Man Down - Rounding the News
Man Down - Rounding the News
Damar Hamlin, John Carpay, Kevin McCarthy, January 6th pipe bomber, and more
Happy New Year!
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to 2023. While many of us were hoping we’d ease our way into the new year relatively uneventfully, we have thus far been proven predictably naive. That means that Rounding the Earth will remain busy for the foreseeable future, and I will continue to bring you my summary of the news as I see it, through the lens of “unflattening the Earth” - a phrase I intend to use frequently in the New Year.
My name is Liam Sturgess and I am your host for this weekly news roundup, presented by Rounding the Earth. Before we get started, I want to remind everyone that you can support the show by sending us a Rumble Rant, a tip on Rokfin, or LBRY tokens on Odysee. Even more importantly, I invite you to join us over on our Locals community, where I have posted the show notes for today's episode along with the links to watch the show live on Rumble, Rokfin and Odysee, as well as directly through the StreamYard platform.
Join the community as a free member or sign up to support us for $5 per month to gain access to Locals-exclusive livestreams.
You may have noticed that I have not yet released Part V of my “Examining Effective Altruism” series - not to worry, it’s coming. It turns out it was rather ambitious thinking I could wrap everything up in a nice bow in just a week, when it had taken me over a month to get through the first four parts. Moving forward, I am going to experiment with separating Rounding the News and my special investigations series, allowing both to fully serve their purpose.
Without further ado, let’s get started!
JCCF President John Carpay spends a day in jail
John Carpay, the President of the Alberta-based Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), surrendered himself for arrest in the final days of 2022. He spent part of New Year’s eve in custody.
In a statement released on January 1st, the JCCF announced that it “was made aware” of a Canada-wide warrant for John’s arrest, at which point he presented to the Calgary Police Service (CPS).1 Describing the warrant as “unexpected and without explanation,” the JCCF and John explained that it was issued “in connection with the events that took place in 2021,” referring to John’s hiring of a private investigator to follow Glenn Joyal, “chief justice of what is now Manitoba's Court of King's Bench.”23
According to CBC News, John faces an upcoming hearing before the Law Society of Manitoba starting February 8th.
Kip Warner, Executive Director of the Canadian Society for the Advancement of Science in Public Policy (CSASPP), responded to the news with the following statement, where he summarized the events leading to the arrest:4
Mr. Carpay did not enjoy his New Year’s Eve. I had hoped his difficulties would have ended after he faced serious professional repercussions to his livelihood from the Canadian Bar Association. Instead he spent yesterday in solitary confinement without a cot, mattress, blanket, or even a pillow after having been criminally charged and taken into custody by the Calgary police. This was presumably in response to Mr. Carpay having engaged a private investigator to investigate Chief Justice Joyal’s private life as it related to various provincial COVID-19 restrictions that were in effect at the time.
Although I did not agree with Mr. Carpay’s decision after it was well publicized and I came to learn of it, I do appreciate that he believed that he was doing the right thing.
Nevertheless, the JCCF continues to litigate cases related to COVID-19, including against restrictions on gathering in both Alberta and Ontario.
The United States has no Speaker - so far
For the first time since 1923, the United States of America is left without a Speaker of the House of Representatives.5
Kevin McCarthy was expected to assume the position following the Republican Party’s victory of the House during the closer-than-anticipated 2022 Midterm Elections, having previously served as House Minority Leader.
However, as of Thursday night, McCarthy had failed to win a majority of support from his Republican colleagues after a shocking 11 rounds of voting.6 He needs 218 votes, and has thus far settled on 200 - with representative Matt Gaetz shifting his 201st vote to former President Donald Trump before the day was done. More specifically, on the 7th ballot.7
For those who find that an absurd proposal, it’s actually within the realm of possibility. As Axios points out, “[n]othing in the Constitution requires the speaker to be a sitting member of Congress, though that has been the case throughout U.S history.” Furthermore, there may even be a good strategic reason to call for this, as suggested by constitutional lawyer Robert Barnes several weeks ago in an appearance on The Duran.8
Check out the first 10-15 minutes of the video to hear Barnes out on this one:
January 6th pipe bomber remains unidentified
Two years ago today, many thousands of protesters descended upon Washington, D.C. to contest the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a day that was sure to live on in infamy, no matter the outcome.
Much like the COVID-19 crisis, a real protest that really got out of hand was used as a political vehicle, taken advantage of and rewritten time and again. An interesting summary of events can be found at a website called Here Is the Evidence.9
One of the (many) loose ends not yet tied up from the January 6th protest is the identity of the person captured on camera planting pipe bombs in garbage cans outside both the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Thankfully, no explosions ever actually occurred.
As reported by the Epoch Times, on January 4, 2023, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced they were increasing the reward offered for information on the suspect from $100,000 to $500,000.10
Honourable mentions…
Ukraine precision strike on school kills 60+ Russian soldiers
The Duran: Russia MOD missile statement. Ursula calls Elensky, promises money. Bday tweet upsets Poland PM. U/1
BBC: Makiivka: Russia blames missile attack on troops' phone use
Jordan Peterson faces “re-education” for political wrongthink
Toronto Sun: LILLEY: Jordan Peterson threatened with psychologists licence being revoked over political statements online
Damar Hamlin suffers cardiac arrest on the field
In a shocking moment broadcast to millions of live TV viewers on January 2nd, Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin collapsed.11 This is a video replay of the tragic event:
What followed was an unprecedented demonstration of how divided the public has become. It seems that everyone immediately jumped into action, with the internet split down the middle on what “definitely” happened. Everyone, however, quickly came to the same understanding that Hamlin had, indeed, collapsed due to cardiac arrest. In human terms: his heart stopped.
Despite the novelty with which Hamlin’s injury is being discussed, he is far from the first athlete to collapse under mysterious circumstances since the rollout of the COVID-19 injectable products. One website that’s been keeping track of such incidents is Good Sciencing - their current tally of so-called #CollapsingAthletes has reached the grim milestone of 1616, 1114 of which have died.12
Here’s the catch: it’s highly unlikely all of these athletes collapsed because of the shot. That’s nowhere near what matters. Athletes collapsed before 2021 from a variety of causes. But nowhere near this many.
As such, it stands to reason that those already paying attention to this ongoing health crisis jumped to conclusions. What was perhaps less expected is the way in which seemingly average people so quickly engaged in preemptively countering any suggestion at all that the shot could have played a role.
#CollapsingAthletes and #JumpingtoConclusions
In his video published January 3rd, Ryan Christian of The Last American Vagabond detailed at length the ways in which both the new media and regular people on the internet were immediately jumping to conclusions based on what they had already decided was (or could not be) the case, resulting in only two possible lanes to drive in.13
However, the point he really hammers home is this: it is always okay to ask the question. After all, that is the scientific method, and it is far more important to acknowledge what we can’t possibly know than it is to insist on shaping a narrative in one’s own favour. That goes for everybody, no matter your bias. Each individual case is not the same as the last.
Don’t be like Greg Doyel of IndyStar, who definitely thinks he knows exactly what happened.
In his article (which also came out less than 24 hours after Hamlin’s collapse), Doyel warns his readers that “anti-vaxxers” were flooding social media to overtly and intentionally lie in order “to promote their agenda.”14 He describes these people as "evil" no less than five times in the article itself, or six if you count the title listed in search engine results.
Not only are those people evil in Doyel’s eyes, but anybody who falls for their lies are “gullible” and “following them into the depths of hell.” He does afford this group of “others” one back-handed compliment, though - “these folks weren’t uninformed”. Nope, just evil people who don’t like being told what to do.
…I suppose that implies non-evil people do like being told what to do?
Unfortunately, Doyel does seem to be rather uninformed about at least a few things, demonstrated by his assertion that the Twitter account @DiedSuddenly_ formed five weeks ago is “devoted to this one piece of misinformation”, rather than to devoted to, oh, I don’t know, promoting the movie of the same name?
The point is this: Doyel doesn’t know anything much about Damar Hamlin’s situation, so why does he seem so confident in his crass dismissal of anybody who even thinks about the word “vaccine”? Isn’t it odd that he would be so devoid of curiosity as to describe anybody and everybody who holds a different thought in their head than him as either evil or gullible?
As for me, if I’ve learned anything over the last three years, it is there will always be something else to learn.
That brings us to our new term of the week: commotio cordis.
Commotio cordis
Dr. Robert Malone joined our friend Tommy on Tommy’s Podcast to share some very wise words on the situation, and to help articulate why both sides of the conversation were almost definitely wrong.15
Describing the “commotion,” Dr. Malone explains that from his understanding, Hamlin took “a hard hit to the chest… and he got up, staggered, went down.” The medical response team acted quickly, “succeeding in cardioversion.” In the words of the Mayo Clinic, cardioversion is “a medical procedure that uses quick, low-energy shocks to restore a regular heart rhythm.”16 Basically, they got his heart started back up. "They succeeded in bringing him back to life, but after a period of time - it didn't come easy," Malone added.
The Good Doctor then elaborated on something called commotio cordis, which was quickly deferred to in the mainstream discussion as the supposed “most likely” cause of Hamlin’s cardiac arrest.17 But first, he established that not enough information was yet available for anybody to be making any sort of authoritative claim on the cause, particularly in the dichotomy of myocarditis vs. commotio cordis.
“It is bringing out, let’s say, the best and the worst of the internet community right now. Some of my colleagues jumped into the fray right away. I can tell you, I took a lot of flack last night for not doing that, and I’m so glad I stuck to my guns and didn’t and waited for a little more information to trickle out.”
What is commotio cordis? A 2012 paper in the American Heart Association’s Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology journal describes it as “a phenomenon in which a sudden blunt impact to the chest causes sudden death in the absence of cardiac damage.”18 The University of Connecticut's Korey Stringer Institute elaborates:19
Commotio Cordis is seen mostly in athletes between the ages of 8 and 18 who are partaking in sports with projectiles such as baseballs, hockey pucks, or lacrosse balls. These projectiles can strike the athletes in the middle of the chest with a low impact but enough to cause the heart to enter an arrhythmia. Martial arts is a sport in which a strike of a hand can also cause the heart to change it’s rhythm. Without immediate CPR and defibrillation the prognosis of commotio cordis is not very good. This condition is extremely dangerous with rare survival.
As pointed out in an article published by UNC Health (once again, on January 3rd), the condition is exceptionally rare; “Only about two dozen cases are reported every year.”20 How does that stack up against the risk of cardiac arrest temporally associated with COVID-19 injection? I'm not the man to answer that.
Apparently, neither is Dr. Christopher Kelly. To his credit, he points out that "Football’s extremely dangerous for a variety of reasons, but [commotio cordis] is generally not one of them.” But I’m not sure how that squares with his suggestion that the condition is a “leading cause of sudden cardiac death among young athletes.” He supports this assertion by linking to an article on the National Center for Biotechnology Information that states “Although it is infrequent, it is an important cause of sudden death in young athletes.”21 The page was last updated September 19, 2022, and the earliest archived version I can find was dated June 27, 2020.
Based on my limited knowledge, it looks to me like commotio cordis is generally seen as something you don’t walk away from. As such, I find it interesting that so many were so quick to go with this ridiculously rare assumed diagnosis while lashing out at anyone asking whether myocarditis was a possibility - especially given that reported cases of myocarditis, along with pericarditis, are very much a thing, and at a higher rate than "expected."22
Obviously, heart damage is very serious, no matter the cause, and the nexts few years are going to be rough as the long-term effects of the mass-vaccination campaign are witnessed.23
How is he now?
As of Thursday evening, Hamlin is said to have woken up. The headlines are straight out of Hollywood, and are changing in live time.
According to CNN, Hamlin is on the mend. He seems to be “neurologically sound and is moving his hands and feet,” though he is not yet speaking.24 Needless to say, I am joining in with the millions of people praying for Hamlin to make a recovery.25
That’s all for today, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in to Rounding the News, and I hope you learned as much as I did.
If you’ve enjoyed the show, please drop us a Rumble Rant or a tip on Rokfin, and before you leave, go sign up as a member of our Locals community at www.RoundingtheEarth.locals.com. You can even snag yourself a free month of premium support using the promo code included on the pinned comment, after which you can keep us going and gain access to behind-the-main-scenes discussions that we’re keeping within our more intimate community.
I have been Liam Sturgess, and you can find me at www.LiamSturgess.com, or on Twitter @TheLiamSturgess. See you next week!
Halvorson, M. (2023, January 1). Statement Regarding Charge Laid Against John Carpay. Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms. https://web.archive.org/web/20230104182201/https://www.jccf.ca/statement-regarding-charge-laid-against-john-carpay/
John Carpay’s personal statement after his release. (2023, January 2). Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms. https://web.archive.org/web/20230104182525/https://www.jccf.ca/john-carpays-personal-statement-after-his-release/
Gowriluk, C. (2023, January 3). Lawyer faces 2 criminal charges after having Manitoba judge followed during churches’ COVID-19 court challenge. CBC. https://archive.ph/t1utj
Warner, K. (2023, January 1). Status Updates. Canadian Society for the Advancement of Science in Public Policy. https://web.archive.org/web/20230106052441/https://www.covidconstitutionalchallengebc.ca/status-updates
Epstein, K. (2023, January 4). US House in chaos after Kevin McCarthy loses speaker votes. BBC News. https://archive.ph/Bbazp
Foran, C., Annie Grayer, Kristin, Raju, M., Zanona, M., Grayer, A., & Wilson, K. (2023, January 5). House adjourns for third day without picking a speaker in longest contest in 164 years | CNN Politics. CNN. https://archive.ph/pyn4q
Matt Gaetz votes for Trump for speaker. (2023, January 5). Axios. https://archive.ph/rVYE1
The Duran. (2022, December 20). Truth and transparency. Secrets and disinformation w/Robert Barnes (Live). Rumble. https://web.archive.org/web/20230105183557/https://rumble.com/v21lkci-truth-and-transparency.-secrets-and-disinformation-wrobert-barnes-live.html
Capitol Protest January 6th. Here Is the Evidence. Retrieved January 6, 2023, from https://hereistheevidence.com/capitol-protest-1-6-21/
Nguyen Ly, M. (2023, January 5). FBI Increases Reward to $500,000 for Information About Capitol Hill Pipe Bomb Suspect. The Epoch Times. https://www.theepochtimes.com/fbi-increases-reward-to-500000-for-information-about-capitol-hill-pipe-bomb-suspect_4963485.html
Maadi, R. (2023, January 3). What happened to Buffalo Bills’ Damar Hamlin? What we know so far. Global News. https://web.archive.org/web/20230104075653/https://globalnews.ca/news/9383742/damar-hamlin-injury-explainer/
1616 Athlete Cardiac Arrests, Serious Issues, 1114 of Them Dead, Since COVID Injection. Good Sciencing. Retrieved January 4, 2023, from https://archive.ph/D6vfB
TheLastAmericanVagabond. (2023, January 3). Damar Hamlin Suffers Cardiac Arrest On Field - Is It Appropriate To Ask The Question? Rumble. https://web.archive.org/web/20230104042930/https://rumble.com/v23r4z8-damar-hamlin-suffers-cardiac-arrest-on-field-is-it-appropriate-to-ask-the-q.html
Doyel, G. (2023, January 3). Doyel: Don’t let anti-vaxxers lie to you about Damar Hamlin like they did with Bert Smith. The Indianapolis Star. https://web.archive.org/web/20230103181348/https://eu.indystar.com/story/sports/columnists/gregg-doyel/2023/01/03/anti-vaxxers-using-buffalo-bills-damar-hamlin-to-promote-covid-agenda-vaccine-bert-smith-ncaa-ref/69773059007/
Tommy's Podcast. (2023, January 3). TPC #1,038: Dr. Robert Malone (Commotio Cordis). Rumble. https://web.archive.org/web/20230104035005/https://rumble.com/v23r7b4-tpc-1038-dr.-robert-malone-commotio-cordis.html
Mayo Clinic Staff. (2022, May 20). Cardioversion. Mayo Clinic. https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/cardioversion/about/pac-20385123
Treisman, R. (2023, January 3). Did Damar Hamlin experience commotio cordis? What to know about the rare phenomenon. NPR. https://web.archive.org/web/20230106020941/https://www.npr.org/2023/01/03/1146744819/damar-hamlin-buffalo-bills-cardiac-arrest-commotio-cordis
Link, M. S. (2012). Commotio Cordis. Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, 5(2), 425–432. https://doi.org/10.1161/circep.111.962712
Belval, L. Commotio Cordis. Korey Stringer Institute. Retrieved January 3, 2023, from https://archive.ph/01HJf
Kelly, C. (2023, January 3). What Happens in Commotio Cordis? UNC Health Talk. https://web.archive.org/web/20230105064133/https://healthtalk.unchealthcare.org/what-happens-in-commotio-cordis/
Tainter, C. R., & Hughes, P. G. (2022, September 19). Commotio Cordis. PubMed; StatPearls Publishing. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK526014/#:~:text=Commotio%20cordis%20plays%20a%20distressing
Oster, M. E., Shay, D. K., Su, J. R., Gee, J., Creech, C. B., Broder, K. R., Edwards, K., Soslow, J. H., Dendy, J. M., Schlaudecker, E., Lang, S. M., Barnett, E. D., Ruberg, F. L., Smith, M. J., Campbell, M. J., Lopes, R. D., Sperling, L. S., Baumblatt, J. A., Thompson, D. L., & Marquez, P. L. (2022). Myocarditis Cases Reported After mRNA-Based COVID-19 Vaccination in the US From December 2020 to August 2021. JAMA, 327(4), 331. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2021.24110
Piccirillo, F., Watanabe, M., & Di Sciascio, G. (2021). Diagnosis, treatment and predictors of prognosis of myocarditis. A narrative review. Cardiovascular Pathology, 54, 107362. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.carpath.2021.107362
Close, D., Wolfe, E., & Hanna, J. (2023, January 5). Damar Hamlin is awake and holding hands with family, his agent tells CNN, days after his cardiac arrest during NFL game. CNN. https://archive.ph/u7TEN
Fans light candles, offer prayers for Damar Hamlin’s recovery. (2023, January 3). NBC News. https://web.archive.org/web/20230106040139/https://www.nbcnews.com/video/fans-light-candles-offer-prayers-for-damar-hamlin-s-recovery-159176261776
Do you think that IF Damar collapsed due to myocarditis and IF he survives it and does ok, that might end up being threatening to the narrative? I’m just thinking that if I collapsed and I was told that the most probable explanation was vaccine induced myocarditis, I’d become that vaccine’s number one outspoken critic, ya know?