Thursday, May 6, 2021

Free Will – Our Greatest Power

 https://www.aish.com/sp/f/48965061.html

 

Free Will Summary

Level One: Don't be a sleepwalker. Make decisions actively.

Level Two: Don't be a puppet of society's goals, or a slave to your old decisions.

Level Three: Be aware of the conflict between the cravings of your body and the aspirations of your soul.

Level Four: Identify with your soul, not your body.

Level Five: Make your will God's will.

The Denial of Free Will in Hasidic Thought

 https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-denial-of-free-will-in-hasidic-thought/

From the Baal‑Shem Tov…there is a parable of a person who decided to test his wife, so he made himself appear to her as a sea captain, and grabbed her and enticed her. But she refused, until he forced her to agree to him. Afterwards, she came to him with a broken heart and revealed the matter to him. Her husband then said to her, "It was I, and you never committed adultery with another." Thus shall God clarify the sins of Israel, that all was from God. And so I heard from our Master, Teacher, and Rabbi, Blessed be his memory, from Izbica, the interpretation of the verse, "You were rebellious with God (Deuteronomy 9:8)," for it should have said, "against God." But the meaning is that God will make it clear that when we were rebellious it was also with God, and from Him it issued. (Pri Zaddiq, 4.236-237)

 

Tucker Carlson Says Vaccine-Related Deaths May Be Abnormally High — But Vaccines Haven't Been Linked To Deaths

 https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/05/05/tucker-carlson-says-vaccine-related-deaths-may-be-abnormally-high---but-vaccines-havent-been-linked-to-deaths/?sh=762879c7bd35

 Carlson cited recent data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System — a database run by the FDA and CDC — showing more than 3,300 reports of deaths after coronavirus shots were administered, a sum Carlson called “not even close to normal.”

Carlson acknowledged some of these deaths may have been coincidences, and concluded it’s unclear how many fatalities are actually linked to the vaccines.

But VAERS is designed to allow anybody to report an adverse event without any verification, and an unknown number of its reports have nothing to do with the vaccine.

Tucker Carlson Makes BS Claim ‘30 People Every Day’ Are Dying From Vaccines. Here’s the Truth.

 https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlson-makes-bs-claim-30-people-every-day-are-dying-from-vaccines-heres-the-truth

 Fox News host Tucker Carlson continued his reckless mission to mainstream vaccine skepticism on Wednesday night by dangerously speculating that thousands of Americans have died from COVID-19 vaccinations, citing a faulty open-sourced database that has become a haven for misinformation.

Over the past few months, the Fox News star has repeatedly used his top-rated primetime show to cast doubt on both the efficacy and safety of the coronavirus vaccines. Despite the fact that countless clinical trials and real-time studies have found the shots to be overwhelmingly safe, Carlson has told his viewers not to trust the vaccines while questioning if they even work.

 

Big tech acting like Dems’ Pravda

 https://www.lockhaven.com/opinion/columns/2020/10/big-tech-acting-like-dems-pravda/

 Big Tech is the biggest threat to democracy — and must be reined in by Congress — before our rights enshrined in the Constitution protecting free speech and freedom of the press are placed in the dustbins of history.

On Oct. 14, Twitter and Facebook acted no different than Communist state-run media organizations that corruptly block the distribution of information and news stories they don’t like.

 If this type of thuggish censorship and election interference doesn’t send a chill up your spine, what will?

The single most damning quote about the state of the GOP

 https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/03/politics/anthony-gonzalez-gop-cheney-trump/index.html

Asked by The Hill newspaper about efforts to remove Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney from Republican Party leadership because of her vote to impeach former President Donald Trump, here's what Gonzalez said:
"If a prerequisite for leading our conference is continuing to lie to our voters, then Liz is not the best fit. Liz isn't going to lie to people. Liz is going to say what she believes. She's going to stand on principle. And if that's going to be distracting for folks, she's not the best fit. I wish that weren't the case."

 

Liz Cheney's fall shows that Trump is here to stay

 https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/06/politics/liz-cheney-donald-trump-gop/index.html

The Wyoming Republican congresswoman is about to lose her No. 3 House leadership post after a lonely defense of the truth that last year's election was not stolen and that Trump incited a riot in the US Capitol to try to overthrow it.
Those facts are unpalatable for most of Cheney's House Republican colleagues, who have ambitions to rise in a party controlled by the former President despite his two impeachments, botched reelection bid, failure to properly handle the pandemic and insurrectionist exit from power.
Cheney nevertheless warned her party in a valedictory op-ed in The Washington Post on Wednesday that the GOP was at a "turning point" at which the party must decide whether to "choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution" or bow down to Trump.

 

Fox News Has Completed Its Transformation Into Trump TV

 https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/08/fox-news-has-completed-its-transformation-into-trump-tv/

 Fox is ever more firmly entrenched in the official echo chamber of Trump Nation — and ever more divorced from reality. The National Enquirer, owned by Trump friend David Pecker, is Trump’s Pravda (its recent cover story: “Hillary Framed Trump Family! How she set up Donald’s son with dirt file emails!”). Breitbart, once chaired by Trump aide Stephen Bannon, is his Sputnik. Fox is the jewel in the crown — Trump’s own version of RT. “A lot of people wish President Trump was a dictator,” Fox host Jesse Watters said on July 27. Perhaps at Fox “News.”

Roger Ailes’ parting gift: Fox News is Trump’s Pravda

 https://whyy.org/articles/roger-ailes-parting-gift-fox-news-is-trumps-pravda/

Trump’s Pravda is not totally monolithic, however. Chris Wallace still practices real journalism on his Sunday show, and he recently clashed with “Fox & Friends” co-host Pete Hegseth. When Hegseth contended that Comey’s firing was no big deal, Wallace retorted: “This is a big story … This is the first time in history that a president has fired an FBI director who was conducting an investigation that was directly investigating him and his associates. It’s a big story, and I think it’s a legitimate story to cover.”

 

Facebook should make Trump's ban permanent

 https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/05/opinions/trump-facebook-medical-misinformation-emanuel/

Throughout the pandemic, variously emulating a physician, epidemiologist and public health expert, Trump was a fount of misinformation. Probably his worst bits of misinformation were suggesting researchers study the injection of bleach to fight coronavirus (which he later said was just sarcasm), that Covid would "just disappear" with warmer weather and that hydroxychloroquine might prevent Covid-19. This latter claim led some uninfected people to hoard the drug, take it, and tragically caused at least one person to die from an overdose.

Bill Barr's indefensible defense of Trump isn't fooling this federal judge

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/05/opinions/william-barr-indefensible-defense-honig/index.html 

 We know Barr misled the American people in his summary letter, first, because Mueller himself -- in an uncharacteristically confrontational move -- wrote a letter in which he pointedly noted that Barr's public summary "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office's work and conclusions."

Barr's misrepresentations were so flagrant, according to Walton, that they "cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary." This is how a judge calls a litigant a liar, politely.