Most NFL general managers (GMs) are optimistic and displaying overconfidence today as they prepare for tomorrow’s NFL draft. The draft is a once-a-year opportunity for GMs to acquire talent.

Like investors, GMs often think they are smarter than their competitors, aka the market. Yet, they frequently have similar mindsets and follow the same narratives that drive their competition.   

As we will share, overconfidence and groupthink among football GMs and investors are behavioral flaws that often harm performance. Having the tools and strategies to mitigate our behavioral traits is extremely valuable and can lead you to better returns.

Overconfidence In The NFL

Four of the first five picks in the draft are expected to be quarterbacks. Not only is the quarterback the most important position on the field but this year’s draft is hyped as having several future greats.

Based on data from Warren Sharp, an NFL analyst, most of the quarterbacks taken in the early rounds will be average. His Fox Sports article entitled The success rate of first round QBs makes Lamar Jackson’s case for him, quantifies just how poor the odds are of drafting the next Super Bowl-winning quarterback. 

There have been 38 quarterbacks drafted in the first round since 2011, the year the NFL changed the collective bargaining agreement.

These 38 first-round quarterbacks have made a total of 1,909 starts. Their record? 1034-1035-7.

He claims that of those 38 quarterbacks, only one, Patrick Mahomes, has won a Super Bowl. Furthermore, of the 28 from that group who are no longer on their initial contracts, the average time they were a starter was a mere 3.4 years.

Despite the proven mediocrity of quarterbacks taken in the first round, we have little doubt that overconfidence will be on full display by the GMs drafting quarterbacks with their top picks after they make their selections.

Groupthink In The NFL

This behavioral trait arises when people seeking conformity think and act similarly. Typically, groups reach a consensus opinion without proper evaluation and with minimal alternative viewpoints.

For instance, it is widely accepted that the four quarterbacks likely to go in the top five, Williams, Daniels, Maye, and McCarthy, will be excellent pros. Most NFL analysts offer differences between the quarterbacks but praise the physical and mental traits they believe will make them NFL starts. Very few analysts have poor ratings on any of those four quarterbacks.

Choosing one of the four quarterbacks is comforting. Simply, GMs have cover if their pick is a dud. Who could have known? Every expert thought he would be a superstar!

Investor Overconfidence And Groupthink

Replace players with investment ideas and GMs with investors. The overconfidence and groupthink mentality impacting GM draft day decisions are similar to those investors always face.

We quantified the odds of GMs picking above-average quarterbacks earlier. Per DFA Funds, the odds of an investor outperforming the market are even more daunting.

We saw from the data above that an investor has about a 75% chance of underperforming the market in any given year, which means you have a 25% chance of beating the market in any given year.

The message to take away from that statistic is to leave your confidence at the door!

Regarding groupthink, most investors, like GMs, find comfort in knowing that many other investors are doing the same thing. Market narratives are a form of groupthink. Narratives help explain market movements and trends. Often, a narrative develops after a trend has started. In other words, rightly or wrongly, the narrative is the rationale.

Today, narratives appear to be quicker to form and longer lasting. Maybe the advent of social media has allowed for their quicker dissemination and growth.

Narratives describe the mindset of a group of investors. When you unknowingly invest based on a narrative, you are likely setting yourself up for failure.

Strategies To Combat Behavioral Traits

Appreciating that GMs have a one in three chance of successfully using a precious top-five draft pick on a quarterback or that only a quarter of investors will beat the market, we best have tools to manage our behavioral traits and improve our odds of success.

Zig

Warren Sharp advises GMs to “zig while others zag.”

To zig is to have a contrarian mindset. For instance, it’s important for your portfolio to have popular stocks leading the market higher. But at the same time, understand that confidence can wane quickly, and a new set of stocks will take the throne soon enough. Don’t overstay your welcome in a narrative.

It wasn’t that long ago that the Magnificent Seven stocks were all the rage. Their returns handily beat almost every stock and index. Holding a meaningful subset of the seven stocks was vital to keep up with the broad market indexes. However, the Magnificent Seven’s period of outperformance has either ended or is on pause. But, the narrative still thrives, and whether it’s already happening or will occur shortly, investing in the aged groupthink will catch many investors offside.

Take Profits 

It’s hard to sell when others are buying. Still, when the narrative-driven stocks fall out of favor, the prior profits and reduced position sizes will bolster returns and lessen the risk of underperforming the market.

Appreciating what the market, and not popular narratives, tell you is equally vital. For instance, have you noticed that utilities and energy are the best-performing sectors lately? Those solely holding the Magnificent Seven and neglecting other sectors are falling behind.

The SimpleVisor table below shows the relative performance of the Magnificent Seven stocks and XLU, the utility ETF, versus the S&P 500 over various time frames. Other than NVDA, most of the seven have been underperforming the market as of late. Also, the once poorly performing utility sector has been beating the market for the last 45 days. Selling the Magnificent Seven 45 days ago to buy utilities would go against groupthink, but it was a smart call.

Appreciate Your Options

The GMs with the top five picks have a precious option. Instead of picking a quarterback with limited odds of success, they can trade the pick to another team. In exchange, they might receive multiple high-level draft picks, boosting the odds of success.

Other positions in the NFL draft have much better success rates than quarterbacks. If a GM can set aside their confidence in their ability to pick the right quarterback, they can increase the odds that they could easily land at least two very good players and possibly a pro bowler. Maybe they can even use one of the picks to get a quarterback in the later rounds. Let’s not forget Brock Purdy, the San Francisco quarterback who led the 49ers to the Superbowl, was Mr. Irrelevant, the last person taken in the draft.

Investors have options, too. Many stocks, sectors, and factors will likely outperform the market but do not fit the narrative du jour. While buying what others aren’t may be uncomfortable, it may be more profitable.

The other lesson is to diversify. Putting most of your eggs in one basket can significantly impact your relative performance. You will underperform if you are proven wrong, as is most common.

Let Winners Run

One of the most popular Wall Street sayings is, “Cut your losses short and let your winners run.”

If our chances of beating the market are one in four, doesn’t it make sense to trade your portfolio actively? Many investors do the opposite. Their confidence and the attraction of groupthink keep them in underperforming stocks. At the same time, alternative stocks that are less followed may be the best bets.

It can be appropriate and profitable at times to follow the crowd. However, at all costs, don’t ignore alternative views.

Summary

We risk underperforming the market by falling victim to our natural behavioral traits. Therefore, we owe it to ourselves to entertain and understand alternative views. As odd as it may seem these days, we need to watch FOX News and read the New York Times. We must challenge ourselves to understand better things that may not be comfortable.

Seek out and study the views of others with whom you disagree. By better understanding opposing opinions, you will strengthen your existing views or better recognize flaws in your current logic. Either way, an investment thesis is better for it.

Most importantly, remember that you are only human. The Patrick Mahomes of the investment world are few and far between. At times, overconfidence is a good trait, but it can also be a critical flaw.

The post Overconfidence In NFL Drafts: A Lesson For Investors appeared first on RIA.

The dropping of the atomic bomb was evil. For the average conservative commentator, this comment automatically causes a knee-jerk reaction with the same old platitudes. For decades, the American Right has been the defender of our usage of the atomic bomb, with either “it saved more American lives” or “it was the lesser of two evils” being some of the strongest candidates.

Source

Holocaust survivor Tova Friedman’s Auschwitz prisoner tattoo is still visible to this day, serving as a “never again” reminder as her Jewish grandchildren face a modern wave of antisemitism. “It’s like a cancer. If you don’t stop it early, it metastasizes. It’s going to kill the body. It’s killing our country.” She says that when she came to the U.S., it was “like I came to the Promised Land, and it was just a fabulous experience. And here it is today. I am shocked, I am pained, I’m scared. I’m scared both for America, I’m scared for the Jews, and it’s very painful for our young people.”
 

The post Auschwitz survivor: antisemitism is a ‘cancer’ spreading across America appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

Jesus, when I see you held by your Mother,
Leaving her arms
Trying, trembling, your first steps
On our sad earth,
Before you I’d like to unpetal a rose
In its freshness
So that your little foot might rest ever so softly
On a flower!….

This unpetalled rose is the faithful image,
Divine Child,
Of the heart that wants to sacrifice itself for you unreservedly
at each moment.
Lord, on your altars more than one new rose
Likes to shine.
It gives itself to you…..but I dream of something else:
To be unpetalled!….”

The rose in its splendor can adorn your feast,
Lovable Child,
But the unpetalled rose is just flung out
To blow away.
An unpetalled rose gives itself unaffectedly
To be no more.
Like it, with joy I abandon myself to you,
Little Jesus.

One walks on rose petals with no regrets,
And this debris
Is a simple ornament that one disposes of artlessly,
That I’ve understood.
Jesus, for your love I’ve squandered my life,
My future.
In the eyes of men, a rose forever withered,
I must die!…

For you, I must die, Child, Beauty Supreme,
What a blessed fate!
In being unpetalled, I want to prove to you that I love you,
O my Treasure!…
Under your baby steps, I want to live here below
With mystery,
And I’d like to soften once more on Calvary
Your last steps!….

The post An Unpetalled Rose appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

As we get older, the temptation to be dissatisfied with our lives can grow.  A fear of aging, along with memories of past failures and mistakes, can obscure the good in the world around us.  A culture of consumption, distractions, and anesthetics, which is what we’ve created, feeds on that restlessness and profits from the anxiety that so often animates our desires.  In the process, it steals something uniquely human from us.  It reduces us to a bundle of material appetites.  And it resents anything transcendent because questions about meaning threaten the machinery of wanting and possessing more.

This is one of the reasons why beauty – real beauty – can seem so diminished in our daily lives.  Real beauty draws us up and out of ourselves; it connects us to realities that can’t be commodified.  It re-sacralizes the world, even if only for a moment.  And in doing that, it indicts the vulgarity, cynicism, and disorder that constitute so much of contemporary life.

But we’re better than our base appetites.  We deserve something more than commercialized, materialist junk.  And the reason why is simple: As the philosopher Roger Scruton wrote in his book The Face of God, “the [human] face shines in the world of objects with a light that is not of this world – the light of subjectivity.”

Today’s social sciences tend to reduce individuals to data points and the human experience to patterns of behavior.  And of course it’s true that we humans are animated carbon, just like every other animal.  We have instincts and we reproduce more or less like every other animal.  But we’re not like any other animal.  We’re uniquely conscious of both our individuality and our mortality.  Which explains both our fear of loneliness and our need for meaning.  We’re the only species that buries and reveres its dead.  It’s in our nature to want more than this life can give; to sense that something more and higher might be possible.

Again, in The Face of God, Scruton wrote:

Take away religion, [take away] philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways they can represent their apartness.  Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead.  Biological reductionism nurtures this “living down,” which is why people so readily fall for it.  It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic.  It abolishes our kind, and with it, our kindness.

Beauty, in contrast, is an affirmation of our shared human dignity.  It reminds us of the goodness of life in an age of transgressive narcissism and repudiation of the past.  This is why, in the Catholic tradition, hostility to high culture; to excellence and precision in the life of the mind; and more recently and narrowly to the traditional Latin Mass, can seem so strange.

I grew up with the old form of the Mass.  I have no desire to go back to it.  It could often be mechanical and uninspiring, and the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council were overdue and necessary.  When done well, they produce a form of worship that’s both reverent and profound.

But what the old Mass did have, when a priest celebrated it with humility and conviction, was a tactile beauty that appealed to all the senses, especially sight, sound, and smell.  And in doing that, it communicated, vividly, the mystery of an invisible reality — a God radically holy, a God radically “other than” us, but at the same time intimate, loving, and incarnate in our humanity.

People leave the Catholic Church and the wider Christian community today for many different reasons.  But one of those reasons is the unconvincing, bourgeois mediocrity that can be too common in our worship – which then infects the whole atmosphere of Christian life.

My point is simply this:  Ugliness kills the spirit and explains the impulse for desecration that infects so much of modern “art.”  Ugliness dumbs down the imagination, softens the brain, and hardens the heart.  People of faith have a hunger for beauty and mystery and belonging to a story; the story of a living, believing community, ongoing and true across cultures and time.  And they’re too often not getting that in their local churches.

In his book Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Scruton wrote that:

Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people.  It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition, as free individuals seeking our place in a shared and public world.  We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust.  Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves.  The experience of beauty guides us along this second path:  It tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perception as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.  But beings like us. . .become at home in the world only by acknowledging our “fallen” condition. . . .Hence the experience of beauty also points us beyond this world to a “kingdom of ends” in which our immortal longings and our desire for perfection are finally answered.

This is why a hunger for beauty and the religious frame of mind are so closely related and so vital for human flourishing.  They both flow from a humble sense of human imperfection while reaching for the transcendent.  For better or worse, it’s also why so many young families seek out the beauty and mystery of the old Latin Mass.

We need beauty to ennoble our imagination, to guide our scientific intuitions, and to poke through the blather and venom of “wokeness.”  We need it to see reality clearly.  We need beauty because it keeps us human.  Beauty tells us that despite our sins and failures, Creation is good.  And behind it is a Creator who loves us.

The post The Face of God appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

The clusterf*ck in the US House of Representatives this past weekend is surely the final straw. The dreadful grip of the UniParty on national security policy has finally produced sheer madness in a single package. To wit: $95 billion of foreign aid boondoggles that do not benefit America’s homeland security in the slightest. An extension … Continue reading "The UniParty’s Day of Infamy"

The post The UniParty’s Day of Infamy appeared first on Antiwar.com.

When blasphemy and heresy meet sodomy…

Queer in Trier: ‘Bishop’ Ackermann Presides Over Ecumenical Rainbow Service for Aberrosexuals

In the Vatican II Sect, the Modernist layman Stephan Ackermann has been playing ‘Catholic bishop’ of Trier, Germany, since 2009. It was then that ‘Pope’ Benedict XVI appointed him to succeed ‘Bishop’ (now ‘Cardinal’) Reinhard Marx, who had been promoted to become ‘Archbishop’ of Munich and Freising.

Every year the Tier diocese celebrates the so-called Heilig-Rock-Tage. It is a 10-day church festival centered on the relic of the Holy Tunic (Heiliger Rock) of Jesus Christ. This year, the festival took place from Apr.… READ MORE

The name Francis X. Maier may not be well-known outside the inside circles of ecclesiastical life because he has worked diligently but effectively behind the scenes. He served for twenty-three years as senior aide to Archbishop Charles Chaput in the Archdiocese of Denver and then in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Before that, he served for fifteen years as editor-in-chief of the National Catholic Register newsweekly, and earlier as a screenwriter and story analyst based in Los Angeles. He is currently a senior fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Maier has written an excellent book, True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church, just released by Ignatius Press, that should rightfully make his name better known. In this concise and readable book, Maier summarizes the frank and in-depth interviews that he conducted with 103 bishops, clergy, religious, and lay men and women from various backgrounds over a seventeen-month period, from December 2020 through May 2022. While the persons interviewed do not hesitate to point out the shortcomings that they see in the life of the Church as well as her strengths, they do so out of love for the Church and a fervent desire to fix the flaws of the human failings of its leaders and members.

In his introduction to the book, Archbishop Chaput writes: 

At heart, the Church is a “she”, not an “it”: the Bride of Christ; a mother of tenderness and the teacher of truth. And even in an age that derides her and dismisses the need for a God; even in an age when her weakness is often brutally obvious, the Church is younger, stronger, and more beautiful than her enemies have the capacity to understand or see.

Then Archbishop Chaput added a personal note about Maier. He wrote: 

In Denver, in the early days of our collaboration, I sometimes stopped by Fran’s office at the end of the day to think out loud or exchange ideas. I asked him once why he worked for the Church when he could do something else that paid more. He looked at me quizzically, and then said, “Because I love her.” 

In Chapter One of the book, Maier then explains why he loves the Church:

I love the Church because she is my home, my extended family, the mother who takes us back whatever our failures and mistakes. I love her for the grandeur of the art, music, law, architecture, and literature she has inspired. I love her for the brilliance of her intellectual legacy, which has no parallel in human experience. I love her for the good that remains in the civilization she shaped. I love her for her patience and mercy. I love her because she treasures and refuses to abandon the weak. I love her above all because what she teaches is salvific and true. There has never been a Christianity without the Church. She’s essential to the Christian life. The Church preceded the Gospels, not the other way around. And the Christian faith has never been merely a personal relationship with God, as important as that is. It has always been, beginning in the Upper Room, an assembly of believers, an ekklesia—a Church. I love the Church despite the sins of her leaders and her people, including my own.

The various chapters of the book consist of asking different audiences why they love the Church and what they would do to correct any perceived shortcomings in the leadership or life of the Church. While two chapters are interviews of priests, deacons, and bishops (not including me), the vast majority of people interviewed are lay Christian faithful, including a diocesan finance officer, the president of an investment advisory firm, university professors, theologians, legal scholars, business people, social scientists, journalists, immigrants, philanthropists, leaders of lay apostolates, husbands, wives, homeschooling mothers, and non-Catholic Christians. He asks them questions like:

Do you love the Church? If so, why, and what do you love about her?

What are your impressions of the Church, and have they changed over the years?

What are the biggest mistakes a diocese or parish typically makes?

What do you see as the major problems in the Church right now?

What issues, particularly in the United States, need to be addressed for a renewal of the Church to take place?

When you look for practical sources of hope right now, what are they?

Since so many people offer their opinions in this book, it is not surprising that they do not all agree, nor do all share the same advice. But that is one of the attractive qualities of this book, in that the reader will hear a variety of voices, some of whom they may identify with and others with whom they may not. A key indicator of what readers might expect in these answers is the number of times the following words appear in this book: Church–732, God–152, Jesus–70, faith–255, hope–63, and love–116.

The title of the book comes from the 1981 film True Confessions, based on the crime novel of the same name by John Gregory Dunne. As Maier explains in the final chapter, True Confessions is 

not a happy portrait of the Church, her people, or her clergy. . . . The heart of both the novel and the film is the fractious relationship between two Catholic brothers: Des and Tom Spellacy. Des, played in the film by Robert De Niro, is a rising young monsignor, chancellor of the archdiocese, right hand to the cardinal, and on the fast track to be a bishop. Tom (Robert Duvall, in one of his finest roles) is an LAPD detective; the “black sheep” son of their Irish Catholic family. Cynical toward life in general and the Church in particular, Tom Spellacy is the lens through which the story unfolds. Tom is a complicated soul: resentful of his brother’s perceived goodness, calloused by the meanness of the streets, but also protective of his brother’s reputation. Des Spellacy is no less complex: smart, shrewd, ambitious, and (when necessary) ruthless—and also keenly aware of his own sin of pride, masked by a veneer of priestly piety. Onto Tom’s police plate drops the case of the murdered young woman. Where it leads provides the rest of the drama.

His point is that 

alongside the great good that can be achieved through Christian engagement in public leadership, great harm can be done to the Church and her mission when her people and her clergy confuse material success with service to the Gospel. A comfortable Church, a colluding Church, a publicly esteemed Church can very easily become a dead Church. And when faith is merely skin deep, it’s worth remembering that societies sooner or later shed their dead skin.

To prevent this disintegration of the Church’s vitality, Maier proposes nothing less than the call to sainthood: “We moderns tend to think that the era of the saints is over. But we’re wrong. It’s always the era of the saints.” This imperative of personal sanctity is not confined to clergy or consecrated religious, but extends to each and every person: “The task of any ‘new reformation,’ any purifying re-formation of Church and world, begins with each believer.”

In the end, a good book leaves the reader hungry for more, and that is how I felt when I reached its end. We hear directly from Maier only in the preface and chapters one and eleven, while the rest of the chapters are a blend of interview responses with Maier’s brief commentary. Those interviews provide a helpful cross-section of views on the strengths of the Church and suggestions for addressing the weaknesses of ecclesial life. But I found myself wanting to hear more from Maier himself because he obviously has a lot of wisdom to share.

For example, I took solace as a bishop in these words: 

Bishops in the Church tend to get blamed for everything. And sometimes they earn it. But bishops didn’t invent the birth control pill. They didn’t create the sexual anarchy that flowed from it. Bishops didn’t invent the transistor, or the microchip, or the cell phone, or video games, or gay dating apps, or the internet cocoon of pornography that’s destroyed millions of families and vocations. And bishops don’t have a magic wand to cancel out the massively negative influence of popular culture on their people.

Maier also has sound advice for everyone else in the Church when he says that we are 

harvesting the effects of a century of Catholic assimilation and naïve optimism about the compatibility of Catholic teaching and American culture. I’ve always believed in our potential as Catholic Christians to be a leaven in American life. It just hasn’t worked out that way. Of course, that can change. But it requires leaders, and their people, who think in terms of the long haul and commit to missionary witness as their first priority in thought and deed.

Maier’s love for the Church comes through in this book and is why others who love the Church will want to read it. Perhaps we can hope for a sequel in which we will get to hear more of Maier in his own words. 

Image by sidneydealmeida and licensed via Adobe Stock.

In the United States House of Representatives, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) was known for his progressive views, while Ron Paul (R-TX) was known for his libertarian views. There were many times when the two representatives disagreed about American policy and legislation. But, there was also much overlap in their views in regard to United States foreign policy and liberty in America.

In this area of overlap, the two men worked together many times in the House, advocating for the US seeking peace abroad and protecting liberty at home. This collaboration has continued since both men left the House in 2013, with Dennis Kucinich serving as an Advisory Board member for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity that Paul founded soon thereafter.

Interviewed last week by Glenn Greenwald at System Update, Kucinich addressed a possibility he had floated back in 2007 when on the presidential campaign trail. Greenwald queried Kucinich about Kucinich, then participating in the Democratic presidential primary, having offered Paul, who at the same time was seeking the Republican presidential nomination, as someone Kucinich would consider asking to join his ticket as his choice for vice president. Responding to Greenwald, Kucinich spoke of how he “worked closely together” with Paul, who Kucinich referred to as “a straight shooter” and “a good man” and with whom Kucinich “saw a point of coalition on the issues that related to war and the folly of the United States going into one war after another.” “When I mentioned Ron Paul as a possible running mate in 2007, despite the fact that I gave some of my colleagues then the vapors, I felt it was really important to be able to show that my view is not dichotomized; I don’t think in terms of polarity,” Kucinich further stated.

What an interesting campaign that would have been. As Paul likes to say, “Freedom brings people together.” A joint campaign of Paul and Kucinich, focused on the areas where they agree could have helped break down the artificial dichotomy and polarity in American politics that Kucinich critiques. Instead of the example that we keep seeing in Washington, DC of the exercise of “bipartisan compromise” almost always leading to intervention abroad and the diminishing of liberty in America, Kucinich and Paul could have demonstrated how principled cross-parties and cross-ideologies action can advance peace and liberty. And, taking the hypothetical a step further, consider the effort the two men could have undertaken together from the White House to roll back the US government’s many foreign interventionist and liberty suppressing activities.

In their separate campaigns, Kucinich and Paul did much work educating and inspiring people in regard to matters of peace and liberty. Those efforts continue today to yield fruit. But, what if they had combined forces instead? A Kucinich/Paul — or Paul/Kucinich — ticket is an interesting alternative history to ponder.

Judicial Watch has the receipts… and yes, the vaxx was being developed right along with the weapon. Turns out neither worked very well, but I’ll bet they do better next time. -nvp

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it received 5 pages of records from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that show an April 2020 email exchange with several officials in the bureau’s Newark Field Office referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China as including “gain-of-function research” which “would leave no signature of purposeful human manipulation.”

Judicial Watch obtained the records in response to a May 17, 2023, FOIA request for: emails and text messages of the Newark Field Office, including to Special Agent David A. Miller, containing the terms “gain of function,” “GoF,” “R01A|110964,” and/or “EcoHealth.” Judicial Watch sent the FOIA request to follow up on uncovering the FBI Newark Field Office’s investigation of the Fauci agency’s gain-of-function grants after the Covid-19 pandemic began.

On April 23, 2020, an email exchange with the subject “Follow up call” takes place between several unnamed Newark Field Office FBI officials. A person whose name is redacted writes:

Details of the current NIAID [Fauci’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases] grant for WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] bat coronavirus surveillance and WIV bat coronavirus gain-of-function research are available at: https://projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid=9819304&icde=49645421&ddparam=&ddvalue=&ddsub=&cr=1&csb=default&cs=ASC&pball= [summary of NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance for Project 2R01AI110964-06]. The key activity for bat coronavirus surveillance is ‘Aim 1 … We will sequence receptor binding domains (spike proteins) to identify viruses with the highest potential for spillover which we will include in our experimental investigations. (Aim 3).’

The key activity for bat coronavirus gain of function is “Aim 3 … We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that 0/0 divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.” Translated into lay language, this equates to: “In Aim 3, we will use de novo synthesis to construct novel viruses encoding different spike proteins in an otherwise-constant genomic context, and we will test the ability of the resulting novel viruses to infect human cells in culture and to infect laboratory animals. We hypothesize that there is a direct correlation between the receptor binding affinity of the spike protein and the abilities to infect human cells in culture and to infect laboratory animals. We will test this hypothesis by asking whether novel viruses encoding spike proteins with the highest receptor-binding affinity have the highest abilities to infect human cells in culture and to infect laboratory animals.”

The reason I am writing is that the experimental strategy proposed in Aim 3 (“infectious clone technology”), if performed using commercial or in-house gene synthesis to prepare the infectious clones, *** would leave no signatures of purposeful human manipulation***.

(All the emails are here) 

Adam Fadel is a licensed clinical therapist and, after many years of practice, he’s concluded what we know to be true: abortion trauma is real. The founder of the Charlotte clinic “The Corner: Institute for Transformation” explained what he had learned about the trauma that so often goes undiagnosed in a column written for The Fayetteville Observer.

He writes, “As state lawmakers consider the issue of abortion, they need to keep people like Sarah [a pseudonym] in mind — women who aren’t shouting their abortion, but instead are silently grieving.”

In one powerful paragraph Fadel explains

But traumas associated with abortion aren’t ended by the procedure. In fact, many of them begin there. A study conducted by Support After Abortion found that 34% of women suffer “adverse impacts” like anger, shame and regret from medication abortions. Most of these women said they had nobody to talk to afterwards, and had no idea where to go to understand and address their complicated grief. [Underlining added.]

This study results contrast sharply with the endlessly lauded “Turnaway Study.” Fadel explains, “The Turnaway Study is regularly cited by major media outlets as a rebuttal against the idea that abortion harms mothers who terminate their pregnancies.” 

Click Like if you are pro-life to like the LifeNews Facebook page!

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According to the study, women who were able to have an abortion were compared to women who were turned away — thus the name. It “found that just 5% of women regret their abortions.”

Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon, NRLC’s Director of Education & Research, has demolished the study in multiple stories written for NRL News Today. As he pointed out in the conclusion to his five-part critique of the “Turnaway” study,

“Within a week after their ‘denial,’ even before the baby was actually born, 35% of those women were no longer willing to say that having the abortion would have been the right decision. After the birth, we know that 86% were living with the baby; 59% perceived their relationships as good or very good; and nearly half (48%) had full-time jobs.”

But even if we grant, for purposes of argument, that “only” 5% of women regret their abortions, it’s “a huge number,” Fadel writes. “Guttmacher estimates that 23.7% of women have abortions, which using the Turnaway Study’s numbers means that nearly two million women regret their abortion. Leaving these women to suffer in silence is a disservice to them, their families, and their communities.”

Sarah “was also hesitant to approach me because like most women who want to seek healing after abortion, she preferred anonymity out of fear of rejection and judgment.” Fadel concludes

Sarah deserved better than to suffer years of silent regret and shame. I was grateful to be able to help her learn how to address the traumas she had endured, and to heal. As abortion continues to be debated across the state, therapists, lawmakers, abortion advocates, and abortion opponents must put aside differences and make people like Sarah a priority.

LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.

The post Women Who Regret Their Abortions are Suffering Years of Regret and Shame appeared first on LifeNews.com.

Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a new rule on Monday cracking down on prosecutors’ ability to obtain abortion records.

The rule strengthens a 1996 privacy law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), by providing protections for those seeking an abortion, as well as those who perform the procedure, according to a HHS press release. The new provision takes aim at the various red states that have imposed abortion restrictions since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

“Many Americans are scared their private medical information will be being shared, misused, and disclosed without permission,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “This has a chilling effect on women visiting a doctor, picking up a prescription from a pharmacy, or taking other necessary actions to support their health.”

“The Biden-Harris Administration is providing stronger protections to people seeking lawful reproductive health care regardless of whether the care is in their home state or if they must cross state lines to get it. With reproductive health under attack by some lawmakers, these protections are more important than ever,” Becerra added.

The Biden administration first announced its plans in April 2023 to help protect women who are traveling out of state for an abortion from investigation. HIPAA had allowed for the disclosure of some health information to law enforcement officials.

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Melanie Fontes Rainer, director of the HHS’ Office for Civil Rights, said that following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, health care providers have voiced concerns over whether the records of their patients who travel to see them will be requested.

“Patients and providers are scared, and it impedes their ability to get and to provide accurate information and access safe and legal health care,” Fontes Rainer said in a statement. “Today’s rule prohibits the use of protected health information for seeking or providing lawful reproductive health care and helps maintain and improve patient-provider trust that will lead to improved health outcomes and protect patient privacy.”

The rule follows an Arizona Supreme Court decision allowing an 1864 law to take effect that prohibits abortion in all cases except for when the life of the mother is at risk. Abortion will likely be on the ballot in the battleground state this fall, potentially joining Florida, New York and Maryland.

LifeNews Note: Mary Lou Masters writes for Daily Caller. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience.

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