Category Archives: health

May 20, 2020 · 15:37

Unmasking the Political Weaponization of SARS-CoV-2, Part I

Part I: Legalese

Ladies and gentlemen, we have been had.

Seventy (70) days ago, on March 10, 2020, Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts publicly declared that the Commonwealth was under a State of Emergency with regards to the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, more commonly referred to as COVID-19 or simply “coronavirus”. The following Sunday, March 15, the order was extended to prohibit gatherings of more than 25 persons, and forced the closure of all dine-in services at restaurants and bars, effective March 17. Fifty-eight (58) days ago, on March 23 and under the direction of the Massachusetts Department of Pubic Health, Gov. Baker issued a two-week “stay at home” order, closing all businesses not deemed “essential” and effectively halting all medical care unrelated to COVID-19 in anticipation of an onslaught of critically ill patients.

The onslaught never materialized. And today, on May 20, 2020, that “stay-at-home” order has been extended six weeks past its initial expiration date, and Massachusetts citizens are being fined for having the audacity to reopen their businesses in ways Not Approved by the governor.

Boston, we have a problem. Sam Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere are probably turning in their graves to see us lay down and accept this blatant violation of our God-given rights.

Before I even attempt to get into the problem of mandating closures and masks and plexiglass at registers, I need to point out something very, very important that I’m willing to stake my livelihood and good name that most citizens of the Commonwealth are unaware of:

Once a state of emergency is declared in Massachusetts, there is virtually no limit on the governor’s power, including his ability to “temporarily” suspend our Constitutional rights of assemblage and travel. I put “temporarily” in quotation because there is also no expiration date on a declared state of emergency in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The powers of the governor during a state of emergency are enumerated in the “Civil Defense Act”, Acts of 1950, Chapter 639. This includes:

…for the protection of the public, take possession (1) of any land or building, machinery or equipment; (2) of any horses, vehicles, motor vehicles, aircraft, ships, boats or any other means of conveyance, rolling stock of steam, diesel, electric railroads or of street railways; (3) of any cattle, poultry and any provisions for man or beast, and any fuel, gasoline or other means of propulsion which may be necessary or convenient for the use of the military or naval forces of the commonwealth or of the United States, or for the better protection or welfare of the commonwealth or its inhabitants as intended under this act.

Translated into 2020 terms, the Commonwealth can seize both the means of productions and the goods and services produced, including things like UPS trucks and the contents of the local Wal-Mart. The provision does include “reasonable compensation” for said seizures, but we all know what you and I think is reasonable differs from what Beacon Hill considers reasonable.

Further:

Whoever violates any provision of any such executive order or general regualtion issued or promulgated by the governor, for the violation of which no other penalty is provided by law, shall be punished by imprisonment of not more than one year, or by a fine of not more than five hundred dollars, or both

The (only) good news in all this is that according to MGL Part I, Title II, Chapter 17, Section 2a, “Upon declaration by the governor that such emergency has terminated, all powers granted to and exercised by the commissioner under this section shall terminate.” Presumably this means that when the governor does get around to ending the State of Emergency, all orders issued during that time (such as mandatory masks and social distancing) are also null and void.*

Why do I take the time to spell all this out, when I usually limit myself to my open personal opinions, based on established fact? Because up until about three weeks ago, when I found a Facebook post by a local lawyer explaining some of what I have written above, I was woefully ignorant regarding the ways my own elected officials could control my life and liberty without my explicit consent, to the point of bypassing the negative-rights enshrined in the Constitution. Then-State Senator Barak Obama was correct when he explained in a 2001 interview that, “generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties – it says what the states can’t do to you. It says what the federal government can’t do to you. But it doesn’t say what the federal government. ..must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted.”

I am not okay with the steps the state has taken to suppress our civil liberties in light of the threat of the Chinese coronavirus. I think in the coming weeks and months, We The People are going to need to stand up and loudly remind the likes of Baker, Brown, Whitmer, Cuomo, and Newsom that they are not without limits and that we citizens are not without recourse.

*I’m not a lawyer, nor have I verified this presumption with a lawyer. This is my understanding of the law as written.

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January 23, 2019 · 20:39

May God have mercy on our souls.

Today, New York state passed a landmark law protecting unlimited preborn infanticide… or abortion, as it’s more commonly called. The bill, which goes under the euphemistic “Reproductive Health Act” effectively allows for abortion at any time for any reason, and removes abortion from the state criminal code.

It’s a sad, sad day in Mudville.

The law, aimed at protecting access to abortion in the event that Roe v Wade is overturned, is nauseating. I won’t go into it here, but you’re welcome to read the text of the bill HERE. Matt Walsh, professional teller of truths, also has a spot on op-ed, You Can’t Give A Lethal Injection to Criminals in New York but You Can Give It to Infants

At this point, the abortion issue has become a part of a larger problem. The world, and western nations in particular, have a cultural sickness. We live in a world that celebrates death and is nonchalant (at best) about life. Suicides, murders, and general tragedy dominate news media for days at a time. Positive stories involving children and families are seen as “fluff” and “feel good” rather than a goal. The traditional nuclear family is the exception, not the rule. Fatherless families, children born out of wedlock, siblings with multiple fathers or mothers, and rampant, no-fault divorce are the new normal.

Overturning abortion is a noble and lofty goal, but it will mean nothing if we cannot get to the root of the problem. We need to challenge ourselves to change our thinking, to see motherhood and fatherhood as joyful callings rather than heavy burdens. We need to recognize pregnancy as the miracle that it is, and not an inconvenience at best, or a disease at worst.

How can we do this? Support.

We need to nurture a culture in which a loving father is the norm. We need to get away from the Homer Simpson stereotype of fathers being lazy, stupid, and worthless. How many times on television and in movies do we see a father figure as the hero? How many young boys can watch television and say, “I want to be like him!” Instead, we get the bumbling idiots -loving fathers, perhaps, but idiots just the same. Homer Simpson, Phil Dunphy (Modern Family), Bob Belcher (Bob’s Burgers), Hal Wilkerson (Malcolm in the Middle) are just a few that come to mind.

As Chris Rock said, “A n**** will say some shit like, “I take care of my kids.” You’re supposed to, you dumb motherfucker! What are you talking about?” What kind of ignorant shit is that?”

Instead of devaluing fatherhood, we need to elevate it. Paternal leave. Nor referring to time spent with the kids as “babysitting” or “stuck with the kids”. No more commercials where Dad has no idea how to care for his own child and is desperate for Mommy to come home. Dads matter. One of the most beautiful illustrations of this concept can be seen in “soldiers come home” video compilations. If you can make it through those without crying, you should call your psychologist. Should socioeconomic proofs be more your thing, look up statistics involving absentee fathers, crime, poverty, and soaring abortion rates in the black community since the 1950s.

Motherhood deserves its own admiration. The Mommy-Wars need to stop. For mothers that choose to or must work outside the home to provide for their families, childcare needs not to be so prohibitively expensive, nor should it be the responsibility of the tax payer. Mothers who choose to be stay-at-home moms should likewise be supported in their choices.

The last giant issue is adoption. Did you know that adoption in the United States can run families tens of thousands of dollars? We often hear that adoption is the solution to abortion, but how can it be at that cost? How many couples are desperate to have children, but are unable to conceive and unable to adopt because of the outrageous financial burden? When an abortion costs around $300 and adoption $37,000, are we surprised when there are 638,169 abortions (2015) to the 135,000 adoptions? (Including the roughly 670,000 in foster care).

Bottom line: Before we can change the laws, we need to change our culture. Otherwise, what’s the point?

families

 

 

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July 15, 2017 · 00:06

Avert your eyes…

…seriously, this is not safe for work, small children, special snowflakes, or house pets. If I had to see this, well, I sure as hell am not going to be the only one* who suffers.

* * * * * * * * * *      * * * * * * * * * *     * * * * * * * * * *

If you can’t read it, it says, “Periods are not just for women. Hashtag: Bleeding while trans”.

It’s okay. I’ll wait until you stop gagging.

This represents the epitome of what is wrong with celebrating a mental disorder. Yes, I will say that again:

Transexualism, or transgenderism, characterized by the belief that a person born biologically male, or biologically female, believes that he is a member of the opposite sex. One suffering from this belief, also known as gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder, will often undergo extreme measures to portray himself  externally in order to match these conflicted identities. These measures include but are not limited to cross-dressing, hormone therapy, and genital mutilation.

That is the basest summary. Now I’ll get into the technical:

A Biological Glossary¹, because, Facts and Science. 
We all love Bill Nye, because of Science!

Sex
1.  : either of the two major forms of individuals that occur in many species and that are distinguished respectively as female or male especially on the basis of their reproductive organs and structures
2. :  the sum of the structural, functional, and behavioral characteristics of organisms that are involved in reproduction marked by the union of gametes and that distinguish males and females
3. a : sexually motivated phenomena or behavior
b : sexual intercourse
4. genetalia

Gender
1.  a : a subclass within a grammatical class (such as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly   arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (such as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms
b : membership of a word or a grammatical form in such a subclass
c : an inflectional form (see inflection 3a) showing membership in such a subclass
2. a : sex the feminine gender
b : the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex

trans-
(prefix) 1. a prefix occurring in loanwords from Latin ( transcend; transfix); on this model, used with the meanings “across,” “beyond,” “through,” “changing thoroughly,” “transverse,” in combination with elements of any origin:

Here’s the basic, science-based, hard cold truth:
“Gender” is a language construct. In many romance languages, certain nouns are considered either masculine or feminine. The word “cat”, in Spanish, for example, is a masculine noun. One will always refer to “the cat” as “el gato”, regardless if the cat is male or female. Likewise, in French, “the chair” is translated as “la chaise”. Like Spanish, “la” denotes a feminine noun. In English, common nouns (person, place, thing) are neutral.

When it comes to humans, we are born² either male or female. We have a distinguishable and often visible sex: either a penis and testes or labia and vagina. Male babies carry the XY gene, females, XX. When puberty occurs, males will develop a deeper voice, more muscle mass, thicker and more widespread body hair, and the testes will drop further into the scrotum to facilitate the production of sperm. Females will develop breasts capable of creating milk and begin a roughly monthly menstrual cycle.

The menstrual cycle³, of course, brings me to the whole point of this. Every 28 days or so, the uterus, the only reproductive organ capable of protecting a developing baby, lines itself with nutrients and blood. If conception does not occur, the uterus empties itself of this material and begins the process anew. For anywhere between 2 and 7 days, give or take, blood and tissue exits the body via the vagina.

As ONLY females of our species have a uterus and a menstrual cycle, allow me to make it very, very clear that periods ARE just for women. There is no possible way that a biological male is ever going to ovulate, create sperm-friendly cervical fluid, conceive, and bear a child. He will never have breasts that produce milk and nourish that child. This is something exclusive to biological females.

One of the biggest problems I have is the statement, “I feel like a woman.” No person born male can ever truly understand what it is to be a woman. The closest true statement would be “I feel what I imagine being a woman feels like.” As a male, he will never experience the visceral things a female body does, will never see the world colored by the experiences of being a woman, because no matter what he does to his body, he will never be a woman. Likewise, a biological female can never truly understand what it is to be a man. We share the human experience, but it will always be through the lens of our own lives. I can imagine the discomfort of standing in front of a class with an unexpected erection because I have had to walk down the hallway with bloodstained clothes because my period started unexpectedly. I can’t tell you what the sensation in the testes during an erection feels like, nor can a man understand the unique and painful sensation of passing a large blood clot through the vagina. We cannot understand because it is outside our realm of experience. It is impossible.

So to the woman in the picture above suffering from gender identity disorder:
I’m sorry society has failed you. I’m sorry that we, as a culture, have allowed this notion of “sexual freedom” to get so far out of hand that it prevents you from getting the help you so desperately need. I can’t imagine what it is like to feel like you were born “wrong” or “broken”. You are not. You are a woman, a fellow human being, worthy of respect. I am only one small drop of water in an ocean of those who think your suffering is something that should be continued and not abated. I wish there was something that could be done that didn’t force you to poison and mutilate your beautiful body. For it IS beautiful, just as it was the day you were born and your family marveled over your adorable ears and counted each of your perfect fingers and toes. I’m sorry we are so far gone that we cannot help you. We can’t even help ourselves.

Footnotes:

*I really, really hope she cleaned up that bench. Blood-bourn pathogens, anyone?

¹ “Gender.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 14 July 2017.
“Sex.” Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 14 July 2017.
“Trans-.” Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, n.d. Web. 14 July 2017.

²Intersex abnormalities, such as hermaphrodism, only account for 0.008% of live births, or roughly 8 per 100,000 live births. (http://www.leonardsax.com/how-common-is-intersex-a-response-to-anne-fausto-sterling/)

³http://uk.clearblue.com/menstrual-cycles-and-ovulation

 

 

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May 30, 2017 · 21:24

To Vaccinate, or Not to Vaccinate?

…that shouldn’t even BE a question.
Why? Because science.

Woooooow. Want to open up a topic for debate that will irritate both liberals AND conservatives across the board?

Vaccines.

Holy crap.

For those who have been living under a rock for the last twenty years, in 1998, British gastroenterologist Andrew Jeremy Wakefield and eleven of his colleagues published a study in the British medical journal The Lancet suggesting a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and the onset of autism and bowel disease in children. Questions regarding the validity of the study were raised when other doctors and scientists were unable to duplicate Wakefield’s results. Sixty-seven studies conducted between 1998 and 2010 (some of which can be found HERE; HERE; HERE; and HERE) found no correlation between the MMR (or any other) vaccine and the diagnosis of autism.

Other questions surrounding the validity of Wakefield’s claims came from investigative reporter Brian Deer of the Sunday Times, the UK’s most respected newspaper. Deer discovered that Wakefield’s entire study revolved around 12 anonymous children with “apparent brain disorders” admitted to the pediatric bowel unit at the Royal Free Hospital near London between July 1996 and February 1997.

[Please let me, The Blonde, stop right there. I’m a historian and thespian. I teach. My first idea in college, though, was to become a large animal vet, so I have a pretty solid background in science. General science, biology, honors and AP chemistry, honors Physics in high school; biology, marine biology, inorganic chem in college. Even I know that one should not publish a world-shattering study, with the potential to change lives quite literally around the world, based off less than a year’s worth of research on such a small sample. My teachers and professors would have kicked my butt for even suggesting that. But, I digress.]

Parents of eight of the 12 children blamed the MMR vaccine for their children’s diagnosis of both IBD and autism. (Many children with ASD also have GI issues. No one is exactly sure why, but it’s common. AutismSpeaks explains.) As hysteria went global thanks to the likes of Jenny McCarthy, who blamed the vaccine for her own son’s autism, Deer discovered that far from a scientific breakthrough, Wakefield had been approached in 1994 by lawyer Richard Barr, a lawyer of dubious intent looking to start a speculative class-action lawsuit against the manufacturers of the MMR vaccine. What was actually planned I can’t even begin to paraphrase, so I’ll let Deer himself explain.

Unlike expert witnesses, who give professional advice and opinions, Wakefield had negotiated an unprecedented contract with Barr, then aged 48, to conduct clinical and scientific research. The goal was to find evidence of what the two men claimed to be a “new syndrome”, intended to be the centerpiece of (later failed) litigation on behalf of an eventual 1,600 British families, recruited through media stories. This publicly undisclosed role for Wakefield created the grossest conflict of interest, and the exposure of it by Deer, in February 2004, led to public uproar in Britain, the retraction of the Lancet report’s conclusions section, and, from July 2007 to May 2010, the longest-ever professional misconduct hearing by the UK’s General Medical Council (GMC).

Barr [audio] paid the doctor with money from the UK legal aid fund: run by the government to give poorer people access to justice. Wakefield charged at the extraordinary rate of £150 an hour – billed through a company of his wife’s – eventually totaling, for generic work alone, what the UK Legal Services Commission, pressed by Deer under the freedom of information act, said was £435,643 (then about $750,000 US), plus expenses. These hourly fees – revealed in The Sunday Times in December 2006 – gave the doctor a direct personal, but undeclared, financial interest in his research claims: totaling more than eight times his reported annual salary and creating an incentive not only for him to launch the alarm, but to keep it going for as long as possible.” (Brian Deer’s Research)

 

It would be the shady deal heard ‘round the world.

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