Parasite From Cat Litter May Give You Personality Disorders, Schizophrenia, More

You may want to maintain a clean space around your cat. Researchers have found that a parasite commonly found in cat litter, farm animals and undercooked meat could cause changes in the brain, leading to sudden mood disorders, seizures and schizophrenia.

The new study, published in GLIA, shows the effects of a Toxoplasma gondii parasite on the brain’s inhibitory neurons. These important neurons help regulate the flow of ions, which if disrupted could cause different brain disorders.

Researchers at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC in Virginia found that the microscopic parasites could get inside the neurons and cause signaling errors. The disrupted signaling then contributes to schizophrenia, seizures, personality and mood disorders and vision changes.

Up to 40 million people in the U.S. are exposed to the Toxoplasma parasite, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The agency said the parasitic infection commonly causes unnoticeable or flu-like symptoms in healthy people.

However, chronic infection may have serious effects. The study shows that the parasite could build microscopic cysts inside neurons in some people. (Read more from “Parasite From Cat Litter May Give You Personality Disorders, Schizophrenia, More” HERE)

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Comrade Fauci and Field Marshall Birx – the New High Priests of Scientism

April 7, 2020 – San Francisco, CA – PipeLineNews.org – Nothing floats the boat of autocrats more reliably than statistics. This is so because it lends bureaucrats a pretext to speak with a kind of religious authority which would ordinarily be denied them.

We in the West live in an automated, technocratic culture where decisions of all kinds are made according to the vagaries of “big data.” Mathematical in nature, such things as regression analysis and other kinds advanced methods are used to arrive at models that for many, implicitly carry the seal of “certifiably true.”

This method or technique is very handy, for example in manufacturing where it allows corporations to control the overall process in as lean, efficient and profitable a manner as possible.

For example, the United States automobile industry in order to remain economically viable, must bring together at the point of manufacture literally tens of thousands of components and processes. This need be done in order to keep production lines running at a rate consistent with demand. Lacking even the smallest part needed to assemble the final whole, stops the process cold, a reality very much consistent with the ancient proverb, “for want of a nail…the battle was lost, all for the loss of a horse-shoe nail.”

Command of huge amounts of viable data allows manufacturers to keep inventories as low as possible, so that much needed capital isn’t tied up in components [often financed] that in themselves are non-profitable while sitting on shelves. In Detroit [a metaphor, the automobile industry being widely dispersed across the globe] inventories are often kept at a level which will last for only 4 hours! This means that during an 8-hour-shift, entire inventories will be turned twice, supplies arriving no faster than they are consumed – a process that accountants call “just-in-time.”

But producing goods is vastly different from using these same processes to lend an air of empirical truth or veracity to decisions which may well affect the life or death of individual citizens. This process can be seen as a sort of philosophical triage where the well-being of each citizen in contrasted against the amorphous concept – the public good.

The consequences of running out of engine mounts at Chevrolet’s Bowling Green Corvette assembly line shuts things down right now, lost profit and angry customers results. But once the inventory of mounts returns to the proper calculated level, production returns, profits flow and hot-rodders get to do burnouts.

However the consequences of making poor choices within the realm of social/people issues simply because they are supported by assumedly correct empirical data can be disastrous, as we are now witnessing in the health-care field. Nearly every day for the last month Americans have been treated to the Fauci/Birx amateur hour where two individuals – each a highly intelligent medical doctor – have been ceded control of the world’s largest and most important economy, the one that drives the welfare of billions.

This is a planned result; it is happening because the West’s cultural leaders have been deluded in welcoming empiricism into the very difficult process of reasoning we use to think about and make ethical and moral choices.

Much of the impetus behind this process can be traced to the philosophical trends of the last two hundred years ago, certainly from Kant and Hegel onward through Marx and Nietzsche whereby the ethical concepts of truth, good and evil have been destroyed, dismissed as being non-cognitive principles, incapable of producing knowledge.

God is dead – we killed Him.

Yes or no, on or off, the binary 1 or 0, that now largely reckons our world. In a vast number of areas we have become slaves to scientism, the elevation of the scientific method to the level of a religion.

As a consequence, we have come to rely on data to make the types of choices with which agencies of the federal government have been empowered. But data is a funny thing, it can and does come from a multiplicity of sources and to say that input always and conclusively represents this or that is to delude ourselves into thinking that the grand entirety of our world can be reduced to formal models based upon mathematics.

The reality of this is that the nature of these things is entirely subjective, but we remain awestruck by the notion of quantifiability, we over-value that which is called science which is why many of us are now hanging on the every word of two very bright but entirely fallible doctors.

In science, the process often proceeds from observation to hypothesis to predictive results and then confirmation or negation, again by observation. If confirmed we have a theory – a pretty good idea of how things work – but what if the process goes awry, the data set is wrong, and the supposed confirmatory evidence is therefore tainted or incomplete?

Then we would be forcing the proverbial square peg into the round hole, we will demand that reality comport with a faulty model.

This is exactly what Fauci and Birx are now doing. Their predictions in no way represent medical reality here in the United States. Taking the above approach they hypothesized, from limited and tainted data and thought it confirmed their theory.

But the problem is that at every turn it is now clear that neither of these authority figures have a real grasp of the dynamics of the engineered ChiCom virus, yet they refuse to admit they were wrong.

Can anyone forget these two telling the American people that this flu was so deadly that 1-2 million of us would die? But that didn’t take place, so estimates were reduced tenfold, still 1-200,000 deaths would be a nightmare, but it too didn’t happen.

This writer right now has no idea as to what kind of pseudo-science is driving the numbers, though it seems that the ChiCom virus will kill about the same number of people who normally die of the “common” flu.

We are now faced with an opportunity to re-evaluate this entire approach. You cannot close the arsenal of the free world on the strength of predictions made by now entirely discredited individuals – this includes the ChiCom tool who now runs the UN’s World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a Third Worlder who is not a medical doctor [Ed: Third Worlder not being a pejorative, but the fact is that a people who are still dealing with malaria cannot be reasonably expected to manage something as complex as world, health, few are ].

During George W. Bush last term he ordered a review process whereby the United States would be better prepared to deal with pandemics, which are always just around the corner. But where was Fauci, where was Birx, where is the standing emergency response infrastructure, the stored surgical masks, ventilators and quick reaction/triage teams which would have been primed to deal with flu viruses had the directive been followed as envisioned? [ED – GW Bush wanted all of this done because his public health team was concerned about the possibility of an enemy using smallpox as a bio-weapon. His team actually war-gamed this possibility, see William Mayer, Obama, GW Bush, WMDs and CDC’s Response to Ebola – U.S. Wide Open For Asymmetrical Warfare On A Horrific Scale and determined that the US was wide-open to attack and that a significant small pox attack would destroy the fabric of America in 30 days!! The 2001 “Dark Winter – Bioterrorism Simulation Exercise,” was created by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC and the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies.]

Given the demonstrated need to establish systems to deal with the existential threat of biologically bases asymmetrical warfare, the lack of preparedness in dealing with a comparatively simple virus breakout like Wuhan is confirmatory evidence proving that the United States public health system is just another irresponsibly run bureaucracy, albeit one that can run rogue and trash the global economy.

Marxism drives the entire process of which the response mechanism to ChiCom flu is part. But that ideology no longer is what it purported to be mid-19 th century, history does not motivate events, the proletarian revolution has and never will materialize, capitalism will not bring forth the collectivist state and the labor theory of value is childish.

Instead the brightest of these people have moved wholesale to the theories that have come out of Germany’s Frankfurt School/Institute for Social Research, which primarily consists of a concept called critical theory that holds that it is the empirical approach that should dominate the philosophical content of our politics. More dangerously, Critical Theory is inherently and mandatorily destructive because it is radically revolutionary. The application of the technique [Ideologiekritik in the original German] to the West is toxic, its first thesis being:

“Radical criticism of society and criticism of its dominant ideology are inseparable; the ultimate goal of all social research should be the elaboration of a critical theory of society of which Ideologiekritik would be an integral part.” – Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory – Habermas & the Frankfurt School, pg. 26, Cambridge University Press]

This neo-Marxism is informed by not only Critical Theory, but Intersectionality. The two combine to offer a reductionist approach to deconstructing Western political theory and the civilization which has embraced it.

We should never again allow government doctors [Fauci and Birx] the power to rule this country by edict and fiat. Both Fauci and Birx made their wild prediction of millions of deaths relying upon irrelevant and incomplete data such as the mortality figures coming from the practitioners of socialized medicine in China, Italy and Spain. When they were proven wrong they simply revised their estimates until those too were found wanting in the extreme.

What is going on here is that the data is being judged outside of the manner in which it is employed. Sure the fright-wig scare mongering is irresponsible, but few are using the opportunity to attack the method whereby it was produced. We do not ever again want to see proven failures guiding policy at this level. One hopes that after these dark days pass that Fauci, Birx and WHO’s Tedros Adhanom, are banished from the world of public health, but government is never accountable so they will most likely fail upwards.

It’s the nature of such things after all. (For more from the author of “Comrade Fauci and Field Marshall Birx – the New High Priests of Scientism” please click HERE)

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©2020 PipeLineNews.org LLC, William Mayer. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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France Struggles With ‘Chilling’ COVID-19 Data From Nursing Homes; Italy Considers How to Move on After Coronavirus Peak

By Politico. Even though older people are most at risk of developing COVID-19, French health authorities have struggled to get data on the spread of the coronavirus from a key source: nursing homes.

Weeks into the epidemic and shortly after a new reporting system was implemented, health officials raised concerns with Prime Minister Edouard Philippe’s office about the difficulties they face with private care facilities for the elderly, according to internal emails seen by POLITICO.

At least 3,237 people have died from COVID-19 in the country’s nursing homes since early March, according to the most recent official statistics published Tuesday. That was an increase of 820 from the day before and brings France’s death toll to over 10,000. . .

The number of deaths in nursing homes is “objectively chilling,” said Benoît Ribadeau-Dumas, the prime minister’s head of Cabinet, in an email dated Sunday to Aurélien Rousseau, head of the Regional Health Agency (ARS) for the Paris region. (Read more from “France Struggles With ‘Chilling’ COVID-19 Data From Nursing Homes” HERE)

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Phase Two: Italy Considers How to Move on After Coronavirus Peak

By Al Jazeera. Nearly a month after a nationwide lockdown was implemented to prevent the spread of the virus that was ravaging through Italy’s north, there are government discussions and public debate about moving to “phase two” – a period during which citizens will have to learn to live with the virus and one which could risk another outbreak.

Italy is in the unfortunate position of being two to three weeks ahead of other European countries in fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

While figures suggest that the measures have achieved some level of success in slowing the rate of infection, it is likely they will remain in place over the coming Easter period, usually a time for gathering and celebration. . .

The Italian civil protection agency said the number of new infections had begun to decrease. But the daily recorded death toll remains high, 604 on Tuesday.

“Comforting data include the number of people who are admitted to hospital, which gives us a more accurate indication of how the epidemic is evolving compared with other data,” Matteo Villa, who has been crunching statistics for the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, told Al Jazeera. (Read more from “Phase Two: Italy Considers How to Move on After Coronavirus Peak” HERE)

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Alaska Halts Abortions Due to COVID-19

. . .On Tuesday, the state issued an update to a mandate released last month that required non-urgent or elective procedures be canceled or postponed for three months. The update states the intent is to preserve personal protective gear for health care workers and patient care supplies, ensure staff and patient safety and expand available hospital capacity in the midst of dealing with COVID-19.

The update was accompanied by a list of surgeries or procedures that would be considered non-urgent or elective. Under a section for gynecological procedures that “could be delayed for a few weeks,” it lists surgical abortion.

It says healthcare providers “are to postpone surgical abortion procedures unless the life or physical health of the mother is endangered by continuation of the pregnancy during the period of postponement.” The language leaves room for “professional judgment” on the timeframe, state health Commissioner Adam Crum said Tuesday. (Read more from “Alaska Halts Abortions Due to COVID-19” HERE)

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Bill Gates: This Is How Long It May Take Before Americans ‘Can Be Completely Safe’ From COVID-19

It might not be until fall 2021 that Americans “can be completely safe” from COVID-19, Bill Gates said in a Tuesday interview with Judy Woodruff on PBS Newshour.

That’s because it will take more than a year before a vaccine can be developed and deployed, according to researchers working to develop a treatment for COVID-19.

“The vaccine is critical, because, until you have that, things aren’t really going to be normal,” the billionaire philanthropist told Woodruff. “They can open up to some degree, but the risk of a rebound will be there until we have very broad vaccination.”

Social distancing is helping to lower the number of COVID-19 cases. The goal, Gates explained, is to get that number down to a point where “contact tracing” (a process in which those within close contact with an infected person are closely monitored) can be done, in order to maintain necessary quarantines.

To understand what life in the U.S. will look like six to 12 months from now, Gates suggested China as a good model. “They are sending people back to work, but they’re wearing masks. They’re checking temperatures. They’re not doing large sporting events. And so they have been able to avoid a large rebound,” he said. (Read more from “Bill Gates: This Is How Long It May Take Before Americans ‘Can Be Completely Safe’ From COVID-19” HERE)

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White House Working on Plan to Cut Aid to WHO

By NBC News. The White House’s Office of Management and Budget is working on a possible plan to cut U.S. aid to the World Health Organization, administration officials said Wednesday, as President Donald Trump tries to deflect blame for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Administration officials said they also plan to look into the timeline of the WHO’s reaction to the coronavirus after it first appeared in China, as well as “links” to China.

“What the WHO knew and how it reacted to that knowledge is relevant to the U.S. government’s response to the crisis,” a senior administration official said. (Read more from “White House Working on Plan to Cut Aid to WHO” HERE)

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Trump Escalates Tension With World Health Organization Over Coronavirus Pandemic, Repeats Threat to Withhold Funding

By CNBC. U.S. President Donald Trump escalated tension with the World Health Organization on Wednesday, once again criticizing the agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and threatening to withhold funding.

“So we’re going to do a study, an investigation, and we’re going to make a determination as to what we’re doing. In the meantime, we’re holding back,” Trump said at a White House press conference Wednesday. It was not immediately clear from the president’s comment if he was “holding back” on the funding or probe of the WHO.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the administration is reevaluating the WHO’s funding, adding that the United Nation’s health organization hasn’t “achieved what it intended to do,” particularly in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Organizations have to work. They have to deliver the outcomes for which they were intended,” Pompeo said. “We need to make sure that, not only the World Health Organization but every international organization that we take taxpayer money and give it to them for the benefit of America, we need to make sure it’s delivering on those tax payer dollars.” (Read more from “Trump Escalates Tension With World Health Organization Over Coronavirus Pandemic, Repeats Threat to Withhold Funding” HERE)

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Bernie Sanders Drops out of 2020 Race

Sen. Bernie Sanders ended his presidential campaign, he announced on Wednesday, leaving former Vice President Joe Biden as the apparent Democratic presidential nominee.

“I have concluded that this battle for the Democratic nomination will not be successful, and so today I am announcing the suspension of my campaign,” Sanders told supporters in a livestream, saying he wished he could provide supporters with “better news” but “I think you know the truth.”

“We are now some 300 delegates behind Vice President Biden and the path to victory is virtually impossible,” he said. Sanders, I-Vt., called Biden “a very decent man who I will work with to move our progressive ideas forward.” . . .

He added that he understands some supporters who want him to fight on through the convention, but he could not “in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win and would interfere with the important work required of all of us in this difficult hour” as the COVID-19 outbreak grips the nation.

He pledged to have significant influence over the party platform this summer, as he did during the 2016 convention. He pointed to policies like a $15 minimum wage, which has been picked up in some states and cities since he first began campaigning for it at the presidential level five years ago, as evidence that his progressive platform is winning. (Read more from “Bernie Sanders Drops out of 2020 Race” HERE)

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Fake Cops Are Stopping Drivers for Violating Stay-At-Home Orders

Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams shakes his head in confusion: Somewhere out in his county, a guy with flashing lights on his Dodge Charger has been stopping drivers and warning them they’re violating coronavirus-related travel restrictions.

Whoever is stopping the cars isn’t one of Ream’s deputies. Instead, the police impersonator is himself breaking the law and putting himself at extreme risk, because traffic stops are among the most dangerous things most law enforcement officers do. The stops happened several times in March. . .

Reams is not alone. Authorities have reported police impersonators making coronavirus-related stops in Georgia and California, among others. While there are always some people, almost always men, who like to pretend they’re cops, the coronavirus outbreak seems to have emboldened an unusual number of them, particularly in Northern Colorado. . .

And he isn’t the only one. An apparently different group of imposters conducted an even more elaborate checkpoint in Greeley, the capital city of Weld County, around the same time, funneling drivers into a corral where men with unmarked black uniforms and dash-mounted flashing lights questioned them about violating travel restrictions, police said. Like other states, Colorado’s stay-at-home order permits essential travel, including trips to work. . .

In Georgia’s Dawson and Hall counties, a man driving a dark sedan with flashing blue lights in its windshield area stopped several drivers late last month to “enforce a curfew,” the Dawson County Sheriff’s office said. In California, authorities are investigating a man they say pretended to be a cop and falsely said on Facebook that officers from El Centro, a small city near the U.S.-Mexico border, were enforcing a quarantine against three families. (Read more from “Fake Cops Are Stopping Drivers for Violating Stay-At-Home Orders” HERE)

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FCC Makes Decision on Investigating Networks Airing Trump’s Coronavirus Briefings

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai dismissed a petition for the agency to investigate news networks that air President Donald Trump’s press briefings on coronavirus.

The independent government agency slapped down a request from advocacy group Free Press because press freedoms are too important, Pai said in a tweet Monday announcing the decision. The tweet included screenshot of a press statement addressing the petition. . .

Pai’s tweet and press statement comes after Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan demanded Saturday that news networks stop live-broadcasting Trump’s near-daily coronavirus briefings.

“The media must stop live-broadcasting Trump’s dangerous, destructive coronavirus briefings,” Sullivan tweeted along with her column explaining why. (Read more from “FCC Makes Decision on Investigating Networks Airing Trump’s Coronavirus Briefings” HERE)

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CDC May Loosen Guidelines Thanks to This Game-Changing Update

By WND. A key model used by the White House Coronavirus Task Force lowered its projection of coronavirus deaths in the United States by 25% in an assessment issued Wednesday.

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation now forecasts 60,415 deaths, down from 81,766 in its previous report.

IHME’s director, director Christopher Murray, explained in a press release issued Sunday that this institute’s estimates “assume statewide social distancing measures are continuing in states where they have already been enacted, and for those states without such measures in place, it is assumed they will be will be in place within seven days.” . . .

The lowered projection comes as the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers loosening its guidelines for self-isolation. (Read more from “CDC May Loosen Guidelines Thanks to This Game-Changing Update” HERE)

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Feds Loosen Virus Rules to Let Essential Workers Return

By AP News. In a first, small step toward reopening the country, the Trump administration issued new guidelines Wednesday to make it easier for essential workers who have been exposed to COVID-19 to get back to work if they do not have symptoms of the coronavirus.

Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced at the White House that essential employees, such as health care and food supply workers, who have been within 6 feet of a confirmed or suspected case of the virus can return to work under certain circumstances if they are not experiencing symptoms.

The new guidelines are being issued as the nation mourns more than 14,000 deaths from the virus and grapples with a devastated economy and medical crises from coast to coast. Health experts continue to caution Americans to practice social distancing and to avoid returning to their normal activities. At the same time, though, they are planning for a time when the most serious threat from COVID-19 will be in the country’s rear-view mirror. (Read more from “Feds Loosen Virus Rules to Let Essential Workers Return” HERE)

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