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...Monica Gandhi, MD, an infectious disease specialist at UC San Francisco, said...“The more virus you get into your body, the [sicker] you are likely to get."...Severe illness rates are lower in...Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and South Korea...on the Diamond Princess outside of China 18% of the 634 passengers positive for COVID-19 were asymptomatic...onboard an Argentinian cruise ship, 81% of the 128 people who tested positive were asymptomatic...The major difference...was that passengers on the Argentinian ship were given surgical masks...

“I’m a big fan of vaccines but DAMN I’m skeptical of one that‘s supposed to have been developed, tested, produced, and distributed in 6 months — right in time for the re-election of our very own dictator,” the California Democrat wrote Wednesday on Twitter...The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a letter to governors this week instructing them to be prepared for a vaccine by Nov. 1...“It’s very irresponsible how people are trying to politicize notions of delivering a vaccine,” Azar said.

For months, I’ve been laying out evidence that: a new coronavirus was never properly discovered; the diagnostic tests are therefore meaningless; and most of the people who are sick are suffering from traditional illnesses which have been re-packaged under the empty umbrella label, “COVID.” Of course, most people in the world have a religious belief in the new virus. And that opens the door to: “psychological COVID.” Here is what it can look like. A person is watching TV for hours. He’s treated to wall-to-wall news, ads, public service announcements—all about the virus and the pandemic. After days and weeks...

Polls indicate that Americans are very poorly informed about COVID facts. That doesn’t surprise me, and I don’t think it should surprise anyone. A lot of people have trouble with complex scientific information, especially if there’s math involved. It doesn’t help, either, when the popular sources of information – the writers and pundits of the MSM, and/or social media – either don’t understand the information itself, or purposely present it in a skewed and/or confusing manner in order to stir up fear...It amuses me, in a bleak way, that the site reporting on this news gets it wrong, as well....

Facebook on Wednesday banned roughly 900 groups and pages and 1,500 ads related to the QAnon conspiracy. The removals were part of an expansion of the platform's policies on violent rhetoric, which also resulted in 10,000 Instagram pages and nearly 2,000 Facebook groups associated with QAnon having their reach limited. The QAnon theory baselessly claims that President Trump and the military are working together to expose a shadowy cabal of figures in media, entertainment and politics that are trafficking children. In a blog post explaining the policy change Wednesday, Facebook noted that groups and pages dedicated to the theory have...

A passenger on the flight from Las Vegas to Charlotte reportedly refused to follow the airline’s face mask policy after boarding the plane. When they were asked to leave the plane, the traveler reportedly became disruptive and an altercation with other passengers broke out.

Father Cantalamessa's 3rd Advent Homily "The Christian Response to Rationalism" VATICAN CITY, DEC. 17, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Here is the Advent reflection delivered Friday by Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher of the Pontifical Household, for Benedict XVI and members of the Roman Curia. The talk was titled: "'Always Be Ready to Give an Explanation to Anyone Who Asks You a Reason for Your Hope' (1 Peter 3:15): The Christian Response to Rationalism." * * * 1. Usurping Reason The third obstacle, which makes so much of modern culture "refractory" to the Gospel, is rationalism. We will address it in this last...

The 19th century was the nursery for contemporary politics. Every form of modern political activity -- fascism, communism, socialism, liberalism -- has its roots in that epoch. (Yes, I'm fully aware of such figures as Locke, Burke, Madison, and Jefferson, but their work was hijacked and twisted all out of recognition, in large part by French revolutionaries and assorted German academics. Edmund Burke was so appalled by this that, having invented modern liberalism, he turned around and invented modern conservatism.) Anything coming out of the 19th century is going to be imbued with rationalism, the dominant intellectual credo of the...

The anti-clericalism of the leading Enlightenment thinkers contained within it the potential for a new clericalism more authoritarian and murderous than that which it superseded, with intellectuals as its priests. That the cult of the expert — itself an outgrowth of the Enlightenment's enthroning of human reason above all — should appeal to intellectual elites is unsurprising: It is a form of the revenge of the nerds whose superior qualities were unnoted by the pretty girls in high school. The assumption that "rationality" is a matter easily ascertained, at least by the brainy folks, underlies the preference for centrally planned...

Rationalism 628. What is your opinion of rationalism? It is the name of a system accepted by illogical people who wish to imply by the self-chosen title that they are really guided by reason. 629. Has not rationalism made havoc of Christianity, reducing the Bible to a myth, and quenching the fires of hell by humanitarian principles? It has not made havoc of Christianity. It is making havoc of Protestantism. But Protestantism is not really Christianity. The Catholic Church alone is the true representative of Christianity, and she is not affected by rationalism. The Bible is as authentic as ever,...

This is taken from "Final Causes: A Refutation" by Wathen Call, 1891. The book is dedicated to demolishing all notions of purpose, design, meaning and intention in nature, by means of Darwinism and related philosophies. The fascinating thing about Call's book is the autobiographical introduction, where he records the deformation and loss of his faith in detail. Bad childhood catechesis, atheist poets, modern philosophers, German biblical criticism, third-rate rationalist theologians, and finally Comte and Darwin, reduced him from Anglicanism to nothingism. An Exhibit at the Museum of Rationalism Exerpts from Final Causes: A Refutation (1891), preface, introduction, conclusion (much...

Last week was Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, the brainchild of David Horowitz, conservative political gadfly and self-effacing founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Friends of mine and other writers I admire spoke on college campuses around the country, garnering impressive media coverage. The week was a big success, if measured by how much awareness of Islamic villainy was heightened. A lot of people, not including me, feel that there can hardly be such a thing as too much awareness. Estimations of the Islamic threat run exceedingly high, not least in my own party. On this point I find myself uneasily...

I AM a scientist and I have no beliefs. At least, I don't think I have. But isn't that the point? If I knew I had no beliefs then that would itself be a belief. And that's the difference between science and belief, a point missed by advocates of intelligent design, who want their beliefs taught alongside science. A believer knows things, but a scientist tries to discover things. Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against beliefs or religion. I have enormous respect for religion, and am fortunate to count Christians, Muslims, Wiccans and indigenous Australians among my...

ID’s big problem: Who designed the designer? Design is not a real alternative to chance because it raises an even bigger problem — who designed the designer? By Richard Dawkins (December 27, 2005) The logic of creationist arguments is always the same: some natural phenomenon is too specifically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the author can image. Therefore, a designer must have done it. The scientific answer is also always the same: Design is not the only alternative to chance; natural selection is the...

In 2nd Century B.C.E, the Greek Seleucid Emperor Antiochus Epiphanes began a systematic campaign against Judaism, which he saw as an obstacle to the spread of Hellenist philosophy in Israel. He forbid certain forms of religious observance (such as circumcision, for example) — disobedience was punishable by death. He desecrated the Temple by sacrificing pigs there, and he put up a statue of the Greek god Jupiter in the Holy of Holies. Enraged, Mattathias the Maccabee and his five sons recruited a small army of Jews and launched a guerrilla war that is commonly known as the Maccabean revolt. After...

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris, New York: Norton, 336 pages, $24.95 For nearly as long as there have been villages, there have been village atheists, the hypervigilant debunkers who lovingly detail the many contradictions, fallacies, and absurdities that flow from belief in holy writ. As a strictly intellectual proposition, atheism would seem, on the face of things, to have wiped the floor with the believing opposition. Still, village atheists are as numerous, and as shrill, as they’ve ever been, for the simple reason that the successive revolutions in thought that have...

By the time you read this, chances are that Terri Schiavo will be dead. In a land of plenty, where her parents are more than willing to feed her, where millions of thoughtful and concerned citizens have campaigned for her continued provision of sustenance, she is nonetheless condemned to wither away, literally, by a method that would be considered cruel and unusual punishment when applied to the worst of serial rapist-murderers: starvation. Private money and time has been volunteered to support her; Bob and Mary Schindler, Ms. Schiavo’s parents, have, in a blatant display of statist intrusion, been denied the...

The Postmodern World View is schizophrenic. It is split in two and the two parts contradict one another. Francis Shaeffer taught us to think of it as a house with an upper story and a lower story. There is no stairway to connect the two stories. The upper story and the lower story are walled off from one another. In the lower story is scientific materialism which dogmatically asserts that the world is be a closed system which consists of nothing but matter and energy which is subject to the laws of cause and effect. A second dogmatic assertion follows...

PETER Singer, once a Greens candidate and now our most famous philosopher, has changed his mind on killing babies. Good news, you might think, since this author of Animal Liberation used to say parents had a right to kill imperfect children in their first month of life. But in fact he's now told World magazine it would be ethically fine to kill even one-year-olds with disabilities. Or even to breed babies for spare parts. And Singer, now a professor at Princeton, continues his spiral into the moral abyss, by adding "there's no moral problem" with someone having sex with the...