There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
Having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.John 13:1
This fact is essentially a promise; for what our Lord was He is, and what He was to those with whom He lived on earth, He will be to all His beloved so long as the moon endureth.
“Having loved”: here was the wonder! That He should ever have loved men at all is the marvel. What was there in His poor disciples that He should love them? What is there in me?
But when He has once begun to love, it is His nature to continue to do so. Love made the saints “his own”—what a choice title! He purchased them with blood, and they became His treasure. Being His own, He will not lose them. Being His beloved, He will not cease to love them. My soul, He will not cease to love thee!
The text is well as it stands: “to the end.” Even till His death the ruling passion of love to His own reigned in His sacred bosom. It means also to the uttermost. He could not love them more: He gave Himself for them. Some read it, to perfection. Truly He lavished upon them a perfect love, in which there was no flaw nor failure, no unwisdom, no unfaithfulness.
Such is the love of Jesus to each one of His people. Let us sing to our Well-beloved a song.
“….The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”1 Samuel 16:7
‘Mirror, mirror on the wall” Remember that fairy tale? Of course, we all do!
My question for you today is, what do you see when you look into the mirror? Do you only see yourself or do you see God’s image?
Dear one, no matter what you may physically look like, the image of your Father in heaven is unmistakable! You should reflect God’s love, grace and mercy.
When people see you reflect Jesus, they are drawn to His great love. They’ll sense His unconditional acceptance.
You may not see the love of God mirrored in your life because you do not have a relationship with Him.
FORGET NONE OF HIS BENEFITS volume 22, number 46, November 16, 2023
“. . . be filled with the Holy Spirit.” -Ephesians 5:18
With our American holiday of Thanksgiving only one week away, perhaps you could use some advice on how to engage your family members who seem to have a strong aversion to Christianity. Maybe they grew up in the church and for whatever reason left it long ago. Maybe you have tried to get into the gospel with them before and they shut you down pretty quickly. Perhaps you have a homosexual family member who will bring his “partner” to dinner. Maybe you have a cousin or nephew who is dabbling in transgenderism. What can you do without causing a scene at the dinner table?
May I briefly suggest four things? Perhaps I can enlarge on them later. First, remember who you were before you received God’s mercy in Christ (Eph.2:1-13). You were dead in your sins. You were under the control of the devil. You were controlled by your lusts in mind and body. You were without hope and without God. You were a child of wrath, just like your lost family members are, but God had mercy on you. He may have mercy on them too. Ask God to give you a heart of love and compassion for these folks and to take away any vestige of self-righteousness or feeling of moral superiority. If God had not shown you mercy then you could be right where they are at this present time.
Secondly, begin praying now for them. And what should you pray? I suggest three things. First of all, ask God to give you an open door to speak to them. Paul asked both the Colossians and Ephesians to pray for an open door to preach Christ with boldness (Eph.6:19,20, Col.4:3,4). You don’t have to knock the door down and cause a disruption. How might you engage your nephew or cousin? Ask questions. Take a genuine interest in his life, his job, his hobbies. Ask him what he is thankful for and then ask him about any challenges he might have in his life, offering to pray for him. If he opens up with specifics then you have an open door.
The second thing you should pray for is an open heart. In Acts 16 Luke tells us that God opened Lydia’s heart to receive the things spoken to her by Paul the apostle. Remember, all people who are not yet united to Christ are dead in their sins. They have no interest whatsoever in the things of God and Christ. They often are exceedingly hostile to them. Only God can begin to draw them by the Spirit. Pray for God to do so. How will you know He has done so? More about that shortly.
And the third thing to pray for is power, Holy Spirit power in your speech. In Acts 4 we are told that those who were gathered together had prayed and then they were filled with the Holy Spirit and they began to speak the word of God with boldness (Acts 4:31). Boldness of speech is not harshness. It is straightforward. It is speaking the truth in love (Eph.4:15). Paul says that when the Thessalonians received the word from him, they accepted it not as the word of men but for what it really is, the word of God which also performs its work in those who believe (1 Thess.2:13). May I state the obvious? You have no power in yourself to cause your cousin to receive the word which is able to save his soul. You must have the Holy Spirit working through your words of gospel truth.
Thirdly, pray daily for the filling and fullness of the Holy Spirit. I have much I want to say on this topic and will try further to develop this later. Jesus said, “Abide in Me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me,” (John 15:4). What kind of fruit can you bear? The fruit of the Holy Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal.5:22,23). Ask God to produce in you the fruit of the Spirit in greater measure. And you can also bring forth fruit in the lives of other people, spurring fellow believers to be more faithful disciples of Jesus and to be an instrument in the conversion of sinners.
Paul told the Ephesians to be constantly filled (present tense verb as a command) with the Holy Spirit. How are we to be filled with the Spirit? First, surrender yourself wholeheartedly to God the first thing every morning. Cultivate your love relationship with Jesus. Spend time, if only for a few minutes, in His presence. Gaze into heaven, putting your elbows, as it were, on the window sill of heaven and look into the face of Jesus. Gain a vision of His glory and majesty and then go forth in the day on the experience you had with Him that morning. And then ask the Holy Spirit to convict you of any sin you have not already confessed (Is.59:1,2). Be ruthless, be honest with God. He sees it all anyway—your thoughts, idle words, your harsh or lascivious speech, what you watch, what you read. Confess it as sin and repent. Just stop it, right then and there. Then ask for the Holy Spirit (Luke 11:13). Yes it is true that at your conversion you were indwelt by the Spirit, but you must be filled, controlled by the Spirit if you are to have any power at all to effect change in anyone. Jesus said, “If anyone is thirsty let Him come to Me and drink and from his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water,” (John 7:37,38). The key is to be thirsty for His power in your life. Are you thirsty? In the next verse John makes clear that this living water is the Holy Spirit. And then believe, as a little child, that you will be filled with the Spirit. When you sin, and you of course will sin, repeat these steps—surrender to God, confess your sin, ask for the Holy Spirit, and then believe God will give Him to you.
Okay, so your nephew has expressed a trial or two in his life. What can you say? The goal is to get him to read the Bible with you on Zoom or FaceTime. Remember, “The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul,” (Ps.19:7). You can say something like this, “I am sorry to hear of this trial in your life. Would it be okay for me to pray for you about this need?” If he says “Yes” then you could pray a brief prayer at the table or tell him you promise to pray for him later that day. Then you could say, “You know, God really cares about you and everything in your life. God loves His people. I like reading stories about Jesus with people and I am wondering if you think that is something you might like to do? We could meet for three or four weeks, about thirty minutes at a time, and see if these stories might help you.”
If he says “Yes” then God has opened his heart to at least consider the Scriptures. If he says “No” then don’t worry about it. He is not yet open and that is not your fault. If he says “Yes” then set up a time to meet as soon as possible. I suggest you read the stories in Mark’s gospel because these are short and quick hitting, portraying Jesus’ authority and power as well as His death and resurrection. Your time together could go something like this. Begin by asking him one thing he is thankful for in the past week and one thing which is a challenge. Listen. Then get into your reading of the Bible. Have him read the text. Ask him to paraphrase it to make sure he understands it. And then ask three questions. First, what does this passage tell us about Jesus? Secondly, what does this passage tell us about people? And thirdly, what is one thing in this passage you believe God wants you to do?
Give him time to answer the questions. Don’t give him the answers. Let him grapple with the text of Scripture, and then watch how God before your very eyes, in succeeding weeks, begins to transform him. If he sticks with it over several weeks God very well might save him.
Expect God to save him. You can do this. You don’t have to be an evangelist to be used of God in leading people to Christ. What will you do with what you just read?
‘Once-in-a-century’ flood disaster strikes Somalia: Over 450 000 displaced, 1.2 million affected and 32 fatalities reported In a dramatic shift from drought to deluge, Somalia is experiencing unprecedented flooding described as a ‘once-in-a-century’ event by the UN. This natural disaster, exacerbated by El Niño and the Indian Ocean Dipole, has put approximately 1.6 million people at risk, with over 1.24 million already affected. The nation faces a severe humanitarian challenge as it contends with the aftermath of these extreme weather conditions.
Conditions Are “Drier Than The Dust Bowl Years” In The Heartland Of America …Dust Bowl conditions have returned to the middle of the country. In fact, as you will see below, it is being reported that conditions are “drier than the Dust Bowl years” in some parts of Iowa. If the heartland of America doesn’t start getting more precipitation, we are going to be facing some enormous problems in the years ahead.
Erdogan Claims That Israel Is “Threatening People With Atomic Bombs” As Hezbollah Ramps Up Their Attacks From The North Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is doing his best to inflame tensions in the Middle East. We all knew that he was a lunatic, but the inflammatory rhetoric that is coming out of him now is the sort of thing that we would expect to hear from leaders of Hamas or Hezbollah. During a “fiery speech” on Wednesday, Erdogan accused Israel of being a “terror state”, and he boldly declared that Israel’s leaders must be held accountable as war criminals in international courts…
Floods hit veg producers in northern France In the northern French department of Pas-de-Calais, farmers are waiting for the floodwaters to recede before they can determine the extent of the damage
Lockyer Valley: Price of fruit and vegetables set to rise after Queensland storm The cost of popular vegetables is expected to climb right before Christmas after a freak storm devastated farms in Queensland’s Lockyer Valley…”We think in the vicinity of $30 million in crop losses and that’s growing by the day,” Sippel said.
Nikki Haley Takes Fire Over ‘Unconstitutional’ Plan To Force All Social Media Users To Be “Verified By Name” Nikki Haley, a defense industry lobbyist disguised as an aging MILF, floated what many are calling a flatly unconstitutional idea to force all social media users verify their identities online in order to rid the world of ‘bots’ from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea (and of course, hand the US government a nice list of exactly who’s saying what, and where).
Signs That Complete Economic Collapse Is Right Around The Corner While the media continues to blow smoke up our collective behinds, telling us we are financially better off, as millions of Americans are maxxing out their credit cards just to survive the price of food along with their rent/mortgage and utilities, signs of economic collapse are all around us.
Revealed: Govt-Contracted NewsGuard’s Largest Investor Is Pfizer Partner …In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.”…Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.
Australian Ports Hit By “Nationally Significant Cyber Incident” As Containers Pile Up Australian Federal Police are investigating a cybersecurity incident that has paralyzed Australia’s second-largest port operator, which manages container terminals in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Fremantle. DP World Australia is responsible for 40% of Australia’s maritime freight and shuttered operations on Friday after a cybersecurity incident.
Mujahideen Issues France a Final Warning: ‘You Will Pay, Next Time We Will Not Come To Talk’ France’s trajectory is undeniably shifting towards an Islamic future, marked by its status as Europe’s predominant Muslim nation and the annual influx of 400,000 legal Muslim immigrants—a transformation further shadowed by the unmonitored flow of undocumented jihadis crossing its borders.
CDC Runs Two VAERS Systems — The Public Can Access Only One of Them …According to one of those experts — VAERS researcher Albert Benavides, whose experience includes HMO claims auditing, data analytics and revenue cycle management — VAERS’ failure isn’t accidental. “It is not broken,” Benavides wrote in his Substack coverage of The BMJ investigation. “VAERS runs cover for the big pharma cabal.”
The U.S. Government is Secretly Stealing Newborn Babies DNA – Is This Tied to Creating a Biometric Digital ID? There’s something sinister about that little “heel-prick” test that hospitals routinely do on newborns. They say it’s to detect disease but, if that’s the case, why do some states try to keep the DNA samples taken during these procedures and store them for decades without ever telling the parents? asked journalist Leo Hohmann, who says “We know it’s been happening in at least one state and several other states have been caught trying, so this may be more widespread than we thought.”
War Criminal Tony Blair is working with the WEF & Bill Gates to make Digital IDs Mandatory to Live a “Normal” Life around the World “Tony Blair is a multi-millionaire former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom with a track record of lying and was convicted in absentia as a war criminal. He was also named in the Pandora Papers in 2021. Despite all of this, on 31 December 2021, the Queen announced that Blair would be given the most senior knighthood. Now he’s travelling the world trying to resurrect and peddle his digital IDs.”
Principalities of Evil: Bishop Strickland Says ‘Forces’ Influence Globalist Pope Francis Into Making His Decisions Strickland wisely does not blame his removal on Pope Francis, because ‘there are many forces working at him and influencing him to make these kinds of decisions‘…“The only answer I have to that is because forces in the Church right now don’t want the truth of the gospel. They want it changed. They want it ignored. They want to be rid of the truth that is gloriously not going to go away. The truth that is Jesus Christ,
“I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” —Thomas Jefferson (1824)
Fellow Patriots, on this day in 1700, Charleston, South Carolina, passed an act permitting residents to borrow books from the first library in the colonies, which it had established two years earlier. Today, we’re arguing about whether pornographic and gender-confused books should be accessible by children in schools. We’ve, uh, come a long way. —Mark Alexander
More fearmongering from the federal government, with the only solution being to give Washington and the climate cultists more power.
Thomas Gallatin
The sky is falling, but there’s still time to hand over more control of the U.S. economy to a bunch of federal bureaucrats to slow its falling. That in a nutshell summarizes the recently released National Climate Assessment.
The report, compiled by 14 federal agencies with the input of some 700 scientists, is little other than a climate alarmist’s gospel. Yet the compilers of the twice-a-decade report appear keenly aware that Americans have become less impacted or alarmed by the apocalyptic predictions that never quite materialize.
In an effort to scare Americans into buying the Left’s climate alarmism, which dubiously and tellingly can only be addressed through ever more government control of the economy, the report warns of the astronomical cost of climate change without massively expensive government intervention.
According to the report, climate change is costing the U.S. economy $150 billion annually. How, exactly? Well, climate change supposedly makes for more severe weather events (except when it doesn’t because they tell us climate change has little to do with the weather), therefore costing Americans even more of their hard-earned cash.
Then again, $150 billion annually is a bargain compared to the Democrats’ desired Green New Deal. That had an original price tag of $93 trillion over 10 years.
The climate report also claims that “while some economic impacts of climate change are already being felt across the country, the impacts of future changes are projected to be more significant and apparent across the U.S. economy.” Be afraid, folks, because it’s only going to get worse! Droughts, hurricanes, floods, and fires will be rising in frequency — that’s the dire prediction of the climate alarmists.
Never mind the historical data that simply doesn’t back up those alarmist claims. The fact of the matter is that coping with events has always been a reality for humanity. Furthermore, as the climate warms, it actually has benefited humanity in key ways, such as food production.
Another is reducing death. A related study claims that heat-related deaths could quadruple without certain “action” on climate change. What they don’t tell you is that cold kills nine times more people than heat.
Demonstrating just how woke the National Climate Assessment is, there are entire sections focused on promoting the Left’s favorite issues of diversity and equity. It even has a section ridiculously asserting that indigenous people had developed a holistic earth-friendly culture that can be harnessed to better react to climate change. It’s that old trope that everything was perfect, peaceful, and harmonious in North America before those foolish and reckless white Europeans arrived.
This is not science; it’s a cult.
The report focuses on the inequitable impact of climate change on lower-income people and minorities. When in the history of the world has the climate not had an inequitable impact on people with lower incomes? This is not due to climate change but is purely the economic reality of the haves and the have-nots.
Solomon Hsiang, a lead assessment author and climate economist at the University of California, Berkeley, states the obvious: “The research indicates that people who are lower income have more trouble adapting [to climate change], because adaptation comes at a cost.” He then adds, “If people can’t pay for it, then [they] can’t protect themselves.”
The great irony is that Joe Biden’s administration is making everything cost more via product regulations on everything from stoves to air-conditioners to lightbulbs to vehicles. If it wasn’t for the regulatory commissars making the cost of goods rise, then it would be easier for lower-income Americans to afford to adapt to a changing climate.
The report attempts to connect all of Americans’ lives to climate change, claiming that everything from their emotional well-being to their physical health to their bank accounts are under dire threat thanks to climate change. One of the report’s authors insists that climate affects “every sector of human and natural society.” If that isn’t cultish thinking, then what is?
In the end, the biggest bogeyman is the fossil fuel industry, which is essentially blamed for everything to the point that the language of social justice is applied as if it’s a battle of good verses evil.
The truth is, without fossil fuels, life on planet earth would be much more difficult. Lives would be shorter and death would be much more common, and all the wonderful technologies that we take for granted, like readily available clean water, would not be possible. Indeed, the actual injustice is the concerted effort by climate cultists to demonize fossil fuels, which still provide the only cost-efficient means for humanity to adapt to a changing climate.
As the climate changes — which it has throughout earth’s history — humans are far better suited to adapt through the free market than under the tyranny of government.
Both Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping needed a photo op, and they got it in the Potemkin village of San Francisco.
Douglas Andrews
The feces having been hosed down the storm drains, and the drug addicts having been safely shooed off to Oakland, Joe Biden and Communist China’s Xi Jinping met in squeaky clean San Francisco yesterday for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit.
As the Associated Press reports: “It was almost exactly one year since their last encounter in Bali, Indonesia, on the sidelines of another global gathering. In addition to a formal bilateral meeting, Biden and Xi shared a lunch with top advisers and strolled the verdant grounds of the luxury estate where their meeting took place.” The only thing missing was Xi’s new boy toy and bestie, Gavin Newsom.
Oddly, that group of “top advisers” included Climate Czar and Vietnam War fraud John Kerry, who along with his boss just can’t seem to take a hint. They’re clearly of the mistaken belief that if only they keep at it, China will come to embrace climate change just like the American Left has. Memo to Team Biden: Save your CO2. It ain’t gonna happen. These people are throwing up a new coal-fired plant every week.
It wasn’t all idiocy, though. The two met for more than four hours, which was plenty of time for Biden to cobble together a few platitudes at a solo presser he held late yesterday afternoon. These were “some of the most constructive and productive discussions we’ve had,” he said, and he and Xi now have a commitment to “keep the lines of communication open” and a willingness “to pick up the phone.” Biden, we were told, was to speak for 45 minutes altogether — 15 minutes of telepromptered remarks followed by a 30-minute Q&A session. As it turned out, he spoke for around 20 minutes total, which included a disgracefully scripted series of four handpicked questions from predetermined news organizations.
Just to watch Joe Biden robotically move from one teleprompter screen to another, and to misread and mispronounce words, and to stare straight down at his cue cards when “answering” questions from his co-conspirators in the media — all these things make us deeply skeptical of Joe Biden’s ability to effectively articulate American interests on the world stage.
Asked if she noticed any differences between the way Joe Biden handled Xi and the way Donald Trump handled him, former Trump White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany noted that Xi used to take Trump’s calls because he knew Trump meant business. “He knew that because of the tariffs,” she said. “He knew that because of President Trump’s tough talk. He knew that because President Trump showed strength on the world stage.”
What about COVID’s origins? Wouldn’t an American president want to get to the bottom of a pandemic that came from a biolab in Wuhan and killed nearly seven million people worldwide, including more than a million Americans? According to a readout of their discussions, Biden didn’t even ask about it.
Taiwan? Xi apparently reassured Biden that he wouldn’t invade. But he also pressured Biden to stop selling military hardware to the “breakaway” republic that China has vowed to, er, reunify with the mainland.
One area of actual agreement between Biden and Xi was the resumption of military-to-military communication between the two nations, which had been suspended when former Speaker Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan in August 2022. Presumably, this would green-light Biden’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, C.Q. Brown, to surreptitiously undermine his boss just like Mark “White Rage” Milley did to Trump.
Another area of ostensible agreement was on fentanyl, much of which originates in China and which kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. Biden tried to drive home the importance of Xi’s agreement to stop poisoning Americans with the drug by eloquently noting, as only he can, “By the way, y’know, I won’t, I guess I shouldn’t identify where it occurred, but Jill and I know, uh, two people near where I live, their kids, literally, as I said, uh, strange, they woke up dead.”
One particularly bad deal agreed to by Biden was on the use of artificial intelligence in military applications. According to a report from Business Insider, Biden and Xi will agree to limit the use of AI in nuclear weapons as well as in autonomous weapons such as drones.
“This is an incredibly poor decision,” said Christopher Alexander, the chief analytics officer of Pioneer Development Group. “To begin with, China lags behind the U.S. in AI capabilities, so the Biden administration just ceded a strategic advantage. Additionally, AI helps reduce stress to improve decision-making, which is crucial in preventing a poor decision to release nuclear weapons.”
Advantage Xi.
Perhaps the ultimate reason for Xi’s visit, though, was economic. China’s economic growth has slowed considerably of late. Indeed, as Fox Business’s Susan Li noted, growth there is the slowest it’s been since the 1990s. A pandemic and an aging population will do that to a country. And foreign investment in China isn’t what it used to be. As The Wall Street Journal writes, “According to Beijing’s description of the meeting, Xi pressed Biden to lift sanctions and change policies on export controls for sensitive equipment.”
China, of course, isn’t trustworthy, so these agreements might not be worth the handshake. Lying, thieving, and cheating on agreements and obligations are practically de rigueur for the ChiComs, as with its history of intellectual property theft, and with its militarization of the South China Sea’s Spratly Islands less than a year after Xi promised not to.
If Joe Biden and his handlers could take one piece of advice away from the Xi Summit, let it be this pithy standard from Ronald Reagan: Trust, but verify. Otherwise, they’ll keep getting rolled.
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Fueling electric vehicles, Trump files motion for mistrial, pro-Hamas protest turns violent, and more.
Douglas Andrews, Thomas Gallatin, & Jordan Candler
Cross-Examination
Fueling electric vehicles costs roughly $17 a gallon: Who knew free fuel could be so expensive? The efforts of leftists like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg to force the electric vehicle revolution on carmakers and consumers have been exposed in numerous ways of late. But now we have a new study showing that fueling EV costs roughly the equivalent of $17 per gallon. Yowsa. As calculated in the 16-page report from the Texas Public Policy Institute, “The average model year 2021 EV would cost $48,698 more to own over a 10-year period without $22 billion in government favors given to EV manufacturers and owners.” It’s the subsidies, stupid. Furthermore: “The cost of charging equipment and charging losses, averaged out over 10 years and 120,000 miles, is $1.38 per gallon equivalent on top of [the $1.21 per gallon cost claimed by EV advocates]. Adding the costs of the subsidies to the true cost of fueling an EV would equate to an EV owner paying $17.33 per gallon of gasoline.” EVs aren’t all negative. They deliver spectacular torque at the starting line, for example. But it’s becoming clearer by the day that in its desire to pick winners and losers, Big Government has jumped the gun on the demise of the internal combustion engine.
Trump files motion for mistrial in NYC fraud case: Anyone who believes Donald Trump can get a fair trial by a jury of his peers in a Manhattan courthouse is either a Democrat or hasn’t been paying attention to the comedic nature of the case. Accordingly, the Trump legal team requested a mistrial yesterday in his New York fraud case, arguing that the “tangible and overwhelming” Trump hatred of the cartoonish trial judge, Arthur Engeron, and his principal law clerk has “tainted” the case, threatening “both Defendants’ rights and the integrity of the judiciary as an institution.” About that bias: Last year, Engeron told Trump’s attorney that the former president is “just a bad guy” and that Trump-hating New York Attorney General Letitia James “should go after” him. James, in fact, ran for office on a promise to “get” Trump, and earlier this week she was caught smirking in the courtroom as Donald Trump Jr. took the stand. Class act, that AG. Engeron, for his part, has already ruled Trump liable for “persistent fraud,” and he issued a sleazy gag order against Trump last month in an attempt to silence him. No bias to see here, folks. Move along.
Pro-Hamas protest turns violent in DC: It “scared me more than January 6,” said one House Democrat who was there yesterday during the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas riot at the Democratic National Committee headquarters — a riot that injured six Capitol Police and caused the evacuation of the DNC HQ. “Someone sent out word for people to come [back] and police said it’s not safe,” the lawmaker said. “Police were wearing gas masks. … This was not peaceful.” Whomever that honest Democrat lawmaker was, we suspect he’ll be disciplined for his candor by leadership. Can’t have folks deviating from the official J6 “insurrection” narrative, y’know. Democrats, it seems to us, are simply reaping the cultural Marxism they’ve sown on our college campuses. This riot wasn’t just “pro-Palestinian,” though; it was also violently anti-Jew. “Tonight 6 officers were treated for injuries — ranging from minor cuts to being pepper sprayed to being punched,” posted the Capitol Police. “One person has been arrested for assault on an officer.” What’s that? Only one person arrested? How can that be? Where’s the full force of the federal government and the FBI when we need it most?
Terrorism and the border: A Muslim individual on the FBI’s terror watch list was involved in a shootout with Austin, Texas, police who were called to a house in which individuals had been attacked. The terrorist was killed in the shootout. Sadly, two of the responding officers were shot by him during the exchange, with one of them dying from his wounds. There were also two deceased victims in the house, identified as the terrorist’s mother and brother. Police also uncovered his plans to carry out terror attacks against the public. Meanwhile, National Counterterrorism Center Director Christine Abizaid went before the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday and dubiously claimed there was no evidence that foreign terrorist groups are taking advantage of Joe Biden’s open border. “As we look at the global terrorism environment,” Abizaid stated, “as we look at foreign terrorist organizations’ intentions to try and seed operatives into the United States, we don’t have indications that are credible or corroborated that those terrorist organizations are trying to do that at this time.” Abizaid’s claims run counter to that of FBI Director Christopher Wray, who said that “one of the areas we are of concern is individuals who, once here, information later comes in.”
BBC apologizes for pushing anti-Israel propaganda: The British Broadcasting Company issued an apology to its viewers for its erroneous reporting that “medical teams and Arab speakers were being targeted” by Israeli forces. In reality, the IDF had embedded medical professionals and Arabic speakers within its own forces that were tasked with clearing Hamas jihadis out of the Al Shifa Hospital. In other words, the IDF was doing the exact opposite of the BBC’s reporting, as the IDF was engaged in an operation to root out and remove Hamas militants from the hospital while also making every effort to protect and preserve the lives of the innocent within it. This kind of “accidental” reporting happens because of a flawed worldview that automatically assigns an oppressor and oppressed template over all situations irrespective of the truth.
Florida’s about-face on banning Students for Justice in Palestine: In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack against Israel, the pro-Hamas organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) issued a call for all SJP chapters across the country to “join the call for mass mobilization.” The call included a statement that praised Hamas’s murderous attack against innocent Israelis as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance … [against] the Zionist entity.” In response, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration banned SJP groups in state schools, with state university system chancellor Ray Rodrigues citing state law that makes “providing material support … to a designated foreign terrorist organization” a felony. However, DeSantis’s administration soon reversed course and lifted its ban following a challenge raised by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) that charged the state with violating First Amendment protections for free speech. DeSantis’s office is instead working with colleges to get these SJP groups to affirm “a rejection of violence, renunciation of Hamas, and commitment to upholding the law.”
Ben Shapiro slams Candace Owens: A video clip depicting Daily Wire cofounder Ben Shapiro has gone viral in which he is captured blasting fellow commentator Candace Owens as “disgraceful.” What’s the context behind this apparent haymaker? Recently, Owens has been expressing opinions the Jewish Shapiro clearly considers anti-Israel — opinions based on factual inaccuracies, such as the false “apartheid” claim that Muslim Israelis are only permitted to live in certain “Muslim quarters” within Israel. She also claimed that support for Israel has “virtually collapsed socially,” pointing to the numerous pro-Hamas protests as evidence. She then asserted that the reason support remains for Israel is all tied to money. In other words, it seems Owens has been treading in anti-Semitic waters. Ergo, when Shapiro was questioned about her behavior, he called it “disgraceful.” He added that while she still remains employed by The Daily Wire, “I think that her faux sophistication on these particular issues has been ridiculous.” The only question is, how much longer will Owens remain with Shapiro and company?
Headlines
Senate approves stopgap funding bill to avert government shutdown (National Review)
Speaker Johnson says Biden impeachment inquiry has reached stage for “key” witness testimony (Daily Wire)
Biden again calls Xi Jinping a “dictator” as China vows to be “unstoppable” in retaking Taiwan (Fox News) | Antony Blinken winces as Biden calls Xi “dictator” (New York Post)
House Republican demands names of U.S. executives who attended dinner where Xi received standing ovation (National Review)
Migrant encounters at southern border set new record for October (Fox News)
Texas passes bill allowing state police to arrest, deport illegal immigrants (National Review)
Nikki Haley says “every person on social media should be verified by their name” when she becomes president (Not the Bee)
Osama bin Laden is duping young people on TikTok from the grave (National Review)
Rashida Tlaib part of hidden Facebook group that glorifies Hamas, mocks hostages (New York Post)
American multimillionaire couple fund Marxist group coordinating anti-Israel protests (Fox Business)
Satire: Palestinian at hospital for colonoscopy not sure about this doctor holding grenade launcher (Babylon Bee)
Satire: After five minutes with Biden, Xi gives order to invade Taiwan (Babylon Bee)
Mike Johnson sparked media hysterics by talking accurately about American law and history.
Nate Jackson
Leftists only care about the Constitution when they’re defending what’s not in it.
That’s our takeaway from the latest flap over House Speaker Mike Johnson. We wrote a couple of weeks ago about Johnson and leftist Christophobia — the affliction that renders sufferers incapable of tolerating anyone who espouses patriotism and Biblical faithfulness. This was again on full display after Johnson made comments that left journalists in triggered hysterics.
Appearing on CNBC yesterday, Johnson was asked about praying on the House floor the day he was elected speaker, which his interlocutor said provoked a “question about the separation of church and state” and public perception about the whole episode. (Translation: I don’t like what you did, so explain yourself.)
Johnson’s reply, in which he even accurately quoted our Founders from memory, was a brief and incredible history lesson that every American should hear, so we’ll quote him in full:
Listen, faith, our deep religious heritage and tradition, is a big part of what it means to be an American. When the Founders set this system up, they wanted a vibrant expression of faith in the public square because they believed that a general moral consensus and virtue was necessary to maintain this grand experiment in self-governance that we created — a government of, by, and for the people. We don’t have a king in charge, we don’t have a middle man, so we’ve got to keep morality amongst us, so that we have accountability. And so they wanted faith to be a big part of that.
The separation of church and state is a misnomer. People misunderstand it. Of course, it comes from a phrase that was in a letter that [Thomas] Jefferson wrote [to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut in 1802]. It’s not in the Constitution. And what he was explaining is, they did not want the government to encroach upon the church — not that they didn’t want principles of faith to have influence on our public life. It was exactly the opposite.
[George] Washington said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.” And John Adams came next and he said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
They knew that it would be important to maintain our system, and that’s why I think we need more of that — not an establishment of any national religion, but we need everybody’s vibrant expression of faith because it’s such an important part of who we are as a nation.
If members of Congress understood history and faith half as well as Johnson just articulated, we wouldn’t be facing most of the issues we do as a nation. If children in our public schools learned that instead of divisive critical race theory or family-destroying gender-confusion, our culture wouldn’t be falling apart at the seams.
Unfortunately, there was predictable outrage among ignorant journalists over Johnson’s comments.
Media outlets didn’t, of course, explain that Johnson is right about the “wall of separation.” Though NBC News did concede that “it is technically true that the words ‘separation of church and state’ are not written in the Constitution,” its story went on to insist that unnamed “legal scholars” believe the doctrine is key to the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.
Instead of the truth, other headlines across the board treated separation as if it’s a constitutionally settled doctrine, which, again, it’s not. They decried that Johnson called it “a misnomer.”
For good measure, the UK’s Guardian added a subtitle with what the paper obviously considers a smear: “Christian nationalist House speaker bemoans ‘misunderstanding’ of one of US’s founding principles.”
Correction: Johnson was articulating one of America’s founding principles.
Taxpayer-funded NPR might take the cake, however. In a related hit piece, it headlined about “Speaker Johnson’s close ties to Christian right — both mainstream and fringe.” The story delves immediately into a pastor who a quoted “expert” claims helped “organize Christians for January 6th.”
Indeed, NPR proceeds to warn, Johnson and this “network of religious leaders who have advocated to end or weaken the separation of church and state” are a threat to democracy. “Taken to its extreme — as it was by some adherents on Jan. 6 — it embraces anti-democratic means to achieve their end.”
Your tax dollars at work.
This hyperventilating about Johnson is really quite something to behold. This “mastermind of the January 6 plot” is also a “theocrat” who poses a “threat to democracy.” Why, you’d almost think that authoritarian abortion zealots like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are the real Christians.
Time will certainly tell what kind of leader Johnson will be, but it speaks volumes that the Christophobic media is waging a shock and awe campaign to utterly discredit him. When it aids their cause, they’ll espouse and exploit historical ignorance about “separation of church and state” to scare people about a fundamentally decent man.
Jonathan Lewis stood up for a smaller friend who was being bullied and a group of thugs killed him for it.
Gary Bauer
Remember the name Jonathan Lewis. Jonathan was a 17-year-old high school student who had the courage to do the right thing. He stood up for a smaller friend who was being bullied and a group of thugs killed him for it.
This terrible attack occurred in Las Vegas on November 1st. Odds are you haven’t heard about it at all. Maybe you’ve seen a passing reference. Lewis intervened when he saw one his friends get put into a trash can by a gang of teenagers, and the mob turned on him.
There is video of the vicious attack. At least 10 other students knocked him down and kicked him in the head. The attack went on long after Lewis fell to the ground. He was on life support for days and ultimately died from his injuries a week later.
Why does something so horrific not become national news like the video of George Floyd being held down by an officer, which resulted in his death? There’s not an American alive who hasn’t seen that video multiple times.
Well, the Floyd video was weaponized by the left to smear America and impose a narrative on us that our country and the world are divided between the oppressed and the oppressors.
The oppressed are people of color, sexual minorities, Muslims, etc. The oppressors are white, heterosexuals or cisgenders as we’re now called (it’s meant to sound weird) and, depending on the issue, Jews and Asians, who are considered to be “white adjacent” because both communities value hard work and academic achievement.
This murder in Las Vegas doesn’t help that narrative at all. The feral pack of thugs who beat Jonathan Lewis to death were minorities. Lewis, the boy who was murdered, was white.
Universally, every “mainstream” media outlet, every social justice warrior and every church committed to “social justice” has ignored this story about the death of this young man from a working-class family.
His life doesn’t matter. He’s not helpful to anyone. If anything, he complicates things for the left.
Meanwhile, every decent person — black, white, Hispanic, Asian — in Las Vegas who knows about this incident is mortified. They know that in real life, the world isn’t divided between “the oppressors” and “the oppressed.” It’s divided between thugs and decent people of all races.
And that’s the most important point.
Fox News showed the video of Lewis’s attack at least twice Tuesday. Maybe it’s just a coincidence (I can’t help but think that there is a connection), but law enforcement officials have just announced that eight juveniles (ages 13 to 17) masquerading as human beings were arrested and are facing murder charges.
The police are also reportedly investigating to determine if this attack was a hate crime. Gee, you think?!
When faced with adversity, the soccer star rages at a God she doesn’t believe in.
Emmy Griffin
U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team star Megan Rapinoe has played her final match as a professional. To say that it was a disappointing ending for her is an understatement. She was playing in a national championship game for her club team, the OL Reign, when, six minutes into the match, and with no one else around her, she took a sharp cut while running and apparently tore her Achilles tendon.
At first, one might be tempted to feel sorry for this once-great soccer player. Like many a great athlete before her, Rapinoe continued to play despite her waning dominance on the field. Now age 38, she barely played in the recent World Cup as a result. One also has to weigh the sadness of an athlete of her caliber presumably doing all she can to keep her body healthy and minimize the risk of injuries, and then this freak accident happens.
But any sentiments of pity are quickly dried up by her reaction (which is sadly not out of character for her). Her profanity-laced response was: “I’m not a religious person or anything, and if there was a God, like, this is proof that there isn’t. This is f****d up. It’s just f****d up. Six minutes in, and I eat my Achilles.”
To quote Not the Bee: “God doesn’t exist because you tripped over nothing and hurt yourself? God doesn’t exist because the world doesn’t revolve around you? You tripped over nothing so nothing is all there is?”
Rapinoe has ineloquently articulated what many struggle with when it comes to faith in God and the problem with pain and suffering. There is an entire book in the Bible, the book of Job, that addresses the purpose of suffering.
Washington Stand reporter Sarah Holliday makes a great point: “Paganism will always fail to explain suffering.” Non-believers see suffering as pointless and cruel; believers know that suffering has a purpose to it. Rapinoe, based on her comments — granted, spoken in the throws of disappointment — fell neatly into the atheistic worldview of unbelief. Joseph Backholm, senior fellow at the Family Research Council, says: “She’s clearly frustrated. Of course, you can’t be mad at someone you don’t believe exists. So, I think her need to go out of her way to say her injury is proof that God does not exist was an attempt to exact a pound of flesh from a God she is generally angry at for reasons known only to her.”
Aside from the attack against a God she doesn’t believe in, the other sad aspect of this is just the utter lack of character Rapinoe displayed even in her last gasp as a professional player. In the face of adversity and a true freak accident, her response is that of selfish petulance and of rage.
One can only hope that these are the last words we’ll hear from this self-centered and broken human; that her hurtful ideas and damaging worldview — which can be directly tied to the breakdown in dominance of the U.S. women’s soccer team — may fade into silence. Yet it is our sincere hope that she does find God and that He shows her that He is the only one who can heal all her brokenness.
As it stands, Megan Rapinoe’s illustrious career has ended with a whimper instead of the bang she intended.
Latest PodcastPopCon #22: Hollywood and Disney’s Growing List of ChallengersThomas, Sterling, and Andrew explore the “Panderverse” and identify the reasons why diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has created an opportunity. Which new companies will fill the gap that woke ideology has left in the entertainment industry?
Editor’s Note: Each week we receive hundreds of comments and correspondences — and we read every one of them. Click here for a few thought-provoking comments about specific articles. The views expressed therein don’t necessarily reflect those of The Patriot Post.
Student Suspended for ‘War Paint’ — A middle schooler was recently suspended for wearing “eye black” face paint to his school’s football game. The school interpreted his face paint as “blackface” and banned him from all sporting events.
‘You Want to Do It Now?’ — A fight nearly broke out between Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin and Sean O’Brien, the head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union.
“We’re very focused on the data we’re collecting from surveillance efforts, what’s being said on social media platforms, and we have launched an effort to be able to counter some of the negativity and reach out to people when we see hate speech.” —New York Governor Kathy “Big Sister” Hochul
The BIG Lie
“The following are some titles of books that have been banned from schools in Florida…. [Let me know] which book is pornography…. To Kill A Mockingbird, The Hate You Give, Forrest Gump, A Catcher In The Rye, The Hill We Climb, Girls Who Code, Atlas Shrugged, 1984, The Kite Runner, The Bluest Eye, A Wrinkle In Time, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Fault In Our Stars, etc etc.” —singer-songwriter Pink
Lack of Self-Awareness Award
“In this environment … it feels like there are forces that are trying to divide us. Let’s renew our sense of connection with each other and reinforce the importance of our unity. I think that’s really important.” —Vice President Kamala Harris
Non Compos Mentis
“We’re embedding environmental justice principles into the DNA of federal agencies.” —Council on Environmental Quality Chairwoman Brenda Mallory
Belly Laughs of the Day
“The president jokes about his age all the time. And we have to understand that with age has come wisdom.” —DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison
“There has to be some more clarity in people understanding all that this president did.” —Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
Political Futures
“It’s not a great rallying cry for Democrats to say that prices at the grocery store rose to painful levels after Biden became president, but don’t worry — they’re still rising but at a slower pace than before. What voter will get fired up by that? … Biden believed that ‘Bidenomics’ would communicate to voters all the wonderful things he has done for them. They don’t see it that way.” —Byron York
“For the American Right, this primary is a referendum on Trump. Was he tried and found wanting, or is his reelection the only fitting punishment for the misdeeds and norm-breaking of his enemies? The problem for Republicans is that the answer to both questions is probably yes.” —Michael Brendan Dougherty
For the Record
“The idea that climate change is the greatest threat facing us today is insane! The existential threat facing the free world is the growing power of hateful ideologies — communism, Marxism and the modern-day Islamofascism that is trying to destroy Israel now. It also wants to destroy us.” —Gary Bauer
“Across the world, those who have not achieved are uniting against the West. They blame the West for their lack of success while living off the West’s largesse.” —Ben Shapiro
And Last…
“Do you want to not be Hitler anymore? Simple. Just go out and attack some Jewish students, kill elderly Jews in the streets, and openly call for genocide against Jews. Then they’ll stop calling you Hitler. Make sense?” —Christopher Skeet
David Stockman served for a short while as budget director during Ronald Reagan’s first term as president, but he soon resigned owing to Reagan’s refusal to cut government spending. He has since that time worked as a private investment adviser, at which difficult profession he has been highly successful, and he has written a number of books, among which the monumental Great Deformation (Public Affairs Press, 2013), is the most notable. The Great Money Bubble contains many vital lessons about money and macroeconomics, and in what follows I’ll discuss a few of these. But I’m not able to assess one part of the book.
Stockman identifies a common failing in Keynesian economics and in the monetarism of Milton Friedman and his disciple Ben Bernanke, the most popular alternative to Keynesian economics among mainstream economists. According to both of these doctrines, it is necessary to raise aggregate demand to boost employment during a depression, with government spending, according to Keynes, and with monetary expansion, according to Friedman. Stockman denies the need for the government to manage, holding that the free market can take care of itself. He says:
As a congressman from Michigan in the late 1970s. . . . I didn’t think it was the role of politicians to second-guess economic data . . . that resulted from the interactions of millions of workers, employers, entrepreneurs, savers, investors, and speculators on the free market. Decades later, I still don’t. Indeed, the idea that market-driven GDP should find its own natural level without a heavy-handed assist from the government was then and remains today the opposite of the reigning orthodoxy. Rather than vibrant, free, productive capitalism, that orthodoxy sees the U.S. economy as a self-contained, hermetically sealed system that is always badly malfunctioning and forever falling short of its potential, thereby requiring constant external stimulus from Washington via its fiscal and central banking branches. . . . That wasn’t remotely true even a half century ago when the U.S. economy was more inward looking, but it’s utterly preposterous today. That’s because the domestic U.S. economy is self-evidently wide open to the overpowering influences of global trade, capital flows, and the relative labor and production costs everywhere on the planet, all at once.
One way in which critics of the free market argue for the need for government intervention is to challenge the argument that the market will adjust to a decrease in demand by lowering wages, thus staving off unemployment. The critics allege that wages are “sticky” downward (i.e., that employers are reluctant to lower them and employees to accept them). But, Stockman says, this is for the most part false. “The only shred of truth in the ‘sticky’ wages and price argument pertains to wage rates set by quasi-monopoly unions in the heavy industrial sectors such as steel, autos, chemicals, and textiles during the decades immediately after World War II.”
Stockman makes two claims in the passages just quoted which need to be distinguished. One is that the free market doesn’t require government management to deal with economic downturns. The other is that government intervention to secure a desired level of employment will fail because the US economy (and presumably other economies as well) isn’t isolated in the way that would be required for the intervention to succeed. The claims are different because the first could be false while the second is true. That is, it is possible that the free market is incapable of dealing with prolonged unemployment but that the government cannot remedy this. This would be rather like suffering from an incurable illness, a sad but not impossible state of affairs. Fortunately, the free market can indeed cope with unemployment.
But what about the Great Depression? Doesn’t the collapse of the banking system in the dark years between 1929 and 1933 show that the government needs to stimulate the economy during especially bad times? A simple response to this contention is that a central bank system controlled by the government, as was already in place in 1929, would not exist in a free market. Stockman goes beyond this response by challenging the customary account directly: contrary to Milton Friedman, there was nothing amiss in the alleged “collapse” of the banking system at all. Stockman explains, in his typically forthright way:
In summary, the “deflation” that Friedman decried was not caused by Fed actions from 1929 to 1933. Instead, it represented the necessary work of a free market healing itself. The shrinkage of the bloated banking system and overextended credit, which essentially peaked in 1929, was really nothing more than a belated and old-fashioned purge of monetary inflation that had originated in the Great War, a process that the world at that time well understood and had experienced following previous conflicts dating back centuries. In short, the years 1929 to 1933 did not prove that capitalism had some kind of deflationary death wish or that gold-backed money inherently causes economic contraction, such that it can only be cured by central bankers astutely managing a fiat money supply.
Stockman is not yet finished. He also maintains that by abandoning sound money, Franklin Roosevelt spoiled the natural process of market healing:
But by then, the “natural” part of the Great Depression—the purge of World War I and roaring ’20s excesses—was over. In fact, industrial production bottomed in the second quarter of 1932 and began a normal rebound thereafter, one that finally brought national output back to its 1929 precrash level by the second quarter of 1935.
For Stockman, inflationary expansion is a supreme economic evil, one that was widely recognized “until the official adoption of 2 percent inflation targeting in 2012, though informally followed during the Bernanke-Greenspan years in the decade prior.” Before that, he says, “all inflation—of goods, services, and assets—was viewed as bad.”
Stockman argues that unsustainable asset inflation has occurred in many prominent companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Walmart, and he suggests that investments in them should be liquidated. This is the part of the book that I mentioned earlier that I’m unable to assess. Stockman is right that an inflationary boom cannot be sustained forever, but I have no idea when it will end or how investors should cope with asset inflation. I would think it a good idea for investors to pay heed to Stockman, but I cannot go beyond that. I can say with confidence that Stockman has made a devastating case against the macroeconomics of Keynes and Friedman.
The United States Army has removed the COVID-19 vaccine requirement for new recruits.
The Army’s recruitment challenges have been mounting in recent years, exacerbated by the stringent COVID-19 vaccine mandates that were previously in place.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin mandated the experimental COVID-19 vaccine for all military personnel on August 24, 2021, and like thousands of others across the Department of Defense (DOD).
In March 2022, the U.S. Army joined the other branches of the US military in their efforts to purge the ranks of all vaccine dissenters and announced the separation of three soldiers who refused to take the experimental jab. This is the first time the military branch has discharged soldiers over the mandate.
Also included in this initial round of cuts were six Army leaders who were stripped of their ranks, including two battalion commanders. There were also over 3,250 citations handed out to soldiers who are still refusing to comply with the mandate, according to a US Army statement released on March 18th.
In June 2022, up to 40,000 Army Guard troops are still unvaccinated, and at least 7,000 are at risk of being dismissed after refusing to take the experimental COVID-19 vaccine as the deadline for shots looms.
“According to data obtained by The Associated Press, between 20% to 30% of the Guard soldiers in six states are not vaccinated, and more than 10% in 43 other states still need shots,” the news outlet reported.
In July 2022, nearly 40,000 Army National Guard personnel who refused to take the experimental COVID-19 vaccine after the deadline will be barred from participating in federal training and may face financial fines or possible expulsion.
“Beginning July 1, 2022, members of the Army National Guard and U.S. Army Reserve who have refused the lawful DOD COVID-19 vaccination order without an approved or pending exemption may not participate in federally funded drills and training and will not receive pay or retirement credit,” Army said in a statement.
According to authorities from the National Guard who spoke with CBS News, 14,000 of the more than 40,000 members of the Guard who have not been vaccinated against COVID-19 have said that they have no plans to obtain the vaccination in the future.
Soldiers who remain unvaccinated will miss weekend drills and lose their competency, which might lead to dismissal.
“Soldiers who refuse the vaccination order without an approved or pending exemption request are subject to adverse administrative actions, including flags, bars to service, and official reprimands. In the future, Soldiers who continue to refuse the vaccination order without an exemption may be subject to additional adverse administrative action, including separation,” Army said.
“As of June 30, The Army National Guard is at 89% vaccinated with one dose and 87% fully vaccinated. The Army Reserve is at 89% vaccinated with one dose and 88% fully vaccinated.”
In October 2022, military leaders announced they would be lowering their recruiting goal for the Army from 476,000 to about 466,000. Despite lowering this goal, the U.S Army is reporting it will miss recruiting goals for the year by 15,000 soldiers, or 25% of the goal.
The U.S. Army’s 2022 recruiting year was its worst since the end of the draft in 1973. The Army missed its goal of 60,000 new soldiers by approximately 25 percent.
The current fiscal year is likely to be even worse. The shortfall forced the Army to cut its planned active-duty end strength from 476,000 to 466,000, but according to the War on The Rocks outlet, “Army officials project that active end strength could shrink by as much as 20,000 soldiers by September, down to 445,000. That means that the nation’s primary land force could plummet by as much as 7 percent in only two years — at a time when its missions are increasing in Europe and even in the Pacific, where the Army provides many of the critical wartime theater enablers without which the other services cannot function.“
In February 2023, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth issued a memorandum that rescinds all policies associated with the DOD COVID-19 vaccination mandate.
Now that Biden’s vaccine mandate for the U.S. Military has been lifted, members who were discharged for refusing the vaccine can rejoin the service.
It’s not working out too well. Out of the 8,000 people who were discharged, only 43 have rejoined.
Now, Benny Johnson shared that the US Army released its new recruitment strategy by highlighting that the COVID-19 vaccine is no longer required.
Most students support academic freedom and freedom of speech, oppose defunding campus police Nearly half of Harvard University freshmen don’t believe in God, according to survey results from the student newspaper. The Harvard Crimson recently released new results from its survey of the class of 2027. About half of freshmen completed the surveys. The student newspaper found 24.6…
On Thursday’s “Newsline,” former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and Trump surrogate Liz Harrington slam President Joe Biden’s weakness in the face of Chinese Communist Party bullying. Watch NEWSMAX, an independent news network with a conservative perspective, available in 100M+ U.S. homes.
Two very different groups of protesters marched on Capitol Hill this week: (1) Israel supporters who sang and prayed for the victims of Hamas terrorists and (2) Hamas supporters who chanted anti-Semitic invective and assaulted a police officer—injuring several others—while attempting to barricade the Democratic Party headquarters.
MINNEAPOLIS, MN — Target executives announced this week the most intersectional Santa decoration ever, a limbless and not-so-jolly blob of an elf.
“We are proud to unveil the first-ever Chinese, Muslim, transgender, quadruple amputee Santa doll,” Target executive Nancy Jones commented to reporters. “When you look at this totally immobile Chinese elf trying to bow to Allah, well – we think you’ll see the true meaning of Christmas.”
The new, incredibly inclusive Santa decoration has already hit store shelves to much fanfare. “I never in a million years thought I’d see a Santa doll that so accurately represented who I am,” said Muhamed Wong, the sole member of the trans Muslim Chinese quadruple amputee community. “I salute Target for finally making a holiday doll that includes people like me. Well, I mean I would salute Target, but I don’t have any arms. Allah willing, I’m going to roll myself home with my new Santa doll and proudly display it to my friends coming over for Kung Pao chicken.”
Target says they hope the release of this new Santa doll will further their agenda of inclusion, diversity, and lower stock prices.
Their culture is not your costume. DO NOT appropriate ghost, zombie, or vampire culture this Halloween.
During his “My Take,” Thursday, “Varney & Co.” host Stuart Varney analyzed President Biden’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the APEC summit, arguing the president’s frail appearance, coupled with an inept Vice President Harris, could affect China’s judgment on invading Taiwan.
STUART VARNEY: When foreign leaders meet an American president they are sizing him up.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: “I’m embarrassed, I think it’s CBS, but I can’t remember who was CBS. I’m sorry. I apologize.”
BIDEN: “What you got? Washington Post. I think that’s right. Oh, there you are. Sorry. I can’t see in the light.”
REPORTER: “Is there any deal underway to free hostages?”
BIDEN: “Yes. No. Working backward, forward. Look, I have been deeply involved in moving on the hostage negotiation. I think the pause and that is really what the Israelis have agreed to. I’m getting into too much detail. I know, Mr. Secretary, I’m going to stop.”
He seemed confused. He turns 81 next Monday and shows the difficulties of aging.
Forgive me for being blunt, but does anyone believe that he can be president for another five years?
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — The most honorable and benevolent Supreme Leader of the glorious Chinese Empire arrived in San Francisco this week to inspect his newest colony in The Americas.
Local magistrates were on site to receive the Chinese President.
“Hmmm yes, everything seems to be in order,” said the Most Divine President Xi as he drove past a row of peasants waving the beautiful flag of the Chinese Communist Party. “My faithful Steward Newsom seems to be keeping my western kingdom clean and orderly. There is not one vagabond or pile of dookie as far as the eye can see!”
Xi also praised Newsom’s ability to keep the local denizens in line through draconian government overreach, excessive taxes, and crippling regulations. “A good steward must rule with the sharp teeth of a tiger and the forked tongue of a dragon,” he said. “I am most pleased.”
Newsom then showed the Supreme Eastern Potentate the fertile land beyond California’s borders, where the Empire of China would have plenty of room to expand.
At publishing time, Xi’s opinion had changed after he saw the condition of Interstate 10.
Their culture is not your costume. DO NOT appropriate ghost, zombie, or vampire culture this Halloween.
Is Hamas anti-semitic, or just anti-Israel? If anti-semitic, where does that come from?
Hamas’s ideology has been nourished by Islamic anti-Jewish teachings. For example, its Charter quotes a saying attributed to Muhammad, which states that in the end times, even stones and trees will cry out, saying, “O Slave of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him”. There are also many verses in the Qur’an that speak disparagingly of Jews and incite contempt for them, attributing base characteristics to them.
In a 2002 article, Islamic Antisemitism Drives the Arab-Israel Conflict, I identified several qur’anic antisemitic stereotypes and argued that these ideas drive the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During the 2021 Gaza War, Muslim antisemitic utterances made extensive use of quotes from the Qur’an and the Sunna. Here is an excerpt from that article:
“Take, for example, the gloating by an Egyptian scholar that “the faces of the Jews will be disfigured from what the Muslims will do to them” — a reference to Sura 4:47: “You who have been given the Book! Believe in what we have sent down … before we obliterate faces.”
Or the assertion by the mother of a prominent slain Hamas terrorist that “the Jews slayed the prophets of Allah with one hand, and they distorted their sacred books with their other hand.”
Known as tahrif, the claim that the Jews corrupted their scriptures is based on several Qur’anic passages, notably Sura 2:75: “A group of them has already heard the word of God, [and] then altered it after they had understood it — and they know [they have done this].”
And a Canadian imam claimed that “animosity of the believers towards the Jew is based on religious grounds,” invoking Qur’anic verses (e.g., Suras 2:27, 5:64, 2:61) to argue that the Jews disbelieve in God, reject and deny the prophets, and act unjustly.”
My conclusion was that:
“To look at the Jews through the frame of the Qur’an is to see them as contemptible, weak, cowardly-yet-warmongering, treacherous losers. This stereotype offers a very poor basis indeed for Muslims to engage in a lasting quest for peace with the Jewish state.”
In addition to the rich vein of Islamic canonical sources which promote antisemitism, Hamas has also been influenced by the antisemitism of Christian nations. For example, the Hamas Charter speaks of Jews as controlling the world, its financial systems and the media. This idea is taken from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hateful tract originally published in Russia.
In the Hamas Charter, such conspiracy theories are woven in with quranic stereotypes. For example, the Hamas Charter transitions from saying that Jews rule the world to asserting that “There is no war going on anywhere without having their finger in it”.
This echos the Qur’an: “We have cast enmity and hatred among them until the day of Resurrection. Whenever they light the fire of war, God extinguishes it. But they strive (to) foment corruption on the earth.” (Surah 5:54). Hamas, in its animosity to Israel, looks to the Qur’an to construct an image of Jews, and it also draws from the bitter wells of European antisemitism.
So, are Hamas’ goals limited to Israel?
Antisemitism is part of the problem, but the problem doesn’t end with the Jews.
Hamas’ goals are broader than just Israel in two senses. One is that Hamas’ primary motivation is to establish an Islamic system in Palestine, the same goals the Taliban has for Afghanistan and ISIS had for Iraq and Syria.
At the same time, the ideology that drives Hamas will not be satisfied with the conquest of Israel, for Hamas keeps one eye on the caliphate. This is why, from time to time, its preachers call for a day to come when Islam will “liberate” Rome, Europe and America.
Such statements have a long history (see here from some instances). For example, in December 2022, Hamas official Mahmoud Al-Zahar declared that “we are not liberating our land alone. … The entire 510 million square kilometres of planet Earth will come under (a system) where this is no injustice, no oppression, no treachery, no Zionism, no treacherous Christianity.”
He is preaching about the global caliphate with Christianity and Judaism eradicated. Likewise, in 2006 the then-head of Hamas, Khaled Mash’al, preached a sermon in Damascus in which he declared that the nation of Islam will rule the world. These grandiose sentiments should serve as a warning to the whole world.
What does ‘After Saturday comes Sunday’ mean?
There is another sense in which Hamas’ goals will not end with the Jews: a ‘Free, Free Palestine’ ruled by Hamas would result in great devastation for Palestinian Christians. ‘After Saturday comes Sunday’ is an Arabic saying, well known in the Middle East, which implies that Jews will be dealt with first, and Christians later. In reality, whenever war breaks out in Islamic contexts, local (indigenous) Christians always suffer greatly (see Elizabeth Kendal’s book, which explains why).
In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool.
In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” – beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser – “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.
How would the company determine the truth? For issues such as COVID-19, NewsGuard would steer readers to official government sources only, like the federal Centers for Disease Control. Other content-moderation allies, Crovitz’s pitch noted, include “intelligence and national security officials,” “reputation management providers,” and “government agencies,” which contract with the firm to identify misinformation trends. Instead of only fact-checking individual forms of incorrect information, NewsGuard, in its proposal, touted the ability to rate the “overall reliability of websites” and “’prebunk’ COVID-19 misinformation from hundreds of popular websites.”
NewsGuard’s ultimately unsuccessful pitch sheds light on one aspect of a growing effort by governments around the world to police speech ranging from genuine disinformation to dissent from officially sanctioned narratives. In the United States, as the Twitter Files revealed, the effort often takes the form of direct government appeals to social media platforms and news outlets. More commonly the government works with through seemingly benign non-governmental organizations – such as the Stanford Internet Observatory – to quell speech it disapproves of.
Or it pays to coerce speech through government contracts with outfits such as NewsGuard, a for-profit company of especially wide influence. Founded in 2018 by Crovitz and his co-CEO Steven Brill, a lawyer, journalist and entrepreneur, NewsGuard seeks to monetize the work of reshaping the Internet. The potential market for such speech policing, NewsGuard’s pitch to Twitter noted, was $1.74 billion, an industry it hoped to capture.
Instead of merely suggesting rebuttals to untrustworthy information, as many other existing anti-misinformation groups provide, NewsGuard has built a business model out of broad labels that classify entire news sites as safe or untrustworthy, using an individual grading system producing what it calls “nutrition labels.” The ratings – which appear next to a website’s name on the Microsoft Edge browser and other systems that deploy the plug-in – use a scale of zero to 100 based on what NewsGuard calls “nine apolitical criteria,” including “gathers and presents information responsibly” (worth 18 points), “avoids deceptive headlines” (10 points), and “does not repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content” (22 points), etc.
Critics note that such ratings are entirely subjective – the New York Times, for example, which repeatedly carried false and partisan information from anonymous sources during the Russiagate hoax, gets a 100% rating. RealClearInvestigations, which took heat in 2019 for unmasking the “whistleblower” of the first Trump impeachment (while many other outlets including the Times still have not), has an 80% rating. (Verbatim: the NewsGuard-RCI exchange over the whistleblower.) Independent news outlets with an anti-establishment bent receive particularly low ratings from NewsGuard, such as the libertarian news site Antiwar.com, with a 49.5% rating, and conservative site The Federalist, with a 12.5% rating.
As it stakes a claim to being the Internet’s arbiter of trust, the company’s site says it has conducted reviews of some 95% of news sources across the English, French, German, and Italian web. It has also published reports about disinformation involving China and the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas wars. The model has received glowing profiles in CNN and the New York Times, among other outlets, as a viable solution for fighting fake news.
NewsGuard is pushing to apply its browser screening process into libraries, academic centers, news aggregation portals, and internet service providers. Its reach, however, is far greater because of other products it aims to sell to social media and other content moderation firms and advertisers. “An advertiser’s worst nightmare is having an ad placement damage even one customer’s trust in a brand,” said Crovitz in a press release touting NewsGuard’s “BrandGuard” service for advertisers. “We’re asking them to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem,” Crovitz told reporters.
NewsGuard’s BrandGuard tool provides an “exclusion list” that deters advertisers from buying space on sites NewsGuard deems problematic. But that warning service creates inherent conflicts of interest with NewsGuard’s financial model: The buyers of the service can be problematic entities too, with an interest in protecting and buffing reputations.
A case in point: Publicis Groupe, NewsGuard’s largest investor and the biggest conglomerate of marketing agencies in the world, which has integrated NewsGuard’s technology into its fleet of subsidiaries that place online advertising. The question of conflicts arises because Publicis represents a range of corporate and government clients, including Pfizer – whose COVID vaccine has been questioned by some news outlets that have received low scores. Other investors include Bruce Mehlman, a D.C. lobbyist with a lengthy list of clients, including United Airlines and ByteDance, the parent company of much-criticized Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok.
NewsGuard has faced mounting criticism that rather than serving as a neutral public service against online propaganda, it instead acts as an opaque proxy for its government and corporate clients to stifle views that simply run counter to their own interests.
The criticism finds support in internal documents, such as the NewsGuard proposal to Twitter, which this reporter obtained during Twitter Files reporting last year, as well as in government records and discussions with independent media sites targeted by the startup.
Beginning last year, users scanning the headlines on certain browsers that include NewsGuard were warned against visiting Consortium News. A scarlet-red NewsGuard warning pop-up said, “Proceed With Caution” and claimed that the investigative news site “has published false claims about the Ukraine-Russia war.” The warning also notifies a network of advertisers, news aggregation portals, and social media platforms that Consortium News cannot be trusted.
But Consortium News, founded by late Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Robert Parry and known for its strident criticism of U.S. foreign policy, is far from a fake news publisher. And NewsGuard, the entity attempting to suppress it, Consortium claims, is hardly a disinterested fact-checker because of federal influence over it.
NewsGuard attached the label after pressing Consortium for retractions or corrections to six articles published on the site. Those news articles dealt with widely reported claims about neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and U.S. influence over the country – issues substantiated by other credible media outlets. After Consortium editors refused to remove the reporting and offered a detailed rebuttal, the entire site received a misinformation label, encompassing over 20,000 articles and videos published by the outlet since it was founded in 1995.
The left-wing news site believes the label was part of a pay-for-censorship scheme. It notes that Consortium News was targeted after NewsGuard received a $749,387 Defense Department contract in 2021 to identify “false narratives” relating to the war between Ukraine and Russia, as well as other forms of foreign influence.
Bruce Afran, an attorney for Consortium News, disagrees. “What’s really happening here is that NewsGuard is trying to target those who take a different view from the government line,” said Afran, He filed an amended complaint last month claiming that NewsGuard not only defamed his client, but also acts as a front for the military to suppress critical reporting.
“There’s a great danger in being maligned this way,” Afran continued. “The government cannot evade the Constitution by hiring a private party.”
Joe Lauria, the editor in chief of Consortium News, observed that in previous years, anonymous social media accounts had also targeted his site, falsely claiming a connection to the Russian government in a bid to discredit his outlet.
“NewsGuard has got to be the worst,” said Lauria. “They’re labeling us in a way that stays with us. Every news article we publish is defamed with that label of misinformation.”
Both Lauria and Afran said that they worry that NewsGuard is continuing to collaborate with the government or with intelligence services. In previous years, NewsGuard had worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. It’s not clear to what extent NewsGuard is still working with the Pentagon. But earlier this year, Crovitz wrote an email to journalist Matt Taibbi, defending its work with the government, describing it in the present tense, suggesting that it is ongoing:
For example, as is public, our work for the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is focused on the identification and analysis of information operations targeting the U.S. and its allies conducted by hostile governments, including Russia and China. Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online. We are proud of our work countering Russian and Chinese disinformation on behalf of Western democracies.
The company has not yet responded to the Consortium News lawsuit, filed in the New York federal court. In May of this year, the Air Force Research Lab responded to a records request from journalist Erin Marie Miller about the NewsGuard contract. The contents of the work proposal were entirely redacted.
Asked about the company’s continued work with the intelligence sector, Skibinski replied, “We license our data about false claims made by state media sources and state-sponsored disinformation efforts from China, Russia and Iran to the defense and intelligence sector, as we describe on our website.”
The Daily Sceptic
Other websites that have sought to challenge their NewsGuard rating say it has shown little interest in a back-and-forth exchange regarding unsettled matters.
Take the case of The Daily Sceptic, a small publication founded and edited by conservative English commentator Toby Young. As a forum for journalists and academics to challenge a variety of strongly held public-policy orthodoxies, even those on COVID-19 vaccines and climate change, The Daily Sceptic is a genuine dissenter.
Last year, Young reached out to NewsGuard, hoping to improve his site’s 74.5 rating.
In a series of emails from 2022 and 2023 that were later forwarded to RealClearInvestigations, NewsGuard responded to Young by listing articles that it claimed represent forms of misinformation, such as reports that Pfizer’s vaccine carried potential side effects. The site, notably, has been a strident critic of COVID-19 policies, such as coercive mandates.
Anicka Slachta, an analyst with NewsGuard, highlighted articles that questioned the efficacy of the vaccines and lockdowns. The Daily Sceptic, for example, reported a piece casting COVID-19 lockdowns as “unnecessary, ineffective and harmful,” citing academic literature from Johns Hopkins University.
Rather than refute this claim, Slachta simply offered an opposing view from another academic, who criticized the arguments put forth by lockdown critics. And the Hopkins study, Slachta noted, was not peer-reviewed. The topic is still, of course, under serious debate. Sweden rejected the draconian lockdowns on schools and businesses implemented by most countries in North American and Europe, yet had one of the lowest “all-cause excess mortality” rates in either region.
Young and others said that the issue highlighted by NewsGuard is not an instance of misinformation, but rather an ongoing debate, with scientists and public health experts continuing to explore the moral, economic, and health-related questions raised by such policies. In its response to NewsGuard’s questions about the lockdown piece, Young further added that his site made no claim that the Hopkins paper was peer-reviewed and added that its findings had been backed up by a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Yet to NewsGuard, Young’s site evidently posed a misinformation danger by simply reporting on the subject and refusing to back down. Emails between NewsGuard and the Daily Sceptic show Young patiently responding to the company’s questions; he also added postscripts to the articles flagged by NewsGuard with a link to the fact checks of them and rebuttals of those fact checks. Young also took the extra step of adding updates to other articles challenged by fact-checking non-governmental organizations. “I have also added postscripts to other articles not flagged by you but which have been fact checked by other organisations, such as Full Fact and Reuters,” Young wrote to Slachta.
That wasn’t enough. After a series of back-and-forth emails, NewsGuard said it would be satisfied only with a retraction of the articles, many of which, like the lockdown piece, contained no falsehoods. After the interaction, NewsGuard lowered the Daily Sceptic’s rating to 37.5/100.
“I’m afraid you left me no choice but to conclude that NewsGuard is a partisan site that is trying to demonetise news publishing sites whose politics it disapproves of under the guise of supposedly protecting potential advertisers from being associated with ‘mis-’ and ‘disinformation,’” wrote Young in response. “Why bother to keep up the pretence of fair-mindedness John? Just half my rating again, which you’re going to do whatever I say.”
NewsGuard’s Skibinski, in a response to a query about the Daily Sceptic’s downgrade, denied that his company makes any “demands” of publishers. “We simply call them for comment and ask questions about their editorial practices,” he wrote. “This is known as journalism.”
The experience mirrored that of Consortium. Afran, the attorney for the site, noted that NewsGuard uses an arbitrary process to punish opponents, citing the recent study from the company on misinformation on the Israel-Hamas war. “They cherry-picked 250 posts among tweets they knew were incorrect, and they attempt to create the impression that all of X is unreliable,” the lawyer noted. “And so what they’re doing, and this is picked up by mainstream media, that’s actually causing X, formerly Twitter, to now lose ad revenue, based literally on 250 posts out of the billions of posts on Twitter.”
The push to demonize and delist the Daily Sceptic, a journalist critic of pharmaceutical products and policies, reflects an inherent conflict with the biggest backer of NewsGuard: Publicis Groupe.
Publicis client Pfizer awarded Publicis a major deal to help manage its global media and advertising operations, a small reflection of which is the $2.3 billion the pharmaceutical giant spent on advertising last year.
The NewsGuard-Publicis relationship extends to the Paris-based marketing conglomerate’s full client list, including LVHM, PepsiCo, Glaxo Smith Kline, Burger King, ConAgra, Kellogg Company, General Mills, and McDonalds. “NewsGuard will be able to publish and license ‘white lists’ of news sites our clients can use to support legitimate publishers while still protecting their brand reputations,” said Maurice Lévy, chairman of the Publicis Groupe, upon its launch of NewsGuard.
Put another way, when corporate watchdogs like the Daily Sceptic or Consortium News are penalized by NewsGuard, the ranking system amounts to a blacklist to guide advertisers where not to spend their money.
“NewsGuard is clearly in the business of censoring the truth,” noted Dr. Joseph Mercola, a gadfly voice whose website was ranked as misinformation by NewsGuard after it published reports about COVID-19’s potential origin from a lab in Wuhan, China.
“Seeing how Publicis represents most of the major pharmaceutical companies in the world and funded the creation of NewsGuard, it’s not far-fetched to assume Publicis might influence NewsGuard’s ratings of drug industry competitors,” Mercola added, in a statement online.
Lee Fang is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. He writes an investigative newsletter on Substack via http://www.leefang.com.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations, leefang.com and made available via RealClearWire.
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