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The Answer is in C. S. Lewis

Posted by M. C. on April 26, 2022

It is this that Lewis explores – the loss of a Natural Law ethic and the costs associated with this – and this is why Natural Law is the key to resolving the meaning crisis.  It is the fabric that has been destroyed because man has been working on a different strand. 

https://bionicmosquito.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-answer-is-in-c-s-lewis.html

Posted by bionic mosquito 

This “meaning crisis” conversation will eventually come to a natural law ethic, or it will never resolve.

As noted in my opening post on this matter, I am wanting to more fully and directly make this connection – the connection of the meaning crisis to the violation of a natural law ethic, and why restoring the natural law ethic is the only solution to the meaning crisis.

Again, while I call the previous post my opening post, in reality it is what I have been working through for a few years, but have decided I now need to try to pull it together in a concise form.

It has been a month since I published that opening post, “Nature, According to Our Purpose.”  Almost from the time I published it, I have kept getting pulled to C. S. Lewis’s book, the Abolition of Man.  The more I have thought about it, the more I have come to conclude that the answer to my dilemma is all in this book.  Lewis wrote of the problem and solution almost eighty years ago.

I have written about this book in the past.  My previous posts can be found here:

What I believed would be the case, and as I have started to re-read the book has turned out to be true, is that my thought has developed significantly since the time I wrote these earlier posts almost three years ago.  There are many parts that didn’t catch my attention the first time that now seem tremendously relevant.  So, I can’t take a shortcut and just say “read these old posts for the answer.”  Parts of it will be there, to be sure.  But I don’t think it ties together the way I hope it will today.

So, why The Abolition of Man?  Why do I believe the entire answer will be found in this short (less-than-forty-page) book?  Lewis quickly summarizes why we, as human beings, require objective values if we are to live as human beings. 

Now, consider that last sentence carefully: we require objective values if we are to live as human beings.  If he is right, then the clear implication is that if we do not have and hold to objective values, we cannot live as human beings. 

Hence, if we cannot live as human beings, our lives have lost meaning as human beings.  We can live as something else, but not as human beings.  Would this not result in a crisis of meaning, to live as something other than what we are – to not live as we are meant to live?

Lewis covers all of this.  Now, he begins with an example that seems quite quaint to our ears; a seemingly small little slight, an almost unnoticeable ounce of meaning stripped from a large inventory of stock.  It will be worth beginning by examining how far we have fallen since the time he wrote these words – from a small little gap in maintaining objective values to the chasm we now live with today (and we know the limits of widening this gap have not yet been reached).

See the rest here

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Irish Natives Shoved Aside as Government Moves to Buy Homes for Refugees

Posted by M. C. on April 26, 2022

Despite this, the Irish state has shown no sign of attempting to slow the number of arrivals in the country, with many rural towns in the country having already seen their populations double over the past number of weeks as a result of the influx.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2022/04/25/irish-natives-shoved-aside-as-government-moves-to-buy-homes-for-refugees/

PETER CADDLE

Ireland’s open borders government has announced that it wishes for state actors to purchase more homes for refugees, seemingly content to leave native people to rot.

Ireland’s native population once again look like they are being left out in the cold by those who rule them, with their government using emergency powers to allow local councils to purchase homes for the express purposes of housing refugees.

While the power has now been granted in the hopes of housing foreign nationals ostensibly coming to the island in the hopes of escaping the Ukraine war, the government had previously refrained from taking such a measure despite the fact that the country’s own population had already been suffering under a crippling housing crisis.

According to a report by the Irish Examiner, the new powers will be used to help alleviate the country’s massive shortfall in accommodation, the state having already taken in tens of thousands of migrants in recent weeks.

What’s more, the publication notes one government official as saying that “every lever at the disposal of Government is now being pulled” in the hopes of looking after the new arrivals which have been brought in under the country’s open borders approach to dealing with the new migrant crisis.

While the new “expanded acquisition programme” is also set to help those already struggling with homelessness in the country, it is unclear how beneficial such a measure could possibly be for the native population considering the circumstances.

Ireland’s government has already promised that there would be “no cap” on the number of refugees allowed to come to the country, with estimates regarding the total number of arrivals being as high as 200,000, or four per cent of the country’s population.

What’s more, a significant percentage of those already on social housing waiting lists in the Irish capital of Dublin before the crisis appear to be foreign-born, with waiting lists frequently being at least 30 per cent occupied by those born outside Ireland according to data from 2021.

One council, having previously found that around half of their housing list was occupied by those born outside the state back in 2011, has even since claimed to have stopped recording the origins of those on their housing list.

As Ireland’s government pulls out all the stops to house foreign migrants entering the country, those already in the country appear to be becoming less and less satisfied with their nation’s open borders response to the crisis, despite it being lauded by Ireland’s Prime Minister Micheál Martin.

See the rest here

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Resist the Carrot: The Steady Slide Into a Cashless Society

Posted by M. C. on April 26, 2022

Ultimately, the right to economic freedom begins and ends with anonymous financial transactions.  The slide to a cashless, freedom-less economic world is already here, and the bottom is fast approaching. 

Resist the Carrot: The Steady Slide Into a Cashless Society

By Mason Lawlor

As the summer season approaches, many parks and entertainment venues, such as Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, are reminding patrons that they will not be allowed to use cash at their venues.  Coming off the heels of nonsensical and unconstitutional lockdown measures, it seems our descent into a cashless world is still on track, and may even be ahead of schedule.

Shops, theaters, stadiums and restaurants across the country are moving to exclusively “contactless payment methods,” a term so grossly Orwellian it should raise concerns.  After all, customers are still touching their platinum credit cards to pay for snacks at convenience stores.  Whether using your smartphone’s Apple Pay feature or your credit card, there is nothing “contactless” about it.  What is accurate about the term is its intention to make Americans scared of the person taking their food order; scared that other shoppers are nothing but potential infectious threats.

The COVID-19 fearmongering that began in early 2020 accelerated this transformation greatly.  Of course, the controllers needed a carrot to dangle in front of semi-conscious Americans to make their lost freedoms an afterthought.  Fear and convenience are often the two most powerful tools wielded by the state to compel submission, and the people appear to be in love with the simplicity of purely electronic payments.

Much of Atlanta has now become cashless, including major retailers and entertainment venues.  The consequence of this is top-to-bottom surveillance of all financial transactions.  The “doomsday scenario” is what China currently employs; a social credit system, if you will.  Citizens’ chips are suddenly turned off if the Communist Party deems them “untrustworthy,” or scores are dropped at the first sight of non-compliance.

Think of the optics here: anybody who openly criticizes government on social media could be punished financially.  Your score could be docked for engaging in “disinformation,” which is, of course, anything the government decides is disinformation.  It is effectively total control over your pocketbook.  The elites have been aiming to eliminate hand-to-hand cash for decades, as it will allow them to monitor, control and tax every transaction.

Your child wants to sell lemonade on a hot Sunday afternoon?  No, he or she must provide ample identification to open a bank account, most of which are entirely digital now.  What about your teenage son who wants to mow lawns in the summer for his neighbors and earn his spending money?  Sorry, that won’t be allowed either.  Everything must be exchanged under the total purview of the state. 

See the rest here

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My Energy is Your Problem – The Birth of a New Europe

Posted by M. C. on April 25, 2022

No amount of financial wizardry, pathetic virtue signaling about Climate Change, malinvestment into inefficient and unsustainable ‘renewables,’ or military threats would ultimately change the outcome of this story.

The birth of a new Europe is one where the currency risk is now all on the importer of commodities, not the exporter of commodities. I’ve been saying for years that Europe always thought that its huge share of Russian energy exports would give it monopsony power over Russia. That, they thought, without Europe as a buyer, Russia would be at their mercy.

My Energy is Your Problem – The Birth of a New Europe

“Energy makes energy anyhow
So spend yourself and get rich right now”
— Marillion “Rich”

Tom Luongo

This day has been a long time coming. From the moment, more than a decade ago, when it was finally admitted that Europe was destined to be an energy importer, we were going to see the climax of the showdown between the West and Russia.

Europe as energy importer always meant that time was on Russia’s side. All it had to do was draw the conflict out long enough, survive long enough, to force Europe into submission. Russia has the energy Europe needs, no one else can supply it, therefore the final decision will be to accept this fate.

No amount of financial wizardry, pathetic virtue signaling about Climate Change, malinvestment into inefficient and unsustainable ‘renewables,’ or military threats would ultimately change the outcome of this story.

Output off the North Slope has fallen off and Groningen’s gas fields are drying up faster than Hillary’s va-jay-jay with each twist of John Durham’s investigation into RussiaGate.

Every gambit to secure energy from Ukraine (Donbass coal, gas fields in the Sea of Azov) and the Middle East (Syria, EastMed Pipeline, Iran) have also failed.

This is the basic problem the EU faces in its quest for political hegemony. How does it get around this basic fact without fomenting 1) a political crisis at home and 2) a war with Russia and the rest of the Global South who support her, it cannot win?

Force Majeure

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, a conflict created by EU complicity in NATO’s long-standing war on Russia, the EU has tried to play the victim of US/UK aggressiveness while happily going along with it for their own purposes.

That purpose is to advance their agenda of erecting a total surveillance state under the guise of a radical response to Climate Change. Their problem is they have no viable replacement for Russian energy, be it oil, coal or gas, that is capable of sustaining them in the interim.

All of their refusals were met with Russian intransigence. After gleefully going along with the theft of Russian foreign exchange reserves, as well as forcing the abandonment of Russian state assets like seizing Gazprom’s subsidiary in Germany, Europe still tried to say Russia had no legal right change the terms of payment for Russian energy.

It was hilarious to watch as EU sycophants tried to argue Russia had no legal right to claim to force majeure after the EU prohibited Gazprom from spending the euros they would be paid for its gas.

The Russian government responded with a demand for payment for all exports to legally-defined ‘unfriendly countries’ in either gold or Russian rubles. And the howls were heard all around the world.

Even though acts of war, including sanctions, are a typical clause in all Gazprom supply contracts:

See the rest here

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The British are now officially hiding Covid vaccine data

Posted by M. C. on April 25, 2022

As of today, they have stopped releasing it, and they are lying about the reason why.

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-british-are-now-officially-hiding?s=r


Alex Berenson

Until last week, the British government offered the best source of raw data on the efficacy of the Covid vaccines. Each Thursday, the UK Health Security Agency reported the number of new infections, hospitalizations, and deaths by vaccine status.

Since last fall, and especially since the Omicron variant hit, the reports have presented an increasingly dismal picture of vaccine efficacy. Last week’s report showed that in March, nearly 90 percent of adults hospitalized for Covid were vaccinated. And OVER 90 percent of deaths were in the vaccinated:

—

The importance of these reports is hard to overstate.

They were the single best source of raw data about how well the Covid vaccines were or were not working anywhere in the world. It was a long-running sequential series with clearly defined rules from a large country with high vaccine coverage.

Plus, because the British have national health insurance, the government could determine with near-certainty who had been vaccinated. As you can see, fewer than 1 percent of the people in the reports are called “unlinked” – meaning their vaccine status was undetermined.

AS OF THIS WEEK’S REPORT THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT IS NO LONGER PROVIDING THESE CHARTS.

The British government is offering the nonsensical excuse that it can no longer provide the figures because it has ended free universal testing for Covid: Such changes in testing policies affect the ability to robustly monitor COVID-19 cases by vaccination status, therefore, from the week 14 report onwards this section of the report will no longer be published.

The British government is lying.

Even if the end of free testing somehow affected its ability to provide “robust” data about infections, it would make no difference to the hospitalization or death figures, which are far more important. Unless Covid patients are going to be hospitalized anonymously, the Health Security Agency will still be able to match their names (and the names on death certificates) against vaccination records.

In fact the British government would be derelict not to continue to collect the data, and it surely will. But the public will no longer see it.

Why?

One reason and one reason only. Ever since I mentioned the existence of these reports to Joe Rogan in October, they have become an embarrassment. They are impossible to spin, and the clearest possible signal of vaccine failure.

But hiding the numbers won’t make the vaccines work better. It will just make people less likely to believe anything else public health authorities tell them about Covid and the vaccines – if that’s even possible at this point.

Subscribe to Unreported Truths

By Alex Berenson  ·  Tens of thousands of paid subscribers

Independent, citizen-funded journalism

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The New York Times acknowledges reality

Posted by M. C. on April 25, 2022

It happens from time to time. Enjoy!

Covid “does not pose a serious threat”? Did those words just appear in the New York Times?

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-new-york-times-acknowledges-reality?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxNTYyMTUyOCwicG9zdF9pZCI6NTI3NDExNzgsIl8iOiJXTUhxZCIsImlhdCI6MTY1MDgxMzI5NCwiZXhwIjoxNjUwODE2ODk0LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMzYzMDgwIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.nssLcuUe-sooWr0TWjoFFKHtat-BEXNIAbkpGnKiZiQ&s=r

Alex Berenson

Seems African countries couldn’t care less about Covid vaccines:

Gee, I wonder why?

Covid “does not pose a serious threat”? Did those words just appear in the New York Times?

Diana Zicklin Berrent’s newly-single-lady apartment has just frozen over.

But wait! Doesn’t Africa want to replicate the success that Britain – 90% adult vaccinated, 70% boosted Britain – has had in eradicating Covid?

Yeah, about that:

It’s looking more and more like the African decision to let the wazungu try the magic new medicine first will go down as the continent’s first great win of the 21st century.

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NATO and Collective Insecurity

Posted by M. C. on April 25, 2022

by Sheldon Richman

antiwar.com

Collective security, the official goal of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, seems plausible on its face. A group of nations ostensibly concerned about a common threat agree to defend one another in the event of an attack. “All for one and one for all,” as the Three Musketeers said.

But like many things, the principle, even if sincerely invoked, is more problematic than the first glance indicates. This is particularly true with governments, and in no area more so than foreign policy and armed forces. Schoolyard analogies involving bullies do not hold.

NATO was established soon after World War II ostensibly to keep the Soviet Union from overrunning Western Europe. The Red Army was present in Eastern and Central Europe, including eastern Germany, having driven back the Wehrmacht in the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany. It is by no means clear that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin aspired to have his armed forces conquer Western Europe, and his doctrine of “socialism in one country,” which suggests a conservative foreign policy, hardly supports a militarily aggressive posture toward the West. For one thing, the Soviet Union was exhausted from the savage war – it lost well over 20 million military personnel and civilians – and was hardly in a position to begin a new one against the Americans.

While many American politicians, fearing a return of the prewar public sentiment against foreign intervention, spoke of a Soviet threat, not all agreed. The influential Republican senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, whom I will discuss below, questioned the consensus and thus the official premise of the Cold War.

On April 4, 1949, 12 countries – the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland – signed the treaty that created NATO. (The Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union’s counter-alliance with the Eastern European countries it occupied, would not be founded for another six years.) Since 1998, 18 more countries have joined NATO, for a total of 30, including former Warsaw Pact members and the former Soviet Baltic republics that border Russia – with the predicted disastrous consequences. (Austria is not a member, having agreed to neutrality in 1955, in return for the Soviet withdrawal. West Germany became a member in 1955, and then a reunified Germany became a member in 1990 as the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact were being dismantled.)

The heart of the treaty, the “all for one and one for all” provision, is Article 5:

See the rest here

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For 12 Years and Tens of Thousands of Dollars, Is Schooling Worth It?

Posted by M. C. on April 25, 2022

Among economists who study the effects of education, there is a great divide between those who believe that education augments your skills and thereby enables you to do a better job (the “human capital” crowd) and those who think that education mostly reveals your pre-existing abilities and thereby enables you to get a better job (the signaling crowd). Caplan is firmly in the latter camp. 

by George Leef 

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/for-12-years-and-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars-is-schooling-worth-it/

The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan (Princeton University Press, 2018, 395 pages).

Almost every book on education policy (and I have read a great many of them) springs from the set of assumptions that education “experts” embrace: that schooling builds our stock of knowledge and skill, that it needs to be done mainly by government, that it makes us better human beings, and that we owe our prosperity to our great “investment” in education, kindergarten through college.

Among the tiny number of books that challenge the conventional wisdom about education, the latest and perhaps the most daring is Bryan Caplan’s Case against Education. Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University, is not, of course, against people’s acquiring skills and knowledge, but contends that our current system of education does a poor job of that, and at inordinate cost to taxpayers. He would like to see government subsidies for education stopped and believes that in an ideal world, education would be kept separate from the government.

Caplan puts his case starkly: “Most critics of our education system … miss what I see as its supreme defect: there’s way too much education. Typical students burn thousands of hours studying material that neither raises their productivity nor enriches their lives. And of course, students can’t waste time without experts to show them how.”

At this point, nearly all readers will be thinking, “Well, that is obviously wrong, since we know that college brings a handsome payoff to graduates. That college premium certainly shows that more years of education are valuable.”

Here is Caplan’s reply: “How could such a lucrative investment be wasteful? The answer is a single word I want to burn into your mind: signaling. Even if what a student learned in school is utterly useless, employers will happily pay extra if their scholastic achievement provides information about their productivity.”

How signalling works

Among economists who study the effects of education, there is a great divide between those who believe that education augments your skills and thereby enables you to do a better job (the “human capital” crowd) and those who think that education mostly reveals your pre-existing abilities and thereby enables you to get a better job (the signaling crowd). Caplan is firmly in the latter camp. He argues that the education premium that people enjoy for having crossed various educational thresholds is about 80 percent due to signaling and only 20 percent due to human capital improvement.

Education signals three broad traits: intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity. Employers of all kinds want workers with those traits. While it is possible for a person to acquire them in the absence of formal education, it’s almost impossible to let the rest of the world know that — and without such knowledge, few employers will take a chance on you.

Suppose you try to signal your employability in some way other than by getting educational credentials, say by dropping out of high school to prove the Riemann Hypothesis or something equally brainy. Unfortunately, even if you are able to convince some people that you’re a math genius with your proof, to most employers that actually sends a bad signal — your lack of conformity. Trying to get noticed without educational credentials rarely works. Consequently, Americans have become so fixated on those credentials that nearly everyone feels compelled to play the expensive “sheepskin” game.

See the rest here

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The death throes of the ‘Public Health expert’

Posted by M. C. on April 24, 2022

A fraudulent profession has been exposed to the world.

What is left of the Public Health expert class is a variety of ridiculous people who, like the last members of a dying cult, are lashing out to justify what is left of their relevance. The entire Public Health schtick has been exposed as fraudulent. COVID Mania showed us that this outfit is largely nothing more than ideological authoritarians, failed statisticians, midwit academics, and the occasional academic MD who advocates via virtue signal for their non existent patient roster.

https://dossier.substack.com/p/the-death-throes-of-the-public-health?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxNTYyMTUyOCwicG9zdF9pZCI6NTI2Mzg4MTUsIl8iOiJXTUhxZCIsImlhdCI6MTY1MDY1MDAyNiwiZXhwIjoxNjUwNjUzNjI2LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNjkwMDkiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.PkwNP7nXuqyEwR8kMqE_u4fjKyWfNW89_X62u8g8w90&s=r
Jordan SchachtelApr 2118261

The very concept of Public Health, once a rather innocuous term, is facing an extinction level event, and Americans should be incredibly thankful for this development. 

Sometimes, when a people are faced with a grand crisis, a bold new idea or group of individuals moves humanity forward in ways once thought of as improbable, if not impossible.

But the elevation of the supposed masters of Public Health has achieved the opposite effect. It is now a term that half of America reacts to with some combination of revulsion and mockery, and rightfully so.

Prior to the pandemic, America’s Public Health “experts” were rarely heard or seen. In the past, these forces would arise from obscurity to tell us the world is coming to an end, only to be routinely dismissed, forcing them to crawl back underneath the surface. With COVID Mania, that all changed. And now that we’ve seen what this profession is truly about, many long for the days when the insignificance of the Public Health man is restored to his proper place in society. 

Pre-2019, the individuals that are relentlessly populating our corporate press and policy circles were just run of the mill collectivists, a collection of over credentialed and underachieving individuals doing niche “research” to justify their existence in a variety of academic circles, or pushing paper in a government or pharmaceutical bureaucracy. The savior complex they seem to collectively embody had not yet shown its face.

Prior to COVID Mania, panic profiteer Eric Feigl Ding was co-authoring research papers about diarrhea. Deborah Birx was a no name bureaucrat giving lectures sponsored by the Gates Foundation about Aids in Africa. Anthony Fauci was peddling a variety of Ebola-related pharmaceuticals (some things never change). Pfizer’s Scott Gottlieb was… doing the same thing, but without a Wall Street Journal column and a weekly national television appearance. And the Public Health chairs of the various China-funded Ivy League academic departments were lecturing their students about equity and racism, and promoting their favorite socialist heroes.

See the rest here

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They Can’t Do That in Poland!

Posted by M. C. on April 24, 2022

By L. Reichard White

“Yes, but they’re not supposed to – – –

“Yes, but they do. Police are the same everywhere. We Polish know. You Americans will find out.”

Was she right? Are things better or worse now? What are you going to do about it?

They Can’t Do That in Poland!

A Polish friend of mine in Vegas, Paul P., was hosting his sister-in-law from back home. Mariola is quite cultured, beautiful, speaks nearly perfect English, and is very politically savvy – – – she was the protoge’ of economics professor Leszek Balcerowicz who became Poland’s first post-communist finance minister.

On the way back from Los Angeles, they passed a highwayman, ah, that is, a Highway Patrol officer, along the side of the road rummaging through a motorist’s open trunk.

Since I was regarded as the resident expert on American ethnology at the time — at least among my Polish friends — Mariola later asked me what had been going on. I explained that despite previous challenges, according to an at-that-time-recent Supreme Court ruling, American cops had the de-facto right to search in the trunk of your vehicle, and that if you didn’t open up “voluntarily,” they could and would force it open. It’s true. She didn’t believe me at first. “Surely you are joking,” she said. “This is America. They cannot do that – – – even in Poland!” This was before the 1989 Revolution — before the Berlin Wall came down. At the time, Poland was still “communist.”

I in turn didn’t quite believe her. “That’s completely at odds with what we were taught about communist countries. Polish cops can’t even make you open the trunk to your car?” I asked.

“Not without special paper,” she stated. “Not even secret police.”

Mariola was clearly incensed that American cops could do what Polish cops couldn’t, not even during communism.

Chrissy and I were visiting Poland shortly after the wall came down, and got a little first hand experience. Our rented car was parked at an open-air market, when an officer approached us.

After cracking the language barrier, we discovered he wanted to look in the trunk. We asked why. He told us that he thought the car might be stolen and he’d be able to tell by checking the spare tire – – – or something. (We’d only cracked the language barrier apparently, not broken it entirely.)

At the time, because of certain legal anomalies, Poland was a hotbed of cars stolen elsewhere in Europe, so the request wasn’t really out of line. We were reasonably sure our rented car wasn’t stolen — it was a Polish Lada (Fiat) — so we decided to see what would happen if we told the guy “No.”

When we did, he thanked us politely and went on his way. Now there’s a polite policeman! We asked our hosts how they ever caught any crooks. They told us that if he’d had anything much to go on, he’d have been more persistent, but he still wouldn’t be able to check the trunk without permission — or that special paper.

Mariola spent quite a bit of time in the U.S. and even got a Nevada driver’s license. Just before she left America for the last time, she told me why she would never come back.

“They can even search the trunk of my car in America. You have been brain-washed by your stupid drug-war propaganda to think all this doesn’t matter. But it does. Already your country has far more people in jails and prisons per capita than any other country in the world — even your schools resemble prisons. Is this the sign of a free country?

“You have to worry about how much money you bring into the country, how much you take out. You have to keep financial records, not for yourself, but for your IRS. Is this the sign of a free country? You have more police and more laws making more things illegal than any other country in the world. Is this the sign of a free country?

“They told us we lived in free country too.

“I never believed all those propaganda stories they told us about America when I was a child, but I do now.”

“America isn’t free,” she said. “It starts with your driver’s license. When the police stop me in Poland, the only thing they know about me is my name and where I live. Here they go to those computers they have in their cars. They know if I’m married or single, who my husband is, how many children I have. They can find out if I have had any other contact with the police, what my income is or if I’m unemployed. If I were an American, they would know my national identification number — you call it ‘Social Security.’ With that, they could even look at my credit card and spending habits, military record, school grades and even find out my blood type.”

“Yes, but they’re not supposed to – – –

“Yes, but they do. Police are the same everywhere. We Polish know. You Americans will find out.”

Was she right? Are things better or worse now? What are you going to do about it?

HERE for updates, additions, comments, and corrections.

AND, “Like,” “Tweet,” and otherwise, pass this along!

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