Tag Archives: #RightToPrivacy

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I told you so!

I really do love being proved right!

I had previously said that school districts which kept students “gender transitions” secret from their parents will have opened the districts to humongous lawsuits.

More parents claim Colorado school district forced children into overnight rooms with students of opposite sex

Multiple parents claim their child was forced to stay in overnight accommodations with transgender students.

By Kendall Tietz, Fox News | Monday, January 15, 2024 | 9:00 AM EST

More parents have come forward with claims that children in a Colorado school district were forced into sharing overnight rooms, even showers, with students of the opposite sex.

For whatever reasons they have, Fox News is now requiring readers to provide their email addresses to see the articles. If you want to check the original I used, you can access it here without going through more idiocy. Continue reading →

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The abomination of ‘red flag’ laws It's OK if we suspend your constitutional rights for just a little while, right?

Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA), who will be leaving office at the end of the year, tweeted out a nice little graphic of what happens under the so-called “red flag” laws. Due process of law, he tells us, is part of it.

But look at the graphic.

Jane’s social media contact, Randy, posts photos of guns & cryptic messages.

Followed by:

Jane calls the police to report the posts.

What does “cryptic” mean?

adjective Also cryp·ti·cal.

  1. mysterious in meaning; puzzling; ambiguous: a cryptic message.
  2. abrupt; terse; short:
  3. a cryptic note. secret; occult:
  4. a cryptic writing. involving or using cipher, code, etc.

So, if Jane simply doesn’t understand Randy’s message, Governor Wolf wants her to call the cops!

Then follow the next steps:

The police petition in court to temporarily remove Randy’s guns.

Police provide evidence that Randy is a danger to himself/others.

The court agrees to a temporary removal of Randy’s weapons.

You know what you don’t see in there? You don’t see any notification to Randy, and presumably Randy’s attorney, that he is under investigation to see if he “is a danger to himself/others,” because, just like any search warrant, the court and the police do not want the subject of the warrant to know the police are coming to enter his home and seize evidence. Due to Jane’s puzzlement over Randy’s message, the police show up, enter his home, possibly forcibly, and seize his property, all without Randy having had a chance to defend himself before the court.

Now, up to this point, Randy has committed no crime! Rather, because Jane is worried about him, she has sicced the cops on him, and don’t fool yourself: while police officers are normally more politically conservative than liberal, there’s nothing the police, or at least police chiefs, like more than a disarmed public. As they view Jane’s complaint, if they are going to err, they are more likely to err on the side of wanting Randy’s guns removed.

There’s even an incentive there: if they don’t try to have Randy’s firearms taken away, and it turns out that he does commit a crime, or even suicide, with his weapons, and it comes out that the police had Jane’s complaint and didn’t try to take Randy’s guns, they, or their city or jurisdiction, could be held liable in a civil suit. But Jane, doubtlessly, will be shielded from legal action for calling in a genuine concern, and I can see the red flag laws the left want passed keeping her identity confidential.

The police are not the only ones who do not like an armed citizenry; prosecutors don’t care for it much, either, so persuading the prosecutor or city attorney or whomever needs to petition the judge for the removal order might not be difficult. Judges, though not liable for the consequences of their decisions, might well feel their own internal pressure to prevent a tragedy.

So, what’s missing in all of this? As Jane, and the police, and the city attorneys, and the judges, several people, are all at least somewhat motivated by the idea that they could prevent a tragedy, there’s no one involved to protect Randy’s rights.

Enter Jeff Goldstein, and Robert Stacy McCain’s story on his problems:

Crazy People Are Dangerous (and the Problem With ‘Red Flag’ Laws)

Saturday, June 18, 2022

You haven’t forgotten Deb Frisch, have you? In October 2018, Frisch — whose harassment of Protein Wisdom blogger Jeff Goldstein lasted a dozen years — was finally sentenced to four years in a Colorado prison. When last we heard about her, in August 2021, she had been denied parole after ranting insanely at her parole board hearing.

This morning, I noticed I’d gotten some extra traffic to one of my posts about Frisch, and investigation led to Not The Bee: If you need a reason to oppose“red flag” gun laws, this writer’s harrowing 12-year tale of terrifying stalking and harassment might just do the trick.

To cut a long story short, the lovely Miss Frisch became obsessed with Mr Goldstein for some insane reason or other, and when things didn’t go the way she wanted, she started attacking, online, of course, not physically, Mr Goldstein and his family, in particular his then two-year-old son. Miss Frisch made baseless accusations that Mr Goldstein was molesting his son, all of which had to get the attention of local law enforcement; allegations of child sexual abuse are always things which trigger law enforcement investigations.

Mr McCain concluded:

The way our legal system operates — the built-in prejudices of courts, based on decades of precedents intended to “protect” the rights of the mentally ill — it is very difficult to get a dangerously deranged person locked up. Whenever a mentally ill person commits an atrocity (or gets shot by the cops), you’ll see commentators saying that this shows problems with our nation’s mental health system, when in fact it was liberal judges in the 1970s and ’80s who decided it should be nearly impossible to keep crazy people locked up in lunatic asylums, where they belong. These same judges, however, will probably be willing to sign “red flag” orders based on unproven claims, without due process for those targeted by such orders.

According to Governor Wolf, the gun owners do receive due process, even though they don’t get any chance to defend themselves until after their homes have already been invaded by the police and their legally-owned firearms seized, all on the word of someone who doesn’t like a “cryptic” message.

Now, there’s a difference between Jane, who thought Randy’s social media posting had a “cryptic” message, and Miss Frisch, who accused Mr Goldstein of child sexual abuse, but the result is the same: without any actual evidence of a crime beyond someone’s stated ‘concern,’ both “Randy” and Mr Goldstein had to defend themselves through the legal system, costing them expensive attorney’s fees — Mr Goldstein specifically mentioned that he’d had attorneys — to regain their weapons. The fictional Jane in Governor Wolf’s tweet might have had motives as pure as the wind-driven snow, but Miss Frisch’s were wholly malevolent, and (seemingly) driven by obsession and mental illness.

But the police and the courts have no choice but to take allegations of child sexual abuse seriously, and the same will be true of “red flag” law accusations. How can anyone know, prior to an investigation, whether the accuser or ‘tipster’ is being either deliberately fraudulent or simply concerned, but they’ll have to act.

It could be an estranged husband or wife, trying to gain leverage in child custody or support. It could be someone who can’t stand the thought of Bambi getting killed who calls the cops on a guy just before deer season. It could be one gang trying to get another gang disarmed. Or it really could be a concerned citizen who believes he has seen something of legitimate concern. The trouble is that you can never know unless the police actually investigate, and that means records and trouble and quite possibly a suspension of his constitutional rights for an innocent civilian, along with possible attorney’s fees.

The real secret is actual law enforcement. Remember Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people and wounded 17 others in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting? There were continual warnings about him, and at least 23 incidents where the Broward County Sheriff’s Department had calls about him, but nothing was done. Had the Sheriff’s deputies done something really radical like arrested him and charged him with crimes, he could have been convicted, and barred from buying a weapon. The Broward County schools knew of his behavioral problems, transferred him from school-to-school, but, in an effort to keep him out of the so-called ‘school-to-prison pipeline,’ did not notify law enforcement when he assaulted another student.

If law enforcement had done their job, Mr Cruz would not have been able to buy, legally, the weapons he did. If the school district had done their jobs, he would have been reported to law enforcement in a manner which could not be ignored.

So, because the people who are charged, under the law, with notifying law enforcement about someone like Mr Cruz haven’t been doing their jobs, Governor Wolf and the left want ordinary citizens like the fictitious “Jane” to do the job, and to create a system where Jane’s speculation and word have legal weight. After all, it’s for people’s safety, right?

Well, there are a lot of constitutional rights which could be ignored, to improve public safety! We could do away with the need to prove guilt, and just imprison, or execute, anyone we just “knew” was a bad guy. We could suspend the rights of free speech and free association, to keep the bad guys apart. Given that half the country seemed to think that the right of free association and assembly could be suspended over COVID-19, and a bunch of state governors got away with it, well surely that right isn’t really important, right?

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” It seems that a whole lot of Americans have decided that they deserve neither liberty nor safety.

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Ihre Papiere, bitte!

As we have previously noted, with the HITECH Act pushing making medical records electronic and transferable — with appropriate precautions, of course! — we already have records in place which the government could search to see who has admitted to having firearms at home. If you think that the government is not interested in your medical records, and would never actually check them, think again. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

A digital COVID vaccination record is coming in Philly, but is there a need?

A digital vaccination card is coming to Philly, but not many places are asking for the record any more.

by Kasturi Pananjady and Jason Laughlin | Friday, May 27, 2022 | 9:09 AM EDT

Philadelphia is pushing ahead with an effort to issue digital vaccine cards to residents, though businesses and health experts say they may be irrelevant at this stage in the pandemic.

The digital record encrypts the same vaccination information found on paper cards in a QR code format that can be scanned by businesses and others seeking to confirm vaccine status.

“There is a value, but its uptake would be very limited,” said Tinglong Dai, professor of operations management and business analytics at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. “People don’t really use vaccination records much unless you travel outside the United States.”

The city is moving ahead with the system despite ending its vaccine mandate for indoor dining in February. It has no plans to renew any COVID-19 safety restrictions. It declined to say when the digital cards will be available, citing technical issues with the rollout.

Proof of vaccination, though, is useful for more than just access to indoor dining, said Matt Rankin, a spokesperson for the health department. Some businesses do still require customers prove vaccination, as do many employers and schools, Rankin said. The digital proof of vaccination would also be helpful as people get booster shots.

There’s more at the original, and I can’t just quote it all; that’s plagiarism and a copyright violation, but the article noted several points:

  • Philadelphia had planned an online portal for vaccination records even before the panicdemic.
  • People seeking their vaccination records must use a two-factor identification process, including a digital log-in which would send an e-mail or text message for authentication. If the system did not have an e-mail or cell phone number on file, the system wouldn’t work for that individual, so the city askedg vaccine providers to maintain up to date contact information in January.
  • Public health services been seeking a national vaccination database that physicians could access, but such nas not yet been created.

Some of the systems which would be used to scan the QR code in a digital vaccination record do not retain the information, but that does not mean that all of them do. You could ask the doorman who scans your code, but he might not actually know, nor do you have any way to verify that he’s telling the truth when he does answer.

It is, of course, for our own good, right? After all, COVID-19 was a serious public health emergency, right? So, naturally, those not vaccinated simply needed to be excluded from all of public life, right?

So, if “gun violence” is a “public health emergency,” the way the left keep telling us, then the same justifications used to infringe on our constitutional rights during the panicdemic will be available against people who own firearms, won’t they? Except, of course, that would only apply to law-abiding people whom the government know have firearms, not the thugs carrying them illegally.

Expect calls for a national firearms registry!

Political interest in a national record-keeping system sparked by the pandemic has recently waned. That’s in part because vaccinated people are still able to transmit the virus, making vaccination less critical as a tool to prevent COVID’s spread.

It’s something of a surprise that the Inquirer admitted what we already knew, that the various vaccinations, while they seem to mitigate the virulence of the disease, don’t appear to do much in preventing people from either contracting or spreading the virus. In January, acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.” Remember: this was during the first Xi Omicron variant, before there was any real spread of the BA.2 Xi Omicron variant, which is, supposedly, even more infectious.

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What would so-called ‘red flag’ laws actually do? Far more harm than good is what they would do!

How does one actually implement the so-called “red flag” laws? It’s clear that neither Salvadore Ramos nor Payton Gendron were reported to law enforcement prior to buying his weapons, despite having left significant warnings via social media.

Nikolas Cruz had many ‘encounters’ with the Broward County Sheriff’s Department, but they always let him off with a warning. He assaulted a student in school, but the soft-hearted and soft-headed school board, eager to disrupt the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’, declined to report that to law enforcement.

William Teach discusses foot-in-the-door gun control proposals.

If private citizens were unwilling to see Messrs Ramos and Gendron as serious enough threats to take some action, if the idiots in Broward County were unwilling to actually enforce laws already on the books, with what does that leave us? Nina Jankowicz and her Ministry of Truth scouring Twitter and Facebook, reading every message, trying to ferret out bad people? Perhaps some sort of government surveillance of email, looking for nut cases?

No, what we’ll have are people using the system to cause problems for their enemies, cheating wives or their boyfriends trying to get at husbands, beta males trying to take the alphas down a peg, gang members trying to get opposing gang members disarmed and into the ‘system,’ cheating husbands or their girlfriends trying to get cheated on wives checked on by the police, or just liberals trying a new form of ‘SWATting‘ against sensible people. How about #woke teachers or school administrators upset when they find out some of their students are hunters? We’ve already seen efforts to get physicians and their staffs to ask patients, especially children, if there are any guns in their homes! With the HITECH Act pushing making medical records electronic and transferable — with appropriate precautions, of course! — we already have records in place which the government could search to see who has admitted to having firearms at home.

I was asked that question one time, and I responded that not only was it none of their business, but that I found the question intrusive and offensive.

Robert Stacy McCain talks about The ‘Gun Lobby,’ ‘Assault Weapons,’ ‘Common Sense Gun Laws’ and Other Things Joe Biden Keeps Lying About

In the end, they’re typical leftist ideas to get more and more government supervision of our lives, Minority Report thinking that we can somehow police impure thoughts of people who may not have committed any crime.

You think that’s alarmist concern? Look at the way the government tried to track people — ‘contact tracing,’ they called it[1]In jurisdictions with testing capacity, symptomatic and asymptomatic close contacts to patients with confirmed and probable COVID-19 should be evaluated and monitored. For areas with insufficient … Continue reading — who tested positive for COVID-19, and tried to punish people who chose not to get vaccinated.

The left say that this is a minor thing, just something to keep us safer, especially after the recent massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas. But these ‘minor things’ are just more attempts to get their foot in the door, just another ‘minor step’ to achieve their eventual goal of disarming the public.

References

References
↑1 In jurisdictions with testing capacity, symptomatic and asymptomatic close contacts to patients with confirmed and probable COVID-19 should be evaluated and monitored. For areas with insufficient testing support and/or limited public health resources, the following evaluation and monitoring hierarchy (Box 4) and the case investigation and contact tracing prioritization recommendations can be used to help guide prioritization. The hierarchy is based on the assumption that if close contacts listed in Priority 1 become infected, they could potentially expose many people, those at higher risk for severe disease, or critical infrastructure workers. If close contacts in Priority 2 become infected, they may be at higher risk for severe disease, so prompt notification, monitoring, and linkage to needed medical and support services is important.
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Where is our privacy?

Lexington Herald-Leader health and social services reporter Alex Acquisto wrote, “A little over 55% of the state population is fully vaccinated and 23% of residents have received a booster, according to the Kentucky Department for Public Health.” One wonders: would more Kentuckians consider the vaccines if there were no Kentucky Immunization Registry (KYIR) and the Vaccine Tracking System (VTrckS)? Why must my personal medical information become part of the state’s database?

    Kentucky’s omicron surge is now ‘significantly if not rapidly declining’

    by Alex Acquisto | Monday, February 7, 2022 | 4:59 PM EST | Updated: 5:17 PM EST

    The number of new COVID-19 cases and the statewide rate of people testing positive are now solidly declining in Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear said on Monday.

    “Cases are significantly if not rapidly declining,” the governor said in a news conference from the Capitol.

    As it has played out in other states, the longevity of the current omicron surge — from beginning, to peak, and now decline — is significantly truncated compared with the delta surge last year, largely because omicron is much more transmissible. It took the delta variant roughly nine weeks to peak at 30,680 cases a week; omicron reached its weekly caseload peak of 81,473 in four weeks.

Further down:

    Hospitalizations, Beshear said, are also showing a “real downward trend,” though the decline is not as sharp as cases. Over the last seven days, coronavirus hospitalizations dropped by 7%, he said, adding that 2,124 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Monday (down 221 people from Friday), 414 people were in an intensive care unit (40 fewer than a week ago), and 207 are on a ventilator.

    Meanwhile, the number of people seeking vaccinations is “definitely slowing,” Beshear said; at the height of the delta and omicron surges, upwards of 7,000 people would get a dose in any given weekend, and on weekdays, typically more than 3,000 people. Weekends now bring closer to 5,000 people getting doses, and weekdays, 1,000 or less.

There’s more available here.

Kentuckians are independent cusses, and we don’t like people sticking their noses in our business, yet every time the Herald-Leader publishes these stories and shows us these statistics, it tells us what we already really knew: the state government is tracking these things.

The real question is: does the Commonwealth have simply aggregate data, or is the state maintaining information on which specific individuals have been vaccinated?

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The Catholic Church and the Right to Privacy

We have twice reported on Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, who resigned as General Secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, after a conservative Catholic site used cell phone data to show him using Grindr, a homosexual dating app, and frequenting homosexual bars, and noted the New York Times story “Catholic Officials on Edge After Reports of Priests Using Grindr“. Naturally, the Church can’t say that it’s acceptable for priests to be using homosexual pick up apps, but the Church is very concerned about the privacy rights of priests, at least when it comes to their COVID vaccination status.

The Most Reverend John Stowe, Bishop of Lexington

Which brings me to the Most Reverend John Stowe, O.F.M.Conv., the Bishop of Lexington. We have reported, many times, on the Bishop’s policies, with a rather jaundiced eye.

While I have heard no statements from Bishop Stowe concerning Pillar’s exposure of Msgr Burrill’s activities, it would seem that the Bishop is pretty much unconcerned with the privacy of priests in his diocese.

    Bishop Stowe: Catholics deserve to know if their priest is unvaccinated

    Michael J. O’Loughlin | September 16, 2021

    Bishop John Stowe, O.F.M.Conv., last month asked that diocesan employees working at the Catholic Center in the Diocese of Lexington, Ky., vaccinate themselves against Covid-19, extending a mandate that had already been announced for faculty and staff at Catholic schools. The bishop said the diocese let go of “a handful” of employees who refused. When it came to priests in the diocese, the bishop said he turned to “moral persuasion,” urging them to vaccinate themselves as a way to protect parishioners. That seemed to work. About 92 percent of the diocese’s 50 priests have been vaccinated, a rate that puts them as a group well ahead of the 61 percent of adults in Kentucky who are fully vaccinated.

The math is pretty simple: 92% of 50 priests is 46 priests, meaning four diocesan priests are unvaccinated. The Bishop publicly exposed two of them, Father John Moriarty, the Rector of the Cathedral of Christ the King parish, and Father David Wheeler, a parochial vicar at the Cathedral parish, as not having been vaccinated. The Cathedral parish is where the diocesan Bishop has his seat, so His Excellency the Bishop was unable to persuade two other priests that he sees, almost every day, at his resident parish, to get vaccinated.

The other two unvaccinated priests of his diocese have not been named.

I note that the report states that the Bishop “let go”, a euphemism for fired, “a handful” of employees who refused to be vaccinated, meaning that he took “a handful,” whatever that number happens to be, and threw them into poverty. While The Lord hears the cry of the poor, he might not expect one of his Bishops to add to the number of the poor.

    But for the few priests who chose not to be vaccinated, the bishop believes they owe it to their parishioners to be upfront about their status.

    “When I found out that four of them still were not vaccinated, I said they had to disclose that to their people because people were expecting they would be vaccinated,” Bishop Stowe told America. He said he also told the unvaccinated priests that “they couldn’t go into the homes of the sick or the homebound or be in close proximity” to worshippers.

Odd thing, though, that the Bishop would fire let go the “handful” of diocesan employees who declined to be vaccinated, but did not fire let go the four diocesan priests who refused. Could that be because lay employees are far easier to find in this economy, but priests are in short supply? With more parishes, 59, than priests, several priests, including my own parish pastor, who will turn 88 years old in a couple of weeks, have to serve more than one parish.

We have previously noted that Bishop Stowe has been very supportive of homosexual rights and recognition of ‘transgender’ individuals as the sex they claim to be, rather than the sex they are, but I cannot accurately report his position on Pillar’s exposure of the homosexual activity of Msgr Burrill and the privacy rights of Catholic priests when it comes to their vows of celibacy. But we certainly know his views on the privacy rights of both his parish priests and lay employees when it comes to their vaccination status.

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It’s a good thing that the government doesn’t have all of your health records! The left wishes that was different

It’s no surprise at all that the left and the statists would want the government to have your health records!

    Fractured record keeping leaves Philly hospitals unsure which patients are vaccinated

    A patchwork of vaccination record keeping has left hospitals with no easy way to be precise about which of their patients have received inoculations against COVID-19.

    by Jason Laughlin | Tuesday, August 31, 2021

    More than nine months into the effort to vaccinate Americans against COVID-19, the patchwork nature of vaccination records is keeping Philadelphia hospitals from getting clarity on whether patients have had the shot.

    “This is what everybody’s craving for,” said John Zurlo, division director of infectious disease at Thomas Jefferson University. “You’d hope we can get really accurate information about that and right now we really don’t get accurate information.”

    Temple University Hospital and Einstein Medical Center also reported having trouble obtaining accurate records this year, though coordination with the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania departments of health have improved the situation, hospital personnel said.

    Since vaccines were rolled out to the public earlier this year, doctors at Einstein have reported patients who are “100% sure” they were vaccinated not showing up in PhilaVax, the city database. Another record showed a patient to have gotten first doses in January and then again in April. . . . .

    Incorrect data entry may play a role in some of the record inaccuracy, said James Garrow, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. But the biggest causes of confusion are twofold: complications accessing the city’s vaccination records and the lack of a national COVID-19 vaccination database.

    “This has never been a problem in the past because there has never been such an immediate need for access to immunization records like we do for COVID vaccines,” Garrow said.

There’s more at the original, but the major point is one of which I am very glad: there is (supposedly) no national COVID-19 vaccination database.

Further down:

    Exchanging information with PhilaVax requires health-care providers to meet a federally outlined data-sharing standard. Most health-care systems meet that standard, Garrow said, but at least one large city hospital system, Jefferson, does not — though it is in the process of updating its system, hospital personnel said.

The federal government passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in 1996, and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) in 2009, yet the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia still doesn’t meet “federally outlined data-sharing standard(s)”? What’s wrong with that picture?

    Fractured medical record keeping has been the subject of a decades-old policy debate. The 1996 Heath Information Portability and Accountability Act called for a national patient ID to create a central source for people’s medical records, but privacy concerns have kept a national registry from being created. Britain and Israel are among the countries that have such systems, said Tinglong Dai, professor of operations management and business analytics at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, which has made it easier to confirm vaccinations. The lack of a registry in the United States, he said, has become acutely problematic as people being asked for proof of vaccination have nothing but a card as documentation.

    A national registry would also ensure consistent quality, he said, rather than the patchwork of record keeping used across the country now.

    “This is definitely self-sabotaging,” Dai said. “I think there must be a significant portion of the population, including myself, who would really like to have that system so I wouldn’t have to carry around this card.”

Oh, woe is him, he has to carry around the card that he wants everybody else forced to carry! Well, I have such a card, because I was vaccinated months ago, I refuse to carry it around like some form of vaccine passport. If I go someplace, and they insist that I show them my vaccination card, whoever does so will receive a one-fingered salute; if they don’t want to let me in without showing my vaccination card, I don’t want to enter anyway, and most certainly don’t want to give them any of my money.

COVID-19 has become a hugely politicized disease, with the left trying to force the unwilling to comply, and the right sometimes trying to shame those who have chosen to be vaccinated. It might be more convenient to physicians if they had access to patients’ vaccination records, but they can always ask a patient if he has gotten the jab. It seems far more important to me that the government, at any level, not have this highly politicized information.

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It ain’t just them Southern rednecks protesting against #VaccineMandates

I have heard these stories anecdotally, and seen smaller versions of them in the Lexington Herald-Leader, which isn’t exactly a major newspaper. But now even The New York Times is reporting on the story:

    A Hospital Finds an Unlikely Group Opposing Vaccination: Its Workers

    When a Staten Island hospital implemented a vaccine or testing mandate, some of its staff staged angry protests.

    By Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura | August 22, 2021

    Their movement started discreetly, just a handful of people communicating on encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Signal. But in just days it had ballooned tenfold. And within two weeks, it had turned into a full-blown public protest, with people waving picket signs to denounce efforts to push them to receive coronavirus vaccines.

    But these were not just any vaccine resisters. They were nurses, medical technicians, infection control officers and other staff who work at a hospital on Staten Island, which has the highest rate of Covid-19 infection of any borough in New York City.

There’s much more at the Times original,[1]To get around the Times’ paywall, you can also read it here. but I want to point out the most important part: the resisters aren’t just cafeteria workers and custodial staff, the lower-paid people in the hospital and those with little or no medical training. They included “nurses, medical technicians, (and) infection control officers,” people who have degrees, a lot of training, and medical knowledge.

Employees at Staten Island University Hospital who are opposed to mandatory vaccination and testing protested last week. Credit…Yana Paskova for The New York Times. Click to enlarge.

I included the photo to the right, from the Times, something I normally do not do, due to copyright concerns, but this one falls under Fair Use standards. Note that the protesters aren’t the stereotype rednecks the left would have you believe. And while it’s very difficult to read in the photo, the name badge of the gentleman in blue scrubs, holding the “I stand for medical freedom!!” sign, appears to have RN, or registered nurse, in the red band on the bottom of his hospital name badge.

    Scientists and medical professionals point out that those who refuse vaccines are potentially endangering the lives of patients. “Vaccinations are critical to protect our patients, our staff and protect the general community,” said Dr. Mark Jarrett, chief medical officer at Northwell Health, which is the state’s largest health care provider and runs Staten Island University Hospital. “It’s a tough issue, but it’s our professional obligation to always maintain that whatever we do, it’s for the safety of our patients.”

    He said he is hopeful that imminent federal approval of the Pfizer vaccine will persuade some of the unvaccinated to get shots.

    As the Delta variant, the highly transmissible version of the coronavirus that now makes up almost all new cases in the United States, drives a surge throughout the country, public health officials are struggling to boost vaccination rates among frontline medical workers. Among the nation’s 50 largest hospitals, one in three workers who had direct contact with patients had not received a single dose of a vaccine as of late May, according to an analysis of data collected by the U.S. Department of Health.

    The Staten Island protests started last Monday when Northwell Health began requiring unvaccinated staff to get weekly coronavirus tests by nasal swab or risk losing their jobs. On the same day, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that all health care workers across the state would be required to have at least one dose of the vaccine by Sept. 27, with limited exceptions for those with religious or medical exemptions.

So, a third of (hospital?) workers who have direct patient contact hadn’t received a dose of the vaccine by late May? Remember: the vaccines were first made available to health care workers, so it’s not as though their opportunities were as limited as those of the general population.[2]For me, even though I was technically eligible at the beginning of March, the vaccine wasn’t actually available to me until April Fool’s Day, due to shortages. But, as we noted here, the Times itself reported, just three days ago, that ‘Nursing Is in Crisis’: Staff Shortages Put Patients at Risk: “When hospitals are understaffed, people die,” one expert warned as the U.S. health systems reach a breaking point in the face of the Delta variant. While I assume that that one-third ratio has declined some, it must still be fairly high, or the left wouldn’t be trying to force people to get vaccinated.

It has to be remembered: in a time where the supply of workers is low vis a vis the demand for them, workers have the power. When it comes to registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, certified nursing assistants, and medical technicians, even if they are not formally unionized, they have the primary strength of a union, that being the restriction on the supply of available workers. With hospitals and nursing homes experiencing a serious shortage of such personnel, every one that a hospital discharges for not getting the vaccine creates a difficult-to-fill position. The Times reported, on a small health care system:

    Nearly 30 percent of Singing River’s 500 beds are empty. With 169 unfilled nursing positions, administrators must keep the beds empty.

I’m waiting on the credentialed media to start telling us about the shortages of nurses and other personnel from the decisions to mandate the vaccine.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, on the other hand, is all about pushing vaccine mandates:

    Facing new vaccine mandates, more Philly-area residents are agreeing to COVID-19 shots

    COVID-19 vaccine mandates and requirements are here, and more are likely coming. Early evidence indicates they’re effective in reaching those reluctant to get a shot.

    by Jason Laughlin and Marie McCullough | Updated: August 23, 2021

    A growing number of people trickling into Philadelphia-area vaccine clinics this month very much don’t want to be there.

    What cut through reluctance, anxiety, or the cacophony of misinformation on social media, they said, and got them to roll up their sleeves, were the restrictions and mandates that are becoming increasingly common in the city and across the nation.

    “Basically I got boxed in a corner, I guess,” said Kittrell Norman, 33, who has side jobs that now require vaccination. “Until this started messing with my money no one could tell me any different.”

    The Pfizer vaccine’s winning full approval from the Food and Drug Administration on Monday is likely to make vaccine requirements and mandates even more common.

    This is a new phase of vaccination: Get tough.

    Restaurants, cruise lines, colleges, and a growing number of employers — hospitals, municipal governments, Amtrak, Citigroup — are telling workers and customers to prove they’ve been vaccinated or go elsewhere.

There’s more at the original, but if you read it, you might notice what I did: the mandates are working on people like Mr Norman, because he doesn’t have the kind of positions in which he can take the job loss, and, to be blunt about it, he can be more easily replaced than a registered nurse.

There are good reasons to get vaccinated, but I have to wonder: just how much are the left stiffening resistance by their mantra that You Must Comply?

References

References
↑1 To get around the Times’ paywall, you can also read it here.
↑2 For me, even though I was technically eligible at the beginning of March, the vaccine wasn’t actually available to me until April Fool’s Day, due to shortages.
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Nothing is private anymore.

I will admit to some surprise that The Washington Post referred to homosexuals as “queer,” so much so that I made a screen capture of it before it got changed! You can click on the image to enlarge it.

The story is two-fold. It details how Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill resigned as General Secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops “impending media reports alleging possible improper behavior.” But it also details how nothing remains private anymore.

    Top U.S. Catholic Church official resigns after cellphone data used to track him on Grindr and to gay bars

    By Michelle Boorstein, Marisa Iati and Annys Shin | July 20, 2021 | 5:11 PM EDT

    The top administrator of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops resigned after a Catholic media site told the conference it had access to cellphone data that appeared to show he was a regular user of Grindr, the queer dating app, and frequented gay bars.

    Some privacy experts said that they couldn’t recall other instances of phone data being de-anonymized and reported publicly, but that it’s not illegal and will likely happen more as people come to understand what data is available about others.

    Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill has since last fall been the general secretary of the USCCB, a position that coordinates all administrative work and planning for the conference, which is the country’s network for Catholic bishops. As a priest, he takes a vow of celibacy. Catholic teaching opposes sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage.

I am not in the least upset that an actively homosexual priest has lost his job. However, this story makes two very important points:

  1. What was done to ‘out’ Monsignor Burrill was not illegal; and
  2. If you are dumb enough to engage in activity you would not want revealed, don’t be stupid enough to use your Smart Phone to do it.

Duhhh!

    The National Catholic Reporter was the first to report Tuesday morning that Burrill had resigned, citing a memo from Archbishop José Gomez, the USCCB president, to other bishops. The Tuesday memo said it was “with sadness” that Gomez announced Burrill’s resignation, saying the day before, the USCCB staff learned of “impending media reports alleging possible improper behavior.”

    Burrill is a priest from the La Crosse, Wis., diocese and was a parish priest and a professor before joining the administrative staff of the USCCB in 2016. Some USCCB staff and former staff said they were reeling and shocked.

Reeling and shocked? Yeah, I’m guessing: not so much. We have previously noted that a whole lot of priests are homosexual:

    Of course, many factors influence a person’s decision to join the clergy; it’s not like sexuality alone determines vocations. But it’s dishonest to dismiss sexuality’s influence given that we know there is a disproportionate number of gay priests, despite the church’s hostility toward LGBTQ identity. As a gay priest told Frontline in a February 2014 episode, “I cannot understand this schizophrenic attitude of the hierarchy against gays when a lot of priests are gay.”

    So how many gay priests actually exist? While there’s a glut of homoerotic writings from priests going back to the Middle Ages, obtaining an accurate count is tough. But most surveys (which, due to the sensitivity of the subject, admittedly suffer from limited samples and other design issues) find between 15 percent and 50 percent of U.S. priests are gay, which is much greater than the 3.8 percent of people who identify as LGBTQ in the general population.[1]The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1,1% … Continue reading

    In the last half century there’s also been an increased “gaying of the priesthood” in the West. Throughout the 1970s, several hundred men left the priesthood each year, many of them for marriage. As straight priests left the church for domestic bliss, the proportion of remaining priests who were gay grew. In a survey of several thousand priests in the U.S., the Los Angeles Times found that 28 percent of priests between the ages of 46 and 55 reported that they were gay. This statistic was higher than the percentages found in other age brackets and reflected the outflow of straight priests throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

    The high number of gay priests also became evident in the 1980s, when the priesthood was hit hard by the AIDS crisis that was afflicting the gay community. The Kansas City Star estimated that at least 300 U.S. priests suffered AIDS-related deaths between the mid-1980s and 1999. The Star concluded that priests were about twice as likely as other adult men to die from AIDS.

So, no, when I am told that the Catholic bishops and their staff are “reeling and shocked” that one of their own is homosexual, and actively seeking sex, I look at that statement with a jaundiced eye.

Father Burrill was a Monsignor, a now honorary title granted by the Pope to a diocesan priest, normally upon the recommendation of his local bishop. Pope Francis suspended the practice of granting the title, except to members of the Vatican’s diplomatic corps, because he thought it led to clerical careerism. Father Burrill would have to have been a well-known priest of some standing for his local ordinary to submit his name to Rome for the honorific. But a priest frequenting homosexual bars would be found out.

    It wasn’t clear who had collected the information about Burrill. USCCB spokespeople declined to answer questions Tuesday about what it knew about the information-gathering and what its leadership feels about it, except to say the USCCB wasn’t involved. They also declined to comment on whether they knew if Burrill’s alleged actions were tracked on a private or church-owned phone.

No, the last thing the bishops want is someone looking into the sexual activity of a purportedly celibate priesthood!

    The resignation stemmed from reporting in the Pillar, an online newsletter that reports on the Catholic Church. Tuesday afternoon, after Burrill’s resignation became public, the Pillar reported that it had obtained information based on the data Grindr collects from its users, and hired an independent firm to authenticate it.

    “A mobile device correlated to Burrill emitted app data signals from the location-based hookup app Grindr on a near-daily basis during parts of 2018, 2019, and 2020 — at both his USCCB office and his USCCB-owned residence, as well as during USCCB meetings and events in other cities,” the Pillar reported.

There’s a lot more at the original, primarily concerning how Msgr Burrill’s activities were discovered and documented. One thing is obvious: someone was targeting the USCCB, at least in general, if not Msgr Burrill specifically.

The Post concluded:

    The report comes the same week as The Post and other organizations reported that military-grade spyware normally leased to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives and others, revealing new concerns and issues around technology and privacy and democracy.

This time, the data mining caught a misbehaving Catholic priest, but it’s as obvious as can be: if you are using technology to do something you shouldn’t be doing, you are vulnerable to getting caught; all that it takes is for someone who knows what he’s doing to look.

References

References
↑1 The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1,1% either stating that they were ‘something else’ or declining to respond. This does not support the article’s contention that 3.8% of the population are homosexual.