Month: April 2021

Sweden Scraps Bill Gates’ Geoengineering Plot To Block The Sun

Sweden Scraps Bill Gates’ Geoengineering Plot To Block The Sun

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

An effort to dim the sun to stop global warming has been scrapped by the Swedish Space Agency, who announced that the program, funded by Bill Gates, has ‘divided the scientific community’ and will therefore not be carried out.

The Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) released a statement saying that the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), which also had secured Harvard funding, will not go ahead as planned in June.

“SSC has had dialogues this spring with both leading experts on geoengineering and with other stakeholders, as well as with the SCoPEx Advisory Board,” the statement reads, adding “As a result of these dialogues and in agreement with Harvard, SSC has decided not to conduct the technical test flight planned for this summer.”

It also notes that:

“The scientific community is divided regarding geoengineering, including any related technology tests such as the planned technical balloon test flight from Esrange this summer.” 

The Gates funded idea would have seen the release of calcium carbonate, essentially chalk dust, into the atmosphere from a high-altitude balloon to observe the effect it has on sunlight reaching the planet surface.

The ultimate goal of the study was to reduce the temperature on the planet in an effort to stave off global warming.

However, not surprisingly, the notion of blocking out the Sun proved somewhat unpopular, with environmental groups warning of potential “catastrophic consequences.”

The Saami Council, an advocate group for Sweden’s indigenous population, warned that the Gates experiment “essentially attempts to mimic volcanic eruptions by continuously spewing the sky with sun-dimming particles.”

The group also pointed out that SCoPEx could have “irreversible sociopolitical effects” and would do nothing to reduce Carbon emissions, which are touted as the leading cause of climate change.

Essentially, the whole idea comes off as a weird vampirish effort to starve the planet of sunlight, the driver of all life, with little scientific logic behind it at all.

Bill Gates, who is flogging a book about climate change, has poured millions into geoengineerng, funnelling at least $4.6 million to the lead researcher on SCoPEx, Harvard applied physics scientist David Keith.

Gates has repeatedly lauded the notion of dimming the Sun, noteably during a Ted Talk in 2010:

Many have connected SCoPEx research into the use of stratospheric aerosols for geoengineering with so called ‘chemtrails’, suggesting that a spraying program has been ongoing in secret for years.

While the project was given a red light by Sweden, it doesn’t mean it is going away.

David Keith told Reuters that it is only “a setback,” and suggested the project could move to the US, where the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently published a report calling for $100-200 million to be pumped into solar geoengineering over the next five years.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 04/03/2021 – 08:10

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3rLcnRp Tyler Durden

How Close Is The UK To Herd Immunity?

How Close Is The UK To Herd Immunity?

While the UK has long abandoned the strategy of achieving herd immunity by allowing the virus to spread throughout the least at risk sections of the population, Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes that the availability of vaccines finally opened up the possibility of getting there without having to sacrifice the public’s health.

As the latest government figures show though, there isn’t too much further to go before the 60 percent mark – considered the minimum level required – is reached.

Infographic: How close is the UK to 'herd immunity? | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

As of 14 March, estimates based on blood test results taken from a randomly selected subsample of the adult population, indicate that England had the largest share of people with the relevant SARS-CoV-2 antibodies – 54.7 percent.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 04/03/2021 – 07:35

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3sOrZVI Tyler Durden

The European Union: From A Single Market To A Tragic Farce

The European Union: From A Single Market To A Tragic Farce

Authored by Drieu Godefridi via The Gatestone Institute,

Concerning the European Union, opinions are divided between those who consider it useless and costly, and those who believe it to be the future of Europe and a model for the human race.

What is the reality?

Before today’s EU emerged, the construction of a European union was, at first, a tremendous success.

Many liberals have a short memory, but the EU has not always been the big, remote machine it has become. In the era of the more modestly named “European Communities” – entailing, for example, cooperation amongst multiple countries’ economies; or within their coal, steel and nuclear industries – Europe achieved four freedoms of movement: those of people, capital, services and goods. Despite its flaws, shortcomings and innumerable imperfections (nothing human is perfect), this common – or single – market made a massive and substantial contribution to the freedom and prosperity of Europeans.

It is impossible not to consider as progress that a French citizen can move freely in Italy or that a Spanish entrepreneur has the right freely to offer services to citizens of the Netherlands. The original European common market was in every way in line with Jean Monnet’s constructive concept of “peace through prosperity.”

The problem was that the ideologues of all creeds could not be satisfied with this Europe as a mere tool, one that was essentially economic in nature. No, it was necessary to add a political Europe, a social Europe, a Europe of defense, a European foreign policy, an ecological Europe and even a geopolitical Europe.

This evolution consisted, first of all, in subverting European institutions to make them accomplish, in addition to their economic aims, missions that were foreign to them, such as a “common foreign policy” that was never anything than words. How could you have a foreign policy common to the UK, Austria and Portugal?

Next, the institutions and procedures were, and continue to be, constantly adapted, renovated and revolutionized to serve extra-economic ends — such as “peace”, “combat social exclusion”, “promote scientific and technological progress”, “security and justice” — even at the expense of economic ones.

Today, the economic purpose of the European construction has been officially reduced — through treaties – to the bare essentials, aiming at “a sustainable development based on balanced economic growth and price stability” and given over to the demands of political, social and environmentalist Europe. Such demands begin, for example, with the European Green Deal that aims to turn Europe into the first “climate-neutral” continent by reducing Europe’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to “net zero” by 2050, even if the economic consequences to Europeans are unsustainable. According to IndustriAll, the federation of European industrial trade unions, there is a great risk that the European Green Deal will put entire industrial sectors on their knees, slashing millions of jobs in energy-intensive industries, without any assurances that workers in affected industries will have a future.

Thus, the EU, which in the past offered a counterbalance to the anti-economic fury of its member states, is now the permanent amplification of this fury.

No resolution concerning gender or environmentalism adopted by the German or French parliaments can compete with the increasingly extreme proclamations adopted on these subjects, as on others, by EU institutions. For example, the mainstreaming of the most extreme version of the gender theory — the idea that “male” and “female” are cultural, not biological, concepts — is now the official policy of the EU.

What allows these European institutions to go further and further down the path of ideology is that they escape democratic sanction, since the EU remains first and foremost an intergovernmental organization. Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court diagnosed a “structural democratic deficit” in the construction of the European Union, in that the decision-making processes in the EU remain largely those of an international organization. The decision-making is based on the principle of the equality of member-states. The principle of equality of states and the principle of equality of citizens cannot be reconciled in the EU’s current set of institutions, the Court said. Of course, EU institutions are dressed up with flowery language — such as “making the EU more democratic” according the Lisbon Treaty — aimed at making people believe that EU institutions, although imperfect, are increasingly democratic and only waiting to become fully democratic.

Nothing could be further from the truth; as an intergovernmental organization, the EU is not, never has been and never will be a democracy. An international organization is a compact between governments; to add an elected “European Parliament” to the scheme, with very limited capabilities, does not alter the intergovernmental preoccupations of such an organization.

What percentage of European citizens is capable of naming even one Member of European Parliament, European Commissioner or European Court of Justice judge? Americans feel American before being from Wyoming or Arkansas; while Italians, Spaniards, Swedes, Poles and Slovenes identify with their country before feeling European (in the generic sense of the word, not referring to the EU).

For historic reasons, Germany abides as much and often as possible by the EU rules and institutions. As was noted by Ulrich Speck:

“The country has built its political identity and its political system on the concept of being the opposite of the Nazi state. Germans today see the Nazi regime, among other things, as a radicalized form of classical power politics—something that they consider themselves lucky to have left behind.”

In other words, many Germans see the EU as the ultimate antidote to the hegemonic tendencies of their past. While they managed the first part — the mitigation — of the recent pandemic relatively well, they decided to rely on the EU for vaccine management. There is logic in this approach: first, we are stronger together in negotiating with “Big Pharma,” and, also, isn’t this an opportunity to prove to Europeans that this EU that they do not like is at least useful?

Not content with being useless and costly, as in the case of vaccinations against COVID-19, the EU has shown itself to be horribly, comically and tragically ineffective. AstraZeneca, for instance, simply “informed” the bloc that it would not be able to supply the number of vaccines the EU had hoped — and paid for —by the end of March. EU leaders were “furious” that the company appears to be fulfilling its deliveries for the UK market and not theirs. The result of the EU’s inability to uphold the commitments made to it by vaccine manufacturers is without appeal or recourse:

(Source: Our World in Data)

Five hundred years from now, when historians look back on the COVID era, they will say that America’s “Operation Warp Speed,” under President Donald J. Trump, was a triumph of science and logistics.

While it took five years to develop a vaccine against Ebola — the previous world record — it took less than a year in the West to develop several vaccines against COVID, mainly under pressure and with funding from United States taxpayers. Soon the U.S. government realized that the challenge was also logistical; it is all well and good to develop a vaccine, but it also has to be produced in large quantities and then distributed.

At the request of the US government, entire factories were built in a matter of months to produce the vaccine (which had not yet been developed at the time), in an effort whose breadth and scale were not unlike the U.S. industrial war effort of 1941. When it came time to distribute the vaccine, the U.S. government used the best tool at its disposal: the U.S. military. In the end, the U.S. mass vaccination program is being carried out in an unprecedented time frame; President Biden said at the beginning of March that the U.S. will have enough vaccines to inoculate every American by the end of May — two months earlier than previously expected.

Compared to the United States, the EU’s failure is total. While in Europe, the challenge was only to produce and distribute the vaccine, the EU failed miserably on both counts. The European vaccination program now lags far behind the U.S. program and even farther behind those of Israel and post-Brexit Britain.

According to current data, the return to normal in Europe will be one year behind that of America and the United Kingdom. This year represents a cruel multitude of deficits, bankruptcies and personal disasters. It portends, in relative terms, a massive economic regression awaiting the EU, compared to the rest of the world.

The EU’s vaccine management is a metonym for the EU: a tragic farce in the hands of ideologues as obtuse as they are inefficient. EU elites are weak, cowardly and pusillanimous because they know they do not represent anyone, in the true democratic sense of the word – they are not democratically elected, they are not transparent and they are not accountable to anyone. They are ultimately the playthings of governments that never agree with each other – but that do have the legitimacy of being truly democratic: elected, transparent, and accountable. There is also no mechanism for citizens to unelect anyone, should they wish to do so.

Common wisdom would dictate reducing the EU back to a single market, one territory without any internal borders or other regulatory obstacles to the free movement of goods and services. The ideological hubris that animates European institutions and their ideological sponsors will push them in the opposite direction – that of ever-greater centralization – at the expense of the European people and their vital interests.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 04/03/2021 – 07:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2R42vFR Tyler Durden

Abolish the FDA


topicsfuture

Last year, hashtag activists were ready to #AbolishICE, in part over the deaths of about 20 immigrants in custody in 2020. Protesters called on the government to “defund the police” over more than 1,000 killings by law enforcement during the same period. Those deaths are tragic, and many could have been prevented with better policy. But they pale in comparison to the blood on the hands of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over the last 12 months.

Faced with the challenge of COVID-19, the FDA screwed up on nearly every level. When the agency did do something right, it was almost always by making exceptions to its normal policies and procedures.

In this month’s cover story, Ronald Bailey describes some specific targeted changes at the FDA and other bureaucracies that could make a huge difference, as well as some crucial moments when the FDA managed—with great effort—to get out of its own way. This incremental approach to reform is both admirable and realistic. To do as Bailey suggests could help ensure that COVID-19 is our last true pandemic.

But sometimes enough is enough. There was a time when Republicans used to offer up lists of government agencies or cabinet departments they would abolish as part of the presidential primary process—say, the Department of Education or the Federal Reserve. The winner never did abolish anything, of course. But after the year we’ve just been through, nothing should be clearer than the need to eliminate an enormous bureaucracy whose documented failures resulted in the preventable deaths of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people.

The FDA screwed up in prohibiting researchers from testing affected populations in the early days of 2020, when the virus might have been better contained upon arrival in the United States. It screwed up in refusing to lift requirements for mask manufacturers and by declining to allow good substitutes for masks in short supply. It screwed up by collaborating with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to protect a monopoly on testing tools that ended in a disastrous shortage. FDA staffers tasked with approving both treatments and vaccines screwed up by delaying meetings and taking days off as Americans were dying in unprecedented numbers of a disease for which the agency had potential solutions. At press time, the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was widely available in many other nations, remained unapproved in the U.S., for reasons that are opaque to Americans desperate to resume normal lives.

But this is nothing new. The FDA started screwing up the COVID crisis long before the first bite of bat soup, by suppressing innovation and experimentation that could have better positioned scientists and researchers to prevent the outbreak from becoming a pandemic.

The agency is large, with a 2021 budget of $6 billion and the equivalent of about 18,000 full time staff. But that’s not the real cost of the FDA. Nobelist Milton Friedman got it right when he said: “The FDA has done enormous harm to the health of the American public by greatly increasing the costs of pharmaceutical research, thereby reducing the supply of new and effective drugs, and by delaying the approval of such drugs as survive the tortuous FDA process.”

The FDA is being asked to do an impossible, immoral task—and it is doing it badly. Ordinarily, people tend to discover this one at a time, in moments of personal crisis. A patient with a rare cancer is heartbroken to find out a potential treatment is not approved for use in the United States. A pharmacist who would like to offer a customer suffering from side effects an alternate drug is unable to do so. An entrepreneur who has an idea for a new testing tool gets discouraged when she looks into the approvals she would have to obtain before going to market. People seeking to make decisions about their own bodies that would harm no one else are forbidden from doing so, sometimes literally condemning them to death.

This year, Americans experienced that despair and frustration in unison. As our friends and neighbors sickened and died, the FDA equivocated, procrastinated, and played hot potato with tough decisions, just as it has done with minimal consequences to the agency for decades.

The FDA distorts incentives for pharmaceutical companies in ways that can be hard to see because they have been in place for so long. Much as middle schoolers suffer when their instructor “teaches to the test” at the expense of holistic understanding, customers and patients suffer when drug makers focus on jumping through the FDA’s hoops rather than figuring out the best uses for new compounds or the best way to help their customers.

Even now, with three COVID vaccines approved and on the U.S. market, health professionals are unable to pivot to offering a single dose to twice as many people, despite clear evidence that one shot can be highly effective. Why? Because the FDA approval process is not built to handle that kind of change mid-stride. And methods that would have allowed researchers to formally evaluate the efficacy of a single shot were also not allowed pre-release.

The current system is this: The FDA approves new pharmaceuticals as both safe and effective, in most cases after a laborious and expensive process of many years and many millions of dollars. Pharmaceuticals are only approved for certain uses, but physicians are allowed to use them off-label, which immediately undermines the case for the time-consuming efficacy part of the approval. Sometimes, even though drugs have been approved as safe, they are discovered to be harmful after the fact and have to be withdrawn.

When a disease is a really big deal, as with AIDS or COVID-19, the FDA makes exceptions—especially if political pressure comes to bear. The agency grants emergency use authorizations or convenes special committees. When there’s a sob story, a patient is occasionally allowed the “right to try” a treatment earlier than usual. While more exceptions made more often would be an improvement on the status quo, the need for these exceptions and the extremely high stakes for obtaining them shows that there is something deeply wrong with the underlying process.

Whenever a government agency fails in its mission, there are calls for more funding, more authority, more high-quality leadership. But in this case, there is little reason to believe those things will help; the agency’s mission was flawed from the beginning.

In its 115 years of existence, the FDA has certainly nabbed quacks and prevented harmful drugs from coming to market. The agency has been dining out for decades on the story of how it refused to approve thalidomide for sale in the United States, for instance. With all due respect to that incredible catch, this is like NASA boasting about Tang and Velcro. It’s not that the FDA has never done anything good; it’s that it hasn’t done enough to justify the costs.

Sometimes the costs are clear, as they have been this year in the struggle to get access to vaccines and treatments, or as they have been to the sufferers of chronic or terminal illnesses for much longer. Other times the stakes are low for any individual patient but add up. Thousands, maybe millions, of men with heart trouble take a low dose of aspirin every day to reduce the risk of myocardial occlusion. But for many years after that connection was established, the FDA prohibited aspirin manufacturers from advertising it. That single, seemingly minor restriction contributed to the deaths of many, many thousands of Americans.

Alternatives to regulation can also be hard to envision. But the role of the state, if it has one at all, is to protect rights and guard against fraud, not to prevent people from making risky choices. There are many nonstate mechanisms to ensure a safe and effective drug supply. The courts have a role to play here, one that was stunted when the FDA usurped their function in determining where harm or fraud has occurred. Technology to review consumer products is more robust and easier to use than ever, and there are plenty of other industries where private institutions verify and communicate with the public effectively about quality and safety. Without government-granted monopolies and barriers to entry, drugs would proliferate and prices would almost certainly fall, resolving many issues of access.

At the time of this writing, COVID case counts and deaths were finally falling. But there are still 2,000 Americans dying each day. Not every one of these deaths can be laid at the agency’s door, but each day of delay is one more argument for abolishing the FDA.

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Abolish the FDA


topicsfuture

Last year, hashtag activists were ready to #AbolishICE, in part over the deaths of about 20 immigrants in custody in 2020. Protesters called on the government to “defund the police” over more than 1,000 killings by law enforcement during the same period. Those deaths are tragic, and many could have been prevented with better policy. But they pale in comparison to the blood on the hands of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over the last 12 months.

Faced with the challenge of COVID-19, the FDA screwed up on nearly every level. When the agency did do something right, it was almost always by making exceptions to its normal policies and procedures.

In this month’s cover story, Ronald Bailey describes some specific targeted changes at the FDA and other bureaucracies that could make a huge difference, as well as some crucial moments when the FDA managed—with great effort—to get out of its own way. This incremental approach to reform is both admirable and realistic. To do as Bailey suggests could help ensure that COVID-19 is our last true pandemic.

But sometimes enough is enough. There was a time when Republicans used to offer up lists of government agencies or cabinet departments they would abolish as part of the presidential primary process—say, the Department of Education or the Federal Reserve. The winner never did abolish anything, of course. But after the year we’ve just been through, nothing should be clearer than the need to eliminate an enormous bureaucracy whose documented failures resulted in the preventable deaths of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people.

The FDA screwed up in prohibiting researchers from testing affected populations in the early days of 2020, when the virus might have been better contained upon arrival in the United States. It screwed up in refusing to lift requirements for mask manufacturers and by declining to allow good substitutes for masks in short supply. It screwed up by collaborating with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to protect a monopoly on testing tools that ended in a disastrous shortage. FDA staffers tasked with approving both treatments and vaccines screwed up by delaying meetings and taking days off as Americans were dying in unprecedented numbers of a disease for which the agency had potential solutions. At press time, the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was widely available in many other nations, remained unapproved in the U.S., for reasons that are opaque to Americans desperate to resume normal lives.

But this is nothing new. The FDA started screwing up the COVID crisis long before the first bite of bat soup, by suppressing innovation and experimentation that could have better positioned scientists and researchers to prevent the outbreak from becoming a pandemic.

The agency is large, with a 2021 budget of $6 billion and the equivalent of about 18,000 full time staff. But that’s not the real cost of the FDA. Nobelist Milton Friedman got it right when he said: “The FDA has done enormous harm to the health of the American public by greatly increasing the costs of pharmaceutical research, thereby reducing the supply of new and effective drugs, and by delaying the approval of such drugs as survive the tortuous FDA process.”

The FDA is being asked to do an impossible, immoral task—and it is doing it badly. Ordinarily, people tend to discover this one at a time, in moments of personal crisis. A patient with a rare cancer is heartbroken to find out a potential treatment is not approved for use in the United States. A pharmacist who would like to offer a customer suffering from side effects an alternate drug is unable to do so. An entrepreneur who has an idea for a new testing tool gets discouraged when she looks into the approvals she would have to obtain before going to market. People seeking to make decisions about their own bodies that would harm no one else are forbidden from doing so, sometimes literally condemning them to death.

This year, Americans experienced that despair and frustration in unison. As our friends and neighbors sickened and died, the FDA equivocated, procrastinated, and played hot potato with tough decisions, just as it has done with minimal consequences to the agency for decades.

The FDA distorts incentives for pharmaceutical companies in ways that can be hard to see because they have been in place for so long. Much as middle schoolers suffer when their instructor “teaches to the test” at the expense of holistic understanding, customers and patients suffer when drug makers focus on jumping through the FDA’s hoops rather than figuring out the best uses for new compounds or the best way to help their customers.

Even now, with three COVID vaccines approved and on the U.S. market, health professionals are unable to pivot to offering a single dose to twice as many people, despite clear evidence that one shot can be highly effective. Why? Because the FDA approval process is not built to handle that kind of change mid-stride. And methods that would have allowed researchers to formally evaluate the efficacy of a single shot were also not allowed pre-release.

The current system is this: The FDA approves new pharmaceuticals as both safe and effective, in most cases after a laborious and expensive process of many years and many millions of dollars. Pharmaceuticals are only approved for certain uses, but physicians are allowed to use them off-label, which immediately undermines the case for the time-consuming efficacy part of the approval. Sometimes, even though drugs have been approved as safe, they are discovered to be harmful after the fact and have to be withdrawn.

When a disease is a really big deal, as with AIDS or COVID-19, the FDA makes exceptions—especially if political pressure comes to bear. The agency grants emergency use authorizations or convenes special committees. When there’s a sob story, a patient is occasionally allowed the “right to try” a treatment earlier than usual. While more exceptions made more often would be an improvement on the status quo, the need for these exceptions and the extremely high stakes for obtaining them shows that there is something deeply wrong with the underlying process.

Whenever a government agency fails in its mission, there are calls for more funding, more authority, more high-quality leadership. But in this case, there is little reason to believe those things will help; the agency’s mission was flawed from the beginning.

In its 115 years of existence, the FDA has certainly nabbed quacks and prevented harmful drugs from coming to market. The agency has been dining out for decades on the story of how it refused to approve thalidomide for sale in the United States, for instance. With all due respect to that incredible catch, this is like NASA boasting about Tang and Velcro. It’s not that the FDA has never done anything good; it’s that it hasn’t done enough to justify the costs.

Sometimes the costs are clear, as they have been this year in the struggle to get access to vaccines and treatments, or as they have been to the sufferers of chronic or terminal illnesses for much longer. Other times the stakes are low for any individual patient but add up. Thousands, maybe millions, of men with heart trouble take a low dose of aspirin every day to reduce the risk of myocardial occlusion. But for many years after that connection was established, the FDA prohibited aspirin manufacturers from advertising it. That single, seemingly minor restriction contributed to the deaths of many, many thousands of Americans.

Alternatives to regulation can also be hard to envision. But the role of the state, if it has one at all, is to protect rights and guard against fraud, not to prevent people from making risky choices. There are many nonstate mechanisms to ensure a safe and effective drug supply. The courts have a role to play here, one that was stunted when the FDA usurped their function in determining where harm or fraud has occurred. Technology to review consumer products is more robust and easier to use than ever, and there are plenty of other industries where private institutions verify and communicate with the public effectively about quality and safety. Without government-granted monopolies and barriers to entry, drugs would proliferate and prices would almost certainly fall, resolving many issues of access.

At the time of this writing, COVID case counts and deaths were finally falling. But there are still 2,000 Americans dying each day. Not every one of these deaths can be laid at the agency’s door, but each day of delay is one more argument for abolishing the FDA.

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About Two Hours After Bible Worship Group Seeks Emergency Injunction, California Relaxes Guidance for April 15–After Easter, of Course

On Thursday, April 1, the Ninth Circuit upheld California’s restrictions on indoor gathering in Tandon v. Newsom. Over the next 24 hours, the Bible Worship group frantically prepared an emergency injunction application to the Supreme Court. On Friday around 6:00 ET, the group filed that application with the Supreme Court. About two hours later, California changed the gathering guidance, effective April 15. This never-ending game of whac-a-mole is such an abject waste of everyone’s time.

Does anyone believe this timing is coincidental? The government is, once again, trying to frustrate Supreme Court review. And of course, this change goes into effect after Easter.

Thanks to the PDF’s metadata, I can pinpoint the exact minute when the guidance was changed. The document was created at 4:20 PM (PT), and was finalized at 4:56 PM (PT). Once again, the application was filed around 3:00 PM (PT). This change wasn’t planned in advance. The government released this policy after the 9th Circuit ruled, and in response to the imminent stay application.

What happens next? Circuit Justice Kagan has not yet requested a response. I hope she doesn’t set the due date after April 15. Giving the state two weeks would potentially moot the case. (Though I think voluntary cessation keeps it alive.) Kagan previously gave California 7 days in Gateway City Church. That number should be maintained. If Kagan gives California till Friday, April 9, to respond, the plaintiffs can file a response by Saturday. A decision on Sunday, April 11, would allow the group to worship on their Sabbath. That relief would be meaningful. And, the Court could rule well before the April 15 changeover. Of course, we saw the Court was willing to sit on the Kentucky petition in order to moot it. And we know that the Chief does not believe in the concept of voluntary cessation. The five-member majority from Roman Catholic Diocese needs to be proactive here. Issue the ruling as soon as possible. If the dissent is not yet ready, say the dissent will come later. Don’t let the Court’s coward caucus wiggle out of deciding this blatant violation of the First Amendment.

Going forward, there has to be some form of sanctions for government officials who consistently try to frustrate Supreme Court review. Discovery could determine what factors went into changing the policy. I’m sure Rhys Williams, the Senior Advisor on Emergency Preparedness and Management who created this document, would be happy to answer some interrogatories about how and when the government decided to modify this document in response to the stay application.

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Stand Up To Tyranny: How To Respond To The Evils Of Our Age

Stand Up To Tyranny: How To Respond To The Evils Of Our Age

Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”

– Martin Luther King Jr. (A Knock at Midnight, June 11, 1967)

In every age, we find ourselves wrestling with the question of how Jesus Christ – the itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist who died challenging the police state of his time, namely, the Roman Empire – would respond to the moral questions of our day.

For instance, would Jesus advocate, as so many evangelical Christian leaders have done in recent years, for congregants to “submit to your leaders and those in authority,” which in the American police state translates to complying, conforming, submitting, obeying orders, deferring to authority and generally doing whatever a government official tells you to do?

What would Jesus do? 

Study the life and teachings of Jesus, and you may be surprised at how relevant he is to our modern age.

A radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn, Jesus spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire, and providing a blueprint for standing up to tyranny that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him.

Those living through this present age of government lockdowns, immunity passports, militarized police, SWAT team raids, police shootings of unarmed citizens, roadside strip searches, invasive surveillance and the like might feel as if these events are unprecedented. However, the characteristics of a police state and its reasons for being are no different today than they were in Jesus’ lifetime: control, power and money.

Much like the American Empire today, the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day was characterized by secrecy, surveillance, a widespread police presence, a citizenry treated like suspects with little recourse against the police state, perpetual wars, a military empire, martial law, and political retribution against those who dared to challenge the power of the state.

A police state extends far beyond the actions of law enforcement.  In fact, a police state “is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions.”

Indeed, the police state in which Jesus lived (and died) and its striking similarities to modern-day America are beyond troubling.

Secrecy, surveillance and rule by the elite. As the chasm between the wealthy and poor grew wider in the Roman Empire, the ruling class and the wealthy class became synonymous, while the lower classes, increasingly deprived of their political freedoms, grew disinterested in the government and easily distracted by “bread and circuses.” Much like America today, with its lack of government transparency, overt domestic surveillance, and rule by the rich, the inner workings of the Roman Empire were shrouded in secrecy, while its leaders were constantly on the watch for any potential threats to its power. The resulting state-wide surveillance was primarily carried out by the military, which acted as investigators, enforcers, torturers, policemen, executioners and jailers. Today that role is fulfilled by the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the increasingly militarized police forces across the country.

Widespread police presence. The Roman Empire used its military forces to maintain the “peace,” thereby establishing a police state that reached into all aspects of a citizen’s life. In this way, these military officers, used to address a broad range of routine problems and conflicts, enforced the will of the state. Today SWAT teams, comprised of local police and federal agents, are employed to carry out routine search warrants for minor crimes such as marijuana possession and credit card fraud.

Citizenry with little recourse against the police state. As the Roman Empire expanded, personal freedom and independence nearly vanished, as did any real sense of local governance and national consciousness. Similarly, in America today, citizens largely feel powerless, voiceless and unrepresented in the face of a power-hungry federal government. As states and localities are brought under direct control by federal agencies and regulations, a sense of learned helplessness grips the nation.

Perpetual wars and a military empire. Much like America today with its practice of policing the world, war and an over-arching militarist ethos provided the framework for the Roman Empire, which extended from the Italian peninsula to all over Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe, extending into North Africa and Western Asia as well. In addition to significant foreign threats, wars were waged against inchoate, unstructured and socially inferior foes.

Martial law. Eventually, Rome established a permanent military dictatorship that left the citizens at the mercy of an unreachable and oppressive totalitarian regime. In the absence of resources to establish civic police forces, the Romans relied increasingly on the military to intervene in all matters of conflict or upheaval in provinces, from small-scale scuffles to large-scale revolts. Not unlike police forces today, with their martial law training drills on American soil, militarized weapons and “shoot first, ask questions later” mindset, the Roman soldier had “the exercise of lethal force at his fingertips” with the potential of wreaking havoc on normal citizens’ lives.

A nation of suspects. Just as the American Empire looks upon its citizens as suspects to be tracked, surveilled and controlled, the Roman Empire looked upon all potential insubordinates, from the common thief to a full-fledged insurrectionist, as threats to its power. The insurrectionist was seen as directly challenging the Emperor.  A “bandit,” or revolutionist, was seen as capable of overturning the empire, was always considered guilty and deserving of the most savage penalties, including capital punishment. Bandits were usually punished publicly and cruelly as a means of deterring others from challenging the power of the state.  Jesus’ execution was one such public punishment.

Acts of civil disobedience by insurrectionists. Starting with his act of civil disobedience at the Jewish temple, the site of the administrative headquarters of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish council, Jesus branded himself a political revolutionary. When Jesus “with the help of his disciples, blocks the entrance to the courtyard” and forbids “anyone carrying goods for sale or trade from entering the Temple,” he committed a blatantly criminal and seditious act, an act “that undoubtedly precipitated his arrest and execution.” Because the commercial events were sponsored by the religious hierarchy, which in turn was operated by consent of the Roman government, Jesus’ attack on the money chargers and traders can be seen as an attack on Rome itself, an unmistakable declaration of political and social independence from the Roman oppression.

Military-style arrests in the dead of night. Jesus’ arrest account testifies to the fact that the Romans perceived Him as a revolutionary. Eerily similar to today’s SWAT team raids, Jesus was arrested in the middle of the night, in secret, by a large, heavily armed fleet of soldiers.  Rather than merely asking for Jesus when they came to arrest him, his pursuers collaborated beforehand with Judas. Acting as a government informant, Judas concocted a kiss as a secret identification marker, hinting that a level of deception and trickery must be used to obtain this seemingly “dangerous revolutionist’s” cooperation. 

Torture and capital punishment. In Jesus’ day, religious preachers, self-proclaimed prophets and nonviolent protesters were not summarily arrested and executed. Indeed, the high priests and Roman governors normally allowed a protest, particularly a small-scale one, to run its course. However, government authorities were quick to dispose of leaders and movements that appeared to threaten the Roman Empire. The charges leveled against Jesus—that he was a threat to the stability of the nation, opposed paying Roman taxes and claimed to be the rightful King—were purely political, not religious. To the Romans, any one of these charges was enough to merit death by crucifixion, which was usually reserved for slaves, non-Romans, radicals, revolutionaries and the worst criminals.

Jesus was presented to Pontius Pilate “as a disturber of the political peace,” a leader of a rebellion, a political threat, and most gravely—a claimant to kingship, a “king of the revolutionary type.” After Jesus is formally condemned by Pilate, he is sentenced to death by crucifixion, “the Roman means of executing criminals convicted of high treason.”  The purpose of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal, as it was an immensely public statement intended to visually warn all those who would challenge the power of the Roman Empire. Hence, it was reserved solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, and banditry. After being ruthlessly whipped and mocked, Jesus was nailed to a cross.

As Professor Mark Lewis Taylor observed:

The cross within Roman politics and culture was a marker of shame, of being a criminal. If you were put to the cross, you were marked as shameful, as criminal, but especially as subversive. And there were thousands of people put to the cross. The cross was actually positioned at many crossroads, and, as New Testament scholar Paula Fredricksen has reminded us, it served as kind of a public service announcement that said, “Act like this person did, and this is how you will end up.”

Jesus – the revolutionary, the political dissident, and the nonviolent activist – lived and died in a police state. Any reflection on Jesus’ life and death within a police state must take into account several factors: Jesus spoke out strongly against such things as empires, controlling people, state violence and power politics. Jesus challenged the political and religious belief systems of his day. And worldly powers feared Jesus, not because he challenged them for control of thrones or government but because he undercut their claims of supremacy, and he dared to speak truth to power in a time when doing so could—and often did—cost a person his life.

Unfortunately, the radical Jesus, the political dissident who took aim at injustice and oppression, has been largely forgotten today, replaced by a congenial, smiling Jesus trotted out for religious holidays but otherwise rendered mute when it comes to matters of war, power and politics.

Yet for those who truly study the life and teachings of Jesus, the resounding theme is one of outright resistance to war, materialism and empire.

Ultimately, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is the contradiction that must be resolved if the radical Jesus—the one who stood up to the Roman Empire and was crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be—is to be an example for our modern age.

After all, there is so much suffering and injustice in the world, and so much good that can be done by those who truly aspire to follow Jesus Christ’s example.

We must decide whether we will follow the path of least resistance—willing to turn a blind eye to what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the “evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination, to the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive men of work and food, and to the insanities of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence”—or whether we will be transformed nonconformists “dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood.”

As King explained in a powerful sermon delivered in 1954, “This command not to conform comes … [from] Jesus Christ, the world’s most dedicated nonconformist, whose ethical nonconformity still challenges the conscience of mankind.”

Furthermore:

We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians, who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane patterns of the world.  Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune, and life itself in behalf of a cause they knew to be right.  Quantitatively small, they were qualitatively giants.  Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests.  Finally, they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ… The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood.  The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been nonconformists.  In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!

…Honesty impels me to admit that transformed nonconformity, which is always costly and never altogether comfortable, may mean walking through the valley of the shadow of suffering, losing a job, or having a six-year-old daughter ask, “Daddy, why do you have to go to jail so much?”  But we are gravely mistaken to think that Christianity protects us from the pain and agony of mortal existence.  Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear.  To be a Christian, one must take up his cross, with all of its difficulties and agonizing and tragedy-packed content, and carry it until that very cross leaves its marks upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way that comes only through suffering.

In these days of worldwide confusion, there is a dire need for men and women who will courageously do battle for truth.  We must make a choice. Will we continue to march to the drumbeat of conformity and respectability, or will we, listening to the beat of a more distant drum, move to its echoing sounds?  Will we march only to the music of time, or will we, risking criticism and abuse, march to the soul saving music of eternity?

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/02/2021 – 23:30

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About Two Hours After Bible Worship Group Seeks Emergency Injunction, California Relaxes Guidance for April 15–After Easter, of Course

On Thursday, April 1, the Ninth Circuit upheld California’s restrictions on indoor gathering in Tandon v. Newsom. Over the next 24 hours, the Bible Worship group frantically prepared an emergency injunction application to the Supreme Court. On Friday around 6:00 ET, the group filed that application with the Supreme Court. About two hours later, California changed the gathering guidance, effective April 15. This never-ending game of whac-a-mole is such an abject waste of everyone’s time.

Does anyone believe this timing is coincidental? The government is, once again, trying to frustrate Supreme Court review. And of course, this change goes into effect after Easter.

Thanks to the PDF’s metadata, I can pinpoint the exact minute when the guidance was changed. The document was created at 4:20 PM (PT), and was finalized at 4:56 PM (PT). Once again, the application was filed around 3:00 PM (PT). This change wasn’t planned in advance. The government released this policy after the 9th Circuit ruled, and in response to the imminent stay application.

What happens next? Circuit Justice Kagan has not yet requested a response. I hope she doesn’t set the due date after April 15. Giving the state two weeks would potentially moot the case. (Though I think voluntary cessation keeps it alive.) Kagan previously gave California 7 days in Gateway City Church. That number should be maintained. If Kagan gives California till Friday, April 9, to respond, the plaintiffs can file a response by Saturday. A decision on Sunday, April 11, would allow the group to worship on their Sabbath. That relief would be meaningful. And, the Court could rule well before the April 15 changeover. Of course, we saw the Court was willing to sit on the Kentucky petition in order to moot it. And we know that the Chief does not believe in the concept of voluntary cessation. The five-member majority from Roman Catholic Diocese needs to be proactive here. Issue the ruling as soon as possible. If the dissent is not yet ready, say the dissent will come later. Don’t let the Court’s coward caucus wiggle out of deciding this blatant violation of the First Amendment.

Going forward, there has to be some form of sanctions for government officials who consistently try to frustrate Supreme Court review. Discovery could determine what factors went into changing the policy. I’m sure Rhys Williams, the Senior Advisor on Emergency Preparedness and Management who created this document, would be happy to answer some interrogatories about how and when the government decided to modify this document in response to the stay application.

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