“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
The above graphic is courtesy of the Farooq, et al., 2022 paper on the functions of the p53 protein in the human body. The paper is found here: https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105029, “p53 Tumor Suppressor: Functional Regulation and Role in Gene Therapy”, Zeenat Farooq, et al., 1 August 2022.
Health Friday is a series devoted to Big Pharma, vaccines, general health, and associated topics. Since today’s offering is related to the disaster of COVID-19, Yours Truly dedicates it to all persons, of whatever age or location, who have suffered COVID-19 “vaccine”-induced injuries, illnesses, disabilities, or have passed away from, the negative effects of these injectables that they had put into their bodies. However, the discussion is not limited to what is presented today; It is an Open Thread.
There are Important Wolf Moon Notifications; the Rules of our late, good Wheatie; and certain caveats from Yours Truly, of which readers should be aware. They are linked here.
Readers may recall that Yours Truly posted regarding her discovery of the death of a former opera singer with whom she worked, who will be called “D.M.” D.M., as a professional operatic bass-baritone, had an international career, in which one of his “signature roles” was that of Horace Tabor in the Douglas Moore opera, The Ballad of Baby Doe. He had an enormous voice with an unusual “upward extension” that could cover dramatic tenor repertoire. In fact, D.M. was commuting to New York City to study with a voice instructor at the Mannes School of Music to become a Heldentenor (Wagnerian tenor.) However, D.M. eventually left opera performing and taught voice for some years; he then worked as an insurance sales professional. He had had successful MOHS surgery to remove a basal cell carcinoma over a decade ago. There is no doubt in Yours Truly’s mind that D.M. took the COVID-19 “vaccines” in order to keep his job in insurance. In early 2022, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. He passed away in January 2024. I do know that D.M. had at least one potential co-morbidity: he was tall and very big, built almost like a Sumo wrestler, with an extra-large ribcage (this type of body build is important for being a Heldentenor.) May he rest in eternal Peace.
And this is where the p53 protein of the human body comes in.
And, yes, this paper was ordered to be Retracted. It is still available to be read, but the word “RETRACTED” is on every page: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/13/10/2056.
Yours Truly turns to another blog post by Dr. Rose: https://jessicar.substack.com/p/s2-of-spike-protein-buggers-up-p53, 16 April 2024. Dr. Rose discusses the “El-Deiry” paper regarding what the S2 protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (the COVID-19 virus; this protein is also in the COVID-19 “vaccines”) does to interfere with the p53 protein in the “vaccinated” person’s body. The paper is found here: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.12.589252, “SARS-CoV-2 spike S2 subunit inhibits p53 activation of p21(WAF1), TRAIL Death Receptor DR5 and MDM2 proteins in cancer cells”, Wafik El-Deiry, et al., 15 April 2024. Below is a screenshot from this paper:
Yours Truly will again reference the “Angues and Bustos” paper regarding cancer genesis from both the COVID-19 virus itself, and from the COVID-19 “vaccines” (which contain the virus’ spike protein and other “enhancements”): https://doi.org/10/7759/cureus.50703, “SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination and the Multi-Hit Hypothesis of Oncogenesis”, R.V. Angues, Y.P. Bustos, 17 December 2023. Below is the salient Figure 1 from the paper:
Another discussion of how the spike protein from the COVID-19 virus itself, and the COVID-19 “vaccines”, induce negative effects in the body of the “vaccinated” person: https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/spikeopathy-covid-19-spike-protein, “Spikeopathy: COVID-19 Spike Protein Is Pathogenic from Both Virus and Vaccine mRNA”, Peter A. McCullough, MD, 25 October 2023. Below is a screenshot of some of the topics discussed in the paper:
Back to the situation regarding D.M.: There is evidence that skin cancer treatment can actually reduce the risk of colon cancer. Please see: https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.bjc.6604842, “Second primary cancers in patients with skin cancer: a population-based study in Northern Ireland”, MM Cantwell, et al., 6 January 2009. The Cantwell, et al., paper has a reference to a 2008 scientific article on the reduction of colon cancer risk in patients who were treated for basal cell cancer. Please see: https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwn077, “Are patients with skin cancer at lower risk of developing colorectal or breast cancer?”, E. de Vries, et al., 15 June 2008. The Abstract from this paper is below:
Note the importance of Vitamin D from sun exposure in the lowering of risk. In Yours Truly’s opinion, as it is not always possible to have sun exposure on a daily basis to obtain Vitamin D, judicious supplementation of Vitamin D may help to “fill in the gap.” (NOTE: the link to the de Vries paper may, or may not, work: however, interested readers can access this paper via the in-line hyperlink reference to the same in the Cantwell paper.)
Yours Truly is not an “armchair Coroner”, nor does she “play one on TV.” On the other hand, I got to know D.M. fairly well in working with him as accompanist/coach; I very strongly suspect that he was “mandated” to take the COVID-19 “vaccines” in order to keep his insurance job; and I know a fair amount about the negative effects of these Bioweapon Toxin Injections. My personal opinion is that the successfully-treated basal cell cancer that D.M. had years ago was “re-established” as colon cancer after he took the COVID-19 “vaccines.”
Regarding support for the p53 protein, the most potent food source is from Cruciferous vegetables. Please see: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2022.951935, “Cruciferous vegetables as a treasure of functional foods bioactive compounds: Targeting p53 family in gastrointestinal tract and associated cancers”, Saikat Mitra, et al., 3 August 2022. A partial list from this paper of Cruciferous vegetables: cabbages; broccoli; Brussels sprouts; kale; cauliflower; and, turnips.
How many other successfully-treated and/or in remission cancers among COVID-19 “vaccinated” people have been “re-established” as new cancers, or brought out of remission as “aggravated” forms of the original cancers?
Welcome. Please visit this January 1st daily thread for the rules of the road, which are few but important.
2024 Presidential Election Map by County. Let us Never Forget: our VOTES gave the Trump Administration a Mandate to FIX IT ALL.
Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. — Galatians 5:1
We got our miracle. America is back.
Let us dedicate ourselves to the cleansing, healing, and rebuilding of our beautiful nation.
God will guide us. Prayers and thanks to God for President Donald J. Trump.
Can We Watch?
The ability to watch the process of an election–from beginning to end–MUST be intentionally designed into the process. Otherwise, it’s just as prone to sleight-of-hand as a magician’s trick.
As Bev Harris (BlackBoxVoting.org) explained, we want to validate who can vote, who did vote, what each voter marked on each ballot, and how all elections materials are tracked and secured.
Provision for observers at each stage of the process is part of what gives legitimacy to our elections.
Election Observers, the Theory.
In theory, at every step of the process, open and transparent access for observers from each interested party should be expected and provided for. Not just when it’s convenient for the elections officials and their staff.
Any resistance to making provision for observers MUST be considered as suspicious at best, possibly a sign of guilt, and always an indication of maladministration of the election process.
You may remember poll workers taping up sheets of cardboard to block the view of the poll during the 2020 elections. I’ve heard reports of similar behavior in other places since then. Didn’t some group have a way to send on the spot reports to them when these types of things were happening during the 2024 election?
Voter Rolls.
If voter rolls are not freely visible to every citizen, if there is not an audit trail for how rolls change over time, if list maintenance procedures are not transparent, then there is room for hidden fraud. You might just want to check what level of access and transparency your state provides for your voter rolls.
“Maintaining an accurate voter registration list is essential to protecting election integrity. Keeping voter registration lists up to date is a continual process that includes adding new eligible voters, updating voter registration information when a voter moves and removing ineligible voters. The process of adding, updating and removing voters is referred to as list maintenance.” — Election Assistance Commission
As mundane as keeping a list up to date would seem, apparently even a lowly voter roll can aid and abet rigging an election. Or elections. Lots of elections.
Voters in New York State are identified by two identification numbers. This study has discovered strong evidence that both numbers have been algorithmically manipulated to produce steganographically concealed record attribute information. One of the several algorithms discovered has been solved. It first utilizes a mechanism nearly identical to the simple ‘Caesar Cipher’ to change the order of a group of ID numbers. Then, it interlaces them the way a deck of cards is arranged to create a ‘stacked deck’. The algorithmic modifications create hidden structure within voter ID numbers. The structure can be used to covertly tag fraudulent records for later use.
Election Observers, state-by-state.
The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) provides a brief, “Policies for Election Observers.” You can find just about everything you would want to know about your own state’s policies at this link.
Political parties, candidates, citizen groups and independent organizations may deploy observers or watchers to witness election processes in the U.S. Generally, the purpose for these observers is to provide a layer of protection or transparency and to learn from and improve processes, which vary considerably by state. This webpage covers relevant laws and practices for multiple types of election observers nationwide.
In reviewing this brief, I didn’t see anything about allowing observers or insight into mail-in ballot drop boxes, or handling by the USPS. Seems like a problem. As President Trump reminds us all the time, mail-in ballots are “not good.”
Recent Changes to State Laws.
I found the list of recent legislative actions regarding election observers to be an interesting way to get a sampler of what states are focused on these days. Here they are:
Modifications to who can be an election observer of any kind:
South Dakota HB 1182 (2024) allows members of the public to observe voting and counting processes at polling places and requires that polling places be arranged so that poll watchers can see and hear what is going on.
North Dakota SB 2292 (2023) clarifies that any individual beside a candidate on the ballot may be an election observer if they inform the election inspector of their intent to serve.
Louisiana SB 74 (2022) clarifies that those who require assistance with voting may serve as poll watchers.
Oklahoma HB 3321 (2022) requires poll watchers to serve in person and not via electronic devices.
Utah HB 387 (2022) Permits preregistered voters (those who are under 18 years old) to serve as poll watchers, permits poll watchers to observe the ballot curing process and requires ballot adjudication in larger cities to be projected on a screen large enough to be viewed by watchers.
Arizona SB 1835 (2021) requires poll watchers to be registered voters in the state.
Texas SB 1 (2021) requires a training program for poll watchers and requires watchers to present a certificate of completion when reporting for observation. The law adds to the list of processes that poll watchers can observe all activities relating to closing a polling place, ballot signature verification, ballot curing and voter assistance efforts. SB 1 also requires poll watchers to take an oath, establishes a penalty for election officials who knowingly refuse to accept a valid certificate for observation, permits election officials to call law enforcement for the removal of a poll watcher who is in violation of the law, and establishes legal remedies for watchers who believe they were unlawfully prevented from observing election processes.
Nebraska LB 1055 (2020) established the role of a poll watcher as either a registered voter of the state or an individual representing a state-based, national or international election monitoring organization. The bill went into effect after the November 2020 elections.
New York AB 1525 (2019) permitted any political committee supporting or proposing a ballot proposal to have watchers in any general, special, town or village election and any party committee and any candidate on the ballot to have three watchers for each election district in a primary election.
Utah SB 94 (2018) consolidated multiple terms for poll watcher (voting poll watchers, counting poll watchers and inspecting poll watchers) to the generic term “poll watcher” and permitted poll watchers to observe various aspects of the process.
Arkansas HB 2138 (2017) prohibited a member of the state or county board of election commissioners from serving as a poll watcher.
California AB 2021 (2016) clarified that international election observers may have uniform and nondiscriminatory access to all stages of the election process that are open to the public.
Tennessee SB 1945 (2016) prohibited the appointment of a candidate’s spouse to serve as an election observer.
Montana HB 529 (2015) prohibited a candidate from serving as a poll watcher.
New York AB 5075 (2014) prohibited candidates for public office in a given election from acting as poll watchers.
Alaska HB 104 (2013) required that poll watchers be U.S. citizens.
Modifications to the process of becoming an observer:
Arkansas HB 1457 (2023) establishes a poll watcher bill of rights, requires poll watchers to be qualified electors of the state and receive training before an election.
New Mexico SB 180 (2023) requires poll watchers to attend training before accepting appointment.
Nebraska LB 1055 (2020) established an accreditation process for observers. The bill went into effect after the November 2020 elections.
Arizona SB 1054 (2019) increased the amount of time before an election for nonpartisan observers to apply to observe at a counting center. Only three persons or groups may observe activities at the counting center and are chosen by lot from those who apply.
Louisiana HB 563 (2019) required that a list of watchers be filed with the clerk of the court in each parish where a candidate will have watchers if the office is in more than one parish.
New Mexico HB 407 (2019) amended the definition of watchers to include an election-related organization or any group of three candidates for election in a statewide election and outlines which aspects of the process may be observed.
Mississippi HB 467 (2017) added a credentialing process and code of conduct for partisan poll watchers.
Virginia HB 1333 (2015) specified that the state or district chairman may designate authorized representatives of political parties if the county or city chairman is unavailable to do so.
Wisconsin AB 202 (2014) required all authorized observers to sign in at the polling place and provided for observation areas of not less than 3 feet or more than 8 feet from the voter check-in table.
Arkansas HB 1551 (2013) required the state board of elections to certify at least one state election monitor for each congressional district, and HB 1551 (2013) required training for certified state election monitors.
Texas SB 160 (2013) required election officials to provide poll watchers with identification to be displayed by the watcher at the polling place.
Modifications to which aspects of the election process may be observed:
Colorado SB 276 (2023) establishes poll watcher guidelines for primary and special elections and prohibits poll watchers from taking photos and recording inside the election office or polling place.
Montana SB 93 (2021) permits poll watchers to observe at mail ballot deposit locations (drop boxes).
Texas HB 1128 (2021) clarifies that poll watchers may be present in polling places, at meetings of early voting ballot boards and in central counting stations.
Arkansas SB 488 (2021) allows poll watchers to inspect voter statements and ballots during an election, even though these documents are protected under the state’s public records law.
Florida SB 90 (2021) requires poll watchers to wear identification badges while observing and allows each political party and each candidate to have one watcher with viewing access to ballot signature verification.
Hawaii HB 1248 (2019) enacted mail voting across all counties for all elections and included a section allowing poll watchers to be present at voter service centers.
Maryland SB 5 (2015) permitted authorized partisan and nonpartisan observers, and any others who wish to be present, to observe the canvass process.
Virginia HB 319/SB 537 (2012) specified that partisan observers may be close enough to the voter check-in table to be able to hear what is being said, but that observation shall not violate the secret vote or otherwise interfere with the election.
Our Turn.
We can’t leave this to others. We can at least try and get informed on what has been found, what has been done about it, and what more needs to be done.
We can make a difference. And we must make a difference.
If you care about building a lasting and resilient nation, consider yourself on the job. What would be the 5 bullet points in your status report for this week?
Twitterati, etc.
Andrew Paquette (mentioned above) is a refreshingly creative mind to engage with. His latest substack, “X marks the spot,” about trying to get to X, then Grok, might be an interesting read for those of us still trying to get in the gate. One of the replies also gives more ideas for what to try when wanting to open the door into their walled garden.
Prayer.
God Bless America, Land that I love. Stand beside her, and guide her Thru the night with a light from above. From the mountains, to the prairies, To the oceans, white with foam God bless America, My home sweet home.
I wrote this almost 2 decades ago. Most of the reference documents have been removed, archived or changed. However the basics remain the same.
Raw milk is a product whose safety CAN be assured by means other than pasteurization. The first is herd isolation and constant testing of the herd for diseases such as tuberculosis and brucellosis. The second is a very high standard of cleanliness during milking, the third is the testing of the milk itself. If you wish to drink raw milk, as some do then you KNOW the seller and check his facilities and testing procedures.
Unfortunately this type of program would uncover a whole can of worms the USDA/FDA and more importantly the International Corporate Cartel wants buried very DEEP. It is for that same reason the USDA and the Bush Admin. squashed the attempts of Creekstone to do its own BSE testing for Mad Cow disease.
Here is a bit about the BSE cover-up most people are unaware of and why the USDA/FDA want NO TESTING.
…Before the BSE crisis about 350,000 tons of MBM feed was sold in Britain a year, and relatively little was exported. After the ban the UK government did inform the EU, but there was a surge in exports to Europe. Then, as European states – informed of the danger – banned British feed, exporters opened up new markets, including North America, the Middle East and Asia.
Dr Stephen Dealler, a microbiologist and BSE expert, said: “It was a terrible mistake… Look at the controls they are now trying to apply to stop BSE in France and other EU countries. It is going to be much harder in African and Middle Eastern countries.”
Evidence to the British BSE inquiry headed by Lord Phillips shows that British officials washed their hands of moral responsibility over the dangers of MBM spreading BSE to infection-free countries, the approach was to inform international bodies, leaving it to member states to decide whether to import UK feed and prevent it being fed to cattle.…
… It took the United States 10 years to follow Britain’s lead and ban the feeding of cattle-derived meat and bone meal (MBM) back to cattle. But the U.S. allows – indeed, actively promotes – the export of MBM to other countries. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) makes no requirement that warning labels against feeding it to cattle be placed on the product.
One country that exports over a million cattle a year to the United States – Mexico – is just now adopting the ban on MBM as cattle feed. And the enforcement of that ban is suspect.
The FDA has allowed hundreds of meat-processing facilities to fudge on its MBM rules, handing out a handful of warning letters and taking little action to force compliance…
There is a small chance that mad cow disease.. (BSE), is already in this country, according to a risk assessment released today by Harvard University. The risk assessment concluded that even if BSE had entered this country, it wouldn’t become a major public health problem, although human illnesses could occur”.Harvard Risk Assessment 12/3/2001 http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/danger6102.cfm
Quantitative assessment of the BSE risk from meat and bone meal in MBM export, pet food, etc. non-ruminant feed mill mixed feed mill non-ruminant: http://www.svepm.org.uk/posters/2007/De%20Vos.pdf — Page not archived
After disease detectives in Great Britain determined that mad cow (BSE), was spread by feeding cattle infected meal, British officials banned the practice. But they didn’t ban the export of feed, spreading BSE to continental Europe and Japan…At the height of the BSE epidemic, the UK exported 500,000 tons, including 168,000 metric tons of MBM (meat and bone meal) between 1990 and 1996. It also exported 3.2 million cattle to 36 countries. A Harvard study said that the exact amount sent to the U.S. was unknown, but it noted that at least 69 tons of “mammalian meal and flour” and 334 cattle were shipped here during the period. https://web.archive.org/web/20020813043834/http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/danger6102.cfm
….is raw milk safe to drink even? The FDA and food safety experts caution against consuming unpasteurized dairy but that doesn’t stop A-list celebs, like Gwyneth Paltrow from adding raw cream to her coffee every morning.
She lives in California, where the sale of raw milk is legal, provided it has a warning label. (FYI: Her purveyor for raw milk has been linked to at least 165 salmonella cases, the largest outbreak in the U.S. in over a decade.) [So why in hades has it not been shut down? – GC]
…And talk about politics making strange bedfellows: Former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.said, “I only drink raw milk,” in a video clip that made rounds on Twitter/X. Pesky government food regulations be damned!….
Here are some of the pros (notice the fight has been a very long one)
Pasteurization’s great claim to popularity is the widespread belief, fostered by its supporters, that tuberculosis in children is caused by the harmful germs found in raw milk. Scientists have examined and tested thousands of milk samples, and experiments have been carried out on hundreds of animals in regard to this problem of disease-carrying by milk. But the one vital fact that seems to have been completely missed is that it is CLEAN, raw milk that is wanted. If this can be guaranteed, no other form of food for children can, or should, be allowed to take its place.
Dirty milk, of course, is like any other form of impure food — a definite menace. But Certified Grade A Milk, produced under Government supervision and guaranteed absolutely clean, is available practically all over the country and is the dairy-farmer’s answer to the pasteurization zealots.
Recent figures published regarding the spread of tuberculosis by milk show, among other facts, that over a period of five years, during which time 70 children belonging to a special organization received a pint of raw milk daily. One case only of the disease occurred. During a similar period when pasteurized milk had been given, 14 cases were reported.
Besides destroying part of the vitamin C contained in raw milk and encouraging growth of harmful bacteria, pasteurization turns the sugar of milk, known as lactose, into beta-lactose — which is far more soluble and therefore more rapidly absorbed in the system, with the result that the child soon becomes hungry again.
Probably pasteurization’s worst offence is that it makes insoluable the major part of the calcium contained in raw milk. This frequently leads to rickets, bad teeth, and nervous troubles, for sufficient calcium content is vital to children; and with the loss of phosphorus also associated with calcium, bone and breain formation suffer serious setbacks.
Pasteurization also destroys 20 percent of the iodine present in raw milk, causes constipation and generally takes from the milk its most vital qualities
Looks like pasteurized milk is great news for Big Pharma and the supplement manufacturers.
My testimony was framed to respond to objections to raw milk raised by the state health department and to document the benefits of raw milk. To quote from that testimony:
“The state epidemiologist writes that ‘It has yet to be demonstrated that raw milk has any beneficial health effects. . . ‘ He cites articles attached to his letter. In one article, ‘Unpasteurized Milk, The Hazards of a Health Fetish’ (Journal of the American Medical Association, 10/19/84), the authors make a series of misstatements about the research of Francis Pottenger before concluding that raw milk has no health benefits. I detail these charges as follows in the paper I’ve given the members of the Committee.
“Now what Pottenger actually did in some of his experiments is this. He used four groups of cats. All received for one-third of the diet raw meat. The other two-thirds of the diet consisted in either raw milk or various heat-treated milks. The raw milk/raw meat diet produced many generations of healthy cats. Those fed pasteurized milk showed skeletal changes, decreased reproductive capacity and infectious and degenerative diseases.
“Now just who was Francis Pottenger? He was the son of the physician who founded the once famous Pottenger Sanatorium for treatment of tuberculosis in Monrovia, California. He completed his residency at Los Angeles County Hospital in 1930 and became a full-time assistant at the Sanatorium. From 1932 to 1942, he also conducted what became known as the Pottenger Cat Study.
“In 1940, he founded the Francis M Pottenger, Jr. Hospital at Monrovia. Until closing in 1960, the hospital specialized in treating non-tubercular diseases of the lung, especially asthma.
“Dr. Pottenger was a regular and prolific contributor to the medical and scientific literature. He served as president of several professional organizations, including the Los Angeles County Medical Association, the American Academy of Applied Nutrition and the American Therapeutic Society. He was a member of a long list of other professional organizations.
“Pottenger’s experiments met the most rigorous scientific standards. His outstanding credentials earned him the support of prominent physicians. Alvin Foord, MD, Professor of Pathology at the University of Southern California and pathologist at the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, co-supervised with Pottenger all pathological and chemical findings of the study.
“One particular question that Pottenger addressed in his study is one that modern science has largely ignored. It has to do with the nutritive value of heat-labile elements-nutrients destroyed by heat and available only in raw foods.
“In his article ‘Clinical Evidences of the Value of Raw Milk,’ Pottenger writes: ‘Some of the factors transmitted by milk are thermo-labile [sensitive to heat]. Though their destruction may not produce death, their deficiency may prevent proper development of the child. This may show in the development of an inadequate skeleton or a decrease in resistance. . . . delay in development of osseous centers is noted more frequently in those children. . . receiving heat treated milk. It is particularly absent from the raw milk fed children. . . . I am basing this discussion on analysis of 150 children whose parents have consulted me because of respiratory allergies. Many other workers. . . have also shown that treating milk by heating interferes with its proper assimilation and nutritional qualities. . . . The best milk from a nutritional standpoint is raw milk. . . . Heat-treating milk interferes with calcium metabolism causing. . . delay in bone age and small bones. . . . The interference with calcium metabolism as shown in the bones is only a physiological index of disturbed metabolism throughout the body.’
“I have prescribed raw milk from grass-fed animals to my patients for nearly fifteen years. Time and again I have seen allergies clear up and dramatically improved health. Particularly in children, middle ear infections usually disappear and do not recur on raw milk. Both children and adults unable to drink pasteurized milk without problems have thrived on raw milk. In hundreds-perhaps thousands-of my patients using raw milk, not one has ever developed a salmonella, campylobacter, or other raw-milk-related infection.
“In the letter cited above, the state epidemiologist states that ‘The processes of certification and/or inspection do not guarantee that raw milk will not be contaminated with pathogenic organisms.’ He also lists a host of microorganisms that are alleged to be transmitted by raw milk, not mentioning that, as the literature accompanying his letter makes clear, the only organisms even potentially associated with the consumption of certified raw milk are salmonella and campylobacter. And in one of the articles he cites, ‘The Hazard in Consuming Raw Milk’ (in The Western Journal of Medicine), the authors actually state that ‘Salmonella and campylobacter diseases in humans are generally not serious. But in persons with compromised health (particularly those with malignant conditions and immunosuppressed by disease or therapy), these infections may be serious.’
“So, the gist of the state’s argument against certified raw milk is that it might possibly on isolated occasions cause serious disease in some people whose immune systems have been compromised by the toxic effects of chemotherapy. And because of this very slight risk, those of us who might choose to drink certified raw milk for the benefits I have catalogued should be denied that right.”
Here is the REASON the FDA went on the attack.
Please read the whole thing because it is really eye opening what has been done to the actual safety of our food.
“…While I believe a meaningful, uniform, universal ID system for all livestock with adequate tracking will evolve, as a state animal health official, I would be less than responsible if I did not encourage industry and government to move quickly to get a handle on our ability to traceback animals today for diseases such as brucellosis, tuberculosis, and others that present risks of exacerbation and the extreme costs associated with such…” Dr. Sam Holland, State Veterinarian, South Dakota from REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON LIVESTOCK IDENTIFICATION – 2005
Why the sudden need to stampede the USA into a track back system?
This is an example of the USDA’s response to one disease over the last decade. The chart shows how USDA cut back testing after WTO was created and the VP of Cargill wrote the WTO Agreement on Agriculture 1995.
Summary of Tuberculosis Surveillance in California Cattle
Number of Cattle Tested……..1995…..1996…..1997…….1998…….1999……2000…..2001 By Animal Health Officials…10,576…5,100 ….2,861 …..3,530…..1,425 ….1,967…..2,500 By Private Veterinarians …15,921…17,100…19,930…18,189…22,863…19,930…19,587 Submissions at Slaughter……….39……….58 ………64………..39………..58……….64………385
What about the danger of Bovine Tuberculosis in the USA since the passage of WTO and the lifting of tariffs and quarrantine mandated by WTO?
Bovine TB was confirmed in three dairy herds during 2002-2003.[California] ….Although the source of the infections was not confirmed, the investigations indicate TB was most likely imported in infected cattle…. http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/ahfss/Animal_Health/pdfs/Tb_in_California_2006.pdf — archived page removed
…
“The high prevalence of bovine tuberculosis in Mexican cattle was discussed. A multiagency investigation in New York city identified 35 cases of human M. bovis infection. Fresh cheese from Mexico was identified as the likely source of infection” (Winters et al., 2005). http://www.nzfsa.govt.nz/science/riskprofiles/FW0320_Mbovis_in_meat_final_May_2006.pdf — archived page removed
What was the USDA’s response to “The high prevalence of bovine tuberculosis in Mexican cattle”
Texas imports a million cattle a year from Mexico. The cattle port-of-entry at Santa Teresa, NM is the largest entry.
Cattle crossing facilities on the U.S. side of the border are operated primarily by private firms… at Santa Teresa, NM, Chihuahuan cattle producers [Mexican] operate both sides of the cattle port-of-entry… https://web.archive.org/web/20011117084712/http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/Agoutlook/june2001/AO282d.pdf
SO what happened after the waivers of whole herd testing was granted”
For Mexican Feeder Cattle in Effect April 1, 2002… Dr. Logan… said, the disease is extremely rare in U.S. herds. However, more TB-lesioned cattle are being detected at slaughter, and ear tags indicate that many of these animals are of Mexican origin. https://web.archive.org/web/20030413013230/http://www.tahc.state.tx.us/news/pr/2002/302TBMx.pdf
Oklahoma On May 1, 2007, the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture reported a case of bovine tuberculosis (TB) discovered as a result of slaughter surveillance…. Subsequent testing of the index herd identified a TB- positive cow with a Colorado ID tag… The herd has been depopulated…Bovine TB was last reported in Oklahoma in 1982, and Oklahoma has been classified by the USDA as tuberculosis-free since 1984.
New Mexico On June 14, 2007, the State of New Mexico confirmed that a dairy herd in Curry County was infected with bovine tuberculosis…Two infected herds were confirmed with TB in late 2002, .
Additionally, it is anticipated that both New Mexico and California will lose their TB “free” status in 2008, from AGENCY STRATEGIC PLAN: FOR THE FISCAL YEARS 2009-2013 BY TEXAS ANIMAL HEALTH COMMISSION
What is the USDA/FDA position on testing by non-government (or non corporate cartel) entities???
The USDA is abandoning a known effective method of disease prevention, the first-point testing program, where the live cows in a herd are tested, in favor of a method that allows the disease more time to spread since the cows are at the end of their life before testing is done. Also Texas complains of the USDA shutting down disease testing labs by withdrawing funding. This is in line with the USDA’s refusal to allow Creekstone to test 100% of their slaughtered cattle for BSE and Japan’s response of increasing their cattle herds. See: http://www.cornucopia.org/2008/09/appeals-court-prevents-company-from-testing-for-mad-cow-disease/
Government targeting of independents.
The Henshaws were not allowed to test their animals or to even SEE the government test results.
….The claim is that the USDA did this because of Pseudorabies, yet the government did not follow it’s own standard operating procedures of testing as outlined in the USDA’s own documents. The USDA spilled bodily fluids from the slaughtered pigs all over the road where any disease could be transmitted to other farms and other animals. Slaughter is not required for testing for Pseudorabies. These issues seriously puts into question the validity of the disease claim and/or the competence of the government officials involved…. https://web.archive.org/web/20080922034213/http://nonais.org/2006/09/29/henshaw-incident/
The Faillice family had similar treatment from the USDA. When the standard test results were all negative and the animals had all been slaughtered, an experimental testing procedure was used and then the samples “lost” and “Destroyed” Of interest was the fact the Faillice family lived in England and were Experts on Mad Cow disease. (sorry about no direct link you would have to read the book Mad Sheep
There is a darn good reason to bury this report because it gives very good evidence that the USDA and FDA are intentionally allowing disease into this country and ALLOWING it to go unchecked by shutting down testing labs and NOT testing at farms.
Without the increase in food borne disease and the media’s propaganda spreading fear, there would be not reason to implement the new “Food Safety” law passed Congress during the December 2010 lameduck session. Senator Burr, after promising NC farmers he would not vote for the bill, was a co-sponsor. The new Law is specifically designed to wipe out independent farmers as similar laws have done in the European Union. The FDA has already stated it will “harmonize” with EU and other international laws per an agreement signed by Bush and the WTO AoA treaty.
Those treaties and the NEW Law are NOT designed to do a blasted thing about actual food safety. They are only there to help the International Cartels remove “barriers” to trade…. and to remove the independent farmer competition.
From the original before it was modified under the same date of course
The surveillance element or function is the most intensive of the six functions with respect to resources and personnel. Surveillance includes all activities designed and implemented to identify and locate any possible focus of infection or exposure to diseases of animal/poultry health significance in the livestock, poultry and exotic animal population. TAHC surveys animal populations for possible disease problems by collecting blood samples at livestock markets, on farms or ranches, and at slaughter plants…. Additionally, TAHC foreign animal disease diagnosticians investigate all reports of potential foreign animal diseases in order to achieve early diagnosis of a foreign animal disease, should it be introduced into the state.
USDA is moving toward supporting fewer labs nationwide, with the remaining labs serving as regional labs and supporting larger geographic areas….. If this funding is not maintained, this lab will be closed and the out-of-state samples will not be processed by remaining TAHC laboratories….
The first-point testing program is the “early warning system” for the brucellosis program, enabling detection of infection prior to sale of cattle within the state. With the discontinuation of first-point testing, slaughter testing will become the primary method for brucellosis surveillance. There is a key difference between first-point testing and slaughter testing. An animal identified through first-point testing as possibly infected is alive. This allows the agency to collect additional samples (blood, milk and tissue) and conduct additional diagnostic serologic and culture tests to determine if the animal is in fact infected with Brucella abortus. An animal identified through slaughter testing as possibly infected is no longer living and therefore additional testing of that animal is not possible. As a result, the process to be followed requires the identification of the herd the animal came from and conducting a whole herd test to determine whether or not infection is present in the herd. The traceability back to the original owner or farm of origin is also much higher in a first-point test positive versus a slaughter positive, because the animals are individually identified with permanent identification devices, are identified to an owner at the time of testing and market records improve traceability of the animals. …
..All states are expected to collaboratively participate in cooperative disease control and eradication programs or face significant animal movement restrictions from USDA and other states. Movement restrictions would significantly reduce the marketability of Texas animals and increase the cost of market access.
[NAFTA and WTO trade agreements impact] …New national disease control programs, emergency management responsibilities, and trade agreements with foreign countries have a significant impact on TAHC. These new or expanded programs continue to stretch TAHC’s already stressed resources to their limits.
[foreign diseases imported due to trade agreements and the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures]
…The responsibilities of TAHC have significantly increased as programs for disease control and surveillance have expanded, animal and premises identification systems have been initiated, and participation in emergency planning and response activities impacting animal health require more agency resources. Additionally, new disease challenges are emerging. Some are domestic diseases that are increasing in significance. Others are foreign diseases that may be imported as result of the exponential increases in international importations of animals and animal products. Our industries and our economy are threatened by diseases and pests that heretofore we only read about in disease text books or heard about in lectures….
Since 1999, there have been seven foreign animal diseases diagnosed within the United States (West Nile Virus, Exotic Newcastle Disease, High Pathogenic Avian Influenza, Hemorrhagic Disease of Rabbits, Monkey Pox, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, and Wildebeest Associated Malignant Catarrhal Fever). Unfortunately, there does not appear to be an end in sight for outbreaks of foreign or domestic diseases and these diverse activities related to disease control and eradication….
As usual the situation is not nearly as cut and dried as the government and its propaganda arm, the Mass Media would paint it.
Analysis of the real problems with US food safety:
We continue to mourn the untimely passing of our beloved compatriot DePat, known in real life as Susie Sampson, and also as author Patricia Holden.
Until we have a dedicated author for the Tuesday daily open thread, I will be posting “placeholders” like this one, which may or may not be spiced up with additional content.
Gudthots will take DePat’s old Thursday daily open thread.
Please notify me in advance if you would like to post anything in lieu of the Tuesday placeholder. We welcome all content – the topic doesn’t matter.
W
Get Smart – Buy a Globe!
When I was trying to get somebody to take DePat’s Tuesday open thread – meaning THIS thread – and there were no takers, I toyed with the idea of turning this open into a kind of comedy hour. The satire would be brutal – brutal enough that somebody would quickly decide to shut me up by volunteering to take the open. OR SO I HOPED!
I was going to call myself Flat Earth Wolf, and I planned to ferociously but facetiously advocate everything that most people here disagreed with, if not depise. Flat earth, no virus, deep state Trump, woke right – the worse, the better!
Yeah, at first it sounded kinda fun, but then I realized that it would just drive people away. And even I wouldn’t enjoy it.
SIGH.
Eventually, I just decided to use this open to post my own honest opinions about things. The beauty of that is, if somebody disagrees with me, they only have to volunteer to take the open to shut me up – but I don’t have to be funny or interesting, which is work.
I can just spout off and state my piece – and that is exactly what I’m going to do!
Now, as you have seen, I’ve spent a lot of time being “fair” to flat earth, by making sure people who want to post any side of any debate can do so here – and that is still happening. Most of the time, I’m encouraging people to post views that may oppose not only my own views, but everybody else’s, too.
But it’s time to be more….. how shall I say….. “complete” about things.
I try to be “nice” about a lot of “science” that “has issues”. I just try to smile and not pull out any deadly weapons of argumentation.
No serrated blades. No 100-round clips. No razor-studded baseball bats. Maybe a hanky. Yes. A perfumed hanky. Cough. Cough. Pardon me!
WELL – NOT TODAY, AND NOT RIGHT HERE, AND NOT RIGHT NOW.
¿Comprende?
Pardon me for just one moment. I’m gonna be tougher about science. Because we have to be tough. We are up against a very organized force.
The Yellow Berets, also known as Public Health Service trainees, were a group of physicians who participated in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Associate Training Program during the Vietnam War era. They were often derogatorily referred to as “Yellow Berets” by supporters of the war who viewed them as avoiding military service.
We are up against some really bad people, who are fully prepared to tell any lie for their purposes. So this opposing army – OUR army – can’t tolerate weak, wrong, and misled science in the forward combat positions. SURE – if you want to work on the base back in safe territory, you can believe all the bad and broken science you want. But if you want to get out in front, you have to subject your own biases to the relentless sharpening forces of TRUTH – and in particular EVIDENCE.
Some things are very certain out in the front lines. One of them is that this planet is a sphere, roughly.
NOW – like most other professional scientists, I haz science skilz in a lot of different areas, because most true scientists are like that. We don’t turn off the science when we walk out of school or job – and our opinions can be particularly relevant in looking at other people’s “expert” stuff, and asking terrible, sharp, venomous questions that the “experts” in those areas are hiding from, or pretending don’t exist.
Much “organization” in current, problematic, sick, “mainstream” science is done to insulate compromised insiders from pesky intelligent outsiders.
Decorum, you know. That’s it. Decorum.
Well, too bad.
BUT we have to hold ourselves to the same revolutionary standards.
Yadig? Of course! What’s good for vaccines, is good for “no virus”, “flat earth”, and many other things.
Globe Earth Wolf has a recommendation that will ultimately test your faith in God, by beating on it. He’s gonna BEAT your armor until it is HARDER, and the first beat-down is that you need to buy an actual globe and STUDY IT.
They’re CHEAP AS DIRT. Most are made in CHYYYNA. But you still have to buy one. I don’t care where it’s made. BUY A GLOBE. And if you already have one, pull it out of the closet, attic or basement.
Buy one at a garage sale, if you have to.
I recommend buying a globe that is at least 12 inches in diameter, and is mounted so that the tilt of Earth’s axis relative to the sun is clearly demonstrable.
Blue oceans which are highly differentiated in color from the land masses are very helpful. Political boundaries are somewhat immaterial, although they do help you LOCATE things more quickly and precisely, and if they are current, the globe can be used to increase your current geopolitical understanding. On the other hand, a vintage globe can be useful for more historical understanding. In either case, I recommend blue oceans, because some vintage globes hide this physically useful truth, by making everything somewhat off-white, sepia and tan, simply to look good on furniture, as opposed to BEATING ON YOUR BRAIN, which is my purpose.
What I am doing is actually a stupid trick from science – a silly secret among the “top men”. And top women, but let’s not get TOO bogged down in DEI.
You see, MODELS – simple physical models – are behind so much of the best science and so many of the best scientists. I have watched this throughout my entire life, and it’s hilarious. Good models are what won Watson and Crick the Nobel Dynamite & Bankster Prize for DNA, and Doudna and Charpentier the same for CRISPR-Cas9. Good models are how all the best work on C60/Buckyballs/Fullerenes was done.
Good models are how stereochemistry was explained in the late 19th century. Good models are – over and over – how organic chemistry and then biochemistry were worked out in the 19th and 20th centuries.
When I went to school with a bunch of scary smart people, I quickly realized that I could use my cheap plastic molecular model set, which I was ironically forced to buy, but wisely chose to actually use, to find all sorts of science which had apparently evaded older students and even our professors for years. Simple, stupid, cheap, plastic and aluminum, “straws and jacks” (not even balls and sticks) was all it took to figure out realities that would ALWAYS show up in chemical behavior, spectroscopy, and quantum mechanical calculations.
I would SHOW PEOPLE this stuff with models – and you could always tell the winners from the losers by how fast they would start using their own “required but never used” model set to figure things out – by how carefully (or stupidly and carelessly) they would cut their little bonds – by how carefully or carelessly they would grab the right “jack” to get the right angles at the atoms – by how strongly they would reason past the limitations of the cheap models – and by how quickly they would spend some of their hard-earned but very limited cash to buy a SECOND or THIRD model set, to make even bigger and better models possible.
I am doing the exact same thing here, to make you smarter – to make YOU a winner.
Because we can’t have too much winning if you aren’t on the same page as Trump, as well as the historical patriots who really did walk this SPHERICAL planet and built this great civilization – and GOD – who made this WORKING BALL on which WORKING LIFE not only EXISTS but THRIVES and then hopefully carries on His PRO-LIFE MISSION of creating and persisting a life-filled and God-loving universe, which is something GOD WANTS BECAUSE IT’S GOOD.
Just my opinion?
Yeah. But still – buy a globe. You will learn so much from it.
I recommend keeping your globe in some place you visit regularly. I stand in front of my globe generally 2-4 times a day, and I probably toy with it at least daily. When we’re having science discussions here, especially after one of Steve’s science posts, I may spend a half hour with that globe.
What am I looking at?
I am looking at seasons. I’m looking at angles of the sun. I’m looking at hours of daylight, twilight, and darkness. But that’s just the beginning.
Most importantly, I’m looking at thousands of tiny details and saying “OH, THAT MAKES SENSE”. Airplane flights. Jet lag. Shipping routes. Planetary distances. Phone conversations. Satellites. “4 AM”. Russia, CHYYYNA, Japan. Burma Shave. TAIWAN. Why Hawaii has always been filled with trouble and bullshit. Look at your globe and every little thing starts to make sense.
This is very critical. When you have a real, true, winning solution in science, like a spherical planet, it just makes all the little stuff WORK. All the thousands of minor details WORK for any scientist who looks at the model, and kicks the tires. This is why Newton is not “replaced” by Einstein – he’s just being helped out around the edges where things get weird.
The problem with “Flat Earth” (and other things I’ll talk about later) is that one big mistake made from an emotionally attractive bias to the past tries (and fails) to upset all the little yet critical stuff other people are doing or have done – meaning millions of honest, good-faith observations. THEN, the same people who break all the little yet critical stuff for everybody else, when confronted, just throw back some non-working, “causes even more trouble”, evasion of an answer, and pretend that they answered the problem, when they didn’t. And that is exactly why nobody takes them seriously, and most people ignore them.
In science, you have to make something that lets OTHER PEOPLE explain or predict stuff on their own, successfully, nearly every time, to actually have a product that sells AND GETS RE-SOLD. Newton did that. Chemistry did that. Electromagnetism did that. Relativity did that. Quantum mechanics did that. Particle physics did that.
When you look at the globe, try to predict how long automobile trips and plane flights take. Look at where islands are. Look at where history happened. Look at where mankind started, wandered, and settled. Look at climate. Look at weather. Look at temperatures. Look at where those temperatures are on the globe.
Right there, the semi-frozen pizza stumbles hard, but the globe, with two poles on one axis, just works like crazy. Everything is nicely – no – perfectly explained – and it’s explained all together at the same time, by a very simple model.
Your actual globe will make you a solid and strong glober. And scientist. And lover of truth.
And then you will become even stronger, because – believe it or not – you will become stronger in FAITH. You will start to see how God makes stuff WORK – and I mean REALLY WORK – simply, powerfully, independently – and that pattern is something you can predict will show up again, and again, and again.
God makes stuff that WORKS. And KEEPS WORKING.
But I’m getting ahead of things.
So buy that globe, or get the old one out, and let’s talk about it. Make that globe WORK for you. Let it help you see the TRUTH.
And as it brings you closer to TRUTH, it will bring you closer to GOD.
W
“Is there anything as great as a Trump rally?”
TOPSHOT – US President Donald Trump holds a Make America Great Again rally as he campaigns at Orlando Sanford International Airport in Sanford, Florida, October 12, 2020. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
yoni
noun
symbol representing female genitals
a stylized representation of a vulva worshiped as a symbol of a goddess, in particular the Hindu goddess Shakti.
the symbol under which Shakti, or the personification of the female power in nature, is worshiped
The female sexual organs, or a symbol of them, especially as an object of veneration within certain types of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other cultures
concept applicable to female vaginal treatments, exercises, massages, and other focuses
As I have said, I don’t back down on ANY word that comes next in my list of “needful words” that don’t get enough usage. HOWEVER…..
Used in a sentence
I’m not going to show all the things I’ve read regarding yoni. I encourage interested readers to explore on their own. And as for pictures…..
Used in a picture
No. Just no. And the good pictures include symbolic representation of the male counterpart, too. Yikes. Interesting, but…..
MUSIC!
LOL! OK – I am simply not going to promote “yoni” music – this is classified as “women’s health” in my world, and even the less “anatomically technical” music videos are likely to be a bit too pagan and new-age for this site.
On the other hand, being only a bit new-age and globalist (“world music”), Greek instrumental and electronic artist Yanni is somebody my father enjoyed during his sunset years, and Yanni’s music brings back good memories of my mother and father enjoying their retirement, so here you go. Twenty of Yanni’s greatest hits.
https://youtu.be/MKaDLtMkn5I
THE STUFF
Flying insects the size of a hawk or an eagle?
OK – this video is actually some interesting science wrapped in click-bait advertising and bad AI narration. The critters aren’t all THAT bad – although they seem pretty nasty by today’s standards.
Bottom line – kinda happy all these bugs got smaller.
This Rejoice & Praise God Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.
It’s also a place to read, post, and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.
In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts.
We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.
Please show respect and consideration for our fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure your opinion addresses the issue only, and does not confront or denigrate the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name-calling, ridicule, insults, baiting, and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.
In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores, and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.
God is in Control . . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . . Keep Looking Up
Hopefully, every Sunday, we can find something here that will build us up a little . . . give us a smile . . . and add some joy or peace, very much needed in all our lives.
“This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn nor weep.” . . . “Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord. Do not sorrow, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
EGO
Egotism is an excessive focus or occupation with oneself driven by an inflated sense of self-importance. The human tendency toward being an egotist is no surprise from a biblical perspective. It is also something the Bible speaks against, and God soundly dealt with egotists such as King Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 4).
At the root of egotism is self. Egotism is ultimately driven by pride and thinking oneself worthy of the utmost attention or capable of complete self-sufficiency.
Philippians 2:1–11 is one passage that speaks to egotism. Verses 3–4 say, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.” We are to look to the interests of others based on the example of Jesus Christ, who, though He is God, humbled Himself to live a human life and die a humiliating death in our stead. In both the Old and New Testaments, followers of God are called to humility; we are not to have an over-inflated sense of self-importance. Humility is not self-debasement or a lack of confidence. Being humble does not mean that we neglect our own needs or uphold no boundaries. Rather, humility is having an accurate estimation of oneself wherein we think of ourselves less often. We are not preoccupied with ourselves; rather, we see and care about the needs of others. We are willing to sacrifice our own preferences for the benefit of others.
Christians understand that serving self is not the highest goal. To those who are egotistical due primarily to pride, the Bible reminds us that all have fallen short of God’s glory (Romans 3:23). We are each sinners, enslaved to sin, dead in guilt, and in need of a Savior (John 8:34; Romans 6:15–23; Ephesians 2:1–5). On our own, we are nothing and only deserving of hell (John 3:16–18). In truth, there is no justification for pride. But, in Christ, we are made new (2 Corinthians 5:17). We become children of God (John 1:12; 1 Peter 2:9–10). God is the one who validates our existence and gives meaning to our lives. Egotism ultimately leaves people empty. As with all sin, egotism promises a reward it is incapable of delivering (James 1:14–17; Galatians 6:8). It is only in God that we find true life (John 10:10).
The truth of who God is and His gift of salvation resolve the motivation for egotism. First Peter 5:5–7 says, “All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because, ‘God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.’ Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” In Matthew 6:25–34 Jesus says not to worry but to instead seek God’s kingdom first and trust Him for our needs. We can see how God cares for sparrows and the grass of the field, and we trust that we are of much more worth to Him. We don’t need to look out for ourselves as number one because God is looking out for us. He alone is fully capable to meet all of our needs, and we can trust that He will.
God alone is to be worshiped. He is of utmost importance. We can never take His place—either by thinking of ourselves so highly that we believe we deserve to be the center of all attention, or by remaining in a wounded condition that causes us to distrust everyone. Egotism is a natural human tendency. But it is one born of sin that only results in disappointment. Rejecting egotism, Christians are called to entrust themselves to God. Out of the love He lavishes on us, we are to love others (John 13:34–35). We are called to put others above ourselves, care for other people, and attend to their needs. Ultimately, we are to surrender our lives completely to God, worshiping Him alone, loving Him with all of our being, and loving others with His love (Matthew 22:37–40; Galatians 6:2–10). It is in giving of ourselves, not in putting ourselves first, that we actually find life (Matthew 16:24–25).
Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
Our Turn
[Yes, I did this one fifteen weeks ago, just after the election. But it was too cathartic to just throw away.]
We’ve often seen that quote from David Plouffe: “It is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”
This was of course a declaration of intent to annihilate not just Trump, but rather “his kind.”
You know what? I think we should flip it around. David Plouffe’s kind should be destroyed thoroughly and their kind must not rise again.
What is Plouffe’s kind? I suppose it depends on who’s talking and what they are thinking of in particular. Well, at the moment it’s me talking and I am thinking of the sort of maggot who is attracted to politics not to better his world but rather so that he can wield power over others, or line their pockets with “free” money. Often these people end up as what Ayn Rand called “pull peddlers,” receiving money in exchange for using their connections to do favors.
This type is parasitic. Utterly parasitic. And they should be destroyed thoroughly and not allowed to rise again.
The bad news is we will never eradicate them. Useless turds who can’t do anything productive will always be with us. As will the outright sociopaths.
Of course they find Trump to be their enemy. And of course they find us to be their enemy. If we won’t simply lie down and let our “betters” have their way with us, we’re a problem, we’re something to be got rid of. And of late, we haven’t lain down without a protest, as we are “supposed” to do. Dang uppity Garbage Deplorables! We don’t know our place!!!
The good news is we can provide far fewer niches for these parasites. The niches come into being when something that people formerly did of their own free will is taken over by the government; then every aspect of that activity becomes a political football.
Take for instance education. Since the government runs it, if you don’t like what’s being done, you have to form a political movement and try to work your way around the maggots embedded in the bureaucracy. If education were private, then if you didn’t like what they were doing to your child, you’d take your money and your child elsewhere. And people who didn’t even have school-age children presently would have no voice–and not have to pay money. Making it a government “thing” turned it into a political thing, and the maggots began to swarm.
So we wreck them by seriously cutting government and giving them fewer places to exist. Among all of the other benefits, the body politic would have fewer sociopaths and parasites in it.
People like Plouffe are the same type, but they are the full-on political hacks who set policy, rather than implement it. They’re just as bad if not worse; they help government grow, and steer it into serving its own ends, rather than those of the people it is supposed to be serving.
The Deep State is nothing more than a government that serves its own ends.
And we have had enough of this.
They must be destroyed thoroughly, and their kind must not rise again.
This election wasn’t the end, it was the beginning. There are millions of these malignancies in this country and we’ve just defeated two of them. Keep pushing. Now we can go after them wholesale.
It’s our turn.
Our turn.
Our turn.
OUR TURN!
You stole the 2020 election. You’ve mocked and ridiculed and put people in prison and broken people’s lives because you said this thing was stolen. This entire phony thing is getting swept out. Biden’s getting swept out. Kamala Harris is getting swept out. MSNBC is getting swept out. The Justice Department is getting swept out. The FBI is getting swept out. You people suck, okay?! And now you’re going to pay the price for trying to destroy this country.
And I’m going to tell you, we’re going to get to the bottom of where the 600,000 votes [are]. You manufactured them to steal this election from President Trump in 2020. And think what this country would be if we hadn’t gone through the last four years of your madness, okay? You don’t deserve any respect, you don’t deserve any empathy, and you don’t deserve any pity.
And if anybody gives it to you, it’s Donald J. Trump, because he’s got a big heart and he’s a good man. A good man that you’re still gonna try to put in prison on the 26th of this month. This is how much you people suck. Okay? You’ve destroyed his business thing. And he came back.
He came back in the greatest show of political courage, I think, in world history. Like, [Roman statesman] Cincinnatus coming back from the plough [returning to politics to rescue the Roman Republic]. He’s the American Cincinnatus. And what he has done is a profile in courage. We’ve had his back. But I got to tell you, he may be empathetic. He may have a kind heart. He may be a good man. But we’re not. Okay? And you deserve, as Natalie Winters says, not retribution, justice. But you deserve what we call rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you.
Steve Bannon, on election night
OUR TURN!!
OUR TURN!!!
OUR TURN!!!
OUR TURN!!!
January 6 Tapes?
Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.
For all your high talk about your Christian moral background…you’re looking less and less like you have any kind of moral background.
If You are a Patriot and Don’t Loathe RINOs…
Let’s talk about RINOs, and why they are the lowest form of life in politics.
Many patriots have been involved with politics, often at the grassroots, for decades. We’ve fought, and fought, and fought and won the occasional illusory small victory.
Yet we can’t seem to win the war, even when we have BIG electoral wins.
I am reminded of something. The original Star Trek had an episode titled Day of the Dove. It was one of the better episodes from the third season, but any fan of the original series will tell you that’s a very low bar. Still, it seems to get some respect; at a time when there were about 700 episodes of Star Trek in its various incarnations out there, it was voted 99th best out of the top 100.
In sum, the plot is that an alien entity has arranged for 39 Enterprise crew, and 39 Klingons, to fight each other endlessly with swords and other muscle-powered weapons. The entity lives off of hostile emotions, you see and it wants a captive food source. (The other 400 or so Enterprise crew are trapped below decks and unable to help.) Each side has its emotions played and amplified by the alien entity; one Enterprise junior officer has false memories implanted of a brother who was killed by Klingons. The brother didn’t even exist.
Even people killed in a sword fight miraculously heal so they can go do it again.
The second best line of the episode is when Kang, the Klingon captain, notes that though they have won quite a number of small victories including capturing Engineering, can’t seem to actually finally defeat the Enterprise crew. He growls, “What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*”
Indeed. He may have been the bad guy, but his situation should sound familiar.
We are a majority in this country. We have a powerful political party in our corner. There is endless wrangling.
And yet,
What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?
In our case, that power is the RINOs in our midst. They specialize in caving when on the verge of victory. Think of Obamacare’s repeal failing…by one Republican vote. Think of the way we can never seem to get spending under control (and now our entire tax revenue goes to pay interest on the debt; anything the government actually does now is with borrowed money).
We have a party…that refuses to do what we want it to do, and that refusal is institutionalized. If you’ve been involved with GOP politics, but haven’t seen this, it’s because you refuse to see it. Or because you are part of the problem yourself. (If so, kindly gargle some red fuming nitric acid to clear the taste of shit out of your mouth, and let those not part of the problem alone so they can read this.)
We fight to elect people, who then take a dive when in office. But it’s not just the politicians in office, it’s the people behind the scenes, the leaders of the national, state and county branches of the party. Their job is to ensure that real patriots never get onto the general election ballot. They’re allowed a few failures…who can then become token conservatives who will somehow never manage to win (Jordan), or can be compromised outright (Lauren Boebert?).
That way it doesn’t actually matter who has a congressional majority. I remember my excitement when the GOP took the Senate in 1980. But all that did was empower a bunch of “moderate” puddles of dog vomit like…well for whatever reason forty years later the most memorable name is Pete Domenici. And a couple of dozen other “moderates” who simply had no interest in doing what grassroots people in their party–those same grassroots people who had worked so hard to elect them–wanted them to do.
Oh, they’ll put up a semblance of a fight…but never win. And they love it when we fight the Dems instead of fighting them. Just like that alien entity, whose motto surely was “Let’s you and him fight. It’ll be delicious!”
If you think about it, your entire political involvement has come to nothing because of these walking malignant tumors.
That should make you good and mad.
The twenty five who blocked Jordan, and the hundred people who took that opportunity to stab Jordan in the back in the secret ballot should make you good and mad.
I’ll close this with another example of RINO backstabbing, an infuriating one close to home.
In my county, the GOP chair is not a RINO. She got elected when the grassroots had had enough of the RINOs. Unfortunately the state organization is full of RINOs, and the ousted county RINOs have been trying to form a new “Republican Party” and get the state GOP to recognize them as the affiliate. I’m honestly amazed it hasn’t happened yet.
In other words those shitstains won’t just leave when they get booted out; they’ll try to destroy what they left behind. It’s an indication that they know we know how important that behind-the-scenes party power is.
So they must be destroyed. That’s the only way they’ll ever stop.
We cannot win until the leeches “on our side” get destroyed.
What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*
We know it. What is going to be done about it?
*NOTE: The original line was actually “What power is it that supports our battle yet starves our victory.” I had mis-remembered it as feeds. When I checked it, it sure enough was “supports” and that’s what I originally quoted. On further reflection, though, I realized my memory was actually an improvement over the reality, because feeds is a perfect contrast with starves. I changed it partway through the day this originally posted, but now (since this is a re-run) it gets rendered this way from the start.
If one must do things wrong, one should do them wrong…right.
RINOs an Endangered Species? If Only!
According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.
Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.
I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.
But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.
The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.
Given the results of our most recent elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.
I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.
This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you lying piece of rancid weasel shit?
Justice
It says “Justice” on the picture.
And I’m sure someone will post the standard joke about what the fish thinks about the situation.
But what is it?
Here’s a take, from a different context: It’s about how you do justice, not the justice that must be done to our massively corrupt government and media. You must properly identify the nature of a person, before you can do him justice.
Ayn Rand, On Justice (speaking through her character John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged):
Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.
Ayn Rand identified seven virtues, chief among them rationality. The other six, including justice, she considered subsidiary because they are essentially different aspects and applications of rationality.
I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2024 or 2026 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.
Martin Luther King
When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice
President Donald Trump, 20 January 2017 (The “Dark” Inauguration Speech).
[NOTE: Yes, technically this is something I should delete since it’s not January 18th any more and it is dated, but I decided to give it one more run, because some things said here don’t depend on what’s showing on the page-a-day calendar.]
….But I’ll still say something about MLK. He was a decidedly mixed individual. As are we all. But I think he, and many others of his time, did something important and unpleasant; he (and those others) forced a recognition that even after the Civil War we were being hypocritical on the subject of equality under the law. Those people who descended from those who (shall we say) involuntarily migrated to what is now the United States were still getting the shitty end of the stick in many parts of this country, as a matter of law.
He was one hundred percent correct on that.
Unfortunately his successors have turned the point full circle and want a leg up from the law, supposedly to make up for the past mistreatment, but that can only lead to an endless round of back and forth. There are some signs that MLK himself had he not been killed (he would be turning 96 this year were he still alive), would have been right alongside the race baiters (which include some who were with him), other signs that he wouldn’t have.
But just as Thomas Jefferson penned these words, in spite of owning slaves, the words that eventually shamed us into abolishing the “peculiar institution”:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…
I’ll go with what Martin Luther King said…not all that far from where the Inauguration will take place:
And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Emphasis mine. Judge people by the content of their character.
That is as it should be.
I see that at Trump rallies. His words about opening hearts to patriotism were true.
I see nothing but reverse racism on the Left. To them the world is defined by what one group does to another, some group must be on top shitting on everyone else. And it shows. There’s a false dichotomy in their thinking. Either white shits on black, or black shits on white. The way to deal with this false dichotomy, though, is not to gin up a third “group” to make it a trichotomy, or a fourth group to make it, what, a tetrachotomy? quadrichotomy? Is either of those actually a word? Gee maybe we can have a different group on top every week of the year at least until some jackass makes up a 53rd group! (Let’s leave aside the one or two day remainder you get from dividing 365(or 6) by 7. These are leftists studying critical race theory, not mathematicians.)
How about we do something different? How about we work towards a system where the law shits on NO ONE except those who violate the rights of others?
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Gold dipped a tiny bit Friday from its Thursday high mark. Silver dropped 46 cents. Par for the course; silver just can’t keep up with gold for whatever reason. As a result the gold:silver ratio just busted 90, again (it was this high a few weeks ago).
And of course the FRNSI is up, having handily busted the 140 mark.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
A Canadian Talks Back
Here’s a video from a Canadian’s Youtube channel. That channel normally is about urban planning or something like that, but he’s stressed out about the “51st State” stuff. And the tariffs.
If this person’s attitude is typical of the Canadian in the street…well, it’s interesting.
I admit I can’t understand what PDJTs play is here. (I think I may have figured out Greenland.) I understand the tariffs; I don’t understand the “51st state” even though I’m aware he might not actually want to take over Canada and then give it statehood. At first I thought he was simply trolling TrueDope, but if so that would have ended when TrueDope announced he was stepping down. Anyhow, maybe someone reading this has ideas that make some sense of this.
The Final Experiment: More Hypocrisy from the Flerfs
The Flerfs have been going over the videos taken in Antarctica with a fine-toothed comb, and when one of them thinks they’ve found an irregularity, he trumpets it.
And then the others mindlessly echo it. In other words they hold normal people up to a microscope and apply zero critical thinking to claims made by their own side.
Up to 14:06, Jeran allegedly said the sun set in Antarctica, while there. No amount of denials on Jeran’s part will sway them. After 14:06 the clowns don’t know how to read a file listing.
Meanwhile Flat Earth Dave, a/k/a Dirth a/k/a Potato finds his bluff called discussing things with an MIT physicist, who wants to set up a big formal working group to design experiments (starting at 2:38:30 and running through 3:50:00 at least though it gets good at about 3:40:00–at 3:55:00 Flat Earth Dave realizes he’s fucked). Throughout this whole conversation MC Toon analyzes Dave’s cult recruiting techniques.
And his leaking-like-a-sieve app is about to get him in BIG trouble in multiple countries.
Potato was moderating the chat in a livestream Witsit was holding, and people started coming in to say his app leaked, and he spent a half an hour banning those people, starting around 17 minutes in, picking up steam at about 26 minutes.
Glaciation
Another method of wearing down the landscape that we often see today is glaciation. And it leaves behind very obvious signs, enough so that we can chart the extent of glaciation during the geologically recent Ice Age.
Though to be sure we are still in the ice age. We just happen to be in the middle (I hope it’s the middle and not the end) of an “interglacial,” a temporary retreat of the glaciers. The interglacial started in roughly 10,000 BCE (I usually see 9,700 BCE) and that is the beginning of the current epoch, the Holocene. (As a reminder, an epoch is the largest subdivision of a period; a period is something like the Cambrian, Permian, Jurassic, Cretaceous, or Quaternary (the one we’re in), and periods are the third level of subdivision of geologic time after the eon and era.)
[As a complete aside, some advocate for changing our year numbering, by adding 10,000 to them, which would make this the year 12,025. The advantage is that there would be no negative dates throughout human recorded history, yet any idiot can convert the new date back to the old for anything that’s not “BC”. Doing so would pretty closely align with the Holocene, so this is called the “Holocene Calendar.” NB that the year 10,001 is 1 CE, and the year 10,000 is 1 BCE (there was no zero in our current system). Using this system: Julius Caesar was assassinated in 9957 HE; Alexander the Great died in 9678 HE, and the Great Pyramid was built in about 7400 HE, but most importantly Trump began his second term in 12025 HE.]
OK so how do we detect past glaciation? It helps to understand what glaciers are. They are ice, but they start out as snow falling in places where it never has the chance to melt; today that’s high up in mountains, in Greenland, and in Antarctica. Even in those latter areas, though it tends to start in the interior high areas of those landmasses.
As the snow piles up it compresses and gets packed into ice. Ice is not particularly hard stuff (compared to rocks), and will eventually start to flow under the pressure, once it’s about 30 meters (100 feet) thick. There’s still some trace of the layered structure of the snow and these layers are relatively weakly bonded to each other. So a glacier is in many ways like a super-super slow river. A typical speed is about one meter per day though that can vary greatly. Imagine a glacier forming way up in a mountain valley, and then flowing downhill.
Here’s an example, from Denali Mt McKinley. (Incidentally, Wikipedia has not changed the name yet, but searching for “Mt. McKinley” redirects to “Denali.”)
You’ll note the flat area on the left that sort of looks like a river; that’s the top of a glacier. And if you look closely, you’ll even see tributaries on the right hand side, smaller glaciers flowing from smaller valleys into this glacier, with black stripes marking the boundaries. The color differences are generally due to stuff falling onto the top of the glacier; if that happens more in one “tributary” than another, there will be a color difference when they merge.
Some glaciers are actually lubricated by a thin layer of meltwater where they touch the ground; this can be from geothermal activity, or just the sheer mass of the glacier melting the ice, the same way the blade of an ice skate will momentarily melt the water under the skate. This helps the glacier “flow” more quickly.
The upper layers of a glacier have less stress on them than lower layers and don’t want to flow. They’re essentially being carried along by the layers underneath, and will actually crack if the glacier goes over some irregularity in the terrain below, creating crevasses, like here:
If snow should happen to fall on this sort of thing and obscure it, it can be deadly. In fact, the Union Glacier camp in Antarctica is marked off by flags; if you go beyond those flags you could step onto a hidden crevasse and at that point you’re likely dead before you can be rescued. On the other hand geologists will sometimes deliberately descend into crevasses to take samples. Not for the faint-hearted.
So…how can we tell a glacier used to be somewhere but has since melted away?
One way, that works in mountains, is to note the shapes of the mountains and valleys. Glaciers tend to leave wide, U shaped valleys. They also tend to leave pyramidal-shaped mountains, because they will eat away at the mountain and often there are several glaciers off the same mountain. As they eat back into the mountain they will leave sharp edges between adjacent glaciers. Both of these can be seen in this notional diagram:
A cirque is a depression formed by a glacier, if and when it melts, a lake or pond called a tarn may be left behind. Cirques seem to form at the very heads of glacial valleys (I can’t quite find a statement that straightforward, but all the diagrams I see imply it). Neighboring glaciers leave sharp ridges called aretes, the ends of fingers of rock can be ground away by a main glacier to leave a truncated spur, and the mountain at the middle ends up becoming a horn…as in Matterhorn.
Compare a picture of the Southern Rockies in Wyoming:
To the Northern Rockies well into Canada, Banff Park:
Notice that the Canadian peaks are much sharper (and OhByTheWay note the blatantly obvious layering of the sedimentary rocks in those mountains); they’ve been worked over by glaciers and the Southern Rockies in Colorado and Wyoming have not. In fact the lake is Moraine Lake because it appears in a moraine.
When a glacier is doing it’s thing there are two ways it can grind down the terrain it’s on, plucking and abrasion.
Plucking is where the glacier actually uproots rocks–even parts of bedrock–as it passes over them. It’s aided in doing so by having subglacial water get into cracks in the rock and then freezing; that breaks up rocks fairly quickly. Rocks of many different sizes get plucked and incorporated into the underside of the glacier.
Here is a landscape that had much of its rock plucked away at some time in the past, the Aland Islands in the Baltic Sea.
Which leads to the second method, abrasion: Now the bottom of the glacier is like rough grit sandpaper and as the glacier flows grooves or striations can be cut in the underlying rock, as shown here in Mount Rainier national park:
Here’s an illustration showing the two at work. Note that as the glacier goes over the hump, crevasses open up as the top layers flex.
The rock ground away in this fashion becomes fine powder a few thousandths of a millimeter in diameter.
All this suspended rock, the stuff that fell on top of the glacier and the stuff it picked up through plucking and abrasion, eventually gets out of the glacier.
If the glacier ends on land, it can dump a lot of its load as it melts and retreats; this is called glacial till. This ends up as fine sediment with larger rocks in it, in moraines. Also quite a bit can be carried by the stream coming out from under the glacier–all that subglacial water is now released.
The furthest a glacier got before beginning is often revealed by a ridge called a terminal moraine, which can often be seen long after the glacier is completely gone. These are used to determine the extent of the last glaciation that covered much of North America and Europe.
A melting glacier will drop the large stuff it contains, too. If the glacier was particularly large, it might have carried things hundreds of miles, such as these rocks from Norway found in the Netherlands; these are called “glacial erratics”:
However it’s much more common to get smaller rocks appearing in a matrix of finer-grained rock, like this:
When a geologist sees this, it practically screams that a glacier left this behind.
If the glacier gets out over water and starts calving icebergs, those boulders melt out and drop right down into what would otherwise be a nice orderly layering of sediment. This photo is of just such a dropstone and is iconic.
Here’s another…from Namibia. Remember this; I’ll get back to it.
Thus far I’ve been talking about glaciers termed “alpine” and “valley” glaciers, because they start way up in some valley in the mountains…somewhere. But sometimes, a glacier can completely cover a mountain or volcano, as seen in Iceland; that’s called an icecap. But there are even bigger ones; anything over about 50,000 square kilometers is called an ice sheet or a continental glacier. Today there are two of those: Greenland and Antarctica. These tend to flow outward in all directions from a center. We can detect former ice sheets by looking for all of these landforms and even tell where the center was from the direction of the striations left by abrasion. Here is the Laurentide ice sheet from the last glaciation. (For some reason, forms of the word “Laurentian” get applied to North America by geologists.) Note it’s actually contiguous with the “Cordilleran” ice sheet over the Canadian Rockies, and the Innuitian Ice Sheet over the northern Arctic Islands…and the Greenland Ice Sheet, which is still with us today albeit a bit smaller. Iceland was completely covered; its current icecap now confined to the interior of the island was larger back then. The Rockies further south had much more limited glaciation.
The weight of all of that ice (it can be thousands of feet thick) can actually push down the rocks underneath it. The rocks underlying the Earth’s crust are plastic and will flow, if you push on them hard enough and for a long enough time. Then when the ice melts, there’s not nearly as much weight there any more and the land slowly rises. The area around the Great Lakes is still undergoing “isostatic rebound” (or “postglacial rebound”) as the rock continues to rise after the weight of the ice is gone. The Great Lakes essentially fill a depression formed by the weight of the ice; depending on how much rebounding happens they may eventually empty out as the depression ceases to exist.
While a glacier is in the process of melting “proglacial” lakes can form, either dammed by ice that hasn’t melted, or in cirques (the aforementioned tarns), or behind terminal moraines. Sometimes these lakes can be very large and if caused by an ice dam, a major flood can happen when it breaks open. Lake Agassiz is an example. It has been known for quite some time; here’s a map drawn in the 19th century by Warren Upham.
(And there’s that word “Laurentian” again in the title). Note also labelings of Keewatin and Assiniboia for parts of Canada now in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Northern Ontario. Canada tended to give “new” territory to already existing provinces.)
Lake Agassiz may even have been larger than the Caspian Sea at one point. But once enough ice melted in what is now Hudson Bay, torrents of water–a million cubic meters per second–likely poured into Hudson Bay and thence out into the Atlantic. Sea levels probably rose anywhere from 0.8 to 2.8 meters from this one event alone. But that was only the more recent formation and melting of the lake, the prior one 13000 years ago may have caused the Younger Dryas cooling worldwide.
Here is a a diagram reconstructing the history of what is now the Great Lakes. Notice 4000 years ago the Ottawa River drained Lake Huron.
Glacial lakes, while they exist and are fed by meltwater, can have sediment deposited in their beds and these are known as varves. (I see conflicting information on whether varves only happen in glacial lakes, or any lakes, but everything I read agrees they form in fresh water, not salt water.) The layers are annual, a repeating sequence every year, like the alternating light-and-dark bands of tree rings. What causes the annual structure? Springtime runoff is much more energetic and brings larger particles with the water, so one can see alternating coarse/fine layers in the sediment. The reason for thinking varves cannot form in salt water is that the salt will cause clay particles to clump together, erasing the fine/coarse/fine/coarse sequencing. It’s therefore much harder to see annual layers in ocean-deposited sediment.
Varves can be correlated over limited distances and sequences up to 50,000 years long have been assembled, in a process similar to dendrochronology, where tree ring sequences have extended back over ten thousand years. This is a recent varve formation in Japan. More ancient ones running for twenty million annual layers have been found.
One might argue that the assumption that the layers are annual, though plausible (seasonal changes in seasonal water flow are quite plausible), are unwarranted. Note though that those making this argument are arguing for a young earth, and generally they want to believe that all of the varves were laid down within one year. But that twenty million layer formation would still be 50,000 years old if the varves were laid down once a day, and the 50,000 years of the lake in Japan would have taken well over a century at that rate. And the sediments within the varves are simply too fine to have settled out that fast, so thinking about an even faster rate is even more unreasonable. But leaving that one aside, sometimes there is an event that causes a non-annual layer to form, such as a flash flood. But we’ve seen these happen, and they are invariably quite irregular (due to turbulence in the water, I am guessing) and easy to tell from a ‘regular’ annual varve–we’ve also watched those happen and they’re nice and regular. Varves laid down in the past generally look like the annual varves being laid down today, and we can account for the irregular ones that don’t. Another factor is that we can detect seasonal pollen changes in recent varves. And we can date organic fragments in recently-laid-down varves via radiocarbon dating (and I will get to such methods of dating soon), and those results are consistent with annual layers.
Not the First Ice Age
The current intermittent Ice Age began at the beginning of the Quaternary period; indeed that’s how the Quaternary is defined.
I’m going to bring the outline of eons, eras, and periods in from a few weeks ago, to refresh our memories. I’m going to highlight certain things I’ll discuss below, and also expand the Cenozoic.
Phanerozoic (the current eon/eonthem)
Cenozoic (the current era/erathem)
Quaternary
Holocene
Pleistocene
Neogene
Pliocene
Miocene
Paleogene
Oligocene
Eocene
Paleocene
Mesozoic
Cretaceous
Jurrasic
Triassic
Paleozoic
Permian
Carboniferous (Mississippian + Pennsylvanian)
Devonian
Silurian
Orodivician
Cambrian
Proterozoic
Neoproterozoic
Ediacaran
Cryogenian
Tonian
Mesoproterozoic
3 periods
Paleoproterozoic
4 periods
Archean
Neoarchean
Mesoarchean
Paleoarchean
Eoarchean
Hadean (starts with the formation of the Earth)
But it wasn’t the first and it is far from being the worst. We have been able to detect the signs of widespread glaciation in the late Paleozoic (late Devonian through late Permian), an early Paleozoic ice age running from the late Ordovician into the Silurian, and a Huronian ice age, during the early Proterozoic (that’s the eon before the current Phanerozoic, so this was quite some time ago! All of these highlighted above.
But there was also a late Proterozoic ice age, and it was a doozy. As might be suggested from the fact that the name “Cryogenian” suggests “cryogenics” and other things having to do with cold.
The Cryogenian was established as a recognized period in 1990, so it’s fairly “new” in that respect.
The entire world froze over. All of it. At least, everything we can find today shows it happening–we can’t tell what was happening in the mid-oceans. Not only that this happened twice, in events called the Sturtian and Marinoan glaciations (named after epochs within the Cryogenian). That Namibian rock was not dropped recently; Namibia wasn’t affected by the recent ice ages.
But with very little doubt every continent on Earth was blanketed by these two glaciations.
Here’s a map as best as we can reconstruct things that happened that long ago. You’ll note the continents are in very different locations (USA south of the equator and rotated 90 degrees clockwise, just for instance); we’ll get to that in a future post.
The Sturtian lasted most of the Cryogenian, and the Cryogenian was a LONG period, longer than the Cretaceous. (The preceding Tonian was much longer.) Before the Cryogenian, there are possible fossils of something resembling sponges. I have some difficulty imagining any multicellular life surviving what turns out to be tens of millions of years of the Earth being mostly if not entirely covered with ice, in an extreme case looking superficially like Jupiter’s moon Europa.
This was well before the Cambrian “explosion” of fossils that resemble things alive today; it’s possible that this age wiped out any multicellular life that was out there and cleared the way for things more familiar to us (except that we don’t know yet how the Ediacaran life fits in to that–so what I just said is worth exactly what you paid for it).
How do we know this happened? Because there are glacial deposits everywhere on Earth from this time period. More precisely, on every continent, if we can find Cryogenian systems, they show signs of glaciations; not like the Quaternary events where the evidence of glaciation is confined to the northern parts of Earth and, of course (duh) Antarctica. Here’s one of the right age (Neoproterozoic) from Idaho:
You should have no problem recognizing this for what it is, though of course you can’t date the rock with your eyeballs, so you don’t know from this picture when it is.
The one thing we can’t quite be certain of is whether the oceans completely froze over; no oceanic floor rocks survive from then (again, something that will be discussed in a future post). It’s also possible some thin ribbons of land remained uncovered. But if not, if the whole planet truly froze over, well, we call that “Snowball Earth.” If some parts were exposed…that’s “Slushball Earth.”
So what happened? The thing about ice ages is, at the start they are a positive feedback loop. If it gets a bit colder, and more ocean freezes over, that white ice (covering deep blue ocean) increases the Earth’s albedo, meaning we reflect more light and heat, and absorb less, so the Earth cools down more. Which creates more pack ice, which lowers the albedo again. Without some sort of counterbalancing effect, everything freezes. And this time there doesn’t seem to have been any counterbalancing effect.
In some ways the more interesting question is why, having gone global or nearly so, it ever ended. We may have volcanoes to thank for that, as they gradually pumped more and more CO2 into the atmosphere. With no plant life to consume it, it simply warmed the planet to the point where the ice could start to melt…and then the feedback now runs in the opposite direction; more dark oceans increase heat retention. So after tens of millions of years, the Sturtian is over. But the respite isn’t long, because the Marinoan began some time after that…running roughly ten million years.
One can imagine an alien exploratory vessel coming by during this period, looking at the Snowball Earth, and saying, “No point in tarrying. Uninhabitable. Nothing multicellular will ever live here.”
I’ve hinted here at some durations, and these came from subtracting two sets of absolute dates. But I haven’t actually covered absolute dating…so that’s next.
The above free vintage image of a meeting is courtesy of Masterfile and Google Images.
Health Friday is a series devoted to Big Pharma, vaccines, general health, and associated topics. Today’s offering will discuss the appointment by President Donald J. Trump of Gerald W. Parker, Jr., DVM, PhD, to lead the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy.
There are Important Wolf Moon Notifications, the Rules of our late, good Wheatie, and certain caveats from Yours Truly, of which readers should be aware. They are linked here.
Today’s offering has several aspects to the “tapestry of the whole.” There is much information. The first aspect begins here, with a CDC Health Advisory “requiring” hospitals to test patients hospitalized for influenza for the H5N1 Avian Influenza virus: https://merylnass.substack.com/cp/156773935, “CDC has issued a bulletin requiring hospitals to test for bird flu (H5N1) so they can find human cases and start the vaccine”, 9 February 2025. A screenshot of the title and secondary header for this article is below. Dr. Nass is a physician.
On 16 January 2025, a few days before the Inauguration of the former 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, as the current 47th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, the CDC (a department of Health and Human Services, HHS) issued the following Health Advisory regarding new, mandatory hospital testing for Avian Influenza H5N1 for all hospitalized influenza patients: https://www.cdc.gov/han/2025/han00520.html, “Accelerated Subtyping of Influenza A in Hospitalized Patients.” However, it appears that the Health Advisory is being used in ways to make look as if it were issued by the new Trump administration. Or so it seems. Please see below, from the article by Dr. Nass (AdventHealth is a hospital chain that has several facilities, including in Florida and in Wisconsin):
The opening paragraphs of the CDC Health Advisory, per the article by Dr. Nass:
The Health Advisory goes on to list and describe what H5N1 testing needs to be performed, and so on.
Below is a portion of his remarks, from page 27 (of 30) of his prepared statement for the House hearing. Notice the emphasis on federal government funding for university laboratories:
The third aspect is about Global One Health, headquartered at Texas A&M University. Please see: https://onehealth.tamu.edu/about. Below is a screenshot of the “collaborators” involved with Global One Health:
The fourth aspect is about CIDRAP itself: its Director, Michael T. Osterholm PhD. Please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Osterholm. Dr. Osterholm founded CIDRAP at the University of Minnesota in 2001 and has been its Director ever since. Dr. Osterholm has been and/or is still involved with: the NIH; the World Health Organization; the FDA; the United States Defense Department; and, through CIDRAP, is a partner in the United States Department of Health and Human Services BioWatch Program since 2003. He has also been a member of the government’s COVID-19 Advisory Board since November 2020.
The fifth aspect of this “tapestry” is about the “vaccines” now available against the H5N1 Avian Influenza virus. There are several H5N1 “vaccines” available for use in the United States. They are listed here: https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/vaccines-licensed-use-united-states, “Vaccines Licensed for Use in the United States”, current as of 14 February 2025. A screenshot of the current list of H5N1 “vaccines” is below:
AREPANRIX and AUDENZ are cell-based injectables. The Package Insert for AREPANRIX is here: https://www.fda.gov/media/182872/download. The Package Insert for AUDENZ is here: https://www.fda.gov/media/135020/download. For each of these, please read carefully regarding the Warnings and the Adverse Reactions listed and described in Section 5 and Section 6 of each product. (Note: the FDA is “reorganizing” its web pages. If either, or both, of the Package Insert documents do not load from the links above, use a search engine and type in “Package Insert for AREPANRIX” and/or “Package Insert for AUDENZ” in the search box.) The FDA Memorandum regarding the H5N1 “vaccines” in the National Stockpile is here: https://www.fda.gov/media/141737/download.
Note the language regarding the “sole discretion” of “national regulatory authorities” (for example, the USDA) to “mandate” commercial poultry against Avian Influenza. Note also the “fact” that over “150 million birds in the U.S. have been affected with HPAI since February 2022.” The APHIS press release cited in the above is here, dated 20 June 2024: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/avian/avian-influenza/hpai-detections/commercial-backyard-flocks.
Who at the USDA or the CVB (Center for Veterinary Biologics, a unit of the USDA) signed the “Conditional License” for the Zoetis Avian Influenza H5N1 “vaccine” on 13 February 2025? The new USDA Director, Brooke Rollins, was only confirmed for the office on 13 February 2025. Would Ms. Rollins have then immediately signed the “Conditional License” paperwork? Or — did a Biden administration holdover sign the paperwork? Let’s examine the situation:
On 13 February 2025, Brooke Rollins was confirmed as the new USDA Director. She took over on that date from the Acting Director, Gary Washington, a Biden administration holdover, who was the Chief Information Officer for the USDA.
On 13 February 2025, the top organizational flowchart for the USDA’s CVB (Center for Veterinary Biologics) looked like this (the chart is from 31 December 2024; Yours Truly cannot find a more recent one):
The CVB would have been the department that most likely signed off on the “Conditional License” for the Zoetis new “vaccine” for H5N2 that is to be given to chickens. Looking at the above chart, the person who signed off on this “vaccine” likely would have either David White, DVM (Biden holdover), the Director of the CVB; or, Bruce Thomsen, DVM (Biden holdover), the Virology Section Leader. On the other hand, a search via https://www.aphis.usda.gov/leadership (list current as of 22 January 2025) turns up at least two other possibilities: Michael Watson, PhD, (Biden holdover) the USDA Administrator; and, Rosemary Clifford, DVM, (Biden holdover) the USDA’s Chief Veterinary Officer.
What, in Yours Truly’s opinion, appears likely was that a Biden holdover at the USDA or the CVB signed the “Conditional License” of the Zoetis new H5N2 “vaccine” for chickens just before, or even perhaps on the day of, the confirmation of Brooke Rollins on 13 February 2025 as the new Director of the USDA.
But wait, there’s even more! — what appears to be another component of the “perceived threat” combined with gaslighting aspects regarding the “spread of H5N1 Avian Influenza among humans.” And, interestingly enough, the following article from CIDRAP (the organization “tied to the hip” with Gerald Parker, DVM) is dated 13 February 2025 — the day that Brooke Rollins was confirmed as the new Director of the USDA: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/cdc-3-veterinarians-had-recent-h5n1-infections-didnt-know-they-had-been, “CDC: 3 veterinarians had recent H5N1 infections but didn’t know they had been exposed”, 13 February 2025. The three veterinarians had been working with cattle when they were exposed to H5N1.
And further followed by some of his recommendations:
Further: The AMA has just come out with a new CME (Continuing Medical Education) course offering: https://edhub.ama-assn.org/stanford-medicine-cme/audio-player/18944368, “Stanford Medcast Episode 89: Hot Topics Mini-Series: Insights and the Potential Global Impact of H5N1 Bird Flu”, 22 January 2025. This is an interview with Dr. Abraar Karan, MD, MS, MPH. There is an option further down on the webpage to listen to the transcript of the audio; click on “Read Transcript.” Dr. Karan covers various aspects of the current H5N1 situation. Among other items he talks about, Dr. Karan appears to be of the opinion that people should not drink raw milk, as it may contain elements of H5N1 from untested cows. He also appears to approve the testing and “vaccination” of poultry workers and dairy workers related to H5N1. In addition, he appears to be for mass testing of poultry and of dairy cows; and, for the federal government to be more “active” in coordinating and facilitating testing and “vaccination” of animals and humans regarding H5N1.
In Yours Truly’s opinion, it is still unclear as to whether or not there is (or, will be) an “H5N1 Avian Influenza pandemic” on the horizon. On the other hand, there appears to be an increasing amount of what may be seen as “perceived threat” gaslighting — from the federal government, the mainstream media, the AMA, and other entities. And, the issuance of the HHS Health Advisory that “requires” hospitals to test hospitalized influenza patients for Avian Influenza could be a “signal” that there may be the start of increasing pressure to get Americans “vaccinated” against this virus. In addition, also in Yours Truly’s opinion, this increasing pressure **may** be a method of “corralling” Americans to “get back onto the plantation” of obediently doing what the government wants / “mandates” them to do, which is what occurred, and with such success, during the declared COVID-19 pandemic. It has taken the American people almost five years to fully realize that the COVID-19 “vaccines” WERE NOT and ARE NOT “safe and effective”; to fully realize that mass lockdowns created economic chaos; to understand that standing six feet away from another person did not “stop the spread” of the virus; and so on.
Why is there now an EcoHealth Alliance “collaborator”, Gerald W. Parker, Jr., DVM, PhD, in the Trump White House? Why was Dr. Parker appointed to lead the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy?
Paging Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Paging Brooke Rollins.
Below is a screenshot, again from the Halligan blog post via the Presidential Wire article, about GERALD W. PARKER, JR., DVM, PHD, having been appointed to lead the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy:
And, guess what? There is a poultry testing laboratory at the University of Minnesota (a university that is “tied to the hip” with Gerald W. Parker, Jr., DVM, PhD — please see above in the original Health Friday post of Friday 21 February 2025): https://vdl.umn.edu/laboratories/minnesota-poultry-testing-laboratory (which Yours Truly suspects is the same type of BSL-2 safety level that is the case at the USDA Southeast Poultry Testing facility in Athens, Georgia.)
Yours Truly feels it is ** interesting ** that the state of Minnesota declared an Avian Influenza among chickens State of Emergency ** just after ** Dr. Parker was appointed to lead the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy.
This new post is being created for us to collect newer Ukraine history, background, details on the actors on the stage, corruption, shadow government evil-doings, and so on. There are older, related posts on this site by Daughn, here, and here, and a detailed timeline here.
But for today’s focus, let’s start with this interview of an American lawyer who is deeply involved in working to right the wrongs being done to the good Christians of the region.
Bob Amsterdam lays it all out with both compassion and unusual clarity from his viewpoint. NB: he is a liberal and seems to be conflating “right wing” and Nazism. Wolf would likely want to call them Jazis. Amsterdam would probably have no idea what that could mean.
The effort to right the wrongs is documented at this site: Save the UOC. It certainly seems worthy of our attention and our prayers.
May God show kindness and mercy to His people struggling under the oppression that is today’s corrupt government of the Ukraine.
Welcome. Please visit this January 1st daily thread for the rules of the road, which are few but important.
Header Image: 2024 Presidential Election Map by County
Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. — Galatians 5:1
We got our miracle. America is back.
Let us dedicate ourselves to the cleansing, healing, and rebuilding of our beautiful nation.
God will guide us. Prayers and thanks to God for President Donald J. Trump.
Handling Gold.
Well, not really gold. But a process that is even more critical than handling precious metals, but let’s start there. The other day Steve was explaining how registered mail is handled and why precious metals dealers used registered mail due to the strict processes that are followed. The USPS handbook DM-901 covers all the details. It’s a nice document. Covers all the procedures, chain of custody, proper storage, how to document if seals are broken, etc. It’s almost like they are serious about handling registered mail.
What is more important than gold?
How about true and accurate elections that put into power those who legislate whether you get to keep your gold or not? Seems important.
Chain of Custody.
A key feature of the process of handling things of great value is called the Chain of Custody. Whether it is registered mail, election materials (ballots, equipment), or even evidence to be used in prosecuting a criminal case, unimpeachable Chain of Custody is essential.
According to experts, the only way to know if an electronic vote total has been hacked is for voters to have separately recorded their intended selections on paper and for jurisdictions to then use the paper in a manual audit or recount, the results of which can be compared to the electronic total.
But even manual audits or recounts can be “hacked” if the selections on the paper have been marked by a machine, rather than the voter’s own hand. And no matter how that paper is marked, manual audits and recounts can be gamed if the chain of custody between election night and the audit or recount has been compromised.
There are many resources for elections. One resource, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is an independent, bipartisan commission whose mission is to help election officials improve the administration of elections and help Americans participate in the voting process. Their guidance, “Best Practices: Chain of Custody,” gives recommendations to election officials. “The chain of custody of ballots, voting equipment, and associated data is essential to ensure the election system remains trustworthy. Documentation of the chain of custody also provides evidence that all voting procedures were followed. It is a best practice for chain of custody procedures to be clearly defined in advance of every election, well documented and followed consistently throughout the entire election lifecycle or process. The key to an effective chain of custody is to have a set of procedures which are followed in practice. The procedures should be in writing with all steps documented.”
It may be important to note that I have yet to find any federal laws with guidance on the specifics of election materials chain of custody. A search of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 for the term “custody” does not yield any results. An internet search of “election laws chain-of-custody” provides guidance from various organizations (a good example here) and some links to individual Secretary of State websites. If there are federal laws, they are not easily found. Time didn’t permit for me to survey each state for specific chain of custody laws related to elections. It appears that a good number of groups that have public-facing sites with material related to the need for and the development of good practices for managing chain-of-custody.
However, when you get into actual county-by-county execution of these procedures the failures are all to common and even shocking. When regular citizens, concerned about their own local county’s handling of election materials simply asked for a copy of the chain of custody procedures in use during a specific election, the response was far from uniform. As anyone in any type of mission-critical work effort would expect, there needs to a least be: (1) a dated, documented procedure that is signed off before it is to be followed for a specific election and (2) checklists with spaces for signing off for the handling of items requiring chain of custody.
Even when a county is required by their state government to provide these prior to an election, the local elections offices sometimes could not provide these procedures when asked. One particular county office provided a non dated, unsigned document and stated that they weren’t sure which election it was for. Either they didn’t know what they were doing, they didn’t have the right person fulfilling the request, or something else. It seems like this would be posted right on their county elections office website (along with all the other elections documents!). In a number of counties that I know of, the elections office claimed there were “no records responsive to the request.” In other words, they are saying that they didn’t have the state mandated chain of custody procedures. How did they get the election certified without it? How did their Secretary of State sign off on the election without it?
Asking for public records, usually referred to as a freedom of information act (FOIA) request can be done by anyone. More recently the number of people taking it upon themselves to get involved in “citizen oversight” has grown to the point that some public officials have started complaining that all these requests are a form of harassment. Really? Why not just publicly publish all of it?
In one state it seems that a number of counties have hired the same particular law firm as “County Counsel” to advise on the handling of election matters. Unfortunately that liberal law firm seems to have been assisting counties to stone-wall access to public records. And in some cases the guidance given to the county board of supervisors was in fact unlawful. I’m not giving examples to prove my point, I’m just offering information that might be helpful to know if someone reading here is considering looking into how their elections are being handled where they live and vote.
Elections chain of custody refers to physical and electronic evidence controls for:
– who can vote – who did vote – actual ballots as marked by each voter, and – evidence transfer and storage
:
Legitimate elections require public “right to know” (freedom of information) to allow the public and the media to authenticate truth of results. Proper chain of custody safeguards are part of the larger concept of political legitimacy.
:
Incurable uncertainty
Handling election records and data must be scrupulously careful in order to demonstrate to the public that there has been no tampering or contamination.
In court cases, chain of custody violations can result in refusal to admit evidence or even throwing a case out. In elections, chain of custody violations can result in “incurable uncertainty” and court orders to redo elections.
Bev Harris discovered election theft in 2002, wrote a book on it (download it here), advocated for change, and now others have carried on her work. The problems are not new, and they have probably grown worse. But now is the time for us to make our own local governments-that oversee the execution of elections–take note that we are asking questions, seeing problems and expecting better oversight. And for those who have been running elections, just knowing that more people are looking into their work appears to have led to some unexpected early retirements. I can’t say that is an indication of guilt, but it does seem significant.
We can’t leave this to others. We can at least try and get informed on what has been found, what has been done, and what more needs to be done. What do you know about elections and chain of custody. Please post your thoughts in the comments. Thanks
We can make a difference. And we must make a difference.
If not us, who? If not now, when? There has never been a better time.
Twitterati.
General Mike Flynn (@GEnFlynn) has been talking about citizen oversight for as long as I’ve been paying attention.
Gail and PAVACA are going to love this one (link):
Prayer.
God Bless America, Land that I love. Stand beside her, and guide her Thru the night with a light from above. From the mountains, to the prairies, To the oceans, white with foam God bless America, My home sweet home.
