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Cashless Society: Big Banks Prepare To Launch Digital Wallet To Compete With Apple Pay And PayPal |
Posted by: Stone - 01-24-2023, 07:58 AM - Forum: General Commentary
- No Replies
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Cashless Society: Big Banks Prepare To Launch Digital Wallet To Compete With Apple Pay And PayPal
![[Image: wallet_0.jpg?itok=LarqiaI3]](https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_mobile/public/inline-images/wallet_0.jpg?itok=LarqiaI3)
ZH | JAN 23, 2023
Major US banks, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and others, will push into the digital wallet space in the second half of this year to take on Apple Pay and PayPal.
Early Warning Services LLC (EWS), the bank-owned company that operates the money-transfer service Zelle, will be managing the new digital wallet, according to WSJ. The wallet has yet to be named but will be separate from Zelle and allow shoppers to pay at merchants' online checkouts with linked debit and credit cards.
EWS plans to offer the new digital wallet later this year and can handle up to 150 million debit and credit cards during the initial launch. Consumers in good standing with banks will be eligible for the new service.
The purpose of the digital wallet is to take on third-party wallet operators such as Apple and PayPal, according to people familiar with the matter. They said banks are concerned about losing businesses if a digital wallet is not released soon. Even though Goldman Sachs' consumer unit that manages the Apple Card is a money-losing business, there is a plan to launch a high-yield savings account and buy now, pay later program.
The move towards electronic and contactless payments has been gradual but could soon be thrown into hyperdrive if enough consumers adopt EWS' new wallet. It was during the Coronavirus pandemic when the government, Federal Reserve, and corporations urged people to avoid unnecessary physical transactions that increased the push toward a cashless society.
Recall the pivot toward a cashless society was clear as day. Perhaps the coin shortage during the pandemic was a test run. And anyone who dared mention a looming cashless society was deemed a 'conspiracy theorist.'
Just remember who is also shaping the world and influencing politicians and corporations away from a cash economy:
The dystopic view is that a cashless society could mean governments and corporations will have even more control over our wallets -- and that's frightening.
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St. Alphonsus Liguori: Daily Meditations for the Third Week after Epiphany |
Posted by: Stone - 01-23-2023, 08:48 AM - Forum: Christmas
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To secure a happy death the Saints abandoned all things. They left their country; they renounced the delights and the hopes the world held out to them and embraced a life of Poverty and Contempt. O ye sons of men, how long will you be dull of heart? Why do you love vanity and seek after lying?
I.
David calls the happiness of this life the dream of them that awake (Ps. lxxii. 20). In explaining these words, a certain author says: The goods of this world appear great, but they are nothing: like a dream that lasts but a little and afterwards vanishes, they are enjoyed but a short time. The thought that with death all ends, made St. Francis Borgia resolve to give himself entirely to God. The Saint was obliged to accompany the dead body of the Empress Isabella to Grenada. When the coffin was opened her appearance was so horrible and the smell so intolerable that all had to retire. St. Francis remained to contemplate in the dead body of his sovereign the vanity of the world; and looking at it he exclaimed: "Are you, then, my empress? Are you the queen before whom so many bent their knee in reverential awe? O Isabella, where is your majesty, your beauty gone?" "Thus, then," he said within himself, "end the greatness and the crowns of this world! I will henceforth serve a Master Who can never die!" From that moment he consecrated himself to the love of Jesus crucified; and he made a vow to become a Religious, should his wife die before him. This vow he afterwards fulfilled by entering the Society of Jesus.
Justly, then, has a person who was undeceived written on a skull these words: Cogitanti vilescunt omnia. To him who reflects on death, everything in this world appears contemptible. He cannot love the earth. And why are there so many unhappy lovers of this world? It is because they do not think of death. O ye sons of men, how long will you be dull of heart? Why do you love vanity, and seek after lying? (Ps. iv. 3). Miserable children of Adam, says the Holy Ghost, why do you not chase away from your heart so many earthly affections which make you love vanity and lies? What has happened to your forefathers must befall you. They dwelt in the same palace which you inhabit, and slept in your very bed; but now they are no more. Such, too, will be your lot.
My dear Redeemer, I thank Thee for having waited for me. What should have become of me had I died when I was at a distance from Thee? May Thy mercy and patience, which I have experienced for so many years, be forever blessed! I thank Thee for the light and grace with which Thou dost now assist me. I did not then love Thee, and I cared but little to be loved by Thee. I now love Thee with my whole heart, and nothing grieves me so much as the thought of having displeased so good a God. This sorrow tortures my soul; but it is a sweet torment, because it gives me confidence that Thou hast already pardoned me.
II.
Give yourself, then, to God before death comes upon you. Whatsoever thy hand is able to do, do it earnestly (Eccles. ix. 10). What you can do today, defer not till tomorrow; for a day once passed never returns, and tomorrow death may come, and prevent you from ever more being able to do good. Detach yourself instantly from everything which removes, or can remove, you from God. Let us instantly renounce in affection the goods of this earth, before death strips us of them by force. Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord (Apoc. xiv. 13). Happy they who at death are already dead to all attachment to this world. They fear not, but desire death, and embrace it with joy; for, instead of separating them from the Good they love it unites them to the Supreme Good, Who is the sole object of their affections, and Who will render them happy for eternity.
O my sweet Saviour, would that I had died a thousand times before I sinned against Thee! I tremble lest I should hereafter offend Thee again. Ah! make me die the most painful of all deaths rather than permit me evermore to lose Thy grace. I was once the slave of hell; but now I am Thy servant, O God of my soul! Thou hast said that Thou lovest those that love thee (Prov. viii. 17). I love Thee. Therefore I am Thine and Thou art mine. I may lose Thee at some future time; but the grace which I ask of Thee is, to take me out of life rather than suffer me ever to lose Thee again. Unasked, Thou hast bestowed upon me so many graces; I cannot now fear that Thou wilt not hear my prayer for the grace which I now implore. Do not permit me ever to lose Thee. Give me Thy love, and I desire nothing more. Mary, my hope, intercede for me.
Spiritual Reading
THE MARTYRS TEACH US TO ACCEPT DEATH ACCORDING TO THE GOOD PLEASURE OF GOD.
PRAYING TO THE HOLY MARTYRS
Death, which is the tribute that everyone must pay, is the greatest of all our tribulations and makes not only sinners but the just tremble. Our Saviour Himself as Man wished to show the fear that He felt in the face of death, so that He began to pray to His Father to free Him from it. But at the same time He teaches us to accept death according to the good pleasure of God, by saying: Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done (Matt. xxvi. 39). We can all acquire the glory of Martyrdom by accepting death to please God and conform ourselves to His will. For, as we have remarked with St. Augustine, it is not the pain, but the cause or the end for which one submits to death that makes Martyrs. It follows that he who in dying courageously accepts death and all the pains that accompany it, in order to accomplish the Divine will, though he does not receive death at the hands of the executioner, dies, however, with the merit of Martyrdom, or at least with merit very similar. It also follows that as often as any one offers himself to undergo Martyrdom for the love of God, so often does he gain the merit of Martyrdom. We have seen how St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi, when she inclined the head at the Glory be to the Father, imagined at the same moment she was receiving the stroke of the executioner. Hence we shall see in Heaven a great number of Saints crowned with the merit of Martyrdom without having been martyred.
Finally we should be moved to recommend ourselves every day with great confidence to the intercession of the holy Martyrs whose prayers are most efficacious with God. When we suffer some grievous pain, or when we desire a special favour, let us make a Novena or a Triduum in honour of the holy Martyrs, and we shall easily obtain the grace we ask. Let us not fail to honour them, says St. Ambrose, for they are our Princes in the Faith and our powerful intercessors. If the Lord promises a reward to him who gives a drink of water to a poor man, what will He not do for those who for His sake sacrificed their lives in the midst of torments! Let us here observe that the Martyrs before receiving the mortal blow, without doubt prepared themselves many times for those many tortures and for death, so that when they closed their earthly career they died with the merit of not only one Martyrdom, but with the merit of all those Martyrdoms that they had already accepted and offered sincerely to God. Hence we may imagine with what abundance of merits they entered Heaven, and how valuable is their mediation with God.
A Prayer to the Holy Martyrs to Obtain their Protection
O ye blessed Princes of the Heavenly Kingdom! Ye who sacrificed to Almighty God the honours, the riches, and possessions of this life, and have received in return the unfading glory and never-ending joys of Heaven! Ye who are secure in the everlasting possession of the brilliant crown of glory which your sufferings have obtained! -- look with compassion upon our wretched state in this valley of tears where we groan in the uncertainty of what may be our eternal destiny. And from that Divine Saviour for Whom you suffered so many torments, and Who now repays you with such unspeakable glory, obtain for us that we may love Him with all our heart, and receive in return the grace of perfect resignation under the trials of this life, fortitude under the temptations of the enemy, and perseverance to the end. May your powerful intercession obtain for us that we may one day in your blessed company sing the praises of the Eternal God and, even as you now do, face to face, enjoy the Beatitude of His vision!
Evening Meditation
"GOD HIMSELF WILL COME AND SAVE YOU" (Is. xxxv. 1).
I.
God is that strong One Who alone can be called strong, because He is Strength itself; and whoever is strong derives strength from Him: Strength is mine, and by me kings reign (Prov. viii. 14), says the Lord. God is that mighty One Who can do whatsoever He will; and He can do this with ease; He has merely to wish it: Behold, thou hast made heaven and earth by thy great power, and no word shall be hard to thee (Jer. xxxii. 17). By a nod He created the Heavens and earth out of nothing: He spoke, and they were made (Ps. cxlviii. 5). And did He choose to do so, He could destroy the immense machinery of the universe by a nod, as He created it: At a beck he can utterly destroy the whole world (2 Mach. viii. 18). We know already how when he pleased, He burnt five entire cities with a deluge of fire. We know how, previously to that, He inundated the whole earth with a Deluge of waters, to the destruction of all mankind, with the sole exception of eight persons. O Lord, says the Wise Man: who shall resist the strength of thy arm? (Wis. xi. 22).
Hence we may see the rashness of the sinner who wrestles against God, and carries his audacity so far as even to lift up his hand against the Almighty: He hath stretched out his hand against God, and hath strengthened himself against the Almighty (Job. xv. 25). Suppose we should see an ant make an assault upon a soldier, would we not think it rashness? But how much more rash is it for a man to make an assault on the Creator Himself, and scorn His Precepts, disregard His threats, despise His grace, and declare himself God's enemy!
O great Son of God, Thou hast become Man in order to make Thyself loved by men; but where, then, is the love that men bear to Thee? Thou hast given Thy Blood and Thy life to save our souls, and why are we so ungrateful to Thee, that, instead of loving Thee, we despise Thee with such ingratitude? Alas! I myself, Lord, have been one of those who more than others have thus ill-treated Thee. But Thy Passion is my hope. Oh, for the sake of the love that induced Thee to assume human flesh, and to die for me upon the Cross, forgive me all the offences I have committed against Thee. I love Thee, O Incarnate Word. I love Thee, O my God.
II.
But these rash and ungrateful ones are the very men whom the Son of God has come to save, by making Himself Man and by taking on Himself the chastisement deserved by them in order to obtain pardon for them. And then, seeing that man from the wounds inflicted by sin continued very weak and powerless to resist the strength of his enemies, what did God do? The Strong and Almighty One became weak and assumed to Himself the bodily infirmities of man, in order to procure for man by His merits the strength of soul requisite to subdue the attacks of the flesh and of hell. And so, behold Him made a little Child in need of milk to sustain His life, and so feeble that He cannot feed Himself or move Himself.
The Eternal Word, in becoming Man, wished to conceal His strength: God will come from the south; there is his strength hid (Hab. iii. 3, 4). We find, says St. Augustine, Jesus Christ strong and feeble -- strong, since He created all things; feeble, since we behold Him made Man like us: "We find Jesus strong and weak; strong, by Whom all things were made without labour. Would you see Him weak? The Word was made flesh." Now this strong One has chosen to become weak, says the Saint, to repair our infirmity by His weakness, and so to obtain our salvation: He hath built us up by his strength, he hath sought us by his infirmity. For this reason He likens Himself to the hen, when He speaks to Jerusalem: How often would I have gathered together thy children, as the hen doth gather her chickens under her wings! And thou wouldst not (Matt. xxiii. 37). St. Augustine remarks that the hen in rearing her chickens grows weak, and by this mark is known to be a mother; so was it with our loving Redeemer, by becoming infirm and weak, He showed Himself the Father and Mother of us poor weak creatures.
I love Thee, O Infinite Goodness, and I repent of all the injuries I have done Thee. Would that I could, for Thy sake, die of sorrow! O my Jesus, grant me the gift of Thy love; let me not live any longer ungrateful for the affection Thou hast borne me. I am determined to love Thee always. Give me holy perseverance. O Mary, Mother of God, and my Mother, obtain for me from thy Son the grace to love Him always even unto death.
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Please pray for the repose of the soul of Mrs. Bonnie Massett |
Posted by: Stone - 01-23-2023, 07:55 AM - Forum: Appeals for Prayer
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Requiem aeternam dona ei Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.
In your charity, please pray for the soul of Mrs. Bonnie Massett who passed away on January 21st.
The Massetts were very close friends of Fr. Gruner and have been involved in the fight for Tradition and Our Lady of Fatima for a long time.
May her soul and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace. Amen.
✠ ✠ ✠
The De Profundis - Psalm 129
Out of the depths I have cried unto Thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice.
Let Thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.
If Thou, O Lord, shalt mark our iniquities: O Lord, who can abide it?
For with Thee there is mercy: and by reason of Thy law I have waited on Thee, O Lord.
My soul hath waited on His word: my soul hath hoped in the Lord.
From the morning watch even unto night: let Israel hope in the Lord.
For with the Lord there is mercy: and with Him is plenteous redemption.
And He shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her.
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New York City begins distributing free abortion pills ‘to anyone’ |
Posted by: Stone - 01-23-2023, 07:47 AM - Forum: Abortion
- No Replies
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New York City begins distributing free abortion pills ‘to anyone’
'No other city in the nation, or in the world, has a public health department that has provided medication abortion,' Mayor Adams boasted. "We are the first.'
Jan 21, 2023
NEW YORK CITY (LifeSiteNews) — A clinic in the Bronx district of New York City has begun administering abortion pills without charge and available “to anyone,” regardless if they are from in or out of the city.
City Mayor Eric Adams announced Tuesday that the drugs used to kill unborn children in the womb will be made available at four public clinics across the city by the end of the year in response to the landmark overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision which falsely held that abortion was a constitutional right.
“Historically, women’s health has not been prioritized,” the Democrat mayor said and claimed that the overturning of Roe had “endangered women’s health across the nation.” “It was a decision about controlling women’s bodies, choices, and their freedom,” Adams said.
In direct response to Roe being overturned, and noting that this week marks the fiftieth anniversary of Roe’s passing, Adams announced that from January 18 “we will begin rolling out medication abortion at our city’s sexual health clinics.”
While the city already provides medical abortions at its eleven public hospitals, Adams noted, nevertheless “we are expanding the program to reach more New Yorkers,” he said.
“No other city in the nation, or in the world, has a public health department that has provided medication abortion,”Adams boasted. “We are the first.”
READ: Online sale of unauthorized abortion pills has skyrocketed since fall of Roe v. Wade
“For too long, health and health care has been centered around men… If men had periods, pap smears, and menopause, they would get a paid vacation. And if men could get pregnant, we wouldn’t see Congress trying to pass laws restricting abortion,” the mayor claimed.
The city’s health department is financing the expansion of abortion pills from a $1.2 million dollar “sexual health services” fund. Ashwin Vasan, the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene commissioner, said that the abortion pills will not only be free at the point of use, but will be “open to anyone,” a statement which introduces the question of a lower age limit on the procurement of the dangerous drugs.
On January 3, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) relaxed its guidelines on access to the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol, allowing the drugs to be purchased over-the-counter in retail pharmacies, provided those pharmacies “complete a Pharmacy Agreement Form.”
Although the drug still requires a prescription, medical professionals need only to become certified through the “modified” REMS program to prescribe, a qualification that has been simplified. The Pharmacy Agreement Form does not specify any medical supervision, meaning that a woman can receive a prescription for the abortion pill from a REMS-certified medic and pick up the pills at a local pharmacy without any further supervision.
According to government data collected by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, between 2002 and 2015 hospital visits following use of the abortion pill increased over 500 percent, compared with a 315 percent rise in visits following surgical abortion.
Last November, a coalition of pro-life doctors and medical groups filed a lawsuit challenging the FDA’s approval of the two-drug chemical abortion regimen, citing the dangerous risks present for both mothers and their unborn babies.
In the year 2000 the FDA categorized pregnancy as an “illness” for which abortion pills could then be considered a remedy, leading to the initial approval of their use.
“Pregnancy is not an illness, and chemical abortion drugs don’t provide a therapeutic benefit,” the doctors’ lawyers argued.“They end a baby’s life, and they pose serious and life-threatening complications to the mother.”
“The FDA never had the authority to approve these dangerous drugs for sale. We urge the court to listen to the doctors we represent who are seeking to protect girls and women from the documented dangers of chemical abortion drugs,” they added.
Owing to the dangers associated with the abortion-inducing chemicals, 22 attorneys general signed a joint letter to the FDA on January 13, demanding that the agency overturn its new ruling.
“The Food and Drug Administration’s decision to abandon commonsense restrictions on remotely prescribing and administering abortion-inducing drugs is both illegal and dangerous,” the letter states. “In direct contravention of longstanding FDA practice and congressional mandate, the FDA’s rollback of important safety restrictions ignores both women’s health and straightforward federal statutes. We urge you to reverse your decision.”
The FDA has said it will issue a response directly to the attorneys general.
Following the FDA’s relaxation of its rules on abortion pills, pharmacy chains CVS and Walgreens announced they would begin stocking and dispensing the toxic drugs.
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WSJ Shreds Vaccine Makers, Biden Admin Over "Deceptive" Booster Campaign |
Posted by: Stone - 01-23-2023, 07:21 AM - Forum: Health
- No Replies
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WSJ Shreds Vaccine Makers, Biden Admin Over "Deceptive" Booster Campaign
ZH | JAN 22, 2023
Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley has taken a flamethrower to vaccine makers over their "deceptive" campaign for bivalent Covid boosters, and slams several federal agencies for taking "the unprecedented step of ordering vaccine makers to produce them and recommending them without data supporting their safety or efficacy."
Quote:You might have heard a radio advertisement warning that if you’ve had Covid, you could get it again and experience even worse symptoms. The message, sponsored by the Health and Human Services Department, claims that updated bivalent vaccines will improve your protection.
This is deceptive advertising. But the public-health establishment’s praise for the bivalent shots shouldn’t come as a surprise. -WSJ
The narrative behind the campaign was simple; mRNA Covid shots could simply be 'tweaked' to to target new variants - in this case, the jabs were claimed to confer protection against BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron variants, along with the original Wuhan strain.
To call this wishful thinking would be extremely generous.
As Finley writes, three scientific problems have arisen.
- The virus is mutating much faster than vaccines can be updated.
- Vaccines have 'hard wired' our immune systems to respond to the original Wuhan strain, "so we churn out fewer antibodies that neutralize variants targeted by updated vaccines."
- Antibody protection wanes after just a few months.
Finley has brought receipts too...
Quote:Two studies in the New England Journal of Medicine this month showed that bivalent boosters increase neutralizing antibodies against the BA.4 and BA.5 variants, but not significantly more than the original boosters. In one study, antibody levels after the bivalent boosters were 11 times as high against the Wuhan variant as BA.5.
The authors posit that immune imprinting “may pose a greater challenge than is currently appreciated for inducing robust immunity against SARS-CoV-2 variants.” This isn’t unique to Covid or mRNA vaccines, though boosters may amplify the effect. Our first exposure as children to the flu—whether by infection or vaccination—affects our future response to different strains. -WSJ
Here's what happened
For those who took (or were forced to take) the original vaccine, our memory B-cells were trained to produce antibodies against the original Wuhan strain. And as a New England Journal of Medicine article notes, people who have taken said original vaccine were "primed" to respond to the Wuhan strain, and 'mounted an inferior antibody response to other variants.'
The studies directly contradict marketing information from Pfizer and Moderna, which asserted that the bivalent boosters produced a response to the new strains (BA.4 and BA.5) that's 4-6x that of the original boosters - which the WSJ says is "misleading."
For starters, neither Pfizer or Moderna conducted a randomized trial.
Quote:They tested the original boosters last winter, long before the BA.5 surge and 4½ to months after trial participants had received their third shots. The bivalents, by contrast, were tested after BA.5 began to surge, 9½ to 11 months after recipients had received their third shots. -WSJ
Here's the moneyshot: "The vaccine makers designed their studies to get the results they wanted. Public-health authorities didn’t raise an eyebrow, but why would they? They have a vested interest in promoting the bivalents."
In June, the FDA ordered vaccine makers to update the boosters against BA.4 and BA.5, and rushed the companies to push them out before clinical data was available. Meanwhile, Biden's CDC recommended the bivalents for all adults without evidence that they were effective or necessary.
Finley further notes that vaccine makers could have performed small, randomized trials last summer and early fall on the bivalents - with results available by the end of September. But the Biden administration didn't want to wait (and now we know why).
Quote:The CDC published a study in November that estimated the bivalents were only 22% to 43% effective against infection during the BA.5 wave—their peak efficacy. As antibodies waned and new variants took over later in the fall, their protection against infection probably dropped to zero.
Another CDC study, in December, reported that seniors who received bivalents were 84% less likely to be hospitalized than the unvaccinated, and 73% less likely than those who had received two or more doses of the original vaccine. But neither study controlled for important confounding factors—for one, that the small minority who got bivalents were probably also more likely than those who hadn’t to follow other Covid precautions or seek out treatments such as Paxlovid. -WSJ
We're amazed the Journal even put this out there... Kudos to them.
Fortunately for big pharma and the Biden administration, information overload is the new Soma, and Rachel Maddow et al. have everything under control.
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Mutiny erupts among WEF staff over role of ‘Mr Davos’ |
Posted by: Stone - 01-22-2023, 07:34 AM - Forum: Great Reset
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Mutiny erupts among WEF staff over role of ‘Mr Davos’
Founder and chair Klaus Schwab has run forum for 52 years but is now seen by some past and present staff as ‘a law unto himself’
Klaus Schwab has been at the helm of the WEF for 52 years. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images
The Guardian | Wed 18 Jan 2023
The future of Klaus Schwab – Mr Davos for more than half a century – has become a talking point at this year’s meeting after World Economic Forum employees voiced strong criticism of their chair and the lack of a succession strategy.
A group of current and former WEF staff members who contacted the Guardian said the 82-year-old Schwab was a law unto himself and had surrounded himself with “nobodies” who were incapable of running the organisation he founded in the early 1970s.
“Klaus has been at the helm of the WEF for 52 years. When he was born [in 1938] 122 of the 195 states in the world right now did not even exist. He is completely unaccountable to anyone inside and outside the organisation,” the group said.
“We are a group of current and former employees of the WEF. We want to play our role in fostering debate about the role this organisation plays in the world.”
The group said it wanted to remain anonymous. “We are hesitant to come forward as Klaus is very well connected and can make life very difficult for us even after we leave the WEF.”
Speculation about Schwab’s future has intensified this week after a piece on the online publication Politico said the WEF’s strategic partners – the firms that bankroll the $390m (£315m) a year business – were unhappy about the lack of a succession strategy.
The group of WEF staff members said they had posted their criticisms on the social media platform LinkedIn but they had been removed at the request of the WEF, something the organisation denies.
The posts, shared with the Guardian, said: “There isn’t much of a future for the WEF beyond Klaus not just because there isn’t a clear successor but also because his managing board is such a viper’s nest that senior leadership will be at each other’s throats the moment the old man pops off.”
A WEF spokesperson said: “The board of trustees decides any future institutional leadership appointments. The forum has a strong institutional governance structure in place to ensure its continued ability to fully support its mission.”
Former UK prime minister Tony Blair is one of the leading international figures who has been linked with the role.
The group of past and current WEF employees questioned the ability of the organisation to function without Schwab at the helm.
“In most organisations the next generation of top leadership is faintly visible at the higher levels of management but at the WEF Klaus has surrounded himself with such a group of nobodies at the top that it’s hard to see how any of them could be taken seriously by anyone of consequence inside or outside the organisation.
“Klaus picks his leaders using the same criteria Putin uses to pick deputies for the state duma: loyalty, guile, sex appeal. The quality of people at the top is reflective of the type of people who work for the rest of the organisation.”
The head of one UK company agreed that there appeared to be no successor to Schwab lined up. “My impression is that he will die with his boots on,” the executive said.
Another longstanding Davos attender expressed surprise that Schwab had allowed speculation about his future to surface. “If I am honest I find it a bit disrespectful [given everything he has done] but he should have known it would happen and taken steps to head it off.”
The World Economic Forum is a Swiss foundation and does not have shareholders.
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Company genetically engineers fruit flies to be "biofactories" for fake meat production |
Posted by: Stone - 01-22-2023, 07:22 AM - Forum: Health
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Company genetically engineers fruit flies to be "biofactories" for fake meat production
Future Fields' EntoEngine insects have serious environmental and ethical downsides.
GM Watch [adapted] | 11 January 2023
Report by Claire Robinson; technical advice by Dr Michael Antoniou
The biotech company Future Fields has notified the Canadian authorities of its intention to commercialise EntoEngine, a genetically modified fly. The flies are engineered to produce foreign proteins – in this case, growth factors, which are cell signalling molecules that play important roles in cell proliferation and development, for use in what Future Fields calls "cellular agriculture" – what we call lab-grown or fake meat.
The public can comment on the application until 28 January 2023 and we encourage them to do so. In our view, EntoEngine flies poses serious environmental risks in the likely event that they will escape contained conditions.
The details
The company says, "The EntoEngine fly line has been genetically engineered to express a growth factor isolated from cows.... The gene sequence poses no known risks to either humans or animals. Expression of the gene encoding the growth factor is under the control of a gene expression regulator isolated from yeast."
Future Fields argues that the GM fly is needed to replace the usual way of producing growth factors – in bioreactors. The company confirms what GMWatch has long said – that bioreactor technology is expensive, resource and energy hungry and produces vast quantities of problematic waste. The company concludes, reasonably, that growth factors cannot be produced cost-effectively using bioreactor technology – so they aim to produce them in GM drosophila, or fruit flies.
The company makes grand claims for the fly's sustainability and environmental friendliness, compared with bioreactor protein production, based on lower input use and less greenhouse emissions. Drosophila, Future Fields says, "do not have these large operation costs and require only modest environmental controls to ensure optimal rearing... Drosophila can feed on organic side streams and byproducts from other processes (i.e. organic waste). In fact, insects are some of the most efficient organisms at converting nutrients into biomass."
However, the problem with this "solution" is that even with a cheaper source of cell growth factors in the shape of the flies, lab grown meat will still need to be produced in huge bioreactors, with the consequent vast running costs and environmental impacts.
Patent
Future Fields describes the status of the patent on EntoEngine as "pending". Our patent search on the Espacenet and USPTO databases only found one patent on a GM insect with Future Fields as an applicant. The patent, titled "Method for producing recombinant proteins in insects", describes the general concept patent but lacks the experimental data to prove that the system actually works. It's unclear whether other patents exist, but the details of this patent illustrate the types of process that would be used for EntoEngine protein production.
The patent focuses on heat stress (taking the temperature up to 35-40 degrees C) as the trigger that will activate expression of the transgenes in the flies to produce the desired growth factors.
The expression of the transgenes encoding for the desired protein (in this case, mammalian cell growth factors) is under the control of a "gene expression regulator" derived from yeast. So these flies would appear to contain two foreign transgenes: One encoding the desired protein to be expressed and isolated from the flies; and the other encoding the yeast gene expression regulator.
In all likelihood, the yeast-derived gene expression regulator is a member of the heat shock factor family of proteins. The function of these proteins is elevated upon heat stress and their role is to increase expression of genes that will help the organism protect itself from external stresses (e.g. heat, cold, UV light).
Torturing fruit flies
Regarding the heat stress trigger, the patent describes a gruesome and torturous process of gradually getting the flies used to the higher temperature of the heat stressor so that they don't die from the shock of a sudden rise, by applying the stressor interspersed with "rest" periods.
When the insects have exhausted their ability to produce growth factor, they are killed and "harvested", in the words of the Future Fields patent, then ground up into a mass, and the desired protein is extracted and purified out. It is unclear how well the purification process will work and GMWatch warns that native fly proteins could end up contaminating the final product.
Doubtful ethics
The company's patent and publicity make a big deal out of the supposedly superior ethics of using fruit flies to manufacture growth factors for "cellular agriculture", as opposed to extracting them from fetal bovine serum (FBS) taken "from fetuses of pregnant cows prior to slaughter". The patent says that cattle-derived FBS gives rise to "ethical concerns regarding the production of cultured meat products".
But the point on ethics is disingenuous and contradictory, as Future Fields itself justifies its GM flies approach as replacing growth factors produced in bioreactors and not as replacing FBS, because FBS is not used by the lab grown meat industry.
Along the same lines, Future Fields' use of language in its patent seems manipulative. While the cattle from which FBS is derived are subject to "slaughter", the GM fruit flies are merely "harvested", just like the crop plants that even vegans would be happy to eat.
But anyone concerned with the ethics around animal use in agriculture is unlikely to be impressed by Future Fields' description of its GM fly as "a standalone biofactory" – the ultimate reduction of a living creature to a machine.
At a time when prominent environmentalists, from Sussex University's Prof Dave Goulson to TV's David Attenborough, are trying to persuade the public to give insects the respect they deserve as key regulators of ecosystems, genetically engineering fruit flies and then characterising them as "biofactories" or as non-sentient beings on a par with a wheat or maize crop seems distasteful in the extreme.
By timely coincidence, recently published EU-funded research shows that fruit flies, though "tiny", are " amazingly smart". They are capable of attention, working memory and conscious awareness – abilities we usually only associate with mammals.
Environmental risks
The main risk posed by the GM flies is environmental. Containment facilities for GM animals are notoriously insecure – GM glofish have escaped from tanks and are breeding in the wild in Brazil and a whistleblower report paints a damning picture of lax attitudes and neglect of protocols at AquaBounty's GM salmon-producing facilities. The risk with GM flies is that they could escape and breed in the environment or cross-breed with natural flies, leading to the escape of growth factor-producing genes into wild populations.
This wouldn't pose a human health risk, as most of us don't eat living fruit flies and the proteins in dead flies would quickly degrade. But plenty of animals, including mammals, fish, amphibians, and birds, do eat living flies. Because the growth factors in the GM flies are mammalian, they will to some degree be active in any animal that ingests them. This could cause uncontrolled cell division in the animal consumer – potentially leading to cancer.
In evaluating environmental risk in the case of an escape, much depends on what triggers are used to make the growth factor-producing genes express. The heat stress triggers discussed in the patent are worrying because they are designed to spring into action at 35-40 degrees C – temperatures regularly reached in the climate conditions of many parts of the world. And this raises the question: What happens at 31 or 32 degrees? Nothing, or something? And if something, then what?
Conclusion
Future Fields' GM fly appears to be an invention of dubious utility that will do little to improve the sustainability of the environmental catastrophe-in-the-making that is lab grown meat. It poses unacceptable environmental risks in the event of an escape and the ethics around the GM fly's grim life and grimmer death are dubious, to say the least.
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Thief steals St. Michael statue from church, trips, and is injured by the angel’s sword |
Posted by: Stone - 01-22-2023, 06:48 AM - Forum: Anti-Catholic Violence
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Thief steals St. Michael statue from church, trips, and is injured by the angel’s sword
St. Michael the Archangel. | Credit: Flickr / thederek412 (CC BY 2.0)
CNA | Jan 17, 2023
A drunken thief was injured after falling on the sword of a statue of St. Michael the Archangel that he was trying to steal from a church in Monterrey, Mexico.
Local media reported that during the early hours of Jan. 14, Carlos Alonso, 32, allegedly went to the Christ the King Parish in downtown Monterrey to rob the church.
In the darkness, Alonso reportedly jumped over the fence in front of the church entrance, broke a glass door, and entered the church.
While trying to flee with a statue of St. Michael the Archangel, the alleged thief tripped and fell on the angel’s sword, seriously injuring his neck.
Some passersby saw the wounded man at the church doors and called for medical help.
Monterrey Civil Protection personnel arrived at the scene, cut the padlock on the main gate of the fence, and saved the would-be thief’s life.
After stabilizing the injured man, the rescuers took him to a clinic to be treated and to get more information about the damage that may have been caused.
It is expected that once he has recovered, the suspect will be turned over to the public prosecutor’s office, and the punishment he could face for the damage to the church will be determined.
The statue of St. Michael the Archangel was unharmed.
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Vatican’s news outlet highlights Pope’s longstanding relationship with Klaus Schwab |
Posted by: Stone - 01-21-2023, 09:43 AM - Forum: Pope Francis
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Vatican’s news outlet highlights Pope’s longstanding relationship with Klaus Schwab
Fr. Susak's comments to Vatican News served to further highlight the little known, but close, link between Pope Francis' Vatican and the global elite.
![[Image: Francis-Schwab-Vatican-810x500.jpg]](https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Francis-Schwab-Vatican-810x500.jpg)
Jan 20, 2023
VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — As the annual World Economic Forum takes place in Davos, Switzerland – gathering the global elite, wealthy and a host of anti-life and anti-freedom advocates – the Vatican’s news outlet is promoting the event as “presenting solutions” to world “crises.”
In an interview published January 19 on Vatican News, the local Catholic priest in Davos spoke about the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. It is taking place in its customary January spot, after having been held online in 2021 and then in May last year.
Father Kurt Susak, the parish priest in Davos for over ten years, stated that “everywhere you hear about crises. The world is somehow in crisis mode.” In the face of such crises, he added, the attendees at the WEF are “quite consciously” counting on the event “presenting solutions.”
Susak added the the WEF risked losing “its credibility and legitimacy if this meeting did not now also present solutions that are recognizable to the people and lead to an improvement in the many conflicts and challenges.”
Exactly what kind of solutions might be presented, Susak did not mention. However, as LifeSite has extensively reported, the WEF meetings have already highlighted how “access to abortion” is a key issue.
A moderator at one of the sessions briefly talked about the WEF’s “women’s health initiative,” a project by the globalist organization that also pushes abortion and contraception under the guise of “reproductive health.” The initiative aims, among other things, to reduce “unintended pregnancies and unsafe pregnancies.”
READ: Day 2 of World Economic Forum meetings at Davos proves abortion is key part of globalist agenda
Among the numerous partner organizations for the pro-abortion initiative are leading companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Merck, CVS Health, Save the Children as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Criticisms of meeting limited
So far, the WEF’s Davos meeting has raised considerable concern for family and freedom advocates. In addition to the overt promotion of abortion, countries such as Poland and Hungary have come under attack there for their stance defending families. The Executive Director of Human Rights Watch,Tirana Hassan, accused the two countries of being “divisive,” claiming that they “increase acts of violence and discrimination” by their policies.
READ: Human Rights Watch director trashes Poland, Hungary at WEF for championing family values
Building on the widespread rollout of the COVID-19 injection, linked to digital vaccine records in many countries, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair then argued that “proper digital infrastructure” would be necessary in tackling another “pandemic,” in order to “know who has been vaccinated and who hasn’t been.”
READ: Tony Blair tells WEF digital vaccine records are ‘important’ in preparing for the ‘next pandemic’
However, in outlining some concerns about the Davos meeting, Fr. Susak did not mention such attacks on the unborn, the family, or freedoms. Instead, he noted “traffic jams,” the general expense of running the event, and a lack of transparency.
Vatican News paraphrased Susak’s comments, writing that “[h]e notes that everything is overpriced; there is an enormous amount of traffic with accompanying traffic jams and long waiting times; and says the usual way of life in the area is seriously disrupted during the time of the WEF.”
Drawing from Pope Francis’ oft-used themes regarding money usage, Susak also noted “the enormous economic costs” related to the Davos event, and that people question “whether it is worth the cost, whether it is necessary, and what the ultimate outcome of the meeting should be.”
According to Vatican News, Susak added that “very little ultimately is made public” and cited a need for more transparency.
These points aside, Susak nevertheless noted that there were many “positives” to the annual meeting of global elites. The local schools schedule skiing, which “gives the students a great deal of pleasure.”
Susak also appeared to suggest that the event now overshadowed traditional Christmas events in the region. Vatican News wrote that:
Quote:Previously, Christmas was associated with Christmas and ski tourism, he said. “Before that, work is done, preparations are made, all the security measures are organized, carried out. The hotel industry, the restaurant industry, the craft companies, everything is working at full speed. And this testifies to the great cohesion that Davos presents here.”
Church’s relation with WEF meetings
Susak revealed that for a number of years the parish has conducted “silence and prayer” events during the WEF meetings. Such events “gathered people together to pray precisely for the intention that good decisions might be made for a more just and peaceful world,” he stated.
Now the events are ecumenical: “Catholics, Reformed Christians, and evangelical churches” all gather in the “silence and prayer” events, Susak said.
The Vatican has in fact had a close, although little known, relationship with the WEF. Pope Francis has signalled his intimacy with the WEF’s globalist founder Klaus Schwab, by sending an address to the WEF four times in his eight-year pontificate, and allowing an annual Vatican roundtable at Davos, the WEF’s annual conference site in Switzerland.
Cdl. Turkson at the Vatican roundtable during the 2019 WEF Davos meeting
As re-iterated by Susak, Vatican officials attending the Davos meeting have included Cardinals Pietro Parolin, Peter Turkson, and Michael Czerny. The priest added, however, that this year there were no Vatican delegates, suggesting that this was a “statement that Rome is making to the World Economic Forum.”
In a 2021 interview with Vatican News, Susak revealed that Parolin had gone in place of Pope Francis, who had been personally invited by Schwab for the event’s 50th anniversary.
READ: Pope Francis tells ‘global governance’ conference there can be no ‘return to normality’ after COVID
“I really had to be positively surprised at how much interest there is in the Church at the WEF, for example, there is a meeting called ‘Vatican meets WEF’ and there I experienced great interest from all over the world,” Susak stated in 2021.
Vatican News wrote that Schwab had himself been to the Vatican.
Indeed, Pope Francis’ actions and public interests align closely with Schwab and the globalist elites and the WEF. Back in December 2020, Francis used the phrase “build back better,” the slogan synonymous with globalist polices. The phrase was the name of Joe Biden’s website after the election (BuildBackBetter.gov), on which he claimed to be “restoring American leadership.”
Shortly after that, Francis joined with companies across the globe to promote a new “economic system” of capitalism in line with the Sustainable Development Goals, despite their link to abortion, and his own call for simple, austere living.
READ: Pope Francis teams up with UN to educate world on sustainable lifestyles, gender equality, global citizenship
This was then followed up by a partnership between the Vatican and the U.N., in which the Pope once again showed his globalist tendencies by promoting education about “sustainable lifestyles,” “gender equality,” and “global citizenship,” yet avoiding any mention of the Catholic faith.
Such deepening ties with globalist corporations and leaders lends further credence to beliefs that Pope Francis is aligned with the WEF’s call for a “Great Reset.” He has referenced a “supranational common good” and said that “there is need for a special legally constituted authority capable of facilitating its implementation.”
READ: Pope calls for ‘new world order,’ says ‘wasting’ COVID crisis would be worse than pandemic
The pontiff re-issued that call in spring 2021. In an address to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, he echoed the sentiments expressed by Schwab. Schwab’s proposed anti-Catholic “Great Reset” is underpinned by a focus on a green financial agenda, the “withdrawal of fossil-fuel subsidies,” and a new financial system based on “investments” which advance “equality and sustainability” and the building of a “‘green urban infrastructure.”
Indeed, at last year’s delayed Davos meeting, a Vatican official declared that the Catholic Church is “committed to the various issues considered at the forum.”
Father Leonir Chiarello, Superior General of the Congregation of the Missionaries of Saint Charles (Scalabrinians), identified eight key themes of the meeting: “climate and nature, fairer economics … health and healthcare, global cooperation, and society and equity.”
READ: Vatican official at Davos says the Church is implementing the World Economic Forum agenda
He referenced Pope Francis’ Laudato Sí and Fratelli Tutti as examples of how the Catholic Church was adhering to the globalist agenda on particular aspects.
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"Communism must be built with non-Communist hands." words of Vladimir Lenin |
Posted by: SAguide - 01-20-2023, 03:57 PM - Forum: Socialism & Communism
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from the website uncletom.com:
UNCLE TOM documentary part II
Uncle Tom II is an odyssey depicting the gradual demoralization of America through Marxist infiltration of its institutions. The film explores how this deceptive ideology has torn apart the fabric of society while using black America as its number one tool for its destruction.
From Executive Producer Larry Elder and Director Justin Malone, comes the continuation of their highly acclaimed film, Uncle Tom (2020). Uncle Tom II will take the audience deeper into black America’s often eradicated history of honorable men, entrepreneurship, prosperity, faith, and patriotism, to its current perceived state of anger, discontent and victimhood.
Uncle Tom II unveils the Marxist strategy of creating false racial tension between Americans, with its ultimate goal of obtaining power, destroying capitalism and replacing God with government.
There are two documentaries. The first one Uncle Tom came out in 2020 and can be viewed on internet. https://youtu.be/zirCFrvU7dc
The second documentary recently came out some months ago. This is the trailer preview:
Allen West interview with Justin Malone and Chad O. Jackson:
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Abp. Viganò on the Feast of St. Peter's Chair at Rome - January 18, 2023 |
Posted by: Stone - 01-20-2023, 07:21 AM - Forum: Archbishop Viganò
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Abp. Viganò: We must ‘celebrate’ the papacy despite the ‘heretical tyrant’ on the throne of St. Peter
Let us pray that the Lord will deign to grant us a holy pope and holy rulers.
Jan 19, 2023
(LifeSiteNews) — The following is Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s sermon on the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter in Rome.
CATHEDRA VERITATIS
Deus, qui beato Petro Apostolo tuo,
collatis clavibus regni cælestis,
ligandi atque solvendi pontificium tradidisti:
concede; ut, intercessionis ejus auxilio,
a peccatorum nostrorum nexibus liberemur
PRAISED BE JESUS CHRIST
Today the Church in Rome celebrates the feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, with which the authority that Our Lord conferred on the Prince of the Apostles finds in the Chair its symbol and ecclesial expression. We find traces of this celebration since the third century, but it was in 1588, at the time of the Lutheran heresy, that Paul IV established that the feast of the Chair qua primum Romæ sedit Petrus would take place on January 18, in response to the denial of the presence of the Apostle in the City of Rome. The other feast for the Chair of the first Diocese founded by St. Peter, Antioch, is celebrated by the universal Church on February 22.
Let me point out this important aspect: just as the human body develops antibodies when disease arises, so that it can be defeated when it is infected; so too the ecclesial body defends itself from the contagion of error when it occurs, affirming with greater incisiveness those aspects of dogma threatened by heresy. For this reason, with great wisdom, the Church proclaimed Truths of the Faith at certain times and not before, since those Truths were hitherto believed by the faithful in a less explicit and articulated form and it was not yet necessary to specify them. The sacred Canons of the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea respond to the Arian denial of the divine nature of Our Lord, and are echoed by the splendid compositions of the ancient liturgy; the denial of the sacrificial value of the Mass, transubstantiation, suffrages and indulgences are answered by the sacred Canons of the Council of Trent, and along with them also the sublime texts of the Liturgy. Today’s feast responds to the anti-papal denial of the foundation of the Diocese of Rome by the Apostle Peter, a feast that was desired by Paul IV precisely in order to reiterate the historical truth contested by Protestants and to strengthen the doctrine that derives from it.
The heretics and their neo-modernist followers, who have infested the Church of Christ for the past sixty years, act in the opposite way. And where they do not brazenly deny the Catholic magisterium, they attempt to weaken it by being silent about it, omitting it, and formulating it in such a way as to make it equivocal and therefore acceptable even by those who deny it.
This is exactly how the heresiarchs of the past also acted; this is how the innovators acted at Vatican II; and this is how those who, in order not to be accused of formal heresy, seek to cancel those “immune defenses” with which the Church had endowed herself, so as to make the faith fall into error and infect those defenses with the plague of heresy. Almost everything that the Mystical Body had wisely developed over the centuries – and particularly during the second millennium of the Christian era – growing harmoniously like a child who becomes an adult and strengthens himself in body and spirit, has now been willfully obscured and censured, with the deceptive excuse of returning to the primordial simplicity of Christian antiquity, and with the unspeakable purpose of adulterating the Catholic Faith in order to please the enemies of the Church.
If you take the Montinian missal, you will not find explicit heresies in it; but if you compare it with the traditional missal, you will find that the omission of so many prayers composed in defense of revealed Truth was more than enough to make the reformed Mass acceptable even to Lutherans, as they themselves admitted after the promulgation of that fatal and equivocal rite. To confirm this, even the feasts of the Chair of St. Peter in Rome and Antioch have been combined into one, in the name of that cancel culture that the modernist sect adopted in the ecclesiastical sphere well before the woke left appropriated it in the civil sphere.
Today we celebrate the glories of the papacy, symbolized by the Cathedra Apostolica that the genius of Bernini artistically composed on the altar of the apse of the Vatican Basilica, which is dominated by the alabaster window depicting the Holy Spirit and guarded by four Doctors of the Church: Saint Augustine and Saint Ambrose for the Latin Church, Saint Athanasius and Saint John Chrysostom for the Greek Church. In the original project, which has remained intact through the centuries, the Chair was located above an altar, which the devastating fury of the innovators did not spare, moving it between the apse and the baldacchino of the Confession. Yet it is precisely in the architectural unity of altar and chair – which today has been deliberately erased – that we find the foundation of the doctrine of the primacy of Peter, which is founded on Christ, He who is the lapis angularis, just as the altar of sacrifice, which is also a symbol of Christ, is made of stone.
We celebrate the papacy in a historical phase of grave crisis and apostasy, which has risen even to the level of the Throne on which Peter first sat. And while our hearts are broken in contemplating the ruins caused by the devastation of the innovators to the detriment of so many souls and the glory of the divine Majesty; while we implore from Heaven a light that will allow us to understand how to combine Our Lord’s promise Non prævalebunt with the steady stream of heresies and scandals spread by the one whom Providence has inflicted on us at the head of the ecclesial body as punishment for the sins committed by the hierarchy in these decades; while we see the division between those who deluded themselves that they still had a pope segregated in the monastery … and the schism in the dioceses of northern Europe with their wicked synodal journey strongly desired by Bergoglio, we remember the prophecy of Leo XIII of happy memory, who wanted to insert in the prayer of the Exorcism against Satan and the apostate angels those terrible words that at the time must have sounded almost scandalous, but that today we understand in their supernatural sense:
Quote:Ecclesiam, Agni immaculati sponsam, faverrimi hostes repleverunt amaritudinibus, inebriarunt absinthio; Ad omnia desiderabilia ejus impias miserunt manus. Ubi sedes beatissimi Petri et Cathedra veritatis ad lucem gentium constituta est, ibi thronum posuerunt abominationis et impietatis suæ; ut percusso Pastor, et gregem disperse valeant.
Terrible enemies have filled the Church, bride of the immaculate Lamb, with bitterness, they have poisoned her with absinthe; they have laid their wicked hands on all desirable things. There where the See of Blessed Peter and the Chair of Truth was established to enlighten the nations, there they have placed the throne of their abomination and impiety, so that by striking the Shepherd they might also scatter the flock.
These are not randomly written words: they were written after Leo XIII, at the end of Mass, had a vision in which the Lord granted Satan a period of time of about a hundred years to test the men of the Church. They echo the message of the Blessed Virgin at La Salette, fifty years earlier: “Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist,” and precede by little more than a decade that third part of the Secret of Fatima in which, in all likelihood, Our Lady predicted the apostasy of the hierarchy with the Second Vatican Council and the liturgical reform.
Every believer down the centuries has been able to look to Rome as a beacon of truth. No pope, not even the most controversial popes in history like Alexander VI, ever dared to usurp his sacred Apostolic authority in order to demolish the Church, adulterate her magisterium, corrupt her morality, and trivialize her liturgy. In the midst of the most shocking storms, the Chair of Peter has remained unshaken and, despite persecution, it has never failed in the mandate conferred on it by Christ: Feed my lambs. Feed my sheep (Jn 21:15-19). Today, and for ten years now, feeding the lambs and sheep of the Lord’s flock is considered as a “solemn foolishness” by the one who now occupies the Throne of Peter, and the command that the Lord has given to the Apostles – Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you (Mt 28:19-20) – is seen as deplorable “proselytism,” as if the divine mission of the Holy Church were comparable to the heretical propaganda of sects.
He said so on October 1, 2013; January 6, 2014; September 24, 2016; May 3, 2018; September 30, 2018; June 6, 2019; December 20, 2019; April 25, 2020, and again just a week ago on January 11, 2023. And here collapses the last, gasping vestige of what was Vatican II, which made “mission” [missionarietà] its watchword without understanding that in order to proclaim Christ to a paganized world it is necessary first of all to believe in the supernatural Truths that He taught the Apostles and that the Church has the duty to guard faithfully. Watering down Catholic doctrine, silencing it, and betraying it in order to please the mentality of the age is not the work of Faith, because this virtue is based on God who is the Supreme Truth; it is not a work of Hope, because one cannot hope for the salvation or help of a God whose revealing authority and saving love one rejects; it is not a work of Charity, because one cannot love Him whose very essence is denied.
What is the vulnus that has struck the ecclesial body, making possible this apostasy of the leaders of the hierarchy, to the point of causing scandal not only in Catholics, but also in the people of the world? It is the abuse of authority. It is believing that the power connected with authority can be exercised for the very opposite purpose of that purpose which legitimizes authority itself. It is taking God’s place, usurping His supreme power to decide what is right and what is not, deciding what can still be said to people and what is to be considered old-fashioned or outdated in the name of progress and evolution. It is to use the power of the Holy Keys to loose what ought to be bound and bind what ought to be loosed. It is not to understand that authority belongs to God and to no one else, and that both the rulers of nations and the prelates of the Church are all hierarchically subjected to Christ the King and High Priest. In short, it is separating the Chair from the altar, the authority of the Vicar and the Regent from that of the One who makes that authority sacred, ratified from above, because He possesses its fullness and is its divine origin.
Among the titles of the roman pontiff, there recurs, along with Christi Vicarius, also that of Servus servorum Dei. If the first has been disdainfully rejected by Bergoglio, his choice to retain the second sounds like a provocation, as his words and his works demonstrate. The day will come when the prelates of the Church will be asked to clarify what intrigues and conspiracies may have led to the Throne one who acts as the servant of Satan’s servants, and why they have fearfully assisted his excesses or made themselves accomplices of this proud heretical tyrant. Let those tremble who know and yet are silent out of false sense of prudence: by their silence they do not protect the honor of the Holy Church, nor do they preserve the simple from scandal. On the contrary, they plunge the Bride of the Lamb into ignominy and humiliation, and drive the faithful away from the Ark of Salvation at the very moment of the Flood.
Let us pray that the Lord will deign to grant us a holy pope and holy rulers. Let us implore Him to put an end to this long period of trial, thanks to which – like every event permitted by God – we are now understanding how fundamental it is instaurare omnia in Christo, to recapitulate everything in Christ; how hellish – literally – is the world that rejects the Lordship of Christ, and how much more infernal is a religion that strips itself with contempt of its royal garments – robes dyed with the Blood of the Lamb on the Cross – to become the servant of the powerful, of the New World Order, of the globalist sect. Tempora bona veniant. Pax Christi veniat. Regnum Christi veniat.
And so may it be.
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
January 18, 2023
Cathedra Sancti Petri Apostoli, qua primum Romae sedit
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High-Powered Laser Steers Lightning Bolts For First Time |
Posted by: Stone - 01-19-2023, 11:34 AM - Forum: General Commentary
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"Game-Changer:" High-Powered Laser Steers Lightning Bolts For First Time
ZH | JAN 18, 2023
Scientists on top of a Swiss mountain shot laser pulses into a stormy sky to guide lightning for the first time. This might pave the way for laser-based lightning protection systems for rocket launchpads, military bases, airports, and supertall buildings. There hasn't been an advance like this in lightning technology since Benjamin Franklin installed the first lightning rod in the 1750s, following an experiment flying a kite with a large metal key during a thunderstorm.
A team led by Aurélien Houard, a physicist at École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, experimented on the Säntis mountain in north-eastern Switzerland in the summer of 2021 with a high-repetition-rate terawatt laser.
The results were published Monday in the journal Nature Photonics. They showed how a terawatt-level laser pulse could steer lighting toward a 26-foot rod.
Quote:"This work paves the way for new atmospheric applications of ultrashort lasers and represents an important step forward in the development of a laser-based lightning protection for airports, launchpads or large infrastructures," the researchers wrote in the study.
Matteo Clerici, a University of Glasgow physicist who wasn't involved in the research, told WSJ the successful experiment is something "we've been dreaming of for decades ... and the fact that they managed to do it in an outdoor environment is a very big step."
Clerici called the experiment a "game-changer" but noted the technology is in early development and that commercialization could be years away.
WSJ showed how the technology works. A laser beam is blasted into the stormy sky and directs lightning toward the intended target, which happens to be a tall tower.
Source: WSJ
Houard disclosed to WSJ that the prototype laser costs about $2.17 billion. The cost is very high versus a traditional lightning rod, but over time, the technology will improve and become cheaper.
Laser lightning protection could one day guard critical ground-based systems. Franklin's 18th-century innovation has now met 21st-century technology.
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'A digital infrastructure is needed to know "who is vaccinated and who is not"' |
Posted by: Stone - 01-19-2023, 08:33 AM - Forum: Great Reset
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WEF 2023: Former British PM Tony Blair says that "some of the vaccines that are coming down the line will be multiple shots"
so a digital infrastructure is needed to know "who is vaccinated and who is not"
Medical profession implements WHO digital diagnosis code for the unvaxxed
Doctors will be ‘incentivized’ by the government to start asking more questions about your vax status
Hohmann | January 17, 2023
A set of international codes are used by the medical industry for billing purposes under Medicare-Medicaid and the private insurance companies, but it’s not just about billing.
These codes are part of the International Classification of Disease (ICD) system set forth by the United Nations World Health Organization and they’re about to get far more invasive.
This system was originally created after World War II for the purpose of tracking the diagnosis of major diseases within a population. But over the years, there have been 11 major revisions, and with each revision the data being collected on each individual has become more precise and all-inclusive.
More than 1.6 million clinical situations can now be coded, according to the WHO website.
And it’s also become more coercive, to the point where it’s become impossible for doctors to get reimbursed by insurance companies if they don’t upload all the requested data points.
According to an April 2016 article in the American Journal of Neuroradiology, “Across the years, it has become an integral part of the payment infrastructure of the U.S. healthcare system along with the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) coding system for medical procedures.”
The ICD system really grew into an electronic data-mining beast with the passage by Congress of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) in 2012. The digitization of healthcare records was fully implemented with the upgrade to ICD-10 after two congressional delays in 2016.
Since then, there has literally been a numeric code created for almost any diagnosis you can think of, and some you would never think of (Search “crazy ICD-10 codes” and you will see what I’m talking about).
Fast forward now to April 2022. This is when the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) announced a new code that anyone who is awake and aware of the growing medical tyranny should be concerned about. After some delays, the new code was rolled out in October 2022 and became available to nearly every medical clinic and hospital in January 2023.
What is this new code? It’s Code Number Z28.310. This is the code for a very peculiar “diagnosis” since it’s not a diagnosis at all, but an invasion of privacy and likely to be used against many people in the future. This is the code your doctor will log into the computer system that is accessed by government and private health insurers informing them of your Covid vaccine status.
These are internationally recognized codes for very specific medical conditions for insurance and government purposes. They are accessible worldwide should you be overseas and have a health issue that needs to be treated.
I recently interviewed a fully licensed M.D., a physician who practices in a Midwestern state and has full hospital privileges. This doctor’s name will remain anonymous because if it were to get out, he could end up losing his job. On January 12, he informed me that Code Z28.310 went live in his state.
“Yesterday (January 11) it showed up for the first time in any kind of hospital paperwork I’d seen,” the doctor told me.
If diagnostics aren’t entered properly, a doctor may not get reimbursed. Now that this new code is officially required by government and private insurance providers, doctors will likely now be “incentivized” to ask about your vax status, he said. That means they get financial payouts whenever the government decides there’s a “meaningful use” for this data.
I had no idea that doctors were being bought off in this way.
This system appears to be the way the military-industrial-biomedical complex will identify and separate out those who have submitted to their digital identification system, which starts with being “up to date” on your shots — endless shots. As the late Dr. Zev Zelenko and others have said, these continuous boosters will become a “gateway to transhumanism.”
The powers that be at the United Nations and World Economic Forum have a “need to know” when it comes to those who reject this demonic transitioning of the human race, which the transhumanists refer to as an “upgrade” to “humanity 2.0.”
“I’ve never used this diagnosis code, never would for any patient,” the doctor told me in a follow-up interview this week. “I never even knew it existed until last week.”
He explained that Z28.3 is the diagnostic code for being under-vaccinated generally, but it gets more specific from there.
“It’s non-specific,” the doctor explained. “But with Covid they added the 1 after the 3 (Z28.31), so Covid is the only vaccine they’re specific for. Then they added a second digit if you’re partially vaccinated and didn’t get any of the boosters.”
These codes could continue to get more specific to the point that they also log in codes for why you refuse Big Pharma’s ineffective and unsafe — but very profitable — injections.
The doctor told me he saw one patient’s diagnosis code that was specific for refusing the vaccine due to his schizophrenia.
“A lot of people with schizophrenia are paranoid of shots and different treatments, so his doctors were attributing him (as unvaxxed) on that basis,” the doctor said.
So it doesn’t take too much of an imagination to see how this system could be abused.
What about if you continually refuse your doctor-recommended vaccines? Could you end up being diagnosed with mental illness? The doctor I spoke with agreed that this is not far-fetched. And once you get diagnosed with a mental disorder, you can lose many of your constitutional rights. You essentially become a second-class citizen.
“You could technically get a diagnosis of schizophrenia from any medical doctor, but usually they will refer you to a psychiatrist to make that diagnosis,” he said.
And that’s not the only thing to be concerned about with regard to this new diagnostic code.
Here’s where it gets interesting. At the G20 Summit held a couple of months ago in Indonesia in November 2022, the leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies issued a joint statement that called on the nations of the world to implement a global digital vaccine passport system, based on standards set by the WHO, which would force international travelers to have a digital vaccine passport ID on their mobile phone. Without it, you would not be “allowed” to travel outside your home country, unless of course you’re an illegal migrant trying to get to the U.S. or Europe from an “undeveloped” or “under developed” country.
We also know, from a Forbes magazine article published in February 2022, that nearly half of the states in America had already at that point signed the contracts and laid the infrastructure to implement digital vaccine passports, so this same system could eventually be used to control, or at least monitor, the travel of Americans outside of their states.
Then we have the World Economic Forum’s push toward Smart Cities, recently rebranded as “15-Minute Cities,” which would monitor and restrict travel outside of one’s city. Are you following me here? A digital system is being put in place that would have the capability of essentially locking down entire populations at any given time. All that would be needed is a declaration of a “public health emergency of international concern,” or of “regional concern” and the U.S and E.U. are trying their hardest to turn that authority over to the WHO in the form of a new pandemic treaty.
Eventually, as we have been informed by Yuval Noah Harari, a top adviser to Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, the plan is to put this digital surveillance technology not just on your mobile phone but “under the skin.”
The doctor in the Midwestern state explained a medical terminology called “meaningful use” and how it’s used to log personally identifiable data on medical patients.
“If you ever wondered why they try to get your blood pressure and your weight every time you go to the doctor’s office, it’s because hospitals and physicians get reimbursed if they provide ‘meaningful use’ data. They get reimbursed better. They get bonuses. Doctors have monthly meetings with staff and administrators and this is how they get reimbursed higher, they get more money, if they provide that meaningful use data.”
He further explained that if the ICD-10 coding system requires doctors to find out their patients’ Covid vax status as part of the “meaningful use” data, then they will add that to their office charts and they will get reimbursed handsomely for providing this information to the government.
“Every time you go to the doctor’s, they will try to get this information out of you,” he said.
The U.S. expanded its ICD system under the presidency of Barack Obama and the adoption of the Affordable Care Act. Previously, the U.S. used the ICD-9 system, which required less specific and less invasive information on patients, “but then with the ICD-10 system all of a sudden, they got real specified. Instead of just high blood pressure it became, is this high blood pressure caused by spending too much time with your mother-in-law or is it because of this other thing, whatever it may be. It became very specific.”
According to the government’s CMS website:
“ICD-10 also includes significant improvements over ICD-9 in coding primary care encounters, external causes of injury, mental disorders, and preventive health. The ICD-10 code sets’ breadth and granularity reflect advances in medicine and medical technology, as well as capture added detail on socioeconomics, ambulatory care conditions, problems related to lifestyle, and the results of screening tests.”
In other words, ICD-10 coding became a tool for extraordinary data mining of Americans’ personal life histories.
When ICD-10 was implemented, that’s when the AARP got the contract to administer the program in the U.S.
It also got more rigid.
“As a doctor, you have to use the ICD-10 system to get reimbursed,” my doctor source told me.
Even if you do not have government or private insurance and pay strictly out of pocket, each and every diagnosis is still logged into the system.
“If you have an interaction with the healthcare system, you will have an ICD-10 code logged and assigned to your condition,” he said. “And all that data goes into a central database that was created under Obama so that the Electronic Medical Record systems (EMR), can talk to each other.”
“Nobody else is talking about this,” he told me.
Obamacare forced all doctors to use the EMR system in order to get reimbursed.
“Because up until eight or ten years ago, a lot of doctors were still using paper charts. It’s all digitized now.”
In fact, according to the WHO website, that U.N. body has already rolled out an “upgraded” ICD-11 system and is working to get nations to adopt it.
When the U.S. federal government adopted ICD-10, it subsidized the transition, offering interest-free loans and grants that many doctors’ offices used to pay for the upgraded EMR software systems.
“There were hundreds of millions of dollars allocated, but then you had to allow the government to come in and access your books whenever they want,” the doctor said. “But now you can’t get reimbursed unless you go through this system. Virtually every doctor is a part of this system now.”
Bottom line: Be aware of what information you hand over to your doctor, because they essentially all work for the government now. That’s who they are beholden to for reimbursement.
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