Marine Corps Grants it’s First Religious Exemptions to COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate.

Nearly two months after the active-duty Marines’ vaccination deadline, the Marine Corps became the first branch of the US military to provide religious exemptions to the service’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

The Marines have authorized two requests for religious accommodations under the mandate, according to a statement released by the branch on Thursday.

The mandate was issued by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in August 2021, but every department of the military has refused to give religious accommodations, resulting in litigation and charges that the military is discriminating against religious troops in violation of federal law.

A federal judge blocked the mandate for a group of Navy employees earlier this month due to a lack of approvals, stating that the record “overwhelmingly demonstrates that the Navy’s religious accommodation process is an exercise in futility.”

According to Sean Timmons, managing partner of Tully Rinckey’s Houston office, while the verdict didn’t directly relate to the Marines, it likely spurred the military’s first religious exception approvals.

“I think the Marines saw the opinion, saw them get just completely get ripped a new one, admonished, reprimanded judicially … and they saw that, now they’re reacting to it; they’re trying to correct it after the fact,” he explained.

“They’re basically a bank robber who robbed the bank trying to return the money. ‘I’m not a bank robber. I’m just borrowing money.’ It’s laughable, comical,”

A Marines spokeswoman told The Epoch Times that the branch was “hamstrung by privacy considerations,” and refused to reveal information of the permitted exemptions.

In an emailed statement, the spokesman stressed that requests for religious accommodations are “meticulously reviewed” by numerous supervisors. If all of them agree, the request is forwarded to the deputy commandant, who will determine whether to approve or deny it.

While the Marines were the first branch to offer religious exemptions, the two that were approved were only a small portion of the 3,350 requests. Over 3,200 applications were turned down.

According to data published this week and responses from spokespersons for the branches, no other military branch has yet granted religious exemptions.

The Navy has received more than 3,700 requests for religious accommodations as a result of the rule, but has approved none. None of the roughly 2,100 religious exemption requests have been approved by the Army. Over 2,300 requests have been denied by the Air Force, with another 2,158 waiting.

Authorities have defended the lack of authorization, despite thousands of medical exemptions having been issued.

“We understand that it’s weighing on your minds, and we’re working through it as expeditiously as we can…”  Gen. Arnold Bunch Jr., commander of the Air Force Materiel Command, said troops in a virtual town hall last week, “to make sure we’re looking at each one of them on a case-by-case basis, so that we’re following and giving you due process as we go through that review.”

According to court records and lawyers representing troops seeking accommodations, even personnel who receive a religious exemption will be declared nondeployable unless they also receive a medical exemption.

Also, servicemen who have pending accommodation requests have experienced repercussions, such as a Navy SEAL who was denied travel to obtain treatment for a catastrophic brain injury sustained during a deployment.

Except for Army reservists and National Guard members, the military’s vaccination deadlines for active-duty and reserve troops passed weeks or months ago.

Branches have been intensifying punitive steps against personnel who are still unvaccinated despite having pending, rejected, or no accommodation requests, including separating them from the forces. The vaccine refusal discharge code has resulted in the separation of 351 Marines, according to the branch. The Air Force has discharged 87 active-duty personnel, while the Navy has discharged 20 personnel.

According to the Army, no soldiers have been discharged for failing to follow the mandate. Army officials expect to offer more explicit guidelines to commanders on the required separation of such soldiers by the end of January.

Skeptics speculate that the two religious exemptions granted to these marines we’re only permitted because they were already on terminal leave. Meaning they were on their way out of the military service in the first place, and it would have done more harm than good to have them fighting a legal battle as opposed to the service member to just be let go. This would significantly change the optics of the situation, and the fact that the DOD is refusing to provide additional data or context related to these exemptions suggests that there is something to hide. I’ve written in detail about the lack of integrity the DOD has, and how it should be considered untrustworthy.

To all service members experiencing persecution for your faith, remember 1 Peter 4:12-14 says: “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.” Stay inquisitive in the word of God, and the world around you.

Chinese scientists claim to have invented a computer that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to charge criminals.

The equipment was constructed and tested by the Shanghai Pudong Procuratorate, the country’s largest prosecutor’s office. Credit card fraud, conducting a gambling operation, reckless driving, intentional injury, impeding official responsibilities, theft, fraud, and provoking a dispute are the eight most common crimes in Shanghai, according to the machine.

According to the researchers, the so-called AI prosecutor can file a charge with 97 percent accuracy based on a written description of a case.

Professor Shi Yong, the project’s principal scientist, said AI technology may help prosecutors focus on more demanding tasks by reducing their daily duties. Shi is also the director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ big data and knowledge management laboratory, the regime’s top state-run research institute.

“The system can replace prosecutors in the decision-making process to a certain extent,” Shi and his colleagues wrote in the Chinese peer-reviewed journal Management Review. The South China Morning Post was the first to report on the new AI machine.

Chinese prosecutors began using AI in 2016, according to Shi and his colleagues. Many of them now use “System 206,” an artificial intelligence program. The system can assess the strength of evidence, the circumstances surrounding an arrest, and the public danger posed by a suspect.

However, because “they do not participate in the decision-making process of filing charges and suggesting sentences,” all available AI technologies played a limited role, according to the research.

It noted that making such determinations necessitates a machine identifying and removing any items of a case file that are irrelevant to a crime while keeping the relevant information.

According to the paper, the machine must also convert the complicated, ever-changing human language into a standard mathematical or geometric style that a computer can understand.

China’s internet corporations have created excellent natural language processing technologies, but their functioning frequently necessitates the use of huge computers, which prosecutors do not have.

Shi’s team designed an AI “prosecutor” that could run on a computer. It would file a charge against each suspect based on 1,000 “traits” extracted from the human-generated case description language, the majority of which is too short or abstract for humans to understand. The evidence would then be evaluated by System 206.

From 2015 to 2020, they used almost 17,000 cases to teach the algorithm, according to Shi.

With updates, the AI prosecutor was intended to become more competent, according to the publication. It would be capable of identifying less prevalent crimes and filing several charges against a single individual.

However, Chinese prosecutors have raised concerns about the new computer. According to the story, a prosecutor in Guangzhou expressed reservations about using an AI prosecutor to file charges.

Although the 97 percent accuracy is impressive in terms of technology, there is always the possibility of a mistake, according to the prosecutor. “Who will take responsibility when it happens? The prosecutor, the machine, or the designer of the algorithm?”

The use of AI in decision-making could have an impact on a prosecutor’s autonomy which is cause for concern. According to the prosecutor, most prosecutors do not want computer scientists to interfere with a judicial decision.

Another concern is that the AI prosecutor may pursue a charge only based on its prior experience, according to the prosecutor. In a changing social climate, it couldn’t predict how the public would react to a case.

The prosecutor remarked, “AI may help detect a mistake, but it cannot replace humans in making a decision,”

The AI prosecutor was hailed as the world’s first achievement in this sector by Chinese media.

China, unlike Western democracies, lacks an independent legal system since the Chinese Communist Party controls the courts.

Those who speak or act in ways that the Party finds unacceptable, such as dissidents, religious believers, human rights lawyers, and citizen journalists, are frequently charged with vaguely defined offenses like “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” or “subversion of state power,” and are invariably convicted in a justice system with a 99.9% conviction rate.

Zhang Zhan, for example, is halfway through a four-year prison sentence for reporting on the early stages of the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan in February 2020. Western governments and human rights organizations have slammed her conviction. Zhang’s health has deteriorated significantly in prison after she staged a long-running hunger strike and was refused sufficient medical attention, according to her relatives.

Take note people, this is the end goal for utopian globalists. An AI prosecutor is nothing more than software that could be obtained at any point by our nation. If you know anything about artificial intelligence, you’d know that as time goes on it becomes more effective. That all seeing eye, technocratic dystopian society is visible on the horizon. All that’s needed at this point is international compliance and well, time for the either our software engineers in America to create this software themselves or for time so the AI can develop for our globalist sell outs to propose similar measures state side.

We’ve got a long road ahead of us but through faith in the birth and ressurection of Jesus Christ we’re saved. 1 Peter 4:12-14 says: “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.” Stay inquisitive in the word of God, and the world around you.