Better in their words…

Source: CHICKEN SOUP ☙ Saturday, December 9, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

🔥 An old-west style showdown is ambling down Minnesota’s legal sidewalks. The Sahan Journal ran an article yesterday headlined, “St. Louis Park parents threaten legal action over LGBTQ books.” Corporate media has a blackout on the story. Maybe the blackout is because St. Louis Park Somali muslim parents are threatening legal action.

St. Louis Park’s devout Somali muslim community is a ‘vibrant and growing part’ of the city’s population.  Earlier this year, national media celebrated that Nadia Mohamed became America’s first Somali-American mayor. I doubt they’re celebrating now.

St. Louis Park’s muslims mainly hew to Islamic teaching that homosexuality is immoral, and they don’t like it much when woke schools give their young children books graphically depicting homosexual acts. So far, this story sounds a lot like other similar ‘book banning’ stories over the last couple years, like Moms for Liberty’s famous/infamous efforts to limit atypical sexualized content in public schools.

But the Somali parents are taking the argument all the way to its logical endpoint, setting up a vast, unpredictable battle. It is an argument that Christian parents have, for whatever reason, so far avoided making, possibly because of the implications if an eventual Supreme Court decision went the wrong way.

But let’s start at the beginning.

Years ago, St. Louis Park elected several gay school board members. Since then, the district libraries have swollen with material that most parent consider gross if not outright revolting. Gay parents argue that every grocery magazine cover glorifies heterosexual content, and nobody complains about that, so giving school kids cartoons showing little boys performing oral sex on each other is only fair.

“Love is love,” they claim.

(For the record, that is a demonic lie. Sex is not love, and love is not sex. Just ask the entrepreneurial, fifth-wave feminists on OnlyFans. But I digress.)

So six Somali families hired The First Liberty Institute, a conservative, Texas–based law firm that has litigated several high-profile First Amendment cases, like defending a high school football coach fired for praying on the field after games, a cake shop owner who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding, a Muslim inmate denied a religious meal, and a Jewish family trying to place a religious symbol on their relative’s grave in a government-owned cemetery.

So far, First Liberty’s lawyers have only sent the school district a demand letter, but the remarkable part of the story is the legal theory they’re arguing.

A 1993 Minnesota law requires school districts to provide a “parental curriculum review” process. Under the law, districts must allow parents to review instructional materials and, if parents object, schools must “make reasonable arrangements with school personnel for alternative instruction.”

That language could not possibly be more clear.

The Somali parents want the school district to follow the law. They want some reasonable arrangements for their children to receive alternative instruction, instead of cartoon manuals instructing kids how to have gay sex. They just wanted to opt-out:

“It is disheartening that these books were introduced to our children without our knowledge or consent, leaving us with no recourse to opt out,” (a woman named Ilhan told the St. Louis Park school board). “Our request is simply to be informed in advance when materials related to sexuality and LGBTQ identity are included in the curriculum, along with the option to exempt our children from those specific lessons.”

But school board members, advised by compliant staff lawyers, argued that the Minnesota Supreme Court has never interpreted the plain language of the curriculum statute in light of more recent Minnesota laws, like its Human Rights Act, which — to them — seem to conflict with each other, because the HRA bars discrimination against gay students.

In the school board’s view, allowing muslim students to opt-out of gay material might hurt some gay students’ feelings, which would would be catastrophic, thereby unconscionably discriminating against gay folks writ large. Just like Nazis. (Except for Ukrainian Nazis, those are the good ones.)

This is where the stakes in the conflict got turned up to Spinal Tap’s famous Number-11 setting. The Somali muslim parents carefully and respectfully invoked their Constitutional religious liberty. As Ilhan explained, handily wielding the awkward woke vocabulary:

“We wholeheartedly respect the importance of affirming LGBTQ identities, but we are troubled by the way these books have been presented to our children,” Ilhan said. “The manner in which they have been taught appears to exceed the boundaries of affirmation, urging every child to delve into their own understanding of gender and sexuality. This approach, we believe, directly conflicts with our deeply held religious beliefs.”

The reason this argument is so very stakes-raising is that, by invoking the U.S. Constitution, they bypassed all the potential arguments over any conflicts between parents’ rights under Minnesota’s curriculum statutes and the state’s Human Rights Amendment preventing gay students from potentially getting their feelings hurt.

Unless this gets resolved soon, out of court, the dispute tees up the final conflict — over school textbooks — between the rights of religious parents under the First Amendment and the rights of gay secular parents under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. After 9/11, democrats adopted muslims into the party’s Neo-marxist coalition of victim groups. So black Somali muslims currently wear suits of political armor (that Christian parents lack) and the case can proceed on the merits, without all the usual character assassination and bad-motive-imputation.

Much can be learned from these Somali parents’ strategies. I’d put this story squarely into the ‘counter-revolution’ category. Will the Supreme Court find that muslim parents’ deeply-held religious convictions trump the potential for gay students to get hurt feelings when other kids aren’t required to read LGBTQ+ material in public schools?

💉 And … another one! Air Live ran a now-familiar story this week headlined, “A Ryanair flight from UK made emergency landing after the pilot reportedly fell ill.” This makes the fifth pilot medical emergency story in the last three weeks, including the second one on Ryanair. The five include pilots: who ‘fell ill,’ two who ‘became incapacitated,’ one who died from cardiac arrest at the airport, and one who had a seizure and collapsed in the cockpit.

It’s totally normal. There’s nothing to see here. Everything is fine.

💉 The Times of India ran a startling story this week headlined, “Woman, 51, has 5 heart attacks in 16 months, asks ‘what’s wrong with me?’” Good grief, as Charlie Brown would say:

Experts, including multiple doctors she has consulted, believe an auto-immune disease such as vasculitis in which blood vessels get inflamed and narrow could be the cause, but test results have so far not shown any clear diagnosis. Every few months, the tell-tale symptoms of heart attack return: sharp pain in the chest, burping and uneasiness.

“I have had heart attacks in February, May, July and November,” she said, adding that there was another incident when she rushed to a hospital in panic fearing another attack.

Five heart attacks in 16 months! And, an auto-immune disease where blood vessels get inflamed could be the cause. So weird! Maybe we can help; let’s brainstorm. What do we know of that causes auto-immune conditions and systemic inflammation? Hmmm?

The experts are working as fast as they can to come up with new ideas to help us out with all these sudden and unexpected heart attacks caused by everyday activities and the changing climate. How about drones! A headline from the New Scientist two weeks ago:

So.

💉 The most recent GOP debate was interrupted by an 8-minute blackout that was perfectly-timed to delete Vivek Ramaswamy’s entire answer to Megyn Kelly’s question about vaccine problems:

CLIP: Plug pulled on GOP debate question over vaccine injuries (3:28).

The trouble started when Megyn asked candidate Ramaswamy about the horrifying failure of the federal vaccine liability program:

“The Trump administration and private industry developed the covid vaccine in record time. The program protected the drug companies from virtually all lawsuits over vaccine injuries. The government has a program to compensate for such harm but critics say it is a black hole of bureaucracy. 12,000 claims filed, 10% decided, only 8 payouts so far, in a forum with no right to counsel, no hearings, no appeals. Mr. Trump says he’s very proud of Warp Speed. Should he be?”

First, to assuage Trump supporters, Megyn’s question was totally unfair to Trump. Trump created neither the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 nor the 2005 PREP Act, which shield pharma from legal liability for vaccine injuries. Those laws were passed under Presidents Reagan and Bush, respectively, and both laws passed with wide bipartisan support.

The next problem was that both Megyn and Vivek immediately got in the ditch by confusing those two laws. Megyn’s question properly asked about the PREP Act and its Orwellian CICP program, deservedly called a ‘black hole of bureaucracy,’ which has only paid out eight covid vaccine claims in the last three years. Worse, the average payout on those eight claims was insultingly low, around $1,200.

It’s a punchline to a bad joke.

Vivek and Megyn both promptly confused the two programs. In fairness, it can be a little confusing. Bush’s PREP Act and its CICP program handle Emergency Use Authorized “countermeasures.” Reagan’s NCVIA and its vaccine court handle FDA-approved vaccines. PREP covers covid vaccines. (I am currently preparing a lawsuit to challenge the PREP Act.)

Much more interesting to me was how the debate moderators panicked and pulled the plug on Vivek’s answer. I’ll skip discussing how awful that was. Consider it stipulated. But consider this: the debate was live streamed. Moderators must have had prior instructions to delete this question and Vivek’s answer.

Who gave that instruction?

Next, consider the blackout in its historical context. Can you ever recall something like this happening before? A Presidential candidate’s answer censored in real time to “protect” voters from “misinformation?” About drugs?

It has never happened before.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are truly in a brave new world when our overseers control which answers to Presidential debate questions we get to hear. Orwell would probably be jumping up and down, pointing and shouting about having told us so. But they gave away the game by ham-handedly blacking the question out.

🔥 CNN ran a horrifying story last week headlined, “New lawsuit accuses Meta of creating ‘breeding ground’ for child predators.” The lawsuit is utterly scandalous, to say the least, and you can read it for yourself at the New Mexico Attorney General’s website. Despite experts assuring us that Pizza-gate is just a conspiracy theory, ‘pizza’ references were everywhere:

The example above was only a drop in a grotesque chum bucket of pedophilia:

In essence, the complaint alleges that Meta (Facebook and Instagram) has been lying about policing child porn on its network:

In fact, contrary to Meta’s public representations, Meta’s platforms contain account after account with images and associated text depicting pornography, nudity, pedophilia, sexual assault, incest, and sexual fetishes. These accounts often consisted of immense social networks of individuals following and commenting on pornographic videos and images posted on the platforms. Many of the images found on Meta’s platforms were excluded from this Complaint as too graphic and disturbing.

Demonstrating not only Meta’s tolerance for the most exploitative content but also Meta’s ability to limit such material if it so chose, searches for this particular type of content yielded 30 results on OnlyFans and 646 results on Pornhub, but 19,900 results on Instagram and 15,900 on Facebook.

The reference to “cheese pizza” is a well-known pedophile code for child sexual abuse. One of the complaint’s allegations described how investigators, posing as a 13-year-old user named Taya, was repeatedly offered sexualized grooming content:

Taya also conducted a search for “chicken soup,” which is widely understood, because of its initials, to signify “child sex.” She was pointed to this account, which invites the user to “Follow if you like little things”—a reference to sexual interest in children—with cheese pizza emojis for child pornography. The account invites contact “for trade” (or trade in child sexual images) and then shows pictures of young girls in bra tops.

That’s only the beginning. The complaint goes on to describe how investigators penetrated a dystopian world of transactional child porn and even live human trafficking, all seemingly facilitated by Meta’s software, which not only permitted the posts but helped pedophiles find each other, the content, and kids. Facebook and Instagram persistently pushed ads for adult sexual content to accounts that New Mexico investigators created posing as children.

Within hours, Facebook accounts for preteen girls (allegedly 13+) created by investigators reached the maximum number of 5,000 followers — without any promotion by the child. Most followers were men between 18 and 40. I don’t need to tell you what kinds of direct messages these accounts received. But whatever you can imagine, it was worse. Here’s one pretty tame example that the investigator’s fake preteen account received:

Facebook offered to make the investigator’s fake child account a “professional account” that would allow “fans” to send the young lady gifts and money for making short videos.

Facebook also suggested other short videos in the account’s feed linking other preteen girls’ sexualized content, which I won’t show even though the complaint blurred the most offensive parts. It’s gross. Obviously, Facebook’s algorithm was intended to “teach” the preteen how to make money on Facebook.

Another investigator’s fake account (aged 14) received a direct message offering big money if she’d make an explicit sex video: $120,000 for ‘performing’ wearing a face mask, and $180,000 without a mask. Imagine what a young girl must think about that kind of money.

It was very bad. In a sane world, just the evidence from the complaint would prompt Congressional hearings. Why TikTok gets all the blame when Facebook and Instagram are doing this kind of stuff baffles me. There is no doubt that platforms can screen this information if they want to; even PornHub does it. It is nearly beyond argument that Facebook’s tactics are intentional.

The complaint sued Meta as a public nuisance and under New Mexico’s Unfair or Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which we also recently saw used in Texas’ new lawsuit against Pfizer. Among other things, the complaint asks the court to order Meta to disgorge its profits related to these kinds of activities. That remedy alone makes all information about the issue relevant, and broadly opens discovery to the whole platform.

Meta is not going to want to turn over that discovery.

The risk is the Attorney General will settle too fast before discovery gets underway. Because once discovery is available, criminal prosecutions can follow. Kudos to New Mexico’s attorney general.

🔥 Finally, this week Florida’s outstanding Surgeon General, Dr. Joe Ladapo, sent a letter to the FDA demanding answers to three difficult questions over the presence of DNA plasmid contaminants and oncogenic SV40 promoter genes in the mRNA shots:

Dr. Ladapo’s short letter got right to the point. Referring to Kevin McKernan’s groundbreaking work, he asked about the risk of biological integration of the DNA fragments into human cells, especially when combined with the SV40 promoter/enhancer:

This raises concerns regarding the presence of nucleic acid contaminants in the approved Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, particularly in the presence of lipid nanoparticle complexes, and Simian Virus 40 (SV40) promoter/enhancer DNA. Lipid nanoparticles are an efficient vehicle for delivery of the mRNA in the COVID-19 vaccines into human cells, and may therefore be an equally efficient vehicle for delivering contaminant DNA into human cells. The presence of SV40 promoter/enhancer DNA may also pose a unique and heightened risk of DNA integration into host cells.

Our terrific Surgeon General didn’t waste time messing around with the whole ‘no evidence’ fallacy. He threw right in their face the FDA’s own 2007 document, “Guidance for Industry: Considerations for Plasmid DNA Vaccines for Infectious Disease Indications,” which in dark hilarity warned:

• Plasmid DNA could integrate with cells, which could theoretically transform healthy cells into cancer cells.
• DNA integration could make normal chromosomes unstable.
• DNA vaccines might not stay at the injection site, but could affect “intended parts of the body” including the blood, heart, brain, liver, kidney, bone marrow, ovaries/testes, lung, draining lymph nodes, and spleen.

Dr. Ladapo’s letter then asked three very pointed questions, and referred to a previous unanswered letter, demanding answers by December 13th. It’s not clear what he can or will do if his questions remain unanswered, but if the FDA won’t answer a state Surgeon General’s health questions, then what good is it?

The tipping point is tipping ever closer to a tumble.

Have a wonderful weekend in this joyful holiday season! And then meet us all back here on Monday morning to kick off another terrific week of Coffee & Covid.

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