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Regulatory Capture is Killing Us, and We Are Two Steps Away from the Totalitarian Fascist Regulatory States of America

Posted by M. C. on December 27, 2021

From the EPA to the FDA, the massive influence of corporations on the agencies tasked with regulating them has proven to be a deadly experiment in American-Style Fascism.

https://popularrationalism.substack.com/p/regulatory-capture-is-killing-us

James Lyons-Weiler

When the airline industry has a disaster, it goes under review by the National Transportation Safety Board. When corporations dump a toxic brew of chemicals into ground surface waters, they are supposed to answer to the EPA. When drug companies’ products – drugs and vaccines – cause more health problems than they prevent or cure, they are supposed to be subject to recall by the FDA.

When regulatory agencies become dominated by the corporations they are supposed to control, that agency has been captured by the industry. The public interest becomes a lower priority than the bidding of the will of the industry, and the industry flourishes – most of the time at the cost of human health.

Examples exist from agencies tasked with regulating finances, the airline industry, the chemical industry, the petroleum industry, the defense industry, and, of course, the pharmaceutical industry. Those who understand the specific details of regulatory capture eventually develop the position that a captured agency is worse than no agency at all, because via their influence, corporations can begin to wield the administrative power of the executive branch of government, which is more efficient and less expensive than buying political influence.

Both of the major political parties in the US are guilty of allowing the foxes to run the henhouse; wholescale change in policy at the EPA occurs every time the White House changes hands. Trump’s two EPA Chiefs, Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler were stellar examples. Pruitt was a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry (which produces thousands of chemicals), and Wheeler, well, just click the link on his name.

The combined effect of Pruitt’s and Wheeler’s rollbacks on EPA policy enforcement and moves to allow polluting industries to regulate themselves were black and white examples of changes in policy against the evidence provided by Science.

A further consequence of this has been what I call the politicization of fact, examples of which we have seen with environmental toxins, safe food, and vaccine safety. This requires the willful dismissal of the importance of the search for truth, which comes with an abject disregard for rational inquiry, empiricism and the balanced view of Science, and is intolerable to any card-carrying Scientist.

Examples of specific mechanisms (and symptoms) of regulatory capture include:

  • The Blind Eye – Failure to investigate or levy penalties for violations. 
  • Golden Parachute – High-paid jobs for regulators following success in weakening regulatory power while in office. Examples include former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, and former CDC Director Julie Gerberding, both of whom are high-paid executives (Gottlieb, Pfizer; Gerberding, Merck). Gottlieb has continued to appear on national mainstream news outlets during COVID-19, wielding carry-over authority via the title “Former FDA Commissioner.”
  • The Revolving Door – Placing former corporate leaders in positions of regulatory authority, often Directorships (Biden’s current nominee for FDA Chief, Robert Califf, was, according to Wikipedia, “a paid consultant for Merck Sharp & Dohme, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly per ProPublica from 2009 to 2013). The largest consulting payment was $87,500 by Johnson & Johnson in 2012, and ‘most of funds for travel or consulting under $5,000,’  which has been called ‘minimal for a physician of his stature.’ From 2013-2014 he was paid a total of $52,796, the highest amount was $6,450 from Merck Sharp & Dohme, followed by Amgen, F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Daiichi Sankyo, Sanofi-Aventis, Bristol-Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca. He was the Director of Portola Pharmaceuticals, Inc. from July 2012 to January 26, 2015. An advisor of Proventys, Inc., Chairman of the medical advisory board of Regado Biosciences, Inc. and has been a member of the medical advisory board since June 2, 2009, and a member of the clinical advisory board of Corgentech Inc. Forbes wrote that his close ties to the drug industry were the reason for him not being nominated for the FDA Commissioner position in 2009.”
  • Facilitation of Opportunity – An example from oil and gas drilling occurred when the US Minerals Management Service (MMS) agency, which supervised offshore oil drilling, facilitated new projects for the private sector and mismanaged penalties for the BP Oil Spill (DOL Report on the Wayback Machine; the original link is a 404).
  • Rent-Seeking – When individual companies try to get a larger slice of a market’s total wealth without creating any additional wealth for that market. Pfizer recently met with the Biden administration directly, avoiding having to go through FDA’s regulatory process on COVID-19 vaccine boosters, a move that led to the resignation of two top FDA officials, who are now writing op-eds.
  • Ignoring Science – Cherry-picking studies that support a policy position, but ignoring sometimes thousands of studies that fail to support a favored policy. The most recent example is the dismissal of the evidence in support of early use of Ivermectin, for which over 1,400 studies show benefit.
  • Controlling the Narrative – Given their national standing, agency leadership often have the ability to misdirect the public’s focus from an issue of real concern to one that is either of not real concern, or to an issue that is so politicized that no progress in meaningful discourse can be achieved. A good example of this is the substitution of concern over chemicals to climate change. By far, most of the toxic chemicals of concern in our air, food and water are by-products of the petroleum industry – yet they receive little attention by the press compared to “climate change”. Another example is the substitution of the issue of vaccine safety to efficacy; the justification of the risk based on the perceived benefits thwarts inquiries into why vaccines have not been made safer after decades of accumulated evidence of their risk of harm.
  • Self-Regulation (turning regulatory responsibility over to industry) – One example is the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) allowing self-certification by airlines, NYTimes); another is that CDC and FDA used and considered non-peer-reviewed press releases from vaccine makers like Moderna and Pfizer on the safety & efficacy of their COVID-19 vaccine products. Early releases by both Moderna and Pfizer failed to carry the required “Forward-Looking Statements,” and yet SEC has not investigated, also providing an example of failure to investigate.
  • Agency Weakening – By reducing its budget, demoralizing people in key positions and failing to fill positions vacated by retirement and resignations, industry agents can reduce the effectiveness of the regulatory agencies they operate.
  • Federal “Non-Profits” and Funded Applications – The CDC Foundation receives over $25M per year from vaccine makers, and the FDA receives most of their funding from application fees for drug reviews.

Regulatory capture can occur at the State level as well; for example, the fracking industry in Pennsylvania (see POA’s “Fracking and the Revolving Door in Pennsylvania“).

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Here’s How the Energy Crisis Turns Into Hunger and Then… War?

Posted by M. C. on December 27, 2021

https://internationalman.com/articles/heres-how-the-energy-crisis-turns-into-hunger-and-then-war/

by Chris MacIntosh

We have previously warned about a whopping food crisis and supply problems in the fertilizer market. Well, now is worse because that was BEFORE we had the natural gas crisis. Why is that important?

Natural gas is THE critical input into making fertilizer. Urea is essentially ammonia in solid state, the process of which entails reacting ammonia with CO2. And we all now know — thanks to the climate nazis — that CO2 is currently the devil. The problem of course is that with no natural gas there is no urea, and with no urea there is no fertilizer. And with no fertilizer… well, we will eat each other.

Here are the spot urea prices.

Something else that we had noted some time back (in Korea) but which now seems like a larger problem.

Here is an article about an Australian farmer who warns the urea supply crisis could halt normal life within weeks.

Here’s what he says:

‘Not only will we not be able to grow cattle and we will not be able to grow food and we will not be able to grow grain or anything like that, but even if we could, we can’t move it, because we can’t turn a wheel in a truck because we have no Adblue,’ [AdBlue is needed for diesel vehicles — half of all trucks on Australian roads run on diesel

As of February we might not have a truck on the road in Australia, we might not have a train on the tracks.

‘So quite literally the whole country comes to a standstill as of February.’

The farmer then, goes on to say:

‘Go and have a look in your cupboard and go and have a look in your fridge and I guarantee just about every single item there, at some point, urea has been used to produce that item, whether it’s a steak or a salad or a can of baked beans.

Moving to Europe, we have a full blown energy crisis unfolding there, made worse by increasingly more destructive policies by the pointy shoes (let’s produce more solar and wind when it’s proven to be both inadequate and massively costly) and a supply chain crisis.

Take a look at European energy prices.

So here we’re now witnessing the beginnings of what promises to be a storm. Think cold and hungry and you’ve got the right picture.

That electricity comes largely from natural gas, and that natural gas comes from those peaky Russkies.

European Gas Prices Surge Above 100 Euros With Eyes on Russia.

Europe’s benchmark natural gas price rose above 100 euros, or $190 per barrel of oil equivalent, ahead of a series of auctions for pipeline capacity that are seen as a test of Russia’s willingness to ease a supply crunch.

The day-ahead auctions for space on Ukrainian pipelines and capacity at Germany’s Mallnow compressor station will provide a strong signal for how serious Russia is about increasing flows to the west. While the region’s biggest supplier has said it aims to keep refilling European storage sites until the end of December, it hasn’t used short-term auctions to ship more fuel.

So right now we have this situation which is going to make your head spin.

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Is Virtue Signaling Vicious? | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on December 27, 2021

The proper end of debate is not the glorification of whoever “wins” the argument but the ascertainment of the truth or, at the very least, the elimination from contention of a false or misguided belief. Censorship makes this impossible to do,

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/is-virtue-signaling-vicious/

by Laurie Calhoun

yardsign kindnessiseverything y9fu w7

Virtue signaling—the practice of highlighting what one takes to be one’s own moral superiority, often by loudly denouncing the character and comportment, including the speech, of other people—has become a dominant mode of rhetoric throughout social media and network television. Virtue theory, in contrast, is a teleological approach to normative morality concerned with how actions affect one’s soul or character. Historians of philosophy usually trace virtue theory to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the first extant articulation of ideas such as that habits build character, and virtues represent “the golden mean” along a continuum of two vicious extremes. Courage, for example, lies between the two extremes of cowardice and recklessness, according to Aristotle.

It seems unlikely that many of the people who engage in virtue signaling have any genuine interest in the state of anybody’s soul. Certainly shrieking in outrage is unlikely to change anyone’s comportment, much less their beliefs, yet many people persist in the practice anyway, in part because it is both contagious and addictive. The structure of Twitter, in particular, makes it easy to react in a knee-jerk way to short proclamations with which one disagrees. It is in fact very difficult, if not impossible, to carry out reason-based debates in the allotted 280 letter spaces of a Tweet. It furthermore requires a degree of discipline to refrain from shrieking back at shrieking trolls on Twitter, even while knowing that many of them may well be bots—or unreasonable facsimiles…

Having visited in 2021 several different U.S. cities, including Boston, Denver, Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Austin, where prominently displayed lawn signs profess the “enlightened” beliefs of the people residing there, I have been puzzling over the strange new phenomenon of essentially advertising one’s own “virtue.” I presume that what is being asserted is moral rather than epistemological superiority, because most of the proclamations on these signs do not contain much in the way of propositional content. “Love is love” is tautological, but “Black lives matter” and “Science is real” also do not represent any sort of cognitive breakthrough. For that reason, whenever I spot one of these signs, I find myself wondering how many people there are who really do believe the literal antitheses of the statements displayed. It would seem that anyone who believes that “Human lives matter” is committed to believing that “Black lives matter,” so there seems to be a hidden insinuation in these pronouncements that people who do not overtly profess such beliefs do not in fact agree and therefore constitute some sort of affront to good people everywhere, by despicably denying the humanity of black people and the deliverances of the scientific enterprise, among other things.

Yet it has become abundantly clear that the disagreements at issue are not really about the simple statements, per se. Instead, the banal expressions appear to be code for far more substantial and controversial positions, such as that “George Floyd was a hero,” and “Climate change is the most pressing problem facing us today.” In this way, nailing a sign in one’s front yard is a performative way of broadcasting that one belongs to the right club, and may explain the preponderance of such signs in some neighborhoods, where a veritable “war of the signs” is underway. (On one street in Somerville, Massachusetts, I saw “Black Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” placards displayed before adjacent homes.) Anecdotally, I can report that “Black Lives Matter” signs are far more common than “Blue Lives Matter” signs, so it seems that the inhabitants of some left-leaning neighborhoods may feel that by failing to post one of the rainbow signs professing the beliefs of the inhabitants of the house, they may be taken implicitly to ally themselves with the ideological enemy, deplorable Trump supporters and the like.

Alas, in the age of social media, many people appear to labor under the delusion that it suffices to have a “right-minded” opinion in order to be morally superior. This tendency was dialed up significantly during the Trump years, when the stark reality of what can only be termed tribalism became impossible to deny. “You’re either with us, or you’re against us,” serves politicians well during the build up to every war, but now it has infected civil society, to the point where many people reflexively revile anyone who disagrees with them on either Trump or the COVID-19 shots, facilely concluding that they must be not just idiots but also morally depraved.

Millions of Trump haters appear to believe not only that Trump is worthy of their abject abhorrence, but also that they are superior to Trump supporters, who have somehow failed to recognize the former president’s abhorrent character. Shockingly, they lament, millions of poor benighted souls verily celebrate the man as their savior! These polarized attitudes toward Trump are based on beliefs about what he does and why—about which there is considerable disagreement. Mindless worship of a political leader may be wrongheaded, but is it vicious?

To take another example, millions of people have put Dr. Anthony Fauci on a pedestal as their savior from the scourge of COVID-19. Interestingly enough, there seems to be a good deal of overlap between Trump haters and Fauci worshipers, which strongly suggests that the etiology of afflictions such as TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) and COVID Hysteria are traceable to CNN, MSNBC, and the like. Indeed, at this point in history, the most reliable determinant of whether any given person hates Trump and adores Fauci would seem to be not their education, social or economic status, or state of residence, but whether they watch television, and, if so, whether they spend their time at CNN or Fox News channel.

Of course, we often arrive at our beliefs through entirely random and arbitrary processes. We may be absolutely convinced that we are right—Murder is wrong!—but do we deserve any moral credit for having arrived at such a view? I suspect that it is this confusion which leads some people to despise critics. They mistakenly believe that a critic is asserting moral authority, when in fact he or she is making only an epistemological—or, at the most basic level, a logical—objection to what appears to be a manifest falsehood or contradiction. Calling George W. Bush and Tony Blair “war criminals” is to condemn them, but it is also to assert what the speaker takes to be a fact, for if the 2003 war on Iraq was a violation of international law, then its perpetrators were war criminals, and all of those killed in the conflict were victims, whether directly or indirectly, of premeditated, intentional homicide, better known as murder.

Moral rhetoric is intrinsically complicated, because we all have limited perspectives, and it would seem that one person’s incisive critic is another person’s shrieking troll. Being of a naturally critical bent and inclined to sit down and write when questions pop up in my mind, I can attest that some people do consider just about any form of criticism to be an obnoxious, insolent, and self-indulgent form of “virtue signaling.” They may appreciate intelligence in an abstract way, but when it comes after their cherished beliefs, that’s a completely different story.

Witness the plight of Socrates, the case of Julian Assange, or any of the countless other, unnamed, dissidents destroyed by their governments over the course of history. How dare you suggest that there may be weaknesses and contradictions in my views! Who are you to find fault with my opinions and beliefs? These sorts of reactions—typically angry—to attempts to highlight problems with fervently held dogmas have led me to reflect upon the question whether there is any significant distinction to be drawn between, say, screaming that someone is selfish for declining a “vaccine” which is purported not to stop transmission and infection but to moderate symptoms, and pointing out that voluntary obesity has contributed to hospital resource shortages throughout the Coronapocalypse because an estimated 78% of the people who die of COVID-19 are in fact obese.

At the same time that name-calling has become the rule not the exception in responding to anyone who happens to disagree, not only on social media, but also throughout the propagandized mainstream outlets which were formerly homes to journalism, one also occasionally encounters gentle exhortations to “Be Kind.” Only this morning, on a brisk walk on this cold and crisp winter day in Utah, I spotted an SUV with a license plate reading “B Kind.” (I immediately inferred that “Be Kind” had already been nabbed by another, even more enlightened thinker.) Even more so than the yard signs, the exhortation to “Be Kind” may in fact embody a contradiction of sorts, suggesting, as it seems to, that those who see the license plate are going to be mean unless they are told to do the opposite. The form of speech, after all, is an imperative, an order, a command. But is it really “kind” to order people around, or to suggest that, left to their own devices, they would naturally be mean?

The “Be Kind” trend may have been popularized in part by talk show host Ellen Degeneris, around the time when she was explaining her friendship with war criminal George W. Bush. (Oh—was that mean?)

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About Laurie Calhoun

Laurie Calhoun is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, You Can Leave, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique.

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Stockman: ‘Patriotic Duty’ My Eye

Posted by M. C. on December 26, 2021

The only real patriotic duty under these circumstances, of course, is to adopt the words of the other Joe from West Virginia and utter a loud “I’m a no!” when it comes to Biden’s mandates.

by Tyler Durden
Saturday, Dec 25, 2021 – 10:15 PM

Authored by David Stockman via The Brownstone Institute,Rough Rider Teddy must be rolling in his grave as he looks down upon these poseurs gathered in the Roosevelt room. For crying out loud, every one of them is double vaxxed and totally boosted. And they have issued orders to force the same upon more than 130 million of their countrymen—allegedly to prevent the latter from becoming walking vectors of disease and killers of their neighbors.

Yet if the Vaxx is actually a spread stopper, why do they sit there in their masks? What’s the need to protect Biden from Fauci when the sainted doctor is armed to the teeth with vaxxed-in antibodies? And why is Biden festooned with the medical equivalent of Depends when he’s already got the accident-prevention protection of the Vaxx?Or does he? That is to say, if it doesn’t work to stop the spread, the benefit is only private and not public and hence there is no earthly reason for mandating it against the will of millions of citizens who fear that the risks outweigh the benefits. And if it does stop the spread—despite the manifest evidence to the contrary—-why all the face mask virtue signalling on live TV?In short, this “photo op” is worth a thousand words. It’s a live action illustration of what’s been wrong since the beginning in March 2020. Namely, the predicate that one-size-fits all social control mechanisms—lockdowns, closures, distancing, masking, vaxxing—must be preemptively and harshly employed by arms of the state in order to stop the spread of an aerosolized airborne virus which cannot be seen and cannot be stopped.Indeed, the latest argument for mandatory vaxxing—-that it prevents not transmission and infection but just a serious course of the disease—makes the picture patently absurd. What are these cats afraid of then?The real contagion at loose in the world—especially among the western nations which noisily congratulate themselves as model liberal democracies to be emulated by the more benighted nations inhabiting the purported darker corners of the planet—is a virulent outbreak of statist authoritarianism. That is, a definitely not Black Plague virus of the type that has challenged mankind o’er the ages has become a universal excuse for the wholesale cancellation of civil liberties and property rights like never before—even in times of world war.Take the pathetic case of the United Kingdom. It is governed by a Conservative Party that’s traitorous to the cause of liberty and led by an unkempt Donald Trump wanna be who has assaulted the essence of liberal democracy to such a sweeping extent that his most authoritarian predecessors  (i.e. Winston Churchill, among others) scarcely dreamed of it and the Donald himself couldn’t hold a candle to it.BoJo, in fact, is right now hauling out all the tools of public health authoritarianism in response to what amounts to a run-of-the-mill winter flu among the British population.And that latter proposition is not debatable. Not when you compare the peak January data, when virtually no one was vaccinated compared to 80% of adult Brits today, with the 7-day rolling averages through last week. Thus,

  • The case rate last week was 1,138 per million or 30% higher than the 875 per million recorded at the January 2021 peaks, but–The death rate last week of 1.64 per million was down by a god-is-apparently-smiling 91% compared to the 18.21 rate at the January 2021 peak.

Of course, peek under the covers and what you have is the same old, same old. Not only is the Omicron variant far more transmissible and massively less lethal than earlier variants–for the inherent reasons that sensible virologists and epidemiologists have explained ad infinitum—but the propaganda contagion of the state’s Virus Patrol appears to be even more virulent.That is to say, as the government, the BBC, the Guardian and their mass media ilk have stirred the fear pot one more time, the UK testing rate has also skyrocketed and is now well more than double the rate of last January at the previous winter season peak. Thus:Alas, the public health machinery has so effectively stirred the fear quotient among the populace that the positivity rate has fallen dramatically. Compared to a 10.8% rate in January 2021, the current rate is just 6.0%.Obviously, what is happening is that more and more asymptomatic and completely healthy well people are getting tested in response to the drumbeat, which testing surge has generated the predictable wave of new “cases” and new measures of propaganda and control from the Virus Patrol.

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Doug Casey on How Marxists Captured the Universities and Will Soon Capture the Nation

Posted by M. C. on December 26, 2021

Doug Casey: I’m bearish, especially for the near term since actual Jacobins are in charge in Washington.

How can the markets be healthy when what passes for a ruling class in the West actually hate themselves and middle class is collapsing economically and psychologically?

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-how-marxists-captured-the-universities-and-will-soon-capture-the-nation/

by Doug Casey

International Man: Communist and socialist ideas are growing in popularity among the millennial and Gen Z generations. In fact, the majority of young people dislike capitalism and favor a more socialist or even a communist economic system.

This is evidenced by the rise of politicians like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) and The Squad.

What’s your take on this?

Doug Casey: The youth are being corrupted, and it’s more serious than ever. Although I say that a bit tongue-in-cheek since people have probably thought the youth were becoming degenerate since about day one.

For instance, one of the two charges against Socrates when he was executed in Ancient Greece was corrupting the youth. Older people always think the youth are foolish, ignorant, lazy, crazy and generally taking the world to hell in a handbasket. And, of course, many of their charges are, and always have been, true.

But as kids get older, they generally get wiser, more knowledgeable, harder-working, and more prudent—nothing new here. The world has survived roughly 250 new generations since civilization began in Sumer 5,000 years ago. And it will likely survive this one too.

That’s the bright side. And, as you know, I always look on the bright side. But, on the other hand, the American university system has been totally captured by Cultural Marxists, socialists, statists, collectivists, promoters of identity politics, and people of that ilk. These people hate Western Civilization and its values and are actively trying to destroy them. My view is that this challenge is perhaps the most serious we’ve ever encountered, and the dangers are greatly amplified by advancing technology.

International Man: What role are Western universities playing? How is this shaping current and future generations?

Doug Casey: Universities have been totally transformed in many ways over the past century, and it’s been for the worst in every instance. When the average 18-year-old goes to college, he knows very little about how the world works in general. He’s got vague ideas he picked up mostly from TV, movies, and people who got a job teaching high school. They know basically nothing about economics, government, or history. Worse, what they think they know is mostly wrong.

That makes them easy prey for professors with totally bent views to indoctrinate them.

See the rest here

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The Unavoidable Necessity to Make Judgments – Taki’s Magazine – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on December 26, 2021

The unavoidable necessity to make judgments, both moral and aesthetic, creates a nagging bad conscience because we are unsure of the final justification for any of them. This gives rise to a tension relieved often by vehemence.

https://www.takimag.com/article/the-unavoidable-necessity-to-make-judgments/#

Theodore Dalrymple

People, it seems, are increasingly unable to bear the presence in a room of someone who is of different political opinion from theirs. We have now become adept at gauging the general tenor of any gathering’s views and either join in if those views coincide with our own or hold our silence if they don’t. Moreover, a person’s opinions are now the main criterion that people use to assess the goodness or badness of his character; his actual behavior is much less important to them.

The only other criterion that has much salience in the assessment of character nowadays is a person’s taste. To be accused of having no taste, or bad taste, is extremely hurtful. Taste is one of the means by which we categorize people, and we are reluctant to be seen in public with persons of poor taste, for their poor taste reflects on us, too. We judge by appearances and very often there is little else to go on. Our tastes in art, music, reading matter, food, decoration, modes of entertainment, and so forth help to place us in categories. We tend to despise categories other than our own.

Twenty-seven years ago, there was a brilliant play called Art by the French playwright Yasmina Reza, on the matter of taste. Three friends discuss a painting bought by one of them for a considerable price. The painting in question is a canvas painted nothing but white, with a white border and some lines visible in the paint. The purchaser of the painting is a dermatologist called Serge, prosperous but not wealthy; one of his friends, Marc, an aeronautical engineer, is obviously intelligent but not a connoisseur of art; the third personage in the play, Yvan, is a relative failure who has no direction in his life. “Those who claim not to make judgments are always making a self-congratulatory meta-judgment, as it were.”

Marc, the plain, inartistic man of intelligence, sees nothing in the picture (if picture it can be called), and even calls it shit. He thinks it is a confidence trick: After all, anyone could take a piece of canvas and cover it with white paint. But the fact that anyone could have done such a thing doesn’t mean that anyone had done it, at least not before this particular artist, apparently well-known and hence the high price of his work, did it. As for Yvan, he sees, or affects to see, something of value in the painting.

Serge, the purchaser and owner of the painting, thinks that Marc, its detractor, lacks the necessary education and interest to pass judgment on the painting. Marc, by contrast, thinks that Serge is prey to intellectual and aesthetic snobbery. Before long, their disagreement reveals other fissures in their friendship. Yvan tries to mediate between Serge and Marc but is turned upon himself by the other two. Disagreement about a painting has sown real dissension among them.

Matters of taste are indeed capable of sowing dissension and even hatred.

See the rest here

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NFL’s Chief Medical Officer Warns There’s Almost No Indication Of Asymptomatic Spread | ZeroHedge

Posted by M. C. on December 26, 2021

The NFL in defiance of the State. Amazing!

Common sense prevails or the NFL is losing too much money. My guess is…

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/nfls-chief-medical-officer-warns-theres-almost-no-indication-asymptomatic-spread

by Tyler Durden

In the latest sign that “the science” promoted by Dr. Anthony Fauci and the US government as justification for scaring half the country into staying home this Christmas really, truly, no longer applies, the NFL has changed its strategy for dealing with COVID to dramatically break from federal guidelines.ESPN reports that the league is suppressing the latest COVID surge with an understanding that symptomatic individuals are driving transmission within the team environment, said Chief Medical Officer Dr. Allen Sills on Thursday. Apparently, the League has taken its own look at the COVID Problem, and decided that asymptomatic players actually don’t spread COVID.

Well, at least not in any meaningful way.Again, here’s Dr. Sills:

“I think all of our concern about [asymptomatic spread] has been going down based on what we’ve been seeing throughout the past several months,” Sills told ESPN. “We’ve got our hands full with symptomatic people. Can I tell you tonight that there has never been a case when someone without symptoms passed it on to someone else? No, of course I can’t say that. But what I can say to you is that I think it’s a very, very tiny fraction of the overall problem, if it exists at all.”

He clarifies further:

“Clearly if you want to look at the overall pattern and concern about transmission, it is not being driven by people who have no idea that they are infected and they are infecting scores of others. This is being driven by people with symptoms and the exposures during that symptomatic period.”

In response to omicron, the league and the NFL Players Association agreed last week to stop weekly testing on vaccinated players and begin random testing of a sample across teams and positions.Vaccinated players who report symptoms are required to be tested, and unvaccinated players continue to be tested daily, as the league is still performing 1,000 tests per day for players and staff.

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Rousseau, Guevara, Marx and More: The Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcy of the Left | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on December 26, 2021

The revolutionary intellectual has no title to boast of any personal superiority nor to set himself up as the master of society. On the contrary, with his rambling ideologies and his bad human example, which has corrupted the minds and behavior of millions of young people, the revolutionary intellectual is undoubtedly the most pernicious figure of our times.

https://mises.org/wire/rousseau-guevara-marx-and-more-moral-and-intellectual-bankruptcy-left

Guglielmo Piombini Bernardo Ferrero

A brief look at the lives of Rousseau, Marx, Guevara, Brecht, and Sartre suggests that many of the Left’s most celebrated heroes built their philosophies on a foundation of the most repugnant narcissism, violence, and inhumanity. 

Introduction

In editing David Hume’s 1766 pamphlet titled About Rousseau, Lorenzo Infantino has drawn attention to a dispute between the two philosophers that at the time caused much discussion throughout Europe. At the core of that contrast were not only two different world views, David Hume’s classical liberal and individualist weltanschauung versus Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s egalitarian and collectivist one, but also two very different personalities: the Scottish thinker was mild mannered, humble, and reserved, while the philosopher from Geneva was megalomaniacal, paranoid, and quarrelsome.1

The relationship between the two represents an interesting historical episode. When Rousseau became wanted by the police in Continental Europe for his subversive writings, Hume, who empathized with the precarious situation in which the Swiss philosopher found himself, generously offered to host him in his house in England. In addition, he also made an effort with the authorities to get him a living and a pension. However, following a hoax organized by Horace Walpole against Rousseau (specifically a fake letter which was published in the newspapers), the latter was convinced, wrongly, that Hume was the head of a “clique” of enemies who had conspired against him. Hence the irreparable break between the two, in which Hume, unwillingly and only on the insistence of his friends, answered to Rousseau’s unpleasant public accusations.

The Moral Credentials of the Committed Intellectual

In the story of the stormy relationship between Hume and Rousseau there appears a figure that has become typical of contemporary times, the socially engaged intellectual, who emerged precisely in this period and of whom Rousseau was probably the original prototype. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, with the decline of the power of the church, a new character emerged, the lay intellectual, whose influence has continually grown over the last two hundred years. From the beginning the lay intellectual proclaimed himself consecrated to the interests of humanity and invested with the mission of redeeming it through his wisdom and teaching.

The progressive intellectual no longer feels bound by everything that belonged to the past, such as customs, traditions, religious beliefs: for him all the wisdom accumulated by humanity over the centuries is to be thrown away. In his boundless presumption, the socially engaged intellectual claims to be able to diagnose all of society’s ills and to be able to cure them with the strength of his intellect alone. In other words, he claims to have devised and to possess the formulas thanks to which it is possible to transform the structures of society, as well as the ways of life of human beings, for the better.

But what moral credentials do committed intellectuals like Rousseau and his many heirs, who claim to dictate standards of behavior for all of humanity, have? In fact, if we look at their lives, we often find a constant: the more they proclaimed their moral superiority, their dedication to the common good, and their selfless love for humanity, the more despicably and unworthily they behaved with the people they dealt with in everyday life, with family members, friends, and colleagues.2

The Distorted Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, opposed all aspects of civilization, starting from the arts and the sciences. As he wrote in his famous 1750 Discours sur les sciences et les artes, which gave him overnight fame: “When there is no effect, there is no cause to seek. But here the effect is certain, the depravity real, and our souls have been corrupted in proportion to the advancement of our Sciences and Arts to perfection.”3

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Watch “Talking About Stoicism 154 Care for the Mind’s Health First and Foremost” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on December 25, 2021

https://youtu.be/Nx3Df9mDZWM

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The Businessman and the Holy Family – LewRockwell LewRockwell.com

Posted by M. C. on December 24, 2021

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/12/lew-rockwell/the-businessman-and-the-holy-family/

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

At the heart of the Christmas story rests some important lessons concerning free enterprise, government, and the role of wealth in society.

Let’s begin with one of the most famous phrases: “There’s no room at the inn.” This phrase is often invoked as if it were a cruel and heartless dismissal of the tired travelers Joseph and Mary. Many renditions of the story conjure up images of the couple going from inn to inn only to have the owner barking at them to go away and slamming the door.

In fact, the inns were full to overflowing in the entire Holy Land because of the Roman emperor’s decree that everyone be counted and taxed. Inns are private businesses, and customers are their lifeblood. There would have been no reason to turn away this man of royal lineage and his beautiful, expectant bride.

In any case, the second chapter of St. Luke doesn’t say that they were continually rejected at place after place. It tells of the charity of a single inn owner, perhaps the first person they encountered, who, after all, was a businessman. His inn was full, but he offered them what he had: the stable. There is no mention that the innkeeper charged the couple even one copper coin, though given his rights as a property owner, he certainly could have.

And yet we don’t even know the innkeeper’s name. In two thousand years of celebrating Christmas, tributes today to the owner of the inn are absent. Such is the fate of the merchant throughout all history: doing well, doing good, and forgotten for his service to humanity. It’s remarkable, then, to think that when the Word was made flesh with the birth of Jesus, it was through the intercessory work of a private businessman. Without his assistance, the story would have been very different indeed. People complain about the “commercialization” of Christmas, but clearly commerce was there from the beginning, playing an essential and laudable role.

Clearly, if there was a room shortage, it was an unusual event and brought about through some sort of market distortion. After all, if there had been frequent shortages of rooms in Bethlehem, entrepreneurs would have noticed that there were profits to be made by addressing this systematic problem, and built more inns.

Moving on in the story, we come to Three Kings, also called Wise Men. Talk about a historical anomaly for both to go together! Most kings behaved like the Roman Emperor’s local enforcer, Herod. Not only did he order people to leave their homes and foot the bill for travel so that they could be taxed. Herod was also a liar: he told the Wise Men that he wanted to find Jesus so that he could “come and adore Him.” In fact, Herod wanted to kill Him. Hence, another lesson: you can’t trust a political hack to tell the truth. It was because of a government decree that Mary and Joseph, and so many others like them, were traveling in the first place. They had to be uprooted for fear of the emperor’s census workers and tax collectors. And consider the costs of slogging all the way “from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David,” not to speak of the opportunity costs Joseph endured having to leave his own business. Thus we have another lesson: government’s use of coercive dictates distort the market.

Once having found the Holy Family, what gifts did the Wise Men bring? Not soup and sandwiches, but “gold, frankincense, and myrrh.” These were the most rare items obtainable in that world in those times, and they must have commanded a very high market price.

Far from rejecting them as extravagant, the Holy Family accepted them as gifts worthy of the Divine Messiah. Neither is there a record that suggests that the Holy Family paid any capital gains tax on them, though such gifts vastly increased their net wealth. Hence, another lesson: there is nothing immoral about wealth; wealth is something to be valued, owned privately, given and exchanged.

When the Wise Men and the Holy Family got word of Herod’s plans to kill the newborn Son of God, did they submit? Not at all. The Wise Men, being wise, snubbed Herod and “went back another way” – taking their lives in their hands (Herod conducted a furious search for them later). As for Mary and Joseph, an angel advised Joseph to “take the child and his mother, and fly into Egypt.” In short, they resisted. Lesson number four: the angels are on the side of those who resist government.

In the Gospel narratives, the role of private enterprise, and the evil of government power, only begin there. Jesus used commercial examples in his parables (e.g., laborers in the vineyard, the parable of the talents) and made it clear that he had come to save even such reviled sinners as tax collectors.

And just as His birth was facilitated by the owner of an “inn,” the same Greek word “kataluma” is employed to describe the location of the Last Supper before Jesus was crucified by the government. Thus, private enterprise was there from birth, through life, and to death, providing a refuge of safety and productivity, just as it has in our time.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

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