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  LifeSiteNews- Study finds presence of cancer-causing carcinogen in COVID face masks.
Posted by: ThyWillBeDone - 11-21-2022, 10:38 AM - Forum: Health - No Replies

www.lifesitenews.com
Study finds presence of cancer-causing carcinogen in COVID face masks - LifeSite
LifeSite
13 - 16 minutes

https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/stu...mpaign=usa
Tue Nov 15, 2022 - 6:28 pm ESTMon Nov 21, 2022 - 6:09 am EST
STORY-AT-A-GLANCE

In a study of 12 face masks, every mask contained titanium dioxide (TiO2) particles in at least one layer, at levels that “exceeded the acceptable exposure level.”
The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies titanium dioxide as a Group 2B carcinogen, which means it’s “possibly carcinogenic to humans” by inhalation.
A meta-analysis called for a rethinking of nano-TiO2 safety, citing numerous toxic effects in humans and aquatic animals.
Masks take both a physical and psychological toll; the journal Pediatrics highlighted the emotional burden felt by parents, clinicians and patients due to wearing masks in pediatric cancer wards.
YouTube has updated its policies about what constitutes “misinformation” and now allows you to say masks don’t work.

(Mercola) — The face masks that were supposed to protect your health may turn out to be detrimental to it, as increasing evidence points to toxins within their fibers. Titanium dioxide is one such toxin, one that’s particularly troubling in face masks because it’s a suspected human carcinogen when inhaled.

Not only have adults been unwittingly exposed to this likely cancer-causing substance due to widespread mask mandates put in place during the pandemic, but so too have children, whose bodies are especially vulnerable to toxic influences.

Coupled with evidence suggesting that mask mandates and use did not lower the spread of COVID-19, forced mask mandates become all the more atrocious.
Group 2B carcinogen detected in masks

The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies titanium dioxide as a Group 2B carcinogen, which means it’s “possibly carcinogenic to humans” by inhalation. Prior to the pandemic, this occurred primarily in occupational settings during the production of titanium dioxide powders or in the manufacture of products containing the substance.

There’s also been some concern about spray-on (aerosolized) sunscreens, hair color sprays and cosmetic powders containing microscopic particles of titanium dioxide that could be inhaled.

Specifically, the state of California includes titanium dioxide in the form of airborne particles measuring 10 micrometers or less on its Proposition 65 list, stating, “titanium dioxide (airborne, unbound particles of respirable size) is on the Proposition 65 list because it can cause cancer. Exposure to titanium dioxide may increase the risk of cancer.”

Despite the fact that titanium dioxide’s carcinogenicity when inhaled is well-known, the compound is commonly used in face mask textiles to improve stability to ultraviolet light and for use as a white colorant and matting agent.

Nanoparticle technology is also being used in face masks, and nanofibers containing titanium dioxide have been used to make antimicrobial filters, often in combination with silver and graphene, while titanium dioxide nanoparticle coatings may also be applied to cotton fabric to enhance antibacterial properties.

Not only have adverse effects been reported in animal studies involving inhalation of titanium dioxide particles, but a team of researchers warned of “possible future consequences caused by a poorly regulated use of nanotechnology in textiles,” expanding on potential human health and environmental effects.

The researchers stated:

Although originally classified as biologically inert, there is a growing body of evidence on the toxicity of TiO2 [titanium dioxide] to humans and non-target organisms … Artificial sweat was also used to test the concentration of the silver and TiO2 released from fabrics. The release rate was found to depend on the concentration of nanomaterials in the fabric and the pH of sweat.Although originally classified as biologically inert, there is a growing body of evidence on the toxicity of TiO2 [titanium dioxide] to humans and non-target organisms … Artificial sweat was also used to test the concentration of the silver and TiO2 released from fabrics. The release rate was found to depend on the concentration of nanomaterials in the fabric and the pH of sweat.

A meta-analysis published in the journal Small, which focuses on science at the nano- and microscale, also called for a rethinking of nano-TiO2 safety, citing numerous toxic effects in humans and aquatic animals:

Genotoxicity, damage to membranes, inflammation and oxidative stress emerge as the main mechanisms of nano-TiO2 toxicity. Furthermore, nano-TiO2 can bind with free radicals and signal molecules, and interfere with the biochemical reactions on plasmalemma [cell membrane].

At the higher organizational level, nano-TiO2 toxicity is manifested as the negative effects on fitness-related organismal traits including feeding, reproduction and immunity in aquatic organisms.

TiO2 in masks exceeds ‘acceptable’ exposure level

In a study published in Scientific Reports, researchers tested the amount of titanium — used as a proxy for TiO2 particles — in 12 face masks meant to be worn by the public, including single-use disposable varieties as well as reusable masks. The masks were made of various materials, including synthetic fibers like polyester and natural fibers, such as cotton.

Every mask contained titanium dioxide particles in at least one layer, although they weren’t found in cotton fibers or meltblown nonwoven fabrics.

Generally, the amount of titanium dioxide particles in nonwoven fabrics was lower — by a factor of 10 — than in polyester and polyamide fibers. Further, all of the masks except one contained TiO2 nanoparticles, which present an elevated inhalation hazard.

Nanosized particles are typically described as being less than 100 nanometers (nm). The median size of the titanium dioxide particles in the masks ranged from 89 to 184 nm.

Based on a model in which face masks are “worn intensively,” the study found that exposure to titanium dioxide “systematically exceeded the acceptable exposure level to TiO2 by inhalation (3.6 µg).”

On Twitter, Federico Andres Lois shared, “The best (lowest contamination) has more than 5 times the acceptable limit. Ohh and by the way, you are forcing your kid to breathing through it.”

This, the researchers concluded, calls for in-depth research to avoid adverse effects:

[T]hese results urge for in depth research of (nano)technology applications in textiles to avoid possible future consequences caused by a poorly regulated use and to implement regulatory standards phasing out or limiting the amount of TiO2 particles, following the safe-by-design principle.

How masks make you sick

The potential consequences of breathing in carcinogenic particles from face masks worn during the COVID-19 pandemic won’t be known for years, but red flags have been raised from the beginning that face mask usage has consequences, with no meaningful benefit.

Dr. Zacharias Fögen conducted a study to find out whether mandatory mask use influenced the COVID-19 case fatality rate in Kansas from Aug. 1 to Oct. 15, 2020. He chose the state of Kansas because, while it issued a mask mandate, counties were allowed to either opt in or out of it.

His analysis revealed that counties with a mask mandate had significantly higher case fatality rates than counties without a mask mandate.

“These findings suggest that mask use might pose a yet unknown threat to the user instead of protecting them, making mask mandates a debatable epidemiologic intervention,” he concluded.

That threat, he explained, may be something called the “Foegen effect” — the idea that deep reinhalation of droplets and virions caught on facemasks might make COVID-19 infection more likely or more severe.

Fögen explained that wearing masks could end up increasing your overall viral load because instead of exhaling virions from your respiratory tract and ridding your body of them, those virions are caught in the mask and returned. This might also have the effect of increasing the number of virions that pass through the mask, such that it becomes more than the number that would have been shed without a mask.

According to Fögen:

The fundamentals of this effect are easily demonstrated when wearing a facemask and glasses at the same time by pulling the upper edge of the mask over the lower edge of the glasses. Droplets appear on the mask when breathing out and disappear when breathing in.

In the ‘Foegen effect,’ the virions spread (because of their smaller size) deeper into the respiratory tract. They bypass the bronchi and are inhaled deep into the alveoli, where they can cause pneumonia instead of bronchitis, which would be typical of a virus infection.

Furthermore, these virions bypass the multilayer squamous epithelial wall that they cannot pass into in vitro and most likely cannot pass into in vivo. Therefore, the only probable way for the virions to enter the blood vessels is through the alveoli.

A 2021 report focused on health, safety and well-being of face mask usage further noted potential permanent physical damage to the lungs caused by fibrosis from inhalation of fibrous nanoparticles.

“There are real and significant dangers of respiratory infection, oral health deterioration and of lung injury, such as pneumothorax, owing to moisture build-up and also exposure to potentially harmful levels of an asphyxiant gas (carbon dioxide [CO2]) which can cause serious injury to health,” the authors explained.
Masks take an extreme psychological toll

The physical repercussions are only one aspect to consider, as the psychological consequences of mask mandates are also severe. The journal Pediatrics recently highlighted the burden felt by parents, clinicians and patients in pediatric cancer wards when they were forced to wear masks.

Hidden by face masks, clinicians felt powerless to display empathy and compassion during the most difficult conversations with their patients and their families.

Wrote one clinician, who had to deliver devastating health news about the child of a friend:

My mask covered my expression. Perhaps the only way she could have known just how devastated I was to learn of this news was by the tears welling up in my eyes. My natural response was to wrap my arms around my friend and tell her everything would be okay. ‘I will help you, I will fix her, I will do everything in my power to make this go away.’

But how do I show you when my words are muffled by the mask? How can I softly share my words of condolence when I am struggling to catch enough air myself through the 3 layers of fabric? How does anyone break this kind of awful news with personal protective gear creating a barrier between doctor and patient?

The children were also affected, as they couldn’t see their parents’ faces during a time when they needed them most.

Wrote one parent:

When a policy change mandated that parents be masked 24/7 while in the hospital, my child was furious. She would rip the mask off my face and, if it was a paper mask, would pull off the strings so it could not be worn again. ‘I need to see my mommy’ she told me, along with ‘I need kisses to make me feel better and you can’t kiss me with a mask.’

A 2021 psychology report also stated that masks are likely to be causing psychological harm to children and interfering with development.

“The extent of psychological harm to young people is unknown,” the report stated, “due to the unique nature of the ‘social experiment’ currently underway in schools, and in wider society.”
YouTube now lets you say masks don’t work

You may recall that countless public figures have been de-platformed by multiple social media and other online outlets for speaking out against the narrative, including the misguided notion that masks were useful for reducing COVID-19 cases.

Indeed, it wasn’t long ago that even physicians who spoke out against mandatory masks were hunted down like a modern-day witch hunt.

Now, it seems, YouTube has changed its tune, as it has updated its policies about what constitutes “misinformation.” Stating that “masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of COVID-19,” or that “wearing a mask is dangerous or causes negative physical health effects,” was previously a violation of their policy, but this verbiage has since been removed from its examples of misinformation.

Other mask-related statements that have been removed from YouTube’s definition of misinformation include:

Claims that wearing a mask causes oxygen levels to drop to dangerous levels
Claims that masks cause lung cancer or brain damage
Claims that wearing a mask gives you COVID-19

Curiously, while YouTube no longer classifies “claims that COVID-19 vaccines are not effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19 as misinformation,” “claims about COVID-19 vaccinations that contradict expert consensus from local health authorities or WHO” are still off limits.

It’s also against YouTube’s guidelines to post “content alleging that vaccines cause chronic side effects” or “content claiming that vaccines do not reduce transmission or contraction of disease,” — the latter being a blatant contradiction to their COVID-19 vaccine terms.

So, while YouTube now allows you to say masks don’t work, you still can’t contradict WHO on vaccines. Little by little, however, the truth will emerge, as is already occurring with face masks and their carcinogenic contents.

Reprinted with permission from Mercola.

Help Mom of 11 win case after refusing to mask in church

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  German Disaster Official Recommends Stockpiling 'Several Crates' Of Water, Canned Food
Posted by: Stone - 11-21-2022, 07:30 AM - Forum: Global News - No Replies

German Disaster Official Recommends Stockpiling 'Several Crates' Of Water, Canned Food

[Image: prepp.PNG?itok=OHHac6yV]


ZH | November 21, 2022


The head of Germany's Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief (BBK), Ralph Tiesler, has warned citizens to prepare for short-term power outages, particularly in January and February, and to stock up on rations in advance.

"We have to assume that there will be blackouts this winter. By that, I mean a regional and temporary interruption in the power supply. The cause will not only be energy shortages, but also the targeted, temporary shutdown of the networks by the operators, with the aim of protecting the networks and not endangering the overall supply," Tiesler told the news outlet Welt am Sonntag, adding that local authorities in several German municipalities are preparing for the possibility of blackouts, and have developed 'precise plans' that include procuring emergency generators to support the system.

That said, some municipalities are not prepared - and despite German gas storage facilities being near capacity, experts don't think the stockpile will be enough to last the country through the winter due to a lack of new supply from Russia.

"We expect short-term blackouts rather than long-lasting, large-scale blackouts. But good preparation is important for that, too," Tiesler added.


What to do? Stock up...

"Primarily water, several crates, and canned food. That would be enough for ten days. That's what my agency recommends… Our message is: prepare in the first place. Be prepared for possible crises, don't assume that everything will be readily available all the time," Tiesler stated, adding that residents should also purchase battery-powered radios and candles.

Germany's energy woes stem from a drop in gas supplies from Russia, after an ill-advised scheme to shut off their nuclear power plants. The flow of gas was cut off much earlier than expected over Ukraine-related sanctions, as well as explosions in September which rendered the Nord Stream 1 pipeline inoperable.

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  Pope on shared Easter date with Orthodox: Pick a date and we’ll accept
Posted by: Stone - 11-21-2022, 06:44 AM - Forum: Pope Francis - No Replies

From a progressive Novus Ordo site:



Pope on shared Easter date with Orthodox: Pick a date and we’ll accept

[Image: EN_01254559_0873.jpg?w=640&crop=1]


Aleteia [adapted] | November 19, 2022


"On this point, I want to say – indeed, to repeat – what Saint Paul VI said in his day: We are ready to accept any proposal that is made together."

Both the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches have spoken about resolve to find a shared date for Easter, and it seems that this goal might be closer than ever.

This November 19, Pope Francis received in audience His Holiness Mar Awa III, Catholicos-Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, which has its See in Iraq.

The Pope thanked the Catholicos-Patriarch for assuring his desire to find a common date for Easter.

For Catholics, Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. While there are various factors that cause the divergence of dates with the Orthodox – including the use of the Gregorian vs Julian calendar – one aspect is that the Orthodox Churches abide by a previous requirement that said the Pascha must take place after the Jewish Passover in order to maintain the Biblical sequence of Christ’s Passion.

The Pope is among a host of religious leaders working to get this issue solved, along with Patriarch Bartholomew of the Greek Orthodox Church and Tawadros II of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

“On this point, I want to say – indeed, to repeat – what Saint Paul VI said in his day: We are ready to accept any proposal that is made together.”

This is stated by Paul VI in an appendix to the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, promulgated in 1963, Sacrosanctrum Concilium.


2025? Let us have the courage …

Pope Francis added that “2025 is an important year: We will celebrate the anniversary of the first Ecumenical Council (of Nicea), yet it is also important because we will celebrate Easter on the same date.”

For Catholics, it will also be an ordinary jubilee year. Easter that year, for both Catholics and Orthodox, is April 20, the third Sunday of April.

With such a convergence, the Pope proposed:

Quote:So let us have the courage to put an end to this division that at times makes us laugh: “When does your Christ rise again?” The sign we should give is: One Christ for all of us. Let us be courageous and search together: I’m willing, yet not me, the Catholic Church is willing to follow what Saint Paul VI said. Agree and we will go where you say. I dare even to express a dream: That the separation with the beloved Assyrian Church of the East, the longest in the history of the Church, can also be, please God, the first to be resolved.

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  Gregorian Propers for the Twenty-fourth and Last Sunday after Pentecost
Posted by: Stone - 11-20-2022, 06:43 AM - Forum: Pentecost - No Replies

Gregorian Propers for the Twenty-fourth and Last Sunday after Pentecost

[Image: ?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3...ipo=images]


Twenty-fourth and Last Sunday after Pentecost
Introit • Score • Dicit Dominus Ego cogito 
Gradual • Score • Liberasti nos Domine
Alleluia • Score  • De profundis clamavi (Alleluia)
Offertory • Score • De profundis clamavi (Offertory)
Communion • Score • Amen dico vobis quidquid

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  "Pope Francis does nothing as priests sexually abuse sisters in 22 nations."
Posted by: ThyWillBeDone - 11-19-2022, 05:33 PM - Forum: Anti-Catholic Violence - No Replies

https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/arti...pe-of-nuns

"Pope Francis does nothing as priests sexually abuse sisters in 22 nations."

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  PETA Asks Pope to Excommunicate Meat-Eating Catholics |
Posted by: ThyWillBeDone - 11-19-2022, 05:13 PM - Forum: Anti-Catholic Violence - No Replies

www.peta.org
www.peta.org
https://www.peta.org/blog/pope-urged-to-...at-eaters/


PETA Asks Pope to Excommunicate Meat-Eating Catholics | Blog
David Olsen
3 - 4 minutes


Published November 11, 2022 by .
Imagine you’re an international spiritual leader, able to create powerful and positive change for the planet and all life on it. Imagine you’ll be sharing a table with major world leaders at a pivotal moment of the climate catastrophe. Imagine that meat will be served at that table, even though the United Nations has called for a global shift to vegan eating to help protect the environment. Such is the position of Pope Francis I at the Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (COP27), also known as the United Nations Climate Change Conference. That’s why PETA’s Christian outreach division, LAMBS (“Least Among My Brothers and Sisters” from Matthew 25:40), sent the pontiff a letter on November 9, pressing him to take the first steps toward climate justice by resurrecting meat-free Fridays, including the flesh of fish in his new proscription, and excommunicating Catholics who eat animals.
The POPE should say NOPE to meat at #COP27.
He acknowledges that eating meat is a “self-destructive trend” & has already asked Catholics to do their part in saving the planet.
Now, PETA asks that he reintroduce meatless Fridays & excommunicate Catholics who eat animals! pic.twitter.com/rzJvE9wjD9
— PETA (@peta) November 9, 2022
Excommunication may sound harsh when we’re talking about what people put on their plate, but when the health of the planet and the future of life are at stake, no one should be eating meat—least of all the leaders at the COP27 table, who should be setting the highest example of compassion for animals by going vegan during the climate emergency.
COP27 runs this year from November 6 to 18 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. On a coast of the Red Sea with a flourishing coral reef, the location has both biblical and natural significance. It’s a prime spot for the pope to take action.
Pope in Position of Power to Oppose Speciesism, Uplift All of Creation
Humans kill billions of animals used for food each year due to speciesist conditioning. These animals are forcibly bred and kept in tiny enclosures, endure mutilations—such as tail-docking and castration—without pain relief, and are violently killed at slaughterhouses around the globe. Fish used for food are stabbed, suffocated, crushed, or cut open and gutted, often while they’re still conscious. The pope could easily encourage Catholics to be compassionate by explaining that what happens to animals in the food industry runs so terribly against biblical teachings that it should be an offense punishable by excommunication.
Francis has already declared meat-eating to be part of a “self-destructive trend” and urged Catholics to do what they can to combat the climate catastrophe. Having set these precedents, it’s within his power to advance that message at the conference, expanding its reach and influencing fellow leaders to follow suit.
PETA hopes the pope will give all his followers a reason to go vegan. He might consider highlighting the uplifting fact that each person who goes vegan saves nearly 200 animals every year from a cruel fate.
Set that example yourself by trying out a free vegan starter kit and sending one to a friend:

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  FDA Approves First Lab Grown Meat Product For Human Consumption
Posted by: Stone - 11-18-2022, 07:56 AM - Forum: Health - No Replies

FDA Approves First Lab Grown Meat Product For Human Consumption


MSN | November 17, 2022

Meat and Greet
Behold, ethical omnivores: the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved its first lab grown meat product for human consumption.

The decision, a first for cultivated meat in the US, paves the way for Californian startup Upside Foods to start selling its lab-grown chicken product domestically — meaning that now, it only needs approval from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) before the ersatz chicken can hit restaurant menus.

"The world is experiencing a food revolution and the [FDA] is committed to supporting innovation in the food supply," FDA officials said in a statement.

Upside Foods' products were approved via the FDA's Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) provision, Wired reports, in which manufacturers divulge the production process to the agency for review, along with a sample. If everything looks good after inspection, the FDA then sends back a "no further questions" letter to the company.

"We are thrilled at FDA's announcement," said Upside director of communications David Kay in an email to Reuters. "This historic step paves the way for our path to market."

Going Protein
Lab meat like Upside's aren't a plant-based imitation, unlike popular vegan alternatives such as Beyond Burgers. Instead, they're made from real animal cells grown in bioreactors, sparing the lives of actual livestock.

But while at a cellular level the meat may be the same, customers will definitely notice a difference in price. For now, cultivating meat remains an extremely expensive process, so pending USDA approval notwithstanding, it could still be a while before you see it hit the shelves of your local grocer.

To let eager, early customers try out the lab meat, Upside, which already announced its collaboration with Michelin star chef Dominique Crenn last year, will be debuting its chicken at specific upscale restaurants.

"We would want to bring this to people through chefs in the initial stage," CEO Uma Valeti told Wired. "Getting chefs excited about this is a really big deal for us. We want to work with the best partners who know how to cook well, and also give us feedback on what we could do better."

While the FDA's thumbs-up only applies to a specific product of Upside's, it's still a historic decision, signalling a way forward for an industry that's rapidly accruing investment.

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  G20 Bali Declaration - a blueprint
Posted by: Stone - 11-17-2022, 09:24 AM - Forum: General Commentary - No Replies

G20 Bali Declaration


WhiteHouse.gov | November 16, 2022



Just a few excerpts on health and building a more digital world (emphasis mine):


1. We designated the G20 the premier forum for global economic cooperation, and today we reaffirm our commitment to cooperate as we, once again, address serious global economic challenges. ...

19. We remain committed to promoting a healthy and sustainable recovery which builds towards achieving and sustaining Universal Health Coverage under the [UN's] SDGs. While the COVID-19 pandemic is not over, the World Health Organization (WHO) has recently declared monkeypox as another Public Health Emergency International Concern (PHEIC), reinforcing that international health threats are ever present and that the G20 and broader global community must come together to improve our collective prevention, preparedness and response capabilities. We reaffirm the importance of strengthening of national health systems by putting people at the center of preparedness and equip them to respond effectively. We emphasize the need for equitable access to pandemic medical countermeasures, and welcome the efforts of ACT-A, and note that the results of the ACT-A external evaluations can be useful lessons for future discussions. We reaffirm our commitment to strengthen global health governance, with the leading and coordination role of WHO and support from other international organizations. We support the work of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) that will draft and negotiate a legally binding instrument that should contain both legally binding and non-legally binding elements to strengthen pandemic PPR and the working group on the International Health Regulations that will consider amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) (2005) mindful that the decision will be made by World Health Assembly. 

22. We recognize that the extensive COVID-19 immunization is a global public good and we will advance our effort to ensure timely, equitable and universal access to safe, affordable, quality and effective vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics (VTDs). Acknowledging the adoption of the Ministerial Declaration on the WTO Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic and Preparedness for Future Pandemics and the Ministerial Decision on the TRIPS Agreement at the WTO’s 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12), we note that, no later than six months from the date of the Ministerial Decision on the TRIPS Agreement, WTO members will decide on its extension to cover the production and supply of COVID-19 diagnostics and therapeutics. We remain committed to embedding a multisectoral One Health approach and enhancing global surveillance, including genomic surveillance, in order to detect pathogens and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) that may threaten human health. To enable global pathogen surveillance as part of our commitment to implement the IHR (2005), we encourage sharing of pathogen data in a timely manner on shared and trusted platforms in collaboration with WHO. We encourage sharing of benefits arising from the utilization of pathogens consistent with applicable national laws.

23. We recognize the need for strengthening local and regional health product manufacturing capacities and cooperation as well as sustainable global and regional research and development networks to facilitate better access to VTDs globally, especially in developing countries, and underscore the importance of public-private partnership, and technology transfer and knowledge sharing on voluntary and mutually agreed terms. We support the WHO mRNA Vaccine Technology Transfer hub as well as all as the spokes in all regions of the world with the objective of sharing technology and technical know-how on voluntary and mutually agreed terms. We welcome joint research and joint production of vaccines, including enhanced cooperation among developing countries. We acknowledge the importance of shared technical standards and verification methods, under the framework of the IHR (2005), to facilitate seamless international travel, interoperability, and recognizing digital solutions and non-digital solutions, including proof of vaccinations. We support continued international dialogue and collaboration on the establishment of trusted global digital health networks as part of the efforts to strengthen prevention and response to future pandemics, that should capitalize and build on the success of the existing standards and digital COVID-19 certificates.

24. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the transformation of the digital ecosystem and digital economy. We recognize the importance of digital transformation in reaching the SDGs. We acknowledge that affordable and high-quality digital connectivity is essential for digital inclusion and digital transformation, while a resilient, safe and secure online environment is necessary to enhance confidence and trust in the digital economy. We recognize the importance of policies to create an enabling, inclusive, open, fair and non-discriminatory digital economy that fosters the application of new technologies, allows businesses and entrepreneurs to thrive, and protects and empowers consumers, while addressing the challenges, related to digital divides, privacy, data protection, intellectual property rights, and online safety. We acknowledge the importance to counter disinformation campaigns, cyber threats, online abuse, and ensuring security in connectivity infrastructure. We remain committed to further enable data free flow with trust and promote cross-border data flows. We will advance a more inclusive, human-centric, empowering, and sustainable digital transformation. We also reaffirm the role of data for development, economic growth and social well-being. 

25. We encourage international collaboration to further develop digital skills and digital literacy to harness the positive impacts of digital transformation, especially for women, girls, and people in vulnerable situations, and further support efforts to develop reliable skills and literacy. We note the increasing demands for a workforce adept at utilizing emerging technologies, education and training, reskilling and upskilling to meet such demands. We also seek to increase connectivity by accelerating high capacity and secure infrastructure and provide more accessible and affordable resources and tools, while also improve the digital literacy skills of learners, teachers, school leaders, and other educational professional to ensure universal access to education, accelerate learning recovery and promote lifelong learning.

26. We found digital technology becomes the key for recovery and empowerment across various sectors, including in building a resilient and sustainable food system and agriculture, creating sustainable and decent jobs and human capacity development, supporting inclusive trade, industrialization and investment, increasing productivity, as well as opening up the potential of the future economy, especially for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) and start-ups. It is essential to ensure that no one is left behind in our effort to digitally transform our society, by involving all stakeholders, including the youth, women, business sector, audit institution, parliaments, scientists, and labours.

27. We support continued implementation of the G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-Border Payments, including the future delivery of the initial estimates for key performance indicators and 2022 Progress Report that sets out priorities for the next stage of work. We encourage central banks, other public authorities and the payments industry to continue to work collaboratively on these important initiatives to enhance cross-border payments. We welcome the report by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) on interlinking payment systems and the role of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that was presented in a joint workshop by the Indonesian G20 Presidency in coordination with the BIS CPMI and the BIS Innovation Hub (BISIH) on cross-border payments and interoperability at the Festival Ekonomi Keuangan Digital Indonesia (FEKDI) 2022. We also welcome the joint report by the BIS CPMI, BISIH, IMF, and World Bank on options for access to and interoperability of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) for cross-border payments.

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  Massachusetts DPH Secretly Colluded w/ Google to Auto-Install Contact Tracing
Posted by: Stone - 11-17-2022, 08:31 AM - Forum: Socialism & Communism - No Replies

Massachusetts Department of Public Health SECRETELY Colluded With Google To Auto-Install Contact-Tracing SPYWARE On Your Phone


Alicia Powe | November 16, 2022


The Massachusetts Department of Public Health is facing a class action lawsuit after colluding with Google to repeatedly auto-install contact-tracing spyware on the smartphones of over a million Massachusetts residents without their permission or consent.

According to a class action lawsuit filed by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonpartisan nonprofit civil rights organization, the Department of Public Health rolled out the contact tracing app it worked with Google to create in April 2021.

“The App causes an Android mobile device to constantly connect and exchange information with other nearby devices via Bluetooth and creates a record of such other connections. If a user opts in and reports being infected with COVID-19, an exposure notification is sent to other individuals on the infected user’s connection record,” the NCLA explains in the complaint, Wright v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

Initially, the app which obtains users private locations and health information was voluntarily installed.

But then in June, DPH ramped up its contact tracing program and allegedly began surreptitiously installing the surveillance app on residents’ phones.

“On June 15, 2021, DPH worked with Google to secretly install the Contact Tracing App onto over one million Android mobile devices located in Massachusetts without the device owners’ knowledge or permission,” the complaint states

The government agency and tech giant’s “misguided effort to combat Covid-19” is a brazen violation of civil liberties, state and federal law and the United States and Massachusetts Constitutions, the NCLA contends.

“Plaintiffs are individuals who own and use Android mobile devices and live or work in Massachusetts,” the nonprofit group states in the suit. “DPH installed its Contact Tracing App onto each of the Plaintiffs’ Android devices without their awareness or permission, which amounts to a computer crime under federal and Massachusetts law. See 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2); Mass. Gen. Laws Ann. ch. 266, § 120F. No statutory authority supports DPH’s conduct, which serves no articulable public health purpose, especially since Massachusetts has ended its statewide contact-tracing program.”

“Conspiring with a private company to hijack residents’ smartphones without the owners’ knowledge or consent is not a tool that the Massachusetts Department of Public Health may lawfully employ in its efforts to combat COVID-19. Such brazen for civil liberties violates both the United States and Massachusetts Constitution, and it must stop now.

DPH’s contact tracing app is still employed by the government agency to date and is repeatedly reinstalled on plaintiffs’ cell phones after they delete it, surveilling their every move.

“When some Android device owners discovered and subsequently deleted the App, DPH would re-install it onto their devices,” the complaint states. “These secret installations not only invade owners’ reasonable expectation of privacy, but they also intrude upon owners’ property right in their mobile devices by occupying valuable storage space. Because the Massachusetts and United States Constitutions prohibit governmental entities from unreasonable searches and uncompensated takings, this Court should enjoin DPH’s unconstitutional scheme.

Approximately two dozen states used Google-created contract-tracing apps, but only Massachusetts secretly auto-installed the tracking software on its residents’ mobile devices without knowledge or consent, the NCLA asserts.

The Massachusetts Department of Health may be the only government agency under fire for colluding with Big Tech to devise a surveillance mechanism, but millions of Americans nationwide were also contact traced during the Covid pandemic by a voters analytics firm help Democrats target swing voters.

As the Gateway Pundit reported in October, Predict Wise tracked over 100 million Americans from their cellphones and assigned “Covid-19 decree” violation scores throughout the Covid lockdowns.

The firm assigned a Covid-19 decree score based on how much an individual adhered to lockdown restrictions and stayed home.  “Compliers,” were assigned low Covid decree violation scores, while those who disregarded quarantine measures and traveled away from their homes were given high Covid decree violation scores.

After harvesting location data from tens of millions of US cell phones, PredictWise provided the data to its clients which include the  Democratic National Committee, the Democrat Parties of Arizona, North Dakota, Ohio, Florida and South Carolina Democrat campaigns to develop campaign ads.

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  Parallel Economies - Agriculture
Posted by: Stone - 11-17-2022, 08:25 AM - Forum: General Commentary - No Replies

PARALLEL ECONOMIES - AGRICULTURE


The Lunatic Farmer Joel Salatin | November 16, 2022

Hi everyone—

I had the distinct privilege and honor yesterday to speak here at Hillsdale College in Michigan. This college is a bastion of liberty and freedom, refusing even to take the GI bill because of the government strings attached. Since they wanted my remarks written to be printed in the conference proceedings, I wrote this speech and therefore have the unusual opportunity to get you a copy. It was a 40 minute speech to give; you can probably read it in 20-25 minutes. Glad to hear your thoughts.

Blessings,

joel



HILLSDALE COLLEGE

PARALLEL ECONOMIES—AGRICULTURE


Joel Salatin



This spring when Russia invaded Ukraine, fertilizer prices increased in some cases 400 percent and global grain shipments sputtered, our farm didn’t feel anything because we don’t buy fertilizer and we don’t buy foreign grain.  Suddenly our years of being marginalized by the agri-industrial complex inverted and interest in our methods and madness exploded.  Both farmers and non-farmers began asking “how do we disentangle from the system?”

“Just in time,” the darling inventory phrase of recent decades, changed to “just in case” as supply lines fractured.  Culturally, a society detached from menial life tasks like farm chores and kitchen duties, suddenly found itself vulnerable to unforeseen fragilities.  The food and farming sector goal switched from efficiency to resiliency.  In the spring of 2020, as covid’s black swan permeated the world, store shelves went bare.  Farmers euthanized (that means killed and threw away) millions of chickens, turkeys, and hogs because mega-processing plants couldn’t maintain operations.

At our house, we neither worried nor feared because we had freezers full of meat and a basement full of canned garden produce.  I don’t say all this proudly; I say it gratefully, and as a challenge to everyone:  freedom comes from participation.  We’ve spent a couple of generations exiting historically normal tasks and behavior, from integrating livestock and crops, growing gardens, buying locally and cultivating domestic culinary arts.  We even abandoned breast feeding our babies for a couple of decades.

We thought squeezable cheese and subcontracting kitchen duties to mega-corporate entities, replacing decomposition with chemical fertilizer, honey with refined sugar, and butter with hydrogenated vegetable oil would launch us into a new freedom nirvana.  But instead it shackled us, enslaved us to nefarious scientists bringing us fertilizer and menus from laboratories instead of from God’s ecological womb.  Those of us who continued to participate in historically-normal farm chores, garden production, local or biologically grown sustenance, and domestic culinary arts are today enjoying more independence and freedom.  You cannot have freedom without participation.

Here are two questions to ponder.  First, would America’s food system have convulsed as violently if instead of 300 mega-processing facilities employing 5,000 people apiece we funneled our food through 300,000 community-scaled 20-50-employee facilities?  The second question is when rocky disruptions affect our ship of state, would you rather navigate dangerous shoals in a maneuverable speedboat or an aircraft carrier that takes 10 miles to turn around?


Let’s examine what a food and farming parallel universe would look like by juxtaposing current objectives with the lunatic fringe alternative.


1.  CHEAP FOOD VERSUS PRECIOUS FOOD.  If one thing defines American agriculture, it is dedication to cheap food.  American per capita expenditure on food is the lowest in the world; our per capita expenditure on health care is the highest.  Cheap food promised to give us spendable cash to attend football games and casinos, cruises and movies. 

It created a love affair with Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOS) that became incubators for disease.  Floating on a sea of cheap energy, these facilities promised mechanized farming and pharmaceutical health.  Subtherapeutic antibiotic use created a world of superbugs like mRSA and cDiff.  A brand new lexicon burst on the American vocabulary:  campylobacter, lysteria, E. coli, salmonella, food allergies, Type 2 diabetes:  these are nature, beaten and abused, on its knees, pleading and begging “Enough!”   

Instead of God’s designed decomposition driving fertility, petroleum-based chemical fertilizers substituted, like an intravenous feeding tube replacing edible food. In short order, our agriculture system created a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico, infertile frogs, and three-legged salamanders.  And now our life expectancy is dropping; we’re addicted to pharmaceuticals; physical and emotional maladies plague our nation.

Perhaps cheap food policy’s most damaging effect is on farmers themselves.  The primary custodians of our natural resources, not to mention food, feel marginalized and unappreciated.  When’s the last time you heard about a school guidance counselor advising:  “Mary, you’re really sharp, with great grades and honors credentials.  You should be a farmer.”  Burdened with the unnecessary and ridiculous responsibility of feeding the world, American farmers now number fewer than our prison population.  It gives me pause to realize that my book You Can Farm would have much bigger buyer interest if it had been You Can Be a Successful Inmate.  Stewarding our air, soil, and water with our best and brightest will only come when we have a precious food policy. That’s up to consumers, not farmers.

Can you imagine a cheap religion policy?  A cheap road-building policy?  A cheap information technology policy?  Dear folks, you cannot abdicate precious food respect without serious consequences.  As a culture, we must leave this cheap food universe and get in the escape pod of precious food.


2.  QUANTITY VERSUS QUALITY.  Bushels and tonnage are all we measure.  By every metric, over the last century nutritional quality plummeted.  Today you have to eat three times as much broccoli to get the same nutrition as you did in 1940.

Our farm participated in a pastured egg nutrient study several years ago.  The official USDA nutrition label for conventional supermarket eggs lists folic acid as 48 micrograms per egg.  Our Polyface eggs averaged 1,038.  Grass finished beef has 300 percent more riboflavin than grain-finished.  Pastured livestock offer much higher percentages of conjugated linoleic acid; indeed, only two weeks of grain feeding chases it out of the body on beef cattle.

The Bionutrient Food Association is documenting the wildly disparate nutrient contents of various foods.  In carrots, for example, they found that you would need to eat more than 10 carrots of the worst to get the same nutrition as one carrot of the best.  To my knowledge, nobody in the conventional food and farming sector is seeking better quality; they’re just trying to fill bins and trucks.  Doesn’t matter if it’s junk.

We can all thank Austrian biochemist Justus von Liebig for beginning this downward trend when in 1837 he told the world that all life is simply a rearrangement of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous (NPK).  Replacing the magnificent complex relational biological community with simple chemicals denies the human microbiome its optimal sustenance.

Sir Albert Howard, who developed the scientific aerobic composting method and brought it to the world in his iconic 1943 book, An Agricultural Testament, wrote “Artificial manures [that’s what he called chemical fertilizer] lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals, and finally to artificial men and women.”  I would add “who can only be kept alive with artificials.”  A functional authentic agriculture requires a focus on quality.       


3.  SEGREGATED VERSUS INTEGRATED.  Throughout history, agriculture required a highly integrated approach because until cheap energy and mechanization, distribution was laborious.  You couldn’t pack more animals in a house than you could bring in feedstocks and haul out manure by draft power. 

Indeed, from 1900-1910, with the industrial revolution well underway, along with rapid urbanization, newspaper editors and city planners feared metropolitan implosion.  Dependent on draft power to haul in fodder and livery supplies and haul out manure, cities were sinking under transportational inefficiency.  Poop covered the streets.  It was on your shoes when you went into the bakery.  Travelers drug manure into hotels.  Patrons carried poop into restaurants.

On farms, the same constraints required integrated systems.  Crops required proximate animals in order to receive the blessing of their manure.  In 1946, the average morsel of food in America traveled only 40 miles from field to fork.  Today, the average is 1,500 miles.  And we’ve gone from a calorie of energy per calorie of food to 15 calories of energy to a calorie of food.  We’ve become that inefficient, or looked at another way, that segregated.

No longer dependent on nature’s fertility, we mine our fertilizer from far away places to be placed on land that grows crops to be fed hundreds of miles away to animals that are trucked to mega-processing facilities for packaged food shipped to the Costco near you.  Meanwhile, the historic blessing of manure becomes a liability, clogging our streams and poisoning our groundwater because it’s too much in one place for our ecological womb to metabolize. 

Sir Albert Howard also envisioned diamond cities and predicted water-based sewage systems would fade into obsolescence by the 1960s.  He imagined 25-house developments placed in a diamond shape so each one would have access to passive solar heat.  The one acre inside the diamond would employ a master gardener and composter who would collect the human excrement each day, compost it, and grow highly nutritious fruits and vegetables to feed the 25 households surrounding the garden.  Isn’t that beautiful?           

Our college campuses should all have a chicken house attached to the back door of the dining hall so kitchen scraps can be converted to eggs onsite.  All roofs can be guttered to cisterns equipped with pumps operated by exercise bikes in the fitness room.  Students could exercise by pumping the water back up the roof, which would grow vegetables that would cascade down the walls for fresh picking from dorms and classrooms.  The vegetated roofs would cool the buildings enough to eliminate the need for air conditioning.  The cisterns would eliminate stormwater infrastructure.  The campus would be divided into quadrants and each day students would waken to an app notice telling them where fresh blackberries, apples, or strawberries were ready for picking; the students would graze their way across campus.  All buildings would have attached solariums, generating passive solar heat and growing cool-hardy leafy greens all winter, eliminating trucking from California.  The campus that institutes these simple low-tech improvements will be a beacon of hope and help to a world wallowing in hopelessness and helplessness.  Could it be Hilsdale?


4.  CENTRALIZED VERSUS DECENTRALIZED.  People assume that to feed the world, we need big things.  Big chicken factories.  Big combines.  Big fields.  No we don’t.  A lot of littles can outcompete one big.

I appreciate big and small are subjective terms and by USDA standards, our Polyface Farm is now a large farm.  But compared to Tyson, we’re a drop in the ocean.  On our farm, scaling up is not by centralization; it’s by duplication.  The difference is profound.

The average American farmer is now 60 years old.  In the next 15 years, 50 percent—half—of all agricultural equity is going to change hands.  That’s farmland, equipment, and buildings.  No civilization has ever seen that big a change in ownership in peace; only in conquest, like the Huns rampaging Rome.  I’m not suggesting the U.S. is getting ready to be overrun by Huns—maybe we are or maybe we aren’t.  But what we’re seeing in the geo-political agricultural landscape is unprecedented.  Any business book will tell you that when the average practitioner in any vocation or economic sector is more than 35 years old, that’s a sector in decline.  This successional problem isn’t because farming is obsolete. It’s largely due to cost of entry for the next generation.  When young people can’t get in, old people can’t get out.

For example, if a young person wanted to grow chickens for Tyson, the first item on the agenda is a half a million dollar building.  Would you call that an impediment to entry?  Compare that to our pastured poultry model which requires 10 ft. X 12 ft. X 2 ft. high floorless boxes containing 75 broilers (meat chickens) moved daily across the field.  All you have to do is cancel your Netflix subscription for a couple of months and you have enough cash to build one and enter the chicken business.  If you like it, you can build another with retained earnings.  If you love it as much as we do, over time you can build more than 200 of them, debt free.  Dave Ramsey would be proud.

America has roughly 35 million acres of lawn and 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses.  We can spread production over thousands and thousands of places; not a single confinement animal facility is necessary.  We have millions of acres locked up.  On our farm, pastured pork and forest-housed pigs using high tech electric fencing and moved every few days exercises the ecology and eliminates concrete, fans, and despicable manure lagoons. 

People who embrace pod schools, home schooling, and educational coops know that centralization, which is akin to institutionalization, does not a better education make.  The same applies to agriculture.  Spread it out; democratize it; entrepreneurialize it.


5.  MECHANICAL VERSUS BIOLOGICAL.  The Greco-Roman disconnected compartmentalized linear reductionist individualized parts-oriented mindset views life as fundamentally mechanical.  It views living things like inanimate piles of protoplasm to be manipulated however cleverly hubris can imagine, like 3-D printing or metal widgets.

Until recently, this was simply an incorrect idea.  But with today’s disdain for death and cultish worship of animals, it has new allure.  My dog is my aunt is my cat is my child now permeates society with the fundamental notion that life does not require death.  Thinking they’ve entered a new evolutionary elevated spiritual awareness, these folks actually exhibit a profound devolutionary spiral into anti-ecological thinking.  Everything is eating and being eaten.

If you don’t believe that, go lie naked in your flower bed for a week and see what gets eaten.  Or in the pig pen.  Nothing more dramatically illustrates this principle than a compost pile, teeming with bugs and worms, all eating and in turn being eaten.  The life, death, decomposition, regeneration cycle is as foundational to our ecological womb as the need for sunlight and water.  Respect during life creates either desecration or sacredness in sacrifice.  At our farm, we dare to ask how to honor the pigness of the pig and the tomatoness of the tomato, understanding that such questions define ethical and moral boundaries around affirmation and being-hood.  A society that refuses to ask how to have happy pigs will soon refuse to ask how to have happy people.  If we’re going to honor the Tomness of Tom and the Maryness of Mary, it starts with honoring the pigness of the pig.

If you’re eating something that won’t decompose, it probably won’t digest.  Shelf stable cheese isn’t food at all.  Good cheese should mold at room temperature and even sprout legs and walk off the table in a week.  In order to create life, something has to die.  If we want to live, we die to self.  I think Jesus had something to say about that.

Interestingly, our pastured beef, pork, and chicken cook 15-20 percent faster than conventional supermarket counterparts.  One explanation is that ours is more moist due to exercise.  Another is that our animals live a happy life, stress free, and do not live every day secreting hardening adrenalin that makes them tougher to cook.  If we eat stress, do we become more stressed?  Hmmmmmm.

Life is far more than interchangeable parts.  Machines can’t forgive.  They can’t heal.  They can’t love.  You can hug your Tesla all day but when you finally tear yourself away, it doesn’t pine for another hug.  A parallel agriculture understands that growing sacred food, authentic sustenance, feeds our microbiome life, not inert substance. 


6.  OPAQUE VERSUS TRANSPARENT.  The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker used to live above their shops, attend community functions with others, and be approachable.  The industrial revolution expanded the butcher, baker and candlestick maker to a size that was unapproachable.  Hiding behind razor wire and security posts, mega-processors and farms became opaque to the populace, which fostered ignorance about what was going on behind those cloistered complexes.  Ignorance breeds fear.

Fear demanded government oversight.  Today, Americans fear food.  Our credentialed experts told us to quit eating butter and go to margarine.  They said to quit using manure and go to chemical fertilizer.  They encouraged us to powder our garden beds with DDT.  They brought us the food pyramid in 1979, placing Cheerios and Twinkies on the foundational bottom tier.  Today they tell us genetically modified organisms are safe, encourage us to stab our kids with 72 injections before they’re 18, raw milk is bad but Coke is fine.  Folks, the government/industrial credentialed expert track record is abysmal.

The food police are fine with chlorinated chicken and red dye 29, but criminalize home-processed chicken and homemade pepperoni.  You can eat it; you just can’t sell it.  If it’s too hazardous to sell, why isn’t it too hazardous to eat?  Thousands and thousands of wanna-be entrepreneurial farmers are held hostage by scale-prejudicial food regulations.  Food choice is not guaranteed to Americans.  My Virginia commissioner of food inspection told me that if we allowed people to make their own food choices, like buying pie from a friend at church, we couldn’t build enough hospitals for all the people sickened by unsafe food.

Years ago the Government Accounting Office conducted a study on food-borne illness and found four culprits:  centralized production, centralized processing, long distance transportation, and subtherapeutic use of antibiotics.  This is one of the only times I’ve ever seen a government study get it right.  Wouldn’t you think such a finding would make someone in the seat of power ask “well, if that’s the cause, what’s the opposite?”  Let’s see, the opposite of centralized production would be lots of viable small farms.  The opposite of centralized processing would be thousands of small outfits.  The opposite of long distance transportation would be . . . let’s see . . . what would that be?  Oh, local.  And how about drugging our animals?  Oh, that would be happy pigs.  But nobody dared broach the solution because it would invert the power, position, prestige and profits of the entire food and farm industry. Food bullies don’t like transparency.

Why do we listen to them?  On our farm, we have a 24/7/365 open door policy for anyone to come from anywhere to see anything anytime unannounced.  We’re customer inspected, not bully compliant.


7.  CHEMICAL VERSUS CARBON.  What feeds soil biology is decomposing biomass.  Through photosynthesis, a plant takes in something as mystical and esoteric as sunbeams and converts it to fungible, physical, measurable, tradable material.  The plant pumps energy into the soil, where up to 5 billion microorganisms per handful engage in an underground cafe.  “I’ve got a gram of molybdenum I’ll trade you for some polysaccharide.”  It’s more drama and theater than Broadway ever imagined.

All ecosystems thrived without chemical fertilizers.  From the Fertile Crescent to the American plains, chemical 10-10-10 fertilizer did not build the rich soils that grew powerful civilizations that collapsed under fertility depletion.  This historical cycle is as axiomatic as high taxes and governmental corruption.  North America produced more food 500 years ago than it does today.  It wasn’t all eaten by humans, for sure.  We had 200 million beavers eating more vegetation than all the humans today.  Some 2 million wolves at 20 pounds of meat a day.  Passenger pigeons numerous enough to be in flocks big enough to block out the sun for three days flew over the landscape.  And 100-200 million bison, along with elk, deer, prairie chickens and turkeys filled the landscape.

The notion that abundance comes out of a bag or tube fails to appreciate the real source of soil development:  the sun.  In our faith community, we honor the S-o-n.  In a functionally fertile agriculture, we honor the s-u-n.  We do that through a carbon economy rather than a chemical economy.  That means we till less, grow more perennials rather than annuals, and put carbonaceous diapers under our livestock when they’re housed in the winter.

With an industrial-scale chipper, on our farm we convert low-quality trees into chips to absorb manure and urine.  As the diaper builds through the winter, we add corn, which ferments in the anaerobic bedding pack.  When the cows come out in the spring, we put in pigs—we call them pigaerators—who seek the fermented corn and churn the diaper into aerobic compost.  If American agriculture  took all the money we currently spend on chemical fertilizer and battling fires due to overgrown vegetation and spent it on fertility from carbon, we would grow far more nutritious food, build soil, and provide sacred employment for thousands who yearn for society’s respect working in blue collar vocations.

Carbon and organic matter are kissing cousins.  Carbon feeds the soil biology and increases sponginess.  I like to view the soil like a majestic cathedral, full of rooms and compartments.  Some have hydrogen; some have water and some have minerals.  Throughout the cathedral, billions of parishioners called nematodes, actinomycetes, bacteria and the gigantic worms and grubs interact in both harmony and competitiveness, eating and being eaten, trading and growing.

On our farm, we’ve moved from 1 percent organic matter to more than 8 percent in half a century.  Every one percent of organic matter can hold 20,000 gallons of water per acre; we’ve moved 7 percent, which is 140,000 gallons of water per acre we can hold in our farm soils now that we couldn’t when we arrived in 1961.  Our gullied rockpile armpit of the community now produces 3-4 times the county average.  Scarcity moved to abundance.

People who think we could not have fed the world without chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and hybridization don’t understand that if we had had a Manhattan Project for compost, not only would we have fed the world, we would have built soil, reduced sickness, and created landscape resiliency.  Indeed, we would have done it without three-legged salamanders and infertile frogs. Nature is not a reluctant partner to violently wrestle into submission; creation is a benevolent lover to be caressed in the right places.

We don’t need to shortcut the sun.  We need to harness it through carbon.


8.  SICKNESS VERSUS HEALTH. Conventional agriculture’s overriding mentality is that nature is fundamentally flawed and we have to fix it.  The average farm conference focuses nearly all of its attention on disease and sickness.

If you attend an organic or sustainable—whatever buzzword you want to use—conference, you will hear little about sickness.  Although our farm has thousands of animals, we use a veterinarian only once every other year, and that’s for a calving problem beyond our ability.  While the average farmer buys tons of drugs and chemicals, I don’t buy any of it.  What I buy is seaweed as a mineral supplement. 

I run laying hens behind the cow herd in Eggmobiles to duplicate the bird-herbivore symbiosis seen throughout wild ecosystems.  The chickens scatter the dung, peck out the fly larvae to sanitize the field, and eat the newly exposed grasshoppers and crickets, turning it all into incredibly nutritious eggs.  Instead of paying vet bills we sell eggs.

Our animals move daily to new areas, away from yesterday’s toilet.  We’re constantly trying to mimic nature’s template.  When government agriculture experts told us to feed dead cows to cows in the early 1970s, farmers who believe like I do didn’t do it.  We were castigated for being anti-science, anti-progress.  I didn’t buy the expert advice because I couldn’t find a pattern in nature where herbivores eat carrion.  A couple of decades later, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow) stormed across the western world and a collective “Oops, maybe we shouldn’t oughtta done that” replaced the scientific hubris.

Somehow God’s design and modeling keeps things healthy.  Every sickness or malady we’ve had on our farm has been a result of our mismanagement.  It could be lack of sanitation, or selecting the wrong genetics, or nutritional deficiencies.  When we have a sickness issue, we don’t assume we failed to use the right vaccine or drug.  We look in the mirror and ask “what did we do to break down the immunological function of these animals?”  I suggest we learn far more by assuming it’s our fault than if we assume we’re victims of an incorrect concoction.

If we formed a diabolical committee to create a pathogen-friendly farm, what would we do?  We’d have only one animal or plant—a mono-species in order to make sure pathogens always had a host and weren’t confused with other species.  We’d grow them as close together as possible so pathogens always had proximate access to a host.  We’d eliminate sunshine as nature’s best detoxifier.  We’d make them breathe fecal particulate to abrade lesions into fragile mucous membranes.  You get the picture.  What have I just described?  Modern American agriculture.  It’s time for a parallel system.


9.  EXPLOITIVE VERSUS NURTURING. Ever since the Conquistadors exterminated indigenous populations in the New World in the name of God and the Queen, our European DNA loves short-term gain.  Sir Albert Howard said it is the temptation of every civilization to turn what nature spent millenia creating into cash for today.

Desertification, plummeting aquifers, erosion, and McDonald’s all represent a short-term valuation.  One of our problems is that as a society, for all our cleverness, we have not figured out an accounting system that measures liabilities against assets.  If I pollute the stream that runs through our farm, it’s positive for Gross Domestic Product because it creates economic activity.  Labor, trucks, fuel, infrastructure all come to fix the pollution, but it all goes on the national balance sheet as positive income.  What’s the dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico worth? 

We build a juvenile detention facility to house delinquents and call it an asset.  It should be treated as an expense.  A society that does not or will not measure ills across the land is destined for collapse.  If we can’t separate good and bad, evil and righteous, asset and liability, we’re headed for a bankrupt future, spiritually, economically, and ecologically.  Wendell Berry articulates this beautifully when he writes about the cost of divorce.  In a happy homestead with one income, one car, a milk cow, garden and woodlot, the family requires little money. 

But with divorce, now you have two homes, two cars, everybody works in town, spending more on gasoline.  No time is left for gardening or milking the cow, canning or cooking supper.  More meals out, more tranquilizers to suppress anxiety.  He concludes that what is good for us creates less GDP than what is bad for us.  Such a lopsided accounting system makes thinking people want a parallel universe. 

My goal as a farmer is to leave more soil, more pure water, more breathable air, more happy people in my community, more health, more immune strength as a result of my pilgrimage.  In short, more of the commons. True wealth isn’t cash as much as it is decoupling from cash.  Being able to step free of systemic enslavement.  Defunding the Conquistadors.


10.  TYRANNY VERSUS LIBERTY. Government intervention in the marketplace puts everyone at risk.  Subsidies, now called crop insurance, identify only six commodities worthy of protection.  Why?  This skews the market, making the protected items cheaper than they otherwise would be and the unprotected ones more expensive than they otherwise would be.

No government agency has been more successful at annihilating its constituency than the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).  That President Abraham Lincoln, when instituting the USDA, thought government agents were necessary to make farmers successful is perhaps one of the most profound examples of elitist naivete.  We have fewer farmers, worse food, more sickness than we did in the the 1860s. 

The domestic larder no longer exists.  Replaced by the supermarket warehouse, Americans generally are completely dependent on a three-day supply of food in their urban supermarkets.  Neighborhood abattoirs and canneries are gone. Most households don’t even have freezers anymore.  Half of all American households can’t put their hands on $400 right now, so buying half a beef for the freezer is as undoable as walking on water. 

When someone like Amish farmer Amos Miller in Pennsylvania or a food buying club like Rawsome Foods in California tries to offer true choice to the system, government agents and swat teams show up to confiscate and eradicate integrity food.  It’s not all food police.  Some of it is zoning.  On our farm, we can’t legally make and sell a chair from our own trees milled into lumber on our own sawmill because such work is classified manufacturing, which is illegal in an agricultural zone.  The national Rogue Food Conference movement is an antidote to the madness.  These conferences promote circumvention rather than compliance.

I’m in favor of a Food Emancipation Proclamation guaranteeing to every American the right to purchase the food of their choice from the source of their choice.  If you want to come to my farm as a voluntary consenting adult, look around, smell around, ask around and then buy a pound of sausage from a backyard-processed pig or a pot pie from my kitchen, we should be able to transact that trade without a bureaucrat between us.  When the government gets between my spoon and my throat, I call that an invasion of privacy.  What good is the freedom to speak and assemble if we can’t choose our bodies’ fuel to give us the energy to go preach and pray?

In a day when freedom of choice rules the day, when we want the government out of our bedrooms and our womb, surely it’s time to get the government out of our stomachs so we can feed our microbiome the fuel it needs.  We’ve lived under an enslaved food and farming system ever since Lincoln gave us the USDA and it’s time to put the opt out choice on the table.  If I prefer backyard butchery, I should have the right to get it.  If I prefer raw milk, I should have the right to get it.  If I prefer Aunt Matilda’s chicken pot pie, I should have the right to buy it and she should be able to sell it to me if she wants to.

When Governor Tim Kaine, now one of our Virginia Senators, visited our farm toward the end of his tenure, I toured him around and he was totally smitten by what we were doing.  He asked me what he could do for me.  I told him his responsibility was the same as every other elected official:  to act as a hedge of protection for the minority view.  I don’t want chlorine on my chickens.  I don’t want to vaccinate my calves.  I don’t want to cram my pigs in a house.  I don’t want to use GMOs or anti-microbials.  People ask me routinely if I fear Monsanto, Bayer, Cargill, Tyson.  No because they have no power over me. 

The power is from the government regulatory and judicial enforcement agents who are not independent non-partisan objective people.  Subject to emotions, politics, and corporate protection agendas, these powers can terrorize marketplace competition, food choice, and alternative agriculture models.  These powers don’t like compost because it isn’t sterile.  They don’t like cheese that can mold.  They certainly don’t like raw milk.  They don’t want pigs to roam outside.  I told Governor Kaine that his job was to protect the minority view, to keep diversity and creativity alive in our social and agricultural landscape, and to offer Americans choice in their most intimate decision:  what to eat.

The parallel agriculture I advocate embraces a whosoever will mentality.  What can possibly be wrong with enjoying a vibrant minority along with a larger majority?  If we really are fringe, fine; what have the big boys to fear?  Oh, but what if we represent gunpowder in front of these castles?  What if what we have is really better than what they have?  In either case, protecting a parallel option preserves innovation.  The minority view, known as the lunatic fringe, has always provided the answers to society’s problems.  When we look through our plate at dinner, what do we see?  Imagine the farms on the other side, the foodscape on the other side, the nutritional commitment on the other side.  Dear folks, we need to make our menus agree with what we know and believe in our minds.

What I propose here is a long term solution, an abundant solution, a people-affirming solution.  God help us to love it, do it, embrace it.

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  'Orthodox' Archbishop Broglio elected USCCB President
Posted by: Stone - 11-16-2022, 07:13 AM - Forum: General Commentary - No Replies

Archbishop Broglio elected USCCB president
Broglio has a generally orthodox record and has supported religious freedom and conscience exemptions to COVID jab mandates.

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Archbishop Timothy Broglio


Tue Nov 15, 2022
BALTIMORE (LifeSiteNews) – Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, was elected Tuesday to serve as the next president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

The U.S. bishops elected Archbishop Broglio, the current secretary of the USCCB, to a three-year term as president by a vote of 138-99.

Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, chairman of the bishops’ committee on pro-life activities, was elected vice president in a 143-96 vote, winning in a run-off against Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, a noted conservative.

Archbishop Broglio was considered a frontrunner in the presidential race, as he was the runner-up in the USCCB’s 2019 vice-presidential election. The bishops typically pick the conference’s vice president to succeed as president, but outgoing USCCB vice president Archbishop Allen Vigernon of Detroit was ineligible due to age.

Archbishop Broglio, 70, has led the Archdiocese for the Military Services since 2008 and previously served as apostolic nuncio to the Dominican Republic and apostolic delegate to Puerto Rico, according to Catholic News Agency. From 1990 to 2001, he worked as personal secretary to late Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who faced allegations of covering up sex abuse committed by ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and Legionaries of Christ founder Fr. Marcial Maciel.

Broglio has a generally orthodox record. He implemented guidelines in 2013 that prohibit military chaplains from taking part in ceremonies for homosexual partners and reiterated that anyone known to be in homosexual sin may not serve in lay ministries. He also backed former President Donald Trump’s ban on gender-confused troops, condemned allowing open homosexuals to serve in the military, and has recognized homosexuality as a root cause of the clerical sex abuse crisis.

In 2020, he released a “clarification“ stressing that Pope Francis’ remarks affirming same-sex civil unions did not constitute Church teaching.

The military archbishop was one a small number of prelates who opposed COVID-era restrictions on public Masses and strongly denounced COVID jab mandates last year after initially urging Catholic servicemen to get jabbed. In 2017, he did, however, support the Paris Climate Agreement, which subtly incorporates the United Nations’ pro-abortion agenda.

Dissident, left-wing Catholics immediately condemned the election of Archbishop Broglio as USSCB president. The National Catholic Reporter decried the move as a “clear message of rejection to Pope Francis,” noting that Broglio served as apostolic delegate to Puerto Rico when Pope Benedict XVI appointed conservative Puerto Rican Bishop Daniel Fernández Torres.

Pope Francis removed Bishop Daniel Fernández Torres from his diocese earlier this year due to his support of conscience exemptions to vaccine mandates.

Tuesday’s USCCB elections are a defeat for the U.S. bishops’ progressive faction, as the rest of the episcopate voted down decidedly liberal candidates, including Archbishop Paul Etienne of Seattle and Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Síller of San Antonio.

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  Klaus Schwab calls for global ‘restructuring’ at annual international summit
Posted by: Stone - 11-16-2022, 07:04 AM - Forum: Great Reset - No Replies

Klaus Schwab calls for global ‘restructuring’ at annual international summit
'If you restructure an economy, the result is a reduction of income — of disposable income — which can lead to extensive social tensions, which we see in our world.'

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World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab giving an address at the 2022 B20 Summit in Indonesia
BeritaSatu / YouTube

Nov 15, 2022
BALI, Indonesia (LifeSiteNews) — Klaus Schwab kicked off this year’s B-20 meeting in Indonesia Monday by calling for a wholesale “restructuring” of the world’s economic, political, social, and ecological systems.

During his call for a global overhaul, Schwab – a German economist who serves as chairman of the World Economic Forum – said the restructuring will not only take “several years” to accomplish, but will likely include suffering for ordinary people.

“If you look at all the challenges, we can speak about a multi-crisis, an economic, political, social, ecological and institutional crisis. But actually, what we have to confront is a deep systemic — and structural — restructuring of our world. And this will take some time. And the world will look differently after we have gone through this transition process,” he said.


The B-20 is a gathering of business movers and shakers that acts as the official sister organization of the G-20. The G-20 is an international consortium of the world’s largest economies. This year’s B-20 conference features remarks from Schwab but also Twitter owner Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and other global players, some of whom attended virtually. 

Echoing themes from other speeches he’s given about the so-called fourth industrial revolution, Schwab told business leaders that they have arrived at “the inflection point” and that there needs to be a particular focus on technology, energy, the re-reshaping of supply chains, and holding accountable those who pollute the environment. 

“If you restructure a company, you write off the costs and, of course, the shareholders are suffering,” Schwab said during his keynote address, Harnessing the Power of Innovation for Future Economic Growth. “If you restructure an economy, the result is a reduction of income — of disposable income — which can lead to extensive social tensions, which we see in our world.”

Schwab also asserted that there exists a great need for private enterprise and public governments to work more closely together, and that the world needs to move toward a “multi-polar” political landscape that ensures businesses adhere to “stakeholder capitalism.”

“Governments and businesses have to cooperate in order to become a fast fish because in our world today it’s not anymore so much the big fish who eats the small fish, but it is the fast fish who eats the slow fish. And in order to be a fast fish … you have to have two co-pilots: business and governments.”

Schwab touched on transhumanist themes as well, heralding the internet and “the metaverse” as positive advances that have altered mankind.

“Technology will change completely what we are doing at this present time, and not only what we are doing, it will have an impact even on who we are. Just look at how even the internet has changed to a certain extent our identities over the last 20 years,” he said.

“Technological innovation doesn’t deal with one or two innovations,” he also remarked. “It’s a whole panoply of technologies which interact, and which will compete and change how we produce, how we consumer, how we communicate.”

Schwab has long been the target of criticism for meddling in international affairs and pushing for a new world order. During COVID-19, Schwab, 84, was a leading voice for vaccine mandates and lockdowns. He has groomed a large number of influential politicians, including Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, through his Young Global Leaders Program. And as chairman and founder of the World Economic Forum — the group behind the “Great Reset” agenda — he is able to exert an enormous amount of pressure on international bodies and nation states.

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  Conciliar SSPX New Altar Tables
Posted by: Ruthy - 11-15-2022, 04:06 PM - Forum: The New-Conciliar SSPX - Replies (12)

The pictures below are from a newly built, conciliar SSPX church in Richfield, OH - St. Peregrine. - link

They are using a table for an altar. And the crucifix above the table is not a crucifix.

This must be the new norm for the conciliar SSPX, when building a new church, because they are using a table for an altar in the new church being built in St. Marys. Their excuse for the use of the table is the same one that they used to usher in the new mass... It was the norm until about the 8th century.

You can watch an explanation in this video https://youtu.be/GvdG8Nebj70 - Starts about 3:00 minute mark.

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From the book:

The Catholic Sanctuary
and the Second Vatican Council

by Michael Davies -



How tragic it is that the objectives of what Pope Pius XII condemned as a "wicked movement" are now being imposed upon us as the norm for Catholic worship. See that your flocks are not deceived, he warned, "by a mania for restoring primitive usages in the liturgy."
 

It was under the guise of a return to the primitive that the Protestant Reformers were able to destroy the Mass. Today, in the service of false ecumenism, the Catholic ethos of our churches is being replaced by a Protestant ethos, precisely under the guise of a return to earlier practices. No good fruits have come from this ecumenical surrender. In no country in the western world have the changes been followed by an increase in fervor and piety among the faithful[size=undefined]-----[/size]only by a massive falling away from the Faith. [Cf. Michael Davies, Liturgical Shipwreck: 20 Years of the New Mass (TAN, 1995), Part 8.]

St. Richard Gwyn, a Welsh teacher and father of six children who was executed in 1584 for recusancy [refusal to attend Protestant services], looked upon the desecrated sanctuaries of Wales and remarked with sadness: "Yn lle allol; trestyl trist"[size=undefined]-----"In place of an altar, there is a miserable table." God grant that the "miserable tables" that have replaced the traditional altars of sacrifice throughout the Catholic world will one day themselves be removed and replaced by traditional altars of sacrifice.[/size]

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  Here Come "Programmable Dollars": New York Fed And 12 Banking Giants Launch Digital Dollar Test
Posted by: Stone - 11-15-2022, 02:17 PM - Forum: Great Reset - No Replies

Here Come "Programmable Dollars": New York Fed And 12 Banking Giants Launch Digital Dollar Test


ZH |NOV 15, 2022


Never let a crisis go to waste. Or a market crash for that matter.

With equity and bond markets stuck in brutal bear markets and providing a sufficient distraction to what is happening behind the scenes, the Fed and a group of banks have been quietly preparing for the next stage in the "organized crash" pipeline: the rollout of CBSC.

According to a statement by the New York Fed, global banking giants are starting a 12-week digital dollar pilot with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the participants announced on Tuesday.

Citigroup, HSBC Holdings, Mastercard and Wells Fargo are among the financial companies participating in the experiment alongside the New York Fed, which will provide a "public contribution to the body of knowledge on the application of new technology to the regulated financial system."

Bank of New York Mellon, the money-laundering bank of the world, HSBC Holdings, PNC Financial Services, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Truist Financial and U.S. Bancorp are also participating in the test, along with payments network Mastercard.

The project, which is called the "regulated liability network", will allow banks to simulate issuing digital money representing their customers’ own funds before settling through central bank reserves on a distributed ledger, the New York Fed said.

The pilot will test how banks using digital dollar tokens in a common database can help speed up payments.

“Programmable US dollars may be necessary to support new business models and provide a foundation to much-needed innovations in financial settlements and infrastructure,” Tony McLaughlin, managing director for emerging payments and business development at Citigroup’s treasury and trade solutions division, said in a statement Tuesday. “Projects like this, that focus on the digitization of central bank money and individual bank deposits, could be expanded to take a broader view of the opportunity.

Earlier this month, Michelle Neal, head of the New York Fed's market's group, said it sees promise in using a central bank digital dollar (CBDC) to speed up settlement time in currency markets.

For years, Wall Street’s biggest banks have explored the use of blockchain in their businesses for everything from interbank payments to mortgages and cross-border trades. Still, this week’s move comes amid a rout in cryptocurrency markets following the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s digital-asset empire last week.

In addition to weighing central bank digital currencies and compliant stablecoins, “there should be the option of leveraging the scale and economic value of bank deposits,” Raj Dhamodharan, Mastercard’s head of crypto and blockchain, said in the statement. The regulated liability network “is an innovative proof of concept led by the industry that could help shape how consumers and businesses view the credibility of token-based payments.”

The new network is meant to follow existing laws and regulations for deposit-based payments processing, including anti-money-laundering requirements. After the 12-week test, the banks will publicize the results, they said in a statement, though lenders “are not committed to any future phases of work” once the test is complete.

While the initial work will focus on simulating digital money issued by regulated institutions in US dollars, the concept could be extended to multicurrency operations and stablecoins, which are typically backed one-to-one by another asset such as the dollar or euro.

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  Perhaps another N.O. bishop waking up?: “Deconsecrated Temples and the Religion of Man”
Posted by: Stone - 11-15-2022, 07:36 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism - No Replies

“Deconsecrated Temples and the Religion of Man” — Archbishop Hector Aguer

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RorateCaeliblog [slightly adapted - emphasis in the original] | November 12, 2022


In recent times, we have witnessed, here and there, the use of cathedrals and other sacred buildings for conferences and other events for politicians, social leaders and members of other groups of different orientations. In this way, for example, recognition is sought for the ten years since the pontifical election. And the Pope himself endorses them with words such as: "It comforts my soul that my person has made possible this moment of communion, of encounter beyond differences." In these meetings, the Holy Father's teachings in the encyclicals Laudato Si and Fratelli Tutti are invited to be taken up.

Beyond this allusion, it is known that there are many in Argentina, as in the rest of the world, who do not agree with the ideological position of the Pope, specifically with his ecological globalism that has become the official position of the Roman Church. The message of the two documents cited has little to do with the essential mission of the Church and the substance of the faith; in this sense it is clearly different from the homogeneous tradition of the Social Doctrine opened in 1891 by Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum novarum.

It has been remarked, for example, that "even if we have different political or religious visions, we cannot ignore that Francis's social message challenges us all, invites us to ask ourselves questions, summons us not to forget the enormous dignity of every human person." This description of papal thought makes evident the distance that separates it from the Lord's command to the apostles -- valid for the Church of all times -- to make Christians of all peoples (pánta tà éthnē).

This is the main problem, revealed in the painful crack opened in the Church by the official departure from the great and unanimous Tradition. On the other side of the crack, on the shore of homogeneous continuity with the right doctrine -- always the same and always renewed -- are those who are despised as "indietrists" or "backwardists."

In a previous intervention I explained the meaning of this position [of fidelity to tradition, which stands] contrary to the official progressivism that proposes the nebulous gnosis of a "way out," of a march "forward," heterogeneous with respect to the roots that have sustained the Church in difficult times, of express or immanent schisms, and of the heresies that could have wounded her. To move forward, in authentic progress, it is necessary to look back (indietro, as they say in Italian), that is, to sink the roots of thought and the loving adherence of the will in the ecclesial Tradition, which is not a museum piece, but the ever-fertile soil in which the life of Catholicism flourishes.


The encyclicals Laudato si and Fratelli tutti are novel texts that are assimilated to the globalist movement, to the gnosis present in the "new paradigms," foreign to a timely and homogeneous continuation of Tradition. In the 5th century, St. Vincent de Lerins pointed it out in his Commonitory as a matter of identity: in the same dogma, the same sense, the same affirmation.

Let us return to the acts that take place in different sacred buildings. They are political meetings, convocations to bring about a unity of diverse opposing forces; that is what the mission of the Church has ended up in, according to what the Argentine Episcopal Conference, for example, has assumed as its main aspect. Christ remains, in reality, on the margin; he does not count because, obviously, he divides: one is either with Him or against Him. Freemasonry is surprised by this new competition that has come its way, but remains, after all, grateful.

Why are churches specifically chosen for such days? There are spaces as wide or wider than churches, in the civic and social realm. It would be authentically pastoral, for example, to occupy a historical place, the usual scene of all kinds of significant events for cities and towns and their institutions.

Why, then, are churches chosen to become conference halls? Let's say it brutally: to desacralize them. I cannot affirm that this was an express will; for such an express will is not necessary in order to desacralize. These facts are inscribed rather in a habitual purpose, in different dioceses, that in liturgical matters we should do the opposite of what was practiced in other times (and with optimal results). The validity of sacrality was coherent with the grandeur, beauty, and sublimity of the building of worship.

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Why, then, are cathedrals and other temples the settings for these convocations? The Kirchnerist political narrative and the Bergoglian ecclesiastical narrative have coincided in a new secular religion. The lecturers are the officiants of the new cult; the parishioners are the irreconcilable politicians, miraculously reconciled for a short while. I apologize for the ironic comment I have just made; however, I am convinced that it expresses the profound meaning of what happened in these churches.

It is enough to reread the Pauline Letters to see that according to the great Apostle and the Church that was contemporary to him, unity and peace in the world depend on conversion to Christ. In some way, with the art of pastoral discourse, it is necessary to present to political leaders, as to society as a whole, the need to be converted to the Gospel. It does not respond to the Church's mission, according to the Lord's command, to avoid the very core of preaching -- much less, to accommodate the Gospel to the taste and tolerance of politicians or society.

Let us take as an example Paul's attitude in the Areopagus of Athens before Stoic and Epicurean philosophers. The altar dedicated to the unknown God (Agnóstō Theō) inspired in him a lesson in theodicy: he uncovered to the listeners the meaning of that title and introduced them to that God whom they worshipped without knowing him, in whom "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). But the purpose of his discourse was to announce the Risen Christ, Redeemer and Judge of men. Some of the listeners scoffed, but others gave a positive response: "We will hear you speak about it again" (Akousómetha sou perì toutou kaì pálin, Acts 17:32). Those people were restless and eager to hear news, Luke, author of the Book that is the second volume of his Gospel, points out.

The meaning that one wants to give to acts of this type leads whoever wishes to interpret it, for example, to the basic problem of Argentinean Catholicism. Is ours a Catholic country? Father Leonardo Castellani answered in the affirmative, but he added that it was with a "mistongo" [miserable, low-quality] Catholicism. This reality, present to some extent since its origins, has historically upset the heads of the Church. At present, and I believe that without much effort of interpretation, the dislocation of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, whose discourse is usually quite alien to the cultural and social reality of the country, is noticeable. There is, yes, an awareness of the division, of the aggressiveness of the political factions, and the somewhat illusory concern to overcome them.

The same illusion is reflected by the Pontiff in his various messages. In the panorama of the not very serious Catholicism (that means the qualification of "mistongo", according to Castellani), a good number of serious Catholics stand out -- they would be recognized as "backwardists" in Rome -- people convinced that the political malaise and other penalties that afflict us cannot be overcome without the conversion of the majority of the society. The solution would be for the majority of "mistongos" Catholics to become true Catholics.

These "backwardists" are not few in number. On October 8, no less than 1,000 men, on their knees in Plaza de Mayo, prayed to the Blessed Virgin with the recitation of the Rosary, asking for the conversion of the nation. Just a small example. This was the second time that this meeting of men was held in this place, in front of the seat of the national government. The fact that men are the ones summoned is significant in light of the gender perspective, but it is also an invitation to remember that in October 1934, within the framework of the International Eucharistic Congress, presided over by the then Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli as Pius XI's legate, a massive and unusual Communion of men took place. It was a historic milestone in a country where the baptized do not go to Mass; they did not go in 1934, and even fewer go now, especially men.

The reference made above to the Pauline discourse in the Areopagus of Athens can serve as an incitement, an inspiration, to elaborate the discourse that has to be addressed to the crowd of Stoics and Epicureans in today's Argentina. The Apostle based himself on the Unknown God. We can start from the God who is the source of all Reason and Justice, invoked by the authors of the National Constitution. The specifically Christian moment of the speech appears in the mention of the famous article 2, which invariably survived all the reforms: it is a historical fact that has not been reversed. The State "sustains" the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Worship.

Lost as it is, Argentina preserves, albeit faintly, that historical memory: a dimension that cannot be erased. It should not be forgotten or shamefully hidden. Juan Bautista Alberti, the author of the Bases that have served as support to the Constitution, maintained that the State cannot "sustain" a cult that is not its own; that is to say, ours is, in spite of all regrets, a Catholic country. With these data that I have recalled, one may elaborate a theodicy to be proposed in the confused Areopagus of today's Argentina.

+ Héctor Aguer
Archbishop Emeritus of La Plata
November 12, 2022

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