-pot-savvy: This strain of marijuana is not for amateurs.)
In 2022, the federal government reported that, in samples seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration, average levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC—the psychoactive compound in weed that makes you feel high—had more than tripled compared with 25 years earlier, from 5 to 16 percent. That may understate how strong weed has gotten. Walk into any dispensary in the country, legal or not, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single product advertising such a low THC level. Most strains claim to be at least 20 to 30 percent THC by weight; concentrated weed products designed for vaping can be labeled as up to 90 percent.
For the average weed smoker who wants to take a few hits without getting absolutely blitzed, this is frustrating. For some, it can be dangerous. In the past few years, reports have swelled of people, especially teens, experiencing short- and long-term “marijuana-induced psychosis,” with consequences including hospitalizations for chronic vomiting and auditory hallucinations of talking birds. Multiple studies have drawn a link between heavy use of high-potency marijuana, in particular, and the development of psychological disorders, including schizophrenia, although a causal connection hasn’t been proved.
“It’s entirely possible that this new kind of cannabis—very strong, used in these very intensive patterns—could do permanent brain damage to teenagers because that’s when the brain is developing a lot,” Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychiatry professor and a former drug-policy adviser to the Obama administration, told me. Humphreys stressed that the share of people who have isolated psychotic episodes on weed will be “much larger” than the number of people who end up permanently altered. But even a temporary bout of psychosis is pretty bad.
One of the basic premises of the legalization movement is that marijuana, if not harmless, is pretty close to it—arguably much less dangerous than alcohol. But much of the weed being sold today is not the same stuff that people were getting locked up for selling in the 1990s and 2000s. You don’t have to be a War on Drugs apologist to be worried about the consequences of unleashing so much super-high-potency weed into the world.
The high that most adult weed smokers remember from their teenage years is most likely one produced by “mids,” as in, middle-tier weed. In the pre-legalization era, unless you had a connection with access to top-shelf strains such as Purple Haze and Sour Diesel, you probably had to settle for mids (or, one step down, “reggie,” as in regular weed) most of the time. Today, mids are hard to come by.
The simplest explanation for this is that the casual smokers who pine for the mids and reggies of their youth aren’t the industry’s top customers. Serious stoners are. According to research by Jonathan P. Caulkins, a public-policy professor at Carnegie Mellon, people who report smoking more than 25 times a month make up about a third of marijuana users but account for about two-thirds of all marijuana consumption. Such regular users tend to develop a high tolerance, and their tastes drive the industry’s cultivation decisions.
The industry is not shy about this fact. In May, I attended the National Cannabis Investment Summit in Washington D.C., where investors used the terms high-quality and potent almost interchangeably. They told me that high THC percentages do well with heavy users—the dedicated wake-and-bakers and the joint-before-bed crowd. “Thirty percent THC is the new 20 percent,” Ryan Cohen, a Michigan-based cultivator, told me. “Our target buyer is the guy who just worked 40 hours a week and wants to get high as fuck on a budget.”
Smaller producers might conceivably carve out a niche catering to those of us who prefer a milder high. But because of the way the legal weed market has developed, they’re struggling just to exist. As states have been left alone to determine what their legal weed markets will look like, limited licensing has emerged as the favored apparatus. That approach has led to legal weed markets becoming dominated by large, well-financed “multistate operators,” in industry jargon.
Across the country, MSOs are buying up licenses, acquiring smaller brands, and lobbying politicians to stick prohibitions on home-growing into their legalization bills. The result is an illusion of endless choice and a difficult climate for the little guy. Minnesota’s 15 medical dispensaries are owned by two MSOs. All 23 of Virginia’s are owned by three different MSOs. Some states have tried to lower barriers to entry, but the big chains still tend to overpower the market. (Notable exceptions are California and Colorado, which have a longer history with legal marijuana licensing, and where the markets are less dominated by mega-chains.) Despite the profusion of stores in some states and the apparent variety of strains on the shelf, most people who walk into a dispensary will choose from a limited number of suppliers that maximize for THC percentage.
Trump's newest allies have something very specific in common.
— Clandestine (@WarClandestine) August 26, 2024
Tulsi and RFK Jr. are the two most prominent US politicians to discuss the US-funded biolabs in Ukraine.
They have been extremely vocal about this subject, and Trump just brought them both onto his team. 👀
Perhaps… pic.twitter.com/xAxNT62iDk
anti-spiegel | The Russian Defense Ministry has again released a statement on the US biological weapons programs, reporting on the US attempts to better conceal the programs and relocate them from Ukraine to Moldova and Romania.
I have been covering the Russian Defense Ministry's publications on the Pentagon's bioweapons programs in Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian military operation, and translating all Russian statements on the subject. For the average reader, this may be very dry and uninteresting reading, but for experts, this is important information, which is why I take the trouble to translate it all.
Even if the German media ignore these Russian statements or try to ridicule them as crazy conspiracy theories and Russian propaganda, they are being followed very closely by international (mostly non-Western) experts.
Here I translate the new statement from the Russian Ministry of Defense, the slides are taken from the original. After the translation you will find a chronology of the publications.
Start of translation:
The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation continues to analyze the activities of the United States and Ukraine in connection with violations of international treaties prohibiting chemical and biological weapons.
We have repeatedly noted that Washington has a significant interest in obtaining biomaterials from citizens of Russia, Ukraine and other post-Soviet states.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has already published information confirming the large-scale collection and transportation of biomaterials. Before the start of the military operation, the United States and its allies managed to remove at least 16,000 biosamples from Ukraine. Within the framework of the UP-8 project alone, blood samples were taken from 4,000 Ukrainian soldiers. Dangerous pathogens and their vectors were exported, more than 10,000 samples.
The biological material was transported directly, without the involvement of shell companies and intermediaries. Human blood and tissue samples were sent from the Ukrainian Public Health Center to Western research laboratories with links to the Pentagon. They were then used for military biological research, including the selection of biological agents dangerous to the population of a particular region.
According to reports, the United States is continuing to develop biological warfare agents that can specifically target different ethnic populations.
According to available information, the United States has begun to actively involve Moldova and Romania in logistical plans for the transportation of biomaterials, using organizations under its control.
This tactic helps to obscure the ultimate recipient and divert suspicion from U.S. authorities and the U.S. biological warfare program.
Note the movement pattern of the biomaterial. It has been established that the export of dangerous goods to Moldova from the Ukrainian side is carried out through the company "Biopartners", which is a subsidiary of an American company of the same name.
The company Q2 Solution, a subsidiary of one of the Pentagon's largest suppliers, is also involved in the logistics processes. We have information confirming the implementation of contracts by this company under the US Department of Defense Threat Reduction (DITRA) programs worth more than $22 million.
I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the escort of biological cargoes coming from Ukraine is carried out by the logistics companies Gamma Logistics and AeroTransCargo, controlled by Moldovan President Maia Sandu, as well as by medical institutions in Chisinau and Western intermediary organizations.
In the period from August 2022 to May 2024, more than 2,000 transportations of biomaterial samples were officially carried out through the territory of the Republic of Moldova.
counterpunch | The specter of death in Gaza is difficult, if not impossible, to grasp. At a distance, our understanding of the situation often relies on somber statistics, especially in the establishment media. The official count, consistently cited by mainstream outlets, comes in at around 35,000 deaths.
In May, the New York Times and other outlets jumped on a report from the United Nations, which had apparently revised Gaza’s death count. But the U.N. did not, in fact, halve its total of women and children who had died, as the Jerusalem Post claimed. It simply altered its classification system in terms of those estimated to have died and those it could definitively confirm to be deceased. The totals, however, remained the same. Nonetheless, even those numbers, based on information provided by Gaza’s Ministry of Health, end up blurring the cruel reality on the ground. U.N. officials also fear that at least 10,000 more Gazans lie buried under the rubble in that 25-mile strip of land.
But death figures can also impart meaning, as the long-time consumer-rights activist Ralph Nader recently pointed out. He happens to believe that Israel could have killed at least 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a mind-boggling figure, but worth examining. So, I called on him to elaborate.
“The undercount is staggering,” said Nader, whose Lebanese parents emigrated to the United States before he was born. “The U.S. and Israel want a low number, so they look around. Instead of themselves estimating — which they don’t want to do — they cling to Hamas’s [figures], and Hamas doesn’t want a realistic number because they don’t want to be seen as unable to protect their own people. So, they developed these criteria: to be counted, the dead must first be certified by hospitals and morgues [which barely exist].”
He has made it a habit to reach out to writers and editors. Like so many others, I have a bit of a phone affair with that 90-year-old thinker and activist. We discuss politics, baseball, and journalism’s rapid, insidious decline. I’ve certainly heard him animated in the past, but never more indignant than when he addresses the situation in Gaza. “The whole thing is one death camp now. It’s easily 200,000 deaths in Gaza,” he insisted, citing the number of bombs dropped, which have, by some estimates, exceeded 100,000. We know that at least 45,000 missiles and bombs had been used in Gaza within three months of the beginning of Israel’s military campaign. As a result, as many as 175,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed by Israel. So, he seems to be on to something.
“Eventually [the real number of the dead] will come out,” he adds. “They’ll do a census, whoever takes over. The one thing the extended families in Gaza know is who’s been killed in their families.”
Of course, his assertion is circumstantial and he knows it, but he’s making a point. With so much of the Gaza Strip facing imminent starvation, nearly all hospitals out of commission, just about no medicine left, and very little clean water or food, 35,000 deaths are likely, in the end, to prove a drastic undercount.
scheerpost | srael will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews, with any Palestinians who remain stripped of basic rights, will be realized. It will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war criminals. Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel’s huge black hole of historical amnesia. Those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted.
But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy.
Palestinian blood and suffering — 10 times the number of children have been killed in Gaza as in two years of war in Ukraine — will pave the road to Israel’s oblivion. The tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of ghosts will have their revenge. Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will find its allies among other despotic regimes. Israel’s repugnant racial and religious supremacy will be its defining attribute, which is why the most retrograde white supremists in the U.S. and Europe, including philo-semites such as John Hagee, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fervently back Israel. The vaunted fight against anti-Semitism is a thinly disguised celebration of White Power.
Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.
Best ever video to explain the elemental evil of Bill Gates and his infernal foundation. No need to thank me: pic.twitter.com/KRDBnLV7D7
— Ivor Cummins (@FatEmperor) November 28, 2023
thebulwark | Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the comic strip Dilbert, has been canceled for racism. In a video livestream last Wednesday, he declared:
Adams wasn’t done. The next day, he continued:
Most Americans would consider these statements vile. But Adams swears he’s preaching practicality, not hate. “It wasn’t because I hated anybody,” he pleaded in his daily livestream on Monday. “I was concerned that somebody hated me.” That somebody, he argued, was black people. “The whole point was to get away from racists,” he insisted.
A week after his original rant, Adams still claims that nobody has disagreed with his main point: that to steer clear of people who dislike you, it’s sensible for white people to avoid black people, and vice versa.
Adams is wrong. Not just morally, but practically. His advice is empirically unfounded and would make everything worse.
Every time one of these racially incendiary arguments comes along, the cycle repeats itself. The offender gets canceled. His opinion is dismissed as unthinkably repellent. He and his allies seize on that dismissal as evidence that the establishment is suppressing dissent. Nothing should be unthinkable, the dissenters argue. There’s some secret truth, some taboo insight, that the cancel culture is hiding from you.
Sorry, but there’s no great insight here. You can watch hour after hour of Adams’s livestreams, as I have, and you won’t find that nugget of forbidden truth. His reasoning is as sloppy as his research. In every way, he’s just wrong.
Slate | The race-and-IQ debate is back. The latest round started a few weeks ago when Harvard geneticist David Reich wrote a New York Times op-ed in defense of race as a biological fact. The piece resurfaced Sam Harris’ year-old Waking Up podcast interview with Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, and launched a Twitter debate between Harris and Vox’s Ezra Klein. Klein then responded to Harris and Reich in Vox, Harris fired back, and Andrew Sullivan went after Klein. Two weeks ago, Klein and Harris released a two-hour podcast in which they fruitlessly continued their dispute.
I’ve watched this debate for more than a decade. It’s the same wreck, over and over. A person with a taste for puncturing taboos learns about racial gaps in IQ scores and the idea that they might be genetic. He writes or speaks about it, credulously or unreflectively. Every part of his argument is attacked: the validity of IQ, the claim that it’s substantially heritable, and the idea that races can be biologically distinguished. The offender is denounced as racist when he thinks he’s just defending science against political correctness.
I know what it’s like to be this person because, 11 years ago, I was that person. I saw a comment from Nobel laureate James Watson about the black-white IQ gap, read some journal articles about it, and bought in. That was a mistake. Having made that mistake, I’m in no position to throw stones at Sullivan, Harris, or anyone else. But I am in a position to speak to these people as someone who understands where they’re coming from. I believe I can change their thinking, because I’ve changed mine, and I’m here to make that case to them. And I hope those of you who find this whole subject vile will bear with me as I do.
Here’s my advice: You can talk about the genetics of race. You can talk about the genetics of intelligence. But stop implying they’re the same thing. Connecting intelligence to race adds nothing useful. It overextends the science you’re defending, and it engulfs the whole debate in moral flames.
I’m not asking anyone to deny science. What I’m asking for is clarity. The genetics of race and the genetics of intelligence are two different fields of research. In his piece in the Times, Reich wrote about prostate cancer risk, a context in which there’s clear evidence of a genetic pattern related to ancestry. (Black men with African ancestry in a specific DNA region have a higher prostate cancer risk than do black men with European ancestry in that region.) Reich steered around intelligence where, despite racial and ethnic gaps in test scores, no such pattern has been established.
It’s also fine to discuss the genetics of IQ—there’s a serious line of scientific inquiry around that subject—and whether intelligence, in any population, is an inherited social advantage. We tend to worry that talk of heritability will lead to eugenics. But it’s also worth noting that, to the extent that IQ, like wealth, is inherited and concentrated through assortative mating, it can stratify society and undermine cohesion. That’s what much of The Bell Curve was about.
The trouble starts when people who write or talk about the heritability of intelligence extend this idea to comparisons between racial and ethnic groups. Some people do this maliciously; others don’t. You can call the latter group naïve, credulous, or obtuse to prejudice. But they might be open to persuasion, and that’s my aim here. For them, the chain of thought might go something like this: Intelligence is partly genetic, and race is partly genetic. So maybe racial differences on intelligence tests can be explained, in part, by genetics.
Late last year, I was compelled to keep my foot planted deep in William Saletan's ignorant, overreaching backside. Saletan was down to the same insidious and habitual stupid human tricks that certain of our visitors seem to be perennially stuck on. Shame. As it turns out, Saletan has finally come around to the errors and omissions plaguing his thinking. While it's at least five months and some years too late to warrant respect (I mean really, only a true simpleton could go down this path in the first place) - at the very least - his epiphany is worth noting; policy prescriptions based on race are social malpractice. Not because you can't find patterns on tests, but because any biological theory that starts with observed racial patterns has to end with genetic differences that cross racial lines. Race is the stone age of genetics. If you're a researcher looking for effects of heredity on medical or educational outcomes, race is the closest thing you presently have to genetic information about most people. And as a proxy measure, it sucks. By itself, this problem isn't decisive. After all, racial analysis did lead to the genetic findings about beta blockers. But as the conversation shifts from medicine to social science, and particularly to patterns laden with stereotypes, the moral cost of framing such patterns in racial terms becomes unsupportable. We can't just be "race realists," as believers in biological distinctions among races like to call themselves. We have to be realists about racism. No fact in human history is more pervasive than our tendency to prejudge, fear, despise, persecute, and fight each other based on even the shallowest observable differences. It's simply reckless to feed that fire.Of course Saletan equivocates waaaaay too much, understandable given that it's humiliating to be found out as intellectually underendowed. That said, at least he's taken the first step toward scientific and intellectual sobriety. He's no longer in complete denial of what's trivially obvious to those of us with the eyes to see. Let's hope everyone is capable of bootstrapping themselve up and out of the psychological stone age.
As allegedly independent agents within the consensus reality, one of the things each of us has to do in our lives is to discover, as far as possible, the grounds for believing what we are asked to believe. Theories of human nature are inherently controversial because they are socially constructed. This includes allegedly scientific theories of human nature. Whenever you see something presented under the rubric of human nature: science, technology, and life - question it ruthlessly. 
What brings me back to this topic is William Saletan's pathetic mea culpa published in yesterday's Slate. Many of you have criticized parts of the genetic argument as I related them. Others have pointed to alternative theories I truncated or left out. But the thing that has upset me most concerns a co-author of one of the articles I cited. In researching this subject, I focused on published data and relied on peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue. As a result, I missed something I could have picked up from a simple glance at Wikipedia.Oh Hells to the Gnaw - Saletan categorically must not be given a pass for his "dog ate my homework excuse" of sloppy fact checking! This was not merely an instance of sloppy fact checking, rather, it was a demonstration of the willful deceit which would have people to believe that research into the genetic determination of IQ is value-free, morally and ethically neutral, scientific research for the common good. What an audacious and ahistorical crock of conservative nonsense. Such nonsense trading on the collective amnesia and historical ignorance of the public demonstrates the free and easy interlocks between conservative and racist politics and serves as a tour de force illustration of the extent to which the latter ideology perniciously infects and pervades the political and scientific expressions of the former. Only a month earlier, writing in defense of James Watson, Saletan drew the following conclusion;For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to "the scientific study of heredity and human differences." During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime ("Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous") and heresyAmerican Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences. ("Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people"). New Century publishes a magazine called
I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I'm sorry. I owe you better than that.
Well, if he wants to paper over his bruised ego, that's his business. But racism, genetics, culture, black America, and the future of Africa are too important to be papered over.It's clear from Watson's revisionism, reticence, and retirement that he wants to make his hypothesis go away. But wanting it isn't enough. That's not science. It's politics.
ncregister | Canadian food bank clients and disabled retirees facing financial insecurity are now considering doctor-assisted suicide to avoid living in poverty, several sources have reported.
“Based on the definitions in the Canadian law, nearly anyone with a chronic medical condition, such as people with disabilities, can be approved for euthanasia,” Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, told CNA Dec. 12.
“Therefore people with disabilities are requesting euthanasia based on poverty, homelessness, or an inability to receive needed medical treatment, but they are approved for euthanasia based on their disability,” he added.
Meghan Nicholls, CEO of the Mississauga Food Bank in Mississauga, an Ontario city west of Toronto, said demand has increased by 60% since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her food bank network now serves 30,000 people per year, she reported in a Nov. 30 commentary for the Canadian news magazine Maclean’s.
For the first time, according to Nicholls, beneficiaries are reporting that the cost of food has put them into financial insolvency.
“We’re at the point where clients on these programs are telling us they’re considering medically assisted death or suicide because they can’t live in grinding poverty anymore,” she said in the Maclean’s report. “A client in our Food Bank 2 Home delivery program told one of our staff that they’re considering suicide because they’re so tired of suffering through poverty. Another client asked if we knew how to apply for MAID (medical assistance in dying) for the same reasons.”
“We can’t underestimate the effect that poverty has on someone’s mental health. Our clients live with constant worry and cut corners on needed items like medication, fresh food, or warm clothes — constantly living under that stress takes its toll mentally, emotionally, and physically,” Nicholls said.
“When people start telling us they’re going to end their life because they can’t live in poverty anymore, it’s clear that we’ve failed them,” she added.
Nicholls told Canada’s The Catholic Register that leaders of other food banks in Canada have not heard clients speak of plans to take their own lives.
“I don’t know if that’s a bit of an anomaly or if it’s just because we operate this home delivery program. We do have a chance to connect with clients directly, and that kind of relationship might open us up for people to share a little bit more vulnerably than perhaps some other food banks.”
Schadenberg said assisted suicide has become very easy to access in Canada.
“We need to understand that many people with disabilities live in poverty and find themselves having difficulty receiving necessary medical treatment and yet according to the law they have no difficulty being approved for death by euthanasia,” he told CNA. “Clearly this has led to an epidemic of death, of despair, in Canada. Deaths based on cultural abandonment but sold to the population under the false guise of freedom.”
In 2021, over 10,000 Canadians died by euthanasia, also called medical aid in dying or doctor-assisted suicide. This is 10 times the number who died by euthanasia in 2016, when the procedure was first legalized.
welcometohellworld | Autumn Harris' lungs were so filled with fluid they weighed four times what a normal person's lungs should weigh during her autopsy. The thirty four year old died in an Alabama prison in 2018 after going untreated for pneumonia by medical staff for weeks according to a malpractice lawsuit filed by her father in 2020 that will finally get a hearing next year. Six years of waiting for the possibility that maybe someone will be held responsible for his daughter's death.
Harris had been arrested because she missed a misdemeanor court hearing over an alleged theft of $40 Alabama.com reported.
State investigators interviewed women Harris was being held with and one said she got so sick toward the end that she started to hallucinate and was calling one of them momma.
If you are poor please do not make a mistake of any kind. Please do not fuck up in such and such a way leading you to need $40 very badly or to miss a court date. Do not fuck up even once despite the entire world being littered with boobytraps just waiting for you to make a false step. The floor is lava but not in the way that usually means. If you are poor almost every fuck up you might make carries with it a potential death sentence in this country.
It sounds facile and obvious to say that kind of shit doesn't it? It's almost like what's the point? You know it and I know it and people walking through the obstacle course on hard mode know it better than anyone.
I guess we have to keep saying it anyway.
We're all of us walking through the obstacle course to be clear it's just at varying degrees of difficulty. Unless some of you reading this happen to be rich in which case can I have $50,000?
Marquette | The wholesale destruction of Jews and other ethnic minorities in Europe by Nazi Germany before and during World War II has been widely and justly condemned as a crime against humanity. Literally thousand of books and articles have been written on this particular genocide, highlighted by extensive testimony presented to the Nuremberg criminal trials after the war.
We have been conditioned since World War II to believe that such a horrible human tragedy cannot, or at least should not, happen again. Particularly in the Western World, schooled in the Judeo- Christian ethic, we believe that another Holocaust could not happen and particularly not in the United States. It cannot happen here, we saybecause we live under democratic forms of government and our U.S. Constitution guarantees us protection of our lives as a God-given right.
Until this current century, we were no doubt justified in relying on these guarantees to our human existence. But will these guarantees survive the very dangerous new trends in the Western world's regard for the protection of life? Is a new and different kind of Holocaust in the offing, not against Jews or other minorities, but a Holocaust against the elderly, the chronically ill, the terminally ill and the disabled, right here in our own country? This proposition might appear preposterous at first glance, but the issue is important enough to merit a closer look.
It is a surprising historical fact that in the United States, we are wittingly or unwittingly following the same steps that led Germany to the disastrous conclusion that some lives are "life not worthy of life" and can be legally extinguished to suit the needs of society and the desires of the family and the state. Germany progressed from the adoption of genetics theories in the last century to sterilization to abortion to euthanasia to the indiscriminate murder of ethnically and politically undesirable races and aliens. Except for timing, the United States is proceeding along the identical path, with only the legalization of euthanasia. or assisted suicide, remaining before the flood gates open. Indeed, we are now facing this last and fatal step on the "slippery slope".
In January 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court began to hear, on appeal, oral arguments for Vasco v. Quill and Washington v. Glucksberg, the New York and Washington cases which struck down anti-assisted suicide laws in each state earlier in 1996.
If the U.S. Supreme Court follows the unfortunate precedent which it established in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision in which it created with very questionable constitutional basis a new "right" to abortion, then they may now create another new "right" to assisted suicide. If this happens, we will have taken the final step toward undermining the very foundation of our American democracy in which the government has the constitutional responsibility both to protect the lives of its citizens and not destroy those lives.
Ideas do have consequences and the legalization of assisted suicide would have momentous implications for the future of American society, families, medicine and the ultimate evaluation of the worth of a human life, as well as the very foundations of our American form ogovernment. Ultimately, the lives of our citizens may well be subordinated to the desires and interests of the government, which will decide directly or indirectly who will live and who will die. In fact, some U.S. authorities already are beginning to talk about the future demands on the resources of Medicare and Medicaid to maintain patients who might be kept alive for many years by modem medical technology, at great public expense, unless they can be dispensed with through assisted suicide.
It is well known that in the Netherlands today, where assisted suicide is widely practiced, serious abuses are being perpetrated against people who have not given their consent. In almost one-half of the assisted suicide cases in the Netherlands, the decision is being made by third parties without consulting the patient or the family. If the state or its agents can kill targeted people at will, then democracy as we know it will have perished. The next Holocaust, if and when it comes, will thus not be of the same character as the Nazis'. But the end result will be the same, namely, the wholesale killing of undesirables whether they be unborn, partially born, old, ill, or just tired of living.
Let us review the historical steps that both Germany and the United States have passed through since Darwin's theory of evolution originated in the middle 1850s and jolted the scientific world, including scholars, philosophers and even some misguided theologians. We will see how the seeds of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany preceded the Hitler era by several generations
CTH | It is hard to think the unthinkable – but there comes a time when there’s nothing else for it. People raised to trust the powers that be – who have assumed, like I once did, that the State, regardless of its political flavour at any given moment, is essentially benevolent and well-meaning – will naturally try and keep that assumption of benevolence in mind when trying to make sense of what is going on around them.
People like us, you and me, raised in the understanding that we are free, that we have inalienable rights, and that the institutions of this country have our best interests at heart, will tend to tie ourselves in knots rather than contemplate the idea those authorities might actually be working against us now. I took that thought of benevolent, well-meaning authority for granted for most of my life, God help me. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was as gullible as the next chump.
A couple of years ago, however, I began to think the unthinkable and with every passing day it becomes more and more obvious to me that we are no longer being treated as individuals entitled to try and make the most of our lives – but as a barn full of battery hens, just another product to be bought and sold – sold down the river.
Let me put it another way: if you have been driving yourself almost demented in an effort to think the best of those in charge – those in senior positions in government, those in charge of the great institutions of State, those running the big corporations – but finding it increasingly impossible to do so … then the solution to the problem might be to turn your point of view through 180 degrees and accept, however unwillingly, that we are … how best to put this … being taken for a ride.
When you find a stranger’s hand on your wallet, in the inside pocket of your jacket … rather than trying to persuade yourself he’s only making sure it doesn’t fall out … it might be more straightforward to draw the conclusion you’re in the process of being robbed.
Once the scales fall from a person’s eyes, the resultant clarity of sight is briefly overwhelming. Or it is like being handed a skeleton key that opens every locked door, or access to a Rosetta Stone that translates every word into a language instantly understood.
Take the energy crisis: If you’ve felt the blood drain from your face at the prospect of bills rising from hundreds to several thousands of pounds while reading about energy companies doubling their profits overnight while being commanded to subsidise so-called renewables that are anything but Green while listening to this politician or that renew their vows to the ruinous fantasies of Net Zero and Agenda 2030 while knowing that the electricity for electric cars comes, in the main and most reliably, from fossil fuels if you can’t make sense of it all and just know that it adds up to a future in which you might have to choose between eating and heating then treat yourself to the gift of understanding that the powers that be fully intend that we should have less heat and less fuel and that in the planned future only the rich will have cars anyway. The plan is not to fix it.
The plan is to break it, and leave it broken. If you struggle to think the best of the world’s richest – vacuous, self-obsessed A-list celebrities among them – endlessly circling the planet on private jets and super yachts, so as to attend get-togethers where they might pontificate to us lowly proles about how we must give up our cars and occasional holiday flights – even meat on the dinner table … if you wonder how they have the unmitigated gall … then isn’t it easier simply to accept that their honestly declared and advertised intention is that their luxurious and pampered lives will continue as before while we are left hungry, cold and mostly unwashed in our unheated homes.
Here’s the thing: if any leader or celeb honestly meant a word of their sermons about CO2 and the rest, then they would obviously lead by example. They would be first of all of us willingly to give up international travel altogether … they would downsize to modest homes warmed by heat pumps. They would eschew all energy but that from the sun and the wind. They would eat, with relish, bugs and plants. They would resort to walking, bicycles and public transport.
If Net Zero and the rest was about the good of the planet – and not about clearing the skies and the beaches of scum like us – don’t you think those sainted politicians and A-listers would be lighting the way for us by their own example? If the way of life they preach to us was worth living, wouldn’t they be living it already? Perhaps you heard Bill Gates say private jets are his guilty pleasure.
And how about food – and more particularly the predicted shortage of it: the suits and CEOs blame it all on Vladimir Putin. But if the countries of the world are truly running out of food, why is our government offering farmers hundreds of thousands of pounds to get out of the industry and sell their land to transnational corporations for use, or disuse unknown? Why aren’t we, as a society, doing what our parents and grandparents did during WWII and digging for victory? Why is the government intent on turning a third of our fertile soil over to re-wilding schemes that make life better only for the beavers? Why aren’t we looking across the North Sea towards the Netherlands where a WEF-infected administration is bullying farmers off their land altogether, forcing them to cull half the national herd.
Those Dutch farmers are among the most productive and knowledgeable in the world, holding in their heads and hands the answers to all manner of questions about how best to produce food, and yet their government is so intent on scaring them out of the business that a teenage boy in a tractor, taking part in a protest to defend ancient rights and traditions, was fired on by police.
Why do you think it matters so much, to the government of the second most productive population of farmers in the world, to gut and fillet that industry? Why? Why have similar protests, in countries all across Europe and the wider world, been largely ignored by the mainstream media – a media that would have crawled on its hands and knees over broken glass just to report on a BLM protester opening a bag of non-binary crisps. Why the silence on the attack on farming?
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"We will never be fully vaccinated against Covid-19."
— True North (@TrueNorthCentre) July 4, 2022
Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos says Canadians need to be "up-to-date" on their vaccines, which he describes as getting the Covid vaccine every nine months. #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/pjuPGbORQa
bombthrower | Despite increasingly compelling data and peer reviewed studies coming out detailing the harms and side-effects of vaccinations, Canada’s Liberal-Socialist coalition government is doubling down on vaccinations, and appear ready to move the goalposts on what constitutes vaccine compliance.
As reported via Blacklocks Reporter (@mindingottawa on Twitter),
Canadians will be required to get a Covid shot every nine months for the foreseeable future, says Health Minister . Previous definitions of “fully vaccinated” made no sense, he told reporters.
“Nine months is very clear and will help people understand why ‘up to date’ is the right way to think about vaccination now,” said Duclos. “‘Fully vaccinated’ makes no sense now. It’s about ‘up to date.’ So am I up to date in my vaccination? Have I received a vaccination in the last nine months?”
Duclos previously called for the provinces to make vaccinations mandatory and when asked by reporters if mandates would return this fall, he replied “We must continue to fight against Covid.”
Canada seems to be one of the few countries outside Communist China who is frantically clinging to the COVID narrative, relentlessly pushing largely ineffective (and arguably dangerous) vaccines on an increasingly fed up population.
The Trudeau regime is increasingly unpopular, a recent Angus Reid poll finding those who “strongly support” the government falling into single digits. The largest single category was “strongly disapprove” at 41%, Reeling with numerous scandals, corruption and gaffes, Justin Trudeau holds power solely through the merger of his party with the Canada’s Socialist NDP, headed by millionaire Jagmeet Singh.
The deal ostensibly keeps him in office until 2025. Singh is also on the
ropes, frequently being jeered in public even among his base
constituency in Brampton, Ontario. His brother lost his seat in the
recent Ontario election, and Singh himself was run out of a campaign stop by enraged Sikhs who called him “a sell out”.
amidwesterndoctor | Most of the injuries I saw reported here overlapped with the ones I encountered and documented within my own adverse event log. Additionally, there were dozens of respondents (primarily healthcare workers) who had observed a large number of individuals with vaccine injuries; meaning that my experience is not at all unique. The most commonly reported injuries were as follows:
•Strokes and blood clots.
•Fatal heart attacks and less frequently myocarditis or heart failure.
•Cancers that often emerge spontaneously, shock the doctor, and were highly aggressive (frequently killing the individual).
•Sudden severe cases of COVID-19.
•Cases of sudden death (i.e. a wife heard a thump upstairs, ran up, and found her husband dead on the floor).
•Rapid
progression towards dementia in an elder relative (typically resulting
in a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, although in one case Lewy body
dementia occurred).
•Other neurological conditions
One thing I have noticed in reviewing reports of adverse reactions to vaccines is that a large number of them go underreported (even within these reporting surveys) because they represent common diseases people develop rather than something very noteworthy. For example, I believe new autoimmune diseases or exacerbation of pre-existing autoimmune diseases are the most common adverse event that occurs following vaccination, as that seems to be the case for around 20-40% of the patients in many rheumatology practices (see this testimony for example) and this report of a survey conducted by the Israel ministry of health.
However, despite this being the case, I only saw a few reports of autoimmune conditions resulting from the mRNA vaccines within these survey responses. This is relevant because adverse reactions always distribute on a bell curve and the more extreme ones, therefore, are much rare than the less severe. ones. This means the adverse reactions that are noteworthy enough for someone to notice and share likely only represent the tip of the iceberg for adverse events occurring. A recent article showing there has been a 10% spike in disability within the US population so far is the best dataset I have come across to suggest something very concerning on a more chronic level throughout the population is happening.
Many of these cases were very sad, and it is difficult to even begin to imagine what the survey respondents had gone through during this process. Cancer is a particularly terrible disease given the death process associated with it, and despite coming across numerous cases of this happening, I was a bit surprised at how frequently respondents reported these cases. I likewise can understand why continually seeing these types of reports has motivated Steve Kirsch to spend every waking moment he has to bring attention to this issue.
Other conditions were less commonly reported. I took particular note of the following:
•Seven
cases of liver failure (or something similar), along with additional
cases of cancers rapidly metastasizing to the liver and causing liver
failure.
•Six Reports of Lou Gehrig's disease (also known as ALS)
•Three Reports of Fatal Prion Diseases (two of which were specified to be CJD, the third most likely was as well).
•A
few reports of birth defects in vital organs with ACE-2 receptors such
as the heart (it is harder to draw a correlation here since those
defects sometimes happen otherwise, but given that I know one case where
this almost certainly happened, I suspect these may have been linked as
well).
I learned a few major lessons from these reports.
The first is that one respondent made it very clear he and another individual had had a mild Covid infection they were dealing with, but once they became vaccinated, the infection went out of control and rapidly landed them in the hospital. I have been trying to come up with an explanation for a while over why it is so common to see individuals be vaccinated and then rapidly be hospitalized or died from severe Covid. I now suspect that being vaccinated while you are infected alters the immune response and makes COVID much more likely to progress towards being a fatal condition. This is unfortunate because those deaths are often used to justify the urgency of vaccinating.
sky | Donald Trump has signalled his intention to send troops to Chicago to ramp up the deportation of illegal immigrants - by posting a...
