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Orbán: “Christianity has created the free man, the family and the nation” | Chronicles

Posted by M. C. on June 26, 2021

If we were in the Middle Ages and I needed a slogan for my banner to sum up my work and my thought. I’d say “Only dead fish swim with the current.” Whoever swims with the multicultural fad of our time, loses everything that matters in life. True, those who go against the current cause themselves a lot of problems. … But if we don’t pay that price and if we don’t stand up for our interests, we may live more comfortably but we will end up losing a lot more.…

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/orb-n—christianity-has-created-the-free-man–the-family-and-the-nation-/

By Srdja Trifkovic

(This article is a translation of an original interview by Branimir Stanić and Ivan Tašev)

Earlier this month Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—long maligned by the Brussels machine as an authoritarian reactionary inside the ever-so-progressive European Union—gave an interview to the Croatian Catholic weekly Glas Koncila (The Voice of the Council, 20 June 2021). Orbán made several important points in the course of this interview: on the civilizational challenges currently facing Europe (including immigration), on national sovereignty challenged by Brussels, and on the nature of politics in the 21st century. No politician in such a position of authority in any EU member country has had the vision and the courage to talk and act like the Hungarian prime minister. [Excerpts translated from Croatian by S. Trifkovic]

Viktor Orbán: A cultural, nay, civilizational struggle is taking place right now. The struggle for the soul of Europe and for the future of Europe is here, it is happening. Theological debates are seldom held in the trenches, and we are all under attack. That is why prayers are needed for the complete unity of all Christians, including the Orthodox, because without cooperation we cannot sustain Christianity in Europe.…

If someone has a majority, but does not strive for the truth, what does he need it for? It is mere profanation. If, on the other hand, he advocates the truth, but cannot move the majority, how will he act in the interest of that truth? This is the key challenge of Christian politics in democratic societies. To put it simply, we no longer have kings anointed by God, so we must exist in a democracy, connecting the majority and the truth. It is not easy, but it is possible. Christian-Democratic politics has its mandate in relation to Christian culture. Christianity, first of all, created the free man. Therefore, we must – first and foremost – protect human dignity. Then, Christianity created the Christian family. We must protect the concept of the Christian family. Next, Christianity has created nations in this part of the world. If we Hungarians had not followed Christianity for a thousand years, we would have disappeared; so we must also protect the nation. But we also have to protect religious communities and the Church. To summarize, our task is not to protect theological principles, that is the mission of the Church; but our mission is to protect the great Christian achievements of our civilization.…

See the rest here

Srdja Trifkovic

Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor of Chronicles, is the author of The Sword of the Prophet and Defeating Jihad.

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Narrative Soup | Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on June 26, 2021

As “Joe Biden” fades altogether from the scene, the country will have to grapple with the real problems it faces, not hobgoblins of racism, misogyny, white supremacy but how to cope with a dwindling energy supply and a falling standard of living, and how to remain civilized. We’re doing a good job of destroying the institutions that make civilization possible, especially law and the courts.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/narrative-soup/

James Howard Kunstler

A major premise of my 2005 book, The Long Emergency, was that government at the highest level would become increasingly ineffectual and impotent as the melodrama of national collapse plays out. So, there was no small irony that the floundering political elites would settle on the pathetic figure of “Joe Biden” to symbolically head a foundering government. They picked the very embodiment of collapse to usher in collapse, and that is why “Joe Biden” appears to be nothing more than an usher, somebody whose only duty, say, at a funeral, is to show the more important attendees to their places before the ominous casket.

Nobody believes that he is in charge of the executive branch, or even in charge of himself, as he shuffles stiffly out to the podium with eyes gone all slitty to do the one thing his minders have trained him to do: read a teleprompter. Surely the leaders over in Europe were uncomfortably bemused by his recent appearance among them, as if the USA sent a ghost from the bygone 20th century to spook our allies into mindfulness of self-preservation — message: the great power that rescued you in two world wars is gone, and you are on your own now.

The collapse is universal, though, playing out globally in different flavors of culture and economy, but well underway, for Europe, too, and eventually even China. It’s a collapse of modernity and the techno-industrial horse it rode in on. The extreme political narcissists of the day, intoxicated with messianic fantasies, would like to retail a Great Reset in a desperate effort to prevent modernity from becoming yesterday’s tomorrow. But it only seems to amount to an obsessive-compulsive wish to push everybody around and herd populations into controllable corrals that, some suspect, are just a prelude to a not-far-off global Auschwitz. “You will own nothing and you will be happy” is about as reassuring as “work will make you free.”

The USA, with its more anarchic ethos, can only offer laughable rationales for its failures on the disorderly way to bankruptcy and breakdown. Naturally, the folks in-charge are terrified of any challenge to their unconvincing rule. The election audit underway in Arizona is driving them up a tree. The latest desperate gambit is the New York State court system’s move to suspend Rudy Giuliani’s law license as a sort of warning to anyone else who would try to cast doubt on the ironclad rectitude of the recent election.

The New York court’s Attorney Grievance Committee states:

….there is uncontroverted evidence that the respondent [Giuliani] communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to the courts, lawmakers, and the public at large in his capacity as a lawyer for former president Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump’s failed effort at reelection in 2020.  These false statements were made to improperly bolster respondent’s narrative that, due to widespread voter fraud, victory in the 2020 presidential election was stolen from his client.”

Notice the assertion that contesting the vote is necessarily proscribed, and that any argument to that end is in the service of a false “narrative,” which is necessarily inadmissible. Since when is it against the rules to have a point-of-view? Especially a legal point-of-view about legal matters, in courts of law and in the public arena? Now, it happens that a number of state courts dismissed cases brought by Mr. Giuliani, without bothering to entertain any evidence, most particularly affidavits Mr. Giuliani proffered detailing voting irregularities. The courts didn’t want to hear it. If that is proof of anything, it may only be of corruption in the state courts. Has anyone noticed that the grievance committee is manufacturing a narrative of its own, very possibly a false one?

In fact, there is one legal review of the 2020 balloting currently underway in Arizona, at the order of the Arizona State Senate, as it should be because, according to the US constitution, elections are a prerogative of the fifty states’ legislatures. It’s not “a narrative.” It’s as official as can be, and they have every right to do it, and there’s a fair chance that it will uncover both ballot fraud and voting machine fraud. I suppose all that seems “baseless” if you refuse to look. Also, this week a judge in Georgia approved a process to unseal roughly 145,000 mail-in ballots in Fulton County (the Atlanta metro region) to inspect them for fraud. The ruling stems from a lawsuit against the county that alleges evidence of fraudulent ballots and improper counting. “Joe Biden” won the state by a mere 12,000 votes.

Other states, notably Pennsylvania, are taking action toward their own 2020 vote audits, and through the proper legislative channels. The “incontrovertible evidence” of a fair and honest election is the fraud at issue. There are only assertions that it would be wrong to even look for it, and it’s hard to imagine a weaker argument. So, the politburo behind “Joe Biden” is running scared. The New York court’s action against Mr. Giuliani is just a peevish act of political desperation aimed at disabling a legal adversary. That and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s threat to shut down the Arizona audit on specious “civil rights” grounds are just attempts to create distractions for a regime that begins to apprehend it is whirling around the drain.

As “Joe Biden” fades altogether from the scene, the country will have to grapple with the real problems it faces, not hobgoblins of racism, misogyny, white supremacy but how to cope with a dwindling energy supply and a falling standard of living, and how to remain civilized. We’re doing a good job of destroying the institutions that make civilization possible, especially law and the courts.

A major premise of my 2005 book, The Long Emergency, was that government at the highest level would become increasingly ineffectual and impotent as the melodrama of national collapse plays out. So, there was no small irony that the floundering political elites would settle on the pathetic figure of “Joe Biden” to symbolically head a foundering government. They picked the very embodiment of collapse to usher in collapse, and that is why “Joe Biden” appears to be nothing more than an usher, somebody whose only duty, say, at a funeral, is to show the more important attendees to their places before the ominous casket.

Nobody believes that he is in charge of the executive branch, or even in charge of himself, as he shuffles stiffly out to the podium with eyes gone all slitty to do the one thing his minders have trained him to do: read a teleprompter. Surely the leaders over in Europe were uncomfortably bemused by his recent appearance among them, as if the USA sent a ghost from the bygone 20th century to spook our allies into mindfulness of self-preservation — message: the great power that rescued you in two world wars is gone, and you are on your own now.

The collapse is universal, though, playing out globally in different flavors of culture and economy, but well underway, for Europe, too, and eventually even China. It’s a collapse of modernity and the techno-industrial horse it rode in on. The extreme political narcissists of the day, intoxicated with messianic fantasies, would like to retail a Great Reset in a desperate effort to prevent modernity from becoming yesterday’s tomorrow. But it only seems to amount to an obsessive-compulsive wish to push everybody around and herd populations into controllable corrals that, some suspect, are just a prelude to a not-far-off global Auschwitz. “You will own nothing and you will be happy” is about as reassuring as “work will make you free.”

The USA, with its more anarchic ethos, can only offer laughable rationales for its failures on the disorderly way to bankruptcy and breakdown. Naturally, the folks in-charge are terrified of any challenge to their unconvincing rule. The election audit underway in Arizona is driving them up a tree. The latest desperate gambit is the New York State court system’s move to suspend Rudy Giuliani’s law license as a sort of warning to anyone else who would try to cast doubt on the ironclad rectitude of the recent election.

The New York court’s Attorney Grievance Committee states:

….there is uncontroverted evidence that the respondent [Giuliani] communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to the courts, lawmakers, and the public at large in his capacity as a lawyer for former president Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump’s failed effort at reelection in 2020.  These false statements were made to improperly bolster respondent’s narrative that, due to widespread voter fraud, victory in the 2020 presidential election was stolen from his client.”

Notice the assertion that contesting the vote is necessarily proscribed, and that any argument to that end is in the service of a false “narrative,” which is necessarily inadmissible. Since when is it against the rules to have a point-of-view? Especially a legal point-of-view about legal matters, in courts of law and in the public arena? Now, it happens that a number of state courts dismissed cases brought by Mr. Giuliani, without bothering to entertain any evidence, most particularly affidavits Mr. Giuliani proffered detailing voting irregularities. The courts didn’t want to hear it. If that is proof of anything, it may only be of corruption in the state courts. Has anyone noticed that the grievance committee is manufacturing a narrative of its own, very possibly a false one?

In fact, there is one legal review of the 2020 balloting currently underway in Arizona, at the order of the Arizona State Senate, as it should be because, according to the US constitution, elections are a prerogative of the fifty states’ legislatures. It’s not “a narrative.” It’s as official as can be, and they have every right to do it, and there’s a fair chance that it will uncover both ballot fraud and voting machine fraud. I suppose all that seems “baseless” if you refuse to look. Also, this week a judge in Georgia approved a process to unseal roughly 145,000 mail-in ballots in Fulton County (the Atlanta metro region) to inspect them for fraud. The ruling stems from a lawsuit against the county that alleges evidence of fraudulent ballots and improper counting. “Joe Biden” won the state by a mere 12,000 votes.

Other states, notably Pennsylvania, are taking action toward their own 2020 vote audits, and through the proper legislative channels. The “incontrovertible evidence” of a fair and honest election is the fraud at issue. There are only assertions that it would be wrong to even look for it, and it’s hard to imagine a weaker argument. So, the politburo behind “Joe Biden” is running scared. The New York court’s action against Mr. Giuliani is just a peevish act of political desperation aimed at disabling a legal adversary. That and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s threat to shut down the Arizona audit on specious “civil rights” grounds are just attempts to create distractions for a regime that begins to apprehend it is whirling around the drain.

As “Joe Biden” fades altogether from the scene, the country will have to grapple with the real problems it faces, not hobgoblins of racism, misogyny, white supremacy but how to cope with a dwindling energy supply and a falling standard of living, and how to remain civilized. We’re doing a good job of destroying the institutions that make civilization possible, especially law and the courts.


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Death Jabs, Fear Masks, & Corona Communism: This is Exactly How Every Bad Idea From the Establishment Has Been Defeated in All Human History, Just Stay the Course – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on June 26, 2021

Those are the third group of people who are the variable across every era. That third group are the ones who determine the trajectory of society based on whether they stand up, or alternately, based on whether they stay asleep.

If you are wearing the face mask any longer and for any reason, please stop with the face mask and do so right now, committing to never again let yourself live by the low standards of others in the name of obedience.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/06/allan-stevo/death-jabs-fear-masks-corona-communism-this-is-exactly-how-every-bad-idea-from-the-establishment-has-been-defeated-in-all-human-history-just-stay-the-course/

By Allan Stevo

There has never been a time like this, some people say. That would be shortsighted to say. There have, in fact, been many times very much like this.

An elite group captures control of a society, the society finds itself in ruins under their goofy ideas, the society either crumbles under those ideas and disappears into the background, or it wins the fight to remove from power the purveyors of the goofy ideas and correspondingly that society prospers in a renewed renaissance of virtue and sense.

The more a society prospers, the more potential return there is for the goofy in stepping forward to corrupt and take over that society, the more incentive there is for the goofy. Also, the more incentive there theoretically should be for the upright. Though, in a period of great prosperity, the upright tend to grow comfortable and lazy and forget how much they have to lose by behaving negligently with their birthright of freedom and prosperity.

Goofy is a gentle euphemism for evil. Evil is the more correct way to describe the goofy ideas that are being pushed upon us.

As I pointed out in this piece about reopening after the lockdowns, written in April 2020, a full year ago, throughout recorded history, the most common way the goofy-idea-pushing ultra minority elite were put back in their place was by scapegoating a troublemaker or a group of troublemakers and performing one of the main functions of the prison system: protecting society from the individual or individuals in question by isolating them from the rest of society. The most effective way to isolate from society and to make sure a criminal, a tyrant, or other goofy person never does a society harm is to execute them. That was a common solution throughout history for handling goofy tyrants.

John Wilkes Booth, a stage actor, called out this long held ideal after executing the tyrant Abraham Lincoln, a man who was so uniquely egotistical in American history that he decimated the military age male population of his country. That was how egotistical, tyrannical, and hard-to-work-with Abraham Lincoln was. Booth was said to have called out “Sic semper tyrannis” after assassinating Lincoln, “Thus always to tyrants,” or sometimes translated as “Death always to tyrants.”

The southern states sought to succeed. They wanted to be left alone. It was the northern states who were the aggressors, refusing to negotiate civilly with the south and then ultimately refusing to let those states go peacefully.

A debate about a Lincoln lasts to this day. Was Lincoln a good guy or a bad guy? Many people say he was amazing. That thought is absorbed like pablum by many, and is done so with so little critical thought. Anyone who oversees the deaths of so many on the battlefield and the visiting of utter terror among so many more civilians — women, children, and the infirm — is a hard one to call a good guy, no matter how one uses the ends to justify the means. And the ends weren’t all that good: he put down the second American Revolution, work that George III of England couldn’t do, in order to preserve the imperfect US Constitution, which is generally used as a tool for tyranny.

Yes, the Constitution is a good rallying point for the goofy times we live in, a better document than what popular culture could conjure today, but if the best we can do is a document that has helped bring about the injustice and terror of the present (which is what the Constitution is constantly used for), then we have a pretty impoverished view of human potential and have quite a dim future ahead of us indeed.

Thankfully, so much more is possible and so many realize so much more is possible in their own lives, regardless of what a bureaucrat or judge say the Constitution means.

Individually, we can know our own values and know our own boundaries. We can identify our values, communicate our values, and defend our values. We can identify our boundaries, communicate our boundaries, and defend our boundaries. You don’t need a majority of the neighborhood for that to happen. You don’t need a quadrennial election. You don’t need your neighbor’s input for that to happen. We need no one else to do that. We need only ourselves for that to happen.

And that’s exactly what’s happening. More Americans are doing exactly that. They are saying “Yes!” to good things. They are saying “No!” to bad things. They are becoming increasingly firm and resolute about that. And that is exactly how bad times turn into good times.

In all eras, there have always been goofy people with goofy ideas that might feel good in the short term but which are so very self sabotaging in the long term. In this era, we tend to call those people leftists. No one ever pretended Sodom and Gomorrah was going to ride to the rescue. No one should today pretend that San Francisco or New York or Washington, D.C., or any state capital will ride to the rescue. Those goofy people, those people with such comfort around pure evil, they exist in every era and have such plentiful short term prosperity in every era, sometimes even long term prosperity. They are not the variable, they are the constant. They are best ignored.

There is another constant: the sheeplike. They exist in every era. They just want a good leader to follow. They will just as easily follow a righteous leader as they will follow a goofy Cuomo as a leader. They just need to be presented with that confident, comfortable, heart-warming, easy-to-love choice. The sheep too are not the variable. Yes, they do shockingly foolish things while following their foolish leader, but that is not an issue worth obsessing over.

What is to be obsessed over is this exactly: the steel-spined, the lions, the righteous, those who know good from evil, those who cherish that line between good and evil as boundaries and values, who seek to live a righteous life, who of course screw up from time to time, who of course make mistakes, but who will defend and advance what is right and do the important work against that which is wrong.

Those are the third group of people who are the variable across every era. That third group are the ones who determine the trajectory of society based on whether they stand up, or alternately, based on whether they stay asleep. I am here to wake the lions, to rouse them from their slumber, because once that’s done, I know how masterfully they will stand up and breathe freedom into the world around them through their every free breath, through their every free action. It is impossible for a roused lion to avoid rippling freedom and goodness into the world around him. They are not perfect, but they are pretty good at that.

Dear lion, our future rests on you. Will you act? Will you shirk? It is up to you.

Your every action matters.

All you really need to do, in order to end this all in victory, is to live life as truly free as you can.

If you are wearing the face mask any longer and for any reason, please stop with the face mask and do so right now, committing to never again let yourself live by the low standards of others in the name of obedience. Read “Face Masks in One Lesson” to help you make that happen. Read these pieces at LewRockwell.com, to help you accomplish the same, and sign up for the email newsletter at RealStevo.com for videos, classes, and activism opportunities on exactly that as well. We can beat back this medical tyranny before it’s too late. 

Allan Stevo [send him mail] writes about international politics and culture from a free market perspective at 52 Weeks in Slovakia (www.52inSk.com). He is the author of How to Win America, The Bitcoin Manifesto, and numerous other books.

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The Feds Collect Most of the Taxes in America—So They Have Most of the Power | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on June 25, 2021

As the old saying goes, he who pays the piper calls the tune, and with states playing the part of junior partner in the taxation game, we should expect them to be junior partners in every other sense as well.

https://mises.org/wire/feds-collect-most-taxes-america-so-they-have-most-power

Ryan McMaken

In 2021, it’s clear Americans now have thrown off any notions of subsidiarity and instead embraced the idea that the federal government should be called upon to fund pretty much anything and everything. From “stimulus checks” to “paycheck protection,” it’s assumed an entire national workforce can be propped up by federal spending. Moreover, in the wake of 2020’s covid recession, every pressure group, from local governments to weapons manufacturers, looks to the federal government to offer ever larger amounts of federal spending, ladled out from the federal pot of more than $6 trillion of annual spending. Need some “infrastructure”? The federal government will pay for it. Need a bailout? You know where to go. 

And how is all this spending possible? Naturally, it can only happen when governments tax or borrow. And the federal government does a lot of that. Moreover, the federal government can borrow in increasingly stunning amounts thanks to the monetization of debt going on at the central bank. 

The Feds Tax Us a Lot More Than the States

But even if we ignore all the ways the federal government can spend at astronomical levels thanks to huge deficits and monetary tricks, we find the feds are still very much in the game of collecting good old-fashioned taxes. And lots of them. Moreover, the feds are collecting a lot more in taxes than even all states and cities combined. When it comes to taxes, the federal government is the biggest game in town, and it should surprise no one that everyone is looking to DC for some easy cash. We might hear a lot about how “blue states” are levying crippling taxes on their residents. But not even the governments of California or New York have anything on the federal government when it comes to extracting wealth from the taxpayers in America. 

According to a 2018 study from the Tax Policy Center, for example, “Federal, state, and local government receipts totaled $5.3 trillion in 2016. Federal receipts were 65 percent of the total, while state and local receipts (excluding inter-governmental transfers) were 20 percent and 15 percent, respectively.”

State and local governments may certainly be taking their pound of flesh from the taxpayers, but the fact is the federal government is taking a whole lot more.

Indeed, contrary to the US’s reputation for “local control,” the United States is not particularly decentralized when it comes to tax revenues and government spending. When it comes to taxation, the central government dominates in America. In in his study on taxation, for example, Anwar Shah categorizes the United States as “centralized,” noting—with numbers similar to those of the Tax Policy Center—that the federal government collects more than 60 percent of all tax revenue in the nation. This puts the US in the same category—according to Shah—as Brazil and Russia.

On the other hand, only 37 percent of all tax revenue is collected by the central government in Switzerland, a “decentralized” tax system according to Shah.1

In other words, the state and local governments in Switzerland collect most of the taxes, while the situation is reversed in the United States.

This becomes even more clear when we look at tax collection on a state-by-state basis.

Using 2019 data from the IRS we see that total federal tax collections coming out of California amounted to approximately $472 billion. But state tax collections totaled about $188 billion.2 Put another way, the total state tax bill in California was 39 percent the size of the federal tax bill. Or, for every dollar the federal government collects from Californians, Californians pay their state government 39 cents.

The difference is even more obvious in many other states. In Florida in 2019, the federal government collected $210 billion from the taxpayers. The State of Florida, meanwhile, collected $44 billion. In other words, for Florida residents, Florida’s tax bill was only one-fifth the size of the federal tax bill.

rev
Source: Internal Revenue Service, “Table 5: Gross Collections, by Type of Tax and State, Fiscal Year 2020″; and the US Census Bureau’s “2019 Annual Survey of State Tax Collections by Category Table.” 

Even in big states with huge tax hauls like New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, state tax collections don’t even begin to rival the taxes pulled in by federal payroll taxes and income taxes.

In fact, no state collects as much in taxes as the federal government collects. Hawaii comes the closest, where Hawaii residents pay 88 cents in state taxes for every dollar collected by the federal government. But nearly all states collect less than fifty cents for every dollar collected by the federal government.

rev
Source: IRS, “Table 5: Gross Collections, by Type of Tax and State, Fiscal Year 2020″; and the Census Bureau, “2019 Annual Survey of State Tax Collections by Category Table.”

Local governments tend to collect an even smaller amount than states when compared to federal spending. 

The political implications of this are large. Thanks to the Sixteenth Amendment, the federal government is able to tax Americans directly, and it does so in amounts that are usually more than double what the state governments pull in. This puts an enormous amount of power in the hands of federal officials, and it means fiscal power in the United States mostly resides in the hands of federal policymakers. (We could contrast this with Switzerland, where the federal power to tax expires without an affirmative vote extending this power every ten years or so.)

It’s a big reason why we’re now seeing state governments go to the federal government seeking bailouts—and why interest groups spend so much time and energy focusing on federal laws, taxes, and regulations. It’s only natural that they should. Washington, DC, is where most tax money goes in America, so we should expect to find most of the political power there as well. Once we consider that the federal government—with the help of the central bank—can spend far beyond even what it collects in taxes, we should not be surprised that in times of fiscal crisis, state and local governments go running to the feds. As the old saying goes, he who pays the piper calls the tune, and with states playing the part of junior partner in the taxation game, we should expect them to be junior partners in every other sense as well.

Author:

Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power&Market, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

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Watch “Talking About Stoicism 128 Practicing Stoicism” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on June 25, 2021

https://youtu.be/eZa-BOFGU5k

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UK MP Says “Important People” Shouldn’t Need To Quarantine Under COVID Rules | ZeroHedge

Posted by M. C. on June 25, 2021

YOU aren’t important but still it is all about YOU…and not in a good way.

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/uk-mp-says-important-people-shouldnt-need-quarantine-under-covid-rules

Tyler Durden's Photoby Tyler Durden

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

A Conservative MP inadvertently provided an insight into the hypocrisy of lockdown when he said that “people who are important” shouldn’t have to follow the same COVID-19 quarantine rules as the rest of the population.

MP John Whittingdale was speaking about special measures that allow UEFA officials and multi-millionaire football players to enter the UK to take part in the Euro 2020 final on July 11.

While ordinary Brits cannot even go on holiday to most destinations and have to quarantine on return, the government has changed the rules to enable VIPs with a “Euro 2020 invite” to avoid having to self-isolate or quarantine when they arrive in the country.

“The list of those allowed to bypass the government’s quarantine restrictions include executive members of UEFA, members of the council of FIFA and senior executives of the companies sponsoring Euro 2020,” reports Sky News.

Responding to the issue, Whittingdale told Sky News that ‘important people’ were exempt from the restrictions.

Important for football or “morally inconsistent”?

UEFA and FIFA officials will be allowed into the UK to attend the #Euro2020 finals. But is that fair when we can’t visit many of our holiday destinations?

Here’s what the media minister John Whittingdale thinks.#KayBurley DC pic.twitter.com/uBXLWv9qjL — Kay Burley (@KayBurley) June 23, 2021

“We’ve always said that for some people who are important, players, for instance…” said Whittingdale.

Host Kay Burley responded: “So people who want to go on holiday are not important. Is that what you’re saying?”

The MP then attempted to deflect by saying the measures were only lifted for a limited number of people.

“And just in case you don’t want to watch the video…..the answer isn’t that they think you are important,” responded one outraged viewer on Twitter.

This once again underscores the fact that COVID-19 restrictions don’t apply to the elite.

As we have previously documented, there are innumerable examples of politicians and elitists brazenly violating the same stifling rules that they imposed on everyone else.

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TGIF: Liberty as a Problem-Solving Process | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on June 25, 2021

Much more could be and has been said on this subject, but the upshot is this: the best way to expose and correct problems and errors is to leave people free.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-liberty-as-problem-solver/

by Sheldon Richman

Strictly speaking, liberty isn’t the solution to problems. It’s what creates the framework in which solutions can be discovered. That is an important distinction because it reminds us that advocates of full-blown liberty do not offer the world a problem-free society but “only” a society in which problems are discovered and problem-solvers are mobilized as quickly, fairly, and efficiently as impossible.

To get this point across to students in lectures, I used to quote the the title of a 1970 hit record: “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden.” Social troubles will not disappear with the emergence of full freedom, but the chances of spotting and addressing them will be maximized in the most just way. That’s the best we can hope for in a world of scarcity and uncertainty. On the other hand, that’s not too shabby, is it?

What makes this happen? The answer can be captured in a single word: incentives. In a free society people are rewarded–they profit–by spotting and solving problems or correcting errors, before others have done so. Self-interest is further aligned with the interest of others.

This aspect of social life has been developed for many decades by the most important economists, among whom I would spotlight those of the Austrian school. In the 20th century they include Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Israel Kirzner, and Murray Rothbard, followed by a couple of later generations of social scientists who continue to work in this tradition.

If the incentive system is to work, people need to be free to offer solutions. The scientist Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), in writing about education, wrote that to discover the best methods, we need an environment characterized by “unbounded liberty, and even caprice.” As Priestley also put it, “Now, of all arts, those stand the fairest chance of being brought to perfection, in which there is opportunity of making the most experiments and trials.” (I wrote about Priestley’s radical advocacy of freedom in education in Freedom and School Choice in American Education.)

The logic behind Priestley’s idea isn’t complicated. We don’t always know if a method of accomplishing something will work–however good it may look on paper. It has to be tried. Since that’s the case, we need a highly decentralized environment in which ideas can be tested. (I don’t like the word system for what I have in mind because that suggests an overall design rather than what Hayek called “spontaneous order.”) In a centralized system, trial and error would be dicey since the inevitable mistakes would be committed on a large scale, with little chance for individuals to opt out. But in a decentralized environment, mistakes are necessarily contained, readily observed by others, and then corrected by those who offer a different product or service.

Government agents face different incentives since government usually is the only game in town. In fact, they face perverse incentives: politicians and bureaucrats may prosper by the existence and even the exacerbation of problems. If an agency is failing, the solution most often is to appropriate more money! And since government centralizes approaches to problems, mistakes are committed on a large scale, especially when they are undertaken at the national level. Federalism can reduce the scale of error, but not nearly as much as the free market can because state and local governments lack other features of the marketplace.

This point turns the spotlight on another aspect of a free society: competition. Competition is what happens with one person thinks he or she has a better way of doing something than someone else does. The way to find out is to offer it to the public. This shows that competition and cooperation are two sides of the same coin, not opposites. But if the government erects obstacles to upstart competitors, the it throttles the process, and better ways of addressing problems are left on the shelf, if undiscovered at all.

Hayek called competition a “discovery procedure,” which gets at a crucial point. I call competition the “universal solvent.” We can find a similar idea in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, in which he extols the truth-discovering value of the radically free exchange of ideas. (My favorite line from that book: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”)

Freedom and competition make possible discoveries that would not have been found otherwise precisely because it is only in that environment–the market order–that people encounter circumstances and alternatives with respect to which they will demonstrate in action their true preferences–preferences they might not have expected to demonstrate. This is part of what is meant by “spontaneous order.” For this reason, government planners cannot hope to simulate market outcomes. The planners are barred from ever knowing what would have happened if people were left free. As James Buchanan pointed out:

I want to argue that the “order” of the market emerges only from the process of voluntary exchange among the participating individuals. The “order” is, itself, defined as the outcome of the process that generates it. The “it,” the allocation-distribution result, does not, and cannot, exist independently of the trading process. Absent this process, there is and can be no order.”

…Individuals do not act so as to maximize utilities described in independently-existing functions. They confront genuine choices, and the sequence of decisions taken may be conceptualized, ex post (after the choices), in terms of “as if” functions that are maximized. But these “as if” functions are, themselves, generated in the choosing process, not separately from such process. If viewed in this perspective, there is no means by which even the most idealized omniscient designer could duplicate the results of voluntary interchange. The potential participants do not know until they enter the process what their own choices will be. From this it follows that it is logically impossible for an omniscient designer to know, unless, of course, we are to preclude individual freedom of will.

Much more could be and has been said on this subject, but the upshot is this: the best way to expose and correct problems and errors is to leave people free.

About Sheldon Richman

Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute, senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society, and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He is the former senior editor at the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies, former editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education, and former vice president at the Future of Freedom Foundation. His latest books are Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.

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Scientists Worry Next Flu Season Will Be a Disaster – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on June 25, 2021

If masks and social distancing worked like magic to prevent the spread of influenza, why did these measures not eradicate SARS-CoV-2? Masking and social distancing could not possibly have prevented influenza while simultaneously having no measurable impact on COVID-19.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/06/joseph-mercola/scientists-worry-next-flu-season-will-be-a-disaster/

By Joseph Mercola

Mercola.com

Not only are we faced with aggressive attempts to force us into participating in a recklessly dangerous COVID-19 mass vaccination experiment, mainstream media are now drumming up concerns about the next flu season on top of it. As reported by NBC News:1

“More than a year after the pandemic started, Covid-19 is still ravaging parts of the world, but now scientists are warning that another virus could be a serious threat in the coming months: influenza.

This season, the flu virtually disappeared, with less than 2,000 lab-confirmed cases in the United States to date, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.2 In a typical flu season, the U.S. could see more than 200,000 lab-confirmed cases by this time of year, a tiny fraction of the true number of cases, estimated to range from 9 million to 45 million annually …

According to scientists like Dr. Andy Pekosz, a professor of microbiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a year without much flu could lead to a year with a whole lot of flu.

‘We’ve gone over a year without a significant portion of the population getting infected with flu and getting immunity because of that,’ Pekosz said. ‘That could mean that the susceptible people in the population to flu are going to be increasing.’”

Did Masks and Social Distancing Eliminate Influenza?

According to NBC News,3 COVID-19 mitigation measures such as universal mask wearing, social distancing and lockdowns prevented transmission of influenza during the 2020/2021 season. Well, as the old saying goes, “If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.”

First of all, the idea that masks and social distancing magically eradicated influenza, not just in the U.S. but around the world,4 is not supported by any serious science on masks, most of which actually looked at flu viruses. I’ll review some of those below.

It’s also implausible for the simple fact that COVID-19 statistics on cases, hospitalizations and mortality were all massively manipulated. There’s simply no telling how many so-called COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and probably even deaths, were actually flu-related.

Everyone, everywhere was being tested for COVID-19. Not influenza. And anyone presenting flu-like symptoms was automatically assumed to have COVID-19. Even if the flu was tested for and was positive, any falsely positive COVID test would change the diagnosis from flu to COVID-19. If masks and social distancing worked like magic to prevent the spread of influenza, why did these measures not eradicate SARS-CoV-2? Masking and social distancing could not possibly have prevented influenza while simultaneously having no measurable impact on COVID-19.

Granted, each year, one particular strain of influenza virus will tend to predominate (but will vary from region to region), but it’s never 100% just one strain. So, the likelihood of virtually all infections this past year being due to SARS-CoV-2 is ridiculously small to say the least.

See the rest here

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CBS 62 Insider GOES PUBLIC Exposing Network’s Forced Vaccination Rhetoric and Bias – Forbidden Knowledge TV

Posted by M. C. on June 25, 2021

Over the past year and half of corporate COVID mask mandates and a borderline forced vaccination policy, meteorologist and fill-in host, April Moss also witnessed many instances of completely unethical non-journalism and brazen propaganda at her TV station, such as when ViacomCBS corporate headquarters, had their brands, MTV and Comedy Central Brasil join with Facebook and Instagram to strong-arm the Brazilian population into getting vaccinated with their #NãoVacila (“Don’t Hesitate”) program.

https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/cbs-62-insider-goes-public-exposing-networks-forced-vaccination-rhetoric-and-bias/

There’s hope that not everyone who works for the Mainstream Media is a full-blown psychopath, despite the monumental torrent of weaponized lies and evil that they have wreaked upon the world in recent years.

Project Veritas has seen two brave young women come forward in the past week, Ivory Hecker from Houston’s FoxNews affiliate station and April Moss from Detroit’s CBS affiliate, who have since been terminated because they stood for truth and freedom.

Over the past year and half of corporate COVID mask mandates and a borderline forced vaccination policy, meteorologist and fill-in host, April Moss also witnessed many instances of completely unethical non-journalism and brazen propaganda at her TV station, such as when ViacomCBS corporate headquarters, had their brands, MTV and Comedy Central Brasil join with Facebook and Instagram to strong-arm the Brazilian population into getting vaccinated with their #NãoVacila (“Don’t Hesitate”) program.

“This issue is not just about me. I’m watching our whole nation suffer, because they’re put underneath these policies that are enacted by corporations and this is a human rights issue and every American and every person on Earth has the right to breathe fresh air…

“The people are recognizing that elected officials are not making decisions in the peoples’ best interest and as a journalist, I feel responsible…to bring these questions to light.”

She continues, “No longer is true journalism being executed anymore. I feel like it is one of the biggest crimes in history, right now. Because, if we are shaping the American public’s mind, then we need to be seeking truth and every single journalist who goes to school for journalism, the number one thing is integrity, honesty, seeking truth. We are supposed to be the people that bring light to corruption and subjects…

I feel like I’m watching my country disintegrate and if I don’t get up and do something when I’m able to, I just don’t know that I could live with myself.”

Contributed by Alexandra Bruce

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The Spike Protein Is the Killer – Beware of mRNA “Vaccines” – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization

Posted by M. C. on June 25, 2021

The spike proteins being activated in virtually every cell of the human body are overwhelming the body’s immune system, thus, fighting it, rather than enhancing it. This may lead to numerous complications and infections over time. Some of them, like blood clotting, resulting in thrombosis and other heart ailments – and death – may be immediate results after the inoculation. Other potentially fatal effects, many of neurological nature, may not show up immediately but only over time – after one, two, or three years? It will then be difficult to trace the infirmity produced by the Spike Protein back to the vaccine.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/spike-protein-killer-beware-mrna-vaccines/5748384

By Peter Koenig

Beware of the Spike Protein! Beware of mRNA injections!

To do so, you have to absolutely avoid taking or being coerced into accepting the mRNA “non-vaccine” – experimental gene therapy. Because that’s what it is. The experiment is you. Already in SARS-1 of 2002 / 2003, the original, affecting principally the Chinese genome, as did this first covid-19 virus, more appropriately called SARS-CoV-2; it addressed the Chinese DNA. Complements of Harvard’s clandestine, illegal Chinese DNA harvesting in the late 1990s and 2000. See this.

When the Harvard people finally were caught and kicked out of China, it was too late. They had already collected hundreds of thousands, if not millions of DNA samples – upon which most-likely US P4 bio-war labs manufactured this particular corona virus.

This is how Josh MIttledorf puts it:

“The spike protein is the part of the virus structure that interfaces with the host cell. SARS 1 and SARS 2 viruses both have spike proteins that bind to a human cell receptor called ACE-2, common in lung cells but also present in other parts of the body. Binding to the cell’s ACE-2 receptor is like the wolf knocking at the door of Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. “Hello, grandmama. I’m your granddaughter. Please let me in.” The virus is a wolf wearing a red cape and hood, pretends to be an ACE-2 enzyme molecule seeking entrance to the cell.” See this.

Covid-19, alias SARS-CoV-2, is a perfected version of SARS-1, the original one of 2002 / 2003 that hit primarily China. In early 2020, once Wuhan and much of the Hubei Province, and later other parts of China, were sealed off and under lockdown, because Chinese scientists reacted fast to what they immediately knew, this was a new attempt at attacking China, the Chinese health system – the Chinese population. The Chinese authorities were called dictatorial – and followed by the usual denigrations – but they were successful in containing the virus and in dominating it, keeping the damage it caused within boundaries.

Due to these various lockdowns and other hygienic and health measures, close to 80% of the Chinese manufacturing capacity was closed, which had an enormous impact on the rest of the world, depending on Chinese supply chains. Thanks to China’s severe measures to overcome the pandemic as quickly and health-efficiently as possible, China’s economy was up and running again within about six to eight months, and practically to full capacity by the end of 2020.

The inventor of the mRNA-type of vaccine, Dr. Robert Malone, says that the vaccine causes lipid nanoparticles to accumulate in different organ tissues, and specially “in high concentration” in ovaries, meaning, it causes infertility and / or often miscarriages in pregnant women. See this – including a 15 min. video interview with Dr. Malone and evolutionary biologist Dr. Bret Weinstein. What makes the mRNA “non-vaccine”, better called by its CDC assigned name – experimental gene-therapy – so dangerous, is that it produces spike proteins throughout every cell in the human body.

The cause for this rapid and often deadly proliferation of the spike protein is what Dr. Jane Ruby, medical expert and pharmaceutical researcher, calls “Magnetofection”, an aggressive magnetic gel delivery system, included in the injection – to transport the spike protein in “warp speed” into every cell of the human body.

The German manufacturer, Chemicell GmbH, Berlin (see this) of this special magnetic gel says it’s not for use in humans. Yet, Moderna and Pfizer are using it in their mRNA experimental gene-therapy, about which they lie and call it falsely “vaccine”. – Watch Dr. Jane Ruby’s 9 min video here.

This magnetofection transport system is so powerful, that people, who got their jab, were able to stick magnets on their body. The COVID “non-vaccine” injected lipid nanoparticles tell the body to produce the spike protein. Thanks to the magnetic gel, they rapidly leave the injection site and accumulate in organs and tissues. See this by Dr. Alex Pierson.

The spike proteins being activated in virtually every cell of the human body are overwhelming the body’s immune system, thus, fighting it, rather than enhancing it. This may lead to numerous complications and infections over time. Some of them, like blood clotting, resulting in thrombosis and other heart ailments – and death – may be immediate results after the inoculation. Other potentially fatal effects, many of neurological nature, may not show up immediately but only over time – after one, two, or three years? It will then be difficult to trace the infirmity produced by the Spike Protein back to the vaccine.

In a compelling 1-minute video, Dr. Mike Yeadon, former Pfizer Vice President and Chief of Science, warns, “Everyone who takes the experimental vaccine cannot escape death”. See this.

We can only hope that these “compromised” mostly western governments will come to their senses and realize in time what they are doing to the very populations that elected them – and are paying for their livelihood.

If these so-called “world leaders” – imagine, 193 UN member governments follow the same script – something is not quite right, does not fit the agenda of health protection, but fits rather an evil plan against humanity – if these “world leaders” continue following the dictates of their dark satanic masters, they may end up in a Nuremberg 2.0 kind of Court of Justice for crimes against humanity.

Dr. Reiner Füllmich, German-American lawyer and leading member of the German Corona Investigative Committee, has already filed several lawsuits, including class action suits in Canada and the US, and initiated legal prosecution against individuals and institutions mostly in Europe. See the video below – Crimes against Humanity – and this.

https://www.bitchute.com/embed/zlVZoZ68Q5Iq/

Sociologist, philosopher, teacher and writer, Ed Curtin, had this to say:

I know that the experimental mRNA “vaccines” that are being pushed on everyone are not traditional vaccines but dangerous experiments whose long-term consequences are unknown. And I know that Moderna says its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” functions “like an operating system on a computer” and that Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, says that the lipid nanoparticles from the injections travel throughout the body and settle in large quantities in multiple organs where the spike protein, being biologically active, can cause massive damage and that the FDA has known this.

Additionally, I know that tens of thousands of people have suffered adverse effects from these injections and many thousands have died from them and that these figures are greatly underestimated due to the reporting systems.  I know that with this number of casualties in the past these experimental shots would have been stopped long ago or never started.  That they have not, therefore, convinces me that a radically evil agenda is under way whose goal is harm not health because those in charge know what I know and much more. See full text of Ed’s essay here.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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