MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

The Oklahoma National Guard Refused the Vax Mandate. The Pentagon Is Not Pleased. | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on November 20, 2021

We saw a similar response from the Pentagon in 2019 when the legislature of West Virginia contemplated limiting Pentagon control of West Virginia’s troops. Specifically, some West Virginia lawmakers considered a bill limiting the state’s National Guard deployments to only military operations conducted during a period of congressionally declared war. The Pentagon immediately threatened to use the cudgel of federal spending in West Virginia if the bill was adopted.

Maybe this will end OK guard troops defending the US on the other side of the planet where there are no US citizens.

https://mises.org/wire/oklahoma-national-guard-refused-vax-mandate-pentagon-not-pleased

Ryan McMaken

In a surprising development, Republican governor Kevin Stitt has refused to implement the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate. This has placed the governor directly at odds with Pentagon brass and with the White House as it aggressively attempts to enforce its latest vaccine mandate for all military personnel. The Washington Post sums up the situation:

Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) last week removed the state’s adjutant general, who had directed troops to comply with the vaccine mandate, and replaced him with a new commanding general who promptly issued the order rejecting it. In his memo, Brig. Gen. Thomas Mancino, the state’s new National Guard commander, said personnel could sidestep the policy with no repercussions unless they are put on federal duty.

The legal situation is complicated. As originally imagined by early Americans, the state militias are supposed to be independent military units unless called into national service during wartime. Moreover, state governors have at times exercised a de facto veto over federal control of state troops.

[Read More: “Decentralize the Military: Why We Need Independent Militias” by Ryan McMaken]

Since the National Defense Act of 1933, however, National Guard units have been deemed members of both the state’s National Guard and the federal military. Moreover, over time, the federal government has gradually eroded the authority of state governors in controlling the deployment and use of state troops. By 1990, governors had lost virtually all of their independence.

National Guard troops in each state nominally remain under the command of the respective governors unless activated by the US president. Thus, it appears that Governor Stitt is attempting to take advantage of these few remaining powers in order to refuse mandating vaccines for state troops.

Not surprisingly, this has led to resistance from the Pentagon—and if past experience is any indicator—the Pentagon will not hold back in devising ways to punish Oklahoma and its National Guard chain of command unless it quickly falls into line.

Who’s In Charge of Oklahoma’s Troops?

Over the weekend, Oklahoma’s adjutant general issued a statement on the state’s guard vaccine policy:

Under Title 32, Congress established a dual framework for the National Guard. The states receive federal funding in return for being made available to the federal government when called to active duty by the President.

Under Title 32, the Oklahoma National Guard is a state-controlled and federally-funded entity and takes orders from the Governor and his designated chain of command. When mobilized by the President, under Title 10, the Oklahoma National Guard takes all orders from the President and his designated chain of command.

Failing to follow the Governor’s lawful orders while on Title 32 would be both illegal, unethical, and against our sworn oaths. Nothing in this order prevents anyone from taking the vaccine. Also, nothing in his order eliminates the Federal Requirement. The Governor is hoping for Federal Relief from Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and in the interim has granted state relief from this requirement.

Until a Guardsman is activated under Title 10, they follow the lawful commands of the Governor of the State of Oklahoma, who has not mandated the COVID-19 vaccine for Oklahoma Guard Members. Once activated to [T]itle 10 status, Guardsmen are subject to all Title 10 laws and mandates until returning to Title 32 status.

If you [Oklahoma guard members] are not mobilized on Title 10 orders, the only entity that can give you a “lawful” order—that is an order backed by the authority of law—is the Governor and his designated State chain of command. That “law” is Title 32 U.S. code. This is easily seen by the fact that the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] does not apply to you in Title 32 status. Instead, you are governed by the Oklahoma Code of Military Justice (OCMJ).

It is notable that in response to this (accurate) legal interpretation from the governor, the Pentagon has done little other than just insist repeatedly that it has authority to force compliance. No specific legal authority is quoted or invoked.

Yet the Pentagon has plenty of tricks up its sleeve when it comes to getting compliance from state National Guard units. During the 1980s, for instance, Ohio governor Richard Celeste refused to send National Guard troops to Honduras to assist with the Pentagon’s various interventions in Central American regimes.

How the Pentagon Threatens “Disobedient” State Governors

The Pentagon immediately made plans to remove military resources from Ohio in an effort to embarrass the governor. The idea was that the Ohio economy would suffer as military spending in the state was withdrawn. The governor soon caved to the Pentagon’s orders. Thus, the Pentagon has grown accustomed to immediate and unquestioning obedience from state governors, although this is directly contrary to the very idea of state-controlled military units.

We saw a similar response from the Pentagon in 2019 when the legislature of West Virginia contemplated limiting Pentagon control of West Virginia’s troops. Specifically, some West Virginia lawmakers considered a bill limiting the state’s National Guard deployments to only military operations conducted during a period of congressionally declared war. The Pentagon immediately threatened to use the cudgel of federal spending in West Virginia if the bill was adopted.

[Read More: “When State Governors Tried to Take Back Control of the National Guard” by Ryan McMaken]

It is likely the Pentagon will do the same in Oklahoma should the governor persist in refusing to enforce the vaccine mandate. On Wednesday, for example, the Pentagon reportedly claimed that if Oklahoma does not comply, it will no longer be “maintaining national recognition” and the guard will become just a state militia. This is likely a step on the way to removing all federal spending from the state’s guard in the manner used in the past as a means of turning the screws on state government.

BREAKING: Defense official reportedly says, if the Oklahoma National Guard doesn’t comply with COVID vaccine requirements, they will no longer be “maintaining national recognition,” thus, state will no longer have a Nat Guard, but rather a militia – VOA’s Pentagon correspondent— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) November 17, 2021

Moreover, the Pentagon has hinted it will force compliance by going after individual guard members on a “case-by-case basis.” Given that these troops are under the command of the state government, however, “it is unclear who will hold them accountable to the rule and what punishments, if any, will be handed down.”

Unfortunately, military spending is so centralized in the federal government that it will difficult for Oklahoma—or any other state—to refuse Pentagon orders in anything beyond the short term. Moreover, thanks to generations of militarist hysteria over communists and terrorists, the US military establishment has greatly centralized military command authority in Washington overall.

[Read More: “A Fat, Comfortable Military Is a “Woke” Military” by Ryan McMaken]

Yet this news is good news overall. Combined with the US military’s turn toward “woke” politics, this latest episode around vaccine mandates will further help to undermine support for military institutions among conservatives—the very group that has for so many decades offered untrammeled obedience and deference in favor of the Pentagon’s agenda.  Author:

Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power and Market, but read article guidelines first.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

How A Russian’s Grocery Store Trip In 1989 Exposed The Lie Of Socialism

Posted by M. C. on November 20, 2021

Yeltsin was a member of the Politburo and Russia’s upper political crust, yet he’d never seen anything like the offerings of this little American grocery store. “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” Yeltsin said.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/13/how-a-russians-grocery-store-trip-in-1989-exposed-the-lie-of-socialism/

By Jon Miltimore

The fall of the Soviet Union is sometimes remembered as Nov. 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall symbolically collapsed. While the physical barrier endured for some two more years, on that day, East German Communist Party officials announced they would no longer stop citizens of the German Democratic Republic from crossing the border.

The fall of the barrier that scarred Germany was indeed a watershed in the collapse of the Soviet Empire, yet one could argue the true death knell came two months before at a small grocery store in Clear Lake, Texas.

An Unexpected Trip

On Sept. 16, 1989, Boris Yeltsin was a newly elected member of the Soviet Parliament visiting the United States. Following a scheduled visit to Johnson Space Center, Yeltsin and a small entourage made an unscheduled stop at a Randalls grocery store in Clear Lake, a suburb of Houston. He was amazed by the aisles of food and stocked shelves, a sharp contrast to the breadlines and empty columns he was accustomed to in Russia.

Yeltsin, who had a reputation as a reformer and populist, “roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement,” wrote Stefanie Asin, a Houston Chronicle reporter. He marveled at free cheese samples, fresh fish and produce, and freezers packed full of pudding pops. Along the way, Yeltsin chatted up customers and store workers: “How much does this cost? Do you need special education to manage a supermarket? Are all American stores like this?”

Yeltsin was a member of the Politburo and Russia’s upper political crust, yet he’d never seen anything like the offerings of this little American grocery store. “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” Yeltsin said.

A Sickening Revelation

It’s difficult for Americans to grasp Yeltsin’s astonishment. Our market economy has evolved from grocery stores to companies such as Walmart and Amazon that compete to deliver food right to our homes.

Yeltsin’s reaction can be understood, however, by looking back on the conditions in the Soviet Union’s economy. Russia grocery stores at the time looked like this and this:

Now compare that footage to the images of Yeltsin shopping at a U.S. supermarket. The contrast is undeniable. Yeltsin’s experience that day ran contrary to everything he knew. A longtime member of the Communist Party who had lived his entire life in a one-party system that punished dissent harshly, Yeltsin had been taught over and over that socialism wasn’t just more equitable, but more efficient.

His eyes were opened that day, and the revelation left the future Russian president feeling sick.

“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin later wrote in his autobiography, “Against the Grain.” “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”

Yeltsin was not the only person fooled, of course. There is copious documentation of Western intellectuals beguiled by the Soviet system. These individuals, who unlike Yeltsin did not live in a state-controlled media environment, saw the Soviet system as both economically and morally superior to American capitalism despite the brutal methods employed in the workers’ paradise.

“I have seen the future, and it works,” the Progressive Era journalist Lincoln Steffens famously said.

Paul Samuelson, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics and one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, was a longtime enthusiast of Soviet central planning and predicted it would lead to a higher standard of living. “Who could know that [the data] was all fake?” Samuelson is said to have asked a fellow economist following the empire’s collapse.

The Truth About Socialism Revealed

Despite decades of propaganda and obfuscation, the great fiction of socialism was eventually fully exposed with the fall of the Soviet Union and the publication of its archives in the 1990s. No longer could academics deny the truth that the people of the Soviet Union endured a painfully low standard of living despite the vast wealth of its empire.

“Their standard of living was low, not only by comparison with that in the United States, but also compared to the standard of living in countries with far fewer natural resources, such as Japan and Switzerland,” the economist Thomas Sowell observed in “Basic Economics.”

Yeltsin deserves credit for laying bare the lie of socialism that so many others had refused to see. “[T]here would be a revolution,” Yeltsin told his entourage that fateful September day in 1989, if the people in the Soviet Union ever saw the prosperity in American grocery stores. Yeltsin was more right than he knew. Jon Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter. Jon’s reporting has been cited in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN. He has bylines in The Washington Times, The Washington Examiner, and the Daily Caller. He previously served in editorial roles at The History Channel magazine, Intellectual Takeout, and Scout. He is a former reporter for the Panama City News Herald, and served as an intern in the speechwriting department of George W. Bush.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Revolver’s Case For Disbarring Binger – Revolver

Posted by M. C. on November 20, 2021

As such, the Kenosha County DA’s office should be investigated to find out how, exactly, charges were ever filed in the case. Would this be unprecedented? Maybe. So what? Justice demands it.

https://www.revolver.news/2021/11/disbar-thomas-binger/

The entire political show trial of Kyle Rittenhouse has been a disgrace and a sham. The Rittenhouse self-defense case never should have been brought to trial in the first place. It was a travesty of justice that charges were even filed. Many have forgotten that the crazed, partisan Democrat Kenosha District Attorneys office rushed to file charges just two days after the shooting, before any sort of detailed investigation could be completed. The prosecution shamefully lied and slandered Kyle Rittenhouse before the trial even started. They then did so again, endlessly, at trial.

It goes without saying that there is a mile-long list of elected officials, attorneys, and other assorted public figures who must pay a price for the tawdry and disgusting railroading of the heroic 17-year-old “Kenosha kid” who singlehandedly stopped devastating looting and riots in their track with a few shots from his trusty AR-15. And the first shameful partisan political liar on that list goes by the name of Thomas Binger.

Binger has a Sherlock Holmes pin pic.twitter.com/Vc1KCDZ7Qj

— Jacek Posobiec 🇺🇸🇵🇱 (@JackPosobiec) November 10, 2021

Thomas Binger, the floopty-haircut-sporting, goateed, Star-Wars-pin-wearing bespectacled dork draped in candy-cane ties and technicolor shirts, must pay the ultimate career price and be immediately disbarred by the Wisconsin State Bar.

#RittenhouseTrial is Binger wearing a millennium falcon pin ? pic.twitter.com/CYqUkmNBLg

— Dusty Johnson (@DustyJo13750160) November 8, 2021

0:16 / 2:41

WATCH: Check out Darren Beattie’s latest interviews

The precedent here is Mike Nifong, the shameful and disgraced North Carolina prosecutor who broke every principle of fairness and justice in putting on a sham trial in the case of the Duke LaCrosse players from 2006.

For those who do not recall, three Duke LaCrosse players were accused of raping a black stripper. DNA evidence did not match any of the three players, and the corrupt, venal, and politically ambitious prosecutor Nifong brought the case anyway.

Nifong’s sole motive for bringing the case was to raise his political profile and win re-election. He bragged that the case would bring him “millions of dollars’ in free advertising.”

Nifong was disbarred and even jailed for his perfidious conduct. He cried tears of shame as his sentence was read out, waived his right to appeal, and begged for forgiveness. By the end of it, Nifong was sued into bankruptcy, and the state refused to defend his actions on the grounds that they involved “fraud, corruption or malice.” https://www.youtube.com/embed/ieGQWLPwiqY?feature=oembed

With any luck, Thomas Binger will soon share the same fate.

The persecution of Kyle Rittenhouse was an ideological act from the very beginning. It was a political assault meant to intimidate anybody brave or naive enough to use deadly force to protect the innocent and law-abiding from the rioting foot soldiers of America’s regime.

From the moment the Rittenhouse shooting happened, it was an obvious open-and-shut case of self-defense. The shooting took place in the final minutes of August 25, 2020. By the end of August 27, even The New York Times had reconstructed the entire event from beginning to end, with video footage of all relevant moments. The reconstruction showed that Rittenhouse was what he claimed: A good citizen, trying to protect businesses, provide medical assistance, and prevent mayhem. It showed that in all three shootings, Rittenhouse clearly defended himself himself from an ongoing attack.

That’s what the evidence showed. But egged on by a frenzied national media, the same media that called the Kenosha riots “fiery but mostly peaceful,” Kenosha prosecutors charged Rittenhouse with two counts of first degree murder anyway.

The United States has an adversarial justice system, but it is not a symmetrical one. Defense lawyers are expected to be dogged advocates for their clients’ rights. They are allowed to make almost any argument, no matter how fringe, to introduce reasonable doubt about the defendants’ guilt, and there is no wrongdoing when a defense lawyer argues on behalf of a client he suspects or even knows to be guilty, so long as he does not lie or suborn false testimony.

Not so for prosecutors. A prosecutor is not supposed to be an attack dog for the state, pursuing every argument no matter how fringe. A prosecutor must be a neutral seeker of justice. It is a gross ethical violation for a prosecutor to pursue a defendant he suspects or knows to be innocent.

Yet in the case of State of Wisconsin v. Kyle Rittenhouse, prosecutor Thomas Binger and his sidekick James Kraus spent two weeks making desperate, Hail Mary-style plays to send an innocent teenager to prison for decades on end.

Throughout the trial, Binger was the chief villain, acting like a full-blown caricature of a Reddit addict handed too much power.

Binger says that the all Rosenbaum did the night of the shooting was tip over a porta-potty, light a dumpster on fire, swing a chain, tip over a trailer and set it on fire, and say the n-word pic.twitter.com/OgC4XvJulS

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) November 15, 2021

His soy-fandom pins and obnoxious tone, while not themselves evidence of misconduct, certainly set the stage for what was coming.

The prosecutor in the Rittenhouse trial, presumably a grown ass man, Thomas Binger, is wearing a Star Wars resistance pin on his lapel.
What in the goddamn? pic.twitter.com/wMY4CB9RZ4

— Skye (@SkyeTapes) November 10, 2021

But first, let’s go back to before the trial even began. First, Binger and his sidekick tried to smear Rittenhouse by linking him with the Proud Boys, based on a photo of Rittenhouse from after the shooting. The Judge rightfully did not allow this ridiculously prejudicial evidence into the trial.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Why Trials Are Better Than Plea Bargains | Cato at Liberty Blog

Posted by M. C. on November 20, 2021

But at least that disagreement will be an informed one based on the evidence presented in a public jury trial, just as the Founders intended. We are deprived of that opportunity for civic engagement every time a case is resolved through a guilty plea instead of the public jury trial that the Constitution wisely provides. The time is long overdue for us to take a fresh look at our decision to pursue efficiency in the adjudication of criminal charges through coercive plea bargaining to the exclusion of every other constitutional value.

https://www.cato.org/blog/why-trials-are-better-plea-bargains

By Clark Neily

Surprising almost no one, the jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse prosecution returned a verdict of not guilty on all charges, including intentional and reckless homicide. The verdict may be unsurprising given how the trial unfolded, with a singularly unimpressive prosecution team making one blunder after another and a trial judge who some perceived to be unduly favorable to the defense, but it will nevertheless strike many people as inappropriate and even unjust in light of all the circumstances.

But as I argue in a piece published in the Washington Examiner hours before the verdict came down, the most important—and unusual—thing about the Rittenhouse case was the fact that it went to trial at all. That’s unusual because more than 95 percent of criminal convictions in our system are the product not of constitutionally prescribed jury trials, but instead of an ad hoc, extra‐​constitutional, and often jaw‐​droppingly coercive process that we refer to euphemistically as “plea bargaining.” As explained in the Examiner piece, plea bargaining has been an absolute train wreck of a policy that regularly produces false convictions and puts the government in the historically squalid and abuse‐​prone role of inducing people to condemn themselves.

Given the sheer amount of attention they devoted to trial by jury (among other things, it’s the only right mentioned both in the body of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights), the Framers’ intent to put citizen participation at the very heart of the administration of criminal justice is unmistakable. It was also incredibly wise because allowing government actors (including particularly judges and prosecutors) to dictate the results of criminal prosecutions represents a short and slippery slope to tyranny. Indeed, in a piece for Cato’s Policy Report, I compared the effect that the near‐​total elimination of jury trials has had on the criminal justice system to the effect that the extinction of a keystone species like honeybees would have on the ecosystem: complete and utter disaster.

In sum, reasonable people can and will disagree about whether Kyle Rittenhouse was guilty or innocent. But at least that disagreement will be an informed one based on the evidence presented in a public jury trial, just as the Founders intended. We are deprived of that opportunity for civic engagement every time a case is resolved through a guilty plea instead of the public jury trial that the Constitution wisely provides. The time is long overdue for us to take a fresh look at our decision to pursue efficiency in the adjudication of criminal charges through coercive plea bargaining to the exclusion of every other constitutional value.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

CDC Forced To Admit It Doesn’t Collect Data on Natural Immunity to Covid – LewRockwell LewRockwell.com

Posted by M. C. on November 20, 2021

Fessin’ up

No money in natural immunity

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/11/no_author/cdc-forced-to-admit-it-doesnt-collect-data-on-natural-immunity-to-covid/

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.
Children’s Health Defense

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, said it has no record of an individual previously infected with COVID becoming reinfected and transmitting the virus to others.

The FOIA request, submitted Sept. 2 by attorney Aaron Siri of the Siri & Glimstad law firm on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), sought the following information:

“Documents reflecting any documented case of an individual who: (1) never received a COVID vaccine; (2) was infected with COVID once, recovered, and then later became infected again; and (3) transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to another person when reinfected.”

The CDC responded Nov. 5, stating:

“A search of our records failed to reveal any documents pertaining to your request. The CDC Emergency Operations Center (EOC) conveyed that this information is not collected.”

According to Siri, the revelation that the CDC does not collect data on people who have acquired natural immunity to the virus raises questions about vaccine mandates, specifically how the the government, or employers can mandate vaccines for people who may not need them and who could be at a greater-than-average risk of experiencing an adverse reaction to the shots.

In a blog post, Siri wrote:

“… yet the CDC is actively crushing the rights of millions of naturally immune individuals in this country if they do not get the vaccine on the assumption they can transmit the virus. But despite clear proof the vaccinated spread the virus, the CDC lifts restrictions on the vaccinated?! That is dystopian.”

Siri added:

“Every single peer reviewed study has found that the naturally immune have far greater than 99% protection from having COVID, and this immunity does not wane. In contrast, the COVID vaccine provides, at best, 95% protection and this immunity wanes rapidly. I am no mathematician, but a constant 99% seems preferable to a 95% that quickly drops.”

The response from the CDC came as part of a broader exchange between the agency and Siri’s law firm, dating back to this past summer, in which ICAN and Siri’s law firm submitted a citizen’s petition to the CDC calling for restrictions on those individuals with natural immunity to be lifted.

What do the data show?

As far back as last year, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, argued, “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.”

Yet data collected from numerous studies show just the opposite of what the CDC and public health authorities claim in their far-reaching vaccination campaign. In fact, many studies show individuals who have acquired natural immunity demonstrate a stronger and longer-lasting level of immunity and a decreased likelihood to transmit COVID to others.

The Brownstone Institute, founded in May 2021 in response to “the global crisis created by policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020,” documented 81 peer-reviewed scientific studies which all come to the same conclusion: Natural immunity confers more effective and longer-lasting protection against COVID than vaccine-induced immunity.

The same institute previously documented 30 peer-reviewed scientific studies on natural immunity in relation to COVID infection.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Fauci Finally Admits Vaccines Don’t Protect Against Serious Covid or Death – LewRockwell LewRockwell.com

Posted by M. C. on November 20, 2021

More fessin’ up

Fauci’s words amount to the admission that the vaccinated are getting infected and more and more of them are ending up in hospital where they keep succumbing to Covid at increasing rates.

This is what data from Israel and other highly vaccinated countries has indicated for someIn the United Kingdom, for example, between February and September of this year, 72 percent of all Covid-related deaths were among the vaccinated. In Scotland the situation was even worse: 80 percent of Covid deaths occurred among those who had been injected with the vaccines.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/11/vasko-kohlmayer/fauci-finally-admits-vaccines-dont-protect-against-serious-covid-or-death/

By Vasko Kohlmayer

Last week Dr. Anthony Fauci made perhaps the most damning confession in the Covid vaccine saga. So far-reaching are the implications of his statement that the interview in which he made it may well prove a turning point in the fight against the great vaccine fraud that is being perpetrated on the peoples of the world.

In a November 12 podcast session with the New York Times, Fauci was forced to admit the fact that the vaccines do not reliably protect their recipients from serious Covid or death.

Called upon to explain the data coming from Israel – a country with one of the highest vaccination rates in the world – Fauci said the following:

“They are seeing a waning of immunity not only against infection but against hospitalization and to some extent death, which is starting to now involve all age groups. It isn’t just the elderly” [emphasis added].

In other words, the vaccines’ protective efficacy wanes not only in regard to the threat of infection, but also in regard to severe Covid and death. Speaking about the effectiveness of the vaccines in countries with high vaccination rates, Fauci admitted:

“It’s waning to the point that you’re seeing more and more people getting breakthrough infections, and more and more of those people who are getting breakthrough infections are winding up in the hospital.”

Even though Fauci tries to palliate the hard impact of his answer in soft language, the harsh truth behind his words is painfully evident.

Fauci’s words amount to the admission that the vaccinated are getting infected and more and more of them are ending up in hospital where they keep succumbing to Covid at increasing rates.

This is what data from Israel and other highly vaccinated countries has indicated for some time now. In the United Kingdom, for example, between February and September of this year, 72 percent of all Covid-related deaths were among the vaccinated. In Scotland the situation was even worse: 80 percent of Covid deaths occurred among those who had been injected with the vaccines.

For months Fauci and his fellow vaccinators censored the unfavorable data while claiming that the injections protected against serious Covid and death. The evidence to the contrary was clear and extensive. More than two months before Fauci’s admission we marshalled some of it a piece titled The Vaccines Do Not Stop Severe Covid or Death. Fauci was, of course, well familiar with the data we used, but he did everything he could to keep it concealed from the public for as long as he possibly could. Rather than coming out clean, he kept spreading misinformation about the vaccines’ alleged efficacy to protect people from falling seriously ill and dying. But in the end, even such an adroit prevaricator as Dr. Fauci could not hold out any longer under the weight of evidence.

If you notice in Fauci’s latest New York Times interview there is almost a sense of panic, as he mentions younger people. Those who are familiar with the actual data rather than the misinformation narratives propagated by the mainstream media know that Covid has been primarily a disease of the elderly. In almost all places and regions, the median age of Covid-related deaths tends to be higher than the average life expectancy. Younger individuals who were healthy were generally safe from the most severe forms of the disease. But now in countries with high vaccination rates we are seeing younger vaccinated individuals coming down with serious Covid and even dying.

This appears very much like the case of antibody dependent enhancement. Some of the world’s best scientists in the field have warned precisely against this danger. Included among them are Dr. Robert Malone and one of the world’s leading virologists Luc Montagnier. Robert Malone is a co-inventor of the mRNA technology that is used in the vaccines while Professor Montagnier won the 2008 Nobel Prize for his work on the virus that causes HIV. Their warnings have, however, have not only gone unheeded, but both men have been censored and suppressed by the vaccinators with the help of Big Tech and the mainstream media.

It is not our purpose, however, to discuss antibody dependent enhancement in this piece. What we wish to do here is to focus on Fauci’s game-changing admission that the vaccines fail to protect against hospitalization and/or death.

We have already known for some time that the vaccines do not protect from infection even though we were initially told that they were 95 percent effective. This turned out to be a big lie, which the vaccinators managed to keep alive for nearly 9 months. Eventually, however, under the overwhelming weight of data coming in from highly vaccinated countries that experienced subsequent surges of infection, they did have to admit the truth. On August 5 of this year CDC Director Rochelle Walensky confessed on CNN that the vaccines can no longer “prevent transmission.”

In other words, the vaccines have little effectiveness in protecting people from becoming infected with the virus and then in turn infecting other people with it. Just how completely ineffective the vaccines are can be seen from a recent Wall Street Journal report about the Ottawa Senators hockey team which has 100 percent vaccination rate. And yet, despite this, 40 percent of the players on that team are currently testing positive for Covid.

The disturbing part of this is that the vaccinators have known about the vaccine failure at least from the early summer. But rather than calling off the worldwide vaccination drives that have injected hundreds of millions of people with ineffective substances, the vaccinators changed their tack and argued that even though the vaccines will not protect you from infection they will still keep you from serious Covid and death.

Last week, however, this lie was also put to rest by none other than Dr. Fauci himself.

How, then, should we describe vaccines that:

  1. Do not protect their recipients from getting infected and infecting others, and
  2. Do not protect their recipients against hospitalization and death?

Complete failure is the phrase that fits best here.

But these vaccines are worse than useless. They are, in fact, very likely among the most deadly and dangerous pharmaceuticals ever released upon the public.

The question is this: Why are we still injecting people with these ineffective and dangerous substances? What is the purpose other than to enrich those who are involved in their production and distribution?

Now Big Pharma, Fauci and Co. and their media shills say we need to take their boosters to keep ourselves protected (which we never really were). The boosters, however, will likely be as ineffective as the original failed shots. The CDC has recently approved a fourth shot for the vulnerable. This is an indirect admission on their part that the previous three shots have failed. Why in the world would anyone believe that the fourth injection will work?

The Covid vaccination travesty must be stopped now and paused until effective, reliable, and safe alternatives are found.

Vasko Kohlmayer (email) was born and grew up in former communist Czechoslovakia. He is the author of The West in Crisis: Civilizations and Their Death Drives. You can keep up to date with his writings by subscribing to his newsletter Notes from the ‘Twilight Zone’ on Substack.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Talking About Stoicism 149 The Sage Isn’t Alone

Posted by M. C. on November 19, 2021

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

life is pretty amazing

Posted by M. C. on November 19, 2021

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Since 2008, Monetary Policy Has Cost American Savers about $4 Trillion | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on November 19, 2021

Inflation: the hidden tax. Usually used to pay for war.

As one immediate step, Congress should require the Federal Reserve to provide a formal savers impact analysis as a regular part of its Humphrey-Hawkins reports on monetary policy and targets. This savers impact analysis should quantify, discuss, and project for the future the effects of the Fed’s policies on savings and savers, so that these effects can be explicitly and fairly considered along with the other relevant factors.

https://mises.org/wire/2008-monetary-policy-has-cost-american-savers-about-4-trillion

Alex J. Pollock

With inflation running at over 6 percent and interest rates on savings near zero, the Federal Reserve is delivering a negative 6 percent real (inflation-adjusted) return on trillions of dollars in savings. This is effectively expropriating American savers’ nest eggs at the rate of 6 percent a year. It is not only a problem in 2021, however, but an ongoing monetary policy problem of long standing. The Fed has been delivering negative real returns on savings for more than a decade. It should be discussing with the legislature what it thinks about this outcome and its impacts on savers.

The effects of central bank monetary actions pervade society and transfer wealth among various groups of people—a political action. Monetary policies can cause consumer price inflations, like we now have, and asset price inflations, like those we have in equities, bonds, houses, and cryptocurrencies. They can feed bubbles, which turn into busts. They can by negative real yields push savers into equities, junk bonds, houses, and cryptocurrencies, temporarily inflating prices further while substantially increasing risk. They can take money away from conservative savers to subsidize leveraged speculators, thus encouraging speculation. They can transfer wealth from the people to the government by the inflation tax. They can punish thrift, prudence, and self-reliance.

Savings are essential to long-term economic progress and to personal and family financial well-being and responsibility. However, the Federal Reserve’s policies, and those of the government in general, have subsidized and emphasized the expansion of debt, and unfortunately appear to have forgotten savings. The original theorists of the savings and loan movement, to their credit, were clear that first you had “savings,” to make possible the “loans.” Our current unbalanced policy could be described, instead of “savings and loans,” as “loans and loans.”

As one immediate step, Congress should require the Federal Reserve to provide a formal savers impact analysis as a regular part of its Humphrey-Hawkins reports on monetary policy and targets. This savers impact analysis should quantify, discuss, and project for the future the effects of the Fed’s policies on savings and savers, so that these effects can be explicitly and fairly considered along with the other relevant factors. The critical questions include: What impact is Fed monetary policy having on savers? Who is affected? How will the Fed’s plans for monetary policy affect savings and savers going forward?

Consumer price inflation year over year as of October 2021 is running, as we are painfully aware, at 6.2 percent. For the ten months of 2021 year-to-date, the pace is even worse than that—an annualized inflation rate of 7.5 percent.

Facing that inflation, what yields are savers of all kinds, but notably including retired people and savers of modest means, getting on their savings? Basically nothing. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s October 18, 2021, national interest rate report, the national average interest rate on savings account was a trivial 0.06 percent. On money market deposit accounts, it was 0.08 percent; on three-month certificates of deposit, 0.06 percent; on six-month CDs, 0.09 percent; on six-month Treasury bills, 0.05 percent; and if you committed your money out to five years, a majestic CD rate of 0.27 percent. 

I estimate, as shown in the table below, that monetary policy since 2008 has cost American savers about $4 trillion. The table assumes savers can invest in six-month Treasury bills, then subtracts from their average interest rate the matching inflation rate, giving the real interest rate to the savers. This is on average quite negative for these years. I calculate the amount of savings effectively expropriated by negative real rates. Then I compare the actual real interest rates to an estimate of the normal real interest rate for each year, based on the fifty-year average of real rates from 1958 to 2007. This gives us the gap the Federal Reserve has created between the actual real rates over the years since 2008 and what would have been historically normal rates. This gap is multiplied by household savings, which shows us by arithmetic the total gap in dollars.

savers

To repeat the answer: a $4 trillion hit to savers.

The Federal Reserve through a regular savers impact analysis should be having substantive discussions with Congress about how its monetary policy is affecting savings, what the resulting real returns to savers are, who the resulting winners and losers are, what the alternatives are, and how its plans will impact savers going forward.

After thirteen years with on average negative real returns to conservative savings, it is time to require the Federal Reserve to address its impact on savers.

Author:

Alex J. Pollock

Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute. Previously he served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department (2019-2021), Distinguished Senior Fellow at the R Street Institute (2015-2019 and 2021), Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (2004-2015), and President and CEO, Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago (1991-2004). He is the author of Finance and Philosophy—Why We’re Always Surprised (2018) and Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (2011), as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony. Pollock is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Watch “Glenn Greenwald says Decentralized Media is the Ultimate Solution” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on November 19, 2021

https://youtu.be/Yq5agovwmRw

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »