#covidian

[tron]

Like clockwork, when orange man bad is about to be elected, a super duper dangerous disease sweeps through the planet to ensure mail in voting in the us.

[interretialia]

Aetas Covidiana

The Covidian Epoch

[youllnevershutdowntherealnapster]

That’s gonna be a no from me, dawg.

[reynita9]

I can’t believe that they’re out here trying to say eggs cause blood clots now. I have to laugh my ass off sometimes these fuckin people.

[frangipani-wanderlust]

Millions of dollars of propaganda, two years of my life stolen, and him stealing relationships from me, and I never gave in.

What now, bitch?

[kramlabs]

[reynita9]

I can’t stop thinking about how Cocomelon is damaging babies because the fast pace scene changes can “interfere with the development of executive functions”, and how thin parents are spread in capitalism that they rely on television to entertain/keep their babies company just so they have some time to complete domestic tasks. I am thinking about disintegrated Community Care/structure. I am thinking about how Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, Tumblr, all media are engineered to be addictive and alter the executive functioning of kids, tweens, teens, and adults of all ages. How malleable our minds are..bread and circuses. Everything we consume has the power to heal or destroy us. I think about Congress Bill 686, and feel discouraged and powerless. You may have heard of it as “The TikTok Ban” of course, the media intentionally oversimplifies it as a ban on TikTok, but really it is the means for The State to restrict the sharing of information on the internet and to censor us, keep us misinformed and suppressed. The State knows that knowledge is power so they keep us intentionally in the dark and distracted, plucking away human rights one by one while we are watching the stage. The Restrict Act would require the Department of Commerce to “identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, and mitigate transactions involving ICT products and services” 🤳🏼👁️ (ICT means Information and Communications Technology, ICT Products and services refers to social media) When COVID first hit, my friend said “this will be like 9/11, there was the world pre 9/11 and post 9/11” I am not one to believe we are “post-covid” because we are still in the grips of the Covidian information wars, which I feel will be one of the main long term take aways from The-Covid-Years. Bill 686 harms all, because any group of 1 million people organizing or sharing information online can be persecuted, banned and shut down under the guise of “prohibiting certain transactions between persons of the United States and foreign adversaries” Congress Bill 686 establishes both civil and criminal penalties for violations of the bill, meaning anything that they consider an “unacceptable risk to national security.” Please don’t forget we live in a police state which is meant to protect the empire. In The United States privacy is not sacrosanct, and actually American big brother corporations like Meta and Google are investing millions into anti-TikTok propaganda, because it clears their competition and allows them back into the palms of citizens, so they can personally be the ones to steal our time and data. It makes me angry, it’s painful. How can we organize against the faceless enemy? It’s all subversion and censorship, anything to get the undiluted power to be placed back into the hands of an American corporation. It will always be The State, Corporations, and Colleges keeping information tucked away and inaccessible to the masses. We must do what we can to preserve the internet as a place of free information sharing and connection. The infrastructure of our communities in real life are generally weak. Weekly I hit a paywall online, and I have seen my own words be instantaneously given an AI generated COVID misinformation banner before. It’s insane, and most people are not comfortable admitting out loud that we are alive during fascism. What’s funny in a way is, I have long hated TikTok, but now that it risks being banned in this “land of the free” I find myself urgently realizing how important it is to preserve and protect.. It is on the individual to use the internet wisely and with boundaries, not the state to restrict people’s access to information. Privacy is important and data-preservation is important, obviously, but if this is what 686 was truly about, we would be having different conversations. All legislation is created to build a precedent.

[frangipani-wanderlust]

I kept saying people needed to not comply with any COVID mandates, but everyone was smarter than me, I guess.

[darkmaga-returns]

FEMA Still Paying $9,000 For COVID Funerals, Billions On Pandemic Payouts

by Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey | Oct 16, 2024

As the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) carries out widely-criticized responses to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, officials say the agency’s Disaster Recovery Fund is incapable of handling a third major storm.

While some are circulating false accusations that disaster funds have been diverted to immigrants or poured into the proxy war in Ukraine, a review of the agency’s 2024 outlays reveals a different, ongoing drain on FEMA’s coffers: Long after the end of the declared COVID-19 emergency, FEMA is still pumping out billions of dollars to pay for pandemic expenses— icluding, believe it or not, up to $9,000 each for funerals.

As previously detailed at Stark Realities, governments’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic was disastrous on many fronts. While the Pandora’s box of collateral damage included widespread harm to the physical and mental health of individuals, it also dealt a blow to the nation’s fiscal well-being, as the federal government recklessly showered trillions of dollars it didn’t have on people, businesses and state and local governments—with much of that money intended to offset the effects of government’s own tyrannical and counterproductive policies.

While all but the most diehard Branch Covidians have moved on from that dark chapter, the federal government has a distinct version of “long COVID.” Though it’s not clear where all the money is going, FEMA is paying up to $9,000 each to reimburse funeral expenses for those who die from COVID.

That’s an especially odd example of government picking winners and losers. As Stanford University School of Medicine professor and prominent COVID-regime critic Jay Bhattacharya said in a social media post that drew my attention to this giveaway program and its hyper-longevity, “There are apparently more and less worthy ways to die in the U.S.”

Indeed: Why is the family of someone who dies from COVID more deserving of a government-paid funeral than the family of someone who dies from cancer, cardiac arrest or a car accident? It bears emphasis that this question was every bit as relevant in 2020 as it is today.

The favoring of one cause of death over another isn’t the only winners-and-losers dimension of the funeral program: There’s no reimbursement for those who’d planned ahead via pre-paid funerals. Echoing the grievances of people who saved up to pay for college only to see their neighbor’s student loans forgiven by vote-buying politicians, some families say they feel like they’re being punished for having planned for the future.

[aressida]

Old entry: "The Covidian Cult." - Aressida. 1.10.21.

From my understanding that the world should not be fooled by the world’s population as they believed that the vaccinated people outnumbers the unvaxxed. It is not.

How many people do you know personally, friends and family, neighbors and coworkers, who have been injured by or who have died, unfortunately, from taking the vaccine jabs?

Follow the science? No seriously… Follow the DATA. Sighs, this is why they cannot question the cult of science. The science is NOT settled, dumbass. The cognitive dissonance is past delusional at this point. Explains that the public’s failure to understand biology. For months all I see is the continuation of ever forming hypotheses based on a theory that many simply do not understand. This is why this mess continues.

Sick of the people who still wears masks and getting the shots which are fucking deadly, because our Government and the Mainstream Media told us to fear something that’s 99.9% survivable with a full recovery. The hell? How is that making sense to you?

What the hell is wrong with these people getting injected and still wears masks that are proven not to work. The jokes just write themselves. This shit has to stop y’all. Stop getting injected…

I have a feeling that the unvaxxed people may be experiencing starvation, as they are in the works for the year 2022 to 2023 at most. Get ready y’all.

It was never about the virus, but to enact martial law and keep on with the implementation, the 1984 socialism bullshit. They are trying to push us, but there are more of us. They are just recycling old pandemics. There will be endless crisis to justify any endless Authoritarianism. That to be part of the plan of the Globalists to destroy the world.

You know, the more They keep on censoring the more people will resist and the more people that will see the tyranny. Done deal.

Vaccines are poison. That’s all I have to say.

[ireton]

Mistakes Were NOT Made  An Anthem for Justice (by Margaret Anna Alice; Read by Dr. Tess Lawrie)

The Armenian Genocide was not a mistake. Holodomor was not a mistake. The Final Solution was not a mistake. The Great Leap Forward was not a mistake. The Killing Fields were not a mistake.

Name your genocide—it was not a mistake. That includes the Great Democide of the 2020s. To imply otherwise is to give Them the out they are seeking.

It was not botched. It was not bungled. It was not a blunder.

It was not incompetence. It was not lack of knowledge. It was not spontaneous mass hysteria.

The planning occurred in plain sight. The planning is still occurring in plain sight.

The philanthropaths bought The $cience™. The modelers projected the lies. The testers concocted the crisis. The NGOs leased the academics. The $cientists fabricated the findings. The mouthpieces spewed the talking points.

The organizations declared the emergency. The governments erected the walls. The departments rewrote the rules. The governors quashed the rights. The politicians passed the laws. The bankers installed the control grid.

The stooges laundered the money. The DoD placed the orders. The corporations fulfilled the contracts. The regulators approved the solution. The laws shielded the contractors. The agencies ignored the signals.

The behemoths consolidated the media. The psychologists crafted the messaging. The propagandists chanted the slogans. The fact-chokers smeared the dissidents. The censors silenced the questioners. The jackboots stomped the dissenters.

The tyrants summoned. The puppeteers jerked. The puppets danced. The colluders implemented. The doctors ordered. The hospitals administered.

The menticiders scripted. The bamboozled bleated. The totalitarianized bullied. The Covidians tattled. The parents surrendered. The good citizens believed … and forgot.

This was calculated. This was formulated. This was focus-grouped. This was articulated. This was manufactured. This was falsified. This was coerced. This was inflicted. This was denied.

We were terrorized. We were isolated. We were gaslit.

We were dehumanized. We were wounded. We were killed.

Don’t let Them get away with it

[nathanielaaron]

German Media Realise Their Health Minister is an International Laughingstock

The Covid Inquiry is Insulting the Victims of Lockdown

Boris Johnson is Still in Denial About Lockdowns

Bristol University Axes the National Anthem from Graduation Ceremonies Amid Students’ Claims it is “Old-Fashioned” and “Offensive to Some”

Labour Parliamentarians Back Kemi Badenoch on Stopping Children Changing Gender at School

U.K. Government’s Veto of Scotland’s Gender Reforms Ruled Lawful by Top Court

News Round-Up

German Media Realise Their Health Minister is an International Laughingstock

By Eugyppius

I know that some of you are impatient with my posts about German politics, and particularly my repeated pieces on our retarded Health Minister. I get that this can seem like inside baseball, and that all of you suffer under the very similar idiocies of your own Covid politicians. But, I just can’t help myself. Lauterbach is a special case, a truly monumental idiot who in his boundless incompetence and stupidity vastly exceeds his peers. It is my aim to make him the international symbol of pandemic derangement. I want pictures of this human incarnation of everything that is wrong with masking children and force-vaccinating millions printed next to future dictionary entries on Covidianism. We have seen the enemy, and it is this sad, stupid, Smeagol-looking loser, who thinks Eric Feigl-Ding is an authority and that clip-on bowties are fashionable.

You must understand that Lauterbach is not only the dumbest federal politician Germany has ever had. He also ranks among the least competent, most bafflingly idiotic people ever to have attained prominence of any kind. He is a drunken tweeter who as Cabinet Minister once declared war on Russia. He is a dim salt-phobic eccentric whose own ex-wife declared him unfit for the responsibilities of a Cabinet position. He is a tireless advocate of mask mandates who in May 2021 was photographed totally maskless on a train to Hamburg.

He has written one of the saddest, most derivative and pointless Ph.D. dissertations I have ever read. He poses as an epidemiologist while routinely misinterpreting even the simplest scientific studies. His most memorable science fail was a tweet citing a “new American Mega [sic!] Study” showing that mask efficacy is “very great and uncontested”. His link led to a bizarre pre-print that was so bad, some concluded it had to be a hoax. When a serology study emerged showing that 95% of Germans had Covid antibodies, he denied the results meant the pandemic was over, inadvertently questioning the entire premise of mass vaccination. He spent much of early 2022 demanding that ever more people get fourth doses and even said he himself was quadruple vaccinated. Three months later he announced he had tested positive for Covid, declared his symptoms to be substantial, and then violated Berlin quarantine rules to attend a press conference, where he was stupid enough to flash his digital vaccine pass to the cameras. The QR code revealed that he had only ever received three jabs. His Ministry insisted he’d merely failed to register his second booster with the CoronaWarn app, but the next year he doubled down on his stupidity, allowing the press to photograph his physical vaccine records, showing only three doses were registered there as well.

At one point he proposed to exempt the recently vaccinated from indoor mask rules, saying that he hoped this would encourage further vaccine uptake. After polls showed that disturbingly large numbers of Germans were willing to accept quarterly vaccination for the privilege of mask exemptions, he said he’d withdraw the incentive if too many people took advantage of it. This summer, with the political relevance of Covid fading, he opened a new front against summer weather, announcing an initiative to call old people and remind them to drink water whenever temperatures get too high.

There has been such an unrelenting tidal wave of Lauterbachian moronicity that it has proven impossible to keep track of it all. He is an endless source of comedic content, a political lolcow who stumbles from embarrassing gaffe to embarrassing gaffe without ever seeming to notice. Last year, he appeared on national television and ranted bizarrely about the Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis and the Great Barrington Declaration. He seemed to be drunk, or perhaps under the influence of some medication, as he mashed his words about “certain scientists who are shared exponentially on social media”:

So there is exponential growth in viruses, and there is also an exponential growth in false information. You only need a few scientists for this… In the case of Corona, for example, there was a scientists who used to do very good work but has now drifted off course. A Stanford scientist, Ioannidis, made a declaration, the Great Barrington Declaration, which basically said that the virus is not that dangerous, that it’s not killing people, that flu can be more dangerous and so on, a lot of things that just aren’t right. And this has been quoted incredibly often by these people, who are out there, and there are just far too many of them, who would like to hear the relieving message, “it’s not really that bad, we don’t have to do anything”.

The rant escaped notice at the time, but was recently unearthed by my Twitter friend @tomdabassman, who uploaded the clip with English subtitles. He tagged Stanford medical professor and Great Barrington Declaration co-author Jay Bhattacharya, who could hardly believe his eyes. Almost everything in Lauterbach’s rant was wrong, and he said so in a tweet that has now been viewed almost a million times:

Now, for better or worse, Germany looks up to America and prizes American academic culture. When a Stanford professor criticises the German Health Minister, the German press take notice.

First was a modest article in the Berlinzer Zeitung – ‘Harsh criticism from abroad: “Lauterbach seems not have any inkling”‘

Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya doesn’t see [Lauterbach’s statements] as a laughing matter. He wrote on Monday that he’s sorry the Germans had such an unqualified health minister during the Covid pandemic.

He countered Lauterbach’s statements with four points: firstly, Professor John Ioannidis is far from being an outmoded scholar and is one of the most frequently published and cited scientists on the subject of Covid. Secondly, he neither wrote nor signed the Great Barrington Declaration. Thirdly, even this declaration did not declare the virus to be harmless …. Fourthly, Bhattacharya says that “Lauterbach seems to have no idea of the damage his lockdown policy has done to the poor, children and the working class. Germany has worse Covid results than neighboring Sweden”.

The original tweet with the Lauterbach video has already been viewed 500,000 times; the tweeting Health Minister has not yet responded publicly to the Stanford professor’s message.

Then came Bild, the largest-circulation newspaper in Germany, with the headline ‘Stanford Professor has harsh criticism for Lauterbach‘:

In his Covid policy, Karl Lauterbach repeatedly talks about science, arguing with studies and articles. But, of all people, a renowned Covid scientist is now sharply criticising the German Health Minister!

Stanford Professor Jayanta Bhattacharya (50), an expert in health economics, has accused Lauterbach on X of being “incredibly misinformed about Covid science”.

The reason for the outrage: an RBB interview with Lauterbach from March 12th 2022.

In an interview excerpt shared by Bhattacharya, Lauterbach complained about an “exponential growth not only in viruses, but also in false reports. … In the case of Corona, for example, there was a scientists who used to do very good work but has now drifted off course: a Stanford scientist, Ioannidis,” Lauterbach says. He is referring to John Ioannidis (58), Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford University.

Statements that Bhattacharya won’t let stand!

“Professor John Ioannidis is not ‘worn out’ and is one of the most published/cited scientists on Covid,” he says… Furthermore, Ioannidis neither wrote nor signed the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’. And the Stanford professor clarifies in his counterattack on Lauterbach that the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’ never claimed that the virus was “not dangerous.” … “Lauterbach seems to not have any inkling of the damage his lockdown policies did to the poor, to children, and to the working class,” says Bhattacharya. AND: The Stanford professor even calls Lauterbach “unqualified”.

Major blogs and online magazines like Reitschuster and Tichys Einblick have picked up the story, with headlines about how badly informed Bhattacharya finds Lauterbach to be. News.de calls Bhattacharya’s “public reprimand” a “bitter slap in the face” for the Health Minister; Der Westen says much the same, as does the television broadcaster ProSieben.

We desperately need more of this. I call upon Jay Bhattacharya to continue his attacks on the German Health Minister. He is a moronic pseudointellectual fraud and a menace, and the German people need to hear this from Stanford professors like him. Perhaps the other authors of the Great Barrington Declaration could add their voices too. Surely John Ioannidis would also like to weigh in.

This piece originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.

COMMENTS

The Covid Inquiry is Insulting the Victims of Lockdown

By Will Jones

What gives the relatives of Covid victims the sole right to the moral high ground, asks Allison Pearson in the Telegraph. Lockdowns were devastating, and their victims were often far younger than those of Covid. Yet the Covid Inquiry puts the spotlight on the former while largely ignoring the latter. Here’s an excerpt.

I really must stop watching the Covid Inquiry, it’s bad for the blood pressure. Even the element of drama is lacking because we all know how this story ends: Lady Hallett, shaggy blonde bob shaking sorrowfully, will find that chaotic, ‘shopping-trolley’ Boris locked down too late (even though notably un-chaotic Germany only locked down two days earlier than us). Bad Boris also raised commonsense objections to lockdown and refused to keep the population masked and social distancing in perpetuity, as recommended by Susan ‘Stalin’s Nanny’ Michie of the SAGE scientific advisory group. 

Given the choice between Boris’s hale-fellow magnanimity and Michie’s joyless authoritarianism, I know which I would choose, but that is very much not the preference of this appalling establishment sham. 

Relatives of those who died from Covid are allowed to be present (holding up laminated photos of the deceased) which gives proceedings the feel of a tribunal in Revolutionary France hellbent on personal revenge rather than what they should be; a rational and honest assessment of whether shutting down the country was justified. 

After the former Prime Minister apologised on Wednesday – “I understand the feelings of these victims and their families, and I am deeply sorry for the pain and the loss and the suffering,” said Boris – four protesters stood up, holding signs which said: “The dead can’t hear your apologies.” 

What gives those people the right to sole occupancy of the moral high ground? Of course their losses are terribly sad, but the median age of death from Covid (about 83 years) was not that different to the normal life expectancy for men and women before the pandemic. What about younger people killed or traumatised by lockdown? 

Where are the photos of the formerly happy girl who developed anorexia in 2020 and tragically took her own life (as recounted by the girl’s mother to a rightly upset Julia Hartley-Brewer on her Talk TV show)? How about the one million youngsters currently on a waiting list for mental-health services, a shocking queue that would stretch from London to Manchester? 

Any portraits perchance at the Inquiry of the bereaved at funerals who were not allowed to console each other, not even when they lived in the same house for goodness sake? Or the pregnant women who went through miscarriages alone because, apparently, having the father with them was too much of a Covid risk? 

How about the distraught, self-isolating spouses of confused and lonely care home residents who could not visit while staff trooped in gaily with their Tesco carrier bags? What about the grown men and women who still cry into their pillow at night fretting that their darling mum or dad died thinking they had abandoned them? 

Worth reading in full.

COMMENTS

Boris Johnson is Still in Denial About Lockdowns

By Will Jones

When he appeared at the Covid Inquiry this week, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson had a golden opportunity to get to the heart of the issue and denounce lockdown as unnecessary and harmful. But he blew it, says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in UnHerd. Here’s an excerpt.

As a vocal Covid dissident and lockdown opponent throughout the pandemic, watching the U.K. Covid Inquiry these past few weeks has been a depressing experience. One gets the sense that both the people leading the inquiry and the vast majority of those questioned — the architects of the U.K.’s disastrously failed Covid policy — have learnt nothing. 

At one point on Wednesday, Boris Johnson had a golden opportunity to get to the heart of the problem. The lead inquiry lawyer, Hugo Keith KC, asked the former Prime Minister whether the late March 2020 order to lock down the country was “absolutely necessary”. This was Johnson’s golden opportunity to confess the cardinal error of the U.K.’s pandemic strategy: that it imposed lockdown in the first place.

Instead, he averred that the U.K. had “no other tool” than lockdown available. Under questioning about his involvement in pandemic decision-making in January and February 2020, the ex-PM’s mea culpa centred on his regret that he had not “twigged” the seriousness of the Covid threat earlier.

One major problem with this reasoning is that by the time February 2020 rolled around, Covid was almost certainly more widespread than anyone realised because it had arrived earlier than anyone realised. In 2019, Chinese authorities delayed reporting the existence of the virus to the world. Studies of antibodies in stored blood and stored wastewater from across the globe — including Italy, the U.S., Brazil and elsewhere — found traces of Covid’s presence in autumn 2019, long before the world knew about it. Even a January 2020 lockdown would have been too late: our fate was sealed once the virus was abroad in the world.

“The inquiry has been marked by a studied lack of curiosity about the great control group of the pandemic: Sweden,” Dr. Bhattacharya continues. “But Sweden did better than nearly every other country on earth in protecting human life. It has among the world’s lowest cumulative age-adjusted all-cause excess deaths since the start of the pandemic. And it accomplished this feat without lockdown.”

Worth reading in full.

For the full story on early Covid spread, see here and here.

COMMENTS

Bristol University Axes the National Anthem from Graduation Ceremonies Amid Students’ Claims it is “Old-Fashioned” and “Offensive to Some”

By Will Jones

Bristol University has axed the National Anthem from its graduation ceremonies with some students claiming it is “old-fashioned” and “offensive to some”. The Mail has the story.

The anthem has not been played since last year’s ceremony with the university saying it regularly updates its graduation ceremonies. 

God Save The King will now only be played when a member of the Royal Family is present. 

Some students at the 147-year-old university have suggested the National Anthem was culled because it is “irrelevant”, “old-fashioned” or might even be “offensive to some”.

It comes just weeks after the university vowed to remove slave trader Edward Colston’s emblem from its logo, after his statue was toppled during a Black Lives Matter protest in the city in June 2020.

Layla Daynes, 21, told the Sun: “The monarchy isn’t really relevant to my generation, so it wouldn’t be missed.”

Free Speech Union director Toby Young asked: “Why are Britain’s most prestigious universities openly contemptuous of the country’s history and heritage?”

Worth reading in full.

If the point of multiculturalism – which many of the university bosses who make these decisions would swear by – is that we are supposed to be united as a nation despite sometimes massive differences in cultural outlook, how is axing the National Anthem – a prominent symbol of our nation as one people that transcends our differences – supposed to help with that? The suspicion must be that decisions like this are motivated primarily by hatred of country and its history than any honourable motive. Sidelining the National Anthem makes little sense even for the adherents of the multicultural creed – unless the point is just to do Britain down for its supposed ‘systemic racism’ and historic ‘colonialism’.

COMMENTS

Labour Parliamentarians Back Kemi Badenoch on Stopping Children Changing Gender at School

By Will Jones

Tony Blair’s former Education Secretary Estelle Morris, who now sits in the Lords as a Labour peer, has backed Kemi Badenoch on trans rights by saying children should not be encouraged to change gender. The Telegraph has more.

Estelle Morris said pupils should be taught in biology lessons that there are only two sexes.

Speaking in a debate in the House of Lords, she warned that if teachers allowed children to “socially transition”, by referring to them by a different pronoun or name, it could cause them “psychological damage”.

She added that parents should always be informed if a child was struggling with their gender identity.

The comments go much further than the official Labour position, which so far has simply called on the Government to publish advice to schools on gender issues.

A group representing lesbian members of the Labour Party backed Equalities Minister Mrs Badenoch after she warned of an “epidemic” of gay children being told they were transgender.

The Lesbian Labour Group said: “How come a Tory minister can be right and Labour is so wrong?”

The Government has still not published long-awaited guidance for schools on how to deal with children who say they want to change gender, such as whether they should be allowed to take part in sports with children from the opposite biological sex.

I shudder to think what a Starmer-led Government will allow in our schools – it’s been bad enough under the Tories, whose ‘war on woke’ has often felt like little more than empty words from an administration powerless against the Blob.

Worth reading in full.

COMMENTS

U.K. Government’s Veto of Scotland’s Gender Reforms Ruled Lawful by Top Court

By Will Jones

Scotland’s highest court has ruled the U.K. Government acted lawfully by vetoing Nicola Sturgeon’s self-ID gender laws in a humiliating defeat for First Minister Humza Yousaf. The Telegraph has more.

The 

[brunomajorofficial]

I wrote the chorus of this song amidst car alarms, sat on the side of the road opposite a steaming crumpled wreck of a car called Columbo. Columbo was my Ivory White 1981 Mercedes 380 SL, named after the scruffy police detective whose ever present raincoat was a similarly dirty beige hue. I bought him the day I landed in Los Angeles, after taking the first flight out of London when the travel bans were lifted. Columbo was to me a symbol of renewed freedom, post covidian reawakening, the rediscovery of autonomy and more importantly: finding my passion for music and life again. After a creatively barren lockdown, in the 6 months or so I spent driving Columbo around California I wrote nearly the entire album ~ it was the most prolific period of songwriting I’ve experienced. It’s almost worth losing your connection to the thing you love the most, for the feeling of finding it again. 🫶

[frangipani-wanderlust]

Needs the option for "no, I don't 'still' because I never started.'"

Would appreciate reblogs to reach a wider sample size!

[alphaman99]

Richard Ruggiero

If we are going to judge a way of looking at the world solely by its worst adherents, then we should also remember that the only self-declared atheist nations in history have been the communist dictatorships. Lenin said that atheism was fundamental to communism. Stalin and others outlawed and persecuted the Russian Orthodox Church. The Chinese communists have persecuted Christians and other faiths.

So is atheism responsible for the live organ harvesting of China? Is atheism responsible for the 100 million murders by communist regimes? Should we remember that atheist nations starved, beat, whipped, suffocated, tortured and executed millions of people?

I used to be a fairly militant atheist. I’m still an atheist and find it impossible to believe in a benign Creator in a flawed universe. But I’ve grown up enough to see how much good we lost when we abandoned Christianity, and how many vile things have flourished since.

People will believe in something, anything, rather than nothing. Nothing only offers despair. So in your Nothing Society along comes stronger, harder, meaner religions like Islam, many times worse than your jettisoned Christianity. In your Nothing Society along comes drug addiction and suicide, crime and decadence. In your Nothing Society along comes new religions, cults and irrational belief systems like the green eco-apocalypse cult or the woke leftist-progressive cult and the trans reject all biology and sense cult.

There is never really a choice so simple and morally obvious as a choice between religious fundamentalism on one hand and atheist rationalism on the other hand. There are Christian rationalists and there are atheist fundamentalists. There are people whose professed love of Reason or Science leads to the wildest of irrational, unscientific and illogical actions, as we saw with the Covidian Cult.

The Nothing Society was a terrible error that fundamentally ignores human nature. We must believe, and we will believe. Atheism itself becomes a belief system, or ushers in another. The old cliche is that there are no atheists in the trenches. But all the world and all its struggles and all it’s joy and disappointments are ‘the trenches’. We are in the mud, and staring at Death, all of us, no matter how comfortable we may be. And we know it.

We know it in our bones and blood and therefore must believe Something. - Daniel Jupp