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Posted by M. C. on July 22, 2021
“Everyone’s talking about yesterday’s exchange between Dr. Fauci and Sen. Paul over NIH funding of gain-of-function research in China. Fauci was furious at the suggestion that he lied…but it seems Senator Paul has the receipts. Also today: women’s soccer fail, police-defunding mayors spend a fortune for their own security, and more…”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Dr. Fauci, Gain-of-function, NIH, police-defunding, Sen. Paul | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 22, 2021
She went on to say: “Children were not included in the trials, and the adult trials do not have any long-term safety data currently available.”
By America’s Frontline Doctors
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America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) Wednesday filed a motion in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama requesting a temporary restraining order against the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) permitting using the COVID-19 vaccines in children under the age of 16, and that no further expansion of the EUAs to children under the age of 16 be granted prior to the resolution of these issues at trial.
The case will challenge the EUAs for the injections on several counts, based on the law and scientific evidence that the EUAs should never have been granted, the EUAs should be revoked immediately, the injections are dangerous biological agents that have the potential to cause substantially greater harm than the COVID-19 disease itself, and that numerous laws have been broken in the process of granting these EUAs and foisting these injections on the American people.
AFLDS Founder Dr. Simone Gold spoke about the reasons for filing the motion: “We doctors are pro-vaccine, but this is not a vaccine,” she said. “This is an experimental biological agent whose harms are well-documented (although suppressed and censored) and growing rapidly, and we will not support using America’s children as guinea pigs.”
She continued:
“We insist that the EUA not be relinquished prematurely; certainly not before trials are complete — Oct. 31, 2022 for Moderna and April 27, 2023 for Pfizer. We are shocked at the mere discussion of this, and will not be silent while Americans are used as guinea pigs for a virus with survivability of 99.8% globally and 99.97% under age 70.
“Under age 20 it is 99.997% — ‘statistical zero.’
“There are 104 children age 0-17 who died from COVID-19 and 287 from COVID + Influenza – out of ~72 million. This equals zero risk. And we doctors won’t stand for children being offered something they do not need and of whom some unknown percentage will suffer.”
AFLDS Pediatric Director Dr. Angie Farella explained: “My greatest concern with the vaccination of children under the age of 18 is the fact that there is no prior study of these individuals before Dec. of 2020.”
She went on to say: “Children were not included in the trials, and the adult trials do not have any long-term safety data currently available.”
AFLDS Legal Director Ali Shultz commented on AFLDS’ filing:
“Not many people could have taken this on. Dr. Simone Gold is a doctor, and a lawyer and a fierce warrior who will stop at nothing to protect humanity.
“She has a certain finesse in developing the right team to see this medical/legal mission through.”
Read the motion and all supporting documents.
Originally published by America’s Frontline Doctors.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Dr. Angie Farella, Dr. Simone Gold, EUA, Frontline Doctors, temporary restraining order | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 22, 2021
Since the beginning of African National Congress (ANC) rule in 1994, South Africa has been the anticolonial movement’s great success story. While other African countries fell victim to coups and civil wars, South Africa carried on. Yes, it was a one-party state, corruption was rife, violent crime was out of control, and unemployment hovered between 25 and 33 percent—but somehow the country muddled through.
Alas, muddling through is a tactic that can only work for so long.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/boiling-the-frog-in-south-africa/
Dire predictions about ANC rule are finally coming to pass.
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – 14 JULY: A woman and a young girl walk through debris in Vosloorus, Johannesburg, South Africa. (Photo by James Oatway/Getty Images)
July 21, 2021|
President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa is now claiming that the unrest that has wracked his country since July 9 is an organized insurrection. “It is clear now that the events of the past week were nothing less than a deliberate, coordinated, and well-planned attack on our democracy,” he said in an address to the nation. Twelve “persons of interest” have been identified, he said, and at least one of these ringleaders has already been taken into custody.
It would be convenient for Ramaphosa if this eruption of lawlessness, which has left more than 200 dead and threatened food and gas supplies in the provinces of Gauteng and KwaZulu Natal, were the work of a dozen malcontents. It would even be tolerable if it were a political protest aimed at freeing former president Jacob Zuma, whose arrest in connection with corruption charges was the spark for the riots.
Unfortunately, talk of an “insurrection” is a distraction from the real cause of the violence, which is deeper and harder to solve. South African society has been lurching toward dysfunction for a long time. This month’s violence is a sign that the country’s chronic problems may have finally reached a breaking point.
Since the beginning of African National Congress (ANC) rule in 1994, South Africa has been the anticolonial movement’s great success story. While other African countries fell victim to coups and civil wars, South Africa carried on. Yes, it was a one-party state, corruption was rife, violent crime was out of control, and unemployment hovered between 25 and 33 percent—but somehow the country muddled through.
Alas, muddling through is a tactic that can only work for so long. There are about 14 million registered taxpayers in South Africa, out of a population of nearly 60 million. The bulk of income tax revenue comes from just 574,000 individuals. The ANC’s wager has always been that this tiny tax base could be squeezed for all it’s worth in order to fund lavish social benefits for the rest of the population.
Ramaphosa has articulated this gamble explicitly, according to the posthumous memoir of Mario Oriani-Ambrosini, a longtime MP for the Inkatha Freedom Party who died in 2014. During negotiations over the post-apartheid constitution in 1994, Ambrosini wrote, “Ramaphosa told me of the ANC’s 25-year strategy to deal with the whites: it would be like boiling a frog alive, which is done by raising the temperature very slowly.” Under majority rule, “the black majority would pass laws transferring wealth, land, and economic power from white to black slowly and incrementally, until the whites lost all they had gained in South Africa, but without taking too much from them at any given time to cause them to rebel or fight.”
Ramaphosa got the timing right, give or take a few years, but he forgot about the third option: Rather than fight or stay and be boiled, the white minority could always just pick up and leave. When Nelson Mandela came to power, doomsayers predicted a mass exodus similar to that of the Algerian pieds-noirs. Contrary to forecasts, millions of white South Africans stayed, either because they were committed to making the “Rainbow Nation” experiment work or simply because they were too settled to emigrate. That generation is now dying, and their children are constrained by no such inertia.
For a long time, South Africa’s natural resource wealth worked in the ANC’s favor. Gold and diamonds are where they are; you can’t outsource a mine the way you can a factory. However, in 2020, AngloGold Ashanti, a successor company of Anglo American, sold its last remaining operations in South Africa, which meant the end of an unbroken streak that had lasted since Ernest Oppenheimer founded the company a century ago. Even a mining firm’s patience has limits.
The taxpaying minority’s endurance might be greater if in exchange for their money they received basic services, but these days they cannot even count on the electricity staying on. Every suburban home in Johannesburg has a generator in case of “load shedding,” or unscheduled blackouts. Most also have high walls topped with barbed wire or motion sensors. With the police unable or unwilling to do anything about break-ins and robberies, home security has become a luxury for those who can afford to buy their own. South Africa has three times as many private security guards as police.
Last week, Defense Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula admitted that government forces did not even try to protect shopping malls from looters because they assumed private security would take care of it. “It never occurred to us that we should move to areas such as malls, particularly because in malls, anywhere, there is always a contract between business itself and private security companies,” she explained. Even if order is restored, a dangerous lesson has been learned about the state’s inability to perform the basic functions of government in a crisis.
When the historian R.W. Johnson published his book How Long Will South Africa Survive? in 2015, he was mocked for his sensationalist title. All of the problems cited in the book—corruption, tribal tensions, a bloated public sector, gangsterism, political assassinations—had been around for years without turning South Africa into a failed state, critics said. But time may yet prove Johnson right. Ramaphosa is a weak president, well suited to a caretaker regime. If he pardons Zuma, as some have urged him to do, he might be able to end the current violence and restore the pre-COVID status quo. The question is how long that status quo can last. It is not sustainable forever.
Helen Andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative, and the author of BOOMERS: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster (Sentinel, January 2021). She has worked at the Washington Examiner and National Review, and as a think tank researcher at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, Australia. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies from Yale University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, First Things, The Claremont Review of Books, Hedgehog Review, and many others. You can follow her on Twitter at @herandrews.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: African National Congress, Boiling the Frog, Cyril Ramaphosa, Jacob Zuma, South Africa | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 22, 2021
Today the media no longer boasts of being a counterforce to the military and secret service. Instead they are an integral part of the same power structure. There is no distance between these wielders of power; all of them are closely allied to the Democratic Party and woke politics.
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/the-media-strive-to-control-us-completely/
Decades before the electronic media giants rose to their dizzying heights of power and began canceling those whom they decided to bully, a man named Leopold Tyrmand, the future founder of Chronicles magazine, exposed the false self-image of the media as they claimed to defend our freedoms, when they were really aiming for absolute social control. Today, Tyrmand’s remarks in his widely noted American Scholar essay, “The Media Shangri-la: Where Everyone is Free, but some are Freer,” stand out as masterful satirical commentary conveying self-evident criticisms.
Taking his title from the Himalayan utopia depicted in James Hilton’s bestselling novel Lost Horizon, the name for this imaginary place eventually came to denote a secure and serene environment, which, according to Tyrmand, is what the media oligarchs presently enjoy.
Leopold Tyrmand was a renowned satirist, novelist, and outspoken anti-Communist in Poland until he emigrated to the U.S. in 1966. Settling in this country, he continued to write and publish in the Polish language, his works a valued form of underground literature in Communist Poland. “The Media Shangri-la,” in which Tyrmand unloads on the mendacity and hypocrisy of the American media of 1975, shows that he was able to write just as arrestingly in English as in his native tongue.
Although familiar with his subject, Tyrmand’s essay on the media deliberately gives the impression of one who is an outsider looking in on a ridiculous spectacle. It is an enterprise, we are told, in which “disruptive triviality became natural or social process, gawky permissiveness became nonconformity, vulgarity became health, faddishness humanism, exploitative smartness revolutionary change.” He further notes:
With a power to create something out of nothing, the media began, not long ago, to forge their own image—that of a weak, harassed entity whose performance of lawful service to the public is endangered by a brutal, omnipresent government. Exactly the opposite is true.
Tyrmand, who listened to the media attentively after arriving on these shores, was particularly struck by how cavalierly but also self-righteously they stretched the truth. He spoke about the “totalitarian gimmick” seemingly perfected by the Nazis and Communists, but which the American media further developed. These masters of deceit repeated lies with such frequency that the public could no longer tell “the true from the untrue.” Worse, the American media did not simply repeat untruths, but they “produce… endless versions” of their invented narratives, while striking the mock “heroic stance taken by those dedicated to fighting for unpopular causes.”
Although Tyrmand’s censures about the American media—which by now have reproduced themselves in almost every Western country—are as valid today as when he wrote them 45 years ago, certain circumstances have changed, and it would be remiss of me not to mention what they are. The lies that aroused Tyrmand’s concern and anger most intensely were those related to the concerted effort by our journalists and TV commentators to whitewash Communist aggressions and atrocities and blame the U.S. for all clashes with the Soviets, Red Chinese, or their proxies. Far-left journalists like Daniel Schorr and Carl Bernstein, some of whom had intergenerational Communist family associations, were lionized by their colleagues as fearless investigative reporters, and anything embarrassing to the American side during the Vietnam War or helpful to our Communist enemies became a news story in the national press, most conspicuously on CBS and in The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Tyrmand’s references to the mock heroics of those who leaked the Pentagon Papers, a classified report on the Vietnam War prepared by the Department of Defense under Secretary Robert McNamara in 1967, show us the mindset of the media even then. Tyrmand notes that while those who leaked classified information expected others to pat them on their backs for being brave, what their experiences really taught was “the more powerful the institution, the more hypocrisy.” Daniel Schorr in a rare moment of candor admitted that an FBI investigation to which he may have been subject made him more “saleable.” In any case, noted Schorr, “I had a big corporation behind me,” namely CBS.
Other priorities of the media elite have changed since Tyrmand penned his memorable essay. Today the media no longer boasts of being a counterforce to the military and secret service. Instead they are an integral part of the same power structure. There is no distance between these wielders of power; all of them are closely allied to the Democratic Party and woke politics.
But even here Tyrmand may not be entirely out of step. He argues again and again in his essay that the media have placed themselves “beyond the practical reach of anyone.” Furthermore, “Deciding who stays on the stage and who leaves, while they keep the stage gives them an air of invincibility that seems unpardonable to all those to whom democracy is instinct, intuition and an elusive promise of something better.” Even if onetime political rivals have become their closest allies, the media, whatever the technical form in which they operate, have not given up their efforts to control us completely.
Paul Gottfried is editor in chief of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is also the Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Elizabethtown College, where he taught for 25 years, a Guggenheim recipient, and a Yale Ph.D. He is the author of 13 books, most recently Fascism: Career of a Concept and Revisions and Dissents.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: control, Leopold Tyrmand, Media, totalitarianism | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 22, 2021
Ontario, of the approximately nine thousand deaths in the province, 41 percent, occurred in these homes. The public response to this tragedy has become a growing outcry to “nationalize” or rather have the province make all residences publicly funded and controlled. The worst part of this rallying cry, noble as it may be, is the assumption that LTC homes are private to begin with. In reality, the only thing “private” about long-term care homes is their name. These homes are almost entirely funded by the province, with the rest of the cost highly regulated. Doomed from the start, it is no wonder that these institutions collapse under the slightest amount of external pressure.
https://mises.org/wire/canadas-wait-times-healthcare-are-huge-activists-blame-free-markets
For the past sixteen months, headlines have been broadcast across our televisions cautioning us that the elderly and vulnerable populations are most at risk of this life-threatening COVID-19 virus if we do not stop the spread. Despite the preventative measures, long-term care (LTC) homes have been hit the hardest by the pandemic. In Ontario, of the approximately nine thousand deaths in the province, 41 percent, occurred in these homes. The public response to this tragedy has become a growing outcry to “nationalize” or rather have the province make all residences publicly funded and controlled. The worst part of this rallying cry, noble as it may be, is the assumption that LTC homes are private to begin with. In reality, the only thing “private” about long-term care homes is their name. These homes are almost entirely funded by the province, with the rest of the cost highly regulated. Doomed from the start, it is no wonder that these institutions collapse under the slightest amount of external pressure.
When one says that a business is private, it conjures images of free enterprise and entrepreneurship. Even if that is not the first picture that comes to mind, one likely imagines that the consumer, or in this case, the patient, pays for the services. The unfortunate side effect is that people also think, “The greedy capitalist murdered my grandmother.” Those who think this way are the folks that wish to gallop down the trail to full public ownership. While one can understand the sentiment, the basis of this outcry is flawed at best.
In the 2020 April budget, the Ontario government spent $5.76 billion on LTC homes. This egregious sum of money goes toward all medical staff and supplies, recreation programs, support services, and even the groceries purchased for the home. The price charged to the residents is effectively an administration fee and covers nonmedical support staff as well. The catch to this cost is that the province sets maximum levels for these fees, essentially regulating what extras the homes can and cannot afford. At most, LTC homes are allowed to charge eighty-eight dollars a day for a long-term private room. It should be evident that although LTC homes are owned by private entities, they are hardly private in the economic sense, with the government picking up most of the tab and regulating the rest.
The New Democratic Party (NDP) of Ontario has put together a plan to end for-profit healthcare. Still, they really have to ask themselves, “If the government is already paying for all the medical care and controlling the rest of the system, how will more government control make this better?” Although the answer is that no amount of further intervention could make it better, and it’s best to examine why.
Like all central planning, the NDP’s plan and public healthcare in general face the economic calculation problem and knowledge problem hanging over them like the sword of Damocles. The problems that we see with the long-term care homes, such as lack of beds, long waitlists, shortage of nurses, and overall lackluster patient care, are the exact same problems that plague the rest of public healthcare in Ontario and Canada. In Ontario, wait times from the initial doctor’s visit to treatment are approximately 17.4 weeks, which also happens to be the shortest wait time in Canada. When one considers that Canada has the worst wait times out of all the countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the situation is dire. Further, it is significant to note that Canada is the only OECD country with a 100 percent public healthcare system. As the government has no competition, there are no price signals in the market. Without these signals, no economic calculation can occur, and thus no optimum can ever be attained. If the goal is to make LTC homes better, why hand the system over to a government that clearly cannot run the healthcare sector they already control? If 100 percent public control doesn’t work for primary healthcare, how could it ever improve the standards for LTC homes? Andrea Horvath, the leader of the Ontario NDP, and the rest of the party have no answers for these questions in their plan and likely never will.
We know rent control and subsidies distort equilibrium for the worse, reducing overall welfare and inevitably harming more people than it helps. This is, in effect, what the government is doing for LTC homes. There is an enormous market for safe and affordable LTC homes; let us increase investment and competition, and thus availability. I highly doubt any politician would develop a plan that would lead to an improvement in healthcare. The best way to improve long-term care homes is for the government to stop planning, stop paying, and stop interfering. The sad reality is that no politician would sacrifice their votes in favor of a real solution. Author:
Trevor Schleihauf is a twenty-year-old economics student at the University of Ottawa in Canada. To supplement his undergraduate education, he devotes his free time to researching Austrian economics, specifically money and banking.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Canada, Central Planning, healthcare, long-term care, New Democratic Party, Ontario | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 22, 2021
By now, 232 years after the French Revolution, it is clear that unaided human reason is not going to usher in a promised new age of enlightenment, curiosity, and human learning. Instead, having rejected the possibility of objective truth and the source of it–God, because His infinite mysteries could not be fully grasped by the finite bounds of human reason–rationalism is moving our society ever closer towards a “bottomless pit” (Apoc 9:2).
https://aussienationalistblog.com/2021/07/22/the-problem-with-rationalism/
In large part, the definition of ‘rationalism’ varies from source to source. Though, the fairest definition can be drawn from Pope Leo XIII in his 1888 encyclical ‘On the Nature of True Liberty’, where he held rationalism to be belief in “the supremacy of human reason.” A close corollary of this view is that reality itself is “confined entirely within the field of phenomena, that is to say, to things that appear, and in the manner in which they appear: it (reason) has neither the right nor the power to overstep these limits” (my emphasis). Further, if human reason is supreme, anything which cannot be entirely understood through our reasoning faculties must be dismissed.
On first instance (at least for myself), rationalism is an alluring concept. It is true that humans are rational creatures who should live according to both reason and reality; not on a blind faith, misguided prejudice, or baseless hope.
To clarify the matter, the problem with rationalism is not that it holds a proper regard for human reason. Rather, the problem is that rationalism unduly extols human reason, holding it to necessarily and limitlessly result in the discovery of more advanced truths–when this is clearly not the case.
Consider. The French Revolution, which inaugurated the current liberal era, justified its endeavours (or some would say crimes) in the name of human reason. To labour this point and to prove whom they served, the revolutionaries installed a ‘Goddess of Reason’ in the Notre Dame Cathedral:
The early proponents of rationalism, beyond a shadow of doubt, have fulfilled the objectives they once set out to achieve. Liberalism is our state ideology; secularism is ubiquitous; the population is literate; people generally only trust in and live for phenomena.
Those key metrics being fulfilled, however, they have not led to the intellectual and open-minded society once vouched for. In fact, people are more docile, superstitious, averse to independent thinking and most strikingly, servile to arbitrary authority than ever before.
As of 2021, this hideous submission to untruths has reached its peak in common responses to the coronavirus vaccines. In objective terms, it is becoming clear that:
Notwithstanding the above, it is still being fervently urged that we “get the jab”–and many have acquiesced, 10 million Australians so far. In the words of David Solway from Lifesite News, such people
Are not governed by reason but by a species of magical thinking, a kind of voodoo conviction. Despite whatever inner tremors they feel or doubts they may have struggled to suppress, they insist on the soundness of the vaccines and rush to the inoculation booths. These confections are like magical elixirs, bunches of dill or lavender laid at the door to keep out demonic beings, or talismans affixed to the lintel to ward off the angel of contagion.
Our society, continues Solway, is increasingly beholden to “proclaimed opinions that are ephemeral or manifestly not sensible,” with faith now being placed in “shamans and medical men.”
By now, 232 years after the French Revolution, it is clear that unaided human reason is not going to usher in a promised new age of enlightenment, curiosity, and human learning. Instead, having rejected the possibility of objective truth and the source of it–God, because His infinite mysteries could not be fully grasped by the finite bounds of human reason–rationalism is moving our society ever closer towards a “bottomless pit” (Apoc 9:2).
Such would appear to be the end point for a society predicated on rationalism. This being so, much more than unaided human reason shall be necessary to reconstitute an orderly, functional, and intelligent society.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: French Revolution, Pope Leo XIII, rationalism | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 21, 2021
July 19 – aka “Freedom Day” – saw the remaining coronavirus restrictions eased across England.However, MPs are still encouraging people to continue to wear face coverings in enclosed spaces and not rush to return to the office.
With Covid cases continuing to surge, Mr Johnson addressed the country whilst in isolation at Chequers, stating that full-vaccination will be a condition of entry for nightclubs and large venues by the end of September.
Freedom, UK style.
By Lucy Fisher, Deputy Political Editor and Harry Yorke, Whitehall Editor
July 19 – aka “Freedom Day” – saw the remaining coronavirus restrictions eased across England.However, MPs are still encouraging people to continue to wear face coverings in enclosed spaces and not rush to return to the office.
With Covid cases continuing to surge, Mr Johnson addressed the country whilst in isolation at Chequers, stating that full-vaccination will be a condition of entry for nightclubs and large venues by the end of September.
The Prime Minister called on nightclubs to do the “socially responsible thing” and use vaccine passports as a condition of entry. The proof of vaccination can be accessed through the NHS app.
Ministers have predicted that new Covid cases could total more than 100,000 a day within weeks, while scientific advisors say they expect at least 1,000 daily hospital admissions.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Advisor, has said that cases are currently “quite close” to the winter wave, and has called on young people to get vaccinated to guarantee the highest level of protection.
But in more positive news for the vaccine programme, over two-thirds of adults in the UK are now estimated to have received both doses of a Covid-19 vaccine as of July 19 – hitting the Government’s target early.
With restrictions now at an end, the latest guidance is as follows.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Boris Johnson, Chequers, Freedom Day, lockdown rules, NHS | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 21, 2021
It is hard to imagine that when Congress created the National Park Service in 1872 they would have envisioned that the White House would turn it into a spy agency.
According to a notice published in the Federal Register, the Department of the Interior (DOI) is turning the National Park Service (NPS) into a mirror image of the NSA, FBI, DHS and every other three-letter spy agency you can think of.
“Pursuant to the provisions of the Privacy Act of 1974, as amended, the Interior DOI is issuing a public notice of its intent to modify the National Park Service (NPS) Privacy Act system of records, INTERIOR/NPS-1, Special Use Permits.”
This so-called modification of special records permits will allow law enforcement to collect a disturbing amount of personal information on national park visitors.
As Nextgov points out, anyone wishing to get a permit to use one of America’s 423 national parks will have all their personal information sent to the White House.
“The NPS is making it easier to share more data with the White House and other federal agencies on applications and approvals of special use permits for parks spaces.”
America’s absurd War on Terror is now targeting picnics, family gatherings, weddings etc.
“People interested in using a park for a specific purpose at a specific time generally have to obtain a special use permit. NPS issues permits for three types of uses: standard events like weddings, sports, picnics and family gatherings; special events like demonstrations, races, tournaments and the like; and construction, research and utility work.”
When park users apply for such permits, the system collects a wealth of data needed to process the application, including:
According to the notice in the Federal Register, the purpose in collecting everyone’s personal information is “to provide park superintendents with information to approve or deny requests for activities on NPS managed park lands.”
Does anyone really believe that park rangers or campground hosts need visitors SSN’s, DOBs, bank account numbers etc., so they can approve or deny a persons’ request to use our national park[s]?
Nextgov does a great job of describing the NPS collecting park visitors personal information as being an innocuous “update”; it is not.
Page 7 of the notice reveals that the NPS will routinely send everyone’s personal information to numerous federal agencies.
“In addition to those disclosures generally permitted under 5 U.S.C. 552a(b) of the Privacy Act, all or a portion of the records or information contained in this system may be disclosed outside DOI as a routine use pursuant to 5 U.S.C. 552a(b)(3).”
Below is an abbreviated description of the federal agencies that will routinely have access to permit application park visitors personal information:
A. The Department of Justice (DOJ), including Offices of the U.S. Attorneys, or other Federal agency. Any other Federal agency appearing before the Office of Hearings and Appeals.
B. A congressional office when requesting information on behalf of, and at the request of, the individual who is the subject of the record.
C. The Executive Office of the President.
D. Any criminal, civil, or regulatory law enforcement authority (whether Federal, state, territorial, local, tribal or foreign) when a record, either alone or in conjunction with other information, indicates a violation or potential violation of law – criminal, civil, or regulatory in nature, and the disclosure is compatible with the purpose for which the records were compiled.
E. An official of another Federal agency.
F. Federal, state, territorial, local, tribal, or foreign agencies that have requested information relevant or necessary to the hiring, firing or retention of an employee or contractor, or the issuance of a security clearance, license, contract, grant or other benefit, when the disclosure is compatible with the purpose for which the records were compiled.
G. Representatives of the National Archives and Records Administration.
H. State, territorial and local governments and tribal organizations to provide information needed in response to a court order.
I. An expert, consultant, grantee, or contractor (including employees of the contractor) of DOI that performs services requiring access to these records on DOI’s behalf to carry out the purposes of the system.
J. Appropriate agencies, entities of the Federal Government.
K. To another Federal agency or Federal entity, when DOI determines that information from this system of records is reasonably necessary to assist the recipient agency.
L. The Office of Management and Budget.
N. The news media and the public, with the approval of the Public Affairs Officer in consultation with counsel and the Senior Agency Official for Privacy.
According to the memo, the NPS and will keep everyone’s personal information for 15 years at which time they promise to delete or shred it.
“Retention of records with short-term operational value and not considered essential for the ongoing management of land and cultural and natural resources are destroyed 15 years after closure. Paper records are disposed of by shredding or pulping, and records contained on electronic media are degaussed or erased in accordance with 384 Departmental Manual 1.”
Does anyone really think that picnics, family gatherings and weddings pose a threat to our Homeland?
There is one bit of good news to come out of turning the NPS into a spy agency: national park visitors can request a copy of what records the Feds have on them if they include the specific bureau or office that keeps those records in an information request.
“An individual requesting records on himself or herself should send a signed, written inquiry to the applicable System Manager identified above. The request must include the specific bureau or office that maintains the record to facilitate location of the applicable records. The request envelope and letter should both be clearly marked “PRIVACY ACT REQUEST FOR ACCESS.”
And as you can see from the list above, it is going to be a crapshoot to guess which specific federal agency or which branch of law enforcement was spying on your picnic, family gathering or wedding.
It is hard to imagine that when Congress created the National Park Service in 1872 they would have envisioned that the White House would turn it into a spy agency.
As Americans everywhere rush to visit our national parks how many of them will care that the Feds are collecting vast amounts of personal information about them and storing it for 15 years?
Do Americans care enough to stop DHS from turning formerly benign government institutions like the U.S. Postal Service and the National Park Service into federal spying agencies? Only time will tell.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Department of Justice, National Park Service, personal information, Privacy Act of 1974 | 1 Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 21, 2021
America’s war party is trying to find ways to keep the conflict going by raising phony alarms about girl’s schooling, translators and woman’s rights. But we hear nothing at all from these pro-war hypocrites about the murder, rape and dowry killing of thousands of women in India each year. How many misinformed Americans know that Taliban was a religious movement formed to stop the rape of Afghan women and brigandage during the bitter 1990’s civil war? I was there and saw it.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/07/eric-margolis/graveyard-of-empires/
The US-led war in Afghanistan looks to be ending, and not a day too soon. America’s father, Benjamin Franklin, wisely wrote: ‘No good war; no bad peace.’
Yet for 20 years, the United States waged all-out war against this small, remote, impoverished state whose only weapons were old AK47 rifles and the boundless courage of its fierce people.
In my first book about Afghanistan, ‘War at the Top of the World,’ written after being in the field with the anti-Soviet ‘mujahidin’ warriors, I called them ‘the bravest men on earth.’ Now, some 21 years later, I repeat this title.
For the past two decades, the Afghan nationalist mujahidin have faced the full might of the US empire: waves of B-1 and B-52 heavy bombers; fleets of killer drones, constant air strikes from US airbases in Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Gulf; 300,000 US-financed Afghan mercenary troops; up to 120,000 US and NATO troops and other US-paid mercenaries; the brutal Communist-run Afghan secret police, regular government police, Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek militias, hit squads sent by the US and Britain, plus famine and disease. Use of torture by western forces was rampant.
All this to defend the US-installed Afghan puppet governments whose main business was protecting the nation’s growing opium trade which made Afghanistan the world’s largest exporter of opium/morphine that was processed into heroin. Another proud moment for Washington which, in the 1970’s had been up to its ears in Indochina’s opium trade, and later in Central America’s cocaine business.
Afghanistan was a war of lies, sustained by the powerful US and British media. President George W. Bush, a man of deep ignorance, launched this war to cover being caught sleeping by the 9/11 attacks. Bush blamed Osama bin Laden, former US ally, and Afghanistan’s Taliban government for 9/11, though the Afghans were likely not involved with it.
The only proof of bin Laden’s involvement was a number of fake videos that I believe were made by Afghanistan’s Communist-run intelligence service or its former KGB bosses. When I pointed out these videos were fakes, CNN blacklisted me from further broadcasting. So too did Canada’s CBC TV and the Sun chain after I warned Canadian troops were being sent to Afghanistan under false pretenses.
Officially, the US lost 31,376 dead and seriously wounded in Afghanistan; Canada lost 158 dead; Britain 456 dead; the Afghans god knows how many. Estimates range from, 100,000 to one million. Two million Afghans reportedly died during the decade-long Soviet occupation. Almost anything that moved was bombed.
The known cost for this useless war was 2 trillion US dollars, plus hundreds of millions in secret payments to hire ‘volunteers’ from US allies to fight in Afghanistan. This was almost all borrowed money hidden in the US federal debt.
What next? The US is trying to find a way to stay engaged in Afghanistan via air attacks from its bases in the Gulf and possibly new ones in Central Asia. The world’s premier military power simply cannot endure the humiliation of defeat in Afghanistan, particularly so by a bunch of Muslim mountain warriors. All those US and British ‘experts’ who championed the Afghan war are now hiding their faces, as they did after the Iraq debacle.
America’s war party is trying to find ways to keep the conflict going by raising phony alarms about girl’s schooling, translators and woman’s rights. But we hear nothing at all from these pro-war hypocrites about the murder, rape and dowry killing of thousands of women in India each year. How many misinformed Americans know that Taliban was a religious movement formed to stop the rape of Afghan women and brigandage during the bitter 1990’s civil war? I was there and saw it.
What next? As US power wanes, CIA will try to bolster separatist movements among Afghanistan’s Tajik and Uzbek minorities. Iran will arm and finance the Shia Hazara minority. Still Communist dominated Tajikistan and Uzbekistan will support their ethnic brethren in Afghanistan. Most important, India will intensify intrigues in Afghanistan where its powerful intelligence agency, RAW, is increasingly active.
Meanwhile Pakistan quietly supports Taliban which, like a quarter of Pakistanis, is of Pashtun ethnicity. China for once does not know what to do in Afghanistan: it wants to block expansion of Indian influence in the subcontinent but deeply fears militant Islam and its rising influence in Chinese-ruled Xinjiang, formerly Turkistan.
So, Americans may have not seen the last of Afghanistan, one of the greatest follies of US foreign policy. To paraphrase the great Talleyrand, the US war in Afghanistan ‘was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.’
Eric S. Margolis [send him mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Afghanistan, Bin Laden, CIA, graveyard of empires, mujahidin, Taliban | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 21, 2021
Today, most college freshman have already been relentlessly subjected to the constant repetition of Marxist platitudes for twelve years. I have had students who just could not comprehend the simplest, most basic concepts in economics, but could give a two-hour oration about global warming, how “diversity is our strength,” or virtually any other left-wing fad
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/07/thomas-dilorenzo/the-new-segregationists-of-the-left/
Having been a university economics professor for forty-one years, I am sometimes asked how college students – and the university world in general – has changed over the years. One response that I give is that when I started out I noticed that the campus Marxists – who had become “academics” not because they wanted lives as an intellectuals but as political activists in tenured jobs – would capture or corral about say, five or ten percent of the incoming students and convince them to become left-wing campus rabble rousers instead of spending their time educating themselves. Uneducated, sanctimonious, loud-mouthed spouters of leftist platitudes, in other words, just like their Marxist professors. Today, I would say that a strong majority of college students would fit into that category, not just five or ten percent.
The reason for this is that cultural Marxism has infested the lower levels of education, beginning with elementary school. Today, most college freshman have already been relentlessly subjected to the constant repetition of Marxist platitudes for twelve years. I have had students who just could not comprehend the simplest, most basic concepts in economics, but could give a two-hour oration about global warming, how “diversity is our strength,” or virtually any other left-wing fad. They have been taught that to reject the platitudes of the Left makes one an enemy of society and, of course, a racist. If you’re wondering why so many college students claim that they prefer socialism to economic freedom, this is it. This, and the fact that they were never taught a single thing about socialist reality in particular and economics in general.
One positive thing I noticed over the years was that by the 1990s the interaction of black and white students had become, for the most part, perfectly normal with hardly any of them paying any attention at all to skin color. There are exceptions of course, but the societal change was very noticeable.
It was not always like that. When I was an undergraduate I was a fraternity president for two years and we were the only integrated fraternity on campus. The black students were mostly socially segregated with their own Black Student Union (although many of them attended my fraternity’s parties after paying the $1 entrance fee for non-members).
Among my best friends were Elmore Patterson, a smart-as-a-whip black guy from Sharon, Pennsylvania; Fred Taylor, a Jamaican from Montego Bay; and Ramon Martinez, a Puerto Rican from Bedford Stuyvesant (who once told me he had never seen a live cow before going to college in Western Pennsylvania). Fred, Ray and I (and Bob Brautigam) ran a house painting business in the summers. Back then, even an Italian-American like myself was considered to be a “minority” at the very Waspish college that I attended! The college president once invited all the other fraternity presidents to a dinner and left me out, even though we had the largest membership and the highest grade point average of all the fraternities during my entire four years there. (We also had the best Animal House-style parties which is probably why I was excluded).
It really was remarkable to witness, in a relative short amount of time, how race became largely irrelevant to the average college student — unlike in my day, growing up and going to school in the Deep North of northwestern Pennsylvania. America’s white parents in the post-60s generations obviously took to heart Martin Luther King, Jr.’s admonition about judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin and educated their children about it.
Then along came the college “cultural Marxists” who now dominate almost all of the academic world in America. This seems to have started in the mid 1980s when Jesse Jackson led a mob of Stanford University students in a protest march while chanting “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ Has Got to Go.” Being the intellectual giant that he is, Jackson championed the cause of eliminating the teaching about the history of Western Civilization at the college level. Too many high-achieving white guys. The Stanford administration dutifully complied with the wishes of the mob of ignorant, chanting Leftists led by a racial extortionist.
The defining characteristic of the so-called cultural Marxists is that they reject the traditional Marxian class struggle theory of supposed antagonism between the capitalist and working “classes.” Earlier generations of Marxists tried to gain totalitarian power for themselves with that schtick in Europe and America and it didn’t work.
So they invented a new strategy designed to recruit more than just factory workers to the cause. In the newer “cultural” Marxist theory the class struggle is between an “oppressor” class and the “oppressed” classes, especially all minorities, women, the transgendered, and all those other gender categories that they have invented. The oppressor class consists of all white heterosexual males; the oppressed classes includes everyone else. That is why today’s Marxists are so hell bent on shoving so-called “critical race theory” down society’s throat. This “theory” repudiates the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr. about race and instead teaches that all white people – even newborn infants – are inherently evil and racist by virtue of their skin color. Judge people by their skin color, not the content of their character, they preach. Martin Luther King, Jr. is unceremoniously thrown under the bus. The “oppressors” of society, who are the sole causes of everyone else’s problems, are therefore easy to spot – and to demonize, cancel, and destroy.
This Marxist poison is being taught in American schools at all levels today, in the government, and in parts of the corporate world. It teaches black students, especially, that their white classmates are all to be looked at with deep suspicion because they secretly plan on doing them harm. This is why groups of parents of all races have risen up to protest and fight against this insidious form of institutionalized, Marxist-inspired hatred and segregation. How infuriating it must be for parents to raise a child for eighteen years by teaching him or her to be colorblind, and then to have some of the dumbest people in the country, employed by universities, attempting to turn them into ignorant and hateful bigots like themselves. And charging the parents $50,000/year or more for the effort.
Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo [send him mail] is a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. His latest book is The Problem with Lincoln.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: campus Marxists, Cultural Marxism, New Segregationists, oppressed | 1 Comment »
