TBR News May 23, 2020

May 23 2020

The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. May 22, 2020: Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the
election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it. “
Comment for May 23, 2020 : Hypocrisy is always the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Trump has referred to Jesus as a faggot here in the White House at the same time he is kissing the raddled asses of the Jesus Freak Club in the hopes they can get him reelected in November.
It is entertaining to note that if Jesus existed at all, he was an Essene and if he was a member of that cult, he was gay.
This is not a subject that religious scholars like to discuss in public.”

The Table of Contents
Inside the Influential Evangelical Group Mobilizing to Reelect Trump
• Christ the Essene: Could Jesus be Divine and Gay at the same time?
• Jeff Sessions snaps back after Trump tells Alabama not to trust him
• Miami’s fight against rising seas
• Encylopedia of American Loons
• Typical pseudo-medical idiocity

Inside the Influential Evangelical Group Mobilizing to Reelect Trump
May 23 2020,
by Lee Fang
The Intercept
“The Covid virus has been a gift from God,” began Ken Eldred. “The kingdom of God advances through a series of glorious victories, cleverly disguised as disasters.”
In response to the coronavirus pandemic, Eldred noted, millions of Americans are turning to Christ, Walmart is selling out of Bibles, and online church broadcasts have hit record numbers.
But while religiosity was growing, there have been setbacks from the disease outbreak. “Satan has been busy too,” Eldred, a major donor to evangelical and Republican causes, explained. “The virus has messed up many of our plans involving our in-person meetings with voters.”
And the rise of mail-in ballots, Eldred added, would undercut voter identification laws, which have been a pillar of GOP election strategy. “The children of the darkness put early voting into this CARES package,” he grumbled, a reference to the $400 million for election assistance programs to states included in the $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief bill.
Following a brief prayer led by Eldred, in which he declared that “we have now turned the corner on the virus” and asked God for an end to coronavirus deaths, the business of the call got started: How Christian voters can be a force to reelect Donald Trump.
The call, held in mid-April, one in a series of meetings sponsored by United in Purpose, a low-key group that has quietly become a preeminent venue for leaders on the religious right to convene. UIP was crucial in connecting Trump to evangelical leaders in 2016, and it promises to be one of the most vital weapons in Trump’s reelection arsenal this year.
At first, the effort may seem like a throwback. Participants in the group include televangelist preachers and anti-gay activists. David Barton, a historian that serves on the board of UIP, sells box sets of DVDs arguing that America was founded as a fundamentalist Christian nation with no separation of church and state.
But the group, whose supporters include major donors to conservative causes, pastors, and political operatives with decades of winning elections, is serious about serving as the tip of the spear to maintain control of the White House. UIP’s 2020 election plan — which it calls “Ziklag,” a town referenced in the Bible — is a multipronged effort to connect Trump with evangelical leaders and increase support among minority voters through appeals to faith-based messages and church outreach.
UIP did not respond to a request for comment.

Christ the Essene: Could Jesus be Divine and Gay at the same time?
May 23, 2020
by Christian Jürs

The British philosopher, William of Occam, has stated that entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity; that the simplest answer to a complex problem is the correct one.
If this thesis, called Occam’s Razor, is applied to many convoluted historical situations such as the origins of various international wars or incidents like the assassination of Kennedy or the realities behind the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, myths and legends fall and the truth remains standing amongst the rubble.
Ongoing but increasingly limited, public interest in the life and preachings of Jesus the Christ has highlighted this parallel problem: the Christ’s life, ministry and death are so surrounded with a thick growth of myth and legend that it takes a serious, and thoroughly objective, effort to hack through this undergrowth to find the actual, as opposed to the legendary, Jesus.
Stripped of centuries of myth-making, legend and creative writing, the actual facts about Jesus the Christ show a man who is certainly a powerful figure and whose teachings resound, though greatly diminished, even two thousand years after his death.
In an analytical historical study of Jesus, stripped of legend, myth and deliberate propaganda, the real figure emerges from the myth and a strong reality replaces a weak fiction.
Consider, then, this study as an educational process and not an iconoclastic attack and in that light, the resulting revelations will have a powerful, and in the end, a positive, and certainly lasting, effect.
Truth can, indeed, be beneficial. But not to all.
God Hates Fags!
“It’s NOT OK to be gay. It will damn the soul, destroy the life, and doom any nation that tolerates such evil. God Hates Fags is a profound theological statement, which America needs more than it needs oxygen or bread.” — Westboro Baptist Church “News Release,” May 3, 1999.
Although an extreme attitude, the anti-homosexual hysteria expressed by the mid-west Baptist church is prevalent in the preachings and dogmas of the Evangelical, far-right Christian churches. A number of these churches have called for the imprisonment of all homosexuals and a few demand their execution.
That their views are increasingly at odds with the views of the general public is of no concern to them. In their minds, they are right, the others wrong and they will, by one means or another, force the majority to obey the minority.
The interesting part of this hysterical and irrational hatred can be found in the self-hatred of closet gays who have a significant representation in the ministries, but from a historical point of view, the great irony is that the icon of their religion, Jesus, was himself a practicing homosexual!
Not even the year of Jesus’ birth is known although many theologians have concluded that Jesus was born sometime in the autumn, between 11 and 13 CE. Also, there is disagreement about where Jesus was born. Different theologians, as opposed to historians, argue Bethlehem in Judea, and Nazareth.
That was prior to certain archeological discoveries in the Dead Sea area. From the Dead Sea scrolls, we learn that Jesus was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to an Egyptian Jewish father and Egyptian mother.
He was not born in a stable in Bethlehem nor were there any wise men visiting nor a special star hovering overhead.
The basis of all of this revisionist material is clearly set forth in a scroll found at Cave #3 on the Dead Sea in 1953.
It is on parchment (used only for important documents…the rest were on papyrus) and was written at the time of Jesus, about 50-55 CE.
The document is the only extant period reference to Jesus; all the others were created, often out of whole cloth, two hundred years later, and in the case of significant paragraphs in Josephus, later Christian forgeries.
This revealing scroll has been forensically tested as to age, type of ink, handwriting etc and was very clearly created at the time and place indicated.
The text of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written in four different languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabataean.
The scroll in question here, from cave #3 is in Nabataean, used from the 2nd century BCE to the 4th century CE
From this we discover that Jesus was a Jew but born in Alexandria, Egypt, ten years after the date ascribed in the Gospels to his nativity.
‘Bar Nasha’(son of man) was Jesus name for himself.
Jesus was not a Nazerene, as is often stated in the New Testament, but an Alexandrian Jew. His parents immigrated to Palestine, and the young Jesus joined the Essene religious movement where Jesus’ elder brother was a member of this religious and agricultural cult. He subsequently became heavily involved in their revolts against the occupying Roman power, was one of the leaders in a revolt attempt, fled when the Roman troops attacked in a pre-emptive strike, leaving many of his fellow cult members to be captured by the Romans and all later crucified.
He escaped with a small number of Essenes to the desert where he remained until he died.
The interesting aspect of this is that the Essene cult was an all-male agricultural commune and very specifically homosexual in nature and practice. In the scroll, Jesus’ sexual orientation is specifically addressed and names of his male lovers covered.
It should be noted that the scrolls themselves were prepared by members of the Essene cult who were themselves homosexuals and therefore not critical of Jesus orientation.
During the Procuratorship of Antonius Felix (52 to 58 CE) Jesus amassed a mob of about 30,000 Palestinian Jewish dissidents, planning to attack Jerusalem and drive out the Roman garrison. One of Jesus’s Essene close associates, a man named Judas, informed Felix of the impending raid and it was stopped by Roman troops with a heavy loss of life for the rebels. Many were taken prisoner, tried and later crucified for rebellion against the Roman government but the period records show, very clearly, that their leader, Jesus from Alexandria, escaped and vanished into the desert.
Roman period writings show that this man came out of the desert with a force of 30,000 and went up the Mount of Olives in order to fall on the city of Jerusalem, expel the Roman garrison and become ruler. Felix engaged the Egyptian and his followers in battle and dispersed them, taking most of them prisoners.
Josephus, who lived and wrote during the period, wrote about this plot of an Egyptian Jew under the procurator Felix.
The history of Josephus is full of similar occurrences.,which show the state of mind of the Jewish population at the time of Jesus.
An attempted putsch by the Alexandrian Essene prophet, Jesus, would be fully in accord with it.
If we think of Jesus’ activism as such an attempt against Roman authority, the betrayal of the Essenes to the Roman authorities by Jesus’ co-conspirator, Judas, becomes understandable as well.
Marcus Antonius Felix was the Roman procurator of Iudaea Province 52-58 CE, in succession to Ventidius Cumanus.
The period of his rule was marked by internal feuds and disturbances on the part of the Jewish population, which he put down with great severity.
On returning to Rome, Felix was accused of using a dispute between the Jews and Syrians of Caesarea as a pretext to slay and plunder the inhabitants, but through the intercession of his brother, the freedman Pallas, who had great influence with the Emperor Nero, he escaped unpunished.
Porcius Festus succeeded him as procurator of Judea.
The Essenes
After his move to Judea, Jesus became an Essene, and Christianity as we know today evolved directly from this sect of Judaism, with which it shared a majority of ideas and symbols
The Essenes were a religious sect of Judaism that existed from the 2nd century BCE to the the 1st Century CE, in Qumran, a plateau in the Judean desert along the Dead Sea.
The origin of the name Essene is debated. Some credible possibilities are either a version of the Greek word for “holy,” or an Aramaic dialect term for “pious.” In their writings, they refer to themselves as the “Sons of Light”.
The Essenes are discussed in detail by Josephus and Philo. Scholars very clearly believe that the community at Qumran, that produced the Dead Sea scrolls, were Essenes that Jesus was an Essene, and Christianity as we know it today evolved from this sect of Judaism.
The Essenes were, in any case, an agricultural community that had a communistic approach to their life style. There was a common purse and shared wealth and much, if not most, of the first expressed Christian dogma came directly from the Essenes.
Unfortunately for religious acceptance reasons, like the Spartans and Zulus who were essentially a military community cult, the agricultural Essenes were male-oriented and firmly homosexual in nature.
The Essenes were finally outlawed by the Romans following their participation in on-going revolts, and many members were subsequently crucified in a general crackdown under Titus, not because of their sexual practices but because of their political opposition to Roman rule.
The small remnants of the Essenes either retreated to their Dead Sea area and eventually died out or changed their names and joined other more acceptable Jewish religious groups.
Before the discovery and publication of a number of the Dead Sea scrolls, little was popularly known about the Essenes other than from the writings of a few select contemporary authors. These authors included; the Jewish priest and Galilean commander, Flavius Josephus, in his “Jewish Wars” written about 73-75 CE (Jewish Wars 2:119-161) and Josephus’ “Antiquities of the Jews” written about twenty years later. (Antiquities 18:11, 18-22); Josephus, claiming first hand knowledge, called the Essenes, the Essenoi.
The earliest mention of the Essenes is by the Jewish philosopher. Philo (20 BCE – c. 50 CE) of Alexandria Philo wrote that there were more than 4,000 Essenes (Essaioi) living in villages throughout the Palestinian- Syrian area. Among their neighbors they were noted for their love of God and their concerns with piety, honesty, morality, philanthropy, holiness, equality, and freedom.
The deeply religious Essenes did not marry and lived a celibate life, and practiced communal residence, money, property, food and clothing.
They cherished freedom, possessed no slaves, and rejected the use of weapons or participation in commerce.
Philo did not mention any names or places, nor any background to the origins of this group.
The next reference to the Essenes is by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder (died 79 CE) in his Natural History (N’H,V,XV). Pliny relates in a few lines that the Essenes did not marry, possessed no money, and had existed for “thousands of generations.”
Unlike Philo, who did not mention any particular geographical location of the Essenes other than the whole land of Israel, Pliny, also a geographer and explorer, , located them in the desert near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, where the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered in the year 1947 by Muhammed edh-Dhib and Ahmed Mohammed, two Bedouin shepherds of the Ta’amireh tribe.
At this point we find this passage, which contains the only description of local people in this section of Pliny’s work:
“From [or towards] the west onward, Essenes flee the banks [or shores] that harm; a group set apart [or isolated] and in the entire world beyond all others extraordinary [or unique] — without any women, stifling every urge, without money [or possessions], consort of palms.”
The nature of the organization clearly indicates that it was an outspoken communism. They lived in common dwellings, 4000 strong in the time of Josephus, in various villages and rural cities of Judea.
“They live there together,” Philo says of them, “organized by corporations and clubs for friendship and dining (kata thasous, hetairias kai syssitia poioumenoi), and regularly occupied in labors for the community.
“None of them desires to have property of his own, neither a house nor a slave nor a piece of land nor herds nor whatever else constitutes wealth. But they put everything together indiscriminately, and all of them use it in common.
“The money they earn by their labor in various ways they hand over to an elected administrator. Out of it he buys what is needed, and gives them ample food and whatever else is needed for life.”
It might be inferred from this that each man produced for himself or worked for wages.
Somewhat later, Josephus gave a detailed account of the Essenes in The Jewish War (75 CE) with a shorter description in Antiquities of the Jews (94 CE) and The Life of Flavius Josephus (97 CE). Claiming firsthand knowledge, he lists the Essenoi as one of the three sects of Jewish philosophy to include the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
He relates the same information Philo did on the Essenes concerning piety, celibacy, the absence of personal property and of money, the belief in communality, alienation from associating with women, and commitment to a strict observance of the Sabbath. According to Josephus, they had customs and observances such as collective ownership, the sharing of a common purse, the electing of a leader to attend to the interests of them all whose orders they obeyed, were forbidden from swearing oaths and sacrificing animals controlled their temper and served as channels of peace, carried weapons only as protection against robbers, had no slaves but served each other and, as a result of communal ownership, did not engage in trading. He further adds that the Essenes ritually immersed in water every morning, ate together after prayer, devoted themselves to charity and benevolence, forbade the expression of anger, studied the books of the elders, preserved secrets, and were an all-male society, enjoying their own company in preference to that of women.
Also, there was the observation that the Essenes were an all-male cult, using women to produce male children. Women who produced female children were expelled from the Essene community along with their female child. Like the Spartans, and to a lesser degree, the Greeks, women were used exclusively for breeding purposes.
Both Josephus and Philo have lengthy accounts of their communal meetings, meals and religious celebrations.
Their theology included belief in the immortality of the soul and that they would receive their souls back after death. Part of their activities included purification by water rituals, which was supported by rainwater catchment and storage.
Josephus describes their life as follows:
“After this [the morning prayer] they are dismissed by their chiefs and each goes to the work he has learned, and when they have diligently labored until the fifth hour [counting from sunrise, about eleven o’clock] they come together at a stated place, gird themselves with white cloths and wash their bodies in cold water. After this purification they go into the refectory, into which no one has entry who is not a member of their sect. When they have sat down in silence, the baker puts bread before each man and the cook sets a dish before each with one kind of food. Then a priest blesses the food; and it is not permitted to taste anything before prayer. At the end of the midday meal they give thanks again, and thus before and after eating they praise God, the giver of all food. Then they put off their mantles like sacred clothing and go to work again until evening. Supper is taken in the same way as dinner, and when guests come [members of the order from elsewhere, since strangers were not allowed in the refectory.], they too sit at table with them. Neither outcries nor disorder sully the house, and when they converse, one speaks after the other, not all at once, so that people who are not of their order feel the quiet in the house as mysteriously impressive. The cause of their quiet life is their constant moderation, for they eat and drink no more than is required for maintaining their life.
“In general they do no work except on the instructions of their chiefs, with the exception that they may be free in showing sympathy and helpfulness. Whenever an emergency requires it, any one of them may assist those who need and deserve help, or bring food to the poor. But they may not contribute anything to their friends or relatives without the consent of their chief.”
Their communism was carried to an extreme. It extended to their clothing. Philo says:
“Not only food, but clothing as well is in common with them. For there are heavy cloaks prepared for the winter, and light outer garments for summer, so that every man may make use of them as he will. For what one has counts as the property of all, and what all of them have counts as everyman’s.”
They rejected slavery. Farming was their chief occupation, but they also engaged in crafts. Only the manufacture of luxury articles and weapons of war was forbidden, along with trade.
The basis of their whole communistic system was community of consumption, not social production. There is some talk of the latter too, but it is only a question of work that brings in money for individuals either for wages or for goods sold, in either case the work is done outside the social organization.
All the members of the order however have their lodging and meals in common. That is what held them together, above all. It was the communism of common housekeeping. This requires giving up separate housekeeping, separate families and separate marriages.
From the Essenes down through all the early Christian communistic-type sects we can see that all of them are very firmly against marriage.
The Essenes, iin fact, rejected all social contact with women.
Josephus says this in the eighth chapter of the second book of his history of the Jewish War, from which these quotations on the Essenes have been taken. But in the eighteenth book of his Jewish Antiquities, chapter one, he says on the same question:
“They do not take wives and hold no slaves. They hold that the latter is unjust, and the first would give rise to disputes.”
“They reject marriage, but adopt strange children while they are still young and teachable, consider them as their own children and instruct them in their ways and customs. It is not that they would do away with or forbid marriage or the reproduction of the species. But they say that the unchastity of women must be guarded against, since none of them is satisfied with one man alone.”
In both places it is only practical considerations, not asceticism that is the basis of opposition to marriage. Josephus knew the Essenes from his own observations. He had been successively with the Sadducees. Essenes and Pharisees until he stayed finally with the latter.
Thus Josephus is in an excellent position to tell us the basis of the Essenes’ hostility to marriage with women.
Not all the Essenes took the first way. Josephus reports in the previously cited eighth chapter of the second book on the Jewish War:
“There is still another sort of Essenes, who are in thorough accord with the previous ones in their way of living, their manners and rules, but differ from them in the matter of marriage. For they say, that those who refrain from marital relations would deprive life of its most important function (meros), reproduction would constantly decrease and the human race would soon die out, if everyone thought as they did. These people have the custom of trying (dokimazontes) wives for three years. If they have shown after three purifications that they are fit to bear children, they marry them. As soon as one is pregnant, her husband no longer sleeps with her. That is to show that they enter into marriage not for the sake of sensual pleasure, but only for the sake of producing children.”
The passage is not quite clear; but it says at least that these marriages of the Essenes were very different from the customary ones. The “trying” of wives does not seem conceivable except on the presumption of a sort of community of wives kept solely for breeding purposes.
Josephus uses the name Essenes in his two main accounts[as well as in some other contexts (“an account of the Essenes”; “the gate of the Essenes”; “Judas of the Essene race” but some manuscripts read here Essaion; “holding the Essenes in honour”;”a certain Essene named Manaemus”; “to hold all Essenes in honour”; “the Essenes”;. In several places, however, Josephus has Essaios, which is usually assumed to mean Essene (“Judas of the Essaios race”; “Simon of the Essaios race”;”John the Essaios”; “those who are called by us Essaioi”; “Simon a man of the Essaios race”).
Philo’s usage is Essaioi, although he admits this Greek form of the original name that according to his etymology signifies “holiness” to be inexact. Pliny’s Latin text has Esseni. Josephus identified the Essenes as one of the three major Jewish sects of that period.
It was proposed, before the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered, that the name came into several Greek spellings from a Hebrew self-designation later found in some Dead Sea scrolls, ‘osey hatorah, “observers of torah.” Though dozens of etymology suggestions have been published, this is the only etymology published before 1947 that was confirmed by Qumran text self-designation references, and it is gaining acceptance among scholars. It’s recognized as the etymology of the form Ossaioi (and note that Philo also offered an O spelling) and Essaioi and Esseni spelling variations have been discussed by VanderKam, Goranson and others. In medieval Hebrew (e.g. Sefer Yosippon) Hassidim (“the pious ones”) replaces “Essenes”. While this Hebrew name is not the etymology of Essaioi/Esseni, the Aramaic equivalent Hesi’im known from Eastern Aramaic texts has been suggested
If one identifies the community at Qumran with the Essenes (and that the community at Qumran are the authors of the Dead Sea scrolls), then according to the Dead Sea scrolls, the Essenes’ community school was called “Yahad” (meaning “unity”) in order to differentiate themselves from the rest of the Jews who are repeatedly labeled “The Breakers of the Covenant
The Essenes were the followers of a group of priests who had essentially rejected the Second Temple. They argued that the Essene community was itself the new Temple, although they did not reject the notion of the Temple outright. Eventually, they believed, they would be triumphant, gaining control of the Temple and remaking it according to their own ideals.
Accordingly, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE was for them a symbol of imminent victory. With this Roman victory over the rebellious Jews came the end of the Sadducees and the end of the house of Shammai.
The Essenes also believed strongly in the end-times and wrote an entire scroll on that subject. The “Rule of War” detailed the battle plans for the “final” battle. When the Romans overran Jerusalem in 68-70 CE they believed that it was time for them to fight the last battle.
They had been ready and prepared for it and therefore threw their entire beings and everything they had into it. They may have thought they were strong, but they were not strong enough to withstand the Romans. They, and other Jewish groups, were mercilessly and almost totally annihilated.
The last few remaining Essenes in Judea were no longer able to maintain their identity, and some merged with the Hillelite Pharisees, out of which was born the tradition of Rabbinical Judaism.
Traditional theological writings and, through them, sociatal attitudes, depict Christianity as the creation of a single man, Jesus the Christ. This view persists even today amongst traditional Christian scholars.. At present, it is acknowledged by many scholars and historians that Jesus is no longer considered a deity, but he still held to have been an extraordinary personality, who came to the fore with the intention of founding a new religion, and did so, with tremendous, if delayed, success.
The British historian, Gibbon, in his definitive Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (written between 1774 and 1788), has clearly pointed out how striking it is that none of Jesus’ contemporary Jewish and Roman historians mentions him, although he is said, in the New Testament, to have accomplished such remarkable feats.
“But how shall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophic world to these evidences which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses? During the age of Christ, of his apostles, and of their first disciples, the doctrine which they preached was confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, daemons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church. But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and, pursuing the ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral or physical government of the world.”
At Jesus’ death, according to Christian tradition, the whole earth, or at least all of Palestine, was in darkness for three hours. This took place in the days of the elder Pliny, who devoted a special chapter of his Natural History to eclipses; but of this eclipse and the darkness he says nothing. (Gibbon, Chapter 15).
The first mention of Jesus by a non-Christian is apparently found in the Jewish Antiquities of Flavius Josephus. The third chapter of book 18 deals with the procurator Pontius Pilate, and says among other things:
“About this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if he can be called human, for he worked miracles and was a teacher of men, who received the truth gladly; and he found many followers among Jews and Greeks. This was the Christ. Although later Pilate sentenced him to the cross on the complaint of the nobles of our people, those who had loved him remained true to him. For he appeared again to them on the third day, risen to new life, as the prophets of God had prophesied this and thousands of other wonderful things about him. From his comes the name of the Christians, whose sect (phylon) has continued to exist ever since.”
Josephus speaks of Christ again in the 20th book, chapter 9,1, where the high priest Ananus is said in the time of the procurator Albinus to have brought it about that:
“James. The brother of Jesus, said to be the Christ (tou legomenou christou), together with some others, was brought to court, accused as a breaker of the law and delivered over to be stoned to death.”
These pieces of evidence have always been highly prized by Christians; for they come from a non-Christian, a Jew and Pharisee, born in the year 37 CE and living in Jerusalem, and so very well able to have authentic facts about Jesus. And his testimony was the more valuable in that as a Jew he had no reason to falsify on behalf of the Christians.
But it was the promotion and exaltation of Jesus on the part of a pious Jew that made the first passage highly suspect and early-on. The authenticity of these passages was disputed as early as the sixteenth century, and today it is completely agreed by almost all Biblical scholars that it is forgery and does not stem from Josephus. It was inserted in the third century by a Christian copyist, who obviously took offense at the fact that Josephus, who repeats the most trivial gossip from Palestine, says nothing at all about the person of Jesus. The dedicated Christian felt, with understandable justice, that the absence of any such mention in Josephus weighed against the existence or at least the significance of his Savior. Now the discovery of this forgery became strong testimony against Jesus.
But the passage concerning James is also in doubt. It is true that Origen (185 to 254 CE) mentions testimony by Josephus concerning James; this occurs in his commentary on Matthew. He remarks that it is surprising that nonetheless Josephus did not believe in Jesus as the Christ. In his polemic against Celsius, Origen cites this statement of Josephus about James and again notes Josephus’ unbelief. These statements by Origen constitute one of the proofs that the striking passage about Jesus in which Josephus recognizes him as the Messiah, the Christ, could not have been in the original text of Josephus. In point of fact, original period copies of the Josephus writings do not include the passages on Jesus or James.
The passage about James that Origen found in Josephus was also an early Christian forgery. In it the destruction of Jerusalem is said to be a punishment for the execution of James; but this fabrication is not found in the other manuscripts of Josephus. The passage as it occurs in the manuscripts of Josephus that have come down to us is not cited by Origen, while he mentions the other version three times on other occasions. And yet he carefully assembled all the testimony that could be got from Josephus that had value for the Christian faith. It would seem likely that the passage of Josephus about James that has come down to us is also fraudulent, and was first inserted by a pious Christian, to the greater glory of God sometime after Origen, but before Eusebius, who cites the passage.
Like the mention of Jesus and James, the reference to John the Baptist in Josephus (Antiquities, XVIII, 5,2) is also highly suspect as another early Christian creation. And if John did exist, there is a body of thought that he might have been Jesus’ older brother, lover and mentor.
But even if the statement about James was genuine, it would prove at most that there was a Jesus, whom people called the Christ, that is, the Messiah. It could not prove anything more.

Jeff Sessions snaps back after Trump tells Alabama not to trust him
Former attorney general is running for old Senate seat
• President ‘damned fortunate’ he recused from Russia inquiry
May 23, 2020
by Martin Pengelly in New York
The Guardian
After Donald Trump told supporters in Alabama “do not trust” Jeff Sessions and backed his opponent for the Republican Senate nomination, the man Trump trusted to be his first attorney general did something rare: he snapped back.
The president was “damned fortunate”, Sessions said on Friday night, that he recused himself from the Russia investigation.
Sessions, 73, said his March 2017 decision, forced because he did not disclose to Congress contacts with the Russian ambassador during the 2016 election, “protected the rule of law and resulted in your exoneration”.
In fact, special counsel Robert Mueller, appointed by then deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein on 17 May 2017, said in his report that though he had not found evidence of criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the president, he was not exonerating Trump.
Sessions’ claim otherwise was consistent with that of Trump and his supporters.
Sessions was fired after the midterm elections in 2018 and replaced by William Barr, an attorney general who has proved much more to Trump’s liking, working to protect the president and to reject the findings and premise of the justice department investigation into Russian election interference.
Sessions is an immigration hardliner and mentor to the hard-right Trump adviser Stephen Miller. He was the first senator to endorse Trump in 2016.
He is now running in the Republican primary to contest his old seat, which the Republicans lost to the Democrat Doug Jones in December 2017 after nominating Roy Moore, a hardline judge who spoke favourably of Vladimir Putin but was accused of, and denied, sexual misconduct involving girls as young as 14.
On Twitter on Friday night, Trump endorsed a string of congressional candidates, among them Ronny Jackson, a doctor who left the White House engulfed in scandal and is now running for the House in Texas.
Turning to Alabama, Trump wrote: “Three years ago, after Jeff Sessions recused himself, the Fraudulent Mueller Scam began. Alabama, do not trust Jeff Sessions. He let our Country down. That’s why I endorsed Coach Tommy Tuberville, the true supporter of our #MAGA agenda!”
Tuberville is a revered former coach of the Auburn Tigers, a leading name in college football, a near-holy institution in the deep-red state.
Tuberville won the first round of the primary, which Moore also entered. He and Sessions will contest a runoff in July, the winner facing Jones in November. In polling, Tuberville maintains a healthy lead.
Sessions has been so determined in his support of the president who humiliated him and fired him that many critics likened one early campaign ad to a hostage video.
On Friday, he wrote: “Look, I know your anger, but recusal was required by law. I did my duty and you’re damn fortunate I did. It protected the rule of law and resulted in your exoneration.
“Your personal feelings don’t dictate who Alabama picks as their senator, the people of Alabama do.”
If Sessions’ response to Trump seemed made more in sorrow than anger, he was more aggressive towards his opponent.
Still addressing his former master, Sessions said Tuberville was “a coward who is rightly too afraid to debate me. He says you’re wrong on China and trade. He wants to bring in even more foreign workers to take American jobs. That’s not your agenda and it’s not mine or Alabama’s. I know Alabama. Tuberville doesn’t.”
Tuberville retweeted and echoed Trump, and turned Sessions’ accusation of cowardice back the other way.
“Jeff Sessions threw Donald Trump to the wolves with the Mueller appointment,” he said, in a tweet first sent on 17 May, the anniversary of the naming of the special counsel.
“When faced with supporting [Trump] or running scared, Jeff Sessions chose the easy way out and recused himself. I won’t ever run from a fight in the US Senate.”

Miami’s fight against rising seas
May 22, 2020
by Amanda Ruggeri
BBC News
Just down the coast from Donald Trump’s weekend retreat, the residents and businesses of south Florida are experiencing regular episodes of water in the streets. In the battle against rising seas, the region – which has more to lose than almost anywhere else in the world – is becoming ground zero.
The first time my father’s basement flooded, it was shortly after he moved in. The building was an ocean-front high-rise in a small city north of Miami called Sunny Isles Beach. The marble lobby had a waterfall that never stopped running; crisp-shirted valets parked your car for you. For the residents who lived in the more lavish flats, these cars were often BMWs and Mercedes. But no matter their value, the cars all wound up in the same place: the basement.
When I called, I’d ask my dad how the building was doing. “The basement flooded again a couple weeks ago,” he’d sometimes say. Or: “It’s getting worse.” It’s not only his building: he’s also driven through a foot of water on a main road a couple of towns over and is used to tiptoeing around pools in the local supermarket’s car park.
Ask nearly anyone in the Miami area about flooding and they’ll have an anecdote to share. Many will also tell you that it’s happening more and more frequently. The data backs them up.
It’s easy to think that the only communities suffering from sea level rise are far-flung and remote. And while places like the Solomon Islands and Kiribati are indeed facing particularly dramatic challenges, they aren’t the only ones being forced to grapple with the issue. Sea levels are rising around the world, and in the US, south Florida is ground zero – as much for the adaptation strategies it is attempting as for the risk that it bears.
One reason is that water levels here are rising especially quickly. The most frequently-used range of estimates puts the likely range between 15-25cm (6-10in) above 1992 levels by 2030, and 79-155cm (31-61in) by 2100. With tides higher than they have been in decades – and far higher than when this swampy, tropical corner of the US began to be drained and built on a century ago – many of south Florida’s drainage systems and seawalls are no longer enough. That means not only more flooding, but challenges for the infrastructure that residents depend on every day, from septic tanks to wells. “The consequences of sea level rise are going to occur way before the high tide reaches your doorstep,” says William Sweet, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The flooding would be a challenge for any community, but it poses particular risks here. One recent report estimated that Miami has the most to lose in terms of financial assets of any coastal city in the world, just above Guangzhou, China and New York City. This 120-mile (193km) corridor running up the coast from Homestead to Jupiter – taking in major cities like Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach – is the eighth most populous metropolitan area in the US. It’s also booming. In 2015, the US Census Bureau found that the population of all three counties here was growing – along with the rest of Florida – at around 8%, roughly twice the pace of the US average. Recent studies have shown that Florida has more residents at risk from climate change than any other US state.
It has more property at risk, too. In Miami-Dade County, developers had 1.6 million sq ft (149,000 sq m) of office space and 1.8 million of retail space under construction in the second quarter of 2016 alone. Sunny Isles Beach, home to 20,300 people, has eight high-rise buildings under construction; swing a seagull in the air, and you’ll hit a crane. As you might imagine, the value of development in this sun-soaked part of the country is high, too. Property in Sunny Isles alone is now worth more than $10 billion. Many of the wealthiest people in the US reside in Florida, including 40 billionaires on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans; on a recent week, the most expensive real estate listing in the US was a $54 million mansion in Palm Beach.
Despite his history of referring to climate change as a “hoax” and his recent rollback of emissions-slashing initiatives, President Donald Trump is one of these property owners with a stake in the issue. The president frequently visits his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, 75 miles (121km) north of Miami, which is itself an area experiencing flooding from high tides. There also are six Trump-branded residential buildings in Sunny Isles, one of which still provides the president with income, and a Trump-branded condominium complex in Hollywood.
Look beyond all the glass and steel, though, and – despite the federal government’s sidelining of the issue – there’s another thrum of activity. It’s the wastewater treatment plant constructing new buildings five feet higher than the old ones. The 105 miles (169km) of roads being raised in Miami Beach. The new shopping mall built with flood gates. The 116 tidal valves installed in Fort Lauderdale. The seawalls being raised and repaired. And the worried conversations between more and more residents every year about what the sea-rise models predict – and what to do about it.
The communities aren’t short of solutions. “Nobody’s doing better adaptation work in the country than south Florida,” says Daniel Kreeger, executive director of the nonprofit Association of Climate Change Officers. But the question isn’t whether this work will save every community: it won’t. Even those tasked with making their cities resilient admit that, at some point in the future, certain areas here will no longer be “viable” places to live. Rather, the challenge is to do enough to ensure that the economy as a whole continues to thrive and that tourists still come to enjoy the sun, sand – and swelling sea.
t’s a challenge that many officials and experts are determined to meet. Getting there, though, requires a shift in how everyone from mayors to taxpayers, insurers to engineers, property developers to urban planners thinks about their communities – and the everyday decisions that shape them. The eyes of the world are on them: if one of the richest communities on the planet can’t step up, what hope is there for everyone else?
“If the science is correct on this – which it is going to be – the question is, ‘How extreme are the implications?’” says Kreeger. “We are literally going to have to rewrite how businesses function, and how cities are designed. Everything’s going to change. And that’s particularly going to be exacerbated in coastal communities.
“This would be no different than if I came to you and said ‘Hey, in 40 years, gravity’s going to change. I can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to be. But let’s assume roughly between 50% and 80% stronger or weaker than it is now.’ You’d look around and say ‘Shoot, what’s that going to affect?’
“And the answer is: it affects everything.”
Sea level rise is global. But due to a variety of factors – including, for this part of the Atlantic coast, a likely weakening of the Gulf Stream, itself potentially a result of the melting of Greenland’s ice caps – south Floridians are feeling the effects more than many others. While there has been a mean rise of a little more than 3mm per year worldwide since the 1990s, in the last decade, the NOAA Virginia Key tide gauge just south of Miami Beach has measured a 9mm rise annually.
That may not sound like much. But as an average, it doesn’t tell the whole story of what residents see – including more extreme events like king tides (extremely high tides), which have been getting dramatically higher. What’s more, when you’re talking about places like Miami Beach – where, as chief resiliency officer Susanne Torriente jokes, the elevation ranges between “flat and flatter” – every millimetre counts. Most of Miami Beach’s built environment sits at an elevation of 60-120cm (2-6ft). And across the region, underground infrastructure – like aquifers or septic tanks – lies even closer to the water table.
On a nearly two-hour tour of Fort Lauderdale’s adaptation strategies, the city’s head of sustainability, Nancy Gassman, points out incremental differences in elevation: slight rolls in the sidewalk or paving that usually go unnoticed. “That might seem weird that I’m pointing out a couple of feet difference,” she says. “But a couple feet in south Florida – it’s time. Elevation is time for us.”
Not only are sea levels rising, but the pace seems to be accelerating. That’s been noted before – but what it means for south Florida was only recently brought home in a University of Miami study. “After 2006, sea level rose faster than before – and much faster than the global rate,” says the lead author Shimon Wdowinski, who is now with Miami’s Florida International University. From 3mm per year from 1998 to 2005, the rise off Miami Beach tripled to that 9mm rate from 2006.
An uptick also happened between the 1930s and 1950s, says Wdowinski, making some question whether this is a similar oscillation. But that’s probably wishful thinking. “It’s not necessarily what we see now. This warming of the planet has been growing for a while,” he says. “It’s probably a different process than what happened 60 years ago.”
“Can we definitely say it’s the ocean warming?” says Sweet, who has authored several sea-level rise studies. “No. But is it indicative of what we’d expect to see? Yes.”
Modelling specific future scenarios is difficult – partly because scientists are still collecting and analysing data, partly because there are so many variables. What if the US or China reverses its trend on stabilising emissions? What if a major volcano erupts? What if a glacier melts more quickly than expected? But enough credible projections have been done to put together a range of scenarios that researchers are confident about.
One graph compiled in 2015 by the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, a non-partisan initiative that collates expertise and coordinates efforts across Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach counties, is especially revealing (see below). At the bottom is a dotted green line, which rises slowly. Before you get optimistic, the footnote is firm: “This scenario would require significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in order to be plausible and does not reflect current emissions trends.” More probable is the range in the middle, shaded blue, which shows that a 6-10in (15-25cm) rise above 1992 levels is likely by 2030. At the top, the orange line is more severe still, going off the chart – to 81 inches (206cm) – by the end of the century.
But as more data comes in, even the worst-case estimates may turn out to be too low: for example, researchers recently discovered that ice is melting more rapidly than expected from both Antarctica and Greenland, plus gained a better understanding of how melting ice sheets actually affect sea-level rise. “The unlikely scenarios are now, all of a sudden, becoming more probable than they once were thought to be,” says Sweet.
The most dramatic impacts may not be felt for 50 or 100 years. But coastal communities are already experiencing more storms and extremely high tides known as king tides. In the same study, Wdowinski found there were a total of 16 flood events in Miami Beach from 1998 to 2005. From 2006 to 2013, there were 33.
Although the timing of king tides results from the positions of the Sun, Moon and Earth, rising seas heighten their effect. At extreme high tides, water levels have surged to an inch below the Intracoastal Waterway, says Jennifer Jurado, Broward County’s chief resiliency officer. “Once that’s breached, you’re open to the ocean – the supply of water is endless. The system is really at capacity. These are flood conditions, even with just the high tide and supermoon… You see men in business suits trying to trudge through water.”
Even without floods, the rising water table affects everything. The cities here are built on porous limestone. The water doesn’t just come over seawalls; it seeps up from beneath the streets. Nearly 90% of the drinking water in south Florida comes from aquifers, and these are finding their fresh water pushed further and further inland as the salt water exerts more and more pressure. Take Hallandale Beach, a small city of just under 40,000 residents. Saltwater already has breached five of the eight freshwater wells that the city draws from, says Vice Mayor Keith London. And around a quarter of Miami-Dade residents use septic tanks. If these don’t remain above the water table, the result could be thoroughly unpleasant.
Another issue is beach erosion. Florida’s sand may be one of its biggest draws for tourist dollars, but it, too, is vulnerable: though sand never stays put, rising sea levels and worsening storms mean the need to replenish is intensifying. A massive town-by-town project is currently underway; Miami Beach (which, famously, was manmade from the start) just wrapped up its 3,000ft (914m) section, to the tune of $11.9 million.
Of course, another part of the problem is that south Florida is built on a swamp. “The only reason we live here is we learned how to drain it, we learned how to kill mosquitos, and we created air conditioning,” says Jim Murley, chief resilience officer for Miami-Dade County. Residents cut canals to drain inland areas, using the fill to raise the land and build properties. These canals are now open doors for tidal flooding and storm surge. They also cut down mangrove forests and levelled sand dunes – both natural barriers to flooding.
“There is going to need to be a very serious conversation about how we deal with this,” says George Vallejo, the mayor of North Miami Beach. “The development that has happened here over the last 40 or 50 years has not been helpful to this situation. We’ve paved over a lot of the Everglades, we’ve paved over a lot of greenage.
“We’ve done a lot of things that, in retrospect, we would have done differently, knowing what we know now.”
That’s the bad news. But there’s good news, says Gassman, whose no-nonsense demeanour and doctorate in marine biology (with a focus on coastal ecosystems) makes her particularly convincing. “That’s all if nothing changes. I think that’s another thing that the public doesn’t necessarily understand: the predictions that they’re hearing, time and time again, are if we do nothing. But we’re not doing nothing.”
That’s point one. Point two is that the topography of the area isn’t quite what you’d expect. She brings out a map of Fort Lauderdale dotted with squares of purple and orange. Purple means an area is likely to be underwater at 2ft (61cm) of sea level rise; orange means it’s possible. A surprisingly small amount of the map is splashed with colour. And the at-risk areas – which are mostly by the bay, not the ocean – aren’t where you might think. “It’s not the whole city,” she says. “While there are problems in some areas, we’ll have to adjust, but these areas are not in places you’d expect – and we’ll have time to address some of these issues.”
Not every community might be so lucky. Play the inundation game with Noaa’s perversely addictive mapping tool in Hollywood, just 10 miles (16km) south of Fort Lauderdale, and you’ll find that the same 2ft (61cm) rise could put streets and most properties of an entire square-mile swathe underwater – not insignificant for a city measuring just 30 sq miles (78 sq km). (Hollywood also has its own intervention programme underway, including the installation of 18 flap gates to keep seawater from coming up through the drainage system). Still, it’s a good reminder that the problem, as overwhelming as it seems, can be broken down into smaller pieces.
Which is exactly what Gassman and others are trying to do. Touring the city with Gassman is to see it in an entirely new way: not just a city of graceful mansions and pretty canals, but of seawalls that are leaking or too short, fire hydrants that are made of iron (“a fundamental, emergency-based infrastructure that’s made out of a material that’s potentially corrosive from saltwater”), drains that are overflowing and electrical boxes that need to be raised.
“See, those cars are disappearing from view,” she says, pointing to the dip in the road in front of us. We turn onto Isle of Capri Drive. “Look what’s happening. Look how far I’m going to go down. This area floods all the time.”
Fort Lauderdale is dubbed the Venice of America. That’s supposed to be because of its 165 miles (266km) of canals, but recent flooding has made the nickname more on the nose than residents would like.
For both Fort Lauderdale and other communities across south Florida, the main problem is drainage. The systems here were designed to let stormwater drain into the ocean when it rains. Because homes and gardens are higher than the crown of the road, the streets flood first in a storm, by design. Water runs into the storm drain and is piped into the ocean or waterways that lead there.
At least, that’s what is supposed to happen. With sea levels now often higher than the exits to the run-off pipes, saltwater is instead running up through the system and into the streets. To make matters worse, when the sea gets even higher, it can breach the seawall, flood people’s yards and flow down to the road – where it stays.
Since 2013, Fort Lauderdale has been installing tidal valves to deal with the problem. Each of the one-way valves, which allows stormwater through but not saltwater, looks like a big rubber tube and can be attached inside the storm drains. Gassman pulls one out to show me. “If you stick your hand in there and push a little bit, see how it opens?” I do. “Right there, you were fresh water. Now you’re about to be salt water.” She flips the valve around. I push: sure enough, it’s a no-go.
In some areas, the valves alone have been enough. But there’s a catch: the floodwater still can’t leave if the tide is above the level of the outflow pipes. That happened early on at one of the first places they installed a valve, Gassman says. A king tide came over the tops of the seawalls, flooded the street – and then remained higher than the outfall. “The valve wouldn’t open. So the roads stayed flooded 24/7,” she says. “We have had complaints that the valves aren’t working. But no. The valves are working.”
Despite the limitations of the valves, it doesn’t take an engineer to figure out that raising seawalls would fix flooding that resulted from high sea levels, if not from rain. But until recently, Fort Lauderdale had a height requirement for seawalls that was a maximum, not a minimum – for aesthetic reasons. Though some now do specify a minimum height, enforcement remains difficult. A new seawall runs from $600 to $2,000 for a linear foot; adding a 12in (30cm) cap costs about $60 per foot. For the average homeowner, a seawall measures 75-100ft (23-30m). “How are you going to force everyone to put in money?” asks Gassman.
It turns out you can’t, at least for now. Last year, Fort Lauderdale proposed that everyone should be made to raise their seawalls to a certain height by 2035. Thanks to opposition from the public, the proposal failed. Instead, property owners are required to keep their seawalls in a state of good repair. Someone can be reported to the authorities if their seawall is breached by the tide, but the specific new height requirement only kicks in if someone came to ask for the permit – which is required to do significant repairs, or to build a new wall. And Fort Lauderdale makes an interesting test case: if costs seem prohibitive in this relatively well-off area, it’s not going to work in south Florida’s less affluent communities – some of which also are suffering from similar flooding.
Despite Fort Lauderdale’s best efforts, seawalls here remain a patchwork of heights and states of repair. At Cordova Road, Gassman and I look over the finger isles pointing into the Stranahan River. Across the road from the marina, one house has bright-green grass: it’s new, put down after a flood last spring swamped their property with salt water.
Gassman points to an older house on the corner. Their seawall is about a foot lower than their neighbour’s. “That foot of difference allows water to run over their property and flood the road,” she says. “That one property, if we could fix that seawall, we could reduce a lot of flooding, right here.”
It’s not just residents who need to make changes. The city also owns a seawall along this stretch; it, too, was breached recently. Replacing the nearly half-mile stretch could cost up to $5 million. But getting the funds is just the first challenge. The end of the seawall meets a bridge. If you raise the seawall two more feet, what do you do with that bridge to protect it? And what about the docks that residents are currently allowed to have here, all of which will have to be re-done? “The people that live here want a solution and they want it now,” says Gassman. “But there’s both a public and a private cost. And changing one piece of infrastructure starts to domino into needing to change all sorts of things.”
As well as seawalls, cities are investing in pumps. Many have put pump stations in the worst-hit neighbourhoods. But only Miami Beach has adopted an integrated, major pumping system as part of an aggressive overall defence strategy. Starting in 2013, the programme – which Torriente estimates will cost between $400 and $500 million – is multi-pronged. Pump stations have sprouted across Sunset Harbour, an industrial-turned-hip neighbourhood on the barrier island’s bay side, and are moving south.
Roads are being raised, too, sometimes by up to 2ft (61cm), to an elevation which the Southeast Florida Climate Compact’s projections put as a likely sea level height around 2065. Seawalls are being raised to a new minimum – something that residents in Miami Beach were more amenable to than in Fort Lauderdale. The city also is requiring that all new properties build their first floor higher.
It’s an ambitious agenda. And it’s one that’s working. Areas where roads have been raised and pumps installed have been much drier. But, as Gassman noted, it’s not enough to change one piece of infrastructure without changing everything else. In this case, what happens when you raise a road without raising all of the properties around it? Water can go into the properties.
That’s not supposed to happen when the pumps work. But they can fail. Antonio Gallo’s Sardinia Enoteca Ristorante is one of a number of businesses that have found their ground floors are now below the current road and sidewalk height. Last year, the pumps failed to kick in after a brief period of rain; the restaurant flooded, with diners stuck inside. When Gallo went to file his insurance claim, it was turned down. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which runs a national flood insurance programme for at-risk business and property owners like Gallo, anything below street level is considered a basement. Until Fema changes their policy, that includes all of the businesses now below the raised streets. Miami Beach is working closely with Fema to get not only Gallo’s situation, but the general basement classification, re-assessed.
Miami Beach’s efforts are the most aggressive. But resilience also can be built into existing projects. A lot of public infrastructure is built to last for at least 50 or 75 years, and that means planning for what the world will look like then. This is where the Compact’s range of scenarios comes in handy. If you’re laying down something easily replaceable, like a sidewalk, you could build for one of the more optimistic scenarios. An airport? It’s a good idea to go for a higher-risk scenario.
Murley, the chief resilience officer of Miami-Dade County (the county’s first), points to a 4,200ft-long (1280m) tunnel that runs from the Port of Miami to highway I395. Opened in 2014, its main objective was to re-route lorries that previously went through downtown Miami. But the tunnel was also given a huge gate that, in a hurricane, drops down to seal it at both ends. “That’s an example of resilience. We wouldn’t have built that 10 years ago,” says Murley. “We would have built the tunnel, but it would have had an open front. We might have had sand bags.”
A larger-scale example of built-in resilience is going on at the Central District Wastewater and Treatment Plant on Virginia Key, a barrier island where Biscayne Bay and the ocean meet, just east of downtown Miami. It is one of three wastewater treatment plants run by the largest utility in Florida, which serves 2.3 million of the county’s 2.6 million residents. Like the other two, it sits right by the water.
The plant already had a $500 million project on the go, making changes to comply with new Clean Water Act requirements. But because parts of the facility are expected to last 75 years or more, resilience to higher sea levels and storm surge has been baked into the design. Analysts ran what would be needed in a worst-case scenario: a category five hurricane during a king tide, with maximum rainfall. “What the results told us was that we ought to be building stuff at 17-20ft (5-6m) above sea level on the coast. Our current facilities, by and large, range from 10-15ft (3-4.5m),” says Doug Yoder, deputy director of Miami-Dade’s water and sewer department. The new design standards prioritise building at those elevations first for parts of the plants that convey flow – like the
Private developers will need to think about these issues, too. According to the non-partisan research organisation Risky Business, current projections put between $15 billion and $23 billion of existing Florida property underwater by 2050. By the end of the century, that leaps to between $53 and $208 billion.
But many developers aren’t thinking to 2050 or 2100. Their focus is on the time from construction to sale. In a hot real estate market like south Florida, where a lot of investors are foreign or periodic visitors, that timeframe is far shorter – a few years at most.
Until regulations enforce common building standards, few private developers are likely to adopt resilient designs. “I think it’s very hard for a developer or builder to do something the code or government doesn’t require in their zoning or building code,” says Wayne Pathman, a Miami-based land use and zoning attorney and the chairman of the new City of Miami Sea Level Rise committee.
One exception is Brickell City Centre, a $1 billion, 9-acre complex of stores, restaurants, offices, condominiums and hotel in Brickell, a corner of downtown Miami filled with cranes and skyscrapers. Developed by Hong Kong-based Swire Properties, the complex is sleek and airy – and, says Chris Gandolfo, vice president of development for Swire’s US operations, resilient. “Starting years ago, Swire was progressive in its thinking on rising tides,” he says.
Gandolfo ticks off some of the adaptation strategies that were used: building higher than the current flood plain; flood gates that can seal off the underground car park; an elevated seawall. It also has sustainable features like green roofs, native plants and what the developers have dubbed a “climate ribbon” – a walkway that captures the bay winds to cool the structure and lower energy costs, and works as a cistern to re-use rainwater for irrigation. “We may not make immediate returns,” Gandolfo says. “But I think it’ll have long-term returns.”
All of this puts a catch-22 at the heart of south Florida’s development. The state levies no personal or business income taxes and has a low corporate income tax, meaning property taxes provide a major source of revenue. But unless it is managed very carefully, new development brings new challenges.
“Every one of these buildings that goes up expands your vulnerability and magnitude of risk,” says Kreeger. “On the flip side, you’re not getting help from the state, because the state legislature and governor are in total denial about climate change. So you’re bringing in money today which is going to help you. But you’re also bringing a bigger problem tomorrow.”
Thinking about any of this is a relatively new trend. Although scientists began speaking about sea level rise for several decades, the topic only saw real traction among local governments and businesses a few years ago.
Part of the reason is that the issue was being ignored by so many others. Most officials say that the Compact, signed in 2010, has been a major driver in helping local governments collect the data they need and coordinate together on what to do about it – and it was signed after the realisation that, despite concrete problems that had to be solved today, state, federal and international governments weren’t doing what was needed to address them.
The Florida governor is a climate change sceptic and has directed attention away from the issue. Former employees have said they even were told not to utter the phrase “climate change”. Ignoring the issue now appears to pervade the highest levels of US government: the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief doubts whether carbon dioxide plays a primary role in climate change, while President Trump recently signed an executive order overturning emissions-slashing regulations. Draft versions of the White House budget propose cutting the EPA budget by 31% and employee numbers by 20%, as well as steep cuts to Noaa – including 26% of the funds from its Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and entirely eliminating the Sea Grant programme, whose Florida section brings together 17 different universities to study sea level rise challenges and solutions.
Local governments are forging on, but such circumstances make the challenge even greater. With budgets that run in the tens of millions, not billions, local governments already need to be fiscally creative. Meanwhile, planning depends on up-to-date data – there’s no point in raising seawalls if you don’t know how high they need to be. And some of the most reliable projection scenarios, as well as sea level rise data, is gathered from Noaa.
Yet the impact from these changes won’t stop at party lines. Even President Trump’s family isn’t immune. Three feet of sea level rise – which the range of predictions put together by Compact estimates is likely to happen within the next 60 years – will flood Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or Republican commissioner when a neighbour calls you and tells you that their lawn is flooded,” says Gassman. “The water doesn’t care about politics. The water goes where the water goes. And someone who has a flooding problem that’s impacting their quality of life or their property values, they don’t care what flavour their politician is. What they care about is that the city is thinking about it, and that they’re planning to do something about it.”
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Some of the communities in south Florida doing the most to adapt to the effects of sea level rise are doing so largely because of public pressure. In 1993, Miami-Dade put together its first plan to reduce carbon emissions. Hardly anyone came out for the committee hearing, Yoder says. Fast-forward to 2015: a hearing on the county’s budget was dominated by one resident after another asking why the county wasn’t doing more about sea level rise.
So much so, in fact, that the county decided to hire Murley, its first resilience officer. One of his immediate tasks was to look into getting onto the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities programme. Accepted cities receive funding and tailored guidance on how to make themselves adaptable to future challenges, from high unemployment to earthquakes and sea-level rise.
Greater Miami is just at the start of the process, Murley says. But he’s not the only one hoping that the resources made available will help guide the area far into the future. When I try to get in touch with the commissioners or mayor of Sunny Isles, I get a call back from Brian Andrews, a crisis PR consultant. He says sea level rise is something the city is aware of, but that “we’re waiting for the county” to gather data and send guidelines for an action plan. “They’re getting millions and millions from the Rockefeller Foundation for this,” he says. “We’re a little city. We couldn’t do it on our own.”
Despite how awareness of the issue has grown in some communities – particularly those, like Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale, that have seen the most flooding – it’s still common for sea-level rise to get shunted to the end of the list of priorities. “As an elected official, when I go knock on doors, resiliency and sea level rise is never discussed,” says Esteban Bovo, chair of the Miami-Dade County Commission. “It’s never talked about. It’s crime, how much we’re going to invest in police, how much we’re going to invest in traffic, how much we’re going to invest in public safety, libraries – those are the topics of conversation.”
*
Later, I find myself playing with the Noaa sea-level tool again. I zoom in on Sunny Isles. At 1ft, the low-lying mangrove swamps of the Oleta River State Park, just over the water, are submerged and the wooded backyard of the Intracoastal Yacht Club disappears. At 2ft, the St Tropez Condominiums and the newly-built Town Center Park are underwater, as are many shops around 172nd Street. At 3ft, things start to get serious. Blue blots out the entire shopping plaza and the Epicure Market. At 4ft, the entire west side of Sunny Isles is uninhabitable. At 6ft, it’s gone. Only the spine near the beach – where my father lives – remains.
It’s easy to look at Compact’s range of estimates and think that, since a 3ft or 4ft rise may remain fairly far off, everything will be fine for a few more generations. But it’s not. With public infrastructure – from fresh water to flushing toilets to roads – woven between communities, if just one area gets affected, others may suffer. Meanwhile, resilience is only one piece. As shown by the Compact chart’s steep orange line, if emissions continue to rise, adaptation will become increasingly difficult – if not impossible. And unlike raising seawalls or installing tidal valves, that, of course, can’t be controlled by a community or region alone. “Climate change mitigation to reduce greenhouse gases is a global issue and has to be dealt with globally,” says Gassman. “Adaptation to the inevitable effects of climate change is a local issue.”
Later, peering out the window as my plane takes off over Miami, I no longer see the dense green squares of the city’s western edge, the sharp skyscrapers downtown and the surprisingly slender line of barrier islands. Instead, I see what might be lost. From here, the ocean looks vast.
But as the plane climbs, I remind myself that human innovation was enough to drain the swamp and make Florida what it is today. It was great enough to get me here, 15,000ft in the air. And it just might be enough to save what I see below.

Encylopedia of American Loons

Doug Phillips

We’ve covered some deranged fundies over the years, but Doug Phillips has something of a special position among them. Phillips is the kind of guy that conjures up the image of someone shedding tears of elation over the sheer beauty in the justice in seeing heretics tortured and people in general suffer for the glory of God, the kind who views the Republic of Gilead as inspirational and the 11thcentury as already dangerously mired in wayward progressive enlightenment ideas about science, liberty and autonomy. Phillips main concern is women– the fairer and weaker and less rational sex – and how to save women from unbiblical horrors like independence, freedom and having to make decisions for themselves.
Phillips used promoted his views through the Vision Forum until he admitted to having an extramarital affair (though not the abusive details of that affair, more here), which turned out to be somewhat awkward given Vision Forum’s, well, vision, and the Forum was closed down. There is a splendid resource on the Vision Forum and its work here. Before closing, however, the Forum was pretty influential in Christian homeschooling circles, and used to have booths and speakers at every major convention, as well as networks across the Christian homeschooling scene (it’s probably notable that the other proponent of the Biblical Patriarchy model for homeschooling, Bill Gothard, suffered the same fate as Phillips). Phillips was also a central figure in the quiverfull movement.
A vehemently theocratic group, the central pillar of Vision Forum’s mission was Biblical Patriarchy – complementarianism with an emphasis on the fact that man was created first and woman’s creation was secondary. Patriarchy is accordingly the divine family order ordained by God, where the husband and father is the head of the household and the wife and mother created to be his helper and bearer of children. Moreover, children are to marry through a process of courtship guided at every step by their parents, and unmarried adult daughters are to remain under their fathers’ authority and in their fathers’ homes; illuminating detail here). (Choice Phillips quote: “Daughters aren’t to be independent. They’re not to act outside the scopeof their father. As long as they’re under the authority of their fathers, fathers have the ability to nullify or not the oaths and the vows. Daughters can’t just go out independently and say, ‘I’m going to marry whoever I want.’ No. The father has the ability to say, ‘No, I’m sorry, that has to be approved by me.’”) You know the deal (and note: the movement is actively encouraging people to deny their daughters contact with the outside world – this is not just some abstract ideal), though we suspect the Forum associates would be quick to try to explain how the idea is different from the ideas imposed by … well, people they wouldn’t otherwise want to be associated with in other parts of the world. In any case, this organization of society is apparently crucial to bringing about the coming kingdom of God on Earth.
So yes, the Vision Forum subscribes to dominionism, the idea that God has called Christians to take over society, mass culture, and government, bringing them into line with God’s law to establish a theocratic, hierarchical and ordered society – and the explicit goal of homeschooling, then, is to groom children to be soldiers for spiritual warfare. Even Michael Farris has distanced himself from the Vision Forum ideology. The Duggars, however, are apparently fans.
An illustrative example of their work was their Beautiful Girlhood Collection, built on what is ostensibly a Biblical vision of femininity and promoting a vision of girls’ childhoods centered on the idea that servility is beauty: girls play with dolls and cook and clean. There is a brief but apt description here. They even have a “science” section. We’ll pass that one over in silence. The Vision Forum is also opposed to women’s suffrage, having produced an alleged civics study guide “Law and Government: An Introductory Study Course” where it is argued that women should not be allowed to run for office or vote. The “study guide” included contributions from e.g. Roy Moore.
At the 100-year anniversary of the Titanic disaster, Phillips took the opportunity to declare that Titanic was evidence of the goodness of Christianity while the sinking of a French ship La Bourgogne a few years before demonstrates the evils of evolution: “People that were on board the deck of the Titanic at that time were individuals that grew up in a culture which was distinctively Christian in its perspective of the role of men and women; [by comparison, when the La Bourgogne] sunk the sailors and the officers literally threw women and children into the water, beat them over the head, and the men lived and the women died. [,,, ] And in trying to understand why that happened, the commentary was, they grew up in a culture that embraced evolution, it was the struggle of the survival of the fittest, they grew up in the culture of the French Revolution which had rejected biblical Christianity and embraced paganism and the consequences were that men treat women horrifically.” Needless to say, Phillips didn’t quite get the historical details about the two events quite correct (mild criticism here), but of course, his point was not accuracy: “flash forward to the year 2012 and this year our president has finally taken us over the abyss and we have full-fledged commitment to women in the frontlines of combat in overseas battles.” As for evolution, Phillips elaborated: “Evolution says the struggle of the survival of the fittest, there are no differences between men and women, there is no charity, there is no deference, and in an evolutionary world feminism reaches its height and we see no distinctions. The result is babies are killed en masse, women are treated like chattel and men no longer take on their masculine role as defenders.” It is little surprise that a fundie creationist fail to grasp the rather basic and easy distinction between a descriptive, scientific claim about biological reality (not that Phillips is remotely on track here either) and a value system, but it is equally facepalm-inducing every time.
It is certainly not Phillips’s only forays into anti-evolution rants. The Vision Forum even produced a “documentary” (promoted by the WND) called “Mysterious Islands: A Surprising Journey to Darwin’s Eden,” which “debunks the conclusions Charles Darwin reached during his storied trip to the Galapagos Islands.” Apparently they took a group of Christian “scientists” to the Galapagos Islands to determine whether the islands “are a laboratory for evolution as Darwin believed – or a truly magnificent showcase of God’s creation,” which suggests some rather basic (but predictable) lack of understanding of how data and evidence work in hypothesis testing. Phillips, however, have more arguments: Darwin “said we would see fossil examples of animals going from one kind to another,” said Phillips (this is not quite what Darwin said), but it is “our contention that not one transitional form has ever been found.” Yes, we are aware that this is your contention, and that the fact that you are demonstrably wrong is not going to change your mind. “Today people look to the Galapagos, and evolutionists and Darwinists see it in the same way that Christians look to Jerusalem and Muslims look to Mecca,” Phillips said, which is not only a ridiculous thing to say but tells you quite a bit about Phillips’s somewhat cursory understanding of science, scientists and scientific practice. But given this false assumption, it is a short step to Phillips’s conclusion: “They [evolutionists] really embrace the evolutionary faith. In our film, we insist that evolution is, in fact, a faith. It’s a worldview based on unprovable assumptions that are accepted by faith.” We don’t for a second doubt that Phillips is confounded by the lack of impact his contributions have on science, but we are fairly confident that he’ll blame it on heretics and demons.
Phillips is also the founder of the Christian Filmmakers’ Academy and a close associate of Kirk Cameron. He was also featured in Colin Gunn’s “IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America”, which explicitly advocated that the Bible should be the model and core of all public education.
Diagnosis: One of the most disgusting, vile pieces of evil, hateful garbage to ever walk the face of the Earth, and as delusionally insane as he is morally corrupt. Hopefully somewhat neutralized, but his ideology certainly lives on.

Typical pseudo-medical idiocity

ALL VACCINATIONS ARE CAUSING IMPAIRED BLOOD FLOW (Ischemia), CHRONIC ILLNESS, DISEASE AND DEATH FOR US ALLŠPROVENŠsee for yourself.
By Andrew Moulden MD, PhD; www.BrainGuardMD.com
Medical & Neurobehavioral Therapies Director
www.Therapies4Kids.com www.BrightStepsForward.org
Former Leader – www.CanadianActionParty.ca
Dr. Moulden has joined and supports the Christian Heritage Party of Canada
This is a stern, yet humble, warning to all citizens of the globe. It is now proven that we are all being harmed by repeat vaccinations. This evidence must be circulated broadly in light of the imminent Fall, 2009 plan to turn North American schools into MASS vaccine centers to institute triple flu vaccine to us all. Children will be the first to be injected with experimental flu vaccines. The entire vaccine industry, as it turns out, has been experimental. We did not know that we were causing damages – for us all.
In case you are wondering what will happen, the answers are contained in this article. The same thing will happen as has been happening with all vaccines. Clinically silent ischemic brain and body damages will happen. The only difference is that you can now see these damages, with your own eyes, in the here and now, in real time, and in your family photos going back fifty or more years if you have to.
ALL vaccines are causing immediate and delayed, acute and chronic, waxing and waning, impairments to blood flow, throughout the brain and body. This IS causing us all to become chronically ill, sick, and causing brain damages along a continuum of clinically silent to death. This is causing ischemic “strokes”. In some respects, this is also “aging.” Since the damages are microscopic, we cannot see them as they occur. However, we can now see the neurological aftermath of these damages – within hours and days of vaccination – all vaccinations.
In Revelations 18:4 by the epistle of Saint John we are told: “And I heard another voice from Heaven saying “Come out of her my people that ye be not partakers of her sins and that ye receive not of her plagues.” All vaccinations, as you can now clearly see, are causing chronic illness and mass disorders on mass scales. The global health consequences clearly amount to plaques.
As a medically trained Doctor, a PhD trained neuroscientist/neuropsychologist, with a Masters degree in Child/language neurodevelopment, I have been trained to follow clinical observations to empirical assessment couched within the scientific model we rely upon to answer questions of: What is normal and what is not? What is cause? What is coincidence? What is factual? What is fancy? What is reproducible? What is random? What is measurable? What is predictable? What is truth? What is consequence? What is “going on”?
Science is only a man made truth-seeking tool. It is fallible. It is a statistical, probabilistic mathematical model. It has limitations. Wielded for profit – truth can become lost.
Scientific methods, design, and analyses can just as soon hide the truth as they can discover truth, or create ‘truth” de-novo.
Science cannot replace God-given tools of common sense and observation we all have. You do not need statistical probabilistic mathematical models, wielded by experts, to deny what you can see with your very own eyes.
If you place your hand on a hot stove element, you will be burned. If you do not experience pain and you cannot see the burn, then you will not learn that touching hot stove elements is harmful.
All vaccines have been causing “burns” to body and brain. The brain has no pain receptors. You will not feel the pain. You can, however, see the footprints of these “burns” immediate and delayed, from each vaccination. The evidence was before our eyes all along. We simply did not appreciate what these “burns” meant let alone that they were emerging, after each vaccination. The “burns” are largely to internal organ systems. We can ALL now see the damaging effects of these “burns” with our own eyes.
As a physician, it is my sworn duty to cause no harm. As a human being, it is my duty to watch over my fellow beings. As an educator, it is my responsibility to teach awareness and understanding. As a scientist, it is my duty to separate cause from coincidence. As a Christian, it is my value to do unto others, as I would have others do unto myself. As a man, it is my responsibility to stand up to power, with truth and understanding, when those that wield power are in error.
My statements are not the words of a zealot. These are the words of integrity, couched with understanding, that has the potential to reside in every one of you.
Seek, and you shall find. Knock, and the door shall be opened unto you. I have sought. I have knocked. The door has been opened. I have found the truths I was seeking. The answers have not come from my own understandings. The answers are simply self-evident – res ipsa loquitur – the thing speaks for itself.
All vaccinations cause brain damage, disease, chronic illness, aging, and death – res veritas loquitur – the truth speaks for itself. If you do not seek, if you do not knock, if you do not look, if you trust your own understandings, then caveat emptor – buyer beware.
We have answers. We have solutions – www.Therapies4Kids.com . We cannot provide solutions or treatments to a medical system and model that denies it is sick.
My training has taught me how to translate anecdotal clinical observations into empirically sound clinical measurements in medicine, neurodevelopment, and human physiology. This is especially so in dealing with functions of the human brain and behavior.
The pictorial evidence attached to this article represents a small sample of the data I have now collected from thousands. The truth about all vaccinations causing harm is now available for your understanding.
The truth is frightening, disheartening, alarming, and now self-evident.
We have made a global medical mistake based on a lack of knowledge and understanding. We have translated forest fires for 1% of the population into chronic brush fires for the entire population. The brush fires are chronic illness and disease, least of which are the neurodevelopmental disorders.
12-IMAM Brain Damage measurement system
The measurement system I have created is based on the 12 cranial nerves and the clinical skills Doctors are supposed to use to assess brain function and integrity. I have called the measurement system the 12 “Eye” M.A.S.S. Anoxia Measures (12-IMAM).
M.A.S.S. is an acronym for many chronic illnesses and diseases that impair blood flow – “Moulden Anoxia Spectrum Syndromes.” One-size-fits-all global vaccination schemes have created M.A.S.S. disorders on MASS scales. MASS disorders, from infectious diseases to vaccinations, have a common sequence of injuries which includes impaired blood flow, oxygenation, blood carrying capacity, and non-specific immune hyper-stimulation.
In essence, we are creating disease and chronic illness by an over-zealous activation of a natural set of healing mechanisms in human physiology – a component phase of the MASS physiological response.
Remarkably, it is not so much the specific “germs and toxins” that are causing death and disease. It is the response of the body and blood to foreign substances entering the blood and tissues that causes pathology. The state of the blood, the nature of the triggers, the state of the immune system relative to repeat antigenic challenges, conspires to effect damages along a continuum of harm – all organ systems can be affected.
The cellular and tissue damages are additive with each exposure. Direct vaccination is no longer necessary to be vaccine injured. Vaccinations are not the only trigger to pathology. Serial (repeat) vaccinations aggravate the core problems. Once the blood vessels are damaged, to a critical point, the pathological process can take on a self-perpetuating life of its own – from infants to teenagers to adults, to companion pets alike.
Four features of the 12-IMAM measurement system that you can now see, include the eye turning in, the eye turning out, the smile becoming asymmetrical, and the eye blinks coming out of sync. These are strokes, from ischemia, throughout the brain and body, for all. Repeat vaccination is the primary culprit, however, vaccination is not the only cause of this MASS problem in human physiology.
WHITE BLOOD CELL IMMUNE RESPONSE – CAUSING DISEASE
If you repetitively dump a million rubber duckies at the mouth of the Mississippi river, where they become lodged downstream will vary from truckload to truckload. Repeat vaccination, by its effects on the non-specific immune system, is like dumping the triggers which call for repetitive “dumping” of millions of rubber duckies (white blood cells) at the head of the Mississippi river. Once the “triggers” are sequestered in various bottleneck end tributary river branches, they continuously attract more “rubber duckies” to these areas. This impairs blood flow and leads to a net loss of tissue by acute or slow strangulation.
It is the act and magnitude of the “rubber duckies” being called to these end vascular areas that causes congestion, impaired blood flow, lack of oxygen, glucose and nutrients to the affected tissue areas. Without oxygen or nutrients, he cells lining the walls of capillaries self-cauterize (clamp shut). This is a healing mechanism that must be instituted in order to prevent leakage of plasma and or blood into tissues.
With MASS impairs blood flow and oxygenation to the tiny blood vessels in the eye, we sometimes see “retinal hemorrhages.” When MASS occurs in the brain, we call it intracerebral bleeding. When MASS occurs to the bones, we call it brittle bones. Collectively, we label this “shaken baby syndrome.”
A HORSE BY SEVERAL NAMES
When the blood sludging MASS process happens to brainstem areas controlling automatic respiration, the central drive for respiration is lost. We call this sudden infant death or sudden death.
When M.A.S.S. happens to the descending motor tracts in the brain, we call this paralysis, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, infantile paralysis, seizures, encephalopathy.
CBS News has found that since 1988, the vaccine court has awarded money judgments, often in the millions of dollars, to thirteen hundred and twenty two families whose children suffered brain damage from vaccines. All of these children will show the same IMAM-12 ischemic brain damages as children who have been rendered autistic, learning disabled or dead after vaccinations. The process that causes brain damages from vaccination is also the same MASS process that causes all damages after vaccination – all vaccinations. It is not the vaccines doing this. It is “M.A.S.S.” ischemia. Vaccines have been inadvertently concocted to induce MASS.
When M.A.S.S. happens to internal organs or connective tissue, we call it colitis, irritable bowel, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, post-concussion syndrome, a psychiatric disorder.
When M.A.S.S. happens in infants, and children, we call it autism-spectrum disorders, specific learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders, Aspergers syndrome, global developmental delay, and some childhood cancers. Sometimes M.A.S.S. causes or compounds cerebral palsy – both conditions result from impaired oxygenation and blood flow to the brain.
Sometimes we call M.A.S.S. “Kawasaki” syndrome, “Moyamoya”, ‘aseptic meningitis”, “encephalopathy”, “Meningitis”, hypsarrythmia, infantile spasms, West syndrome, or febrile seizures. It is all simply M.A.S.S. ischemia.
Autism and schizophrenia are the same ailment, in physiology, albeit the triggering pathways for schizophrenia (loss of immunological tolerance) has a different trajectory than acquired autism-spectrum disorders. Nonetheless, a similar mechanism is at work for both ailments – MASS ischemia from derailed blood flow.
When MASS happens in teen girls after Gardasil vaccination, it creates death, disease, illness, clouded thinking, and paralysis. Remarkably, the Gardasil shots are simply completing the silent ischemic vascular damages, to body and brain that were caused from each childhood vaccination the girl received. Sudden death is due to loss of central drive for respiration in the same manner that vaccinations are causing many cases of sudden infant death. Sometimes seizures may also occur. The course can be waxing and waning. All vaccines are causing these problems – silently, in an additive manner over each vaccination, for all of us. No one is spared.
When MASS happens in military and armed services personnel, this causes “Gulf war Syndrome.”
When MASS happens to schizophrenia patients being treated with powerful psychotropic drugs that de-rail white blood cell functions, sudden “unexplained” death can occur by the same MASS sudden death sequence that vaccinations sometimes induce in infants and teen girls.
When MASS happens in the elderly, it causes a slow, step-wise deterioration in cognitive functions – we call this dementia. This is slow strangulation of brain tissue from ischemia at the microscopic level.
Febrile seizures are not caused by “fever”. The fever expands the diameter of the tiny blood vessels so that more white blood cell infection fighting “soldiers” can traverse down the ‘roads.” When the blood vessel roads become jammed, by too many white blood cells, and altered fluid dynamics, there is ischemia. Ischemia causes a lack of oxygen to the brain.
No oxygen to electrically active cells causes depolarization. In the heart, ischemia causes arrhythmia – a seizure to the heart. In the brain, ischemia causes seizures – arrhythmia to the brain. Seizures are a symptom of impaired blood flow and oxygenation just like vaccine induced autism-spectrum is a symptom of the same process.
You can have autism without seizures. You can have seizures without autism. You can have brain damages with or without autism or seizures. This is all ischemia – immediate and delayed, from instability of blood flow dynamics.
I can make these statements of fact, and so can you, since the photographs you can now see, before and after vaccination, show we are all having ischemic microvascular strokes – silently. Some of these damages are called “bulbar palsies” and they are the exact same damages we saw from wild polio exposure as we now see from vaccinations. Remarkably, no one ever told you that wild polio and other infectious diseases, were inducing the body to cause ischemic strokes to the brain. Vaccinations induce the same process – albeit in an attenuated and chronic form.
The ischemic brain damages, after vaccination, from infants to adults, cut across all symptom based medical diagnostic end points.
Type 1 insulin dependent diabetes mellitus is a MASS disorder, as is Parkinson Disease, Tourette’s syndrome, Multiple Sclerosis, and several other neuropsychiatric disorders.
Aphasia and loss of expressive speech functions with vaccinations is called “isolation of speech syndrome” or “transcortical motor aphasia.” This is caused by ischemia to end blood vessel watershed vascular territories in the brain – period.
Silent MASS ischemic strokes is how the body caused paralysis and respiratory failure from wild polio virus exposure. This is how death occurred from Smallpox. This is how swine flu vaccine caused paralysis and Guillain-Barré syndrome. This is how thalidomide caused infants to be born with no arms and legs. This is how a series of anthrax vaccines causes military veterans to give birth to children with no arms and legs 18 months after receiving the vaccine series. This is how Vioxx caused heart attack and stroke. This is how pre-natal German measles caused autism-spectrum and organ damages. This is how a systemic drop in maternal blood pressure, during gestation, causes Mobius syndrome (and autism-spectrum). This is how repeat vaccination is causing dementia.
M.A.S.S. is how vaccinations are causing a multitude of chronic illnesses and disease. It is not the germs causing this problem. It is the response of the body to de-railed and unbalanced immune challenges.
THE ROADS TO ROME ARE LOST
When microscopic end blood vessels are destroyed (closed off), as blood flow diminishes and starts to “sludge”, this impairs healing, cellular functioning, and promotes build-up of toxins, heavy metals, and pathogens in circumscribed tissue areas. The ischemia causes disease, autoimmunity, and some cancers if the cells are forced to function in a low energy, low oxygen state. It is not so much “Rome” that is being damaged as it is the roads to and from Rome that are being damaged first. The “fall of Rome” follows as the Romans are starved, strangulated, and forced to live in a “City” that can neither bring supplies in to repair damages, nor can it remove waste from within its central territory by efficient means to meet supply and demand. This is an example of too many Roman Centurions (white blood cells) called to Rome to protect the City. The Centurions, by magnitude and response, block the roads to Rome by virtue of a chronic “Call to Arms.”
There is a better way to prevent disease. Vaccination only masks the cause of disease, it does nothing to address the core problem in physiology – the non-specific M.A.S.S. response and colloidal stability of blood flow dynamics. There are alternative solutions to controlling infectious diseases in populations that do not require injecting foreign substances into your body.
Doctors, pathologists, and coroners cannot see what is right before their very eyes. The cause of sudden infant death, and dementia, in life, is impaired microscopic blood flow. In death, there is no blood flow. Medical science cannot find cause of death and disease, in life, from looking at dead tissue, when the dead tissue exhibits the same cause of death during life – no microscopic end vascular blood flow.
ELECTRODYNAMICS OF BODY FLUIDS – CAUSING DISEASE
A 300 foot Giant Redwood can transport water (nutrients and oxygen) against gravity from the ground to the very top of the tree. The redwood has no moving parts or pump. This transpiration feat is accomplished by the electrodynamics nature of water.
Human blood is 95% water. The human body is 75% water by weight. In physiology, when the electrodynamics quality of water is de-railed by heavy metals, infectious diseases, vaccinations, and other adverse influences, the water which carries oxygen, nutrients, glucose, and healing cells cannot traverse tiny blood vessels to deliver their life sustaining cargoes. This is especially true in end vascular “pipes” that are uniquely oriented against gravity. Blood flow is a function of the colloidal stability of the blood and its products.
The human blood is a colloidal suspension. Proteins. Amino acids, heavy metals etc.. are carried in suspension within the blood as a function of the net negative charge within the system. Drop the net negative charge, flow pressures in tiny end blood vessel “pipes” will start to sludge, agglomerate, and increase viscosity of blood in circumscribed microscopic vascular areas. Medical science has no live imaging tool powerful enough to see this process as it is happening.
By analogy, coffee cream remains in a fluid state when it is moving. If the cream remains stagnant in your coffee cup for several days, it will phase change into a gel. Stagnant blood also turns to sludge and “gel” when it stops moving in a spiral column. Stagnation causes an increase in mass as blood products “come together” to form various degrees of sludge and “gel”.
Agglomerates of sludged blood products cannot traverse microscopic blood vessels designed to carry oxygen transporting red blood cells, in single file. Capillary blood vessels oriented against gravity are uniquely susceptible. Forward blood flow momentum is a function of the negative charge and “spin” in fluid dynamics which keeps particles with mass separated from one another.
Newtonian laws of physics govern how objects with mass move in our universe . The “Big G” is Newton’s Universal Law that Force equals Acceleration x MASS. Increasing MASS (as in sludged blood) with no net increase in Force causes deceleration and no forward flow. No forward flow translates into no oxygen or fuel delivery. For the brain, and body, this causes hypoxia (low oxygen), anoxia (no oxygen) and ischemia (impaired blood flow).
In terms of vaccine damages, impaired forward blood flow in end vascular territories creates brain and organ damages – in us all. These damages have been clinically silent – for millennia. This ischemic process, from germs, toxins, to vaccinations, is the cause of much human disease, pain, and suffering. All vaccines are causing chronic disease, in our attempts to prevent acute disease. We never got rid of the problem, as we did not know what the problem was – until now.
There are some common “end vascular” blood vessels in the human brain, irrespective of age. It is for this reason that we see the exact same measurable signs of brain damage, immediate and delayed, from all vaccinations, for us all in the same manner we saw identical damages from the wild polio virus in the 1950’s. Some of these damages are called bulbar palsies (paralyses) from impaired blood flow through the brain and brainstem. They were present from deadly infectious diseases as much as they are now present from vaccinations. This is slow death, for us all, rather than a fast death, for the few.
When there is impaired blood flow there is impaired oxygen delivery to tissue. Vaccines cause impaired blood flow in an immediate, delayed, waxing and waning pattern. This impairs oxygen delivery throughout the 60,000 miles of microscopic end blood vessel networks in the brain and body. Microscopic brain tissue regions can only survive 4 minutes in an absolute oxygen deprivation state.
Cerebral Vascular Network
Whenever you impair “flow” in any riverbed system, the first areas to “dry up” downstream are the weakest trickling streams furthest from the flow source. These areas are called “end vascular networks.” If an area of tissue is served by a singular blood vessel branch, these areas are called “watershed vascular territories.” These tissue areas are most susceptible to damages when blood flow is partly or completely impaired upstream. For example, the finger-tips, toe-tips, nose-tips, and ear-tips are most susceptible to frost bite as they are end vascular, watershed areas in the human body.
The evidence you can now see, represents the beginning of the end of a flawed medical model and system that has caused the greatest harm, by man-kind to man-kind, in the history of recorded history. Remarkably, we managed to perpetrate these acts under the guise of the greater good, for handsome profit, endorsed by political leaders, corporate merchants, public health officials, and medical professionals alike – they don’t know what they don’t know – a part of the problem.
WHERE HAVE WE BEEN
Debates over the safety, efficacy, and utility of the one-size-fits-all global vaccination programs has reached a fervent pitch. According to the World Health Organization there are 43 million vaccinations administered globally, on any given day. As citizens, we are told “leave the science to scientists.” If you do not have a medical or advanced science degree, your input is irrelevant.” You are told children can handle ten thousand vaccinations safely as they are all attenuated, killed germs, or weakened.”
The problem is that medical science has not known what to measure in order to ensure safety – for all. Now that we have the hard, clinically reproducible, see for yourself measures of neurological damages, we can now see that ALL vaccinations, just like the wild viruses in the pre-vaccine era, are causing tissue, organ, and brain damages. These damages exist along a continuum of harm. The damages are additive with each vaccination received – you can now see this. The clinically silent adverse effects include derailments of all organ systems, to death. We call these adversities by a plethora of clinical labels that are seemingly unrelated to the causal event – repeat vaccinations.
Remarkably, I can now make these bold statements as we can all now see, with our own eyes, the ischemic brain damages, for us all, across ALL vaccinations, from infancy to adulthood, immediately and delayed, irrespective of the end organ damages or clinical diagnostic labels that emerge.
We are selling you vaccines, for profit, which are causing illnesses and death. We then sell you symptom based pharmaceutical products, for profit, to treat the damages and disorders we have caused.
Remarkably, I can now say that the vaccine damages extend to the realm of cancers in addition to varied autoimmune and neurodevelopment disorders.
1-877-NOW-I-CAN
Determining the cause of a particular disease or disorder, in medical physiology, is the first “Bright Step Forward” towards providing rational, targeted, therapeutic interventions to recover from the damages by which a particular disease and disorder state emerged.
All vaccinations are causing “silent” brain and organ damages in exactly the same way that wild polio virus caused paralysis and respiratory failure and how other infectious “plaques” of days gone by, have crippled, maimed, paralyzed, and killed. This is now proven. The damages are additive and summative with each vaccination given. The organ, tissue, and brain damages have been clinically silent, – until now.
You may now see, with your own eyes and understanding, amongst your own family and loved ones,. Evidence now before the United States federal Circuit Courts on vaccine injuries proves that we have ALL been harmed, and are being harmed, by this universal one-size-fits-all vaccination program. Some of this evidence is compiled in an educational 3 disk, 6 hour DVD series entitled: “Tolerance Lost – Volumes 1 to 3.
The Tolerance Lost DVD series, a USA vaccine legal exemption guidebook, and a evidence of harm materials are available at www.BrainGuardMD.com, , or by calling 1-877-NOW-I-CAN.
For answers, solutions, assessment, and help – please contact us directly at 1-877-NOW-I-CAN. www.Therapies4Kids.com, www.BrightStepsForward.org.
There are ways to address the MASS problem and to enable healing to occur even for those that have been damaged. This does not require placing foreign substances or synthetic drugs in the human body – MASS FLO2 LIFE is where the answers must start.
God heals, and the doctor collects the fee. We have reached a time, in history, that we must return to paying fees to the master physician as the medical sciences, in dogma and discourse, has clearly led us a stray.
“Be the change we must see in the worldŠone Bright Step Forward at a time.”
NEXT EDITION OF SPECTRUM MAGAZINE
The global vaccination program is an evil deed, perpetrated by mankind against mankind, for profit, based on a fallible man made tool (‘scientific method”) that can just as soon convince you that the what you see with your own eyes is not true as it can be wielded to “prove” the non-existence of G-D.
These vaccines, as it turns out, are like a maddening wine, which political leaders and “Kings” of the earth have enabled merchants of the planet to grow rich from, at the expense of our collective health and wellness.
The next issue of Spectrum magazine will contain more of the empirical, see for yourself, data and science to explain how this has happened, why it is happening, and what we must now do to help us all.
Matthew 13:41 “The Son of man shall send forth his Angels and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend them which do iniquity.
These autism children are Angels. These vaccines are iniquity. The evidence now before you beckons your spirit, body, mind, and soul to “come out of her my people” as you see God’s desire and character more clearlyŠ. Mystery, Babylon the Great.
Without Faith, without hope, we are lost. Faith and hope can be found. 1-877-NOW-I-CAN
Dr Andrew Moulden MD, PhD
BrainGuardMD.com “12-IMAM”
Therapies4Kids.com ; BrightStepsForward.org
1-877-NOW-I-CAN for assessment and help

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