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The next big scare? USA and Europe buy up millions of doses of Monkeypox vaccine

Posted by M. C. on May 20, 2022

What’s the deal with Monkeypox?

Jordan Schachtel
https://dossier.substack.com/p/the-next-big-scare-usa-and-europe?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxNTYyMTUyOCwicG9zdF9pZCI6NTU2NTM4NjUsIl8iOiJmSnNXaCIsImlhdCI6MTY1Mjk4MTEyOCwiZXhwIjoxNjUyOTg0NzI4LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNjkwMDkiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.o_6Dhum5M_uPzKG9cPNzJIjXUY2dg5G0bq_QQbwyegI&s=r

Suddenly, everyone is talking about Monkeypox, the smallpox-like disease that has surfaced in recent days in both Europe and the United States.

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Health authorities in the two continents have thus far identified only a few dozen cases. And while there’s no reason for concern at the moment, here’s what convinced me to put this on your radar.

Late last night, the U.S. government decided to order millions of doses of monkeypox vaccine.

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According to a press release from European pharma company Bavarian Nordic, the United States exercised a $119 million option on the doses. The vaccines were purchased through the The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). The U.S. government has an additional $180 million in options if it so chooses to exercise them.

Additionally, on Thursday, Bavarian Nordic announced that they were going to supply “an undisclosed European country” with Monkeypox vaccinations.

The U.S. likely has first dibs on the product because the vaccine was developed with American support. Anthony Fauci’s NIAID has supported Bavarian Nordic with well over $100 million in grants. Whether Fauci and his colleagues will receive kickbacks and royalties for this vaccine remains unknown.

Bavarian Nordic received FDA approval for its vaccine in September of 2019, just two months before the commencement of COVID Mania. 

The FDA statement included the possibility that this vaccine was necessary for the market in case of a biowarfare event concerning the “intentional release” of smallpox.

Bavarian Nordic’s president and CEO released a statement Thursday:

“While the full circumstances around the current monkeypox cases in Europe remain to be elucidated, the speed of which these have evolved, combined with the potential for infections beyond the initial case going undetected, calls for a rapid and coordinated approach by the health authorities, and we are pleased to assist in this emergency situation. Infection control has been a high priority for societies during COVID-19, and this situation is an unfortunate reminder that we cannot let our guard down, but must continue to build and strengthen our infectious disease preparedness to keep the world open.”

According to the CDC: “Monkeypox was first discovered in 1958 when two outbreaks of a pox-like disease occurred in colonies of monkeys kept for research, hence the name ‘monkeypox.’ The first human case of monkeypox was recorded in 1970 in the Democratic Republic of Congo during a period of intensified effort to eliminate smallpox. Since then monkeypox has been reported in humans in other central and western African countries.”

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Monkeypox is currently understood as a rare infection primarily spread by wild animals in West Africa. Its symptoms are said to be similar to that of chickenpox. Case fatality rate estimates for human obtained monkeypox in Africa range from 1% to 15%.

ABC News @ABCJUST IN: A Massachusetts resident has tested positive for monkeypox, the state health department confirms. 1st monkeypox case in US this year reported in MassachusettsA Massachusetts resident has tested positive for monkeypox, the state health department confirmed Wednesday.abcn.wsMay 18th 20223,333 Retweets5,002 Likes

Early reports from Europe seem to indicate that Monkeypox is only spreading within the gay community, as cases are being reported exclusively in gay men. The transmission dynamics remain unclear, but that hasn’t stopped the usual panic promoters from making hysterical claims.

Eric Feigl-Ding @DrEricDingCrap—Monkeypox is likely aerosol airborne. Study indicates monkeypox is aerosol stable for up to 90 HOURS and remain infective during that time. I pray we’ve learned our lesson with #COVIDisAirborne and don’t repeat the droplet vs airborne 2 year nonsense. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

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May 18th 20223,177 Retweets6,899 Likes

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Get Ready to Be Muzzled: The Coming War on So-Called Hate Speech

Posted by M. C. on May 20, 2022

by John W. Whitehead

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech.”—Benjamin Franklin

Beware of those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech.

Especially be on your guard when the reasons given for limiting your freedoms end up expanding the government’s powers.

In the wake of a mass shooting in Buffalo, NY, carried out by an 18-year-old gunman in military gear allegedly motivated by fears that the white race is in danger of being replaced, there have been renewed calls for social media monitoring, censorship of flagged content that could be construed as dangerous or hateful, and limitations on free speech activities, particularly online.The erosion of our freedoms happened so incrementally, no one seemed to notice.
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As expected, those who want safety at all costs will clamor for more gun control measures (if not at an outright ban on weapons for non-military, non-police personnel), widespread mental health screening of the general population and greater scrutiny of military veterans, more threat assessments and behavioral sensing warnings, more surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities, more “See Something, Say Something” programs aimed at turning Americans into snitches and spies, more metal detectors and whole-body imaging devices at soft targets, more roaming squads of militarized police empowered to do random bag searches, more fusion centers to centralize and disseminate information to law enforcement agencies, and more surveillance of what Americans say and do, where they go, what they buy and how they spend their time.

All of these measures play into the government’s hands.

As we have learned the hard way, the phantom promise of safety in exchange for restricted or regulated liberty is a false, misguided doctrine that serves only to give the government greater authority to crack down, lock down, and institute even more totalitarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Add the Department of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance Board” to that mix, empower it to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

After all, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

See the rest here

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The Unborns’ Dying Wish: The Abortion of the Fed

Posted by M. C. on May 19, 2022

Yellen’s inability and unwillingness to articulate the Fed’s role in creating lowered purchasing power among the poor is maddening but not surprising. Porter’s comments beg the question: If inflation goes to zero, then does the need for abortions among the poor go away as well?”

https://mises.org/wire/unborns-dying-wish-abortion-fed

In a moment that would have made the progressive eugenicist Margaret Sanger proud, former Fed chair Janet Yellen extoled the virtues of high abortion rates among poor women, as they allow them to have higher labor force participation rates. Paraphrasing Sanger, who is the intellectual founder of the modern abortion industry, Yellen’s argument was plain: it is cruel for parents to bring children into a state of poverty; therefore, it is humane to incentivize abortion among the poor.

California representative and chair of the Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party Katie Porter expressed a similar sentiment before a CNBC audience, remarking that “things like inflation can happen” as a justification for the Democrats’ now failed attempt to enshrine unfettered abortion access in federal law.

Yellen’s inability and unwillingness to articulate the Fed’s role in creating lowered purchasing power among the poor is maddening but not surprising. Porter’s comments beg the question: If inflation goes to zero, then does the need for abortions among the poor go away as well?”

While no reasonable person should hold their breath for an answer from either of these politicians, their comments unwittingly reveal an important causal link in human action. That is, in a modern, wealthy society, the households that are harmed by lost purchasing power from money supply expansion are less likely to bring children into the world, all things held equal. 

The qualification of “modern wealthy society” leans on Gary Becker and Robert Barro’s contention that real net costs in raising children reduce total fertility in families. While all human action is based on individual subjective valuations it’s safe to say that an ongoing loss of real income and wealth can be among the data points that people use to derive their preferences. As the interventions of the Fed alter the structure of prices, income, and wealth it is certainly plausible that these changes can impact fertility choices. With that said, one could simply think about the reality that the poor in the US are among those harmed by money supply expansion as articulated by Richard Cantillon. The increasing lack of purchasing power over time, creates the tendency for these households to have fewer children than they otherwise would have. This results because each childbirth represents a net loss in real wealth. The reasons for this outcome in a developed economy are quite simple. In most wealthy nations, child labor and panhandling are unnecessary because those nations have enriched themselves via the international division of labor. This has also had the welcome effect of eliminating a household’s perceived need to supply children to traffickers, which sadly remains a scourge of the developing world.

What Becker and Barro fail to account for is that wealthy and poor nations alike may also allow fiat central banking. What this omission fails to capture is the reality of a harmed class who lose purchasing power over time under inflationary regimes. It is just such households that Yellen and Porter have described as having a need for abortion access due to their financial distress.

The destruction of human life (or potential life, for some) resulting from central banking is implied by Jörg Guido Hülsmann’s attack on fiat currency. His observation is that such regimes are socially destructive and that they tend to increase the financial fragility of households. This fragility can be particularly crushing among the poorer classes, as fiat inflation is deemed to be a “juggernaut of social, economic, cultural, and spiritual destruction.” It turns out that part of this social destruction may very well include the negation of the society shared between mother, father, and yet-to-be-seen (or, as some might say, unseen) child. 

Even if one gives the pro-choice/proabortion faction the full benefit of the doubt by conceding that they don’t want ANY abortions to occur and would prefer that the only pregnancies were wanted pregnancies, thus eliminating the need for abortion, the logic that connects inflationism to abortionism still stands. It could be additionally reasoned that inflationism represents a boon to the contraception industry as a whole. While such a connection might seem trivial, recent observations from Saifedean Ammous noted how inflation is a means to lower the cost of reckless behavior in financial markets. I’m simply suggesting that inflationism might generate moral hazard in sexual behavior as well.

If Yellen and Porter’s shared goal is to continue to boost female labor force participation and engage women in what Josef Pieper called “proletarianization,” where “total work” is the norm, then the inflation-abortion connection is certainly an effective means to achieve it. Yellen further justified this reasoning to Senator Bob Menendez by contending that increased—and presumably federally funded—access to abortion generates better educational and economic outcomes for those children conceived later in a woman’s life. Such irony could only be lost on the most ardent abortionist. 

Setting aside the existing moral arguments for or against abortion, an understanding of the connection between money supply increases and the heightened likelihood of abortions among the poor may contribute to the Austro-libertarian discussion on the question of the morality of abortion. If it is indeed the case that an increased likelihood of abortion among the poor is one of the myriad social consequences of the Fed’s currency debasement, then the would-be-born could also rejoice at the central bank’s abortion.

Author:

Contact Jeffrey L. Degner

Jeffery L. Degner is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Cornerstone University and a former Mises Summer Research Fellow. He holds Bachelor’s degrees in Economics and History from Western Michigan University where he also earned an M.A. in Applied Economics. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Angers under the direction of Dr. Jorg Guido Hülsmann.

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Guess where the disinfo has been coming from

Posted by M. C. on May 19, 2022

Tom Woods

This is one of my favorite things of the past two years.

Apparently the Office of the Surgeon General has asked each of the 50 states to submit examples of Covid misinformation and the impact that such misinformation has had.

The response by Indiana is priceless.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita acknowledged the harms done by misinformation, and then proceeded to list “the following examples of disinformation from the CDC and other health organizations that have shattered the public’s trust in science and public health and will take decades to repair.”

Beautiful.

The document then lays out the problems with lockdowns and masks, refutes the claim that the jabs could prevent transmission (the basis for the various vaccine passports and mandates), and criticizes the authorities for overcounting Covid deaths and denying natural immunity.

Then, too, it criticizes the practice of mass asymptomatic testing: “Mass testing of asymptomatic individuals with contact tracing and quarantining of people who test positive has failed to substantively slow the progress of the epidemic and has imposed great costs on people who were quarantined even though they posed no risk of infecting others.”

“Three facts are crucial to understanding why this policy has failed,” it continues. “First, even close contacts of someone who tests positive for the SARS-Cov-2 virus are unlikely to pass the disease on. In a large meta-analysis of household contacts of asymptomatic positive cases, only 3% of people living in the same home got sick.

“Second, the PCR test that has been used to identify asymptomatic infections often returns a positive result for people who have dead viral fragments, are not infectious, and pose no risk of infecting others.

“And third, the contact tracing system becomes overwhelmed whenever cases start to rise, leading to long delays in contacting new cases. At precisely the moment when contact tracing might be needed, it cannot do its job.

“At the same time, quarantining people is costly – for workers without adequate sick leave, absenteeism due to contact tracing means pay cuts, lost opportunities, and perhaps even an inability to feed families. For children, it means more skipped lessons and missed opportunities for academic and social growth at school, with long-run negative consequences for their future prospects. In the UK, an official government review determined that its 37 billion pound investment in contact tracing was a waste of resources. The same is undoubtedly true in the United States.”

Then it takes on the implicit and sometimes explicit claim and goal of total eradication of Covid, even though it bore none of the characteristics of a disease that could be eradicated. The process of trying to do so, meanwhile, would cause incalculable damage:

“First, we have no technology to reduce the spread of the disease or meaningfully alter disease dynamics. Lockdowns and social restrictions fail because only people who can afford to work from home without losing their job can comply over long periods….

“Second, there are many animal hosts for SARS-CoV-2 and evidence of transmission between mammals and humans. One USDA study in late 2021 found that nearly 80% of white-tailed deer in the U.S. had evidence of COVID-19 antibodies. Dogs, cats, bats, mink, and many other mammals can get COVID-19. So even if the disease were eradicated among humans, zoonotic transmission would guarantee that it would come back.

“Finally, eradication takes a global commitment from every country – an impossible goal since COVID-19 eradication is far from the most pressing public health problem for many developing countries.”

So as usual, the real misinformation comes from the official sources, and the statement by the Indiana Attorney General is a rare case in which this problem is publicly acknowledged and countered.

Now it’s true: you and I knew most if not all of this stuff pretty early on. We knew it because we were able to get information from sources other than the official ones.

That’s what we do in my no-censorship group (we’ve been off Facebook for years by this point), the Tom Woods Show Elite.

You’ll always be ahead of the curve in there, because we’re all people who know what we’re talking about, and who specialize in telling the truth, no matter how unpopular.

Membership in the best group on Earth is but one of the goodies that your generous host here gives to supporters.

Warm your generous host’s heart by clicking here:http://www.SupportingListeners.comTom Woods

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Let Them Eat Bugs… How Out of Touch Elites Reveal Their Contempt and What Comes Next

Posted by M. C. on May 19, 2022

Example #3: Let Your Pets Die

Example #4: Gas Is Too Expensive? Buy a Tesla

Let Them Eat Bugs… How Out of Touch Elites Reveal Their Contempt and What Comes Next

by Nick Giambruno

Recently, Bloomberg published an article titled “Inflation Stings Most If You Earn Less Than $300K. Here’s How to Deal.”

It recommended rethinking providing medical treatment to your pets:

“If you’re one of the many Americans who became a new pet owner during the pandemic, you might want to rethink those costly pet medical needs.”

Upon being told that the people had no bread, Marie Antoinette reportedly responded, “let them eat cake.”

These infamous words were a stark illustration of the French elite’s careless indifference to the plight of ordinary people. Moreover, they likely fueled the anger that sparked a revolution that overturned the French ruling system.

Had Marie Antoinette not been so out of touch, she might have had a better choice of words.

Although history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme.

I am bringing this up because recently, modern political, financial, and media elites have made numerous “let them eat cake” remarks.

They similarly reveal how oblivious they are to the average person’s problems as inflation spirals out of control, shortages spread, the stock market crashes, and economic prospects look dimmer by the day.

Let’s look at them and examine what they could mean for the social and political environment in the future… and what you can do about it.

Example #1: Inflation Is Good

First central bankers, the mainstream media, and academia tell you there is no inflation.

Then, when inflation becomes undeniable, they tell you not to worry because inflation is only “transitory.”

Then, when it becomes apparent that it’s not merely transitory, they tell you not to worry because inflation is actually a good thing.

It’s not uncommon to see ridiculous headlines like this:

Example #2: No More Turkey at Thanksgiving

After inflation broke through multi-decade highs, it’s no longer possible to maintain the farce that “inflation is good.”

So the elite’s messaging has pivoted to ways the plebs can cope with ever-decreasing living standards.

Last Thanksgiving, it was impossible for the Federal Reserve to ignore the soaring costs of turkey. So, instead, the St. Louis branch had a helpful suggestion for those struggling—substitute delicious turkey for cheaper heavily-processed industrial sludge.

See the rest here

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Voters Increasingly Returning to In-Person Ballots over Mail

Posted by M. C. on May 19, 2022

By Eric Lendrum

American Greatness

In many states across the country, voters appear to be returning to in-person voting for their top preference, after vote-by-mail was greatly increased and heavily promoted during the coronavirus pandemic.

According to the Associated Press, many states, including key swing states, have seen massive drops in the number of requests for mail-in ballots. In Georgia, where nearly one million ballots were cast by mail in the primary elections in 2020, only about 85,000 voters have requested mail-in ballots for this year’s primary. Other states that saw similar declines include Ohio, West Virginia, and Indiana.

In 2020, a record high of approximately 43 percent of American voters cast their ballots by mail; in 2016, by contrast, only about 24.5 percent sent in mail-in ballots. A key component of this trend was the COVID-19 pandemic, where lockdown measures that shut down businesses, schools, and everyday life led to increased calls for making voting easier and more convenient. At least 12 states significantly expanded vote-by-mail operations.

But despite predictions that vote-by-mail would become the new norm due to its convenience, voters are rejecting this method in favor of the traditional vote in person. Among the reasons for the reversal include the easing of COVID restrictions as the pandemic begins to subside, as well as numerous widespread questions about voter fraud in the 2020 election, in which mail-in ballots played a key role.

After numerous suspicious and sudden reversals of the vote count in key swing states on election night in 2020, President Trump and many other Republicans began pointing out the weaknesses in the security of mail-in ballots. In more recent years, evidence has continued to emerge that there was systematic voter fraud in the key swing states involving the mail-in ballots, orchestrated to steal the election from President Trump in favor of Democrat Joe Biden.

As a result, multiple Republican-led states – including Iowa, Georgia, Florida, and Texas – have passed new laws cracking down on mail-in ballots and other related measures, including legalized ballot-harvesting and ballot dropboxes.

Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), pointed out that even in 2021, when pandemic restrictions were still mostly in place, the Virginia elections saw fewer votes cast by mail than in 2020.

“Elections are kind of going back to where they were,” Stewart said bluntly.

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We’re Just A Confused Species In An Awkward Transition Phase

Posted by M. C. on May 19, 2022

The ability to intimately appreciate beauty and mystery with a profound depth and complexity only to spend our entire lives frantically doing anything but that.

Caitlin Johnstone

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/were-just-a-confused-species-in-an?s=r

Really, when it comes right down to it, things are a mess because humans are in a very awkward and confusing stage in our development as a species.

Our giant brains evolved faster than we could adjust to, and now we’re these scared little apex predators stumbling around the earth with massive prefrontal cortices overlaying a bunch of deep primordial conditioning. A rapidly developed capacity for language and abstract thought strapped on top of a fear response that our distant evolutionary ancestors developed to help them run away from long-extinct monsters with big sharp teeth.

This sudden change has left us in a transition stage where we haven’t yet gotten the hang of the immense power which now erupts from within our skulls and gives us the ability to shape our world to our will. Like how the ancient mammalian ancestors of whales probably looked awkward when they first began reentering the sea, before they got the hang of swimming and their nostrils moved to a location more conducive to breathing in the water.

It’s left us at this weird, uncomfortable stage where we have the intelligence to do amazing things, but haven’t yet developed the wisdom to use this newfound capacity in a harmonious way.

We now have the ability to conquer our own ecosystems using technology, but we lack the wisdom not to do so.

We have the intelligence to invent nuclear weapons, but we lack the wisdom not to build them.

We have the ability to plan for our individual futures, but we lack the wisdom to make sure our species as a whole has a future.

We have the ability to think abstract thoughts, but lack the wisdom to refrain from building identities out of them.

We have the ability to ask questions, but lack the wisdom to deeply question our own true nature and whether the world is really as it seems.

The ability to write vast tomes of philosophy that contain not one line telling us how to be content on the planet we were born on.

The ability to construct entire belief systems that are completely useless for learning to live in harmony with what is.

The ability to discover spirituality only to use it for vapid escapism and tyrannical psychological domination.

The ability to research human psychology only to use it to convince people to buy junk they don’t need and support wars they don’t want and vote for politicians they don’t like.

The ability to invent mass media only to use use it to promote and normalize a status quo that is killing us all.

The ability to invent something as transcendental as music only to popularize songs about owning stuff and getting money.

The ability to technologically link billions of minds on the internet only to spend all our time arguing about nonsense.

The ability to tell stories only to spend our energy using storytelling to manipulate and control each other.

The ability to intimately appreciate beauty and mystery with a profound depth and complexity only to spend our entire lives frantically doing anything but that.

We have the ability to do all these things skillfully and harmoniously; we just haven’t quite gotten the hang of it yet.

It’s like when you got your first bike for your birthday and you knew it could make you go a lot faster than you normally can, but it took a lot of practice before you went from training wheels and painful falls to swiftly breezing through the neighborhood. These giant prefrontal cortices we got on our birthday give us so much potential, and we’ve been bumbling around on training wheels and taking nasty spills when we try to take them off.

I’m sure the early evolutionary ancestors of birds were awkward as hell too before they finally got the hang of flying. They would have looked ridiculous, and it wouldn’t have been immediately clear from an outsider’s perspective exactly what nature was going for there. Like biological baby scribbles.

The only difference is that the awkward evolutionary transition phases of birds and whales did not involve giant neural networks which make childbirth painful and could easily lead to the death of all terrestrial life.

The birth of a human baby is difficult due to the size of our enormous, rapidly evolved brains relative to our more slowly evolved pelvic bones. The birth of a sane humanity will be difficult for similar reasons.

I do believe we have the ability to make the jump from this awkward transition phase to become a truly conscious species. But it looks like if we do make it, it’s going to be by the skin of our omnivore teeth.

___________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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Celebrities Are Such Scumbags Because They’re Invested In The Status Quo

Posted by M. C. on May 19, 2022

Caitlin Johnstone

Horror author Stephen King made the bizarre decision to tweet “I stand with Nina Jankowicz” the other day in support of the freaky shitlib who will be leading the Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth. Nothing really to say about that beyond what it is.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/celebrities-are-such-scumbags-because?s=r

Have you ever wondered why a famous person whose work you’ve enjoyed has such a myopic perspective on world events? How someone can stir you at your most intimate depths with their words or their music and yet have a blinkered mainstream political worldview that is manufactured by think tanks and spinmeisters?

Celebrities have been particularly odious empire sycophants these last few days, and it’s probably worth taking a moment to reflect on what’s going on when that happens.

Bette Midler has been drawing headlines for her recent let-them-eat-cake remark about baby formula shortages, taking to Twitter to tell Americans, “TRY BREASTFEEEDING! It’s free and available on demand.”

There are of course many reasons why parents might be unable to consistently provide breast milk to their baby, including but not limited to the very health problems and long working hours that the US status quo often creates. More than this, telling individuals what to do in response to a systemic problem created by the wealthy and the powerful serves to divert attention away from criticisms of those people and those systems.

bettemidler @BetteMidlerI’ll happily pay more for gas for her. March 11th 202215,349 Retweets122,415 Likes

Midler often uses her Twitter account to broadcast her indifference to the struggles of the less fortunate, like in March when she tweeted “I’d happily pay more for gas for her” with a picture of a child holding a Ukrainian flag. Midler has an estimated net worth of a quarter billion dollars.

While we’re on the subject of Ukraine, U2’s Bono and the Edge recently played a concert in Kyiv in support of the world-threatening US proxy war against Russia, because of course they fucking did. Bono, who says he has “grown very fond” of war criminal George W Bush and praised capitalism at the World Economic Forum and teamed up with warmonger Lindsey Graham to promote US empire narratives about Syria in 2016, would of course be seen singing “Stand by Ukraine” in support of US empire narratives in a Kyiv subway in 2022.

See the rest here

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act: From Propaganda to Censorship to Tyranny

Posted by M. C. on May 19, 2022

by Laurie Calhoun 

The outcry on social media about “Mary Poppins” (whose performances have gone viral) is unlikely to subside anytime soon, which is why I surmise that the selection of Jankowicz may have been intended by the DGB masterminds as a red herring, to distract attention from the profound problems with the very idea of a Disinformation Governance Board.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-smith-mundt-moderniziation-act-from-propaganda-to-censorship-to-tyranny/

jankowicz stephen king greenwald 02

Spectacle and theater have come to dominate the political arena today, even more so than ever before. Politicians are now celebrity oligarchs, who use tax revenues to promote their pet projects, and to enhance their personal investment portfolios, while pretending in scrupulously orchestrated performances to care about the populace from whom all of the money they squander is siphoned. Congresspersons who issue dire warnings about global warming jet across the world for photo ops with President Zelensky in Ukraine. The provision by the federal government of Peloton bicycle memberships to the house of representatives and their staff, all on the taxpayers’ dime, will begin on May 18, 2022. Meanwhile, more than 550K Americans are currently homeless. The absurdity of all of this has reached the point where we now seem to inhabit something akin to a sequel to the Hunger Games.

Consider the person recently selected by the Biden administration to head up its new Disinformation Governance Board (DGB), the self-styled “Mary Poppins of Disinformation,” Nina Jankowicz, whose melodramatic mode of “correcting” what she takes to be falsehoods is disturbing to behold, to put it mildly. The DGB is being championed needless to say by spokespersons for President Biden, including former press secretary Jen Psaki, who not only defended Jankowicz as “an expert on online disinformation” and “a person with extensive qualifications” but also expressed perplexity that anyone should take issue with the mounting of the DGB: “I’m not sure who opposes that effort.” This type of gaslighting should be recognized for what it is by now, for it has gone on throughout the Biden presidency, with officials responding with unbridled snark to anyone who raises perfectly valid questions about what they are doing. How dare you?!

“Our patience is wearing thin,” President Biden himself soberly warned the populace in denouncing the reluctance of some of his compatriots to volunteer as pro-bono subjects in a Pfizer experimental medication trial. We were furthermore “informed” in December 2021 by the White House that, for our disobedience, we could look forward to “a winter of severe illness and death.” Given the volume of such nonstop, and frankly surreal, psyops perpetrated on the populace since 2020, and before that as well—albeit usually more subtly—perhaps no one should have been surprised when a figure who could have been plucked directly from either Hunger Games or Brazil arrived on the scene to lead the charge against disinformation and “help” us to determine what we ought and ought not to believe. As if to further test the credulity and compliance of the populace (both of which were largely confirmed throughout the Coronapocalypse), the Biden administration selected to head up its dubious new board a person who has served as the functional equivalent of a Democratic Party operative for years.

Revulsion is a natural reaction to Jankowicz’s appointment, but this particular piece of political theater strikes me as too “on the nose.” The outcry on social media about “Mary Poppins” (whose performances have gone viral) is unlikely to subside anytime soon, which is why I surmise that the selection of Jankowicz may have been intended by the DGB masterminds as a red herring, to distract attention from the profound problems with the very idea of a Disinformation Governance Board. Perhaps the histrionic Jankowicz will be furloughed in response to a barrage of criticism from lawmakers on the right, to be replaced by a more staid and sober character, someone skilled at persuading television viewers that he speaks the truth. In that event, the U.S. populace and their ostensible representatives will have been duped.

Unfortunately, the victims of government-produced propaganda throughout the Coronapocalypse, which judging by its effects amounted to the psychological equivalent of a blunt-force head injury, have become more receptive than ever before to the latest propaganda lines and scams. “I got vaccinated” profile picture frames have been replaced with a beautiful Ukrainian flag, and some people are even donning t-shirts and displaying blue-and-yellow banners in their front yards alongside their “In this house we believe” rainbow placards. While lamenting inflation, caused directly by the profligate printing of currency by the government to fund COVID-19 “rescue” packages, those who support the latest print run of $40 billion for Ukraine appear to have been convinced by the government-vetted pundits on television (who else?) that although Putin is incorrigibly evil and beyond the reach of reason, he would never, ever, even when repeatedly threatened with regime change and his personal demise, resort to the use of nuclear weapons, thus causing World War III and the end of human civilization.

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Welcome to Grokfest, New Hampshire’s New Liberty Festival

Posted by M. C. on May 19, 2022

Since the Free State Project began working to move liberty-minded individuals to the small New England state of New Hampshire, the sheer volume of libertarians and libertarian-adjacent people in the state has ballooned.

by Sidney Algernon

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Since the Free State Project began working to move liberty-minded individuals to the small New England state of New Hampshire, the sheer volume of libertarians and libertarian-adjacent people in the state has ballooned. What was once a small group of dedicated liberty activists has grown to leave a massive mark on the politics and culture of the mostly-rural Granite state, but the goal of “Liberty in our Lifetime” stays the consistent focal point for what could be described as a homeland for liberty.

With more movers than ever before, the yearly liberty festival Porcfest has grown exponentially, with many people showing up simply to have a respite from endless lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine passport schemes that plague other states. For many of the newer attendees, Porcfest (short for “Porcupine Freedom Festival”) is a vacation to a libertarian society.

With demand for liberty higher than ever, the supply of liberty events and festivals seems to be increasing in the Granite State. In 2017, the first “Forkfest” was held, also at Rogers Campground in Lancaster. This year, “Grokfest” describes itself as, “A gathering of mostly-normal people who enjoy the outdoors, good conversations, and great food.” This was the first Grokfest, and is being hosted by Cynthia and Brian of the Garnet School of Self-Sufficiency. Events include a “UTV Fun Hunt” with water-guns, as well as a happy hour with a cash bar, firearm classes, and a cornhole tournament.

I attended the first ever Grokfest this year and spoke with Cynthia. I asked her what Grokfest is all about.

“First and foremost, it’s about community—the Liberty Community. I wanted to provide an alternative to Porcfest: something more centrally located, not as crowded, more of a focus on quality of life, learning, laughing, and creating your own fun. One difference is the people and activities are the entertainment, rather than being ‘entertained’ by a bunch of speakers—which doesn’t seem very social to me.”

I asked her about new movers to New Hampshire, and even though she feels Porcfest is crowded, she doesn’t seem to think that new movers are a problem. “I have personally gotten several families to move to New Hampshire in the past year. That’s a great feeling!” she said.

When speaking with free-staters, there’s a strange mix of excitement and occasional nostalgia. On one hand, the excitement of knowing that movers are arriving faster than ever, plans for freedom are more successful than ever, and that New Hampshire is more free than ever is omni-present, but sometimes there’s a twinge of sad nostalgia for the liberty community that once was. The same people are still here, but as humans we are limited by Dunbars number. Instead of a single, monolithic liberty community, we instead have many hundreds of liberty communities based on the associations and friendships of liberty lovers. These are often shaped by specific interests, whether in gardening, backpacking, bill review, shooting, crypto-currency, pantry-building, or even MMA-fighting, with the sheer number of liberty lovers in such a small place (at least 6,200 if you go by just movers that are tracked by the FSP itself), it seems only natural that people gravitate toward those they share the most in common with.

Self-sufficiency is on the minds of many liberty-lovers across the world, and when it comes to free-staters, they aren’t any different. That’s why the organizers of Grokfest started the Garnet School of Self Sufficiency. There, they host classes on topics such as making Jam, Jerky, Cider, and Maple Syrup. They also have classes on firearms safety, beekeeping, and first aid. At Grokfest, I attended their foraging class, which included a walk along a path and various stops to point out inedible and edible plants, as well as tasting the latter. I learned that birch-tree leaves actually make a very delicious tea, so since I live in an area with a plethora of birch I’ll likely store some of that for the winter in my pantry.

I asked Cynthia what inspired Grokfest. “I found out that Porcfest was out of sites, and I realized there was a void that the market had to fill,” she said. Cynthia explained how she is attending Porcfest this year, but is going to be sharing a site.

With Porcfest very much full, it is really wonderful to see that the liberty community is hosting other festivals to accommodate camping and socializing among other liberty people. Cynthia and Brian intend to host another Grokfest later this year, in the fall. They also intend to host Grokfest 2023, but slightly later in the spring to take advantage of warmer weather.

“The Fall one will have apple picking and cider pressing. It’s a lot of fun for kids and adults! And we’ll make ratatouille from the garden harvest as another project, we’ll have composting demos, and a living-room garden class, growing things in your living room over the winter. We are both very curious, creative and crafty, and like to teach.”

Creative and Crafty is how I’d describe the tent sites. Each tenting area has a name such as “Area 51,” “FEMA Camp,” and “Bohemian Grove.” Each also hosts an outhouse that matches the theme of the campsite. Signs, complete with flowerbeds, welcome you to each area. I chose to stay at Bohemian Grove, which granted me an excellent view in a quiet location.

The very first Grokfest was a swell time, a down-tempo and chill event that reminded me of Porcfests of years gone by. It didn’t have the crowds, it didn’t have the major libertarian names hosting talks, it didn’t have a bunch of vendor stalls where you could buy kratom-infused butter-coffee. Instead it had good fun for friends and family, an environment where you can let the kids run around and play on their own in the full knowledge that they’ll be safe. I certainly hope to attend the next one, and if you come up to New Hampshire, maybe I’ll see you there, too.

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About Sidney Algernon

Sidney Algernon is a resident of New Hampshire and is involved with the Free State Project. His website is https://jobdestroyer.xyz

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