I find many people treat the Freedom of Religion piece of the first amendment as virtually inoperable because they, themselves, are not religious, and increasingly our society is not either.
However, after seeing how easily the government has cast aside our speech rights (as shown in the Twitter Files) and our press rights (look at what happened to Taibbi and Shellenberger in front of the House committee last week), I would urge everyone treat these rights as all one-in-the-same.
If one falls, they all fall. Either we all enjoy liberty, or none of us do.
Our Founders knew instinctively that government is inherently evil and that limits must be placed around it. The made sure we had a Constitution that assured us that our rights come from God, not the state. During Covid, many Americans gave in to their worst, unreasoning fears and, hoping for safety gave up their rights to the state. And so wound up with neither liberty nor security. Just as Franklin warned.
I have been thinking about this lately. The newly minted citizens of the United States of America were freed from monarchy - the rule based in the judgment of one human. As you say they knew the risks involved in the concept of government and tried so very hard to create something better. What we have allowed it to become is tragic.
Hey Cat, did you catch the Epstein piece in the WSJ's opinion section today which calls out his fellow Dems for closing their eyes to what's obvious to every honest person - that Biden is a senile imbecile and a fabulist who has no business being our president and that a second term for him would be a travesty.
It's less about the freedom of religion than what the limits are. To use an extreme example, your religion may require human sacrifice, but that doesn't mean you get to kill people. In this case, I hope we can all agree there are at least some circumstances where the public health supersedes the freedom of religion. To use a not-so-extreme example, if Ebola virus were found at the church, surely public health officials should have the power to shut down the church for some time. This case seems compelling only in hindsight, when it's clear that Santa Clara probably went too far, but it's being framed like a black and white freedom of religion issue where church leaders and parishioners should never have any limits at all.
It’s actually about the arbitrary administration if government authority. When other entities such as movie productions and liquor stores were not under the same restrictions as churches, it becomes an unconstitutional abridgment of first amendment rights. And, of course, we now know that so much of government policy dictates weren’t about “the science “ at all.
If I were a conspiracy analyst, I might be inclined to think the state was encouraging people to turn to liquor instead of God or community. Drunk people don't rebel. Despairing people don't rebel. The state wants to be the ultimate authority, and the church gets in the way of that. Also, some of the most effective dissenters in history have been religious people, and they definitely can't have that.
Add marijuana, since states with legalized weed allowed weed shops to stay open as an "essential" service. The Democrats want the populace to be stoned, less resistance that way.
I agree that movie studios and liquor stores are not "essential services" and that politics played too much of a role in the pandemic regulations. The regulations also went on too long.
However, in the beginning, not much was known about COVID except that it was killing people. Cities had to keep the number of people on ventilators below the number of ventilators available. I'd like to see an article on how small most ICU's for large cities are--I was very surprised to find out how few patients they are actually equipped to handle.
Many people seem to use religion as giving them the right to do anything they want and pick and choose which laws they will or won't follow. Even now, religious people, specifically Christians, are trying to force THEIR beliefs on people by trying to limit access to mifepristone substituting medical knowledge for the will of one very religious judge (even though many religions don't believe life begins at conception they don't seem to count in the U.S. anymore).
It doesn’t wash my friend. Liquor stores were open by government fiat, churches were closed by government fiat.
Ventilators are the exact reason nyc was such a catastrophe compared to the rest of the world (That and the governor ordering contagious people into nursing homes). nyc doctors were announcing by April that ventilators were the wrong treatment and they proved it conclusively by the simple expedient of removing patients from ventilators and seeing they did not struggle to breathe.
This case will have to get out of california in order to find a rational court. After Washington DC - where jury foremen say things like “we know michael sussman lied to the fbi but we have more important things to do” - California courts are the worst in the nation.
Scott, Scott, Scott, where you begin. Ironically you say "[I]n the beginning [now where have I heard that?] not much was known about Covid . . ." I assert to the contrary. That odious gnome Dr. Fauci had reason to know a great deal about it and hid his knowledge from the populace, and I suspect the government leadership. Then you go on with "except it was killing people." I submit what was killing people was hiding that knowledge under the log by things like getting apoplectic at the term China virus or the idea limiting travel from China. Additionally our figures for Covid deaths are so skewed for a wide variety of reasons, many related to greed, that we will never know how many people were killed by Covid. Then you raise the ventilator excuse. Again a complete miss - as it turns out placing people on their backs on ventilators was a mistep for most. As for your hospital ER query the answer thereto is greed. Almost all hospitals are owned by a small number of corporations and like all corporations their interest is the bottom line a/k/a greed. They simply cannot afford to have ERs lying useless for large periods of time, like you know when there is not an epidemic. IOWs it is not in the interest of those corporations to be prepared for a pandemic. As for "religious people" thinking "religion as giving them the right to do what they want and to pick and choose which laws they will and won't follow." You are ill-informed. Since you singled out Christians, please note that Christians follow rules. They are essentially found in the Ten Commandments. America, and her laws, were founded on those principles. So the notion of doing whatever they want is ludicrous. The problems arise when as here, the government [which has forgotten from whence it came and ignores many of those Commandments] issues commands which diverge from the Commandments. In that circumstance Christians are called upon to "speak truth to authority". That is what this noble church did. That is what Martin Luther King, Jr. did. That is what Nelson Mandela did. That is what William Wallace did. Governments throughout history have overstepped. People with integrity step up. You should be grateful, otherwise the odious little gnome would still have you masked, isolated, and filled by hypodermic with whatever he dreamed up next.
As a retired minister , my experience has been that there are many many people who hate Christianity and are set to blame it and its adherents for everything gone bad in this country. I am ordained in a progressive church that has long had gay pastors and ordained the first woman in the late 1800s. We have been on the forefront of many progressive issues and have never been Bible Thumpers (or god forbid Trumpsters) but that doesnt matter.
I have met people who have not darkened the door of a church for years if at all and have no idea about how churches have changed since the 1950's, but that doesn't matter. I was told that my denomination preaches hatred, is racist and takes the stories i the Bible literally and therefore is against all women thanks to Eve. So I am not a bit surprised that Calvery was ordered to shut down at the demand of the California Legislature - maybe they should have met in a liquor store - I think they were kept opened.
Your greed comment relative to hospitals here is a quick answer to a very complex problem. I am in no way a fan of the US health system, but suffice to say that government funded health systems ranging from Canada to the entire EU suffered severely from the same issues hospitals had here early on in the pandemic: Being overwhelmed by patients, ventilator shortages, not nearly enough hospital supplies, ER's way beyond capacity, not enough beds, staffing issues as attendants, doctors and nurses had Covid issues themselves...
Corporations may not have been prepared here, okay - but neither were government run health systems around the world, where the word 'greed' does not apply.
I am using greed in the sense of profit driven. Which corporate owned hospitals are. They have no choice. Their duty to their shareholders is paramount, as required by law. The comparison to government funded health care is thus apples and oranges. I would be curious to know if the small number of independent or not for profit hospitals here fared better.
That is a shortcoming of the medical industry. They too have been elevated to hero status when in fact they were lying to the public. They could have invested in temporary structures to prepare for a pandemic.
There could be very simple systems in place for ventilators in the event of things like train derailments, they could have accepted military personnel but there were unoccupied floors without staff.
It's actually good that they lacked ventilators, since those were killing many.
Hospitals are captured by Big Phama and they are not heroes.
Firing staff who had natural immunity is stark evidence of how little they know of basic biology. Or do they know and are captured by big pharma? I suspect the latter.
Our granddaughter a RN who had covid and the antibodies was fired because she refused to get the vaccine. On one hand hospitals cry they need more nurses and on the other hand fire nurses that have natural immunity Those vaccinated were reinfected at the same rate than those who had natural immunity. https://nypost.com/2023/02/27/natural-immunity-as-effective-as-covid-vaccine-years-after-mandates/
The nurses fired from her hospital are suing the hospital as well they should.
Nurses with natural Immunity were the best suited for front line work. They knew another infection would not kill them and they could work without fear. They also would not be as likely to spread the infection as silent carriers. There was no science behind firing these workers. There was only a pharma narrative to cover up the accident by making themselves Vax heroes.
I suggest you spend one week in medical school, on the “wards” or in practice & only then might you begin to understand. Don’t confuse technocrats & appointed political hacks with physicians.
I'm not speaking of physicians. They too are victims of an industry captured by Big pharma. I personally know physicians. They lose their license in mysterious ways if they ruffle the wrong feathers. Many medical professionals were fired for refusing the jab.
Most good Doctors refused to administer the jab due to liability and ethical concerns. That's why it was administered by pharmacists. Guess which hand a pharmacist will never bite.
The article says the church followed restrictions for 2 months, until May 2020. Do you remember what else happened in May 2020 when millions of people chose not to follow COVID restrictions? But it’s terrible that religious people use religion as an excuse to pick and choose what laws to follow?
In China they quickly set up triage tents. Our hospitals could have such equipment standing by. They also could have enlisted the National guard. They did not like the optics of that. Tarnished the image.
Cuomo ignored the hospital ship Trump sent. Pure politics.
The odious Cuomo who infected old folks homes with covid which killed these old folks at an alarming rate (murdered), screamed that Trump was not doing enough to help NY. But when Trump sent a US hospital ship to NY the ship was never used. Cuomo put politics over the heath of his state's citizens.
In the left-wing mind, "erring" on the side of the left-wing preference is always the appropriately "cautious" approach. To err in favor of the other side is unconscionable.
I am a deep Christian who has NEVER tried to impose my will on anyone.
Covid: Feb 2020, Diamond Princess Cruise Ship, 3700 people on board for a month isolated on-ship, 800 tested positive, 15 people died = 0.4% fatality rate = the flu(a harsh one at that). Nothing more. A flu, and it hit my wife and I hard. A flu.
And those cruise-goers who succumbed were likely elderly and/or obese. I've been on enough cruises to know that there's a lot of very LARGE people on cruise ships. Those all-you-can-eat buffets.
Just as the liberal want to have no limits on when the child can be exterminated. Even after managing to survive the attempted killing.
Almost all abortions come from unprotected consensual sex by two people.
Law demands the father must protect & support the child. Yet has no say in its destruction.
Is there not a point the heathy mother must take on the responsibility of birth as well?
Crushing a child’s skull in the birth canal or letting them die on a tray is murder. Both of these and other inhuman acts are being forced on our society.
Yet Americans buy babies from all over the world spending hundreds of millions. Would it be better to allow these unwanted babies be sold to the highest bidder?
I think that the proper comparison here to the restricting of church services in 2020 would be the shutting down of mass event venues, such as sports events held at arenas and stadiums, theatres, concerts, political events etc..
Was it an infringement of your First Amendment rights that you couldn't go to the baseball game? It was shut down for the very same reason.
In hindsight it sure may look like overreach, but at the time the large gatherings of people in a confined space scared the hell out of health authorities. Having three people in a liquor store was not thought of in the same way.
The Constitution does not guarantee the right to attend baseball games, but it specifically assures the free exercise of religion. It is a treacherous slope that says “just this once, we’ll keep you from your religious observance in the name of the greater good.” What would have happened, do you suppose, had people begun gathering in Walmart to pray and worship in their chosen faith? And I don’t recall a single mosque being shut down.
I was going to say the same thing but you beat me to it. Pro-lockdowners always ignore that pesky little Constitutional right thing. Then they come back with, "But, at the time..." or "in the beginning... " This B.S. went on for over a YEAR. Not just in the "beginning." Long after facts about Covid spread and vulnerability became known. And even then, in some states including mine, it only ended when the courts mercifully forced the state to end it.
I'm reminded of something someone posted in my NextDoor community in the spring of 2020. It went something like: "Anyone feel like bringing signs down to the park and having a barbecue but calling it a 'protest'"?
This was all knowable at the time that it was a massive and unjustified overreach. The Diamond Princess cruise liner incident had occurred in Feb 2020 prior to any of this and illustrated just how minor overall the virus itself was. The nearly universal overreaction of health authorities around the world is a textbook illustration of fear and ignorance trampling over rational policy.
Who was dying? The elderly and the very ill. That's what Diamond Princess showed us. The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration had it right: take steps to protect the vulnerable and let the rest of society continue more or less normally.
The Italian death count did not rise significantly until the government mandates and interventions started. It's estimated that covid arrived in northern Italy around August 2019 yet there was no significant rise in overall mortality until late February 2020 when the government got heavily involved. I'd posit that it was clumsy and heavy-handed ill-conceived reactions that ultimately caused most of the death toll and that covid itself was only a contributing factor.
In fact sports events were open in July 2020. Dr Fauci attended one early that month and pulled down his mask while sitting less than 6 feet from two persons.
Bingo, Lady in the Lake. Government does and should have the right to shut everything down in certain circumstances. (e.g., war, terrorist attack, global pandemic). What it cannot do is shut down some entities and not others. The state and local governments that shut down church gatherings but allowed civil protests were blatantly violating the Constitution, and should be castigated (and sued) for doing so.
If the church had been *shown* to be an epicenter of Covid infection, it would have been legitimate to *temporarily* shut it down. But it was not. That's the entire point here.
When these California counties closed the parks and even banned surfing - a healthy and solitary activity in the sea that cannot under any scenario be conjured to transmit Covid - you knew that they were simply insane authoritarians who a free people would and should resist with all means necessary. I cannot begin to express how much I detest them.
The article said the church was violating the law. What law? The insane restrictions were put in place by decree not law. Ruling by decree is call dictatorship. Also the elitists disregarded their own rule. Gavin Newsom went to elite parties unmasked and didn't observe social distancing.
I guess it is OK for the Dem elites to do as they damned well please but the rest of the unwashed rabble, us, have to abide to their unconstitutional mandates. The ever senile Joe issued many of these mandates which were eventually struck down by the courts.
Comrade, you expect the legislature to keep up with all the details necessary to reach our 5-year quotas?! We must push the level of decision-making downward, close to the people, and put it in the hands of party members capable of adapting governance "on the fly," according to the IMPERATIVES of the moment.
I wonder if such a broad sweeping law such as this would stand up in court. For example, where does it stop? Football and skat boarding are detrimental to the participants health. Serious injury and death can happen to the participants. Can the nut cases in California outlaw these two activities because of health issues. Where does it end?
I know about this because I read the Michael Lewis book "the Premonition". It's a three-star, not his typical excellence, but it's interesting stuff. The law holds up and really needs to be the case, kind of like we have to have a cop be the unquestioned authority at the time of an arrest. Then if they overstep we figure that out later.
I think the control on public health officials is that they could lose their job if they overstep and it's a political thing. Their boss is very political and subject to voting.
Actually, if you ask Michael Lewis, it's too political. He makes the case in the book that California suffered because the tough-as-nails no-nonsense blonde heroine of his book, a county public health official who was considered a superstar, then became the No. 2 public health officer for the state rather than the No. 1 only for DEI reasons, and that her boss ended up being useless and in charge at just the wrong time, during the pandemic.
With an air-borne aerosol virus it is extremely hard to show where an individual case came from. The virus literally floats in the air.
That's no excuse for shutting down a church or business and also no excuse for mask mandates or lockdowns. It is a reason the authorities should have been providing honest ADVICE, not mandates, and let the people choose for themselves.
I knew something was very messed up when--instead of falling back on the county-health-department-administered system of quarantine that was used regularly before vaccinations became available in the 20th century--they attempted to quarantine *everyone* (via lockdown).
Yes, instead of isolating the sick and protecting the most vulnerable (elderly in nursing homes), they did the precise opposite - imprisoned and sanctioned the healthy and slaughtered the innocents by introducing active Covid cases into adult care facilities. Cuomo, Murphy, Lamont, Whitmer literally have gotten away with criminally negligent homicide and nobody even notices.
A lot of us notice. We just have no power or authority to do anything about it. That's why these people are working so hard on censorship and propaganda initiatives. I think a few of them know that if the people regain control, they are going to be up against the wall.
Was it not legitimate to tell the church to limit attendees to 100 people during the pandemic? Seems legit since that's exactly what the Supreme Court allowed in the end. But the Church still violated that limit.
County health officials around the country are endowed with tons of power and act on whatever evidence they see fit.
Santa Barbara County's health commissioner once shut down parties at UCSB due to an encephalitis outbreak. The evidence was a slew of college kids with encephalitis. Insisting on more evidence would have been wrongminded. We can seek to modify those powers after the fact, or seek punishment if they are abused, of course!
To clarify, it is true that county health officials in normal times are endowed with broad discretion. In your encephalitis among party kids illustration that worked precisely as it should have - a verifiable outbreak of a well-known illness which warranted an immediate, temporary cessation of activity by the local authority. Obviously it worked to confine the outbreak. That is not what happened with Covid rather Covid was a novel, IOW not well-known, illness that was met with panic and hysteria and local leadership (county health officials) were eschewed in favor of a hastily thrown together triumvirate led by a man who likely funded the creation of the virus. No wonder it was "his worst nightmare". Almost everything the faux leadership suggested has proven to be wrong.
No it was not legitimate. Everything the earthly powers decreed was wrong with the possible exception of social distancing and I think that was suggested, and voluntarily followed, not mandated. That church followed a higher law. Thank God. There are now at least 3000 people out there free of the anxiety, depression, and anger that many others feel after the draconian measures employed. I bet the children are hitting their milestones too. You know the old ones on which we used to rely to Guage childhood development.
Social distancing was certainly mandated, as it describes in the article in the case of this Church violating Santa Clara County's orders on such.
Your argument is that the churchgoers needed to be in groups of 600 to find solace, because groups of 100 wouldn't do. The Supreme Court and I simply disagree.
Maybe. There is a different Supreme Court now. Does it not trouble you that the Church was right in that it was not a center of outbreaks? Does it trouble you that a blind eye was turned to those masses of people gathering to protest the death of George Floyd, many of them screaming at the top of their lungs? I submit that was just a different type of religious fervor.
Yes, you give an extreme example, and that’s entirely the point, it is extreme. What the congregants of the church did was not extreme, and they are proving their case. We must stick to the facts of the matter and avoid the extremes. We can’t legislate in a one-size-fits-all box. People can reason and use good common sense. We must trust that. And, the conclusion and subsequent actions by government against people who they perceive to have little or no common sense is egregiously unjust.
My comment is aimed at people making the argument that this is a clear cut case because the public health is secondary to religious freedom. It is not.
But the burden of proof is (and should be) on the government seeking to infringe. When you allow the government to infringe Constitutionally protected rights on the basis of "might" and "could," you destroy the limits that the Constitution very intentionally placed on the government.
Freedom to exercise religion is an important limit. But does one take a balanced view and recognize that a masking requirement alone might not interrupt that freedom?
There was never even evidence to justify any sort of masking requirement. Masks have been known for a long, long time to have no measurable efficacy against viral infection of any kind yet for what are likely political reasons, they ignored ~130+ years of studies and data to enact it anyway.
A masking requirement absolutely does interrupt that freedom. How I manage risk, fear, reason, trust, mortality, how I relate to the persons standing of their own free will to my left and right, idolatry, holy relics, etc is between me and my God and has nothing the fuck whatsoever to do with Goodwife Kelly Green.
How I manage my religious decisions is not your concern and people like you have gone a long way to fanaticizing people like me: e.g. I once was pretty go along to get along but now I will die, literally die, before I will allow your ilk to control me. You've shown your colors; now look at mine.
This should have more to do with overall freedom than religious freedom. This is the crux of the matter. The state and all those behind it (I choose the word behind rather than within) employ the Trump deplorable mindset to this group of people because they are religious. They use an opposing mindset when handling BLM.
You nailed it. This has everything to do with anti-Christian bigotry and little to do with public health. Where were the government snoops monitoring the massive George Floyd protests for social distancing and mask-wearing? But that was different, right, because that was for "social justice."
Arbitrary laws are unjust, masks were never proven effective, lockdowns were never effective. There was no opportunity to debate these points with the unelected officials who imposed the rules. This was and is bigger than freedom of religion. What is clear is that the majority in this country are willing to give up their freedom because of fear. Take another booster it’s free
I remember when liberals were fond of quoting the adage, "He who would surrender his freedom for his security deserves neither." This was used frequently to criticize the War on Terror. Hmmm, I can't seem to recall hearing that from a liberal lately...
Just to make one small point on lockdowns. Communities with lockdown mandates were not more safe than nearby communities without lockdown mandates. But that is because people self-regulate. Sweden never had lockdown orders, but people were very much more cautious in their behavior. So a lockdown of a community can certainly work (see China) to prevent spread of disease, but a lockdown mandate in a liberal democracy doesn't have specific value when the people are freely already locked down.
Gavin Newsom got some praise (not from me) for being the first Gov to lock down the state - but this happened well after everyone I know had been in self-imposed exile for a week and a half, so to us it was kind of laughable to praise him.
Exactly. Give people factual information and let them choose how to respond. The people in this church chose to congregate and they did not suffer as a result.
If we don't have religious freedom, all of our other freedoms will go by the wayside. The Declaration of Independence says our freedoms come from the Creator, not from government. If we start to believe our freedoms come from government, then we are lost because, as we found over the past 3 years, governments are capricious. Since our freedoms come from God, they are inalienable. That is why we must protect freedom of religion. If we don't all is lost.
The article says the church followed COVID restrictions until May 2020. Do you remember millions of people ignoring COVID restrictions in May 2020? I do. Public health quickly took a back seat then. Outrage against religion seems misplaced.
Again you have missed the point. The Church and its congregation did not know the outcome of Covid anymore than did the State. Rather the Church and its congregation understood there are things worse than dying.
So are you arguing, then, that the freedom of religion is absolute and that it trumps public health concerns? because this is why I am using the Ebola example to try to demonstrate that there are limits. It's not very helpful to claim there are no limits only because you believe the state overstepped in this case and not because you actually believe there are no limits.
The Ebola example is pure straw man. It’s so stupid to say “well, if the facts had been completely different then my set of responses would have been justified.” You never let facts and observable outcomes get in the way of your policy preferences.
Public health is precisely subordinate to religious freedom. I'm an atheist, a non-believer. But I get what spirituality does for humans. You obviously do not. You are in no position to direct the faith and practice of faith by others.
Actually, it IS secondary, because the constitution clearly states that free practice of religion cannot be impinged. However, the public interest in protecting public health is legitimate and not far behind.
I see it boil down to, if there was a highly deadly flesh eating bacteria transferred by skin contact, the right to go to church still can't be impinged, but public health officials can certainly ban human to human contact in that setting.
What you don't seem to grasp is that religious freedom is impinged by persons such as yourself smugly claiming the right to set conditions for a religious community that does not include you. "Look how balanced and rational and magnanimous I am. I'll allow you to go to your little church but here is a list of what you can and can't do inside it." As we say here in Texas, bless your heart.
It doesn't matter how well you regard your own judgement: you still don't get to insert yourself into how other people choose to gather and worship. You can imagine up Very Scary Things all day long and yet not a one of them grants you the authority to interfere with the rights of others to practice their faiths within their own communities. It's not for you to decide whether and which covid mitigations are disruptive or offensive to others' religious observance.
Well, I'm not from Texas, where I'm from we just say f u to your face when we mean f u. We don't play games about it. Rudeness is rudeness whatever state you're from, and if you could be more civil, I'd appreciate it.
Whatever you think, the Supreme Court said different.
Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas agreed with you. The other six agreed with me, including Kavanaugh and Barrett, so maybe you can bless their hearts?
The Church correctly fought for its rights. Then those rights were established as ability to congregate in groups of up to 100. As Alan said it's about balance. Personally, i feel right to freely practice religion is absolute and enshrined. But that is not a right to no mask and it is not a right to gather 600 at a time when Supreme Court says limit to 100.
This is endlessly fascinating if you look into the series of Supreme Court decisions. I had no idea (probably largely because, though I care about the issue, while these things were happening I also was in the middle of dealing with a crazy pandemic-stricken world).
Notes on the legal cases:
SC decided that New York could NOT make limitations to as low as 25 people for religious gatherings.
SC *allowed* bans on singing and chanting
SC at first declined to overturn lower court rulings, but then later did and found that full bans were not ok, but limitations to about 20-25% of capacity and 100 people were ok if in line with what other public spaces were being limited to
I am 10 min in here and this is hours of work, so I could be off on a lot.
But one very interesting part of the last item there is that there was a time when full bans were actually allowed after being appealed to the SC. That has implications for this matter. I don't agree with that and I'm happy that there is no full ban allowed now, but I do agree with having reasonable limitations and I think by allowing limits at 100 people the SC found a good balance.
This is the part that actually scares me. Courts are beginning to make decisions that are not theirs to make. You can be happy when they rule for your side, but that isn't always the case.
What does a judge know about infectious diseases? Common pregnancy complications? Or any other medical issue?
Even outside of the medical realm, politically tough decisions are being forced on courts when they should be made by Congress.
The legislators of California would happily fully restrict religious worship and ban it completely at their whim when there is a pandemic. The Court stepped in and said they could not do that. Seems like a net good to me.
Hamilton, F. 78: "But it is not with a view to infractions of the Constitution only, that the independence of the judges may be an essential safeguard against the effects of occasional ill humors in the society. These sometimes extend no farther than to the injury of the private rights of particular classes of citizens, by unjust and partial laws. Here also the firmness of the judicial magistracy is of vast importance in mitigating the severity and confining the operation of such laws. It not only serves to moderate the immediate mischiefs of those which may have been passed, but it operates as a check upon the legislative body in passing them; who, perceiving that obstacles to the success of iniquitous intention are to be expected from the scruples of the courts, are in a manner compelled, by the very motives of the injustice they meditate, to qualify their attempts. This is a circumstance calculated to have more influence upon the character of our governments, than but few may be aware of. The benefits of the integrity and moderation of the judiciary have already been felt in more States than one; and though they may have displeased those whose sinister expectations they may have disappointed, they must have commanded the esteem and applause of all the virtuous and disinterested. Considerate men, of every description, ought to prize whatever will tend to beget or fortify that temper in the courts: as no man can be sure that he may not be to-morrow the victim of a spirit of injustice, by which he may be a gainer to-day. And every man must now feel, that the inevitable tendency of such a spirit is to sap the foundations of public and private confidence, and to introduce in its stead universal distrust and distress."
The problem is Churchgoers and not-churchgoers have a right to impartial, truthful, and balanced information. There is no doubt that the "public health officials" have destroyed my faith in them by suppressing information. Thus, they forfeit the right to make decisions over my life, and more importantly, my son with Autism's life.
This has been going for 20+ years. There is not one "public health official" who can answer the question, "Can you show me a study on the CUMULATIVE effect of all the vaccines introduced to the CDC's Childhood Vaccine Schedule since the 1986 Vaccine Act." Big Pharma does not want this in any way to be done, so it has never been done.
My suggestions for a path forward are at the end of my very long pinned article, and for the record, I will say a prayer today for Pastor Mike:
But they don't "forfeit the right". They never do. They just move on to their next screw-up, their next botch, their next f**k-up. Never held to account, never with their feet held to the fire.
There's no "probably" about them going too far. The whole thing was willfully and criminally incompetent from the outset.
The people in the church understood there were risks, and made decisions as free human beings that their faith was more important, if it came to that, than their lives. They have that right in this country, in my view.
I think people would instinctively isolate themselves if something like Ebola came around. In this case you run into the problem that the State couldn't and still can't back up any of it's restrictions with actual science. Covid wasn't nearly as deadly as the claims, the usefulness of social distancing is just made up, and we already had 40 years of studies on masks that found no evidence that they worked either. I think the church leaders and parishioners were doing what many of us were already doing in other parts of the country. They weighed the evidence and decided it was more important to live normally.
In hindsight? No. A lot of us knew the restrictions were going too far at the time. Covid by all accounts just wasn’t a threat to the general public. The science was clear on that from the beginning. When was the great Barrington declaration written? Those scientists knew, and so did those of us who listened to them.
IMO if there is a deadly virus going around the government’s role is to share all the information they can, and make recommendations. That’s it.
Adults should be able to choose how they move through the world. We don’t need a nanny state to babysit us.
Not in the very beginning, though. In the very beginning (February), the virus was pretty deadly and spreading fast, so I can understand the initial guidance, and we all responded in kind immediately. We listened and we acted responsibly. That would have continued, I believe, had we not been treated so condescendingly. What ensued was an inexcusable disaster corrupted by politics and hubris. The people were written out of the equation for decision-making because we were rendered incapably of doing so. That's not what government was designed to be.
John Ioannidis, the top epidemiologist in the world by any measure, wrote this article in Stat on March 17, 2020. I printed 2 copies out for my kids that day. I posted it below.
Go look up his credentials. He is one of the 5 most cited scientists on the planet. The actual experts were saying what has been proven to be true from the very beginning. The Italian data showed the same, with 150,000+ tracked cases, that was published by the first week of April 2020. YOU may not have known, but reality was knowable. The millions of us reading actual experts and watching the models completely fail within 3 days by comparing them to the public health charts knew because it was knowable. It takes a 4th grade math education, at best, to read bar charts. It takes looking up “size of coronavirus aerosol” and “size particle (insert your mask type) filters” to see if a mask could even physically work if properly fit (hint, they can’t, not even n95s).
This crap of “we didn’t know” is such bs. Some people didn’t know because they like being lied to by legacy media and power hungry government stooges, not because it wasn’t knowable. It’s not my job, and it certainly isn’t the job of my children, to hide in the basement for any reason to coddle those who are too close minded to stop listening to the people who have been lying to them daily for at least the last 2 decades (the entirety of my adult life). I don’t understand why so many enjoy being lied to by these people, but nobody gets off the hook with claims of ignorance when that ignorance was a choice to be moved by lying propagandists rather than replicated observable outcomes. Life is not safe and it isn’t risk free but for the vast majority a respiratory virus is just a simple slightly uncomfortable unavoidable part of life.
Yes! NC Mom for the win! Best comment in this thread by far. I remember reading that piece and forwarding to to friends who wouldn’t even read it. Dark times
This was great to read NCmom! Well done you. Feb 2020 I was in Northern Ireland preparing to come home to NYC. I researched and shopped masks, concerned about air and subway travel, grabbed a few N95s (including some respirators we never used) for the family, as I was a little spooked. I remember clearly the flip flop on whether masks were good or bad, wear them, don't wear them, and absolutely remember the guidance that wearing them could actually pull and trap the aerosol droplets into your mask making things worse. Medical professionals have been wearing N95s for eons; they didn't know definitively how they would work in this case? It was insane. People have short memories, and then craft the past as they would prefer to remember it. Thanks for this information and the article. I will read it now.
I get being spooked. It’s human. The actual data guided my choices when I got spooked, and I was absolutely shocked how few knew or cared about the actual data and relative risk. I hold zero animosity for anyone being human and getting scared. We all make mistakes. I have zero patients for those unwilling to admit that they made mistakes. I can’t stand the “well, if the facts had been different I would have been right” arguments from the Covidians who cling to that absurd logic to this day. Literally anything can be justified if actual facts are disregarded in favor of completely imaginary ones.
I wrote an email to our governor around April 18, 2020 pointing out we actually flattened our healthcare system, children, and the economy. So few remember what happened. I kept it printed out so I will never forget. My kids will never forget.
About a week before April 1, 2020 Roy Cooper ordered a statewide lockdown to begin April 1. Schools had been shut since March 17th. An effective lockdown had been in place since the third week of March.
The models published in all the major newspapers in NC around March 27, 2020, which you now have to pull off way back machine because they have changed the imbedded models but not the words of the articles, claimed by April 17, 2020 the hospitals in NC would be overwhelmed with 30,000-40,000 Covid patients. This was published after the effective lockdown had begun and official lockdown start was announced for April 1st. The models claimed this would happen EVEN WITH the lockdown, and near perfect compliance. These people were all supposedly already infected.
How many hospitalized Covid patients were there April 17, 2020 in the state of NC? Fewer than 800. Total. In the entire state. In a state of 16 million. We didn’t break 1,000 until around May and all those people got sick anyway during the lockdown.
It took maybe 5 minutes a day to pull up the NC Covid dashboard and compare the data to the widely published “model.” It was evident it would fail by day 3. I waited until the projected to peak to see just how far off it was.
Covid patients in NC hospitals have never even reached 25% of that projection. Never at any point, and our state gave up on any serious restrictions before the more lethal Delta wave hit here. By September there were some capacity restrictions, but in practice only urban public schools remained closed. Churches were open with zero restrictions by around mid May here - Cooper is a lawyer and knew NC has very strong religious protections. He didn’t even fight it once the first lawsuit came. Restaurants,entertainment facilities, all private schools, most charter schools, kids camps, businesses, and all stores were opened by the end of August (with most opening June/ July). My country club never closed. My kids’ school reopened for its regular summer camps June 1st. Mask mandates didn’t hit here until urban public schools started reopening part time around November.
Simply checking the observation against the “projection” in the early days took less than 5 minutes a day, and my then 6 year old could go through the process. It was not complicated. Everyone who could read and use a computer could do this. Every so called journalist in this country was capable of it. Nearly every adult and the majority of children who could read could simply check the public data.
Yet so few did, and when those of us who did tried to share with others, hoping and praying to inspire curiosity , we were called murders, monsters, grandma killers, terrorists, extremists, criminals, people called on the government to remove our children, hotlines were set up to tattle on us. I knew by the end of April exactly how the Holocaust had happened. It shook me to my core. It still does.
I didn’t throw a fit over the initial shutdown. I had wiser friends who knew it wouldn’t be just 2 weeks that did, and I have since told them many times they were right and I was wrong. I was curious. I was content to sit home a couple weeks with my husband and kids. I was curious because the data never matched the hysteria so I wanted to know more. I was wrong to accept the initial shutdown and foolish. I will own that because I think owning my mistakes is how I don’t repeat them. I will never comply with insanity again.
By May I was livid. There was no excuse for any adult who felt like having an opinion to ignore the actual data. By June we were vacationing in Hilton Head with our kids and family friends where masks, social distancing, and insanity weren’t a thing. As humans we all make mistakes, but we have a responsibility to be informed for ourselves. Failure to do so results in tragedy and in this case is how we let a generation of poor and middle class kids get destroyed, to say nothing of letting the old die cruel and inhumane deaths alone and afraid, the businesses lost, the communities ripped apart, the deaths of despair, the died suddenly, the destruction of our economy, the societal instability, the end of scientific debate, the capture of educational institutions, the careers destroyed.
There were many days, particularly after we had traveled, which was often, that I was open with my parents that I would prefer them not pick the kids up from school. My kids went back to their elite private school in person and on time mid August 2020. My dad had cabin fever. Most of their friends were hiding. They’d been forced to work from home. My dad heard my request, promptly discarded it, left earlier than I could and called to tell me he was going to pick the kids up, he’d get there first, and the kids will get in his car because they like him. I was annoyed, but laughed. It was all true. The man turned 18 fighting in combat in Vietnam. Who the hell was I to tell him what to do? The man grew up in an abusive, alcoholic, impoverished home. He’s been working for pay since he was 5. He gave my brother and I and my mom a great life and is one of the most loving humans I have ever met. Who the hell am I to “demand” he not see his grandchildren? I could give him my opinion, and he could disregard it. Who the hell am I to tell him what to do after he has spent more than 7 decades of being a contributing member of society? That’s not my place, and I’m the one who will be by my parents’ bedside whenever they do get sick and die. I will be holding their hand. I will be coordinating their treatment. I will be broken-hearted. If I have no business telling them what to do, and what risks of illness they are “allowed” to take, absolutely no one else has that right.
That applies to everyone. No one has a right to tell contributing, law abiding people they are prohibited from participation in life so some hysterical stranger can get some insane sense of faux safety. No one has a right to rob children of their healthy development so adults that have no interest in their lives can feel safer. No one, especially not government, had a right to sentence the entire population to months, in some places years, of house arrest. Breathing is not a crime.
I disagree. The diamond princess quarantine happened very early, and the data coming out of that was very clear that only the most frail were in danger. I know because I read analysis of the data from independent journalists. The information was out there but it was suppressed and the media went with the super deadly fast spreading story, which was false.
I hope in the future we will all be more skeptical of the media, especially when they’re telling us to be afraid.
I was in Europe at that exact time and that just isn't so. Italy will tell you it was pretty deadly and not only to the old and infirm. An 80-yr old priest died giving his respirator to a young adult.
An 80-year old priest isn't the best example of a young person dying.
The fact remains that the regular seasonal flu is more deadly to young people. That's been established. Did some healthy people die of Covid? Yes. Was it a significant risk to them? No.
"Probably went too far"? You're fucking kidding me - the ChiCom Plandemic was/is the biggest single grab of civil liberties ever foisted upon a supposedly FREE society.
And boobs like Alan Miles are the same as guys in Germany who nodded when the powers said Jews were a threat. The state is supreme, so anything opposing it is against i9t and must be corralled or destroyed.
But it wasn’t Ebola - and health authorities knew it. They knew it didn’t seriously threaten younger healthy people before it even got here. The crackdowns on churches were an exercise in raw power - they were about crushing dissent - they had very little to do with health policy.
Exactly. Nothing like ebola. That is the point. We need nuanced reactions, not treating the flu like ebola.
For the left, it's one size fits all. This is the problem with making everything a federal issue.
They claim to value diversity but what they really want is monoculture. They want us all to be like California, ostensibly because we are too dumb to know how good it is in California. Sorry, but I've been there.
Honeybees have to be shipped in to pollenate California's monpculture crops. Bees cannot survive in an area with one species of plant that provides pollen and nectar for only a week or two.
Diversity is nature's way of preventing extinction. Monoculture is dangerous.
No, no, and no. Emphatically no. Individuals have the right to make their own risk assessments.
Your Ebola example is just a straw man. Are you aware that Ebola never really made it to the US. One or two cases at most. Did not spread. Why is that when Covid spreads like, well like air?
You are just a dupe who falls for whatever fear the totalitarians spread. Then you spread it.
If it were Ebola we wouldn't be having this conversation. The weapon is the infringement on the rights of the Republics citizens while claiming "reason", employing police state tactics and using the opportunity to criminalize citizenship. The criminal DNC/CCP/IMF/WEF juggernaut has conspired to hold the American Constitutional Republic and her citizens in thrall to a lie for over a decade. The '08 crash, Russia Gate, Covid, the riot's, J/6, and the Ukraine have all been exploited opportunities to reduce the American national dialogue to a psyop while criminal financiers looted American lives and treasure. Again: Mass arrests for thought and speech crime across Europe and the expansion of euthanasia laws in Europe and Canada beyond anything needed to deal with the terminally ill. Criminal finance wants the American Constitutional Republic gone.
It’s up to the individual to decide what level of risk they want to take. If one is frightened then by all means stay home. But, good grief, give me Liberty or give me death. We have become a society full of fear and anxiety. How tragic.
We as free people have the right to make decisions based upon what we believe is the risk vs reward of a situation. As we are now finding out after the fact is the damage done to the mental health and education of children, the rise in the rate of drug deaths due to isolation, the lack of evidence that social distancing or masking were effective strategies. I could go on and on. Not to mention the hypocrisy of BLM protest being great but you can’t go to church. This case is not compelling in hindsight. We as citizen’s must take a much more jaundice view of mandates from so called experts when they attempt to limit our freedoms.
I am curious whether you believe that if I, a free person, have been exposed to Ebola but feel fine, then I'm ok to decide I'm going to board a plane or whether public health authorities have the power to quarantine me against my will. I'm really just trying to understand if you would give public health authorities no powers whatsoever.
The hypothetical here is that I have been exposed to Ebola but am not feeling sick. I’d really appreciate an answer - I know the church case is different - because I’m trying to understand if you think there are any circumstances where public health authorities can curtail my civil liberties
You've got Ebola on the brain. Besides it being an utterly stupid straw man, it is meaningless. Gandalf just responded and you are not realistic. As many others here have written.
You see, junior, Ebola doesn't have "asymptomatic" infections. You get it, you get very ill, just keel over in no time. No walking around, no getting on airplanes. Covid does have asymptomatic infection. And Covid has very high transmissibility rates but low fatality rates. And now you posit a situation involving a single "exposed" person. What this discussion is about is mass shutdowns of society - education, commerce, life itself. By unelected bureaucrats, many with no real expertise (like the Randi Weingarten's of the Left) but drunk on their purported power. Barring a single person who has high infection risk is entirely different than what the commissars of government did with Covid. Apples and oranges.
You aren't "appreciat[ing] and answer". You are beating your rented mule of an Ebola straw man insisting that someone agree with you from which you can posit justification of Covid lockdowns. You tried with religion. No. Bam! You tried with Free Speech. No. Bam! You are confused and hopelessly lost. Suggest you sleep on this and maybe tomorrow you'll think better.
These were new measures far too extreme for the type of threat. We put 2 years of our children's education beneath aging boomers. As a grandparent I am appalled. I would rather die than sacrifice the future generation
It is a blank and white freedom of religion issue. Using ridiculous straw man arguments about human sacrifice, or faux claims of “in hindsight” when everyone with a brain knew the risk profile by the first week of April 2020, wouldn’t be necessary if there were ever legitimacy to your claim. We have freedom of association as part of our freedom of religion. “Gathering” humans together, of their own free will, is not human sacrifice.
No. I do not concede that. I also note that this happened in the much lauded Silicon Valley, which I am starting to perceive as a den of iniquity. God bless Pastor Mike and his flock. They are truly doing the Lord's work. As for your last statement you completely overlook the fact, read that again, fact, that those who would be our earthly overlords got almost everything wrong.
In response to your question I think there is a reasonableness test that includes the duration of the adverse event and what is known. Ebola of course is deadly for most of those that get the disease and I think short term limits would be appropriate in both cases. I would also assume that public health official wouldn’t have different standards for BLM riot and church attendance. Also since hospitalization and death were mostly limited to the elderly and obese an individual had a better grasp of deducing their actual risk of significant consequences to themselves and their social circle
You wrote ‘The "science" is settled and cannot be questioned.’ I understand that you were mocking the authorities. I would have stressed it a little differently: what's been said over and over again is “THE science.” There is no such thing as ~the~ science, as used here. One can talk about the science of physics or chemistry or biology, but the way Fauci, Collins and the rest have used the term turns science into dogma. Dogma is absolutely antithetical to any form of science.
To the degree that anyone tries to force a viewpoint on people, he’s a dictator, not a scientist.
There was a case I read about awhile back here in Washington State that, while a small amount by comparison, has some bearing on the way the State approaches their power to levy fines. The Seattle metropolitan area has a number of pay-per-use driving lanes on the federal taxpayer paid "freeways". They can be pretty expensive per mile during commuter hours during which time they become effectively "elitist lanes". They have a high-tech RFID tag charging system backed up by cameras for license plates if you drive in one of these lanes without the tag. They work pretty well at charging to the owner of the vehicle via the cameras. But not perfectly. There was a guy in Texas somewhere who received a bill from the State of Washington for a few hundred dollars for driving in these toll lanes. Only he'd never been in Washington. Nor had his vehicle. He assumed it was, of course, a mistake and threw it away, figuring they'd soon straighten it out and in any event couldn't reach him. He kept getting bills every month - additional charges and then fines on the unpaid past charges. He just kept throwing them away. After several years. They came after him through the courts. I don't recall exactly how but suddenly he had to deal with it. He went to court arguing that since it was their mistakenly identifying his vehicle he couldn't be held liable. The judge told him that he should have dealt with it then, and since he hadn't he was obliged to pay half of it. He had to pay several thousand dollars to clear it up. I know this is not the same thing, but it's a cousin of it.
For what it's worth, I would prefer it if churches did not exist at all, but I am in favor of the freedom of people to have them if that's what they want.
And, pertinently, to attend them, to voluntarily engage in whatever services they like, even if public health authorities or some other government body would prefer they didn't.
The selectivity of Covid "enforcement" demonstrated the Left's totalitarian predilections very clearly. Walmart could be open, but small businesses could not. In some areas, certain items (such as gardening supplies) were forbidden to be purchased, even though the store was allowed to be open. Churches could not hold services, even if they were held outdoors, with parishioners sitting in their own socially-distanced cars in the parking lot.
What was and wasn't allowed tracked very closely with Leftist ideologies. That should have been a very large red flag. But some still refuse to see it (largely the types who still drive around masked in their own cars).
The problem I have with this line of reasoning is that I don't believe it would have existed if masks and sheltering in place hadn't been politicized early on.
Masks and sheltering in place only happened because of politics. It was a purely political move. There was never any actual data to justify either. None. John Ioannidis is one of the top epidemiologists on the planet (long before Covid). I printed out his article from Stat, posted below, twice for my kids March 17, 2020. Go look up the March 2020 models. They failed completely within 3 days.
When you combine California threatening to cut off the electricity of churches with the CDC voting unanimously to recommend the vaccine for 2-year-olds, it really could not be more clear that modern Democrats are just high-functioning psychopaths………..or low-functioning.
You could add in mutilating children, gender by whim, opening our borders to hordes of illiterates, grifters and terrorists, basing the electric grid on pinwheels and panels, borrowing and spending and expecting no blowback........People who held such beliefs used to be institutionalized. Now they are lionized. Lunacy.
“First, in August 2020, another church next door gave the state permission to let enforcement officers spy on Calvary’s faithful through a chain-link fence on its property”
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It’s hard to get people to understand this because the problem with fascism is that real fascism *has* been tried so when there aren’t tall black boots and fiery balcony speeches people think
“Oh this isn’t fascism they aren’t marching with their legs up high.”
The real problem is that ideally you would want to stop the Nazis *before* they build the camps, but the pre-camps phase we are currently in is not easily recognized as Nazism by most people. Oh well. Just buy some extra food and water because they will turn off your bank and utilities with a Cheshire grin.
I agree Kevin. I visited the document center in Nuremberg to better understand how such a parasite could take over a Democratic Republic with numerous safeguards. The Nazis had honest buy in from many people and their popularity, proclivity to lie, and use violence were all tools to increase power. I see a lot of similarities today. Different clothes, different lies. Hell aspects of wokeism are often antisemitic too.
How can this fly with people who are educated on these historical issues?
"The medical profession has wrestled with the significance of the Doctors Trial. For instance, to observe its 50th anniversary, the British Medical Journal printed a special issue (free downloads here). The lead article “War crimes and medical science” warned that the Nazi problems were “not unique to one place or time, and could happen here” and the trial “left us with a legacy we still shrink from confronting.” It pointed to contemporary problems in American medicine and warned “there will always be imperatives that threaten the professional values we profess to hold so dear” and “the profession of medicine carries within it the seeds of its own destruction.” Yes."
I have yet to see who was behind the decision to keep people out of churches, but say we were "allowed" to go to Home Depot and Target. As if they were Covid free... and stocked items hadn't been touched by everyone. And don't get me started on the handgun used daily by people for self checkout. A small bookstore and my hair dresser were shut down due to imminent death from Covid. Home Depot was Covid free! And the masses got in line and went along with it... which was actually the most troubling.
No one will be held accountable. They won't ever apologize.
Americans in 1775 revolted in response to far less draconian and impactful insults. Yet most Americans simply took it lying down. Why? What has changed that has made us so soft, compliant and feckless?
Hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times - and so the cycle continues with the only question being “how hard will the times be before stronger men rise up?”
Many polls suggest Brandon might actually win again despite blowing up the country, inching towards a nuclear WW III, and reckless government spending causing inflation that is crushing the bottom 70%.
Unless something changes, it will get much worse before it gets better.
Just look at CA - they keep electing idiots who coddle criminals, tax success, and encourage drug addiction and adolescent sex (hey you can abort up to 42 weeks even if post birth). All while CA has a literacy rate around 75% (WV is 90% for comparison), people literally 💩 in the streets, and taxes reallocate wealth to Newsome cronies faster than the coffers of Ukrainian oligarchs.
Yet we keep doing it - endless wars, more centralization of unaccountable power, higher taxes for wasteful government pet projects, more insanity thrust on poor and middle class children in public and woke private schools, endless failure justified by claiming mediocre is “better” because it’s “inclusive.”
"To go to a church where you could see people smiling and have a conversation took away the hopelessness."
Well, see, that's that problem. If you have hope then you won't feel the need to abdigate your rights and freedom in order for Big Brother to save you. We just can't have that! Stay inside and go insane online instead of going to church, fer yer health!
"the county noted that it is proud of its public health orders, which resulted 'in one of the lowest death rates of any major county in the United States.'" Lowest death rates... from covid... maybe. What about increases in unemployment, drug/alcohol abuse and addiction, domestic violence, and general always-online-induced hysteria?
They have no proof for any of their claims. Not the efficacy of lockdowns. Or masks. Or vaccines. Or that the vaccines are harmless. Or that repurposed drugs were ineffective. All they had was the power of the state, a sufficient number of quislings and a very heavy hand.
It is supremely ironic that California has morphed from one of the most entrepreneurial, creative states to one of the most egregiously authoritarian. And they keep voting for more of the same. How is anyone better off under such a stifling regime?
They are also the land of the illiterate. For all the ego CA has one of the lowest literacy rates - around 75% compared to WV at 90%; highest levels of economic inequality, highest rate of homelessness, lowest rates of home ownership, bottom half for high school graduation rates, middle of the pack for college educated rates. The ego is hysterical because it’s not based in reality.
Nice to meet you NCmom! Wow, and yes, California is the poster child for the "new Elite" corrupting the culture. They hide behind social justice but accomplish exactly the opposite, Kardashian style- Instagram optics, Twitter no substance, lip service to the downtrodden they so desperately want to help while creating the largest class of homeless people and mentally ill on the streets to ever rival Reagonomics. History will bear all that out. (Mind you I'm not not affiliated with any political party).
The natural beauty and pleasant weather and good government (in the 60's-80's) attracted lots of people to California. Unfortunately, these were the wrong kind of people. They thought they could live off the fat of the land and impose all sorts of schemes on the population that make them feel good and think they are good, i.e. virtue signal.
Look out Texas and Florida, these morons are on their way.
Are they really voting? 😉 In Canada our elections are now being exposed as being influenced by China. Communists there or Democrat liberals here - all the same. Power for them - compliance for us. The left are ruthless and we all need to wake up fast and get off our asses and fight back.
Agree! One thing to pay taxes and have a community that has good schools, good public transportation, well maintained roads, a responsive police force, and other quality of living factors versus living in a community where the quality of living is going down while the taxes are going up.
How does California keep voting for leftist regimes? Because when you look at a map, CA is almost all red. CA is a state of oil, agriculture, and hard workers who are middle class. So what happened...
It started with gerrymandering! It continues with the laws that allow primaries to be a run off not between parties but against top vote getters. It has roots in counties so huge that the urban vote totally swamps the suburban and rural vote. There was a point where some how the real balance and real representation was taken away and voters' voices were lost. Eastern Oregon wants to join Idaho for similar reasons. (edited when Sharon caught my directional mistake...it is eastern oregon seeking to leave and not western as I original wrote)
Gerrymandering is by no means unique to blue states--look at Nashville being split in half so that both halves are now in red districts vs. being together as a blue district.
Personally, I think the House of Representatives should be elected statewide. Everyone votes for three (or whatever) and the top vote getters become the representatives. That way groups excluded by gerrymandering could band together and get representation.
I sometimes think we'd have better representatives if they were chosen completely at random for two years of service. Sure, you'd get an occasional left or right wing crank but you'd also avoid big donors paying millions of dollars to install someone in a job that pays $170K.
Gerrymandering is not unique, but certain states have it down to a very fine art. Of course, all done by "independent" committees whose members were selected by the party in power.
I did not see the word "snitches" in this piece but it sure did come to.mind. Maybe a silver lining from the past three years is that snitching is now socially acceptable on the left ( sarcasm intended as I have been schooled in the past on these posts and others to make that clear!). Let us not forget that there were thousands if not millions of our fellow citizens who wanted to actually put non vaxxed people in JAIL ( no sarcasm as that is a fact).
All leftist governments love snitches. Read the tale of Pavlik Morozov who ratted out his own father to Stalin's ghouls. Little Pavlik got his "just desserts." A worthy fate for all who prostrate themselves to the state.
Thank toxic feminism (now the D.E.I. commissariat) for the rise of the "anonymous" informer and the first assaults on trial and due process. We've all watched the life destroying trial by accusation and the rise of the career devastating rumor mill whisperers as they've worked their tyranny and destruction.
Eeeeeeeesssshhhh, Mike R. I wish you didn't invoke toxic feminism as a primary culprit here. Snitching started waayyyyy way way before that, mostly against women. Snitching is a trait of the weak.
Men who are bad for women are also bad for other men. The same is true of women. The anonymous student/co-worker complaint, whisper campaign, shunning, pile-on, and career/reputation destruction based on often vague emotional discomfort and claimed victimhood began as a feminist ploy on the university campus and evolved into D.E.I. "wokedom". There was/is a toxic active anti-male/anti-family element at play in feminist politics. However not all feminist's are bad.
Being painted with the broad brush of toxicity when you're trying to be the best human you can be hurts doesn't it.
“The Christians of Calvary Chapel argue it’s their constitutional right to weigh the physical risks of Covid-19 against the mental and spiritual risks of missing church.”
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No. They have constitutional right regardless of whether or not they are weighing risks to ‘public health’, which is a fake discipline and an intentionally vague term designed to facilitate fascism.
This. I wish people would read the Constitution, which codifies inalienable, natural-born rights. (Rights not granted *by* the government, but protected by it.)
Equally important, rights not explicitly granted to the government are reserved to "the people." And if the government - including its courts - are violating the Constitution, the people have the absolute right to throttle that government.
But you have to have people willing to defend the Constitution and fight and die for it.
I've mentioned this before but when CT Governor Lamont announced his diktat against gatherings of 5 or more people, I was incensed that not one legislator of either party rose up. I sued him personally - and alone - in Federal court. I believe I would have won because he claimed his orders were based on CDC guidance but even the CDC's idiotic rule was 10 people. More to the point - how many people joined or supported my lawsuit?
No one gave corporations, tech and the surveillance state the right to commodify, surveil and interfere with American lives and liberty. They took it. In all fascist regimes people are no more than managed livestock. Can we see Auschwitz any other way? Slavers, exploited labor, exploited natural resources, unaccountable criminal conspiracy, looting, torture, rendition, assassination and the pathological willingness to lie and distort the truth is all standing at the front door.
The fallacy of your argument lies in the statistics that show there was virtually no difference in the death rates per million between states that rabidly followed the draconian protocols and those that did not. We now know that these protocols, like masking, quarantine, etc., had zero effect, and that natural immunity is better than the immunity (if any) provided by the vaccines. The virus would have been self contained if we had simply protected the vulnerable (aged, immune compromised, chronically ill) and let everyone else go about their business without restriction. The Great Barrington Declaration laid this all out clearly early on, but was ignored and shunned by those in charge. But my greatest concern is that we, the people, allowed our rights and lives to be trampled on with very little resistance.
No, the fallacy of his argument is ignorance of (or disdain for) the First Amendment, which makes no exception for pandemics or public health situations. Period. The government massively over-reached, many people went along with it, but that does not make it acceptable, constitutional, or legal.
If I took you to the basement of an insane asylum and introduced you a little man who thought he was Napoleon Bonaparte how long would you spend trying to convince him he wasn't?
I can pick any topic I like. Then, claim myself a champion of "the cause", financially profit off the struggle, justify the violation of human conscience as the necessary moral equivalent of war, and denounce all who oppose me as evil. It is the realm of poseurs and sycophants. Well paid poseurs and sycophants. I weaponize and use reason against the reasonable as a means of looting and pushing my own agenda forward at the expense of reason itself. My megalomania and narcissism disempowers you and your reality while allowing me to expand my own. If I can get the DNC, Soros, Billy Gates or the IMF to fund me my career is set.
Truth speaker's yep always. But (my opinion) we need a return to the only legitimate center ground from which to view the chaos surrounding us. That is, as an active citizen of the American Constitutional Republic.
Actually Sweden and Florida are two places that did it right. Minimal intervention in people's lives, no serious economic damage, kids went to school throughout and are not now 2-3 years behind, and yet their statistical death rates were about the same as the places with draconian policies. The Florida death rate is only slightly higher than the New York death rate. As for Sweden, the initial death rates in early 2020 were higher than their Nordic neighbors, but in comparison with the rest of Europe, Sweden came through the pandemic relatively well and is among the countries with the lowest excess mortality during the period 2020–2021. Their most recent medical commission review reported "In the light of current knowledge … the Commission is not convinced that extended or recurring mandatory lockdowns, as introduced in other countries, are a necessary element in the response to a new, serious epidemic outbreak." The most current studies show that natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity and that masking makes absolutely no difference in the virus transmission rate (which studies for the past 40 years had already validated). I put my absolute trust in real scientists, like all that signed the Great Barrington Resolution, which essentially advised the U.S. to implement a policy similar to that of Sweden. "Trusting scientists" who either knowingly spewed misinformation disguised as fact, or ignored contrary opinions by other doctors and scientists, often those far more reputable than themselves, along with the power grab by politicians, and the collusion of the main stream and social media, is what got us into this deplorable situation. In the next edition of the book "Chicken Little," the chicken will likely be wearing a mask while claiming "the sky is falling," and we will all be eaten by the fox.
You can’t possibly still believe the steaming pile of garbage that was forced fed to thee masses in order to protect and enrich the elite.
Every day there are more revelations and admissions that the authoritarian crackdown was all a complete farce.
Willingly continue to submit to the distortion if you wish, but the rest of us clearly understand we were duped. Lied to, damaged in hundreds of crucial ways, even killed by the authorities and their personal greed for money and power.
That study was funded by the Commonwealth Fund, which is a well-known Democrat social policy operation. It's president, David Blumenthal, was an Obama political appointee. Those facts do not automatically discredit the findings of the study, but they certainly cast a shadow.
Because often the groups funding these kinds of "studies" are anticipating an outcome. Commonwealth Fund contributing to a study that yields a result aligned to their advocacy goals is unsurprising. Yale is "very Republican?" Can you back that up?
Okay for hundreds of people to freely roam through Costco, Walmart, Home Depot, Target, Lowe’s, etc on the hour every day though. Okay for thousands to march shoulder to shoulder in the streets for months in 2020. Pick and choose your ‘public health’ and then tell us we’re ‘being political’ when we point out the arbitrariness and the inconsistencies. Liquor stores, strip clubs are germ free and safe. Movie crew eating areas on picnic benches crowded together, under a tent. I’ve seen that too. What pathetic nonsense. People will believe anything.
But answer the question: why were rules unequally applied? Why did Hollywood and BLM get exceptions? When you answer that we can talk about trust. All credibility is lost precisely because “the science” was politically compromised.
And this is where we part ways. I’d rather be free than operate under the guise of someone else’s definition of “safety”; turns out the vaccine had a lot of “misinformation” a round what it does and does not do. I also did my research, pushed back against all unfounded safety protocols, and here we are in the same place, following our own personal choices. That’s the entire point.
This piece makes my blood boil, especially after seeing Gavin Newsom taking his child to private school while claiming it was too dangerous to open public schools and closing restaurants while allowing movie caterers to operate freely. Then there was the French Laundry. It was and is obvious that these restrictions were selectively applied and backed by sketchy science. Moreover, the length of time involved, the lack of reporting on other countries with different policies says to me that we are dealing with a bunch of petty power brokers and “good Germans” who should be ashamed of themselves. This lengthy lockdown was unsuccessful as a public health approach and a disgraceful episode in American history. Next, please report on current college Covid vaccine mandates (even including boosters). The UK and Denmark don’t even recommend Covid shots for this age group. Here, to access an education, you have to comply. Wake up people. Whatever this is, it isn’t science.
Great piece by Heather! I’m a fan, admittedly, and she’s a good friend of mine too.
The parties in this lawsuit both need to pipe down.
It is true that hindsight is 20/20, and also true that the masking issue remains politicized well beyond the point of ridiculousness.
I previously commented that the way people use masks in public is akin to licking a vacuum cleaner’s dust filter. As a retired surgeon, I can vouch after wearing these things for 30+ years they don’t do much for aerosolized viruses. Just ask any ENT or gynecologist about their experiences lasering HPV lesions, and that’s in a controlled environment, or look at the studies from the early days of the HIV epidemic that found patient blood in the nasal cavities of masked surgeons after procedures.
Masks keep nose hairs and boogers out of surgical wounds, and that’s a good thing! But I think there’s a general consensus that viral isolation requires a space suit with HEPA filtration. All the articles and posturing about face masks have proven difficult to interpret which proves only one thing, which is the mask effect is negligible, if any.
So, from my perspective, the mere fact that Santa Clara County dropped the public gathering complaint (after the Supreme Court ruling), makes the remainder of the case into an issue which if properly lawyered, juried, and adjudicated an easy win for the church.
But, this is California, and asking for impartiality is magical thinking.
We already know what happens if this ladders it’s way up through the appellate courts. The mask issue has been decided in favor of independent decision making by the appellate courts.
The real danger here is that if a very lethal bug gets loose, the trust and faith in our public health system has been eroded to the point of no return.
Your last sentence may be true but I am a staunch believer that good things can come out of bad things. As such I believe that when the next one comes, and it will, we will handle it much better. Hopefully the government leadership will understand the necessity of transparency and be straight with the citizenry. We deserve nothing less.
“The pastor said he welcomed the agents who entered the church and identified themselves as working for the county.
‘We liked them,’ McClure said of the officials. ‘We gave them coffee, food, and the gospel. They were doing their jobs.’”
My favorite part of the whole story. The agents were doing their job and God, through Rev. McClure, was doing His.
My friend attends this church. Rev. McClure views every attack by the government, including the suit, as an opportunity to witness to a fallen world.
I fear scenarios such as this increasingly are what we as Christians will face in a “post-Christian” culture. Seriously, how were Santa Clara County’s surveillance tactics any different from those deployed by the Chinese government against dissidents?
Remain steadfast, people of Calvary.
“For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” 1 Cor. 1:25
It's now pretty clear that the lockdowns never prevented Covid and did more harm than good, destroying the economy, jobs and lives. It's also becoming clear that the mask edicts - which allowed any face covering, no matter how dirty and reused - also did no good and probably harmed children. Same with forced injections of a vaccine that neither prevents Covid nor is completely safe as was claimed and should never have been forced on healthy people or those with natural immunity. But we'll never know for certain until we have an unbiased investigation of the facts detailing all the harm. Only then will be be able to show that the hysterical, panicked and tyrannical edicts of the nitwits we elect had no factual underpinning and were, therefore, unlawful as being arbitrary and capricious. Even more important, we need to understand that giving untrammeled power to government - no matter the reason - is a Faustian bargain; a deal with the devil. Free, independent and self-reliant do not do - or countenance - such things. What Covid really requires is a deep look into ourselves and a reflection on why we let ourselves turn into a bizarre, Twilight Zone version of the panicked, fearful and ultimately murderous residents of the neighborhood that turned on each other when the lights went out.
The collateral damage to our children especially the most vulnerable will be a lifetime of struggle by not having the basic skills needed to survive in our complex society. Maybe the unintentional goal is increased control. I am reminded of the book The True Believer by Eric Hoffer.
Collateral damage is the point of the exercise. Slow encroachment on, and destruction of human community, connection and dignity, claiming moral superiority and social concern, as I slowly introduce sterile and anti-human strictures for control.
I guarantee you that there were throngs of county and state officials who joyfully violated all those same laws they used to try to shut down the church
Some of us are old enough to remember commisars laughing at the prolies in breadlines as they headed to their dachas, in chauffeured Zils, slurping vodka and caviar.
Much is made of the French Laundry and much should be made of a haute restarant with elite patrons allowed to stay open when even restaurants with outdoor dining were being closed. It is also important to note how many restaurants in CA were not able to survive the shut down.
The most egrigious crime is that Newsom closed public schools and continued to send his children to a private school. Non attendance whether never using the computer to tune into school during Covid and not coming back to school post covid are big issues for certain school districts. Lack of education has huge ramifications.
Anyone not furious at the patent abuse of Science and Authority during the REACTION to the COVID pandemic is stupid. Ignorant. Willfully blind.
The flu was and remains more dangerous for all healthy people under 65 or so than COVID. Period. Full Stop. We did not shut down life for the flu, ever, and by and large that included the great flu pandemic of 1918 or so, which truly was catastrophic.
With COVID, our hospitals were empty for most of the idiocy. They were laying people off. They were postponing needed surgeries, which NOW is increasing mortality from cancer, heart disease and other conditions.
The stress of the lockdowns BY ITSELF killed people. A LOT of people. And the authorities KNEW this would happen. Suicides. Depression leading to poor health. Substance abuse.
Many kids were damaged emotionally FOR NO REASON, and many suffered developmental problems they will never likely fully outgrow.
The whole thing was criminal, and I have been saying since 2020 we need Nuremburg-style Trials, and those responsible need to spend the rest of their lives in jail.
I find many people treat the Freedom of Religion piece of the first amendment as virtually inoperable because they, themselves, are not religious, and increasingly our society is not either.
However, after seeing how easily the government has cast aside our speech rights (as shown in the Twitter Files) and our press rights (look at what happened to Taibbi and Shellenberger in front of the House committee last week), I would urge everyone treat these rights as all one-in-the-same.
If one falls, they all fall. Either we all enjoy liberty, or none of us do.
This fight is all of our fights.
Check out my Substack at
https://www.gordoncomstock.com/
Our Founders knew instinctively that government is inherently evil and that limits must be placed around it. The made sure we had a Constitution that assured us that our rights come from God, not the state. During Covid, many Americans gave in to their worst, unreasoning fears and, hoping for safety gave up their rights to the state. And so wound up with neither liberty nor security. Just as Franklin warned.
I have been thinking about this lately. The newly minted citizens of the United States of America were freed from monarchy - the rule based in the judgment of one human. As you say they knew the risks involved in the concept of government and tried so very hard to create something better. What we have allowed it to become is tragic.
The ever senile Joe tries to rule by mandate just like a monarch. The socialists love the incompetent, ever senile Joe.
Hey Cat, did you catch the Epstein piece in the WSJ's opinion section today which calls out his fellow Dems for closing their eyes to what's obvious to every honest person - that Biden is a senile imbecile and a fabulist who has no business being our president and that a second term for him would be a travesty.
We need a new word. The first term is a travesty.
Part of me cannot believe the WSJ ran the piece.
See, for further reading:
Are We the Byzantines?
By Victor Davis Hanson
March 16, 2023
It's less about the freedom of religion than what the limits are. To use an extreme example, your religion may require human sacrifice, but that doesn't mean you get to kill people. In this case, I hope we can all agree there are at least some circumstances where the public health supersedes the freedom of religion. To use a not-so-extreme example, if Ebola virus were found at the church, surely public health officials should have the power to shut down the church for some time. This case seems compelling only in hindsight, when it's clear that Santa Clara probably went too far, but it's being framed like a black and white freedom of religion issue where church leaders and parishioners should never have any limits at all.
It’s actually about the arbitrary administration if government authority. When other entities such as movie productions and liquor stores were not under the same restrictions as churches, it becomes an unconstitutional abridgment of first amendment rights. And, of course, we now know that so much of government policy dictates weren’t about “the science “ at all.
If I were a conspiracy analyst, I might be inclined to think the state was encouraging people to turn to liquor instead of God or community. Drunk people don't rebel. Despairing people don't rebel. The state wants to be the ultimate authority, and the church gets in the way of that. Also, some of the most effective dissenters in history have been religious people, and they definitely can't have that.
Add marijuana, since states with legalized weed allowed weed shops to stay open as an "essential" service. The Democrats want the populace to be stoned, less resistance that way.
Dispensaries proliferated during the pandemic and continue to soar. Massage parlors too.
I agree that movie studios and liquor stores are not "essential services" and that politics played too much of a role in the pandemic regulations. The regulations also went on too long.
However, in the beginning, not much was known about COVID except that it was killing people. Cities had to keep the number of people on ventilators below the number of ventilators available. I'd like to see an article on how small most ICU's for large cities are--I was very surprised to find out how few patients they are actually equipped to handle.
Many people seem to use religion as giving them the right to do anything they want and pick and choose which laws they will or won't follow. Even now, religious people, specifically Christians, are trying to force THEIR beliefs on people by trying to limit access to mifepristone substituting medical knowledge for the will of one very religious judge (even though many religions don't believe life begins at conception they don't seem to count in the U.S. anymore).
It doesn’t wash my friend. Liquor stores were open by government fiat, churches were closed by government fiat.
Ventilators are the exact reason nyc was such a catastrophe compared to the rest of the world (That and the governor ordering contagious people into nursing homes). nyc doctors were announcing by April that ventilators were the wrong treatment and they proved it conclusively by the simple expedient of removing patients from ventilators and seeing they did not struggle to breathe.
This case will have to get out of california in order to find a rational court. After Washington DC - where jury foremen say things like “we know michael sussman lied to the fbi but we have more important things to do” - California courts are the worst in the nation.
Scott, Scott, Scott, where you begin. Ironically you say "[I]n the beginning [now where have I heard that?] not much was known about Covid . . ." I assert to the contrary. That odious gnome Dr. Fauci had reason to know a great deal about it and hid his knowledge from the populace, and I suspect the government leadership. Then you go on with "except it was killing people." I submit what was killing people was hiding that knowledge under the log by things like getting apoplectic at the term China virus or the idea limiting travel from China. Additionally our figures for Covid deaths are so skewed for a wide variety of reasons, many related to greed, that we will never know how many people were killed by Covid. Then you raise the ventilator excuse. Again a complete miss - as it turns out placing people on their backs on ventilators was a mistep for most. As for your hospital ER query the answer thereto is greed. Almost all hospitals are owned by a small number of corporations and like all corporations their interest is the bottom line a/k/a greed. They simply cannot afford to have ERs lying useless for large periods of time, like you know when there is not an epidemic. IOWs it is not in the interest of those corporations to be prepared for a pandemic. As for "religious people" thinking "religion as giving them the right to do what they want and to pick and choose which laws they will and won't follow." You are ill-informed. Since you singled out Christians, please note that Christians follow rules. They are essentially found in the Ten Commandments. America, and her laws, were founded on those principles. So the notion of doing whatever they want is ludicrous. The problems arise when as here, the government [which has forgotten from whence it came and ignores many of those Commandments] issues commands which diverge from the Commandments. In that circumstance Christians are called upon to "speak truth to authority". That is what this noble church did. That is what Martin Luther King, Jr. did. That is what Nelson Mandela did. That is what William Wallace did. Governments throughout history have overstepped. People with integrity step up. You should be grateful, otherwise the odious little gnome would still have you masked, isolated, and filled by hypodermic with whatever he dreamed up next.
Well said Lynne the whole Covid story was bullshit!
As a retired minister , my experience has been that there are many many people who hate Christianity and are set to blame it and its adherents for everything gone bad in this country. I am ordained in a progressive church that has long had gay pastors and ordained the first woman in the late 1800s. We have been on the forefront of many progressive issues and have never been Bible Thumpers (or god forbid Trumpsters) but that doesnt matter.
I have met people who have not darkened the door of a church for years if at all and have no idea about how churches have changed since the 1950's, but that doesn't matter. I was told that my denomination preaches hatred, is racist and takes the stories i the Bible literally and therefore is against all women thanks to Eve. So I am not a bit surprised that Calvery was ordered to shut down at the demand of the California Legislature - maybe they should have met in a liquor store - I think they were kept opened.
Your greed comment relative to hospitals here is a quick answer to a very complex problem. I am in no way a fan of the US health system, but suffice to say that government funded health systems ranging from Canada to the entire EU suffered severely from the same issues hospitals had here early on in the pandemic: Being overwhelmed by patients, ventilator shortages, not nearly enough hospital supplies, ER's way beyond capacity, not enough beds, staffing issues as attendants, doctors and nurses had Covid issues themselves...
Corporations may not have been prepared here, okay - but neither were government run health systems around the world, where the word 'greed' does not apply.
I am using greed in the sense of profit driven. Which corporate owned hospitals are. They have no choice. Their duty to their shareholders is paramount, as required by law. The comparison to government funded health care is thus apples and oranges. I would be curious to know if the small number of independent or not for profit hospitals here fared better.
That is a shortcoming of the medical industry. They too have been elevated to hero status when in fact they were lying to the public. They could have invested in temporary structures to prepare for a pandemic.
There could be very simple systems in place for ventilators in the event of things like train derailments, they could have accepted military personnel but there were unoccupied floors without staff.
It's actually good that they lacked ventilators, since those were killing many.
Hospitals are captured by Big Phama and they are not heroes.
Firing staff who had natural immunity is stark evidence of how little they know of basic biology. Or do they know and are captured by big pharma? I suspect the latter.
Our granddaughter a RN who had covid and the antibodies was fired because she refused to get the vaccine. On one hand hospitals cry they need more nurses and on the other hand fire nurses that have natural immunity Those vaccinated were reinfected at the same rate than those who had natural immunity. https://nypost.com/2023/02/27/natural-immunity-as-effective-as-covid-vaccine-years-after-mandates/
The nurses fired from her hospital are suing the hospital as well they should.
Nurses with natural Immunity were the best suited for front line work. They knew another infection would not kill them and they could work without fear. They also would not be as likely to spread the infection as silent carriers. There was no science behind firing these workers. There was only a pharma narrative to cover up the accident by making themselves Vax heroes.
It all stinks to high heaven.
I suggest you spend one week in medical school, on the “wards” or in practice & only then might you begin to understand. Don’t confuse technocrats & appointed political hacks with physicians.
I'm not speaking of physicians. They too are victims of an industry captured by Big pharma. I personally know physicians. They lose their license in mysterious ways if they ruffle the wrong feathers. Many medical professionals were fired for refusing the jab.
Most good Doctors refused to administer the jab due to liability and ethical concerns. That's why it was administered by pharmacists. Guess which hand a pharmacist will never bite.
Captured by Pharma.
The article says the church followed restrictions for 2 months, until May 2020. Do you remember what else happened in May 2020 when millions of people chose not to follow COVID restrictions? But it’s terrible that religious people use religion as an excuse to pick and choose what laws to follow?
In China they quickly set up triage tents. Our hospitals could have such equipment standing by. They also could have enlisted the National guard. They did not like the optics of that. Tarnished the image.
Cuomo ignored the hospital ship Trump sent. Pure politics.
The odious Cuomo who infected old folks homes with covid which killed these old folks at an alarming rate (murdered), screamed that Trump was not doing enough to help NY. But when Trump sent a US hospital ship to NY the ship was never used. Cuomo put politics over the heath of his state's citizens.
What a despicable human being.
Good bless the Democrats.
New York also rejected the Samartan's Purse ship. Which was another check on my running something-ain't-right-here sheet.
They put one up in Detroit. I think it had around five patients.
In the left-wing mind, "erring" on the side of the left-wing preference is always the appropriately "cautious" approach. To err in favor of the other side is unconscionable.
No problem with this is perceived.
I am a deep Christian who has NEVER tried to impose my will on anyone.
Covid: Feb 2020, Diamond Princess Cruise Ship, 3700 people on board for a month isolated on-ship, 800 tested positive, 15 people died = 0.4% fatality rate = the flu(a harsh one at that). Nothing more. A flu, and it hit my wife and I hard. A flu.
And those cruise-goers who succumbed were likely elderly and/or obese. I've been on enough cruises to know that there's a lot of very LARGE people on cruise ships. Those all-you-can-eat buffets.
Just as the liberal want to have no limits on when the child can be exterminated. Even after managing to survive the attempted killing.
Almost all abortions come from unprotected consensual sex by two people.
Law demands the father must protect & support the child. Yet has no say in its destruction.
Is there not a point the heathy mother must take on the responsibility of birth as well?
Crushing a child’s skull in the birth canal or letting them die on a tray is murder. Both of these and other inhuman acts are being forced on our society.
Yet Americans buy babies from all over the world spending hundreds of millions. Would it be better to allow these unwanted babies be sold to the highest bidder?
Lots of inconvenience in life’s journeys.
Lady in the Lake -
I think that the proper comparison here to the restricting of church services in 2020 would be the shutting down of mass event venues, such as sports events held at arenas and stadiums, theatres, concerts, political events etc..
Was it an infringement of your First Amendment rights that you couldn't go to the baseball game? It was shut down for the very same reason.
In hindsight it sure may look like overreach, but at the time the large gatherings of people in a confined space scared the hell out of health authorities. Having three people in a liquor store was not thought of in the same way.
The Constitution does not guarantee the right to attend baseball games, but it specifically assures the free exercise of religion. It is a treacherous slope that says “just this once, we’ll keep you from your religious observance in the name of the greater good.” What would have happened, do you suppose, had people begun gathering in Walmart to pray and worship in their chosen faith? And I don’t recall a single mosque being shut down.
I was going to say the same thing but you beat me to it. Pro-lockdowners always ignore that pesky little Constitutional right thing. Then they come back with, "But, at the time..." or "in the beginning... " This B.S. went on for over a YEAR. Not just in the "beginning." Long after facts about Covid spread and vulnerability became known. And even then, in some states including mine, it only ended when the courts mercifully forced the state to end it.
I'm reminded of something someone posted in my NextDoor community in the spring of 2020. It went something like: "Anyone feel like bringing signs down to the park and having a barbecue but calling it a 'protest'"?
This was all knowable at the time that it was a massive and unjustified overreach. The Diamond Princess cruise liner incident had occurred in Feb 2020 prior to any of this and illustrated just how minor overall the virus itself was. The nearly universal overreaction of health authorities around the world is a textbook illustration of fear and ignorance trampling over rational policy.
By the end of March 2020, in of the first countries hit by the virus, Italy, had almost 12000 deaths. Sounds like a pandemic to me..
Who was dying? The elderly and the very ill. That's what Diamond Princess showed us. The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration had it right: take steps to protect the vulnerable and let the rest of society continue more or less normally.
The Italian death count did not rise significantly until the government mandates and interventions started. It's estimated that covid arrived in northern Italy around August 2019 yet there was no significant rise in overall mortality until late February 2020 when the government got heavily involved. I'd posit that it was clumsy and heavy-handed ill-conceived reactions that ultimately caused most of the death toll and that covid itself was only a contributing factor.
In fact sports events were open in July 2020. Dr Fauci attended one early that month and pulled down his mask while sitting less than 6 feet from two persons.
Interesting that it "scared the hell out of health authorities" but not the actual people who would gather.
Maybe the people wearing the lab coats took more seriously what was floating around out there than the people gathering for God.
Maybe because many of them were involved in the creation of what was floating around....
Bingo, Lady in the Lake. Government does and should have the right to shut everything down in certain circumstances. (e.g., war, terrorist attack, global pandemic). What it cannot do is shut down some entities and not others. The state and local governments that shut down church gatherings but allowed civil protests were blatantly violating the Constitution, and should be castigated (and sued) for doing so.
If the church had been *shown* to be an epicenter of Covid infection, it would have been legitimate to *temporarily* shut it down. But it was not. That's the entire point here.
When these California counties closed the parks and even banned surfing - a healthy and solitary activity in the sea that cannot under any scenario be conjured to transmit Covid - you knew that they were simply insane authoritarians who a free people would and should resist with all means necessary. I cannot begin to express how much I detest them.
I detest them to, every single one of them. They have no shame and continue to still lie about this nonsense.
The article said the church was violating the law. What law? The insane restrictions were put in place by decree not law. Ruling by decree is call dictatorship. Also the elitists disregarded their own rule. Gavin Newsom went to elite parties unmasked and didn't observe social distancing.
I guess it is OK for the Dem elites to do as they damned well please but the rest of the unwashed rabble, us, have to abide to their unconstitutional mandates. The ever senile Joe issued many of these mandates which were eventually struck down by the courts.
https://news.yahoo.com/supreme-court-struck-down-biden-234737308.html
Good on this brave pastor and his congregation.
Also a mandate is not a law. It's when two men go to dinner.
This line wins the Internet for today.
I see what you did there.
😂
😂😂😂
haha
Anyone else notice .... Biden people don't post things to support their candidate, They only post hate against Trump. Think R T and comprof.
"What law?"
Comrade, you expect the legislature to keep up with all the details necessary to reach our 5-year quotas?! We must push the level of decision-making downward, close to the people, and put it in the hands of party members capable of adapting governance "on the fly," according to the IMPERATIVES of the moment.
The County's case against them is linked in the article and states
State and local public health orders are mandatory directives, and violation of either is
punishable by law. (Health & Safety Code, §§ 120275; 120295; Government Code §§ 8567; 8571;
8627; 8665.)
47. On August 11, 2020, the County Board of Supervisors adopted Urgency Ordinance
No. NS-9.921 (“Urgency Ordinance”), which creates a comprehensive civil enforcement program to
combat the spread of COVID-19. The Urgency Ordinance is intended to facilitate enforcement of
the Public Health Orders and to ensure compliance with those Orders, including by providing a
significant deterrent to violating the Public Health Orders.
I wonder if such a broad sweeping law such as this would stand up in court. For example, where does it stop? Football and skat boarding are detrimental to the participants health. Serious injury and death can happen to the participants. Can the nut cases in California outlaw these two activities because of health issues. Where does it end?
I know about this because I read the Michael Lewis book "the Premonition". It's a three-star, not his typical excellence, but it's interesting stuff. The law holds up and really needs to be the case, kind of like we have to have a cop be the unquestioned authority at the time of an arrest. Then if they overstep we figure that out later.
I think the control on public health officials is that they could lose their job if they overstep and it's a political thing. Their boss is very political and subject to voting.
Actually, if you ask Michael Lewis, it's too political. He makes the case in the book that California suffered because the tough-as-nails no-nonsense blonde heroine of his book, a county public health official who was considered a superstar, then became the No. 2 public health officer for the state rather than the No. 1 only for DEI reasons, and that her boss ended up being useless and in charge at just the wrong time, during the pandemic.
With an air-borne aerosol virus it is extremely hard to show where an individual case came from. The virus literally floats in the air.
That's no excuse for shutting down a church or business and also no excuse for mask mandates or lockdowns. It is a reason the authorities should have been providing honest ADVICE, not mandates, and let the people choose for themselves.
I knew something was very messed up when--instead of falling back on the county-health-department-administered system of quarantine that was used regularly before vaccinations became available in the 20th century--they attempted to quarantine *everyone* (via lockdown).
Yes, instead of isolating the sick and protecting the most vulnerable (elderly in nursing homes), they did the precise opposite - imprisoned and sanctioned the healthy and slaughtered the innocents by introducing active Covid cases into adult care facilities. Cuomo, Murphy, Lamont, Whitmer literally have gotten away with criminally negligent homicide and nobody even notices.
A lot of us notice. We just have no power or authority to do anything about it. That's why these people are working so hard on censorship and propaganda initiatives. I think a few of them know that if the people regain control, they are going to be up against the wall.
First time in human history they chose to lockdown a healthy population.
Was it not legitimate to tell the church to limit attendees to 100 people during the pandemic? Seems legit since that's exactly what the Supreme Court allowed in the end. But the Church still violated that limit.
Based on what evidence? Other than whim and caprice.
The Court got a lot wrong. They disgraced themselves, only not as badly as other courts and nowhere near as execrably as government officials.
County health officials around the country are endowed with tons of power and act on whatever evidence they see fit.
Santa Barbara County's health commissioner once shut down parties at UCSB due to an encephalitis outbreak. The evidence was a slew of college kids with encephalitis. Insisting on more evidence would have been wrongminded. We can seek to modify those powers after the fact, or seek punishment if they are abused, of course!
They couldn’t find any cases out of this church so that example is useless.
The punishment against the county in this case needs to be extreme to show governments they can not do this. 50x the $2.8 million isn’t enough
"County health officials around the country are endowed with tons of power and act on whatever evidence they see fit."
Yeah, that's the problem, actually.
To clarify, it is true that county health officials in normal times are endowed with broad discretion. In your encephalitis among party kids illustration that worked precisely as it should have - a verifiable outbreak of a well-known illness which warranted an immediate, temporary cessation of activity by the local authority. Obviously it worked to confine the outbreak. That is not what happened with Covid rather Covid was a novel, IOW not well-known, illness that was met with panic and hysteria and local leadership (county health officials) were eschewed in favor of a hastily thrown together triumvirate led by a man who likely funded the creation of the virus. No wonder it was "his worst nightmare". Almost everything the faux leadership suggested has proven to be wrong.
No it was not legitimate. Everything the earthly powers decreed was wrong with the possible exception of social distancing and I think that was suggested, and voluntarily followed, not mandated. That church followed a higher law. Thank God. There are now at least 3000 people out there free of the anxiety, depression, and anger that many others feel after the draconian measures employed. I bet the children are hitting their milestones too. You know the old ones on which we used to rely to Guage childhood development.
Social distancing was certainly mandated, as it describes in the article in the case of this Church violating Santa Clara County's orders on such.
Your argument is that the churchgoers needed to be in groups of 600 to find solace, because groups of 100 wouldn't do. The Supreme Court and I simply disagree.
Maybe. There is a different Supreme Court now. Does it not trouble you that the Church was right in that it was not a center of outbreaks? Does it trouble you that a blind eye was turned to those masses of people gathering to protest the death of George Floyd, many of them screaming at the top of their lungs? I submit that was just a different type of religious fervor.
Yes, you give an extreme example, and that’s entirely the point, it is extreme. What the congregants of the church did was not extreme, and they are proving their case. We must stick to the facts of the matter and avoid the extremes. We can’t legislate in a one-size-fits-all box. People can reason and use good common sense. We must trust that. And, the conclusion and subsequent actions by government against people who they perceive to have little or no common sense is egregiously unjust.
My comment is aimed at people making the argument that this is a clear cut case because the public health is secondary to religious freedom. It is not.
But the burden of proof is (and should be) on the government seeking to infringe. When you allow the government to infringe Constitutionally protected rights on the basis of "might" and "could," you destroy the limits that the Constitution very intentionally placed on the government.
Well said.
Freedom to exercise religion is an important limit. But does one take a balanced view and recognize that a masking requirement alone might not interrupt that freedom?
That isn’t a balanced view.
Substantially no one wore masks in Africa and the case rate was enormously lower than it was in the West.
Public health generally succeeded in those states that avoided mandates and failed where they were harsh.
There was never even evidence to justify any sort of masking requirement. Masks have been known for a long, long time to have no measurable efficacy against viral infection of any kind yet for what are likely political reasons, they ignored ~130+ years of studies and data to enact it anyway.
A masking requirement absolutely does interrupt that freedom. How I manage risk, fear, reason, trust, mortality, how I relate to the persons standing of their own free will to my left and right, idolatry, holy relics, etc is between me and my God and has nothing the fuck whatsoever to do with Goodwife Kelly Green.
How I manage my religious decisions is not your concern and people like you have gone a long way to fanaticizing people like me: e.g. I once was pretty go along to get along but now I will die, literally die, before I will allow your ilk to control me. You've shown your colors; now look at mine.
This should have more to do with overall freedom than religious freedom. This is the crux of the matter. The state and all those behind it (I choose the word behind rather than within) employ the Trump deplorable mindset to this group of people because they are religious. They use an opposing mindset when handling BLM.
You nailed it. This has everything to do with anti-Christian bigotry and little to do with public health. Where were the government snoops monitoring the massive George Floyd protests for social distancing and mask-wearing? But that was different, right, because that was for "social justice."
Arbitrary laws are unjust, masks were never proven effective, lockdowns were never effective. There was no opportunity to debate these points with the unelected officials who imposed the rules. This was and is bigger than freedom of religion. What is clear is that the majority in this country are willing to give up their freedom because of fear. Take another booster it’s free
I remember when liberals were fond of quoting the adage, "He who would surrender his freedom for his security deserves neither." This was used frequently to criticize the War on Terror. Hmmm, I can't seem to recall hearing that from a liberal lately...
Just to make one small point on lockdowns. Communities with lockdown mandates were not more safe than nearby communities without lockdown mandates. But that is because people self-regulate. Sweden never had lockdown orders, but people were very much more cautious in their behavior. So a lockdown of a community can certainly work (see China) to prevent spread of disease, but a lockdown mandate in a liberal democracy doesn't have specific value when the people are freely already locked down.
Gavin Newsom got some praise (not from me) for being the first Gov to lock down the state - but this happened well after everyone I know had been in self-imposed exile for a week and a half, so to us it was kind of laughable to praise him.
Exactly. Give people factual information and let them choose how to respond. The people in this church chose to congregate and they did not suffer as a result.
Do you really believe any COVID information coming from China? Name a free country where lockdowns stopped COVID spread.
Public health is not second to religion because public health isn’t a thing. So it doesn’t even rank compared to religion.
You are so right. Public health isn't a freedom either, it is a responsibility.
If we don't have religious freedom, all of our other freedoms will go by the wayside. The Declaration of Independence says our freedoms come from the Creator, not from government. If we start to believe our freedoms come from government, then we are lost because, as we found over the past 3 years, governments are capricious. Since our freedoms come from God, they are inalienable. That is why we must protect freedom of religion. If we don't all is lost.
The article says the church followed COVID restrictions until May 2020. Do you remember millions of people ignoring COVID restrictions in May 2020? I do. Public health quickly took a back seat then. Outrage against religion seems misplaced.
Again you have missed the point. The Church and its congregation did not know the outcome of Covid anymore than did the State. Rather the Church and its congregation understood there are things worse than dying.
So are you arguing, then, that the freedom of religion is absolute and that it trumps public health concerns? because this is why I am using the Ebola example to try to demonstrate that there are limits. It's not very helpful to claim there are no limits only because you believe the state overstepped in this case and not because you actually believe there are no limits.
The Ebola example is pure straw man. It’s so stupid to say “well, if the facts had been completely different then my set of responses would have been justified.” You never let facts and observable outcomes get in the way of your policy preferences.
Did she say that, or anything close to that?
Freedom to gather is much higher on my list.
Public health is precisely subordinate to religious freedom. I'm an atheist, a non-believer. But I get what spirituality does for humans. You obviously do not. You are in no position to direct the faith and practice of faith by others.
In other words, this was a clear cut case.
Actually, it IS secondary, because the constitution clearly states that free practice of religion cannot be impinged. However, the public interest in protecting public health is legitimate and not far behind.
I see it boil down to, if there was a highly deadly flesh eating bacteria transferred by skin contact, the right to go to church still can't be impinged, but public health officials can certainly ban human to human contact in that setting.
What you don't seem to grasp is that religious freedom is impinged by persons such as yourself smugly claiming the right to set conditions for a religious community that does not include you. "Look how balanced and rational and magnanimous I am. I'll allow you to go to your little church but here is a list of what you can and can't do inside it." As we say here in Texas, bless your heart.
It doesn't matter how well you regard your own judgement: you still don't get to insert yourself into how other people choose to gather and worship. You can imagine up Very Scary Things all day long and yet not a one of them grants you the authority to interfere with the rights of others to practice their faiths within their own communities. It's not for you to decide whether and which covid mitigations are disruptive or offensive to others' religious observance.
Well, I'm not from Texas, where I'm from we just say f u to your face when we mean f u. We don't play games about it. Rudeness is rudeness whatever state you're from, and if you could be more civil, I'd appreciate it.
Whatever you think, the Supreme Court said different.
Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas agreed with you. The other six agreed with me, including Kavanaugh and Barrett, so maybe you can bless their hearts?
Yes, big government doesn't trust people. They are forgetting who works for whom.
The Church correctly fought for its rights. Then those rights were established as ability to congregate in groups of up to 100. As Alan said it's about balance. Personally, i feel right to freely practice religion is absolute and enshrined. But that is not a right to no mask and it is not a right to gather 600 at a time when Supreme Court says limit to 100.
This is endlessly fascinating if you look into the series of Supreme Court decisions. I had no idea (probably largely because, though I care about the issue, while these things were happening I also was in the middle of dealing with a crazy pandemic-stricken world).
Notes on the legal cases:
SC decided that New York could NOT make limitations to as low as 25 people for religious gatherings.
SC *allowed* bans on singing and chanting
SC at first declined to overturn lower court rulings, but then later did and found that full bans were not ok, but limitations to about 20-25% of capacity and 100 people were ok if in line with what other public spaces were being limited to
I am 10 min in here and this is hours of work, so I could be off on a lot.
But one very interesting part of the last item there is that there was a time when full bans were actually allowed after being appealed to the SC. That has implications for this matter. I don't agree with that and I'm happy that there is no full ban allowed now, but I do agree with having reasonable limitations and I think by allowing limits at 100 people the SC found a good balance.
This is the part that actually scares me. Courts are beginning to make decisions that are not theirs to make. You can be happy when they rule for your side, but that isn't always the case.
What does a judge know about infectious diseases? Common pregnancy complications? Or any other medical issue?
Even outside of the medical realm, politically tough decisions are being forced on courts when they should be made by Congress.
The legislators of California would happily fully restrict religious worship and ban it completely at their whim when there is a pandemic. The Court stepped in and said they could not do that. Seems like a net good to me.
Hamilton, F. 78: "But it is not with a view to infractions of the Constitution only, that the independence of the judges may be an essential safeguard against the effects of occasional ill humors in the society. These sometimes extend no farther than to the injury of the private rights of particular classes of citizens, by unjust and partial laws. Here also the firmness of the judicial magistracy is of vast importance in mitigating the severity and confining the operation of such laws. It not only serves to moderate the immediate mischiefs of those which may have been passed, but it operates as a check upon the legislative body in passing them; who, perceiving that obstacles to the success of iniquitous intention are to be expected from the scruples of the courts, are in a manner compelled, by the very motives of the injustice they meditate, to qualify their attempts. This is a circumstance calculated to have more influence upon the character of our governments, than but few may be aware of. The benefits of the integrity and moderation of the judiciary have already been felt in more States than one; and though they may have displeased those whose sinister expectations they may have disappointed, they must have commanded the esteem and applause of all the virtuous and disinterested. Considerate men, of every description, ought to prize whatever will tend to beget or fortify that temper in the courts: as no man can be sure that he may not be to-morrow the victim of a spirit of injustice, by which he may be a gainer to-day. And every man must now feel, that the inevitable tendency of such a spirit is to sap the foundations of public and private confidence, and to introduce in its stead universal distrust and distress."
(note the change at SC on full bans was due to substitution of Barrett for RBG)
The problem is Churchgoers and not-churchgoers have a right to impartial, truthful, and balanced information. There is no doubt that the "public health officials" have destroyed my faith in them by suppressing information. Thus, they forfeit the right to make decisions over my life, and more importantly, my son with Autism's life.
This has been going for 20+ years. There is not one "public health official" who can answer the question, "Can you show me a study on the CUMULATIVE effect of all the vaccines introduced to the CDC's Childhood Vaccine Schedule since the 1986 Vaccine Act." Big Pharma does not want this in any way to be done, so it has never been done.
My suggestions for a path forward are at the end of my very long pinned article, and for the record, I will say a prayer today for Pastor Mike:
https://outsidein51.substack.com/p/pro-vaccine-safety-in-2023-where
But they don't "forfeit the right". They never do. They just move on to their next screw-up, their next botch, their next f**k-up. Never held to account, never with their feet held to the fire.
Exactly. The lack of accountability emboldens the behavior.
There's no "probably" about them going too far. The whole thing was willfully and criminally incompetent from the outset.
The people in the church understood there were risks, and made decisions as free human beings that their faith was more important, if it came to that, than their lives. They have that right in this country, in my view.
Yes, agree, and that is everything.
I think people would instinctively isolate themselves if something like Ebola came around. In this case you run into the problem that the State couldn't and still can't back up any of it's restrictions with actual science. Covid wasn't nearly as deadly as the claims, the usefulness of social distancing is just made up, and we already had 40 years of studies on masks that found no evidence that they worked either. I think the church leaders and parishioners were doing what many of us were already doing in other parts of the country. They weighed the evidence and decided it was more important to live normally.
In hindsight? No. A lot of us knew the restrictions were going too far at the time. Covid by all accounts just wasn’t a threat to the general public. The science was clear on that from the beginning. When was the great Barrington declaration written? Those scientists knew, and so did those of us who listened to them.
IMO if there is a deadly virus going around the government’s role is to share all the information they can, and make recommendations. That’s it.
Adults should be able to choose how they move through the world. We don’t need a nanny state to babysit us.
And Fauci knew a lot more than he said.
He sure did! Under oath he very clearly exaggerated the IFR … why? To scare people into compliance
Not in the very beginning, though. In the very beginning (February), the virus was pretty deadly and spreading fast, so I can understand the initial guidance, and we all responded in kind immediately. We listened and we acted responsibly. That would have continued, I believe, had we not been treated so condescendingly. What ensued was an inexcusable disaster corrupted by politics and hubris. The people were written out of the equation for decision-making because we were rendered incapably of doing so. That's not what government was designed to be.
John Ioannidis, the top epidemiologist in the world by any measure, wrote this article in Stat on March 17, 2020. I printed 2 copies out for my kids that day. I posted it below.
Go look up his credentials. He is one of the 5 most cited scientists on the planet. The actual experts were saying what has been proven to be true from the very beginning. The Italian data showed the same, with 150,000+ tracked cases, that was published by the first week of April 2020. YOU may not have known, but reality was knowable. The millions of us reading actual experts and watching the models completely fail within 3 days by comparing them to the public health charts knew because it was knowable. It takes a 4th grade math education, at best, to read bar charts. It takes looking up “size of coronavirus aerosol” and “size particle (insert your mask type) filters” to see if a mask could even physically work if properly fit (hint, they can’t, not even n95s).
This crap of “we didn’t know” is such bs. Some people didn’t know because they like being lied to by legacy media and power hungry government stooges, not because it wasn’t knowable. It’s not my job, and it certainly isn’t the job of my children, to hide in the basement for any reason to coddle those who are too close minded to stop listening to the people who have been lying to them daily for at least the last 2 decades (the entirety of my adult life). I don’t understand why so many enjoy being lied to by these people, but nobody gets off the hook with claims of ignorance when that ignorance was a choice to be moved by lying propagandists rather than replicated observable outcomes. Life is not safe and it isn’t risk free but for the vast majority a respiratory virus is just a simple slightly uncomfortable unavoidable part of life.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/
Yes! NC Mom for the win! Best comment in this thread by far. I remember reading that piece and forwarding to to friends who wouldn’t even read it. Dark times
This was great to read NCmom! Well done you. Feb 2020 I was in Northern Ireland preparing to come home to NYC. I researched and shopped masks, concerned about air and subway travel, grabbed a few N95s (including some respirators we never used) for the family, as I was a little spooked. I remember clearly the flip flop on whether masks were good or bad, wear them, don't wear them, and absolutely remember the guidance that wearing them could actually pull and trap the aerosol droplets into your mask making things worse. Medical professionals have been wearing N95s for eons; they didn't know definitively how they would work in this case? It was insane. People have short memories, and then craft the past as they would prefer to remember it. Thanks for this information and the article. I will read it now.
I get being spooked. It’s human. The actual data guided my choices when I got spooked, and I was absolutely shocked how few knew or cared about the actual data and relative risk. I hold zero animosity for anyone being human and getting scared. We all make mistakes. I have zero patients for those unwilling to admit that they made mistakes. I can’t stand the “well, if the facts had been different I would have been right” arguments from the Covidians who cling to that absurd logic to this day. Literally anything can be justified if actual facts are disregarded in favor of completely imaginary ones.
I wrote an email to our governor around April 18, 2020 pointing out we actually flattened our healthcare system, children, and the economy. So few remember what happened. I kept it printed out so I will never forget. My kids will never forget.
About a week before April 1, 2020 Roy Cooper ordered a statewide lockdown to begin April 1. Schools had been shut since March 17th. An effective lockdown had been in place since the third week of March.
The models published in all the major newspapers in NC around March 27, 2020, which you now have to pull off way back machine because they have changed the imbedded models but not the words of the articles, claimed by April 17, 2020 the hospitals in NC would be overwhelmed with 30,000-40,000 Covid patients. This was published after the effective lockdown had begun and official lockdown start was announced for April 1st. The models claimed this would happen EVEN WITH the lockdown, and near perfect compliance. These people were all supposedly already infected.
How many hospitalized Covid patients were there April 17, 2020 in the state of NC? Fewer than 800. Total. In the entire state. In a state of 16 million. We didn’t break 1,000 until around May and all those people got sick anyway during the lockdown.
It took maybe 5 minutes a day to pull up the NC Covid dashboard and compare the data to the widely published “model.” It was evident it would fail by day 3. I waited until the projected to peak to see just how far off it was.
Covid patients in NC hospitals have never even reached 25% of that projection. Never at any point, and our state gave up on any serious restrictions before the more lethal Delta wave hit here. By September there were some capacity restrictions, but in practice only urban public schools remained closed. Churches were open with zero restrictions by around mid May here - Cooper is a lawyer and knew NC has very strong religious protections. He didn’t even fight it once the first lawsuit came. Restaurants,entertainment facilities, all private schools, most charter schools, kids camps, businesses, and all stores were opened by the end of August (with most opening June/ July). My country club never closed. My kids’ school reopened for its regular summer camps June 1st. Mask mandates didn’t hit here until urban public schools started reopening part time around November.
Simply checking the observation against the “projection” in the early days took less than 5 minutes a day, and my then 6 year old could go through the process. It was not complicated. Everyone who could read and use a computer could do this. Every so called journalist in this country was capable of it. Nearly every adult and the majority of children who could read could simply check the public data.
Yet so few did, and when those of us who did tried to share with others, hoping and praying to inspire curiosity , we were called murders, monsters, grandma killers, terrorists, extremists, criminals, people called on the government to remove our children, hotlines were set up to tattle on us. I knew by the end of April exactly how the Holocaust had happened. It shook me to my core. It still does.
I didn’t throw a fit over the initial shutdown. I had wiser friends who knew it wouldn’t be just 2 weeks that did, and I have since told them many times they were right and I was wrong. I was curious. I was content to sit home a couple weeks with my husband and kids. I was curious because the data never matched the hysteria so I wanted to know more. I was wrong to accept the initial shutdown and foolish. I will own that because I think owning my mistakes is how I don’t repeat them. I will never comply with insanity again.
By May I was livid. There was no excuse for any adult who felt like having an opinion to ignore the actual data. By June we were vacationing in Hilton Head with our kids and family friends where masks, social distancing, and insanity weren’t a thing. As humans we all make mistakes, but we have a responsibility to be informed for ourselves. Failure to do so results in tragedy and in this case is how we let a generation of poor and middle class kids get destroyed, to say nothing of letting the old die cruel and inhumane deaths alone and afraid, the businesses lost, the communities ripped apart, the deaths of despair, the died suddenly, the destruction of our economy, the societal instability, the end of scientific debate, the capture of educational institutions, the careers destroyed.
There were many days, particularly after we had traveled, which was often, that I was open with my parents that I would prefer them not pick the kids up from school. My kids went back to their elite private school in person and on time mid August 2020. My dad had cabin fever. Most of their friends were hiding. They’d been forced to work from home. My dad heard my request, promptly discarded it, left earlier than I could and called to tell me he was going to pick the kids up, he’d get there first, and the kids will get in his car because they like him. I was annoyed, but laughed. It was all true. The man turned 18 fighting in combat in Vietnam. Who the hell was I to tell him what to do? The man grew up in an abusive, alcoholic, impoverished home. He’s been working for pay since he was 5. He gave my brother and I and my mom a great life and is one of the most loving humans I have ever met. Who the hell am I to “demand” he not see his grandchildren? I could give him my opinion, and he could disregard it. Who the hell am I to tell him what to do after he has spent more than 7 decades of being a contributing member of society? That’s not my place, and I’m the one who will be by my parents’ bedside whenever they do get sick and die. I will be holding their hand. I will be coordinating their treatment. I will be broken-hearted. If I have no business telling them what to do, and what risks of illness they are “allowed” to take, absolutely no one else has that right.
That applies to everyone. No one has a right to tell contributing, law abiding people they are prohibited from participation in life so some hysterical stranger can get some insane sense of faux safety. No one has a right to rob children of their healthy development so adults that have no interest in their lives can feel safer. No one, especially not government, had a right to sentence the entire population to months, in some places years, of house arrest. Breathing is not a crime.
I disagree. The diamond princess quarantine happened very early, and the data coming out of that was very clear that only the most frail were in danger. I know because I read analysis of the data from independent journalists. The information was out there but it was suppressed and the media went with the super deadly fast spreading story, which was false.
I hope in the future we will all be more skeptical of the media, especially when they’re telling us to be afraid.
I was in Europe at that exact time and that just isn't so. Italy will tell you it was pretty deadly and not only to the old and infirm. An 80-yr old priest died giving his respirator to a young adult.
An 80-year old priest isn't the best example of a young person dying.
The fact remains that the regular seasonal flu is more deadly to young people. That's been established. Did some healthy people die of Covid? Yes. Was it a significant risk to them? No.
Those were not mandates though. And the Church complied until May.
"Probably went too far"? You're fucking kidding me - the ChiCom Plandemic was/is the biggest single grab of civil liberties ever foisted upon a supposedly FREE society.
And boobs like Alan Miles are the same as guys in Germany who nodded when the powers said Jews were a threat. The state is supreme, so anything opposing it is against i9t and must be corralled or destroyed.
But it wasn’t Ebola - and health authorities knew it. They knew it didn’t seriously threaten younger healthy people before it even got here. The crackdowns on churches were an exercise in raw power - they were about crushing dissent - they had very little to do with health policy.
Exactly. Nothing like ebola. That is the point. We need nuanced reactions, not treating the flu like ebola.
For the left, it's one size fits all. This is the problem with making everything a federal issue.
They claim to value diversity but what they really want is monoculture. They want us all to be like California, ostensibly because we are too dumb to know how good it is in California. Sorry, but I've been there.
Honeybees have to be shipped in to pollenate California's monpculture crops. Bees cannot survive in an area with one species of plant that provides pollen and nectar for only a week or two.
Diversity is nature's way of preventing extinction. Monoculture is dangerous.
No, no, and no. Emphatically no. Individuals have the right to make their own risk assessments.
Your Ebola example is just a straw man. Are you aware that Ebola never really made it to the US. One or two cases at most. Did not spread. Why is that when Covid spreads like, well like air?
You are just a dupe who falls for whatever fear the totalitarians spread. Then you spread it.
If it were Ebola we wouldn't be having this conversation. The weapon is the infringement on the rights of the Republics citizens while claiming "reason", employing police state tactics and using the opportunity to criminalize citizenship. The criminal DNC/CCP/IMF/WEF juggernaut has conspired to hold the American Constitutional Republic and her citizens in thrall to a lie for over a decade. The '08 crash, Russia Gate, Covid, the riot's, J/6, and the Ukraine have all been exploited opportunities to reduce the American national dialogue to a psyop while criminal financiers looted American lives and treasure. Again: Mass arrests for thought and speech crime across Europe and the expansion of euthanasia laws in Europe and Canada beyond anything needed to deal with the terminally ill. Criminal finance wants the American Constitutional Republic gone.
well done
It’s up to the individual to decide what level of risk they want to take. If one is frightened then by all means stay home. But, good grief, give me Liberty or give me death. We have become a society full of fear and anxiety. How tragic.
We as free people have the right to make decisions based upon what we believe is the risk vs reward of a situation. As we are now finding out after the fact is the damage done to the mental health and education of children, the rise in the rate of drug deaths due to isolation, the lack of evidence that social distancing or masking were effective strategies. I could go on and on. Not to mention the hypocrisy of BLM protest being great but you can’t go to church. This case is not compelling in hindsight. We as citizen’s must take a much more jaundice view of mandates from so called experts when they attempt to limit our freedoms.
I am curious whether you believe that if I, a free person, have been exposed to Ebola but feel fine, then I'm ok to decide I'm going to board a plane or whether public health authorities have the power to quarantine me against my will. I'm really just trying to understand if you would give public health authorities no powers whatsoever.
You would be too sick to go anywhere.
This was not Ebola and Trump is not Hitler, so please try being realistic.
The hypothetical here is that I have been exposed to Ebola but am not feeling sick. I’d really appreciate an answer - I know the church case is different - because I’m trying to understand if you think there are any circumstances where public health authorities can curtail my civil liberties
You've got Ebola on the brain. Besides it being an utterly stupid straw man, it is meaningless. Gandalf just responded and you are not realistic. As many others here have written.
You see, junior, Ebola doesn't have "asymptomatic" infections. You get it, you get very ill, just keel over in no time. No walking around, no getting on airplanes. Covid does have asymptomatic infection. And Covid has very high transmissibility rates but low fatality rates. And now you posit a situation involving a single "exposed" person. What this discussion is about is mass shutdowns of society - education, commerce, life itself. By unelected bureaucrats, many with no real expertise (like the Randi Weingarten's of the Left) but drunk on their purported power. Barring a single person who has high infection risk is entirely different than what the commissars of government did with Covid. Apples and oranges.
You aren't "appreciat[ing] and answer". You are beating your rented mule of an Ebola straw man insisting that someone agree with you from which you can posit justification of Covid lockdowns. You tried with religion. No. Bam! You tried with Free Speech. No. Bam! You are confused and hopelessly lost. Suggest you sleep on this and maybe tomorrow you'll think better.
We have measures in place.
These were new measures far too extreme for the type of threat. We put 2 years of our children's education beneath aging boomers. As a grandparent I am appalled. I would rather die than sacrifice the future generation
It is a blank and white freedom of religion issue. Using ridiculous straw man arguments about human sacrifice, or faux claims of “in hindsight” when everyone with a brain knew the risk profile by the first week of April 2020, wouldn’t be necessary if there were ever legitimacy to your claim. We have freedom of association as part of our freedom of religion. “Gathering” humans together, of their own free will, is not human sacrifice.
No. I do not concede that. I also note that this happened in the much lauded Silicon Valley, which I am starting to perceive as a den of iniquity. God bless Pastor Mike and his flock. They are truly doing the Lord's work. As for your last statement you completely overlook the fact, read that again, fact, that those who would be our earthly overlords got almost everything wrong.
In response to your question I think there is a reasonableness test that includes the duration of the adverse event and what is known. Ebola of course is deadly for most of those that get the disease and I think short term limits would be appropriate in both cases. I would also assume that public health official wouldn’t have different standards for BLM riot and church attendance. Also since hospitalization and death were mostly limited to the elderly and obese an individual had a better grasp of deducing their actual risk of significant consequences to themselves and their social circle
I am not religious but completely agree with you - "if one falls, they all fall. Either we all enjoy liberty, or none of us do."
This is a battle of the new religion against the old. Follow the science! https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-follow-the-science
Yuri—
You wrote ‘The "science" is settled and cannot be questioned.’ I understand that you were mocking the authorities. I would have stressed it a little differently: what's been said over and over again is “THE science.” There is no such thing as ~the~ science, as used here. One can talk about the science of physics or chemistry or biology, but the way Fauci, Collins and the rest have used the term turns science into dogma. Dogma is absolutely antithetical to any form of science.
To the degree that anyone tries to force a viewpoint on people, he’s a dictator, not a scientist.
Well said, Joe. The Science (TM) is the opposite of true science. Many "my body my choice" lefties still worship Fauci as a priest.
2A advocates have been sounding this alarm for a while, I think.
I agree, and I think the church has a good case in the First Amendment.
But a much better one in the Eight Amendment.
The Eighth Amendment protects against imposing excessive bail, excessive fines, or cruel and unusual punishments.
With a $2.8M fine, Santa Clara County is trying to crush the church, pour encourager les autres.
There was a case I read about awhile back here in Washington State that, while a small amount by comparison, has some bearing on the way the State approaches their power to levy fines. The Seattle metropolitan area has a number of pay-per-use driving lanes on the federal taxpayer paid "freeways". They can be pretty expensive per mile during commuter hours during which time they become effectively "elitist lanes". They have a high-tech RFID tag charging system backed up by cameras for license plates if you drive in one of these lanes without the tag. They work pretty well at charging to the owner of the vehicle via the cameras. But not perfectly. There was a guy in Texas somewhere who received a bill from the State of Washington for a few hundred dollars for driving in these toll lanes. Only he'd never been in Washington. Nor had his vehicle. He assumed it was, of course, a mistake and threw it away, figuring they'd soon straighten it out and in any event couldn't reach him. He kept getting bills every month - additional charges and then fines on the unpaid past charges. He just kept throwing them away. After several years. They came after him through the courts. I don't recall exactly how but suddenly he had to deal with it. He went to court arguing that since it was their mistakenly identifying his vehicle he couldn't be held liable. The judge told him that he should have dealt with it then, and since he hadn't he was obliged to pay half of it. He had to pay several thousand dollars to clear it up. I know this is not the same thing, but it's a cousin of it.
Well said and 🙏 amen.
Hear hear.
For what it's worth, I would prefer it if churches did not exist at all, but I am in favor of the freedom of people to have them if that's what they want.
And, pertinently, to attend them, to voluntarily engage in whatever services they like, even if public health authorities or some other government body would prefer they didn't.
The local churches in this country do some pretty amazing things to serve the people in their communities. Thank God, literally, that they exist.
The selectivity of Covid "enforcement" demonstrated the Left's totalitarian predilections very clearly. Walmart could be open, but small businesses could not. In some areas, certain items (such as gardening supplies) were forbidden to be purchased, even though the store was allowed to be open. Churches could not hold services, even if they were held outdoors, with parishioners sitting in their own socially-distanced cars in the parking lot.
What was and wasn't allowed tracked very closely with Leftist ideologies. That should have been a very large red flag. But some still refuse to see it (largely the types who still drive around masked in their own cars).
I must admit a combination of mirth and exasperation with lone drivers wearing masks in a vehicle with windows shut tight.
Mirth because it’s just so ridiculous.
Exasperation because the truth is *right in front of them* yet at this late date they refuse to see.
At this point, they are mentally ill. No other explanation.
The problem I have with this line of reasoning is that I don't believe it would have existed if masks and sheltering in place hadn't been politicized early on.
Masks and sheltering in place only happened because of politics. It was a purely political move. There was never any actual data to justify either. None. John Ioannidis is one of the top epidemiologists on the planet (long before Covid). I printed out his article from Stat, posted below, twice for my kids March 17, 2020. Go look up the March 2020 models. They failed completely within 3 days.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/
When you combine California threatening to cut off the electricity of churches with the CDC voting unanimously to recommend the vaccine for 2-year-olds, it really could not be more clear that modern Democrats are just high-functioning psychopaths………..or low-functioning.
Regardless of either, they are INSANE. Bottom line.
Nailed it again, Kevin.
You could add in mutilating children, gender by whim, opening our borders to hordes of illiterates, grifters and terrorists, basing the electric grid on pinwheels and panels, borrowing and spending and expecting no blowback........People who held such beliefs used to be institutionalized. Now they are lionized. Lunacy.
“First, in August 2020, another church next door gave the state permission to let enforcement officers spy on Calvary’s faithful through a chain-link fence on its property”
——————————————————
It’s hard to get people to understand this because the problem with fascism is that real fascism *has* been tried so when there aren’t tall black boots and fiery balcony speeches people think
“Oh this isn’t fascism they aren’t marching with their legs up high.”
The real problem is that ideally you would want to stop the Nazis *before* they build the camps, but the pre-camps phase we are currently in is not easily recognized as Nazism by most people. Oh well. Just buy some extra food and water because they will turn off your bank and utilities with a Cheshire grin.
I agree Kevin. I visited the document center in Nuremberg to better understand how such a parasite could take over a Democratic Republic with numerous safeguards. The Nazis had honest buy in from many people and their popularity, proclivity to lie, and use violence were all tools to increase power. I see a lot of similarities today. Different clothes, different lies. Hell aspects of wokeism are often antisemitic too.
How can this fly with people who are educated on these historical issues?
I agree with you both. Like America now Germany in the 1930s was a technically and ethically advanced society.
"How can this fly with people who are educated on these historical issues?"
It doesn't seem like we ever remember anything.
https://pitt.substack.com/p/echoes-of-eugenics-what-the-doctors
"The medical profession has wrestled with the significance of the Doctors Trial. For instance, to observe its 50th anniversary, the British Medical Journal printed a special issue (free downloads here). The lead article “War crimes and medical science” warned that the Nazi problems were “not unique to one place or time, and could happen here” and the trial “left us with a legacy we still shrink from confronting.” It pointed to contemporary problems in American medicine and warned “there will always be imperatives that threaten the professional values we profess to hold so dear” and “the profession of medicine carries within it the seeds of its own destruction.” Yes."
I have yet to see who was behind the decision to keep people out of churches, but say we were "allowed" to go to Home Depot and Target. As if they were Covid free... and stocked items hadn't been touched by everyone. And don't get me started on the handgun used daily by people for self checkout. A small bookstore and my hair dresser were shut down due to imminent death from Covid. Home Depot was Covid free! And the masses got in line and went along with it... which was actually the most troubling.
No one will be held accountable. They won't ever apologize.
Americans in 1775 revolted in response to far less draconian and impactful insults. Yet most Americans simply took it lying down. Why? What has changed that has made us so soft, compliant and feckless?
Comfort and ease
The 1/6 event was a very peaceful "Storming of the Bastille".
When the left protests they risk nothing. AOC faked being handcuffed.
When patriots protest they risk it all, and the capitol police eventually conceded that the cause was just.
Hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times - and so the cycle continues with the only question being “how hard will the times be before stronger men rise up?”
Many polls suggest Brandon might actually win again despite blowing up the country, inching towards a nuclear WW III, and reckless government spending causing inflation that is crushing the bottom 70%.
Unless something changes, it will get much worse before it gets better.
Just look at CA - they keep electing idiots who coddle criminals, tax success, and encourage drug addiction and adolescent sex (hey you can abort up to 42 weeks even if post birth). All while CA has a literacy rate around 75% (WV is 90% for comparison), people literally 💩 in the streets, and taxes reallocate wealth to Newsome cronies faster than the coffers of Ukrainian oligarchs.
Yet we keep doing it - endless wars, more centralization of unaccountable power, higher taxes for wasteful government pet projects, more insanity thrust on poor and middle class children in public and woke private schools, endless failure justified by claiming mediocre is “better” because it’s “inclusive.”
"To go to a church where you could see people smiling and have a conversation took away the hopelessness."
Well, see, that's that problem. If you have hope then you won't feel the need to abdigate your rights and freedom in order for Big Brother to save you. We just can't have that! Stay inside and go insane online instead of going to church, fer yer health!
"the county noted that it is proud of its public health orders, which resulted 'in one of the lowest death rates of any major county in the United States.'" Lowest death rates... from covid... maybe. What about increases in unemployment, drug/alcohol abuse and addiction, domestic violence, and general always-online-induced hysteria?
Do they have proof of this “lowest death rate” they claim? No they do not - it’s nothing but bogus Marxist statistics with zero basis in truth.
They have no proof for any of their claims. Not the efficacy of lockdowns. Or masks. Or vaccines. Or that the vaccines are harmless. Or that repurposed drugs were ineffective. All they had was the power of the state, a sufficient number of quislings and a very heavy hand.
It is supremely ironic that California has morphed from one of the most entrepreneurial, creative states to one of the most egregiously authoritarian. And they keep voting for more of the same. How is anyone better off under such a stifling regime?
California has become the land of the smug superior. The most dangerous breed of all.
They are also the land of the illiterate. For all the ego CA has one of the lowest literacy rates - around 75% compared to WV at 90%; highest levels of economic inequality, highest rate of homelessness, lowest rates of home ownership, bottom half for high school graduation rates, middle of the pack for college educated rates. The ego is hysterical because it’s not based in reality.
Nice to meet you NCmom! Wow, and yes, California is the poster child for the "new Elite" corrupting the culture. They hide behind social justice but accomplish exactly the opposite, Kardashian style- Instagram optics, Twitter no substance, lip service to the downtrodden they so desperately want to help while creating the largest class of homeless people and mentally ill on the streets to ever rival Reagonomics. History will bear all that out. (Mind you I'm not not affiliated with any political party).
The natural beauty and pleasant weather and good government (in the 60's-80's) attracted lots of people to California. Unfortunately, these were the wrong kind of people. They thought they could live off the fat of the land and impose all sorts of schemes on the population that make them feel good and think they are good, i.e. virtue signal.
Look out Texas and Florida, these morons are on their way.
Are they really voting? 😉 In Canada our elections are now being exposed as being influenced by China. Communists there or Democrat liberals here - all the same. Power for them - compliance for us. The left are ruthless and we all need to wake up fast and get off our asses and fight back.
Well, Castro Jr does love himself some authoritarian leftists governments. It might literally be in his blood.
That, along with insane taxes, are the main reasons CA is hemorrhaging residents.
Agree! One thing to pay taxes and have a community that has good schools, good public transportation, well maintained roads, a responsive police force, and other quality of living factors versus living in a community where the quality of living is going down while the taxes are going up.
How does California keep voting for leftist regimes? Because when you look at a map, CA is almost all red. CA is a state of oil, agriculture, and hard workers who are middle class. So what happened...
It started with gerrymandering! It continues with the laws that allow primaries to be a run off not between parties but against top vote getters. It has roots in counties so huge that the urban vote totally swamps the suburban and rural vote. There was a point where some how the real balance and real representation was taken away and voters' voices were lost. Eastern Oregon wants to join Idaho for similar reasons. (edited when Sharon caught my directional mistake...it is eastern oregon seeking to leave and not western as I original wrote)
https://abc30.com/politics/red-vs-blue-california-election/398766/
Eastern Oregon.
Thank you for catching my "duh"...yes, eastern Oregon!
Gerrymandering is by no means unique to blue states--look at Nashville being split in half so that both halves are now in red districts vs. being together as a blue district.
Personally, I think the House of Representatives should be elected statewide. Everyone votes for three (or whatever) and the top vote getters become the representatives. That way groups excluded by gerrymandering could band together and get representation.
I sometimes think we'd have better representatives if they were chosen completely at random for two years of service. Sure, you'd get an occasional left or right wing crank but you'd also avoid big donors paying millions of dollars to install someone in a job that pays $170K.
The state wide idea is an awful idea. The randomly chosen would be better than what we have now.
Gerrymandering is not unique, but certain states have it down to a very fine art. Of course, all done by "independent" committees whose members were selected by the party in power.
I did not see the word "snitches" in this piece but it sure did come to.mind. Maybe a silver lining from the past three years is that snitching is now socially acceptable on the left ( sarcasm intended as I have been schooled in the past on these posts and others to make that clear!). Let us not forget that there were thousands if not millions of our fellow citizens who wanted to actually put non vaxxed people in JAIL ( no sarcasm as that is a fact).
Snitching. Good word to bring to mind. And terrifying at the same time. Took me right back to the holocaust. We should be very concerned.
When "snitches get stitches" they don't snitch.
All leftist governments love snitches. Read the tale of Pavlik Morozov who ratted out his own father to Stalin's ghouls. Little Pavlik got his "just desserts." A worthy fate for all who prostrate themselves to the state.
Thank toxic feminism (now the D.E.I. commissariat) for the rise of the "anonymous" informer and the first assaults on trial and due process. We've all watched the life destroying trial by accusation and the rise of the career devastating rumor mill whisperers as they've worked their tyranny and destruction.
Eeeeeeeesssshhhh, Mike R. I wish you didn't invoke toxic feminism as a primary culprit here. Snitching started waayyyyy way way before that, mostly against women. Snitching is a trait of the weak.
Men who are bad for women are also bad for other men. The same is true of women. The anonymous student/co-worker complaint, whisper campaign, shunning, pile-on, and career/reputation destruction based on often vague emotional discomfort and claimed victimhood began as a feminist ploy on the university campus and evolved into D.E.I. "wokedom". There was/is a toxic active anti-male/anti-family element at play in feminist politics. However not all feminist's are bad.
Being painted with the broad brush of toxicity when you're trying to be the best human you can be hurts doesn't it.
Yes, that's what I said, not what you initially said.
“The Christians of Calvary Chapel argue it’s their constitutional right to weigh the physical risks of Covid-19 against the mental and spiritual risks of missing church.”
—————————————————————-
No. They have constitutional right regardless of whether or not they are weighing risks to ‘public health’, which is a fake discipline and an intentionally vague term designed to facilitate fascism.
Right to worship and assembly CANNOT be infringed by the government.
This. I wish people would read the Constitution, which codifies inalienable, natural-born rights. (Rights not granted *by* the government, but protected by it.)
Yes “God given”. Good injunction to “know your constitution “ as they try to steal your rights
Equally important, rights not explicitly granted to the government are reserved to "the people." And if the government - including its courts - are violating the Constitution, the people have the absolute right to throttle that government.
But you have to have people willing to defend the Constitution and fight and die for it.
I've mentioned this before but when CT Governor Lamont announced his diktat against gatherings of 5 or more people, I was incensed that not one legislator of either party rose up. I sued him personally - and alone - in Federal court. I believe I would have won because he claimed his orders were based on CDC guidance but even the CDC's idiotic rule was 10 people. More to the point - how many people joined or supported my lawsuit?
None. I was beyond disgusted.
No one gave corporations, tech and the surveillance state the right to commodify, surveil and interfere with American lives and liberty. They took it. In all fascist regimes people are no more than managed livestock. Can we see Auschwitz any other way? Slavers, exploited labor, exploited natural resources, unaccountable criminal conspiracy, looting, torture, rendition, assassination and the pathological willingness to lie and distort the truth is all standing at the front door.
Got Constitution?
Public health is a fake discipline?
The fallacy of your argument lies in the statistics that show there was virtually no difference in the death rates per million between states that rabidly followed the draconian protocols and those that did not. We now know that these protocols, like masking, quarantine, etc., had zero effect, and that natural immunity is better than the immunity (if any) provided by the vaccines. The virus would have been self contained if we had simply protected the vulnerable (aged, immune compromised, chronically ill) and let everyone else go about their business without restriction. The Great Barrington Declaration laid this all out clearly early on, but was ignored and shunned by those in charge. But my greatest concern is that we, the people, allowed our rights and lives to be trampled on with very little resistance.
No, the fallacy of his argument is ignorance of (or disdain for) the First Amendment, which makes no exception for pandemics or public health situations. Period. The government massively over-reached, many people went along with it, but that does not make it acceptable, constitutional, or legal.
If I took you to the basement of an insane asylum and introduced you a little man who thought he was Napoleon Bonaparte how long would you spend trying to convince him he wasn't?
I can pick any topic I like. Then, claim myself a champion of "the cause", financially profit off the struggle, justify the violation of human conscience as the necessary moral equivalent of war, and denounce all who oppose me as evil. It is the realm of poseurs and sycophants. Well paid poseurs and sycophants. I weaponize and use reason against the reasonable as a means of looting and pushing my own agenda forward at the expense of reason itself. My megalomania and narcissism disempowers you and your reality while allowing me to expand my own. If I can get the DNC, Soros, Billy Gates or the IMF to fund me my career is set.
Truth speaker's yep always. But (my opinion) we need a return to the only legitimate center ground from which to view the chaos surrounding us. That is, as an active citizen of the American Constitutional Republic.
Actually Sweden and Florida are two places that did it right. Minimal intervention in people's lives, no serious economic damage, kids went to school throughout and are not now 2-3 years behind, and yet their statistical death rates were about the same as the places with draconian policies. The Florida death rate is only slightly higher than the New York death rate. As for Sweden, the initial death rates in early 2020 were higher than their Nordic neighbors, but in comparison with the rest of Europe, Sweden came through the pandemic relatively well and is among the countries with the lowest excess mortality during the period 2020–2021. Their most recent medical commission review reported "In the light of current knowledge … the Commission is not convinced that extended or recurring mandatory lockdowns, as introduced in other countries, are a necessary element in the response to a new, serious epidemic outbreak." The most current studies show that natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity and that masking makes absolutely no difference in the virus transmission rate (which studies for the past 40 years had already validated). I put my absolute trust in real scientists, like all that signed the Great Barrington Resolution, which essentially advised the U.S. to implement a policy similar to that of Sweden. "Trusting scientists" who either knowingly spewed misinformation disguised as fact, or ignored contrary opinions by other doctors and scientists, often those far more reputable than themselves, along with the power grab by politicians, and the collusion of the main stream and social media, is what got us into this deplorable situation. In the next edition of the book "Chicken Little," the chicken will likely be wearing a mask while claiming "the sky is falling," and we will all be eaten by the fox.
“The science”… “the protocols”…seriously???
You can’t possibly still believe the steaming pile of garbage that was forced fed to thee masses in order to protect and enrich the elite.
Every day there are more revelations and admissions that the authoritarian crackdown was all a complete farce.
Willingly continue to submit to the distortion if you wish, but the rest of us clearly understand we were duped. Lied to, damaged in hundreds of crucial ways, even killed by the authorities and their personal greed for money and power.
Also, Florida and California had the same covid death rate.
Florida 4000 deaths per million
California 2500
That study was funded by the Commonwealth Fund, which is a well-known Democrat social policy operation. It's president, David Blumenthal, was an Obama political appointee. Those facts do not automatically discredit the findings of the study, but they certainly cast a shadow.
Because often the groups funding these kinds of "studies" are anticipating an outcome. Commonwealth Fund contributing to a study that yields a result aligned to their advocacy goals is unsurprising. Yale is "very Republican?" Can you back that up?
Okay for hundreds of people to freely roam through Costco, Walmart, Home Depot, Target, Lowe’s, etc on the hour every day though. Okay for thousands to march shoulder to shoulder in the streets for months in 2020. Pick and choose your ‘public health’ and then tell us we’re ‘being political’ when we point out the arbitrariness and the inconsistencies. Liquor stores, strip clubs are germ free and safe. Movie crew eating areas on picnic benches crowded together, under a tent. I’ve seen that too. What pathetic nonsense. People will believe anything.
But answer the question: why were rules unequally applied? Why did Hollywood and BLM get exceptions? When you answer that we can talk about trust. All credibility is lost precisely because “the science” was politically compromised.
“People’s constitutional rights are a bogus argument and offer no protection from the virus.”
The narrative perfectly encapsulated.
The virus is infinitely less important than even a single conditional right.
Horses. Ass mouth
And this is where we part ways. I’d rather be free than operate under the guise of someone else’s definition of “safety”; turns out the vaccine had a lot of “misinformation” a round what it does and does not do. I also did my research, pushed back against all unfounded safety protocols, and here we are in the same place, following our own personal choices. That’s the entire point.
Hopefully there will be a reckoning for all the lockdown proponents who inflicted tremendous harm upon the public. It starts at the ballot box.
Nope. Elections are no longer reliable. Ballots are counted, not votes from voters
This piece makes my blood boil, especially after seeing Gavin Newsom taking his child to private school while claiming it was too dangerous to open public schools and closing restaurants while allowing movie caterers to operate freely. Then there was the French Laundry. It was and is obvious that these restrictions were selectively applied and backed by sketchy science. Moreover, the length of time involved, the lack of reporting on other countries with different policies says to me that we are dealing with a bunch of petty power brokers and “good Germans” who should be ashamed of themselves. This lengthy lockdown was unsuccessful as a public health approach and a disgraceful episode in American history. Next, please report on current college Covid vaccine mandates (even including boosters). The UK and Denmark don’t even recommend Covid shots for this age group. Here, to access an education, you have to comply. Wake up people. Whatever this is, it isn’t science.
Great piece by Heather! I’m a fan, admittedly, and she’s a good friend of mine too.
The parties in this lawsuit both need to pipe down.
It is true that hindsight is 20/20, and also true that the masking issue remains politicized well beyond the point of ridiculousness.
I previously commented that the way people use masks in public is akin to licking a vacuum cleaner’s dust filter. As a retired surgeon, I can vouch after wearing these things for 30+ years they don’t do much for aerosolized viruses. Just ask any ENT or gynecologist about their experiences lasering HPV lesions, and that’s in a controlled environment, or look at the studies from the early days of the HIV epidemic that found patient blood in the nasal cavities of masked surgeons after procedures.
Masks keep nose hairs and boogers out of surgical wounds, and that’s a good thing! But I think there’s a general consensus that viral isolation requires a space suit with HEPA filtration. All the articles and posturing about face masks have proven difficult to interpret which proves only one thing, which is the mask effect is negligible, if any.
So, from my perspective, the mere fact that Santa Clara County dropped the public gathering complaint (after the Supreme Court ruling), makes the remainder of the case into an issue which if properly lawyered, juried, and adjudicated an easy win for the church.
But, this is California, and asking for impartiality is magical thinking.
We already know what happens if this ladders it’s way up through the appellate courts. The mask issue has been decided in favor of independent decision making by the appellate courts.
The real danger here is that if a very lethal bug gets loose, the trust and faith in our public health system has been eroded to the point of no return.
Your last sentence may be true but I am a staunch believer that good things can come out of bad things. As such I believe that when the next one comes, and it will, we will handle it much better. Hopefully the government leadership will understand the necessity of transparency and be straight with the citizenry. We deserve nothing less.
“The pastor said he welcomed the agents who entered the church and identified themselves as working for the county.
‘We liked them,’ McClure said of the officials. ‘We gave them coffee, food, and the gospel. They were doing their jobs.’”
My favorite part of the whole story. The agents were doing their job and God, through Rev. McClure, was doing His.
My friend attends this church. Rev. McClure views every attack by the government, including the suit, as an opportunity to witness to a fallen world.
I fear scenarios such as this increasingly are what we as Christians will face in a “post-Christian” culture. Seriously, how were Santa Clara County’s surveillance tactics any different from those deployed by the Chinese government against dissidents?
Remain steadfast, people of Calvary.
“For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” 1 Cor. 1:25
It's now pretty clear that the lockdowns never prevented Covid and did more harm than good, destroying the economy, jobs and lives. It's also becoming clear that the mask edicts - which allowed any face covering, no matter how dirty and reused - also did no good and probably harmed children. Same with forced injections of a vaccine that neither prevents Covid nor is completely safe as was claimed and should never have been forced on healthy people or those with natural immunity. But we'll never know for certain until we have an unbiased investigation of the facts detailing all the harm. Only then will be be able to show that the hysterical, panicked and tyrannical edicts of the nitwits we elect had no factual underpinning and were, therefore, unlawful as being arbitrary and capricious. Even more important, we need to understand that giving untrammeled power to government - no matter the reason - is a Faustian bargain; a deal with the devil. Free, independent and self-reliant do not do - or countenance - such things. What Covid really requires is a deep look into ourselves and a reflection on why we let ourselves turn into a bizarre, Twilight Zone version of the panicked, fearful and ultimately murderous residents of the neighborhood that turned on each other when the lights went out.
The collateral damage to our children especially the most vulnerable will be a lifetime of struggle by not having the basic skills needed to survive in our complex society. Maybe the unintentional goal is increased control. I am reminded of the book The True Believer by Eric Hoffer.
Yes, Hoffer's book is quite good. I got a copy and read it not long after BLM riots started becoming common.
Collateral damage is the point of the exercise. Slow encroachment on, and destruction of human community, connection and dignity, claiming moral superiority and social concern, as I slowly introduce sterile and anti-human strictures for control.
I guarantee you that there were throngs of county and state officials who joyfully violated all those same laws they used to try to shut down the church
Covid showed us very clearly that elite Leftists were all about "rules for thee but not for me."
Some of us are old enough to remember commisars laughing at the prolies in breadlines as they headed to their dachas, in chauffeured Zils, slurping vodka and caviar.
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
Including and especially governor Gavin Newsom and his large donors. They get exceptions and so do strip clubs. But churches don't.
The Amish ignored all the restrictions and were fine:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/10/10/attkisson_how_amish_communities_became_the_first_to_acheive_herd_immunity_from_covid-19_in_may_2020.html
I’ve longed to dine at The French Laundry. I guess Newsom succumbed to a similar craving.
Much is made of the French Laundry and much should be made of a haute restarant with elite patrons allowed to stay open when even restaurants with outdoor dining were being closed. It is also important to note how many restaurants in CA were not able to survive the shut down.
The most egrigious crime is that Newsom closed public schools and continued to send his children to a private school. Non attendance whether never using the computer to tune into school during Covid and not coming back to school post covid are big issues for certain school districts. Lack of education has huge ramifications.
Anyone not furious at the patent abuse of Science and Authority during the REACTION to the COVID pandemic is stupid. Ignorant. Willfully blind.
The flu was and remains more dangerous for all healthy people under 65 or so than COVID. Period. Full Stop. We did not shut down life for the flu, ever, and by and large that included the great flu pandemic of 1918 or so, which truly was catastrophic.
With COVID, our hospitals were empty for most of the idiocy. They were laying people off. They were postponing needed surgeries, which NOW is increasing mortality from cancer, heart disease and other conditions.
The stress of the lockdowns BY ITSELF killed people. A LOT of people. And the authorities KNEW this would happen. Suicides. Depression leading to poor health. Substance abuse.
Many kids were damaged emotionally FOR NO REASON, and many suffered developmental problems they will never likely fully outgrow.
The whole thing was criminal, and I have been saying since 2020 we need Nuremburg-style Trials, and those responsible need to spend the rest of their lives in jail.