Category: Blithe Spirit
The good and the bad, emphasis on Trib and Sun-Times
Vaccine Effectiveness Hits as Low as Minus 300% – as UKHSA Announces it Will No Longer Publish the Data
Vax doing more harm than good? By a long shot, apparently.
The general situation:
It is said that people can only worry about one thing at a time; if so, then I’m sure that few people are currently worrying about the recent increase in Covid cases in the U.K.
This is a good thing – the hospitalisation and mortality rates of Omicron appear to be significantly lower than those of previous variants, so it’s surely time to just accept Covid as another type of cold that’ll give us all an annoying sniffle every couple of years.
Good for the mother country.
But the sticky problem of the vaccines remains. Do they work or have they made things worse? Luckily, the UKHSA (just about) continues to publish the Vaccine Surveillance Report and as a result we can explore how the vaccines are impacting on Covid in England.
And this…
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Power to the People: Chicago Tribune Reporter Dan Hinkel Returns
Hinkel’s return to the dirty world of Chicago journalism is not surprising. The reason is that journalism, particularly print journalism, is going through a massive transformation in Chicago, from profit-driven media into a world of non-profit news organizations like the new one Hinkel is joining, the BGA.
The profit-driven Tribune, long a steadfast and crucial independent watchdog over the city, crashed on the ideology of contemporary progressive journalists like Hinkel. A stale, sterile, and barely believable narrative about the city was imposed with a monotony that might drive any truly curious reader away.
The journalists and editors at the paper blamed external forces like big bad capitalism, but never their own glaring refusal to look at the city with fairness, let alone originality. Chicago print journalists are ideologues, and ideologues…
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Covid Deaths “Impossible to Calculate” as Authorities Used 14 Different Definitions, Say Oxford Researchers
Our leaders. Gosh.
WE ARE LED, LITERALLY, BY THE MENTALLY DEFECTIVE: Biden’s Remarks at ‘Equal Pay’ Event Were a Gaffe-Filled Dumpster Fire.
See also: Has Nancy Pelosi Been Drinking on the Job Again? It Sure Looks That Way…
Masks are harmful to your health, let us count the ways
The ‘Smile Free’ Campaign – The Daily Sceptic
The Government requirement for healthy people to wear a face covering in a range of indoor community settings, purportedly to reduce the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has arguably been the most insidious of all the coronavirus restrictions.
Anyone reluctant to wear a face covering risks being challenged by others: “It’s only a mask”; “It’s no big deal”; “If it prevents just one infection, it’s worth it”. These comments are based on the premise that healthy people have nothing to lose from donning a mask when moving around their communities, but they fail to recognise an important truth:
Masking the healthy is not, and has never been, a benign intervention.
You’re joking. Oh? Don’t laugh. Here’s a list:
For the purposes of this article, let’s leave to one side the accumulating evidence that face coverings are associated with:
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Pope Francis an enemy of ecumenism that goes beyond friendly relations with other churches?
Sunday sermons, weekday observations
After the announcement of Anglicanorum coetibus, signifying the erection of the Ordinariates, the senior Anglican in Argentina … so he narrates … received an invitation from H E Cardinal Bergoglio.
He “called me to have breakfast with him one morning and told me very clearly that the Ordinariate [authorizing Anglicans’ acceptance into full communion with Rome] was quite unnecessary and that the church needs us as Anglicans.”
Stay where you are, we like it that way, he told the man.
Some years later, after election to the See of St. Peter, [Pope Francis] said to Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk (Pembroke College Oxford and ‘Foreign Minister’ of the Moskow Patriarchate):
“. . . the Catholic Church will never allow an attitude of division to arise from her people. We will…
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Kids without masks in an Oak Park school, a child’s reaction to seeing a friend unmasked: “Mamma, you know my friend from carpool? I got to see the rest of her face today!”
Child being one of her three, a mother telling this in the 412-member Public group Oak Park [IL] Back to Normal:
Today was my kids’ first day of school with masks optional. They are in 4th, 1st, and Pre-K.
My youngest’s first words when I went to pick her up: “Mamma, you know ***’s sister ***? My friend from carpool? I got to see the rest of her face today! She is so beautiful! And she wears the prettiest blue earrings.”And at bedtime: “You know Mamma, I never really saw Ms. ***’s lips and teeth and smile before today. Just a little bit quickly when she took a quick drink of water. I really like her smile.” Ms. *** has been her teacher since August 2020!
The 3 and 4 year olds in her mixed age Montessori class still aren’t allowed to unmask because…Oak Park. One of her…
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Francis talked a good game when he was elected pope . . .
Sunday sermons, weekday observations
Last March 13 was the ninth anniversary of the election of Pope Francis. The moment Pope Francis came out of the lodge of Blessings and spoke his first words as Pope, a pontificate began that promised a lot and aroused many hopes. Now that we enter the tenth year of the pontificate, what are the promises that have been kept? And what will the legacy of Pope Francis be?
In his first speech, Pope Francis stressed that he wanted to begin a journey “bishop and people, people and bishop.” From the very beginning, Pope Francis wanted to mark his pontificate on the theme of the outgoing Church, which had also characterized his speech to the general congregations. And in those words, one could already find a push towards synodality, which led him to convene two special synods and…
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A progressive explains: Majority unnecessary. Control procedure, and you win every time.
Sunday sermons, weekday observations
The explainer dealt in church matters — Vatican Council II in the ‘sixties. But the comment might have come from a 2022 political operative.
In his [Vatican II Notebook], on November 10, 1962, Father [Marie-Dominique] Chenu[OP] notes this sentence by Father Giuseppe Dossetti, one of the main strategists on the progressive front: “The winning battle is run in dealing with the procedure.I have always won in this way.”
The author, Roberto de Mattei, comments:
In assemblies the decisional process does not belong to the majority, but to the minority which controls the procedure. Democracy doesn’t exist in political society and even less so in religion.
As for church matters,
Democracy in the Church, observed the philosopher, Marcel De Corte, is ecclesiastic Caesarism, the worst of all the regimes.
Specifically, says de Mattei, at the 2014 Synod on the Family…
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