"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." — Hermann Goering, Nazi leader

With all that is crashing down upon us, from government-manipulated crises to the blowback arising from a society that has repeatedly prized technological expedience and mass-marketed values over self-ownership and individual sovereignty, those coming of age today are facing some of the greatest threats to freedom the world has ever witnessed.

It's downright frightening.

Young people will find themselves overtaxed, burdened with excessive college debt, and struggling to find worthwhile employment in a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion. Their privacy will be eviscerated by the surveillance state. They will be threatened, intimidated and beaten by militarized police. They will be the subjects of a military empire constantly waging war against shadowy enemies and government agents armed to the teeth ready and able to lock down the country at a moment's notice.

As such, they will find themselves forced to march in lockstep with a government that no longer exists to serve the people but which demands that "we the people" be obedient slaves or suffer the consequences.

It's a dismal prospect, isn't it?

Unfortunately, we failed to guard against such a future.

Worse, we who should have known better neglected to maintain our freedoms or provide our young people with the tools necessary to resist oppression and survive, let alone succeed, in the impersonal jungle that is modern America.

We brought them into homes fractured by divorce, distracted by mindless entertainment, and obsessed with the pursuit of materialism. We institutionalized them in daycares and afterschool programs, substituting time with teachers and childcare workers for parental involvement. We turned them into test-takers instead of thinkers and automatons instead of activists.

We allowed them to languish in schools which not only look like prisons but function like prisons, as well — where conformity is the rule and freedom is the exception. We made them easy prey for our corporate overlords, while instilling in them the values of a celebrity-obsessed, technology-driven culture devoid of any true spirituality. And we taught them to believe that the pursuit of their own personal happiness trumped all other virtues, including any empathy whatsoever for their fellow human beings.

We have allowed them to be manipulated by a corporate culture that simply wants money and control. However, as Aldous Huxley warned: "The victim of mind-manipulation does not know he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible and he believes himself to be free."

No, we haven't done this generation any favors.

Based on the current political climate, things could very well get much worse before they ever take a turn for the better. Here are a few pieces of advice that will hopefully help those coming of age today survive the perils of the journey that awaits:

Back in January I wrote an article about four randomized controlled trials of ivermectin as a treatment for covid-19 that had at that time released their results to the public. Each of those four trials had promising results, but each was also too small individually to show any meaningful impact on the hard outcomes we really care about, like death. When I meta-analyzed them together however, the results suddenly appeared very impressive. Here's what that meta-analysis looked like:
It showed a massive 78% reduction in mortality in patients treated with covid-19. Mortality is the hardest of hard end points, which means it's the hardest for researchers to manipulate and therefore the least open to bias. Either someone's dead, or they're alive. End of story.

You would have thought that this strong overall signal of benefit in the midst of a pandemic would have mobilized the powers that be to arrange multiple large randomized trials to confirm these results as quickly as possible, and that the major medical journals would be falling over each other to be the first to publish these studies.

That hasn't happened.

Rather the opposite, in fact. South Africa has even gone so far as to ban doctors from using ivermectin on covid-19 patients. And as far as I can tell, most of the discussion about ivermectin in mainstream media (and in the medical press) has centred not around its relative merits, but more around how its proponents are clearly deluded tin foil hat wearing crazies who are using social media to manipulate the masses.

A child just died - but not because of the 'Rona. Essentially no children have died because of the 'Rona.

But a 15-year-old Colorado boy just died from the "cure." Which apparently triggered a heart attack - a thing that rarely-to-almost-never kills healthy 15-year-olds. His heart was fine on April 18, when he received the Pfizer "cure" for the 'Rona that stood a next-to-nil chance of killing him or any other healthy child. He was dead on April 20, two days after receiving his Holy Needling.

If this is a coincidence, then so is the tide.

It's also not the only such "coincidence."

Another child - this time a 16-year-old girl who lived in Wisconsin - is no longer living, anywhere. She also died within 48 hours of receiving the "cure" for a sickness she didn't have, that she wasn't likely to get and which - if she did get it - was as likely to kill her as a cheerleading accident.

This isn't "conspiracy theory." It is admitted to fact, by the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) which keeps track of such things. Two dead kids constitutes quite an "adverse event" - given that kids are as close to being immortal as it gets. Accidents being the greatest risk of death they face.

But this was deliberate.

Perhaps not intentionally so - but does that matter? If some fool doesn't intend to run a red light but does anyway - and kills you - does the intent matter to your now-dead self?

And this "cure" is intentional.

"They were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late." — Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

The U.S. government, in its pursuit of so-called monsters, has itself become a monster.

This is not a new development, nor is it a revelation.

This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world — including its own citizenry — in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

Mind you, there is no greater good when the government is involved. There is only greater greed for money and power.

Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government.

These horrors have been meted out against humans and animals alike. For all intents and purposes, "we the people" have become lab rats in the government's secret experiments.

Fifty years from now, we may well find out the whole sordid truth behind this COVID-19 pandemic. However, this isn't intended to be a debate over whether COVID-19 is a legitimate health crisis or a manufactured threat. It is merely to acknowledge that such crises can — and are — manipulated by governments in order to expand their powers.

As we have learned, it is entirely possible for something to be both a genuine menace to the nation's health and security and a menace to freedom.

This is a road the United States has been traveling for many years now. Indeed, grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions have become synonymous with the U.S. government, which has meted out untold horrors against humans and animals alike.

For instance, did you know that the U.S. government has been buying hundreds of dogs and cats from "Asian meat markets" as part of a gruesome experiment into food-borne illnesses? The cannibalistic experiments involve killing cats and dogs purchased from Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, China and Ethiopia, and then feeding the dead remains to laboratory kittens, bred in government laboratories for the express purpose of being infected with a disease and then killed.

It gets more gruesome.

After Jamil Robinson drank the water from the infirmary at East Jersey State Prison, he became so violently ill that prison officials quietly sent him to the hospital. On February 9, Robinson was placed in a medically induced coma, which he stayed in for more than 30 days. When he woke up on March 12, nurses told him he had contracted Legionnaires' disease, a rare form of pneumonia.

Unlike many pneumonias, Legionnaires' isn't spread from person to person but rather through water contaminated with a bacterium called Legionella — meaning that if Robinson had contracted it, anyone else sharing his water source was likely at risk. If left untreated, the infection can be fatal; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 10 people who contract Legionnaires' will die. But Robinson said that by the time of his return, people incarcerated at EJSP had heard nothing about Legionnaires' disease or Legionella contamination from prison officials.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Joe Biden was seen wearing a mask in a climate summit with world leaders, despite his being vaccinated and despite the conference being virtual and held over Zoom. This has made some wonder if Biden even understands how a virus works, but Biden says he's just being cautious.

"We can't let our guard down just because we're vaccinated and alone in a room," Biden told reporters with a megaphone while standing twenty feet away. "See, there is this little thing called a 'computer virus.' Ha, I bet you thought I was some out-of-touch boomer who doesn't know about computers. Well, for one thing, I'm too old to be a boomer -- I'm the generation before that -- and I've used typewriters since I was a kid -- which is a lot like a computer before you attach the TV. So I know all about computers, and they get viruses. Maybe COVID. Who knows? Better to wear a mask around them."

Facebook has removed a popular, rapidly growing group where members would post stories about alleged negative COVID-19 vaccine side effects.

The group, "COVID19 VACCINE VICTIMS AND FAMILIES," had over 120,000 followers when it was shut down and had been gaining more than 10,000 followers per week.

The shutdown of the page follows Facebook introducing a ban on a wide range of claims about the coronavirus vaccine in February. The list of prohibited claims includes claims that the vaccines cause blood clots and claims that the coronavirus vaccine change people's DNA (something that even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook staff during a July 2020 internal meeting).

Ever since the beginning of the covid pandemic, one of the big topics of discussion has been whether infection results in lasting immunity. Since the advent of the vaccines, that has expanded in to a discussion about whether prior infection or vaccination provides a higher degree of immunity.

Back in December, I wrote about a study that showed that 90% of people who get covid still have antibodies six months out from infection. This was encouraging news. However, all it really did was show that most people keep their antibodies for a decent period of time after infection. It didn't actually tell us anything about the probability of being re-infected.

Antibodies are a "surrogate" marker. We think they might tell us something useful, but we can't really be sure. It's kind of like looking at the share of a population that have high blood pressure instead of looking at the proportion that are having strokes. We really don't know whether the presence of antibodies after infection means that someone is immune, or whether the absence of antibodies means that someone has lost their immunity. In fact, we still don't really know whether antibodies play a meaningful role in fighting covid or not. Correlation isn't always causation. Antibodies appear to be a good marker for prior infection, but that doesn't mean that they have a causal role in preventing a re-infection.

So, what we really need is a study that looks at the degree to which people actually get re-infected, not more studies that look at antibodies. Once we have that, we can do a comparison with the results of the vaccine trials, and then we will finally have a reasonably good estimate of whether prior infection or vaccination provides a higher level of immunity, or if they are equivalent. That is now exactly what we have, thanks to a study that was recently published in The Lancet.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of bizarre, hollow orbs which washed up on a north-east beach this week have been baffling locals.

The unusual grey heart-shaped shells drifting ashore at Fraserburgh have had many walkers scratching their heads over their unusual appearance and sheer amount.

The odd little orbs, covering much of the beach, are actually the ghosts of a species of sea urchin, Echinocardium cordatum, often fondly referred to as "sea potatoes".

In effect, the beach has become a graveyard for the urchins' hollow remains, whose Latin name translates literally to "spiny heart," in a fitting nod to their unusual shape.

People vaccinated against COVID-19 may require booster shots within nine to 12 months of their initial vaccination, Reuters reported.

Evidence suggests that the coronavirus vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna offer at least six months of robust protection from COVID-19 infection. But even if this protection lasts for longer, several highly-transmissible viral variants are now circulating; that means people may need a regular booster shots to bolster immunity to the virus, Dr. David Kessler, chief science officer for President Joe Biden's COVID-19 response task force, said at a congressional committee meeting on Thursday (April 15).

"The current thinking is those who are more vulnerable will have to go first," in terms of getting their booster shots, Kessler said.

From early on in the pandemic, experts predicted that officials may need to roll out multiple generations of COVID-19 vaccines and that regular booster shots may be necessary, since experts couldn't know then how long vaccine-generated immunity would last, Live Science previously reported. And there's always the potential for new virus variants to emerge and thwart the current vaccines, raising the risk of so-called breakthrough infections, meaning infections among fully vaccinated people.

Breakthrough infections are completely expected, as none of the COVID-19 vaccines are 100% protective against the coronavirus. The CDC has been monitoring for such infections since the vaccine rollout began, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, told the House subcommittee hearing, according to Reuters.