Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Keeping Liberty Alive in an Age of ‘Coronavistas’ | Chronicles

Posted by M. C. on April 9, 2021

With social media acting as the arbiter of allowable discussion, and with continued censorship and cancellation of those with views challenging the ‘accepted narrative,’ the United States is on the verge of losing its cherished freedoms. It is not at all clear whether our democratic republic will survive—but it is clear it will not survive unless more people begin to step up in defense of freedom of thought and speech.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/keeping-liberty-alive-in-an-age-of–coronavistas-/

By Jeff Minick

A look around at our coronavirus-obsessed world leaves those of us still possessing common sense with one question: What on earth have we become?

This question arises when viewing videos such as this one, where a pregnant, Catholic mother refusing to wear a mask is cited for trespassing during a Mass in Dallas, Texas. This young woman broke neither the mandates of the governor of that state nor of the bishop of that diocese, but was nevertheless reported to the police in the middle of Mass by the pastor of the parish. One of the ushers reportedly shouted, “Arrest her!” and then went to the parking lot to record her license plate number.

Three police officers—three!—showed up to haul her out of Mass and accuse her of violating the regulations of a business, i.e. the church. They then issued her a ticket for trespassing, forbidding her attendance at any future services at that church.

I’m not indulging in hyperbole when I say that some among us have lost their minds. Like fashionistas, who devote themselves to the intricate workings of the fashion industry, we now have “Coronavistas” in our midst, devoted to upholding the precise regulations which allegedly help prevent the spread of the virus.

Here in Virginia the nonsense continues. Nearly everyone in the local grocery store wears a mask. If you want to buy a bottle of vodka from the ABC store, put on a mask. In the coffee shop and other restaurants I sometimes visit, patrons are required to wear a mask when entering those establishments, but may then remove the mask throughout the course of their meal. Why is that? Does the virus only attack human beings on their feet?

My local library requires patrons to wear a mask and it also quarantines all returned books for three days. For months, they quarantined books for five days, but they have now reduced that time. Were either of those book quarantine times based on science? If we can catch the virus from a book, then the librarians shouldn’t allow visitors like me to roam the library shelves, touching book after book.

Meanwhile, in a tiny convenience store off the beaten path in my town, no one—not the owners, not the employees, not the customers—wears a mask. I go there frequently for various supplies, and as far as I know, none of these folks have keeled over from COVID-19. Do country folks and rednecks know more than our experts?

Thankfully it seems that some experts have not lost their minds and become “Coronavistas.” Dr. Scott Atlas is one of these, and in an article written for Hillsdale College’s Imprimis, he assails the mainstream media and the medical establishment’s advocacy of masks, closures, and lockdowns. He accuses publications like the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Science of being contaminated by politics.

I have been shocked at the unprecedented exertion of power by the government since last March—issuing unilateral decrees, ordering the closure of businesses, churches, and schools, restricting personal movement, mandating behavior, and suspending indefinitely personal freedoms. Second, I was and remained stunned—almost frightened—at the acquiescence of the American people to such destructive, arbitrary, and wholly unscientific rules, restrictions, and mandates.

Atlas concludes his article with these words:

Meanwhile, our shutdowns damaged our children’s education and emotional development, restricted our religious practices, killed off tens of thousands of small businesses, brought a booming economy to its knees, and separated all of us from one another.

Were these sacrifices worthwhile? Were they beneficial?

We may never know the answers to these questions. What is perfectly clear, however, is that Atlas’s conclusions are right on the money. Big tech, corporations, many of our universities, and our federal and state governments have spent the last year silencing critics of their policies and usurping American liberties.

Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” In a letter to his wife Abigail, John Adams stated, “Liberty once lost is lost forever.”

There is no magical formula to guarantee the preservation of our freedoms, but there are steps all of us can take to regain and keep our liberties. Listening skeptically to the mainstream media and to government officials, voting, protesting to our elected leaders at all levels when our rights are trampled, engaging when possible in peaceful disobedience like that woman in church: these are but a few possibilities.

Most of all, however, we must keep the fires of freedom burning in our hearts. It is that liberty which makes America unique.

Jeff Minick

Jeff Minick lives in Front Royal, Virginia, and may be found online at jeffminick.com. He is the author of two novels, Amanda Bell and Dust on Their Wings, and two works of non-fiction, Learning as I Go and Movies Make the Man.

Be seeing you

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

It’s Time to Focus on the Enemy Within, Not Without | Intellectual Takeout

Posted by M. C. on April 9, 2021

Unlike our president, vice president, Secretary of Defense, and “woke” military command, Putin has some noticeably redeeming features. He thinks marriage should be exclusively between heterosexuals, that males and females differ in socially significant biological ways, and that white people are not inherently evil. Believing and defending such politically inconvenient truths may be necessary for saving “the entire West.” It might be even more useful for this purpose than trying to relive the Second World War by taking on Russia and China.

What I’m recommending is a more sober assessment of the relative dangers that face our society. The war led by the state, the educational establishment, the media, large segments of corporate capitalism, and now the military against normal America seems far more pernicious than any danger that is coming out of Russia or China. We need a strategy for combatting the internal enemy far more desperately than we need more arms for fighting our foreign competitors.

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/it-s-time-to-focus-on-the-enemy-within–not-without/

By Paul Gottfried

The reincarnation of Hitler in some national leader and the heroism of Churchill, both stand-by props of neoconservatives, rear their head again in a recent commentary by Daniel Gelernter.

Expecting neocons to abandon their continual reference of these props would be comparable to asking the Democratic Party to stop talking about “systemic racism” or Mike Pompeo to cease mentioning “our values.” Why give up rhetorical tricks that elicit applause and large checks from wealthy sponsors every time one makes use of them? But as I point out in my book on antifascism, those who engage in silly comparisons shouldn’t imagine that the weight of historical scholarship supports their games.

Gelernter gets giddy pulling out his exaggerated, anachronistic parallels between Putin “the murderer” and the evil Führer, the expanding Japanese empire between 1936 and 1941 and the present Chinese government. His description suggests that we are again thickly embroiled in the Second World War, with only the names of the villains having been changed to reflect the minimally altered circumstances. Munich in October 1938 comes back as another neocon reference point in Gelernter’s complaint that we have not armed ourselves to the teeth to combat the new Hitler. Any failure to be immediately ready for war against the neocon-designated enemy brings back memories (at least for Gelernter and his buds) of how “democracies” surrendered to Hitler’s demand to occupy the Czech Sudetenland in 1938.

Allow me to cite what may be Gelernter’s most lunatic statement in this trip down neocon memory lane:

Now imagine that you are Putin himself—a dictator, a murderer, an absolutely brilliant strategist. What would be your next move? Probably to invade one of the Baltic states to break up NATO. In theory, an attack on any NATO member should be treated as an attack on all. But if Putin senses that there will be no response, or a half-response reminiscent of the so-called Phony War, he can destroy the major barrier against Russia taking over Eastern Europe one country at a time. And the sad fact is that if we, in America, are not willing to go to war to protect Estonia from Russia—and I suspect most of us are not—then Europe and ultimately the entire West is at risk.

Here we are dealing not only with the return of Hitler in the person of Putin and the revival of Imperial Japan as the Chicom regime. We must also confront the likelihood that the “entire West is at risk” if a single Russian soldier crosses into Estonian territory. Where, Gelernter asks by implication, is the new Churchill, who will lead our armies to victory, if Nazi Russia decides to occupy Estonia? This, after all, is the greatest threat that now supposedly faces “the entire West.”

One might of course dispute this judgment and point to other far grimmer threats that now confront Western civilization. Like Thucydides and Aristotle, we might be led to the non-neocon conclusion that the greatest threats to governments or societies come from within.

That certainly applies to the Western world and to our own onetime country, which are in the grips of an ugly cultural and political war. Pardon me if I’m more concerned about preserving traditional gender roles or something resembling the family that I grew up in than I am with the Russian bête noire of such worthies as Gelernter, Rep. Eric Swalwell, and journalist Jake Tapper!

We might also draw a distinction between predatory regimes like Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia—that romped all over the European continent exterminating indigenous populations—and today’s Russia and China, which are asserting traditional national interests. The latter can certainly create trouble, and I am not suggesting that no measures be taken if the Russian government tries to increase its control over Ukraine or if the Chinese government bullies Taiwan more aggressively. But even those aggressive actions would still not be of the same magnitude as Hitler’s armies overrunning Poland and France and murdering millions of their civilian population. Nothing indicates that Putin is about to do anything even remotely as brutal.

Nor is anyone denying that the Chinese government has treated ethnic minorities, particularly the Uyghurs in East Turkestan, quite brutally. We are therefore right to protest such inhumanities and put economic and diplomatic pressures on the Chinese to stop these misdeeds. But the appropriate measures called for in these cases fall far short of the total mobilization required to fight Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II.

Paul Gottfried

Paul Gottfried is editor in chief of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is also the Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Elizabethtown College, where he taught for 25 years, a Guggenheim recipient, and a Yale Ph.D. He is the author of 13 books, most recently Fascism: Career of a Concept and Revisions and Dissents.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Daniel Gelernter, Nazi, Putin, Stalin, systemic racism | Leave a Comment »

America’s elites want a racial apocalypse – spiked

Posted by M. C. on April 9, 2021

The woke may be winning in cyberspace and the corporate suite, but economic factors may prove more decisive in the long run. By 2032, minorities will constitute the majority of the American working class. They did better in terms of income under President Trump than previous administrations from both parties. This was one reason for the shocking move of Latin voters, devastated by the lockdowns, to Trump last year.

These populations are also voting with their feet and moving to red America. In a newly released report, the fastest growth in minority populations are occurring in the south, intermountain west and parts of the Great Plains. Demographer Wendell Cox also notes they are leaving the big progressive cities seeking lower house prices, more opportunities, and, yes, also lower taxes. As minorities move to these places, buy homes, and start businesses, they may tend to become more conservative in their values.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/04/08/americas-elites-want-a-racial-apocalypse/

Joel Kotkin

Jamil Ford still recalls the disorders of late May. ‘It was like Baghdad’, he recalls, even as jurors listen to the arguments during the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer accused of killing George Floyd. ‘I constantly think about it. The past history does not go away’, the African-American architect recalls, noting with trepidation possible National Guard deployments. ‘The mental part is still there.’

I know how he feels. In 1992 we went through this same process in Los Angeles when the police were exonerated in the beating of Rodney King. This unleashed a three-day explosion of often violent protests, resulting in $1 billion in damages and over 50 fatalities. In the end, the disorder led to some necessary shifts in police procedures but ultimately left the area relatively poorer and considerably less black than before.

Will things be different this time around? No politician in American history owes more to African-American leadership and voters than Joe Biden. His flailing campaign was rescued from the respirator by South Carolina’s heavily black Democratic electorate. African Americans sustained his path through states such as Texas. Since taking office, Biden’s commitment to battling the ‘sting of systemic racism’ and encroaching ‘white supremacy’ has accompanied his early actions and seems to have shaped many of his appointments.

The left’s and the media’s embrace of racial apocalypse, both in the US and in Britain, remains sadly selective. The recent Atlanta murders, given exhaustive coverage, appear to be the product not of Trumpista brownshirts but a singular, screwed-up madman. Meanwhile, attacks on Asians historically have come in large measure from minorities, largely African Americans. The most recent attack on Capitol Hill came not from Trumpistas but a follower of the ultimate anti-white, Louis Farrakhan.

The same media that hypes anti-Asian violence by whites usually ignores that by other ‘people of colour’. When the perpetrator is a Muslim jihadi, as was the case in Colorado, coverage has been less, even if the body count was twice as high. The ‘people of colour’ solidarity that bleeds over the pages of mainstream media has little room for nuance. It tends to ignore the fact that many Asians, and many Hispanics, oppose such things as quotas to selective high schools and colleges. Podcast ‘Lockdown is an assault on our humanity’ spiked

Similarly, most minorities seem not to share common ground with posturing politicians, and progressive intellectuals, who have excused looting as a form of racial redress. Minority business people generally don’t regard random violence as justice; the impact on business enterprises is felt particularly keenly in Minneapolis. A focus on police abuse is clearly needed, but the vast majority of Americans – including millennials and minorities – do not favour defunding law enforcement. They may be more concerned with the resurgence of violent and other crime in our core cities, even though it is often downplayed in the media.

The impending threat of violence in Minneapolis and elsewhere, offers manna from heaven for some but disaster for most. The racial-protest industry, perfected by the openly neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter, has raised a reported $90million, much of it from corporate largesse. What civil-rights activist Bob Woodson calls ‘race-grievance predators’ – like Ibrahim Kendi – are being bankrolled by oligarchs, like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.

Thanks to the Floyd incident, diversity departments of corporations, universities and governments now have permission, indeed a mandate, to embrace open discrimination against whites and, when convenient, Asians as well. Companies like Coca-Cola now impose expensive racial ‘diversity training’ on their employees. Other businesses, like Uber Eats, have gifted free delivery for African-American-owned firms only, while Oakland has initiated a $500-a-month basic-income programme for poor people, funded by rich non-profits, but with the proviso that whites need not apply.

Racialism also holds short-term political benefits for Democratic politicians. Every Republican move now made – getting rid of the Senate filibuster or challenges to electoral laws – has morphed into a ‘return to Jim Crow’. A discussion of controls, whether at the voting booth or the border, is immediately labelled as racist. Anyone suggesting otherwise risks being sent into the digital gulag by the dominant oligarchy. Podcast Do we need a licence to be free? spiked

The experience of the past 50 years shows, consistently, that civil disorders reduce investment in core cities, and lead companies to invest elsewhere. South Los Angeles is worse off, relative to the rest of the region, than in 1965. Research reveals riots have had this effect in much of the US. After last summer, many downtowns, notably Minneapolis and Portland, have suffered enormous setbacks in terms of business activity.

Businesses generally are loath to invest in places where violence lurks, and law enforcement seems unequal to the task of controlling it. One friend, himself a minority, had a medical warehouse in central Minneapolis that was burned down in the riots. He says the company has plans to rebuild – in suburban Atlanta or in Florida. ‘We can’t afford to destroy the economy’, warns Jamil Ford, who, with his church, tried to protect businesses last spring. ‘These are all the ones who can drive things after the fires happen.’

Already struggling with the pandemic, urban centres have been the hardest hit of America’s geographies in terms of employment losses. One recent survey found that today barely 10 per cent of corporate executives would consider investment in a big city; the vast majority are now opting for suburban and small-city locations.

In the coming days, we will hear repeatedly from Black Lives Matter and its media allies about police brutality and the need to assault remaining residues of dreaded ‘whiteness’ in our society. One black journalist, writing in Newsweek, warns about how African Americans will experience another bout of ‘trauma’ during the trial. Certainly they will cringe as the defence tries, as is its sad duty, to lessen or even eliminate charges against Chauvin.

This worry, given the past, is understandable, but legitimate concern over police abuse does not suggest minorities embrace the prevailing narrative. The vast majority of all races, noted a 2018 survey, reject the political correctness increasingly embraced by the billionaire class as well as corporate HR departments. Indeed, the most extreme people on racial issues are not Blacks and Hispanics but radicalised whites, whose Antifa shock troops well represent the lunatic fringe.

Red Guard-like seminars may make money for the practitioners of redress but it is what my friend Sergio Munoz calls ‘the multiculturalism of the streets’ that will save us. The idea of America as a kind of apartheid regime seems surreal in a country where one in 10 babies born in the US has one white and one non-white parent and 12 per cent of all African Americans are now immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Interracial marriage has gone from three per cent in 1967 to roughly one in six now.

It’s also time to ditch the West Side Story of repressed urban minorities. The suburbs, not the cities, now dominate the non-white experience in America. In the 50 largest US metropolitan areas, 44 per cent of residents live in racially and ethnically diverse suburbs, ranging from 20 to 60 per cent non-white. Even after the death of George Floyd and the subsequent unrest, most minorities still seek out ‘the American dream’, notes a recent study, but many lack the conviction that they can realise it.

These people, for the most part, are not seeking to create their own Bantustans or Barrios. They want a shot at making it in America, and we should do whatever works to ensure they get a chance.

Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His latest book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is now out from Encounter. You can follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Elites, Muslim jihadi, racial apocalypse | Leave a Comment »

VAWA Balkanizes Rights, Cynically Erasing Male Indians | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on April 9, 2021

This statistic is drawn from a National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NIPSVS), “Violence against American Indian and Alaska Native Women and Men.” In citing the disturbing statistic, VAWA makes a curious omission. Immediately after the 84.3 percent figure, the NIPSVS reads, “More than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native men (81.6 percent) have experienced violence in their lifetime.” In other words, Native American men experience only 2.7 percent less violence than women. Why does this data not make it into VAWA?

https://mises.org/wire/vawa-balkanizes-rights-cynically-erasing-male-indians

Wendy McElroy

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) embodies a political trend that cripples human rights in the guise of crusading for them. This trend is the balkanization, or fragmentation, of rights. Recently passed by the House, VAWA has moved to the Senate, where the trend it represents may well be translated into more law.

Identity politics and its activist branch, social justice, claim to champion oppressed groups. Yet both reverse the process by which oppressed groups have historically claimed their freedom: the universalization of rights. The term “universal rights” means that every human being, simply by being human, possesses the same rights and to the same degree as everyone else. Freedom means every person has an identical and enforceable claim to his or her own body and to peacefully acquired property. Justice occurs whenever this claim is enforced.

The progress of freedom and justice can be charted by scanning history for how rights gradually expanded to include an ever-widening circle of groups until every single human being enjoyed their protection. The Magna Carta (1215) extended basic rights to English nobles in order to protect them from the king. This is how universal rights typically begin; powerful elites force authorities to expand their legal protections through state privilege and, then, more and more groups claim human rights until they come down to a matter of birth. A hard-fought extension of rights occurs: they spread from landowners to men who have other specific “qualifications” like being white, then to women with the same qualifications, and, finally, to all human beings without qualification. The end point is when no one’s rights are based on secondary characteristics such as race, gender, or status. Every person has a vested interest in respecting the rights of others because his own rights depend on it.

Identity politics heads in the opposite direction. It claims special rights for allegedly oppressed groups—most notably women and blacks or other minorities. Rights are no longer based on a shared humanity but on secondary characteristics. Rights are balkanized rights, with the “rights” of one group differing from and in conflict with those of other groups: women versus men, minorities versus whites. Every group has a vested interest in having their “rights” triumph over those of others, because benefits will flow to them from the vanquished group; the claimed “rights” are more accurately called privileges or entitlements.

To understand how the balkanization of rights manufactures conflict, it is useful to examine the dynamic up close in microcosm. VAWA was recently reauthorized by the House and has moved to the Senate for approval. The purpose of the Act is to provide grants to programs that prevent sexual violence against women or assist its victims. In short, the “oppressed” group it allegedly champions receives entitlements at the expense of another group—men—who are either dismissed as victims or blamed as perpetrators.

Consider just one section of VAWA: Title IX, Safety for Indian Women. Except one mention in passing, the section does not acknowledge the alarming abuse of Indian boys and men, let alone advocate for them.

Those who drafted the new VAWA must be aware of current statistics and data on the abuse of Indians. One example: a state bill in Nebraska, LB 154, mandated that the Nebraska State Patrol produce “a report on missing Native American women in Nebraska” to be submitted in June 2020. The twenty-one-line bill mentions “Native American women” six times—boys and men not at all. Ordinarily, being left out of a government action is a good thing, but such bills are a vital part of creating a twisted narrative that sets society at war with itself.

Fortunately, the researchers went beyond the mandate of “missing women” to provide a more accurate picture. A May 23, 2020, article entitled “Nebraska State Patrol Study: Boys Make Up Majority of Missing Native Americans” appeared in the Omaha World Herald. A surprising statistic was presented. “The greatest percentage of Native American missing persons are boys age 17 or younger, accounting for 73.3% of all Native American missing persons in Nebraska.” Native American boys account for 59.6 percent of all missing people in the entire state.

The reaction of bureaucrats, politicians, and the media was appalling but typical. In the conclusion of the study, Judi M. Gaiashkibos, executive director, Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs, addressed only “women and children.” She lamented “actions and policies” that “have displaced women from their traditional roles in communities and governance and diminished their status … leaving them vulnerable to violence.” State senator Tom Brewer, who cosponsored LB 154, stated, “We need all law enforcement to communicate and work together to address the exploitation and victimization of Native women.” A Lincoln Journal Star article on LB 154 was entitled “Senators want to step up investigations of missing or abused Native women.” Men and boys are nowhere.

VAWA conspicuously ignores inconvenient studies and cherry-picks the ones it deems to cite. The section on Native American women’s safety opens, “More than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women, or 84.3 percent, have experienced violence in their lifetime.” This statistic is drawn from a National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NIPSVS), “Violence against American Indian and Alaska Native Women and Men.” In citing the disturbing statistic, VAWA makes a curious omission. Immediately after the 84.3 percent figure, the NIPSVS reads, “More than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native men (81.6 percent) have experienced violence in their lifetime.” In other words, Native American men experience only 2.7 percent less violence than women. Why does this data not make it into VAWA?

For one reason alone: it shows that women and men tend to be victimized by violence at similar rates. Those who twist the statistics are not indifferent to suffering of boys and men; they are afraid of it. In an honest discussion of sexual violence, including domestic abuse, their preferred group would not “win” the oppression game and be awarded the oppression prize.

Instead, the identitarians present a parody of human rights in which only approved groups are recognized as victims. Unapproved individuals are lost in the balkanization despite the fact that, in the final analysis, only individuals suffer and cry out for help. Individual human beings do not count, however. Only those who share the secondary characteristic of approved genitalia receive compassion. This means it is not compassion at all. It is politics, as cynical as it comes.

With so much debate about wokeness, perhaps the violence aimed at Native American males will be the point at which society says “no more,” no more institutionalized misandry. The balkanization of rights must stop. Author:

Contact Wendy McElroy

Wendy McElroy is a Canadian individualist anarchist and individualist feminist. She was a cofounder along with Carl Watner and George H. Smith of The Voluntaryist magazine in 1982.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: identitarians, Nebraska State Patrol Study, Violence Against Women Act, wokeness | 1 Comment »

Watch “‘New Normal’? Davos Billionaire Crowd Pushes Orwellian ‘Smart Mask'” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2021

Just as many US states are seeing Covid numbers plummet, Klaus “trans-humanist” Schwab’s World Economic Forum is pushing a new “smart mask” that not only tells you when to take a breath of fresh air: it also warns you to put it on if you’ve forgotten it. All tracked through your mobile phone. It is one more step toward China’s Orwellian “social credit” system (in fact, the mask itself was developed by a Chinese firm!). And the billionaire elites want to shove it down our throats.

https://youtu.be/iajy8rm3FCo

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Davos, Klaus Schwab, new normal, Orwellian, Smart Mask, trans-humanist | Leave a Comment »

Doug Casey on Diversity Officers, Compliance Officers

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2021

Doug Casey: Compliance results in waste, inefficiency, and less customer satisfaction. We’re becoming more like the old Soviet Union, where things weren’t done for economic reasons, but for political reasons.

SJWs are actually destroying their own companies in pursuit of political correctness and diversity. They’re not fostering harmony; they’re breeding resentment and antagonism. They’re causing people to look at themselves not as individuals—as human beings—but as members of racial groups. It’s insane and perverse.

But this is just one symptom of the malaise affecting almost every aspect of Western Civilization.

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-diversity-officers-compliance-officers-and-other-supernumeraries/

by Doug Casey

International Man: Everywhere you look, ever-increasing government regulations create a serious obstacle to economic activity. There are too many regulations today, many with severe penalties. Most companies of even modest size now have a compliance department, along with numerous compliance officers and supernumeraries. That wasn’t the case a few decades ago.

It seems the compliance industry was created not by satisfying a demand in the marketplace, but rather by satisfying some rule a politician made arbitrarily.

How and why did this happen? What does this say about the economy and society?

Doug Casey: It indicates a growing dislike and distrust of business and commerce and increasing reliance on the government. It’s a disturbing trend.

Companies have a vested interest in providing the best product at the most competitive cost to their customers. That’s how you succeed in business. Government, on the other hand, is necessarily a monopoly based on coercion. That’s bad enough, but it’s run by—no surprise—the type of people who become government employees. You can see them at the DMV and the post office. Worse, the whole apparatus has long been captured by rent-seeking cronies.

The situation is complicated by the fact outfits like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Twitter work hand in hand with certain government agencies.

It’s unfortunate that at this point you really can’t trust either government or Big Business. On the bright side, however, the average person seems to be becoming aware of that. That’s a good thing because it’s better for the society if everybody is skeptical and questions authority.

Despite that, we’re basically becoming much more centralized. Big companies are getting bigger, merging and acquiring smaller companies. The government continues growing much faster than the economy itself. As an economy becomes more centralized, it naturally becomes less responsive. Big bureaucratic things move slower than little entrepreneurial things. They don’t react as quickly. They don’t notice what the little guy thinks or says and don’t much care about the peons in “flyover country.”

It’s bound to get worse, not just for the reasons I’ve already mentioned, but because legislatures of all sizes are constantly passing new laws. They believe that’s what they’re there for. Old laws are rarely abolished, just buried under new laws. Furthermore, most new laws and regulations are oriented toward identity politics, notions of social justice, multiculturalism, political correctness, and the like.

Government regulations are never good; they subvert the market. And there are more of them now than ever. It goes back to what Reagan very cleverly said about the government versus the economy: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

International Man: According to Reuters, 66% of companies expect the cost of senior compliance staff to increase. And nearly two thirds of companies expect their total compliance budget to be slightly or significantly more over the next 12 months.

This trend doesn’t show signs of slowing down. What does it mean when you have a whole category of busybodies looking for a hundred different reasons to say no to a client?

It’s very bad for consumers and the economy overall. But little companies are hurt worse. Big companies can afford to hire a regulatory staff. They even hire lobbyists to get new regs passed, to cement themselves in place, and quash new competition. New regulations and compliance costs are very intimidating for little guys and new companies. But they’re not even a rounding error in costs for giant companies like General Motors or IBM or Google. Little companies and startups generally have to obey the same laws, but it’s a huge cost for them, sometimes an unsurmountable cost.

Regulatory compliance only helps the big get bigger. The little people can’t even get into the game to compete with them. That’s bad because it’s anti-entrepreneurial. It hurts the economy by increasing costs for all corporations of all sizes—even while it helps the big relative to the small.

More regulations are also an excuse for government to hire more employees to enforce them. So you’ve got higher costs for business and higher costs for government. It’s actually worse than a total waste. It would be better to pay these people to dig ditches during the day and fill them up at night. That would be better than having them enforce regulations that actively damage the economy. Everybody loses.

There are no good consequences to regulations except for the cronies who get them passed and whom the regulations help at the expense of the economy as a whole.

International Man: How has overregulation created such a massive disincentive to producing products in the marketplace? How is it stifling economic development?

Doug Casey: Well, let me answer that question by looking at an industry that I’m involved in: the mining industry. It’s never been an easy business, but today it’s actually one of the worst businesses in the world because of regulation and government action in general.

It used to be that if you were lucky enough to find a viable deposit, the only thing that stopped you from putting it into production was raising capital and getting the machinery and miners on site to start digging.

Today, from the time that you figure out it’s a viable deposit, it probably is going to take you another 10 years of jumping through various legal and environmental hoops. Regulations have practically killed the mining industry by raising its costs immensely.

Regulations don’t just stifle general economic development. If you violate them you’re subject to legal prosecution, possibly of a criminal nature. This is a huge disincentive to do anything. It’s why Americans are disinclined to open factories and employ people. Every employee is a potential liability, a walking potential lawsuit. It’s one more reason industry has left the US for other countries

International Man: The banking industry is one of the worst offenders when it comes to the burdens of government regulations. It’s well known this has made dealing with banks and brokers a nightmare. Financial institutions often treat their own customers like they’re criminals or terrorists.

Will banks regulate their way out of existence? Is the same kind of frustration coming to other industries?

Doug Casey: Essentially banking should be—and once was—a business like any other business. There were two totally different types of accounts: demand and time. With demand deposits, you charge people to store their money securely and write checks against it. With time deposits a customer had to leave his money with the bank for a fixed amount of time, for a fixed interest rate. The bank might give them 3% and lend it out at 6%. In those days, bankers competed based on their liquidity and solvency—nobody thinks of these things today. Everyone figures the government will bail out any bank that needs it.

Today banking is a highly regulated, quasi-government monopoly business. Classical banking was based on 100% reserves. Today it’s all fractional reserves, perhaps 10%. This is a subject few people have any familiarity with today. Perhaps we should talk about it in detail sometime.

Disregard their ads: Most banks today are zombies; they’re walking dead men. They’re all on the edge of bankruptcy because they’re no longer run according to classical rules of banking. Fractional reserve banking makes every bank in the world liable to a run. Few will prove solvent in a major economic downturn. Absolutely none of them are liquid. The system relies on the Fed to print money to paper over an excess of bad loans.

But it’s not just that the basic system is unsound. It’s become highly bureaucratized. When I was a kid it was possible to walk into a bank—as a kid with no identification—and open an account. It was easy. That’s impossible today.

And forget about transferring any meaningful amount of money without filing numerous forms. “Where did the money come from?”, “Where is the money going?”, “Who exactly is the recipient?”, and “Why are you sending it?” are standard questions now. Anybody can be accused of the artificial and made-up crime of money laundering today. Banks have become almost an arm of the State.

It’s no wonder nobody trusts banks and everybody hates banks today. And they should.

The silver lining to this, however, is that as time goes on, people will increasingly use cryptocurrencies to obviate banks. With cryptos you can send money anywhere privately—which is impossible with banks—and instantly—which is impossible with banks—and at almost no cost—which is also impossible with banks today. Cryptos like Bitcoin check a lot of boxes.

The banking industry in its present form is a dinosaur. The only hope for the banking industry is for it to return to its roots. That would include the segregation of demand and time deposits, a return to banking secrecy, and the abolition of the Federal Reserve, among other things. But none of that is going to happen in today’s world.

International Man: The compliance industry represents a degradation of society and the economy. But today it’s gone much farther than that. There is another new supernumerary at many companies these days… diversity officers.

Where did these people come from and what are the consequences for business and society as a whole?

Doug Casey: This was one of the more insane consequences of accepting the tenets of political correctness. Diversity officers require or at least encourage companies to have quotas of blacks, Hispanics, gays, the disabled, females, and so forth. I don’t know how many different classifications of politically favoured people there are. But there are quite a few and more every day.

Companies are pushed to hire people based upon accidental characteristics like gender, skin color, religion, and God knows what else. Not what they can do or the quality of their work. It’s absolutely insane on every single level. Among other faults, it perversely works against the very people it’s supposed to help… smart customers will tend to avoid them because they might be an incompetent diversity-hire.

The fact that these things are accepted without protest is a sign of how degraded and irrational society has become. Nobody dares protest this nonsense for fear of being called out as an evil person.

It’s a boon only for ambulance-chasing lawyers and malingerers. Diversity and political correctness act as causes for frivolous lawsuits. Anybody can use arbitrary reasons based on accidental characteristics to sue and in effect shake down their employer.

Diversity officers help only race-hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and people who see themselves as professional blacks or professional Hispanics or professional gender aberrants.

International Man: Many companies and institutions in America today value political correctness over merit. What will this trend do to productivity?

Doug Casey: It’s devastating.

And it goes farther than just altering who is hired and why. Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) are trying and succeeding in influencing how people think. Through TV commercials, among other things. Some commercials are much more interested in promoting diversity than selling products. It should be a cause for shareholder suits against management. Take the infamous Gillette commercial that was so antagonistic and hateful against white males.

In the past, I just bought any razor that seemed to work. Including Gillette, which has a good product. But now I go out of my way as a matter of principle to not buy any Gillette product, because I’d feel I was supporting cultural Marxism and enemies of civilization. Not that the few dollars I spend on shaving equipment every year will make any difference, but I suspect there are millions of people who feel the same way.

But this is just one symptom of the malaise affecting almost every aspect of Western Civilization.

Editor’s Note: All signs point to this trend accelerating until it reaches a crisis… one unlike anything we’ve seen before. That’s exactly why Doug Casey and his team just released this urgent video. Click here to watch it now.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Compliance Officers, Cryptos, Diversity Officers, overregulation, SJW | 1 Comment »

Doug Casey on the Rise of Woke Companies and ESG Investing

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2021

In reality, stakeholders are just hangers-on, employees, or people who are looking to get in on a shakedown. But everybody slavishly acknowledges them and parrots the meme: “Yes, we’ve got to look out for the stakeholders.”

Where did that concept come from? The same place as ESG and EDI. It’s a recent creation, but Boobus americanus seems to think it was carved in stone at the country’s founding.

We’re told to protect them as if they were a valuable and endangered species. I say, “A pox upon stakeholders.” If they want a vote in what a company does, then they ought to become shareholders. Stakeholders have been created out of nothing by cultural Marxists for the purpose of shaking down shareholders.

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-the-rise-of-woke-companies-and-esg-investing/

by Doug Casey

International Man: The trend of investing in so-called environmental, social, and governance (ESG) companies is growing. Companies are rated based on their carbon emissions, diversity on their board, among other factors. Many companies seem to be bending over backwards to show their ESG credentials.

What do you make of all this? Where did this all come from?

Doug Casey: A tsunami of political correctness is washing over the entire world. It’s not just the US. But it didn’t just arise spontaneously in a vacuum.

The first time that I ever heard the term “politically correct” was in a Saturday Night Live skit in the early ’80s. At the time, I just thought it was a funny catchphrase. It sounded like a takeoff on the Soviet term “politically unreliable,” which was used to describe those who weren’t dogmatic communist ideologues. However, it turned out to be an indicator of a much broader trend, one that got underway in the ’60s. It started in the universities.

Three generations of people have gone to college since the ’60s. In those days, attending college was relatively rare, only around 10% of the youth. It was less than 5% in the previous era. Now it’s quite common, with over a third of Americans getting degrees.

In those days, college was actually supposed to be about learning something tangible. Either subjects about the natural world—science, medicine, engineering, and the like—or humanities—literature, history, philosophy, and the like. There was always a divide between the two categories, of course. Sciences were hard and required diligent work with verifiable data, whereas the humanities were soft, largely the province of opinion and interpretation. Both disciplines have degraded, however. Even math is now considered too “white,” while the humanities have morphed into indoctrination.

College professors—and I speak as somebody who was a trustee of the tenth oldest college in the country for five years— are now almost all “woke,” full of social justice warriors (SJW) and declared Marxists. It appears about 93% of faculty members vote Democrat—not that voting Republican necessarily means you support principles that have much to do with either free minds or free markets.

I’m afraid that the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans is basically over. The progressives, socialists, Marxists, and their fellow travelers have won the intellectual and moral battle. The loss is now being reinforced by the media with their biased reporting, the corporations with their woke ads, and entertainers with their highly politicized skits and shows.

Going back to the analogy of a battle, the Left initially fought a guerrilla war. In recent years they’ve grown strong enough to win set-piece battles. Now they have nearly complete control of the State apparatus. They won’t let go of it. Their next step is just to mop up the resistance.

How does this relate to the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) mandates that are being enforced everywhere? Very directly.

One problem with ESG is that it sounds so positive. Who doesn’t want a clean environment? Who’s opposed to social harmony instead of a race war? Isn’t it better to have some “governance” as opposed to the straw man of Road Warrior-style chaos?

The reality is that ESG mandates managements to redirect corporate resources from creating new wealth and satisfying consumer demands to implementing the semi-religious charities of a new Green religion. And to keep them on the path to righteousness, corporate boards now have to include women, People of Color (a newly minted aggrieved group), and those with psychological and sexual aberrations. Which—the way these things are dictated—amounts to actively transgressing against men, whites, and normals. It’s a new form of class warfare.

The fact that companies are bending over backward to show how ESG conscious they are, how woke they are, and how respectful of SJW values they are, says that they aren’t concentrating on taking care of business and making profits. Putting virtue-signaling first is a very bad sign for productivity and business.

Now that ESG has gotten a seat at the table, it’s opened the door to the next stage of this trend—Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI). Like ESG, it sounds friendly and welcoming; it’s not.

There is no equality, except before the law and in the grave; trying to make people equal is stupid and counterproductive. But Equity is worse than enforced equality. It means giving certain groups privileges and assets by virtue of ethnicity, gender, disability, or accident of birth. It’s a formula for hatred and resentment.

Diversity boils down to race and gender. It certainly doesn’t include a diversity of viewpoints.

Inclusion has a place in polite society. But it has to be earned, like any other privilege. In fact, there’s more to be said for exclusivity than inclusivity. Exclusivity is about maintaining standards, as are, for instance, private clubs. Perhaps that’s why we see so few private clubs these days; if a club doesn’t include practically everyone and anyone, it’s asking for a lawsuit in today’s world.

These notions will backfire on their promoters and enforcers. Many people of color are diversity hires now. As a result, many in the public—including people of color—will go out of their way to avoid black doctors, lawyers, and engineers because they are wondering whether or not they’re truly qualified. “Affirmative action” devastates the very people it’s supposed to help as it degrades them and breeds resentment. This is all real poison.

It identifies people not as individuals but as members of a group.

International Man: The ESG trend seems to be part of a larger cultural shift.

What is your take? How will this cultural shift affect the competitiveness of US companies?

Doug Casey: Virtue signaling and wokeness are affecting every aspect of life.

One reason that companies in the old Soviet Union were so unproductive, and turned out crappy products, was that they were much more interested in being “politically reliable” than profitable. Being politically correct today encourages people to sign up for things like gender studies, sociology, and political science today, rather than science, technology, and math courses.

It’s a real cultural shift working to destroy the competitiveness of US companies. And it’s supercharged by the fact actual Bolsheviks now control the government. It’s Mussolini’s dream, where the government and corporations are walking hand-in-hand in a so-called public-private partnership; classical fascism.

International Man: With the rise of ESG investing, shareholders have become less important than stakeholders.

What is going on here? Where did that concept come from?

Doug Casey: A shareholder actually owns part of a company and has paid for that privilege. But over the last generation, shareholders have become less important. In fact, they’re treated as a nuisance by professional managers. “Stakeholders,” who bring absolutely nothing to the party, have become a protected species.

Where did that concept come from? The same place as ESG and EDI. It’s a recent creation, but Boobus americanus seems to think it was carved in stone at the country’s founding.

International Man: Given everything we’ve discussed, what are the investment implications? What can the average person do?

Doug Casey: Historically, an average price-to-earnings (PE) ratio for stocks was in the 12–18x range. Now it’s been moved up to 24–25x. A lot of companies neither have earnings nor are expected to for the foreseeable future.

Market norms are much higher—mainly due to money printing—but they should actually be much lower. Why? Because corporations have changed their emphases from creating value and making money to enforcing political and social notions. Quite frankly, that makes them worth less.

When the next bear market bottoms, maybe it won’t be at a PE of 8 or 9 to 1, as in the past. Maybe it’ll be something like 4 or 5. Wokeness, diversity hiring, PC, and the rest of it are working to destroy capital. The destruction won’t be immediate, of course. But Americans who think it’s a good idea now will regret it soon enough and for the rest of their lives.

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about it except try to insulate yourself from its worst aspects and raise hell when you hear people talking nonsense—which won’t make you any friends in the days of Cancel Culture.

It’s important to speak out about these things actively as opposed to just grumbling and allowing the bad guys the moral high ground. You’ve got to challenge these things wherever possible.

Right now, you can still challenge these things, but it’s increasingly risky. People are now getting fired from their jobs if they hold non-PC views—and it’s likely to get much worse for the foreseeable future.

We’re actually moving—devolving—into the same kind of world that existed in the Soviet Union.

I think it’s too late to try and change the trend. In a way, resistance is futile. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t resist, simply because you have to live with yourself.

Editor’s Note: Socialist ideas are becoming increasingly popular in the US. At the same time the US government is printing money hand over fist. All while the US empire continues to overstretch itself across the world.

It’s all shaping up to be a world-class disaster… one unlike anything we’ve seen before. That’s exactly why New York Times bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent video showing how it all could go down. Click here to watch it now.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: ESG, Politically Correct, shareholders, stakeholders, Woke Companies | Leave a Comment »

Jab-erwacky (or, Why Are People So Crazy about Being Guinea Pigs?) – OffGuardian

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2021

When major media openly muse about the virtue of permanent imprisonment, when “experts” tell us that life is about nothing but the constant fear of disease, when publicists insist that our most sacred duty is to sacrifice ourselves for the benefits of mega-corporations, it’s time to ask – seriously – whether our public messages help or hinder the cause of civilization.

https://off-guardian.org/2021/04/06/jab-erwacky-or-why-are-people-so-crazy-about-being-guinea-pigs/

Michael Lesher

Seek thou the Covid Jab, my son!
The genes that morph, the fraud that hypes!
Let Pfizer have its way, but shun
Those frivolous skeptic types!

(Big Brother has said, ‘Tis good, ‘tis good,
And so the sacrifice is just –
Submission now is hardihood,
In Big Pharma we all trust…)

And hast thou had thy Covid Jab?
Put on that mask, thou foolish lad!
Yes, you feel sick – that’s just the trick
That means we’ve all been had.

About twelve hours ago I passed a sort of personal milestone: I found, and read, an ecstatic Facebook post from the twentieth person I know who has received a dose of one of those experimental drugs the U.S. government, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars of our money, is trying to persuade us to turn loose on our immune systems.

Yes – I’ve been keeping count of those weird effusions of relief and self-congratulation from the latest dupes of the coronavirus coup. To be honest, they baffle me. And infuriate me.

At first, I couldn’t believe that anyone would boast of turning himself into a human guinea pig, without getting a cent in compensation, just to add to the profits of a corporate camorra. Then I couldn’t believe I’d find five such posts on Facebook. Then I bet myself that I’d never encounter ten of them.

Well, now I’ve seen twenty.

Twenty separate people bragging about handing themselves over to the biggest, and perhaps the most dangerous, medical scam of my lifetime.

So what’s next? Will people I know start making breathless Facebook posts each time they swallow arsenic or snort some airplane glue? Are they going to brag publicly about wading through chemical dumps? Am I supposed to applaud them if they do?

Or are these indiscreet posters trying to convince me – by lending their voices to the media hysteria about vaccines that aren’t vaccines, for an emergency that isn’t an emergency – that if we let a gang of drug pushers play with our cell structure, we’ll find ourselves somehow on the short road to paradise?

If that’s what they’re up to, they’re going to have to do a lot more convincing.

Because the whole thing is nuts.

To begin with, as of this writing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have already recorded 1,909 American souls for whom these “vaccines” really were tickets to paradise – in more prosaic language, to the morgue. When glossing over this fact, my Facebook “friends” have a numerical paradox on their hands. Think back to March 9 of last year, when the national coronavirus death toll officially stood at twenty-six – that’s right, twenty-six – and the whole chorus of coronavirus propagandists was screaming “emergency” and demanding that we acquiesce in the quashing of the Bill of Rights and the suspension of representative democracy in four-fifths of our states. Yet now, we’re supposed to shrug off a mortality figure more than seventy times that size – while Big Pharma is raking in billions from the indiscriminate use of scantily-tested experimental drugs?

And that’s not all. Even a cursory glance behind the curtain of vaccine propaganda reveals more than enough to give any rational person pause.

First, it’s an open secret that vaccines for respiratory viruses have never been a success; the United States is among the few countries where they are actively promoted, and this is largely due to the influence of the vaccine manufacturers, who successfully pressured the CDC to change its system for counting flu-related deaths in 2004 in order to raise public fears about respiratory viruses. (A CDC official virtually admitted this in a public interview ten years later.) Vaccines have never played more than a marginal role in stemming viral epidemics, and there’s no evidence that COVID19 will be any different.

Second, the mantra that COVID19 vaccines will hasten the development of “herd immunity” (a phrase the propagandists once reviled, but began to celebrate once they realized it could be used to turn bigger profits for drug makers) presupposes that the vaccines prevent transmission of the virus. But they don’t; the Food and Drug Administration has specifically denied, with respect to each of the drugs in question, any “evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person.” So these drugs will play no role in slowing the epidemic, let alone stopping it.

This fact also gives the lie to the propagandists’ virtue-signaling to the effect that a “vaccinated” person no longer poses a health risk to others. Since there’s no evidence that these drugs prevent transmission of the virus, the truth is that they’re of no public value whatsoever; if they work at all, they benefit only the person who has been vaccinated (allegedly by reducing the severity of his symptoms upon infection).

In a word, the whole COVID vaccine-promotion bandwagon is built on a lie; in fact, it’s misleading even to call these drugs “vaccines” in the first place. Unlike every one of the vaccinations governments have mandated for over a century, a COVID19 vaccination offers no public protection of any kind. There is no legitimate rationale for requiring it, nor for using public money to promote it.

You might want to bear this fact in mind whenever you hear the propagandists nattering about “vaccine passports” to separate the privileged vaccinated from the rest of us, or about restricting the liberties of people who decline to be guinea pigs. Such talk isn’t about health, and it certainly isn’t about “science.” It’s a police-state project, pure and simple – built out of public hysteria, stoked with lies – and has exactly the same moral legitimacy as those infamous yellow stars Jews were required to wear under Nazi rule.

And there’s still more. Calling these experimental drugs a cure for a public health hazard turns reality on its head. In fact, the drugs themselves constitute a public health hazard.

Mind you, that isn’t conjecture; it is a simple fact of regulatory procedure. The FDA (never known to be excessively conservative where Big Pharma is concerned) at least requires certain animal-testing protocols to be followed before it approves drugs for human use. But the COVID19 “vaccines” have been specifically exempted from such tests.

What is more, that departure from basic safety procedures was premised on the false assumption that COVID19 represents an “emergency.” In fact, as scientists like Denis Rancourt have been showing for months, all-cause mortality figures for the United States have seldom been outside ordinary parameters since at least last summer. That rules out the existence of a health “emergency” – you can’t have an “emergency” when mortality figures fall within normal ranges – and absent an emergency, there’s no excuse for cutting short the normal testing requirements. And yet that’s exactly what our government has done – with the approval of the so-called “health experts” you see quoted in the New York Times, a fact that tells you all you need to know about whom those “experts” really work for.

An additional word is in order here. The “gene therapy” technology used in two of the three vaccines now available in the U.S. has never before been licensed for human use; when tested in an earlier form, it ran into trouble when vaccinated animals that were afterwards exposed to a “wild virus” experienced exaggerated and potentially deadly reactions. Testing of that sort isn’t performed on human subjects, so the Pfizer and Moderna drugs – both of which rely on the identical principle (involving “messenger RNA”) – have never been cleared of the danger of causing similar severe reactions when humans, after vaccination, are exposed to the pathogen in “wild” form.

In other words, as far as FDA supervision is concerned, anyone who takes these drugs is playing medical Russian roulette.

In fact, our government isn’t just refusing to protect us – without even an arguable excuse. Our government is going out of its way to subject us to dangers it is obliged to minimize. Even before these experimental drugs had reached the market, U.S. officials had taken the unprecedented step of granting the manufacturers blanket legal immunity for any adverse effects the drugs may cause. Then they exempted the “vaccines” from crucial stages of pre-approval animal testing (as I’ve mentioned already). And now, they’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds to pressure people into taking the drugs – while concealing serious questions about their safety, let alone their public utility.

Got that? The government is using scads of public money to persuade people to subject themselves to a medical hazard that same government could have protected us from, but has instead done everything in its power to intensify.

That’s worse than negligence. That’s a crime.

The cynicism of the indoctrination campaign is instructive, too. “Much anticipated new research,” according to NBC News, shows that…

See the rest here

Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. His latest nonfiction book is Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014); his first collection of poetry, Surfaces, was published by The High Window in 2019. A memoir of his discovery of Orthodox Judaism as an adult – Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a “Born-Again” Jew – was published in September 2020 by Lincoln Square Books.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Big Brother is watching you, big pharmaceutical, CDC, Gene Therapy, nuclear Guinea Pigs | Leave a Comment »

‘The Most Merciful Thing a Large Family Can Do to One of Its Infant Members Is To Kill It.’ — Why Face Masks Matter – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2021

“Everything the government is doing right now is designed to make you fat, weak, stupid, depressed, lazy, and reliant on crumbs they wipe off their plates. Health replaced by pharmaceuticals. Education replaced by programming. Hard work replaced by handouts. These people hate you.”

-Ian Smith, New Jersey Gym Owner Who Refused To Close Down

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/04/allan-stevo/the-most-merciful-thing-a-large-family-can-do-to-one-of-its-infant-members-is-to-kill-it-why-face-masks-matter/

-Ian Smith, New Jersey Gym Owner Who Refused To Close Down

—————————-

I want to remind you who you are dealing with.

They may be a childhood friend, they may have raised you, they may share your blood, they may be your neighbor, they may be your softball teammate, they may share a pew with you at church on Sunday.

Whoever they are, their worldview has really gained an upper-hand in the mainstream propaganda outlets since the Ides of March 2020.

They tend to be abortion supporters.

They tend to be technocrats with a passion for tinkering and central planning that looks an awful lot like eugenics when it nears the topic of health or medicine.

They tend to be anti-white racists (many of them white themselves).

They tend to have spent so much time in school that “indoctrinated” is as fitting a word for their thought pattern as can be imagined.

Their campaigns since the Ides of March 2020 have taken on a moralistic tone. Imagine that: abortionists and eugenicists taking on a moralistic tone? Anti-white racists and anti-family sociopaths taking on a moralistic tone?

It should not be surprising to anyone that people like that will say whatever they need to in order to accomplish the next incremental victory.

It should also not be surprising that many people are prone to following bad advice from some pretty bad dudes. Discernment is not everyone’s forte.

Bad people and bad ideas exist in every era. Some average folks follow those bad ideas. This is even more common when a leadership vacuum exists. None of this can be surprising. It is the norm of every single era throughout human history.

What should be surprising, however, is that people like you and me believe them, and furthermore that people like you and I do virtually everything the bad dudes tell them to do, especially when accompanied by a good enough reason.

That’s not normal. It’s not a constant throughout all of human history. It ebbs and flows. Accordingly, the direction of society ebbs and flows as the upright leaders of a society rise to the occasion or shirk from responsibility. The leaders are not those in positions of governmental authority. To the contrary such offices are often devoid of leaders. Leaders are those who live appropriately and inspire others with their example.

So many people who get what’s going on have been so very compliant during the corona communism that was implemented after the Ides of March 2020.

Around the turn of the last century, a woman named Maria Montessori emerged. It is impossible to read Montessori’s work without seeing her Roman Catholicism shine through, without seeing a foundational tenant of Christianity and western culture shine through: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

She doesn’t stop there though. She doesn’t just say man is created in the likeness of God. She says child is created in the likeness of God.

As the industrial revolution surged and modernity was being used to eclipse Christianity in philosophical attacks against the dignity of man, Montessori was witnessing the educational system firsthand. As the educational system was turning into 1.) A way for manufacturers to train children as laborers to obediently follow orders, 2.) A way for governments to indoctrinate, 3.) A way for the professional class and the proto-technocrats to professionalize the home life and open up the home as a treasure chest for professional teachers and other industries, 4.) A way for progressives to shatter the home, 5.) A way for East Coast American elites, British elites, and their counterparts to impose their twisted views of the world on the youth, 6.) A way for the mind of a child to be controlled and trained rather than liberated and empowered — as all that was happening, Montessori was providing a response to what it meant to be a human child, to be made in the likeness of God.

Her schools exist globally to this day. Her work and the work of her disciples is a true testament to what a school can be like if a child absolutely must leave the home for schooling.

A steward is one who takes care of the property of another. Montessori’s loving stewardship of God’s gift of a child is some of the most powerful stewardship in all educational literature.

At about the same time, around the turn of the last century, another person came about, and witnessed all the same changes.

Instead of stewarding what the Lord put on this earth, this person took a different approach. She sought to make it her decision who lives and who dies. She sought to make it her decision who wins and who loses. She sought to make it her decisions who grows and who shrinks.

And not just her decision but the decision of others. Not just her decision but the decision of elites. Not just her decision but the decision of anyone who wanted a say on who could and who could not have a baby.

The technology for having abortions had long existed, going back into classicism, a moral issue so significant that abortion is forbidden even in the Hippocratic Oath. Abortion was not this person’s impactful innovation, nor was genocide or eugenics her impactful innovation. Margaret Sanger is credited with building the infrastructure that brought this topic mainstream in the United States and across the globe.

Through her efforts in the United States and globally, Sanger set in place the greatest genocides of all human history.

Sanger wrote about this:

“The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

She wrote many more awful things that were just as ugly in her day as they are today. It is shrugged off by her supporters as a symptom of her times. That’s inaccurate though and dishonest and conveniently avoids an important conversation. Sanger was not a sign of her times. To a whole lot of people the spoken and written words of Sanger were as demonic and sociopathic then as they are today.

This does not stop her from having an army of disciples.

The disciples of Sanger are very bad people who want to disguise the most ugly sacrifice of infants as a most beautiful thing.

Incrementally they chip away at human dignity. They chip away at the likeness of God.

When you wear your mask, you join them in their treachery, as they chip away at the human dignity of anyone who would place such a thing on their face.

It doesn’t matter what the masses do. It doesn’t matter what the sheep do. It really doesn’t matter what the most evil people do. It matters what the lions do. It matters what the Remnant does. It matters what the moral backstop of society does.

Do you hear me? They don’t matter. YOU matter.

Twain wrote that a brave man can stand up to a lynch mob of 10,000 and get them to back down.

Don’t compare yourself to the sheep. Compare yourself to other lions. A lion is worth 10,000 sheep, if he will come into his own as a lion, if he will show courage, if he will do what’s right.

My friend, wear the mask, close your business, honor the lockdown, and you pave the way for the sickest future and enable the sickest of humans, each and every time you do it.

It doesn’t matter what reason you give yourself. It doesn’t matter what justification you have prepared. You do really bad things for the world each time you follow such prescriptions.

Stop it.

Stop it now.

The hour is late. And here you are, enabling evil, as if your every act has no consequence.

Thousands of readers of these pages have written me to tell me how they do it differently from most people, how they never wear a mask for any reason. Their stories and their techniques are in “Face Masks in One Lesson,” they are in my LewRockwell.com writings, and they are part of the videos, pointers, and classes I offer to those who sign up at RealStevo.com. The most important thing they do though, that each one of these brave and righteous people have done, is to refuse to comply with evil. Will you do the same?

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.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: anti-family, Anti-white racists, Central Planning, Margaret Sanger, Maria Montessori | Leave a Comment »

Biden and Janet Yellen Are Pushing a Global Minimum Tax Rate. The EU Is Very Pleased. | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2021

So, for at least a decade, EU politicians have openly complained that tax competition is “a threat to the European Union.” The regimes in the west don’t like having to deal with smaller, poorer regimes that can offer lower taxes to employers, investors, and producers.

https://mises.org/wire/biden-and-janet-yellen-are-pushing-global-minimum-tax-rate-eu-very-pleased

Ryan McMaken

It has long been a dream of central planners and interventionists to set global, uniform tax rates for all regimes. These globalists know that so long as sovereign states have the ability to freely set their own tax rates, some regimes are tempted to engage in “tax competition” in order to attract capital. When this happens “tax havens” allow companies and individuals to “shop around” in terms of where to put their productive wealth.

The antidote to this “problem,” we are told, is so-called tax harmonization. Under tax harmonization schemes, all governments are forced to impose a certain minimum tax rate so that high-tax countries need not compete with low-tax countries. Noncompliance comes with sanctions.

Without tax havens, of course, regimes have more freedom to raise taxes to ever higher levels because the gap between the high-tax regimes and low-tax regimes is significantly lessened.

So, it should surprise no one that President Biden’s Treasury secretary Janet Yellen is now pushing for a global minimum corporate tax, and for an increase to the US corporate taxes:

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Monday urged the adoption of a minimum global corporate income tax, an effort to at least partially offset any disadvantages that might arise from the Biden administration’s proposed increase in the U.S. corporate tax rate.
Citing a “30-year race to the bottom” in which countries have slashed corporate tax rates in an effort to attract multinational businesses, Yellen said the Biden administration would work with other advanced economies in the Group of 20 to set a minimum.

Naturally, such a scheme doesn’t work without a means to punish countries that don’t cooperate. According to Reuters,

The U.S. plan envisages a 21% minimum corporate tax rate, coupled with eliminating exemptions on income from countries that do not enact a minimum tax to discourage the shifting of jobs and profits overseas.

In other words, “Biden’s corporate tax measure would also penalize other countries without a minimum corporate tax by more heavily taxing their subsidiaries in the U.S.”

A Long War on Tax Competition

The US’s new attack on tax havens and tax competition comes after years of attempts by the EU and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to impose enforceable minimum tax rates. The OECD is currently in the process of negotiating what Daniel Mitchell calls a “global high tax cartel.”

Moreover, the European Commission has been complaining for many years about low-tax member states within the bloc.

In early 2019, for example, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker pushed the idea of ending the ability of EU members to veto changes in tax policy so as to make tax rates across EU countries more equal. Ireland and Hungary, which have adopted low tax rates to attract businesses, have long opposed such efforts. Malta has vehemently objected as well.

In the EU, France and Germany—the largest and most powerful states in the bloc—have pushed for an EU-wide corporate tax policy for years. Germany and France have already announced plans to bilaterally pursue a common corporate tax policy, but this is just the first step. The next step is to impose minimum tax rates on the rest of Europe as well.

Europe isn’t the only place where regimes have hoped to attract capital with low tax rates. Small island nations in the Caribbean also function as tax havens and have earned the ire of the European Union’s leadership.

In many ways, the effort to achieve tax harmonization is also a war on small countries, waged by big, powerful countries.

After all, small countries have limited tools in attracting capital. All else being equal, small countries that use small-time local currencies are at a disadvantage in a world of competing fiat currencies. Small countries also potentially have less access to ready labor and other inputs necessary for production. Finally, small countries are at a disadvantage when they are physically located far from other centers of capital. This is the case for many Caribbean and eastern European countries.

East vs. West and Rich vs. Poor

One way small countries can compete is by lowering corporate tax rates. This is partly why Ireland, Malta, and Hungary have all pursued low-tax policies. In fact, in 2019, Hungary slashed its corporate tax rate to 9 percent from 19 percent. Ireland—which has long been at the periphery of Europe and was considerably poorer than the rest of Western Europe as late as the early 1990s—has now become known for its relatively low corporate tax rate, which now stands at 12.5 percent. In contrast, France’s corporate tax rate as of 2020 was 32 percent. Germany’s rate was 29.9 percent. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the old established economies of the EU—France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the Low Countries—all have higher corporate tax rates compared to the old Iron Curtain countries.

In Poland and Czechia, for example, the corporate tax rate is 19 percent. It’s 16 percent in Romania. Naturally, after the end of the Soviet Union, these countries sought to raise their standards of living and enter the global marketplace. One way to attract capital was to make their economies more attractive to foreign capitalists.

The rich west of Europe has never approved of this strategy.

Now, it looks like the US is joining this effort to force smaller, poorer countries to raise their tax rates. The Trump administration threw a bit of a wrench in the EU’s plans to harmonize taxes when Trump was able to win approval of a corporate tax cut from 35 percent to 21 percent. That presented an indirect threat to the Franco-German plan to turn the industrialized world into one big high-tax bloc. But now with Biden in the White House, the US looks like its “ready to help” by raising US rates to a France-friendly 28 percent, and by also pushing for a new global tax regime.

The high-tax regimes of the world will be more than happy to join in. 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.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Biden Administration, EU, Global Minimum Tax, Janet yellen | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries

Next Entries »

MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Murray Rothbard

Columnists

Subscribe

E-mail Martin Fox

Counter

Favorite Sites

Information Liberation

Alex Jones’ Prison Planet

Gary North Specific Answers

Antiwar

The Daily Bell

Tenth Amendment Center

Economics Policy Journal

The American Thinker

The New American

Lew Rockwell

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Keeping Liberty Alive in an Age of ‘Coronavistas’ | Chronicles

Jeff Minick

It’s Time to Focus on the Enemy Within, Not Without | Intellectual Takeout

Paul Gottfried

America’s elites want a racial apocalypse – spiked

VAWA Balkanizes Rights, Cynically Erasing Male Indians | Mises Wire

Watch “‘New Normal’? Davos Billionaire Crowd Pushes Orwellian ‘Smart Mask'” on YouTube

Doug Casey on Diversity Officers, Compliance Officers

Doug Casey on the Rise of Woke Companies and ESG Investing

Jab-erwacky (or, Why Are People So Crazy about Being Guinea Pigs?) – OffGuardian

‘The Most Merciful Thing a Large Family Can Do to One of Its Infant Members Is To Kill It.’ — Why Face Masks Matter – LewRockwell

Biden and Janet Yellen Are Pushing a Global Minimum Tax Rate. The EU Is Very Pleased. | Mises Wire

A Long War on Tax Competition

East vs. West and Rich vs. Poor