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Facebook banned from Facebook

Considering my humble blog has been both banned and scrubbed from Facebook/Messenger (more on this later), I find today’s developments absolutely hilarious:

As of publishing time, Facebook has been down for several hours, along with WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Oculus VR. But that’s just the beginning. The social media behemoth’s stock prices also crashed on Monday, making the company’s already bad day even worse…

Let’s start with the outages. Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram had to take to Twitter to let users know that the platforms were experiencing problems…

Users who tried to access Instagram and WhatsApp were greeted by a 5xx server error, while Messenger and Facebook have been buggy all day, with most users reporting that they’re unable to use the platforms.

There are also problems being reported with Oculus VR, the Facebook-owned virtual reality system. Users are reportedly able to use games they’ve already uploaded to their systems, but cannot install new games. Social features are also not working.

There’s been no word yet from Facebook about what’s causing the problems. but earlier in the day Brian Krebs, an investigative journalist who focuses on cyber security issues, tweeted this: “Confirmed: The DNS records that tell systems how to find  http://Facebook.com or http://Instagram.com got withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables. Can you imagine working at FB right now, when your email no longer works & all your internal FB-based tools fail?”

Meanwhile, the Twitterverse is having a field day with Facebook’s terrible, horrible, no good very bad day, with many saying that we’re all probably better off with it out.

For at least today, the world is a slightly better place.

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Clueless, or in your face? You decide

Congresswoman Occasional Cortex continues to provide dividends: at a leftist-dominated gala where tickets cost $30,000 and corporations buy tables for $275,000, she attended in a designer gown emblazoned with — what else? — “Tax the Rich.” Meanwhile, another attendee showed up with a cape labeled “equal rights,” mugging maskless for the camera while the waitstaff, dressed in all black, including masks, waited demurely behind her.

In honor of this superlative feat of aristocratic hypocrisy, I offer this rendition of a Gilbert and Sullivan classic:

“I am the very model of a modern Marie Antoinette,

My superficial silliness has far to see rock bottom yet;

I should have stuck to tending bars, instead of public policy

But someone has to make a buck while making us less strong and free.”

These people deserve every bit of scorn Americans can heap on them. Never forget that. They not only aren’t your “betters,” they aren’t even your equals in terms of competence, empathy and virtue. All their ‘virtue signalling’ is subconscious compensation.

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The fraud of public ‘ejukashun’

I’ll preface this by saying I know many teachers who serve in the public school system who are student-focused and take their responsibilities seriously. They are working uphill, however, in an ecosystem that no longer ensures Johnny knows his “3Rs” before going out into the world. Publicly funded education, whether K-12 or university, has become bloated by bureaucracy and its attendant agendas, and focuses on its core mission only to the extent necessary to preserve its lifeblood: funding. Now that the public worldview is openly hostile to the Christian faith, it’s time for a mass exodus. Beyond that, even non-Christians should agree that examples like this show the system needs draconian doses of accountability (to include jail time for fraud). The best way to instill that accountability long term would be to privatize education entirely. Local taxes should fund students, not systems. If students’ parents find they’re not being served well, they should be free to take their resources to a place that will do better. Instead, millions, if not billions of tax dollars are being poured into rat holes like this:

The report confirms administrators at Augusta Fells improperly changed grades and pressured teachers to give students grades they did not earn. The internal investigation also found students were scheduled in classes that did not exist and/or that they did not attend, when they should have been withdrawn due to lack of attendance…

Fox45 News also obtained a list of 21 seniors enrolled at Augusta Fells in 2019. These students were enrolled, even though it appears they were not attending the school. Ghost students, as they’re known by educators, can be used to inflate enrollment numbers and increase the tax dollars a school receives. We spoke to a man who was enrolled at the school, even though he was in jail. (emphasis added)

North Avenue’s internal investigation confirms these findings, saying approximately 100 students had questionable status, and may not have been actively attending school while still remaining on the rolls…

In July, Fox45 reported that 41% of all Baltimore high school students have a 1.0 GPA or lower. Among freshmen it was 51 percent who had a D average or lower. I suspect if the city looks it will discover that similar fraud is taking place at other schools, i.e. students who never show up for classes that don’t exist. Augusta Fells may have been the worst school in Baltimore but it’s far from being the only one that is failing the students and parents who live there.

These children are being crippled for life, left as ill-functioning adults with little hope for the future. What should be the penalty for inflicting that on the next generation? No wonder public schools are embracing Critical Race Theory. Better to teach their minority students (of which there are many in Baltimore) that it’s “whitey” holding them back, so they don’t figure out it’s the education unions and associated public bureaucrats.

Sadly, it’s no better in post-secondary education. As a former competitive debater, I’m appalled to present to you the Cross Examination Debate Association’s 2014 national champions, from Towson University:

If there is to be any future for our country, we must rescue our children from this grist mill.

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If they feel the need to lie…

Then they are not on the side of the Good on this one:

After talk show host Joe Rogan made a quick recovery from COVID and attributed it in part to using Ivermectin, Rolling Stone magazine suddenly ran this story (including a paragraph taking a swipe at Rogan):

The rise in people using ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug usually reserved for deworming horses or livestock, as a treatment or preventative for Covid-19 has emergency rooms “so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting” access to health facilities, an emergency room doctor in Oklahoma said.

This week, Dr. Jason McElyea told KFOR the overdoses are causing backlogs in rural hospitals, leaving both beds and ambulance services scarce.

“The ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated,” McElyea said.

“All of their ambulances are stuck at the hospital waiting for a bed to open so they can take the patient in and they don’t have any, that’s it,” said McElyea. “If there’s no ambulance to take the call, there’s no ambulance to come to the call.”

Goodness! Americans better stay away from that stuff, right? Well, not so fast. One hospital associated with Dr. McElyea felt it necessary to issue a statement:

Although Dr. Jason McElyea is not an employee of NHS Sequoyah, he is affiliated with a medical staffing group that provides coverage for our emergency room.

With that said, Dr. McElyea has not worked at our Sallisaw location in over 2 months.

NHS Sequoyah has not treated any patients due to complications related to taking ivermectin. This includes not treating any patients for ivermectin overdose.

All patients who have visited our emergency room have received medical attention as appropriate. Our hospital has not had to turn away any patients seeking emergency care.

And a simple phone call by a local station to another hospital at which the doctor works quickly revealed they’ve had no such issues, either (see paragraphs in the story following the NHS Sequoyah statement excerpted above).

Rolling Stone clearly ran the story without bothering to do any due diligence as to the doctor’s claim… you know, what journalists would do, if we had any left in the corporate media. And they weren’t the only ones to run with this story that just had to be true about all those Trump rubes in flyover country flooding hospitals after eating horse paste. Sadly, a long list of other mainstream news outlets jumped on the bandwagon, and apparently not one — not one! — made the simple phone call to any of the hospitals that would have put this horse**** to pasture before it ever saw a headline.

Note the dismissive reference all the stories employed about its use as a livestock dewormer. That’s far from the whole story. Ivermectin is on the World Health Organization’s list of Essential Medicines (see page 6 at this link), and has been used in humans since the late 1980s. While it’s primarily prescribed as an anti-parasite drug (think malaria), it showed early promise as a possible way to reduce Covid mortality. But the campaign against such ‘off-label use’ began quickly and continues to this day… helped in a significant fashion by a press that is in reality a propaganda machine.

Why this bias to scare Americans away from Ivermectin? Likely because it’s a viable option to compete with the not-vaccines. Sooner or later, even those not paying keen attention to what’s going on are going to begin questioning why some countries are already talking about a fourth “booster” with the likelihood many more will follow every few months, while others are going to allow 12-year-olds to overrule their own parents and get the jab.

Everything — lockdowns, ‘vaccine’ passports, media coverage, employer pressure, government policy — has become a funnel leading to only one destination: a shot (or two or five) in the arm with a substance about which nothing is known of the long-term effects. Why? I don’t claim to know, whether it’s simply a profit machine for Big Pharma (Ivermectin is no longer under patent and the generic tablets are considered relatively inexpensive) or something much more evil. I don’t think knowing the planned end state is as important right now as knowing there is clearly a highly orchestrated agenda at work here.

We live in a postmodern, post-Truth world. When that world is in unison pointing in a single direction, it’s essential to open the aperture and consider what’s not being highlighted. And for your own sake, take anything you see, read or hear in the mass media with massive doses of salt.

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Interesting

Covid had a busy day Monday in Israel, as the country recorded almost 11,000 new ‘cases’ in one day.

Why is this interesting? Because Israel has one of the highest vaccination rates of any country in the world. Roughly 60 percent of its population have had two doses, and 66 percent have had at least one. This is yet another example of why it’s wrong to call these shots ‘vaccines.’ The Centers for Disease Control has a very specific definition for ‘vaccine’ and ‘immunity:’

Vaccine: A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease. Vaccines are usually administered through needle injections, but can also be administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose.

Immunity: Protection from an infectious disease. If you are immune to a disease, you can be exposed to it without becoming infected. (emphasis added)

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/imz-basics.htm

When I participated in competitive debate, one of the first things done in a match was to establish definitions. The public discourse about these injective substances has completely ignored the CDC’s own established definitions of both ‘vaccine’ and ‘immunity.’ Words matter. That’s why I try to refer to the shots as anything BUT ‘vaccines.’ I was challenged on this once, and asked ‘what would you call them?’ In a rare inspired moment, I said “experimental prophylactics.” The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think that’s pretty close to the mark.

The word wrangling continues with the term “breakthrough cases.” If a large number of people who’ve had the shots are still contracting Covid (even if with milder symptoms), it shows this is not a ‘vaccine.’ Bottom line: don’t let the media set the terms for the discussion. Challenge their definitions and do your own homework. They’re counting on people being parrots rather than active participants.

But wait! There’s more that’s ‘interesting:’

Two of the FDA’s most senior vaccine leaders are exiting from their positions, raising fresh questions about the Biden administration and the way that it’s sidelined the FDA.

Marion Gruber, director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research & Review and 32-year veteran of the agency, will leave at the end of October, and OVRR deputy director Phil Krause, who’s been at FDA for more than a decade, will leave in November. The news, first reported by BioCentury, is a massive blow to confidence in the agency’s ability to regulate vaccines.

The bombshell announcement comes at a particularly crucial moment, as boosters and children’s shots are being weighed by the regulator.

Whether this is just the usual agency turf war between the CDC and FDA, or something more nefarious, remains to be seen. But having two such people leave just as the not-vaccines are being considered for approval for children, is a “hmmmm” moment for me.

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How’d that work out?

The same government that told us for 20 years we “have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” has now stopped fighting them over there… and is bringing them here by the planeload.

I’m sure amid all the chaos at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul that refugees are being exhaustively screened so that only those who don’t pose a threat are brought here…

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Undermining the force

Afghanistan won’t be the last fight our nation loses, particularly if those raising the next generation of military leaders have their way:

The desegregation of the military in 1948 was a great step forward for our nation. Generations of Americans in uniform have been taught to see each other as brothers and sisters in arms, not as the sum of their skin color. So it should be no surprise that our enemies within are doing their damnedest to undo all of that. The service academies have one purpose: produce the senior leaders of tomorrow, capable of leading Americans to victory in combat. This indoctrination is antithetical to that purpose.