Seventy years ago, the thankless task of ideological indoctrination in Polish universities fell upon the communist leadership and their approved instructors. The people would learn what was best for them, even if it killed them. Today, by contrast, the students seem perfectly happy to indoctrinate themselves. No government coercion necessary. Things have a way of coming full circle, and then some! "The Legutko Affair," covered in last month's issue of The Postil should demonstrate that. But before discussing the present state of affairs, we must return to the past. The time is 1951, just a few years after the imposition of communism. The place: the gothic lecture hall at Jagiellonian University, Professor Legutko's alma mater.

Previously, students had heard lectures here by scholars like Roman Ingarden, a student of Husserl. But when the students were herded into the hall that year to attend the recently introduced Marxist-Leninist indoctrination lectures, a new man appeared at the lectern, informing them he was to be their new professor. This particular class of students — soon to graduate with degrees in psychology — were about to learn some important lessons about the nature of totalitarianism. In a twisted way, these were actually lessons in psychology, though that certainly was not their professor's intention.

First of all, the man spoke nonsense unfitting of a university, and the students immediately recognized this — or at least most of them did. Second, he wasn't even a real professor. The students soon discovered that he had attended high school, but it was unclear if he had ever actually graduated. Third, this new "professor" treated the students with contempt and barely concealed hatred. His tyrannical teaching style mirrored that of the communist party leadership — whom he had to thank for his new, "socially advanced" position.

Nearly two months of rain fell in just a few hours in Lot-et-Garonne Department in southwestern France late on 08 September 2021.

Streets of the city of Agen were inundated with over 2 metres of water, according to the city government. Around 70 firefighters were deployed to the area and teams responded to around 130 incidents, mostly flooded cellars or buildings. No injuries or fatalities were reported. Local authorities opened the set up an evacuation centre in the town hall. According to local media reports, firefighters rescued around 20 people.

Areas of nearby Boé, Nérac and Marmande were also affected and several roads in the area closed. In Boé, part of the roof of a supermarket collapsed under the weight of the rain.

Météo France said between 19:00 and 22:00 on 08 September, the La Garenne station in Agen recorded a record 128.8mm of rain. As much as 80.5 mm of this total fell in just one hour. The 24-hour rain record previously was 73.6mm on from February 1990.

The abandonment of Americans in Afghanistan foreshadows the abandonment of freedom-loving patriots in the American homeland

America has been playing with fire for years, disrespecting its Constitution and allowing, even encouraging politicians to pander to the fears of an ever-present boogieman over the higher values of individual freedom and responsibility.

Boogiemen are very effective tools in the arsenal of those waging psychological warfare against a nation. They are effective because a good boogieman usually brings legitimate scary qualities to the table.

Islamic terrorists are legitimately scary.

Invisible viruses that spread throughout the population are legitimately scary.

People are willing to give up freedoms under the illusion that it's only a temporary inconvenience. "Just go along and soon all will return to normal," they say.

After the attack that killed 2,900 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, politicians came under pressure to "do something" to prevent another such attack by Islamic militants against innocent civilians.

Rather than just bombing the Taliban into oblivion and leaving its God-forsaken land, the politicians responded by occupying Afghanistan and launching a doomed effort to transform that nation into something it never wanted to be. At the same time they were failing at nation-building in Afghanistan, the politicians embarked upon sweeping extra-constitutional "reforms" here at home.

This essay is written from the point of view of a physician, medical educator, and bioethicist who sees the deplorable fact of physician involvement in the Shoah as an opportunity to highlight enduring moral lessons for the medical professions. Medicine and law are intimately connected to one another, and, since the professionalization of medicine in the United States and Europe in the latter half of the 19th century, even more so. One discipline that connects both is moral philosophy; for both law and medicine involve reason and the will, directed toward the good of the person. Thus, the story of the Holocaust is a tragedy that unfolded because of the corruption of moral philosophy first, and medicine and law second.

Why is this important? The reason is that there are those who argue against the contemporary application of lessons learned from the horrors of Nazi medicine. Some say that "Nazi medicine" was not real medicine or science: We cannot even call what the Nazis did "medicine," since medicine contains within it an assumption of rigor and beneficence. This is an objection I hear from medical scientists, who point to safeguards such as the Nuremberg Code (1947), the Declaration of Helsinki (1964), and the Belmont Report (1978) as proof of the radically different nature of science today. But this argument is circular. It defines science as "good science," (relegating anything unethical to "bad science" or "pseudoscience") when in fact these very safeguards were born out of abuses from what was then the most scientifically advanced country in the world. Medicine then, as now, is not somehow immune from this abuse, as the horrific postwar abuses at Tuskegee and elsewhere make clear.

Other scholars have suggested that the real cause of the Holocaust was an economic, political, or racial one — not a moral one — and that, since the United States has a radically different political, economic, and cultural system, the use of the "Nazi analogy" should be restricted. Medical abuses today are somehow less likely because economic, political, and cultural considerations are highly specific. One prominent bioethicist, for example, noted:

A key component of Nazi thought was to rid Germany ... of those deemed economic drains on the state ... a fear rooted in the bitter economic experience after the First World War. ... [These themes] have little to do with contemporary debates about science, medicine, or technology.

New evidence has emerged of gross violations during the UK investigation into the alleged poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury on 4^th March 2018. The new revelations put into question the main evidence that the Skripals were poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok.

The blood samples taken from the Skripals could have been tampered with so that they test positive for Novichok, newly disclosed information obtained from the UK Ministry of Defense reveals. Furthermore, documents show that Russia was not the only country in the world that could be linked to the nerve agent Novichok.

The US had covered up its own Novichok program masked as research on fourth generation nerve agents (FGAs) and muzzled the Organisation for the prohibition of chemical weapons (OPCW) a decade before the Skripals attack.

Beijing's flood season ended on Aug. 31, with the highest average precipitation in recent 20 years, said the municipal meteorological bureau.

During the flood season, lasting from June 1 to Aug. 31, the average precipitation of China's capital reached 627.4 mm, approximately 70 percent more than that of the same period in ordinary years.

In 2021, Beijing has also experienced the rainiest July since 1951, as measured by average precipitation of 400.4 mm.

From June 1 to Aug. 31, the city reported 62 instances of precipitation, an increase of 30 percent from the same period last year, said the bureau.

Source: Xinhua

We received 379 reports about a fireball seen over Île-de-France, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, Bretagne, Brittany, Centre-Val de Loire, Cymru, England, Hauts-de-France, Normandie, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Occitanie, Pays de la Loire, St Helier, St Martin, Vale and Wales on Sunday, September 5th 2021 around 21:47 UT.

For this event, we received 5 videos and one photo.

People from across the political spectrum packed onto the streets of Amsterdam to protest the Dutch government's proposed vaccine passes. The demonstration blocked roads in the city centre for miles.

Crowds of protesters gathered in Amsterdam's Dam Square on Sunday for a 7km (4 mile) march through the city's canal-lined streets and back to the square, all in protest of the center-right government's coronavirus policies.

Video footage showed a seemingly endless column of protesters marching along the route, with some observers claiming that the actual group of demonstrators was up to 3km (1.8 miles) long.

French riot police officers have been scolded for brutally arresting two women, after backing away when confronted by a big group of protesters against the so-called coronavirus health passes, who stormed a mall in central Paris.

Hundreds of people forced their way into the Forum des Halles shopping center on Saturday, amid a nationwide string of demonstrations against the Covid-19 restrictions and mandates. The group was seen chanting 'Freedom!' inside the mall, which is partially underground and connected to the metro transit hub of Chatelet-Les Halles.


To restore public order, authorities deployed a riot police unit, BRAV-M, a French acronym for the Motorized Brigades for the Repression of Violent Actions - even though the crowd was not even technically defying the ban on entering shopping centers without a health certificate, since Forum des Halles is one of a handful of Paris venues exempt from the coronavirus pass mandate.

Work is now underway on building a "sanitary shield" around Russia, held together by a chain of high-tech biological research facilities designed to handle deadly pathogens and develop vaccines against them, Moscow has announced.

Speaking at the New Knowledge conference in the Russian capital on Friday, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova praised the project as vital for the country to deliver. The order to establish it came from President Vladimir Putin himself, and officials are now "actively working" on plans for it, she said.

"Today we believe that this project is one of the most important, because this won't be the only pandemic that we will have to face in our lives," Golikova added. The first 15 "high security" laboratories will be up and running by 2024 and will deal with viruses that are "very, very contagious, and lead to fatal diseases," she said. At present, the country only has three such labs, but there are hopes to lift this number to 36 by 2030.