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News

Wuhan virus: communist China destroyed samples, silenced doctors, and disappeared critics

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The Wuhan Virus started in China
The Wuhan Virus started in China

I’m not a big fan of National Review these days, but I wanted to link to this article because it quoted a bunch of pay-walled articles to make some good points about how we got the Wuhan virus. Not only is China to blame for the Wuhan virus, but they are actually trying to cover it up now, and shift the blame to the countries that they are damaging.

Here are the main points of the article:

  • China destroyed samples and suppressed information about the Wuhan Virus since December 2019, leaving other nations in the dark and unprepared
  • Chinese doctors who warned about patients with the Wuhan virus were silenced by the communist regime in China
  • In January, Chinese authorities denied that the Wuhan virus could be spread between people, and allowed huge gatherings of people in Wuhan
  • The President of China knew about the Wuhan virus for weeks but refused to tell anyone about it
  • The communist China government let 5 million people leave Wuhan without screening them
  • Critics of China’s handling of the Wuhan virus – even rich businessmen – are disappearing

I love the article, because it links to articles behind paywalls from the UK Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc.

Here’s the UK Times:

Chinese laboratories identified a mystery virus as a highly infectious new pathogen by late December last year, but they were ordered to stop tests, destroy samples and suppress the news, a Chinese media outlet has revealed.

A regional health official in Wuhan, centre of the outbreak, demanded the destruction of the lab samples that established the cause of unexplained viral pneumonia on January 1. China did not acknowledge there was human-to-human transmission until more than three weeks later.

The detailed revelations by Caixin Global, a respected independent publication, provide the clearest evidence yet of the scale of the cover-up in the crucial early weeks when the opportunity was lost to control the outbreak.

And here’s the Washington Post:

As word of a mysterious virus mounted, Li Wenliang shared suspicions in a private chat with his fellow medical school graduates.

The doctor said that seven people seemed to have contracted SARS — the respiratory illness that spread from China to more than two dozen countries and left hundreds dead in the early 2000s. One patient was quarantined at his hospital in Wuhan, China, Li said. He urged people to be careful.

Li and seven other doctors were quickly summoned by Chinese authorities for propagating “rumors” about SARS-like cases in the area — but their warnings were prescient. Soon, health officials worldwide would be scrambling to combat a novel virus with a striking genetic resemblance to SARS.

Here is something else I found on the Daily Wire – the response of the atheistic communist Chinese regime to being caught:

The National Security Council blasted the Chinese Communist Party on Tuesday for expelling journalists from the country and spreading false information about the origin of the virus instead of focusing on stopping the virus, which originated in China.

“The Chinese Communist Party’s decision to expel journalists from China and Hong Kong is yet another step toward depriving the Chinese people and the world of access to true information about China,” the NSC said in a statement. “The United States calls on China’s leaders to refocus their efforts from expelling journalists and spreading disinformation to joining all nations in stopping the Wuhan coronavirus.”

The statement from the NSC comes after China announced it would expel American journalists working for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

“It also demanded that those outlets, as well as the Voice of America and Time magazine, provide the Chinese government with detailed information about their operations,” The New York Times reported. “The announcement went on to say that the American journalists now working in mainland China ‘will not be allowed to continue working as journalists in the People’s Republic of China, including its Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions.’ The two territories are semiautonomous and in theory have greater press freedoms than the mainland.”

Rather than admit responsibility, apologize and make restitution, they are responding by throwing out the journalists who criticize them. And you can bet those journalists would be murdered in secret if they were not American citizens. After all, the communist Chinese regime has been credibly accused of a massive organ harvesting operation – including harvesting the organs of living victims as they are being killed:

Last week, the Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China issued its final report concluding that China engages in the systematic human-rights atrocity of killing political and other prisoners and harvesting their organs.

[…]The Judgment convincingly concludes that China is guilty as charged. According to the report, beginning at page 415, there are four methods by which China kills prisoners and harvests their organs.

  1. Organ harvesting from prisoners incompletely executed by shooting;

  2. Organ harvesting from prisoners after lethal injection;

  3. Execution by organ explanation (killing by organ harvesting);

  4. Organ harvesting under the pretext of brain death (taking organs from people not really dead).

The United States is not alone in suffering major economic and public safety consequences because of the decisions of the communist Chinese government. There is even talk of demanding reparations. We are already in a bear market, and there is likely to be a recession because of their suppression of the evidence. And I also think that there is a lesson there for our election in November – this is what people on the secular left always do when they fail to deliver on their promises. They deny responsibility and silence or destroy those who warned them. It’s standard operating procedure for communists. Communism requires atheism. And without God, any immorality you can imagine is possible.

News

UK parents accuse school of secretly brainwashing their child into transgenderism

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Young people seem to like gay marriage more than they like individual liberties
Where do young people get their positive view of LGBT issues?

Last week I blogged about a case from Canada where the teachers and administrators conspired with doctors to get a child onto the transgender track. Here is another case that was just reported on the weekend, this time from the UK. What was shocking to me was that this school is apparently a “free school” – the UK term for a private school.

Here’s the story from the UK Daily Mail:

A school has been accused of secretly allowing a 13-year-old girl to attend ‘radicalising’ mentoring sessions that convinced her that she was transgender.

Ashleigh and Ged Barnett allege that until the one-to-one sessions began last September, their daughter appeared comfortable in her body and showed little interest in transgender issues.

But they say she had changed completely by November, sporting a short haircut and talking about feeling that she was really a boy.

They were confused by the transformation until they met her headteacher to discuss another matter and learned that their daughter had been having weekly sessions with the head of the school’s LGBT group.

[…]‘The teaching assistant also pointed her in the direction of a YouTube website of a trans activist, which featured a video where they showed off their mastectomy scars and told how well the operation had gone.’

The couple said they were furious when they found school staff had let the teenager attend the sessions ‘behind our backs’. 

Mrs Barnett said: ‘The school didn’t think it was fit to tell us. We are her parents, but responsibility to care for our child has been taken away. The attitude is that it’s the child’s choice and it’s got nothing to do with us.

The teachers are very clear that although they are being paid to do a job by parents, they are not going to their job. They deserve to be paid by parents to do whatever they want. Not what parents want. In fact, the schools are in league with organizations on the radicl left, and the teachers and administrators are much more interested in getting the approval of these far-left groups than the parents who pay their salaries.

Mrs Barnett also claimed that the teaching assistant encouraged their daughter to change in a boy’s cubicle and that staff began using a male name for her.

She alleges the teaching assistant had no formal counselling qualifications and only received training from local charity Eikon that provides ‘LGBT+ awareness sessions’ for schools.

In recent email correspondence with the couple, headteacher Jane Davies said she believed their daughter should be left to use the changing facilities she preferred.

‘We will continue to provide a safe environment for [your child], but it is not our place to alert you to how she feels,’ she wrote.

‘It is important that you understand that she is old enough to make her own decisions.’

This is not an unusual attitude for teachers to take about handling the children who are entrusted to them. There was a time in the past when teachers were more humble, and saw themselves as partners with parents. But that went out of fashion way back during the time of progressive President Woodrow Wilson.

He said this:

The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible. By the time a man has grown old enough to have a son in college he has specialized. The university should generalize the treatment of its undergraduates, should struggle to put them in touch with every force of life.

Instead of seeing their purpose a serving parents, they see themselves as masters of the child, and the parents just pay their salaries and feed and clothe the child. The worldview transfer is done by the teachers, because they are the keepers of all wisdom and morality.

Well, as always in these matters, it’s good to look at the studies. So let’s look at a recent one that should help parents to understand transgenderism.

Here’s how the study was first reported by Science Daily:

This month, a Brown University researcher published the first study to empirically describe teens and young adults who did not have symptoms of gender dysphoria during childhood but who were observed by their parents to rapidly develop gender dysphoria symptoms over days, weeks or months during or after puberty.

[…]The study was published on Aug. 16 in PLOS ONE.

Peer pressure / The Internet:

The pattern of clusters of teens in friend groups becoming transgender-identified, the group dynamics of these friend groups and the types of advice viewed online led her to the hypothesis that friends and online sources could spread certain beliefs.

[….]”Of the parents who provided information about their child’s friendship group, about a third responded that more than half of the kids in the friendship group became transgender-identified,” Littman said. “A group with 50 percent of its members becoming transgender-identified represents a rate that is more 70 times the expected prevalence for young adults.”

This article at The Federalist had a few examples to illustrate the conclusion of the study. I’ll pick two.

The study includes other eye-opening information, such as case studies of several children’s stories.

  • “A 14-year-old natal female and three of her natal female friends were taking group lessons together with a very popular coach. The coach came out as transgender, and, within one year, all four students announced they were also transgender.”

  • “A 14-year-old natal female and three of her natal female friends are part of a larger friend group that spends much of their time talking about gender and sexuality. The three natal female friends all announced they were trans boys and chose similar masculine names. After spending time with these three friends, the 14-year-old natal female announced that she was also a trans boy.”

I thought this quote from that article was interesting as well, given the culture’s obsession with “bullying”, which is a nebulous term that can mean actual bullying, or mere disagreement.

The study also may indicate that school “anti-bullying” programs typically created by LGBT activist organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign may help accelerate children identifying as transgender by pushing peers and authority figures to profusely express their support.

Coming out as transgender means instant fame and popularity, because you’re a victim, and everyone has to be nice to you… or else:

“Great increase in popularity among the student body at large. Being trans is a gold star in the eyes of other teens,” wrote one parent on the study response form. Another wrote, “not so much ‘popularity’ increasing as ‘status’ … also she became untouchable in terms of bullying in school as teachers who ignored homophobic bullying …are now all at pains to be hot on the heels of any trans bullying.”

People on the left are always faking hate crimes against themselves or making false rape accusations. Being a victim gets them attention and makes people treat them nicely.

The response from LGBT activists to this study was to claim that it was full of errors, so it was pulled and submitted to rigorous review. You won’t be surprised to find that the second review process found no major errors in the paper.

News

Is the vastness of the universe evidence against God’s existence?

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Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

Physicist Hugh Ross writes about it in Salvo Magazine.

First a quick blurb about Hugh Ross:

Hugh Ross launched his career at age seven when he went to the library to find out why stars are hot. Physics and astronomy captured his curiosity and never let go. At age seventeen he became the youngest person ever to serve as director of observations for Vancouver’s Royal Astronomical Society. With the help of a provincial scholarship and a National Research Council (NRC) of Canada fellowship, he completed his undergraduate degree in physics (University of British Columbia) and graduate degrees in astronomy (University of Toronto). The NRC also sent him to the United States for postdoctoral studies. At Caltech he researched quasi-stellar objects, or “quasars,” some of the most distant and ancient objects in the universe.

Now back to the topic “Is the vastness of the universe incompatible with God’s existence?”

Here’s Ross’ introduction:

Scientists seem more difficult to please than the golden-haired girl of fairy-tale fame. While Goldilocks troubled herself over the just-right porridge, chair, and bed, astronomers appear preoccupied with the size of the universe.

In the days before telescopes, when an observer could count a few thousand stars in the night sky, many considered the universe too small and unimpressive to be the work of an almighty, all-knowing Creator. Only an infinite cosmos, they said, would befit an infinite deity. But then, others argued, an infinite cosmos might eliminate the need for a Creator.

Thanks to the Hubble space telescope, scientists now see that the universe contains roughly 200 billion large- and medium-sized galaxies and about a hundred times as many dwarf galaxies. The stars in those galaxies add up to about fifty billion trillion, and they comprise a mere one percent of the mass of the observable universe.

Because of the travel time of light, the universe humans can observe is really the universe of the past. What researchers know about the expansion and geometry of the universe informs us that the universe of today is at least several hundred times more enormous than the universe we can see. The universe is trillions of trillions of times larger and more spectacular than what the earliest astronomers presumed!

And yet, this new knowledge of the vastness of the universe has led to new complaints. In his book, God: The Failed Hypothesis, Victor Stenger says, “If God created the universe as a special place for humanity, he seems to have wasted an awfully large amount of space.” Stephen Hawking, in the best-selling science book of all time, A Brief History of Time, shares Stenger’s view: “Our solar system certainly is a prerequisite for our existence. . . . But there does not seem to be any need for all these other galaxies.” So now the universe is too big to befit the all-wise, all-powerful God of the Bible.

I like how he quotes an atheist physicist to get the challenge right. No sense in caricaturing the claim of your opponent.

I formalized Stenger’s argument like this:

  1. If all things in the universe are not done the way that Victor Stenger likes them, then there is no God.
  2. All things in the universe were not done the way Victor Stenger likes them.
  3. Therefore, there is no God.

I would deny premise 1, there, since there is no reason to believe that’s it’s true.

Anyway, let’s see what Hugh Ross says:

The hot big bang model (now firmly established by observations) tells us that at the moment of cosmic creation, the universe was infinitely or near-infinitely hot and compressed, and all the ordinary matter existed in the form of hydrogen. As the universe expanded, it cooled. The rate at which the universe expanded and cooled depended in large part on its mass—the greater the mass, the slower the expansion and cooling rate. The slower the expansion and cooling rate, the more time the universe would spend in the temperature range (13–150 million degrees Centigrade) at which nuclear fusion can occur.

Because of its mass, the universe spent about twenty seconds in the nuclear fusion temperature range when it was between three and four minutes old. As a result, 24.77 percent of the universe’s hydrogen (by mass) fused into helium. Thus, when stars began to form—about 380,000 years later—they started off composed of about 75 percent hydrogen, 25 percent helium, and trace amounts of deuterium, lithium, and beryllium.

In the nuclear furnaces of the stars themselves, more hydrogen fused into helium, and, in addition to the extra helium, all the rest of the elements that appear in the periodic table were synthesized (created). The capacity of stellar nuclear furnaces to produce an abundance of elements heavier than helium (all but two of the elements) depended critically on how much of the universe’s initial hydrogen was fused into helium and heavier elements during the first several minutes after the cosmic creation event. How much fusion of the universe’s primordial hydrogen actually occurred at this time depended, in turn, on the universe’s mass or mass density.

If the universe’s mass (or cosmic mass density) had been even the slightest bit less than a hundred times the fifty billion trillion stars occupying the observable universe, nuclear fusion during the first several minutes of its existence would have proceeded less efficiently. Thus, the cosmos would have been forever incapable of generating elements heavier than helium—elements such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sodium, and potassium—all of which are essential for any conceivable kind of physical life.

On the other hand, if the universe’s mass had been even the slightest bit greater, nuclear fusion during the first several minutes after its beginning would have been too productive, and all the hydrogen in the universe eventually would have been fused (after just two generations of stars) into elements as heavy as iron or heavier. Again, all the most life-essential elements, including hydrogen itself, would have ceased to exist.

Basically, your body is made up of heavier elements, and if the universe was not as massive as it is (and as old as it is), then there would not be enough heavy elements to make you, or to make massive stars like our Sun which burn steady for long periods of time. We need the heavy elements and we need the steady source of heat.

Dr. Ross has another reason why God would use vast space and long periods of time, and if you want to read that, you can click here. I think that it’s important for us all to get used to the idea that we all need to understand science apologetics. God put these evidences into the universe for us to discover and use.