Sky Links, 10-25-20
The debate still rages among Christians – especially evangelicals – over Trump, and how we might vote this time around. There are, however, many Christians like me who have shifted from hesitancy about Trump to support for him – warts and all.
In spite of their now-ubiquitous presence in most of the Western world today, relatively little evidence exists to support widespread use of face-masking to prevent the spread of respiratory disease. A 2019 World Health Organization review of pandemic mitigation measures, for instance, found "no evidence" that face coverings helped to stop the spread of influenza.Whether or not studies on influenza transmission can apply to COVID-19 is unknown; the disease's relatively recent emergence means that scientific studies on it are in short supply. Studies can take many month to secure funding, develop methodologies, carry out experiments, interpret the findings, write a research paper and get it peer-reviewed and published.To bridge that gap, a team of Danish scientists earlier this year sought to carry out a major randomized controlled trial study to determine how effective masks might be at stopping COVID transmission. The study, begun in April, involved around 6,000 Danish citizens, half of whom wore face coverings during "normal behavior" and the other half of whom went without them.The study concluded in June. Yet the Copenhagen newspaper Berlingske reported this week that it has been rejected by at least three elite medical journals so far — the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association."They all said no," Christian Torp-Pederson, one of the study's researchers, told the Danish newspaper this week. He added that the study's scientists "cannot start discussing what [the journals] are dissatisfied with, because in that case we must also explain what the study showed, and we do not want to discuss that until it is published."
-Frank Turek
After all, do you think this video would exist if Biden was running against Bush rather than Trump?
No, this video exists because Christians are looking for any excuse to avoid voting for Trump. When I ask never-Trump Christians, “If it was Bush vs. Biden, who would you vote for?” They all say, “that’s easy—Bush!” Yet Trump supports more conservative and pro-life policies than Bush. This reveals that they are voting personality rather than policy. (Look, I wish we had a good personality and platform in one candidate. Unfortunately, we don’t. I give Trump and A- on policy and a D on demeanor; Biden gets an F and policy and a C on demeanor.)
But Trump’s caustic and rude personality is no justification for suggesting that life isn’t the most important issue anymore. The first duty of government is to prevent the taking of innocent life, and certainly not to pay for the taking of innocent life (as the Democrat platform advocates with its taxpayer funding of abortion.) While being pro-life doesn’t necessarily make someone a good candidate, being pro-abortion necessarily disqualifies a candidate.
Pro-life author Scott Klusendorf asks you to “imagine a school house that is on fire with children trapped inside. A crude talking man with arrogant tweets is willing to join you risking his life to save kids. Meanwhile, a “nice” man thought to be less haughty and with fewer sarcastic tweets not only refuses to help you, he promises to throw gasoline on the fire. Is there no morally significant difference between the two men? Worse still, should we endorse the arsonist? If you think Biden and the Democrats do not have wicked plans on abortion and will rush to implement them, you have not been paying attention to their campaign promises or the actions Senate democrats–who can’t even bring themselves to outlaw letting unwanted humans die after birth.” In short, policy trumps personality.
If the goal of Mr. Vischer and his narrator (pastor Skye Jethani) is to get Christians to give up on Roe and vote Democrat, I have a question for them: Would you would have made this video if the issue was not abortion and Roe but slavery and Dred Scott? (Dred Scott affirmed slavery by opining that blacks were only three-fifths of a person.)
“Overturning the Dred Scott decision isn’t our top priority anymore. We’ve put justice after justice on the Supreme Court and still haven’t been able to overturn it after all these years. And even if we do overturn Dred, some states will still have slavery. Besides, there are other ways of reducing slavery. And since slavery has decreased under pro-slavery presidents, it’s perfectly fine to vote for Stephen Douglas over Abraham Lincoln.”
Would these men be making that dreadful case? Would they be casting doubt on the moral importance of voting for Lincoln over Douglas? Would they gloss over the fact that Douglas not only wants to keep slavery legal, but he wants you, the taxpayer, to subsidize it?
No one would accept that case. And we shouldn’t accept theirs now. It’s a make-believe case.
Transcripts: Clinton Aides Allied With Fusion GPS Pair After Election -- to Re-Push Anti-Trump Dossier
-Paul Sperry
A month after TDIP was formed in 2017, former Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri summed up the post-election strategy in a Washington Post column comparing “Russiagate” to Watergate and encouraging the press and other Democrats to “turn the Russia story against Trump.”
“If we make plain that what Russia has done is nothing less than an attack on our republic, the public will be with us. And the more we talk about it, the more they’ll be with us,” she advised. “Polls show that voters are now concerned about the Russia story and overwhelmingly support an independent investigation.”
Though the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory was officially debunked by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report in March 2019, it has tied up the Trump presidency. A separate report released late last year by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz also debunked many of the theories propagated by the dossier, while uncovering misconduct by the FBI in using the dossier to obtain warrants to electronically eavesdrop on a Trump campaign adviser.
Podesta’s and Sullivan's recently released testimony provides evidence that the Clinton team and other Democrats never stopped campaigning against Trump. Hillary Clinton didn’t just pay for the Russian-sourced opposition research on candidate Trump before the election; her top aides helped bankroll continuing efforts to cast the now sitting president as a Russian agent.
The Damage Russiagate Has Done
-Patrick Lawrence
A lot of people are “still taking at face value” all the misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies our newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters have purveyed incessantly for the past four years.
Why is a very large question. All possible answers are disturbing. But here is another big one we get to before that: When we consider together all its many consequences, has Russiagate destroyed what remained of American democracy before illiberal liberals, spooks, law enforcement, and the press colluded to erect the dreadful edifice?
Your columnist’s answer rests on the most scrupulously precise definition of Russiagate one can manage: What we have witnessed these past four years is an attempted palace coup against a sitting president.
Cold comfort it is that the gang that couldn’t shoot straight bungled the job. It has also created a Democratic default position: When wrongdoing by Democrats is credibly exposed, automatically blame Russia. Among much else, that has led to unnecessary tension with a nuclear power. This damage will long stay with us.
The Real Debate is Between Fauci and Other Scientists, Not Fauci and Trump
-D. Axe, W. Briggs, J. Richards
Fauci gave the president bad advice on lockdowns, and yet the public health official has paid no price for it. On the contrary, the press has lionized Fauci. That’s made it hard for the president to pivot away from the lockdowns.
Unfortunately, by taking on Fauci directly, Trump allows the media to frame the dispute as Trump versus “the science,” with Fauci as the stand-in for the science. The real debate, though, is between Fauci and the growing body of scientific evidence that contradicts his advice. What’s more, there are thousands of scientific experts who are ready to talk about that evidence.
The lopsided influence of a few scientists like Fauci is the result of what we call the tyranny of experts. Being a public health official is not a gold medal for scientific acumen. It confers no advantage when it comes either to smarts or to public policy. Officialdom merely allows narrow specialists to exercise power in areas outside their ken and competence.
Imagine, for instance, if an immunologist who had worked for decades in the federal government told the president that if he doesn’t shut down the country, 2.2 million people would die. And imagine if that advice were based not on evidence but on a computer model that other expert modelers later described as “a buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming.” Finally, imagine if that advice were protected from critique by other reputable scientists.
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You don’t have to imagine this. It happened in March. Dr. Anthony Fauci and someone else — not yet identified — gave just that dubious advice to President Trump. At the time, the president had no access to experts who would have challenged Fauci’s claims. He was also under siege by a hostile press that championed Fauci and the lockdowns. As a result, the president had little choice but to act on that advice.
This is the tyranny of experts.
Don Bongino with Pollster Robert Cahaly
The incredible decision by Twitter and Facebook to block access to a New York Post story about a cache of emails reportedly belonging to Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter, with Twitter going so far as to lock the 200 year-old newspaper out of its own account for over a week, continues to be a major underreported scandal.
Treason in America: An Overview of the FBI, CIA and Matters of ‘National Security’
-Cynthia Chung
Today we see the continuation of the over seven decades’ long ruse, the targeting of individuals as Russian agents without any basis, in order to remove them from the political arena. The present effort to declassify the Russiagate papers and exonerate Michael Flynn, so that he may freely speak of the intelligence he knows, is not a threat to national security, it is a threat to those who have committed treason against their country.
On Oct. 6th, 2020, President Trump ordered the declassification of the Russia Probe documents along with the classified documents on the findings concerning the Hillary Clinton emails. The release of these documents threatens to expose the entrapment of the Trump campaign by the Clinton campaign with help of the U.S. intelligence agencies.
The Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe released some of these documents recently, including former CIA Director John Brennan’s handwritten notes for a meeting with former President Obama, the notes revealing that Hillary Clinton approved a plan to “vilify Donald Trump by stirring up scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”
Trey Gowdy, who was Chair of the House Oversight Committee from June 13th, 2017 – Jan. 3rd, 2019, has stated in an interview on Oct. 7th, 2020 that he has never seen these documents. Devin Nunes, who was Chair of the House Intelligence Committee from Jan. 3rd, 2015 – Jan. 3rd, 2019, has also said in a recent interview that he has never seen these documents.
And yet, both the FBI and CIA were aware and had access to these documents and sat on them for four years, withholding their release from several government-led investigations that were looking into the Russiagate scandal and who were requesting relevant material that was in the possession of both intelligence bureaus. Do these intelligence bureaus sound like they are working for the “national security” of the American people?
The truth must finally be brought to light, or the country will rot from its head to tail.
Brain Damage From Masks Cannot Be Reversed
-Vanessa Beeley
The following is a transcript of the highlights (by Henna Maria) from Dr. Margarite Griesz-Brisson’s recent extremely pressing video message, that was translated on-air from German into English by Claudia Stauber. Video below.
Dr. Margarite Griesz-Brisson MD, PhD is a Consultant Neurologist and Neurophysiologist with a PhD in Pharmacology, with special interest in neurotoxicology, environmental medicine, neuroregeneration and neuroplasticity. This is what she has to say about masks and their effects on our brains:
“The rebreathing of our exhaled air will without a doubt create oxygen deficiency and a flooding of carbon dioxide. We know that the human brain is very sensitive to oxygen depravation. There are nerve cells for example in the hippocampus, that can’t be longer than 3 minutes without oxygen – they cannot survive. The acute warning symptoms are headaches, drowsiness, dizziness, issues in concentration, slowing down of the reaction time – reactions of the cognitive system.
However, when you have chronic oxygen depravation, all of those symptoms disappear, because you get used to it. But your efficiency will remain impaired and the undersupply of oxygen in your brain continues to progress.
We know that neurodegenerative diseases take years to decades to develop. If today you forget your phone number, the breakdown in your brain would have already started 20 or 30 years ago.
While you’re thinking, that you have gotten used to wearing your mask and rebreathing your own exhaled air, the degenerative processes in your brain are getting amplified as your oxygen deprivation continues.
The Coronavirus Experts Were Wrong, Now They Need Scapegoats
-Daniel Greenfield
The problem isn’t just the China Virus. It’s that we adopted the China Model to fight it.Public health experts adopted China’s draconian lockdowns without knowing how well they really worked and in a country that, fortunately, lacks the power to truly enforce them.China’s deceptiveness and lack of transparency meant that we did not know how well anything that the Communist dictatorship did to battle the virus that it spawned actually worked. Despite that, our public health experts, and those of most free countries, adopted the China Model.We don’t know how well the China Model worked for the People’s Republic of China, but it failed in every free country that tried it. Lockdowns eventually gave way to reopenings and new waves of infection. This was always going to happen because not even the more socialist European countries have the police state or the compliant populations of a Communist dictatorship.Desperate, the public health experts adopted China’s compulsive mask wearing, a cultural practice that predates the virus, as if wearing a few flimsy scraps of fiber would fix everything.It hadn’t and it didn’t.But by then the public health experts and the media that had touted them were moving fully into the scapegoat portion of the crisis. The China Model had failed, all that was left was shifting the blame to more conservative and traditional populations, and away from the cultural elites.
Kanye West Says Star Wars Prequels Are Better Than the Sequel Trilogy
-Adam Barnhardt
Kanye West is a massive supporter of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. The musician took a stand on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Podcast, claiming the prequels were far superior to the sequel trilogy after watching Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith nearly a dozen times in quarantine. As West says, the prequels reign supreme because they came to fruition directly from the mind of George Lucas, as opposed to the sequels that he slams as products of the massive corporate machine.
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