Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Life expectancy in the United States last year dropped to its lowest point in a quarter century, and it’s not all because of Covid.

Last year saw a 5% decline in life expectancy for Americans, dropping to under 77 years of age.

And while some experts want to try to tie the drop to Covid-19, the numbers reveal that there’s much more at work here than people being killed by the China Virus. There’s another epidemic that is killing Americans at an alarming rate: The Opioid Epidemic.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Covid-19 was the third-leading cause of death for a second consecutive year in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday, and a rising number of drug-overdose deaths also dragged down life expectancy. Overdose deaths have risen fivefold over the past two decades.

The death rate for the U.S. population increased by 5%, cutting life expectancy at birth to 76.4 years in 2021 from 77 years in 2020. The CDC in August released preliminary estimates demonstrating a similar decline. Before the pandemic, in 2019, life expectancy at birth in the U.S. was 78.8 years. The decline in 2020 was the largest since World War II.

While the drop coincides with the Covid pandemic, the increased numbers aren’t caused by the disease alone.

The leading cause of death in the US is still heart disease and cancer.

Then there’s the opioid epidemic.

The country during the pandemic has recorded more than 1.2 million excess deaths, which is a measure of all deaths beyond prior-year averages and can represent both undercounted Covid-19 deaths and collateral damage from other causes, including more overdoses. The CDC put the final count for 2021 overdose deaths at about 106,700, a record that is 16% higher than the prior year. The final count differs from a preliminary count for last year that topped 108,000 because the CDC in its final counts doesn’t include overdose deaths that occurred among non-U. S. residents.

Opioid deaths increased because of lockdowns.

People locked in their homes are more likely to have heart disease.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of people missed cancer screenings and got lesser treatment thanks to lockdowns.

As we covered here at NTB recently, the excess deaths we are seeing aren’t because of Covid, but the lockdowns.

n August of this year, I reported that Moderna is suing Pfizer and BioNTech for infringing patents that are key to Moderna’s mRNA technology platform that was used to develop the covid vaccine.

In response, Pfizer has now countersued Moderna.

The ongoing legal battle now sees Pfizer and its partner BioNTech reject its rival’s claims it copied the shot.

Pfizer has accused Moderna of rewriting history, and dubbed its lawsuit ‘revisionist history’.

Manhattan-based Pfizer requested from a federal court in Boston that Moderna’s lawsuit be dismissed.

Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, fired back at Moderna on Monday in a patent lawsuit over their rival Covid-19 vaccines.

They are seeking dismissal of the lawsuit in Boston federal court and an order that Moderna’s patents are invalid and not infringed.

We need effective biotech companies that are not infected by politics or social justice. Unfortunately, those don’t appear to be the companies we have.

Pfizer asserts their vaccine technology was arrived at through independent research.

Everything you need to know about the motives and methods of the 21st-century Left can be learned from studying 20th-century Communism. What Mises said about Marx and Engels, and the ad hominem quality of their rhetoric — slander and insults, rather than actual arguments — was even more true of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, et al. Having once seized power, the Bolsheviks immediately proceeded to suppress all potential rivals. Within a month, they established the Cheka (predecessor of the NKVD and, later, the KGB) and appointed Felix Dzerzhinsky as its leader. Eight months later, the Red Terror began in earnest, and within a matter of weeks, the Bolsheviks had summarily executed more victims than were sentenced to death in the entire preceding century by the Tzarist regime

Snip.

The other day I wrote a piece about how the Left can’t argue anymore. My thesis was pretty simple: because they have owned the cultural means of production so long they have lost the need for or ability to argue things logically.

I still believe that. Having rarely been exposed to a conservative argument that [they] haven’t been able to dismiss merely through repeated ridicule the Left pretty much only engages in ad hominem attacks. Even very smart prominent Lefties . . . seem incapable of doing much more than insulting their opponents any more. It all boils down to Bad Orange Man or MAGA simps. . . .

But I ran into a slightly different perspective on the matter while cruising Twitter, and I think it deserves consideration: sometimes, at least, the person throwing out an absurd take isn’t actually hoping to convince you of anything. They are, rather, trying to discredit the source and do nothing more. The ad hominem attack is the only point — to destroy the credibility of their opponent, without actually convincing you of any particular argument.

Thus the need to label anything that refutes The Narrative as “disinformation.”

State Rep. Brian Harrison (R-Midlothian) filed proposed legislation to prohibit state tax dollars from being used to pay for gender modification procedures.

House Bill 1029 states, “No funds authorized or appropriated by State law shall be expended for any gender reassignment.”

“Just as the Hyde Amendment, which has enjoyed bipartisan support for almost 50 years, bans tax dollars from funding abortions, I’m proud to file a bill which protects Texans from being forced to pay for their neighbor’s sex change,” Harrison said in a statement. “Irrespective of how anyone views these procedures, it should be uncontroversial that tax money should not fund them.”

Harrison added that the bill was filed in response to a statement made by President Biden’s Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra that public money should be used to provide these procedures to those who want them.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, directed her state Department of Health to terminate a contract with The Transformation Project, a transgender activist group that is hosting a “Gender Identity Summit” next month, after The Daily Signal drew the governor’s attention to the summit and the group.

“Gov. Kristi Noem is reviewing all Department of Health contracts and immediately terminated a contract with The Transformation Project,” Ian Fury, Noem’s chief of communications, told The Daily Signal on Friday. “The contract was signed without Gov. Noem’s prior knowledge or approval.”

Fury sent The Daily Signal a copy of the document dissolving the state contract.

“South Dakota does not support this organization’s efforts, and state government should not be participating in them,” Noem told The Daily Signal in a statement provided by Fury. “We should not be dividing our youth with radical ideologies. We should treat every single individual equally as a human being.”

Fury said that The Transformation Project had not complied with its state contract. The organization had failed “to submit required quarterly reports for two consecutive quarters,” among other violations.

All funding to any radical social justice group should be cut, and the people responsible for funding them fired for cause.

(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

The very progressive and liberal nation of Sweden is showing that they still have at least a little bit of common sense in health leadership.

Sweden has decided to cut ties with WPATH, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health because they’re a bunch of activists.

Swedish health authorities have officially broken ranks with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) with the announcement that gender clinics will no longer be attempting to perform experimental sex changes on under-18s but will instead offer “psychological support to help youth live with the healthy body they were born with.”

According to an article published in the Swedish medical journal Läkartidningen, new guidelines will be published before the end of the year advising against puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery for under 18s. This is in direct contrast with the WPATH Standards of Care 8 (SOC8) released earlier this year which advises affirmation and medical intervention as the first line of treatment for gender-confused minors.

Sweden is rejecting these recommendations because it’s clearly an extreme measure to do sex change operations on minors.

However, the Biden admin has told us that they’re totally on board with the radical recommendations.

Despite surpassing her 2018 fundraising record, Stacey Abrams’s 2022 Georgia gubernatorial campaign fell into deep debt due to reckless expenditures, according to staffers and operatives who worked on the failed campaign.

The campaign still owes more than $1 million to vendors, Abrams campaign manager Lauren Groh-Wargo confirmed to Axios.

Some of the campaign’s lavish expenditures included the rental of a home near Piedmont Park in Atlanta, which Abrams envisioned as a “hype house” for TikTok videos but which was ultimately underutilized, staffers told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Some aides occupied the empty large house as a work space. It can now be rented for $12,500 a month, the publication noted.

The campaign’s youth outreach strategy also proved pricey. Against the better judgement of many staffers, who found the idea irresponsible, Abrams launched a pop-up shop and “swag truck” to hand out merchandise, such as T-shirts and hoodies.

Abrams burned through cash on polls that ended up being inconsequential and consultants whose contributions were unclear, staffers also said.

Many employees in the campaign were given generous salaries compared to other candidates’ teams. For example, the campaign advertised paid canvasser jobs at $15 an hour, higher than the typical rate, according to a Georgia Tech blog discovered by the Journal-Constitution.

Benefitting from glossy, identity-focused coverage, Abrams brought in nearly $98 million as of early November. Yet, her campaign nearly ran out of money in the final stretch. Most of the 180 full-time staffers who worked for her were told they’d receive their last paycheck just a week after Election Day, according to Axios.

YouTube has banned the official Pornhub account, which boasted more than 900,000 followers, after repeated violations.

The platform’s move comes in the wake of other Big Tech companies, like Meta/Instagram and TikTok, removing such accounts. Other corporations, like Visa, Mastercard, Roku, Comcast, Unilever, Kraft-Heinz, and PayPal, have also cut ties with Pornhub.

“Upon review, we terminated the channel Pornhub Official following multiple violations of our Community Guidelines,” YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon said, according to Variety. “We enforce our policies equally for everyone, and channels that repeatedly violate or are dedicated to violative content are terminated.”

MindGeek, Pornhub’s parent company, has been hit with multiple lawsuits from survivors of child sex trafficking who claim videos of their abuse were platformed on the pornographic site.

A ban on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices within institutions of higher education has been filed in the Texas House.

State Representative-elect Carl Tepper (R-Lubbock) filed House Bill (HB) 1006 that requires higher education institutions in Texas to “foster a diversity of viewpoints [and] maintain political, social, and cultural neutrality.”

The teeth of the bill command these universities to “demonstrate a commitment to intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” by eliminating DEI offices or anything like them “beyond what is necessary to uphold the equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

It also allows anyone to bring forth civil action against an entity for violation of the prohibition, something Tepper confirmed was modeled after a similar mechanism within the Texas Heartbeat Act.

Additionally, the definition of “expressive activities” protected under state law is expanded to include “published or unpublished faculty research, lectures, writings, and commentary.”

Tepper told The Texan, “These offices have been out of control for a while now and people are getting really frustrated with them.”

Faster, please.