Boy is politics entertaining, and provides much fodder for someone like the great Jimmy Dore:

H/t Oklahomans for Cannabis:

Vaccines are safe and effective? Not so for Cheron Golding, who received a flu shot in 2013 and developed transverse myelitis, a disease on par with the worst aspects of polio: paralysis, loss of vision, etc. She took her case to vaccine court and won.

It’s good that she received the payment, but the question needs to be answered: how can an allegedly innocuous medical procedure cause a complication as severe as transverse myelitis? There are around 1,400 new cases of this polio-like illness in the United States each year, with over 33,000 Americans affected permanently in some manner by the illness. With all the fear-mongering circulating about polio, why don’t we hear more about those numbers? How many cases are vaccines responsible for? This is important. Vaccine injuries need to be spoken about plainly, even if only to confront the fact that safer vaccines need to be developed. Hiding the problem, or denying that it exists, is harming thousands needlessly. The logic goes that if some vaccines were perceived by the public as unsafe, then vaccine uptake would plummet. It would take years, maybe decades to rebuild public confidence, so health authorities believe it to be better to deny vaccine injury rates at every instance. I believe this to be the cause of the phenomenon of giving multiple vaccines in a single visit. If a doctor were to admit that more than one vaccine at a time is dangerous, the first question would be, why? And so now we have doctors administering combinations of vaccines at once, despite their never having been tested for reactions.

Combining various medications and administering them to a child all at once would be insane if it were any other product. But for vaccines it is standard procedure, regardless of the outcome.

Ex-Dallas cop Amber Guyger has been convicted of murder for the 2018 shooting death of her neighbor, Botham Jean, after entering his apartment.

Surprising, considering what cops get away with on a daily basis. Guyger faces up to 99 years, which she deserves, but will more than likely receive much less. Justice has been sweetly served in this instance, and hopefully it will send a message to cops, that their mantle of impunity is rapidly disappearing.

Barring a Tulsi Gabbard nomination, Trump will serve a second term. It’s astounding, in a way, given his general boorishness, that this will be so. It seems like it would be much harder to nominate a candidate that would lose to such a knucklehead, but the Democratic Party is well on its way to seeing its candidate get steamrolled in 2020. The only candidate that could conceivably win is Tulsi. Can you picture how quickly Trump would deflate once he begins attacking the personal character, or looks, of an active-duty member of the military, and veteran of the misbegotten Iraq war? Tulsi would trounce Trump with grace, and he would appear nothing more than a bumbling old fool, and America would marvel at how they could’ve elected such a bottom-dweller. Of course, he won by default. Hillary was a terrible candidate, and would’ve been a hideous President. How many wars would we be engaged in now, had she won?

Tulsi is more presidential as a candidate than all the inhabitants of that office of the past century. She would swat Trump like a fly, and be every bit the president that Obama should’ve been. Anti-war with a backbone.

I digress. The Trump impeachment scandal, complete with a “whistleblower” from inside the White House that turned out to be a CIA officer, who has now been conveniently deposited into “witness protection” so as to not reveal his identity, is doing nothing but ensuring his second term. Why? Because it is broadcasting the overt corruption of Biden and his dealings with Ukraine. Biden openly bragged about doing what Trump is now accused of doing, and most Americans see that, and realize that impeachment is a political Hail Mary. It’s even worse for Democratic candidates, who now have to answer uncomfortable questions about the whole affair. These candidates can’t afford to appear sympathetic to Trump, so, if asked, they must answer that Biden’s actions with Ukraine are no big deal. Nor is it a big deal that his son was handed a cushy “job” on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

It must have seemed clever to push for impeachment after such a conveniently-timed leak, but the facts that voters will care about will be the revelations of massive corruption that were the focus of Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president. For all his faults, Trump will be seen as at least making a genuine attempt to get to the bottom of one instance of the commonplace corruption that has so outraged voters for so long, outrage that propelled him into office in the first place. It will do the same a second time.

Insane story out of Chicago.

The mother had just given birth, and a nurse prepared to administer the shot before both parents objected. The nurse deemed this to be medical neglect, and walked out of the delivery room with the newborn infant. Thankfully, the parents were reunited with their new child 12 hours later. And now those parents are suing, and it’s fairly certain that they’ll receive a sizable settlement for what amounted to kidnapping, and an unimaginable degree of emotional distress for the mother and father. Hopefully the costly litigation will send a message to other hospitals to respect the wishes of their patients, and above all, not to kidnap newborns.

Doctors like to spring the vitamin K shot onto parents shortly after a child is born, giving them almost no time to make an informed decision. The shot is sold as a completely safe way to protect a newborn’s blood-clotting ability in the event of an accident, but the truth isn’t so innocent. The vitamin K shot, phytonadione, contains polysorbate 80, benzyl alcohol, and aluminum. These three ingredients have been implicated in a host of neurological issues later in life, yet it is apparently fine to administer to a minutes-old infant. Aside from this, a baby doesn’t begin developing its own vitamin K until 8 days after birth for a host of reasons crucial to the child’s survival and development.

This is more than adequate to rationally refuse the shot at birth. But in a world with strict protection and enforcement of parental rights, no justification is needed other than a firm ‘No’.

From Activist Post: Facebook censors trending vitamin D story to protect flu vaccines by using former CNN reporter, with the story in question here: Study: Vitamin D more effective than flu vaccine.

Reason: ‘Telecontraception’ secret-shopper study shows safety of online birth control services

Is the elimination of the prescription requirement for birth control a cause of the Left Wing or the Right? I recently ran this by someone whose opinion I hold in esteem, someone I’d call a Jimmy Dore-style leftist, and they believed that it was generally thought to be Left Wing. It certainly has been. Yet, to advocate for the elimination of a barrier to a market transaction, it could be also described with the scare-term “deregulation”, has traditionally been a “Right Wing” imperative. Yet the “Right Wing” has primarily consisted of individuals who bring a heavy dose of moral baggage that prevents them from applying this “deregulation” consistently. Members of the “Right” have been the primary supporters of such totalitarian programs as the War on Drugs.

I immediately descended into the reasons why this is yet another instance that proves the Left/Right dichotomy to be utterly bunk. To abolish the prescription requirement is clearly humanitarian, yet the principle behind it contradicts the traditional Left wing distrust of the “free market”. It also contradicts the Old Testament moralizing of many on the “Right”, who are thankfully aging out of politics. Yet examples like this prove the underlying humanitarianism of the principle. Clearing away restrictions results in wider access, so why not apply it to every aspect of society? Why not apply it to healthcare, which is currently hog-tied with restrictive regulations that prevent growth, competition, innovation, and which would lead to wider access to a far better, far more affordable service? This life-or-death dependence that everyone feels with regard to their health insurance is as clear a sign as any that something is very wrong with the healthcare industry. It lacks a true market. And lacking a true market, it’s more expensive, more inconvenient, and far inferior to what would exist had many of these regulations never existed.

It is difficult for someone to accept that the only path to a better world lies in a clearing away of these obstacles to choice and voluntary interaction. Too many dirty words have been associated with it: “deregulation”, “capitalism”, “free market”, etc. It is difficult to accept that artificial regulation benefits the powerful. The prescription requirement for birth control has been a clear benefit for doctors, with women picking up the tab. Unnecessarily so. It’s examples like this that can turn on a light bulb in the minds of idealists who are willing to advocate for a better future, leading them to the underlying, universal principle of liberty.

The human race has gone about as far as it can go with regulation and restriction. Every manner of engineered utopia has been attempted, and the results are hard to look at. The consistent pursuit of the principle that opposes this restriction in every walk of life is our only option. Following that path would mean the acceptance that the future is uncontrollable, but also the acceptance that it is a future that will be far better than the present, something to welcome, not to fear.

Jimmy Dore covers it better than anyone else could:

Do they really just use and stockpile them? Or are they arming their proxies? Trump’s multi-billion dollar deal with the Saudis brings this to mind. It’s a well-known fact that the Saudis have funded Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, does this not make anyone uneasy? The most virulent, flag-waving supporters of the War on Terror have seemed unconcerned about their government’s relationship with this totalitarian Islamic state. I’ve asked these people about it, they just shrug. How can it be that they don’t care? The Iranians are apparently more of threat than this theocratic dictatorship that oppresses its own people in a way that can only be described as medieval. And so we must worry about, and punish, the Iranians, a country whose only crime appears to be a refusal to play ball with the U.S.

By allowing our government to engage in massive weapons deals with this Islamic totalitarian state, that also controls our government via the petrodollar, we are setting ourselves up for something truly horrific down the road. There is no telling what else is promised or exchanged hands under the table. The people of the Mideast have an aversion to paper money, wisely so. They demand payment in something real. Weapons, yes, but also gold. How much U.S. gold now sits in Saudi coffers? This “alliance” is dangerous, short-term thinking of the worst sort, and our kids will get stiffed with the tab.