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Ten Lessons From the Muses-“We were all born for each other”
Posted by M. C. on May 22, 2021
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Marcus Aurelius, stoicism | Leave a Comment »
Caught Red-Handed: CDC Changes Test Thresholds To Virtually Eliminate New COVID Cases Among Vaxx’d | ZeroHedge
Posted by M. C. on May 22, 2021
by Tyler Durden
Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,
Essentially, Covid19 has long been shown – to those willing to pay attention – to be an entirely created pandemic narrative built on two key factors:
- False-positive tests. The unreliable PCR test can be manipulated into reporting a high number of false-positives by altering the cycle threshold (CT value)
- Inflated Case-count. The incredibly broad definition of “Covid case”, used all over the world, lists anyone who receives a positive test as a “Covid19 case”, even if they never experienced any symptoms.
Without these two policies, there would never have been an appreciable pandemic at all, and now the CDC has enacted two policy changes which means they no longer apply to vaccinated people.
Firstly, they are lowering their CT value when testing samples from suspected “breakthrough infections”.
From the CDC’s instructions for state health authorities on handling “possible breakthrough infections” (uploaded to their website in late April):
For cases with a known RT-PCR cycle threshold (Ct) value, submit only specimens with Ct value ≤28 to CDC for sequencing. (Sequencing is not feasible with higher Ct values.)
Throughout the pandemic, CT values in excess of 35 have been the norm, with labs around the world going into the 40s.
Essentially labs were running as many cycles as necessary to achieve a positive result, despite experts warning that this was pointless (even Fauci himself said anything over 35 cycles is meaningless).
The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) is altering its practices of data logging and testing for “Covid19” in order to make it seem the experimental gene-therapy “vaccines” are effective at preventing the alleged disease.
They made no secret of this, announcing the policy changes on their website in late April/early May, (though naturally without admitting the fairly obvious motivation behind the change).
The trick is in their reporting of what they call “breakthrough infections” – that is people who are fully “vaccinated” against Sars-Cov-2 infection, but get infected anyway.
Essentially, Covid19 has long been shown – to those willing to pay attention – to be an entirely created pandemic narrative built on two key factors:
- False-positive tests. The unreliable PCR test can be manipulated into reporting a high number of false-positives by altering the cycle threshold (CT value)
- Inflated Case-count. The incredibly broad definition of “Covid case”, used all over the world, lists anyone who receives a positive test as a “Covid19 case”, even if they never experienced any symptoms.
Without these two policies, there would never have been an appreciable pandemic at all, and now the CDC has enacted two policy changes which means they no longer apply to vaccinated people.
Firstly, they are lowering their CT value when testing samples from suspected “breakthrough infections”.
From the CDC’s instructions for state health authorities on handling “possible breakthrough infections” (uploaded to their website in late April):
For cases with a known RT-PCR cycle threshold (Ct) value, submit only specimens with Ct value ≤28 to CDC for sequencing. (Sequencing is not feasible with higher Ct values.)
Throughout the pandemic, CT values in excess of 35 have been the norm, with labs around the world going into the 40s.
Essentially labs were running as many cycles as necessary to achieve a positive result, despite experts warning that this was pointless (even Fauci himself said anything over 35 cycles is meaningless).
But NOW, and only for fully vaccinated people, the CDC will only accept samples achieved from 28 cycles or fewer. That can only be a deliberate decision in order to decrease the number of “breakthrough infections” being officially recorded.
Secondly, asymptomatic or mild infections will no longer be recorded as “covid cases”.
That’s right. Even if a sample collected at the low CT value of 28 can be sequenced into the virus alleged to cause Covid19, the CDC will no longer be keeping records of breakthrough infections that don’t result in hospitalisation or death.
From their website:
As of May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to focus on identifying and investigating only hospitalized or fatal cases due to any cause. This shift will help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance. Previous case counts, which were last updated on April 26, 2021, are available for reference only and will not be updated moving forward.
Just like that, being asymptomatic – or having only minor symptoms – will no longer count as a “Covid case” but only if you’ve been vaccinated.
The CDC has put new policies in place which effectively created a tiered system of diagnosis. Meaning, from now on, unvaccinated people will find it much easier to be diagnosed with Covid19 than vaccinated people.
Consider…
Person A has not been vaccinated. They test positive for Covid using a PCR test at 40 cycles and, despite having no symptoms, they are officially a “covid case”.
Person B has been vaccinated. They test positive at 28 cycles, and spend six weeks bedridden with a high fever. Because they never went into a hospital and didn’t die they are NOT a Covid case.
Person C, who was also vaccinated, did die. After weeks in hospital with a high fever and respiratory problems. Only their positive PCR test was 29 cycles, so they’re not officially a Covid case either.
The CDC is demonstrating the beauty of having a “disease” that can appear or disappear depending on how you measure it.
To be clear: If these new policies had been the global approach to “Covid” since December 2019, there would never have been a pandemic at all.
If you apply them only to the vaccinated, but keep the old rules for the unvaccinated, the only possible result can be that the official records show “Covid” is much more prevalent among the latter than the former.
This is a policy designed to continuously inflate one number, and systematically minimise the other.
What is that if not an obvious and deliberate act of deception?
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: CDC, Test Thresholds | Leave a Comment »
EconomicPolicyJournal.com: 7 Product Categories Being Slammed by Price Inflation
Posted by M. C. on May 22, 2021
https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2021/05/7-product-categories-being-slammed-by.html
The cost of grocery items has climbed 2.4% overall in the last year, but the jump in retail meat prices has been much more dramatic. Compared to April 2020, pork prices are up 11%, bacon prices are up 16.3%, and beef prices are up 4.8%. Poultry prices are 11% higher than last year. The price for wings, which hit a record $2.92 per pound is 180% higher than they were in early 2020.
After hitting historic lows in 2020, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. has risen above $3 for the first time since 2014, according to the AAA.
House price bids are coming in above the asking price, sight unseen. The average house is up 33.9% on a year-on-year basis.
The price for lumber has soared by 377% in the last year, adding as much as $36,000 to the price of a newly built home.
Retail prices for electronics have recently started to climb, too, led by the price of big screen TVs, which are 30% more expensive than they were last year.
Used cars and truck prices increased by 10% just last month, and are up 21% over the last 12 months.
The price of renting a car was up 16.2% last month.
It is only the beginning folks, there is much more to come, especially if the Federal Reserve continues its mad money printing. –RW
(via LifeHacker)
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Gasoline, grocery, lumber, price inflation | Leave a Comment »
Cops Shoot Unarmed Man 122 Times Over Broken Tag Light | The Libertarian Institute
Posted by M. C. on May 22, 2021
One of the most bombshell details of the case is the fact that attorneys found the reason for the stop was entirely unjustified. Lawyers claim that the officer who initiated the original stop, Teannie Hernandez, lied about the reason for the stop that October night.
Police lied about the reason for the stop, lied about the reason for the chase, lied about the reason for the death by firing squad, lied to prosecutors about the facts of the case, and destroyed video evidence of the actual shooting and crash. Essentially, an innocent man who ran from an unlawful traffic stop, was executed by police, who investigated and cleared themselves in his murder.
Citizens of Hialeah beware, corrupt killer cops patrol your city.
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/cops-shoot-unarmed-man-122-times-over-broken-tag-light/
by Matt Agorist
On the night he was killed, Lester Machado, 24, was targeted by police who falsely claimed he was driving with a broken license plate light. For some reason—which we will never know—Machado did not stop when police attempted to pull him over and police used this as a reason to chase him down and fire more than a 100 rounds into his car. Machado was unarmed and his car was disabled when six cops fired a stupefying 122 bullets into his car, executing him in firing squad fashion.
Though Machado’s tragic death unfolded in 2017, attorneys for the family have discovered new evidence in the case which they say is enough to prosecute the officers involved.
“This is not something you could have just looked at one report and said, ‘aha, this is a cover-up of a bad shooting,’” said Rick Diaz, the family’s attorney. “It took a lot of time.”
One of the most bombshell details of the case is the fact that attorneys found the reason for the stop was entirely unjustified. Lawyers claim that the officer who initiated the original stop, Teannie Hernandez, lied about the reason for the stop that October night.
When lawyers were given access to Machado’s Honda Accord, they hooked the battery back up and the light worked perfectly.
“In fact, despite the heavy collision to the Honda’s rear end, all of the lights on the back of the Machado vehicle, brake lights, tag lights, and back up lights are fully functional to this day,” the renewed lawsuit states.
The lawsuit also alleges a coverup took place as one key piece of evidence—surveillance footage of the chase and shooting—vanished while in police custody.
What’s more, lawyers claim police denied potentially life-saving medical treatment to Machado as he lie bleeding out in his vehicle. The 911 call between a dispatcher with the Hialeah Fire Rescue Department and another with Miami-Dade Fire Rescue showed that authorities couldn’t agree on who had jurisdiction over the incident. In the ten minutes it took them to decide, Machado bled to death.
“For more than ten minutes, as Machado was bleeding out and dying, this ridiculous argument ensued,” said the lawsuit.
As the Miami Herald reports, “the federal lawsuit was originally filed against Hialeah and a slew of officers in October 2019, alleging Hialeah police violated Machado’s civil rights and inflicted a wrongful death. The amended complaint was filed this week after the family’s lawyers pored over video and radio dispatch recordings, crime scene evidence and interviewed dozens of police personnel during depositions. One of the key depositions was that of former Hialeah Officer Maria Benitez, who was involved in the chase and later told the lawyers about what she believed were efforts to obfuscate what happened that night.”
Benitez would go on to blow the whistle on the department, claiming they engaged in a coverup and told lawyers that officer Hernandez admitted she had no probable cause to stop Machado that night.
“I’ll just say the tag light was out,” Hernandez said, according to Benitez. “I’ll also say he was swerving across lanes.”
Benitez said Hernandez told her she was simply trying to pull Machado over to boost her arrest stats before the upcoming performance evaluation. Benitez also said the department pressured her to say it looked like Machado had a gun but “Benitez simply refused to lie because it was not true,” the lawsuit said.
According to the lawsuit, the entire reason for the stop, the subsequent chase, and the death by firing squad were all unjust.
Police claim they used such force because Machado “attempted to ram” a patrol car during the pursuit. However, the lawsuit states the officer falsely claimed Machado attempted to ram him and the radio dispatch proves police were told to cancel the pursuit.
The Hialeah police department has a policy of not pursuing vehicles over minor traffic infractions and they were told to call off the chase. “Do not chase the vehicle,” a dispatcher repeated, according to the logs.
But then another officer got on the radio and falsely reported that the Honda “had actually struck” one of the police cars, the lawsuit said. Lt. Antonio Luis reversed the sergeant’s order and instructed his officers to “proceed.”
“He rammed my unit. He rammed my unit,” Hialeah police officer, Esteban Holland falsely claimed over the radio. But this never happened. Surveillance footage would later show that it was Holland who struck Machado’s vehicle on the side.
Police would later go on to claim Machado attempted to ram two other officers using this as justification to begin firing through their own windshield as they drove down the road.
According to the lawsuit, as reported by the Herald, one officer even began firing at the moving car from inside his speeding car, with Lt. Luis conducting a dangerous “PIT maneuver,” a tactic in which a police car bumps the back of a suspect’s car and accelerates in order to cause it to lose control. That’s what happened: Luis hit the Honda’s right-rear bumper, causing it to lose control, spin counterclockwise and crash into the Metrorail column.
This completely disabled Machado’s Honda Accord.
Despite Machado’s vehicle being completely disabled and despite the fact that Machado was unarmed and posed absolutely no threat, a hail of gunfire immediately erupted. More than 100 rounds struck Machado’s vehicle.
“During this entire episode, The Honda could not possibly be used as a deadly weapon as when it hit the Metrorail column it was visibly disabled with its rear axle partially detached and all of its airbags deployed,” according to the lawsuit.
Prosecutors would then go on to clear all the officers involved, using a highly flawed “fleeing felon” law which allows cops to kill fleeing suspects if they believe they are a danger to the public. Machado was trapped in a disabled vehicle, he was unarmed, and he was accused of fleeing a stop for a broken license plate light — yet somehow, prosecutors claimed he presented a public threat.
“The officers had a lawful right to try and stop Lester Machado for his traffic offense and arrest him when he willfully fled and escalated his conduct to that which endangered the lives of the officers and citizens on the road,” the State Attorney’s Office wrote in its final report on the case in 2018.
According to the lawsuit, however, Hialeah police were deceptive with their presentation of the evidence to prosecutors and they tricked” the State Attorney’s Office while engaging in a “massive and extensive cover-up to protect the shooters and witness officers from potential criminal charges, administrative charges, and civil liability.”
Police lied about the reason for the stop, lied about the reason for the chase, lied about the reason for the death by firing squad, lied to prosecutors about the facts of the case, and destroyed video evidence of the actual shooting and crash. Essentially, an innocent man who ran from an unlawful traffic stop, was executed by police, who investigated and cleared themselves in his murder.
Citizens of Hialeah beware, corrupt killer cops patrol your city.
This article was originally featured at The Free Thought Project
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Hialeah, Lester Machado, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, Teannie Hernandez, Unarmed Man | Leave a Comment »
“No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, No Unvaxxed” – OffGuardian
Posted by M. C. on May 22, 2021
When they said ‘there were no plans for ‘discriminatory’ Covid vaccine passports’, they were quietly funding at least eight different vaccine passport schemes since last year.
https://off-guardian.org/2021/05/21/no-irish-no-blacks-no-dogs-no-unvaxxed/
Dustin Broadbery
The government is pressing ahead with its Vaccine Passport and plans for a two-tier society are afoot. The effrontery of those leading the charge beggar’s belief.
When they said ‘there were no plans for ‘discriminatory’ Covid vaccine passports’, they were quietly funding at least eight different vaccine passport schemes since last year.
And that’s just the half of it. We are midway through a Europe-wide feasibility study for the development of a common vaccine passport, launched by the European Commission in 2018.
They would have you believe – they were caught with their trousers down, their policies are proportionate to the emergency as it unfolds, and at all times they operate according to a system of informed consent.
But hang on a minute. Since the onset of SARS-CoV-2, they have played the most astonishing game of deception and manipulation. Cooking the books, fiddling the tills and distorted their official numbers.
They have deliberately plunged society into two camps – skeptics and adherents, compliant and non-conformists.
Last year established the mood for pettifogging anyone questioning the narrative, while those refusing to comply were branded narcissists and psychopaths or denounced as ‘Covid deniers’ – the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier.
This government has polarised the nation on a scale never before attempted, legitimising a particular brand of prejudice and enmity not seen in Europe since the days of the Third Reich. And once the NHS App becomes your ticket to freedom on Monday, they will finally have means to weed out and punish dissidence while rewarding blind faith in authority. No matter how injurious their compliance is to society at large, the silent majority have lost their moral compass.
But it must be understood – this principle of divide and rule is as old as the hills. It was not so long ago that signs hung in the windows of establishments in Britain that read: ‘No dogs, No Irish, No blacks’. The difference today is that it won’t be the colour of your skin, your class, gender or sexual orientation that will condemn you, it will be something far more virulent – your ideology.
That this crucial point has been entirely missed by the chattering classes is astonishing. And despite the most flagrant attempts to marginalise large segments of society, identitarians, the woke brigade and other erstwhile defenders of the most marginalised remain largely unphased. Unless it is to flap their arms in the air over higher rates of vaccine hesitancy amongst ethnic minorities. But the rest of us can go to hell.
Who cares about anyone not from a protected social group, right?
In this bizarre parochial moral imperative, discrimination is only frowned upon if you’re discriminating against someone’s authorised and rubber-stamped marks of distinction, whereas discrimination, of and by itself, is entirely permissible.
These crowd-pleasers would defend their moral high ground by telling you “the unvaccinated are selfishly putting others’ lives at risk”, or that “mask refuseniks are superspreaders”. But hold on a minute. All of this is pure conjecture which, like everything else under the post-COVID sun, has been founded on speculative science and policies pulled straight from the magician’s hat.
Other than taking the government on its word, where is the actual evidence of asymptomatic transmission? Where is the evidence of mask efficacy?
In fact, can someone point me to a single risk assessment for any of these high-risk interventions? But to deny someone entry into an establishment, to prevent them from travelling, shopping, or worse, stepping foot outside of their own bolthole is no moot point. These are very real and tangible forms of discrimination, for no other reason than you personally disagree with their choices.
These people have clearly made peace with the fact that membership to society is now the exception rather than the rule. They labour under some neotribal sense of entitlement – if you’re not with us, you’re against us. Like their neolithic ancestors they take refuge in the herd from an unseen predator threatening their hand to mouth existences. Positioning themselves in the upper echelons of this looming two-tier system, with others equally desperate to get their lives back and ready to submit to whatever ephemeral demands are made of them in return for one coveted free pass to re-enter polite society.
While the rest of us – who will not be spoken for, bribed or coerced – will risk excommunication from the social-balm in defence of our principles.
This loose association of the poorest and most marginalised, conscientious objectors, lockdown skeptics, and anyone with a shred of faith in their god-given sovereignty of being or bodily autonomy will wage a personal crusade of civil disobedience against the tyranny de jour, as Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King did before them. For them, braver men have endured far worse for much less.
But what the first group fails to realise is that they are doing the unofficial bidding of another group – the well-healed members of our political establishment to whom the rules do not apply. Who are protected by more exemptions than the rest of us are governed by regulations. And who, at the onset of the pandemic, were not caught with their pants down, as the general population was.
As this group spoke of herd immunity, they quietly struck a £119 million COVID advertising and propaganda deal with one of the world’s biggest marketing companies. Going on to become the UK’s biggest advertiser in 2020.
Just a day before the first lockdown, their Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) began work on the most criminal propaganda campaign in British history:
Extract from UK gov’t report “Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures”, read the whole thing here.
See the rest here
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: coronavirus, Covid19, Dustin Broadbery, EU, Masks, the new normal, UK, vaccine passports, Vaccines | Leave a Comment »
The Other Virus: Learned Helplessness | The American Conservative
Posted by M. C. on May 22, 2021
One of the better examples of learned helplessness is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a great book made into an impressive movie starring a lean Jack Nicholson. Nurse Ratched cows a group of mentally ill men into complete learned helplessness, encouraging them to rat each other out for small offenses, and to follow her every order no matter how absurd. The kicker comes near the end when we learn all of the men (except Nicholson) are free to leave the hospital at any time. They just…can’t.
It is amazing how fast people stepped into the Nurse Ratched role. Within moments of COVID’s arrival in the national conscience, officials like California’s Gavin Newsom, and New York’s Andrew Cuomo and Bill De Blasio raced to assume fat emergency powers. They spent not one moment assessing the impact of their decisions to lock down against the effects of the lock down. They ignored information questioning the value of lock down. They turned topsy-turvy the idea that in a free society the burden of proof is on those who would restrict freedom and not on those who resist such restrictions.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-other-virus-learned-helplessness/
What is a culture of compliance, and ever-shifting rules, doing to us? 
(Victor Moussa/Shutterstock)
May 17, 2021|
12:01 am Peter Van Buren
Why would any American allow the government to deny him a final goodbye to the person who raised him? Why would anyone allow grandma to die untouched in a hospital room without fighting back? In the post-vaccination era, why don’t people remove their masks? Learned helplessness, employed as a control tool.
Learned helplessness is well documented. It takes place when an individual believes he continuously faces a negative, uncontrollable situation and stops trying to improve his circumstances, even when he has the ability to do so. Discovering the loss of control elicits a passive reaction to a harmful situation. Psychologists call this a maladaptive response, characterized by avoidance of challenges and the collapse of problem-solving when obstacles arise. You give up trying to fight back.
An example may help: You must keep up with ever-changing mask and other hygiene theater rules, many of which make no sense (mask in the gym, but not the pool; mask when going to the restaurant toilet but not at your table; NYC hotels are closed while Vegas casinos are open; Disney California closed while Disney Florida was open) and comply.
You could push back, but you have been made afraid at a core level (forget about yourself rascal, you’re going to kill grandma if you don’t do what we say) and so you just give in. Once upon a time we were told a vaccine would end it all, yet the restrictions remain largely in place. You’re left believing nothing will fix this. Helpless to resist, you comply, “out of an abundance of caution.”
American psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier created the term “learned helplessness” in 1967. They were studying animal behavior by delivering electric shocks to dogs (it was a simpler time). Dogs who learned they couldn’t escape the shock simply stopped trying, even after the scientists removed a barrier and the dog could have jumped away.
Learned helplessness has three main features: a passive response to trauma, disbelief that trauma can be controlled, and stress.
Example: You are being stalked by a killer disease which often has no outward symptoms. There is nothing you can do but hide inside and buy things from Amazon. The government failed to stop the virus initially, failed to warn you, failed to supply ventilators and PPE gear, and failed to produce a vaccine quickly enough. You may die. You may kill your family members along the way. You have lost your job by government decree and are forced to survive on unemployment and the odd stimulus check—manufactured dependence. It is all very real: WebMD saw a 251 percent increase in searches for anxiety this April.
Americans, with their cult-like devotion to victimhood, are primed for learned helplessness. Your problems are because you’re a POC, or fat, or on some spectrum. You are not responsible, can’t fix something so systemic, and best do what you are told.
The way out is to allow people to make decisions and choices on their own. This therapy is used with victims of learned helplessness such as hostages. During their confinement all the important decisions of their life, and most of the minor ones, were made by their captors. Upon release, many hostages fear things as simple as a meal choice and need to be coaxed out of helplessness one micro-choice at a time.
Example: You cannot choose where to stand, so follow the marks on the floor. Ignore the research saying three feet apart is as useful or useless as six feet apart. Don’t think about why the rules are the same inside a narrow hallway and outside in the fresh air but don’t apply at all on airplanes.
Kin to learned helplessness are enforcers. Suddenly your waitress transitions from someone serving you into someone ordering you to wear a mask, sit alone, eat outside, etc. Flight attendants morph from delivering drinks to holding the power to have security haul you to jail for unmasking when not actively eating. Companies once run by entrepreneurs are today controlled by the harassment-stalking undead from HR. We’ve become a republic of hall monitors. And there it is. The wrong people are in charge.
One of the better examples of learned helplessness is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a great book made into an impressive movie starring a lean Jack Nicholson. Nurse Ratched cows a group of mentally ill men into complete learned helplessness, encouraging them to rat each other out for small offenses, and to follow her every order no matter how absurd. The kicker comes near the end when we learn all of the men (except Nicholson) are free to leave the hospital at any time. They just…can’t.
It is amazing how fast people stepped into the Nurse Ratched role. Within moments of COVID’s arrival in the national conscience, officials like California’s Gavin Newsom, and New York’s Andrew Cuomo and Bill De Blasio raced to assume fat emergency powers. They spent not one moment assessing the impact of their decisions to lock down against the effects of the lock down. They ignored information questioning the value of lock down. They turned topsy-turvy the idea that in a free society the burden of proof is on those who would restrict freedom and not on those who resist such restrictions.
They were aided in manufacturing learned helplessness by the most sophisticated propaganda operation ever created. Already engorged with the coin of three years of fake news, the legacy media saw the value of a new crisis in working toward their two real goals: making as much money as possible garnering clicks, and defeating Donald Trump. Previous shows—Russiagate, with a hat tip to 9/11 when Americans demanded fewer freedoms to feel safer—illustrated the way. On a 24/7 basis Americans were injected with the message: You are helpless and Donald “COVID” Trump will kill you; your only hope is to comply fully with the people at CNN who are administering the electric shocks.
Truth is useless to propagandists, actually a threat. Look at what turned out to be false (in addition to Russiagate): We never ran out of ventilators or PPE or nurses or ICU beds or morgues. Masks are not needed outdoors. We did in fact develop a vaccine, several for that matter, in less than a year. Almost everyone who died was elderly or had serious comorbidities (a distinct class) but we salivated over “new case numbers” as the primary metric anyway because they went up so much faster. When people questioned the real-world view against the media portrayal, they were told about “asymptomatic COVID” or shunned as hoaxers. Everyone makes mistakes. But just as with Russiagate, all the media mistakes swung one way.
It worked. Condo boards boarded up their gyms. Restaurants forced diners to eat outside in the rain. Entire industries, such as tourism and hospitality, disappeared overnight. New groups were shoved into poverty and unemployment. Children were denied education, criminals released from jails. People were told not to hug their loved ones or celebrate birthdays or attend church. We were told to fear our neighbors as potential carriers.
Every time dissenting information popped up—Florida opening its beaches for Spring Break, for example—the media rushed in to declare everyone was going to die. Texas was declared dead, South Dakota was declared dead, and Americans believed it all even when reports of survivors started drifting out of Disney World.
Americans are not comfortable accepting that their lives being manipulated at this level, the way for example many Russians assume it to be so. We tend to dismiss such things as conspiracy theories and make an Oliver Stone joke. But ask yourself how many of the temporary security and surveillance measures enacted after 9/11 are still controlling our lives almost 20 years later. Is the terror threat still so real the FBI needs to monitor our social media in bulk? Was it ever?
Nothing here is to say vaccines don’t work, or are themselves dangerous. That’s another debate. This is about the politics of mass control. Add up the “doesn’t really make sense but we do it anyway” COVID rules and try to make sense of them. Why would otherwise smart leaders implement such rules, for example in New York’s case, purposely impoverishing a city or seeking to defund the police in the midst of triple digit rises in crime? Every time your answer is, “it just doesn’t make sense,” consider a scenario beyond coincidence where it would make sense, however out there that might be. It might be the most important thing you can do.
Then look out the window. Remember “15 days to flatten the curve?” With no voting or debate, a system based on a medical procedure capable of controlling our travel, which businesses we can visit, which hotels we can stay in, what jobs we can hold, what education we can access, at which point it is no more “voluntary” than breathing, was put into place. We no longer need to ask what is going to happen. Remember the real question is always why.
Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Andrew Cuomo, Bill de Blasio, compliance, Gavin Newsom, Learned Helplessness, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest | Leave a Comment »
FDA Protects Covid-19 Vaccine Makers Seeks Withdrawal Of Competing Dietary Supplement – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on May 22, 2021
Another potential cure brushed under the rug?
By Bill Sardi with Matthew Sardi
Amazon Appeases FDA Removes Sulfur-Based Dietary Supplement From Online Offerings Because It Cures COVID-19 And Threatens Vaccine Emergency-Use Provisions.
Late last year (2020) the FDA issued a warning letter that a sulfur-based dietary supplement couldn’t be lawfully marketed because it was first studied as a drug in 1963 and marketed in that same year under the trade name Mucomyst to break up mucus accumulation in the upper respiratory tract (bronchus, lung).
The dietary supplement industry legally challenged the FDA over this categorical restriction for use solely as a drug to treat disease to the exclusion of its use to promote health, which is the what dietary supplements are permitted to claim.
See the rest here
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: FDA, Mucomyst, N acetyl cysteine, NAC | Leave a Comment »
Uniformed U.S. Soldiers Giving Covid Jab at Bars?
Posted by M. C. on May 22, 2021
Show me your arm, the 2021 variant of show me your papers.
https://rumble.com/vhd5cz-uniformed-u.s.-soldiers-giving-covid-jab-at-bars.html
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Covid Jab, U.S. Soldiers | Leave a Comment »
Why the Misuse of the Word “Efficiency” Is Such a Problem | Mises Wire
Posted by M. C. on May 22, 2021
These confusions train others to ignore economists’ efficiency statements when dealing with what Franz Oppenheimer termed “the political means” of seeking one’s self-interest.
Unfortunately, virtually every government intervention justified by claims of enhancing efficiency is tainted with logical abuses, unless viewed as a way for the beneficiaries to more efficiently take what belongs to others. As a result, efficiency has largely been demoted from a useful term of analysis and insight to little more than another warning that the wise should watch their wallets.
https://mises.org/wire/why-misuse-word-efficiency-such-problem
An important impediment to understanding valuable insights economists have to offer is that they have trained people to ignore their pronouncements on efficiency. Economists’ common use of a standard of efficiency known as “potential compensation,” which is at odds with a more important concept in which efficiency is advanced whenever there is a Pareto improvement (named after Vilfredo Pareto), is a major reason.
Say there were a policy that supposedly produced $100 in benefits for Adam and imposed $40 in costs on Eve. In that situation, Adam could conceivably compensate Eve with something between $40 and $100. If such compensation was actually arranged and voluntarily agreed to, both parties would reveal their beliefs that the result was efficient because both expected to benefit. That would make such an arrangement a Pareto improvement, because those whose rights were involved were made better off, and no one was harmed. This is what happens in voluntary market transactions. However, in public policy, compensation is not generally paid to the losers, so “potential compensation” is a misleading guide, because some lose, violating the Pareto standard.
When compensation is acceptable and is paid, all parties get more in value than they give up. In such cases, what economists call efficient—in that there is the potential, via compensation, to make all parties better off—is same as what each individual sees as enhanced efficiency for themselves. In that case, there is no gap between the Pareto standard and that based on potential compensation.
But when compensation is not paid, what is alleged to be efficient for society under the potential compensation standard need not be an efficiency improvement for each party. This violates the Pareto standard, because some parties involved are made worse off. In the example above, Eve is made worse off by a supposedly efficient policy. That is why we so often see people strenuously object to “efficient” policies, requiring government coercion to enforce the supposedly beneficial “solution” over their objections.
The confusion can be compounded by economists’ tendency to also say that something is efficient if the “right” or “optimal” quantity of output is produced. Unfortunately, even if that quantity (unknowable in the absence of a market process to reveal it) were to be produced, affected parties could not know if it would actually benefit them until they knew how the cost burden would be distributed. Those who turn out to be disproportionately burdened could easily be losers, despite such supposed efficiency. This discrimination, whether imposed through regulations (e.g., restrictions imposed on owners of affected properties under the Endangered Species Act) or taxes (e.g., through progressive income taxes), breaks the connection between alleged efficiency and the enhanced well-being of those affected.
These confusions train others to ignore economists’ efficiency statements when dealing with what Franz Oppenheimer termed “the political means” of seeking one’s self-interest.
If an allegedly “efficient” policy does not make Eve better off, why should she care whether economists term the policy efficient? Those in her position (which all of us all too frequently are in) learn to ignore efficiency pronouncements as irrelevant to the real question—“Am I helped or hurt?” As a result, people learn that if they are helped (their benefits exceed their costs), they don’t care if it is accomplished through means economists call inefficient. On the other hand, if they are hurt (their costs exceed their benefits), they don’t care if economists term it efficient. In contrast, market exchanges by their nature are restricted to those which the parties involved agree are efficiency enhancing.
Economists’ pronouncements about “efficient” programs, poorly explained if explained at all, are used to support all sorts of government programs that violate the most central meaning of efficiency—the Pareto standard of gains, but not losses, to willing exchange participants. Yet such efficiency claims can always be heard from some economists—whom Henry Hazlitt once called “the best buyable minds,” in Economics in One Lesson.
As Hazlitt (and others) laid out, they sometimes look at short-run effects while ignoring often far more important longer-term effects; ignore or undercount relevant costs (including the additional costs to society from the distortions caused by the additional taxation); overcount benefits (alleging, for example, multiplier effects of spending, while ignoring the same multiplier effects in the opposite direction from the taxation required); count benefits as costs (many government projects are alleged to generate income and jobs, as if they were both benefits, when only the income is a benefit and the jobs are the costs people incur to get the added income); and perform a host of other logical contortions. And such warping of benefit-cost analysis from a technique to analyze issues more carefully and systematically, as Ben Franklin used it, into a framework to misrepresent them more convincingly, supports false claims that harming those affected increases efficiency.
Thinking in terms of efficiency can be helpful in increasing our well-being. But economists’ sloppy and inconsistent use of “efficiency” is a powerful source of misunderstanding. That is why whenever arguments are couched in efficiency language, one must evaluate them with great care before giving them credence.
In particular, a crucial underlying principle is that if the people who know the relevant circumstances and tradeoffs continue to cooperate across markets, they must believe it is efficient for them to do so, given their circumstances and alternatives. So overturning their decisions by government fiat is prima facie evidence that inefficiency will be created. Similarly, if people object to having a supposedly efficient policy imposed on them, that policy violates the standard that no one is made worse off. And when efficiency language disguises the transfer of decision-making over a person’s property to someone else, making the beneficiary the effective owner without paying for the privilege, the transfer is not really about efficiency.
Unfortunately, virtually every government intervention justified by claims of enhancing efficiency is tainted with logical abuses, unless viewed as a way for the beneficiaries to more efficiently take what belongs to others. As a result, efficiency has largely been demoted from a useful term of analysis and insight to little more than another warning that the wise should watch their wallets.
Author:
Gary M. Galles is a Professor of Economics at Pepperdine University and an adjunct scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. His research focuses on public finance, public choice, economic education, organization of firms, antitrust, urban economics, liberty, and the problems that undermine effective public policy. In addition to his most recent book, Pathways to Policy Failures (2020), his books include Lines of Liberty (2016), Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies (2014), and Apostle of Peace (2013).
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Efficiency, potential compensation, Vilfredo Pareto | Leave a Comment »
My Corner by Boyd Cathey-Time to Privatize Our Public Schools
Posted by M. C. on May 21, 2021
That hatred, that fury, that lunacy so apparent in the eyes of those demonstrators in March 2019 and so evident in thousands and thousands like them, begins in our schools with administrators and teachers, and with local school boards, dousing our children with the flammable ingredients which corrupt and pervert, and turn them into what I have termed modern “pod people.”
These “pod people” serve a larger and more fearsome purpose: the ultimate success of the Revolution against God and man. For their fanatical assault against what they perceive as white supremacy and racism is in fact an attack on Creation itself, on the natural laws of that Creation, and the God Who made it.
http://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/
Friends,
Recently, a good friend related to me some of the experiences his daughter was having in a high school not too far from him. You see, his daughter is a history teacher—or should we say “social studies” teacher, to be politically correct? It seems that the curriculum she must teach and the approved texts her students must use in the classroom are redolent thematically with the idea that from its beginning America was characterized by ingrained racism: indeed, a white racism which infected and colored practically everything, from the social structures in the colonies and later codified by a racist Constitution, to the dealings—both legal and familial—between inhabitants, to the very language they used to communicate their thoughts, beliefs, and ideas.
Like other teachers at her school my friend’s daughter is instructed to impart these insights as part of an overall educational template that suggests that from its earliest settling the America colonies, and then the American republic, were moored historically in a quasi-religious belief in “white supremacy” and the pervasive “racism” which defined it.
While not as forward or fulsome perhaps as the “1619 Project’s” recommendations and its embrace of “Critical Race Theory,” grammar and high school curricula echoing the “Project” now shape students in such a way as to prepare them, if they are college bound, for a fuller indoctrination as they continue their education.
Given that most freshly minted teachers coming out today from the vast majority of our country’s schools of education already possess a well-developed predisposition and vision that comports with the vision projected by the “1619 Project,” and that many local school boards are dominated by the same vision, is it any wonder what students in public schools are being taught?
And for those who go on to college, the ground is well prepared. From a young seven year old boy who is proud that his conservative parents supported Donald Trump, who goes to church with them regularly, whose everyday thoughts turn to games, sports and friends, and are millions of miles away from “wokeness,” we transition to the molded college journalism grad at age twenty-two from the University of North Carolina or from any number of other institutions of higher learning across the nation, who mouths fierce and unrelenting slogans about “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “intersectionality,” and demands “equity.” And “equity” is a weasel word never fully defined, but an essential ingredient in the Critical Race Theory (CRT) lexicon.
As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, in their volume, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2012, 49) describe it, CRT calls for “aggressive, color conscious efforts to change the way things are,” meaning the use of race as the determinant in making decisions as to how property, positions of power, and prestige are allocated in society. And since for the past two millennia the white race has oppressed and abused black and brown peoples around the world, simple equality of opportunity is not enough, in fact is evil, just one more effort of the white man to maintain his privileged position. Indeed, what is entailed in the current talk about “equity” is the requirement for various forms of reparation, a kind of reverse discrimination to satisfy the social injustices and the effects of white colonialism, slavery, and exploitation of black and brown peoples over past centuries.
True, while the curricula in thousands of public schools may not be this explicit, they nevertheless seed impressionable minds and groom students for what is to come. The results are evident…on the downtown streets this past summer of nearly every large or medium-sized American city set ablaze by howling mobs, or as dozens of historical monuments have come down because they honor white people who helped create this nation, or as “woke” corporate executives, media barons, entertainment glitterati, as well as the educational establishment censor and cancel hundreds and thousands of years of Western civilization and culture…because it was created by whites.
For some twenty years I have chaired North Carolina’s Confederate Flag Day, held in early March each year. Sponsored by the North Carolina Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the event was held in the House of Representatives chamber of the historic 1840 State Capitol building, honoring the historic flags of the Confederacy and the citizen soldiers who fought under those flags. The event was always peaceful. Back in 2019, with heightened racial tensions nearly everywhere after the Charleston shootings, as we ended our observance, a large violent mob of Antifa thugs, Black Lives Matter demonstrators, and others assembled outside the Capitol blocking our exit. I’ve recounted what happened in a column published on March 11, 2019. Nearly 200 armed police and State Troopers had to form a cordon to enable us to exit the building safely and find our way to our cars.
I wrote then: “As I exited with other attendees I looked into the faces of the mob: what I observed was a very real madness, an unleashed fury, eyes filled with uncontrolled hatred…. Those angry faces—those glaring and fierce eyes…betrayed ruptured souls, corrupted and demonized, existing in a kind of counter-reality with their own set of always-advancing rules, but dedicated in a fearsome and unambiguous way to the destruction—salvation through destruction—of Western Christian civilization, of mankind as we have known it.”
That hatred, that fury, that lunacy so apparent in the eyes of those demonstrators in March 2019 and so evident in thousands and thousands like them, begins in our schools with administrators and teachers, and with local school boards, dousing our children with the flammable ingredients which corrupt and pervert, and turn them into what I have termed modern “pod people.”
These “pod people” serve a larger and more fearsome purpose: the ultimate success of the Revolution against God and man. For their fanatical assault against what they perceive as white supremacy and racism is in fact an attack on Creation itself, on the natural laws of that Creation, and the God Who made it.
It is time for our cowardly legislators to begin the process of privatizing the public schools and turning education over once more to the parents where it belongs.
be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: critical race theory, CRT, pod people, Privatize, Public Schools | Leave a Comment »
