Enemy of the State-Read the Book-Know the Man
This is not a Safe Space but Baby, I don't care.
"I am not a number, I am a Free Man" - No. 6
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
Posted by M. C. on April 7, 2021
A month after Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced an end to all coronavirus restrictions, covid numbers continue to crash in the state. While Fauci was quick to attack Abbott’s move to open Texas, when asked this week why the doom he predicted did not come about he had no answer. Also today: Baseball is back in Texas and vaccine passports are ruled out.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Fauci, Texas Covid | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on April 7, 2021
Taylor recognized how tariffs corrupted the entire political system: “Laws for creating exclusive privileges and monopolies corrupt governments, interests, and individuals; and substitute patronage, adulation and favor, for industry, as the road to wealth.”
by James Bovard
This is the 200th anniversary of the publication of one of the best American books on trade policy by one of the most thoughtful and least appreciated political analysts of the Founding Fathers era.Taylor was contemptuous of Washington long before it was cool.
[Click to Tweet]
I ran into John Taylor of Caroline when I was roaming the shelves of the Library of Congress in 1987. A few weeks earlier, I had written a piece that the Wall Street Journal headlined, “U.S. Fair Trade Laws Are Anything But,” in which I pounded the Commerce Department for almost always finding imports guilty of selling at “less than fair value” on the basis of nonsense pulled out of their bureaucratic ears. I scoffed that U.S. “trade laws perpetually inflate domestic prices in order to protect consumers against the one-in-a-million possibility that a foreign company could corner the market — and raise prices.” Bruce Smart, the undersecretary of commerce for international trade, sent an angry response to the Journal: “Mr. Bovard displays an alarming ignorance of our trade laws.” I sought to allay officialdom’s alarms by becoming better informed.
I slipped into the Library of Congress alcoves, found the shelves with publications on trade policy from America’s first decades, and fetched out an armload of musty petitions to Congress from the early 1800s. Citizen committees from Boston to Virginia denounced rising tariffs as a betrayal of the Constitution, denying that the federal government had any right to forcibly sacrifice some groups for others’ profit. I also found Tyranny Unmasked, a not-quite-tattered 1822 book. The author, John Taylor (1753–1824), had been an Army officer under George Washington during the Revolutionary War and later served in the U.S. Senate, representing Virginia. I photocopied the entire book and devoured it page by page. (Tyranny Unmasked was reprinted by the Liberty Fund in 1992.)
Taylor’s book beautifully showed how politicians could not strangle trade without also destroying freedom. It was a revelation to see how protectionists had used the same arguments in the early 1800s that they propagated in the 1980s. Taylor provided some of the most insightful quotes for my 1991 book, The Fair Trade Fraud (St. Martin’s Press). In exchanges between individuals — in contract law — the test of fairness is the voluntary consent of each party to the bargain — “the free will which constitutes fair exchanges,” as Taylor wrote. But when politicians call for “fair trade” with foreigners, they routinely use a concept of fairness that is diametrically opposed to the words’ normal usage. When politicians speak of unfair trade, they do not mean that buyers and sellers do not voluntarily agree, but that U.S. government officials disapprove of the bargains American citizens choose to make.
Tyranny Unmasked was an angry retort to an 1821 report by the congressional Committee on Manufactures, which asserted that “commerce is exporting, not importing” and “the excess of exports over imports is the rate of profit.” This same gem of logic popped up in President Donald Trump’s ragings against imports, thereby proving that some fallacies are eternal.
Taylor skewered protectionists with piercing sarcasm: “How could it happen that exchanges of property with foreigners should ruin us, but that transfers of property [by means of tariffs] to capitalists should do us no harm?” Taylor recognized how tariffs corrupted the entire political system: “Laws for creating exclusive privileges and monopolies corrupt governments, interests, and individuals; and substitute patronage, adulation and favor, for industry, as the road to wealth.” Taylor appealed to the values of 1776 to seek to block the skullduggery of his time: “We fought in the revolutionary war against exclusive privileges and oppressive monopolies.” And Taylor also had the record on his side: “In the history of the world, there is no instance of a political economy bottomed upon exclusive privileges, having made any compensation for the deprivation it inflicts.”
Tyranny Unmasked rebutted the statist delusions that were bubbling up in the District of Columbia even before the birth of Ronald Reagan. Taylor scoffed at the notion of any natural or inherent harmony of interests between rulers and the ruled: “Governments able to do so, uniformly sacrifice the national interest to their own.” Taylor derided the congressional report for asserting “that an overflowing treasury indicates national prosperity.” Taylor points out that “this is the chorus of all the songs uttered by those who receive such overflowings.” Perhaps he saw how tariffs and other business subsidies would turn Washington into a swamp of lobbyists and shameless hustlers. Taylor jibed, “What painter has drawn Liberty as a mogul almost suffocated with money and jewels; or with an overflowing Treasury in her lap, and scattering money and exclusive privileges with her hands?”
Protectionists in the early 1800s were calling for higher tariffs as retaliation against European barriers against American imports. Taylor noted, “All monopolies and exclusive privileges [for protecting domestic manufacturers] have succeeded by using the same argument. It is invariably condensed in the single word ‘reciprocity’…. It would be exactly the case of a pacific war, in which the nations should make laws that neither should attack the other, but that each should shed at home a reciprocal portion of its own blood.”
Taylor heartily flogged that recipe for prosperity:
We have long been engaged in what is called a war of reciprocity. Blow begets blow, and wound follows wound, and commerce is gasping in the battle…. We have not gained a single victory in a twenty years’ war of restrictions against restriction, and the harder we strike the enemy, the more severely the blow recoils upon ourselves.
Taylor recognized that the best way to fight foreign unfair trade practices is to maximize American productivity. He declared, “The most efficacious mode of defeating foreign restrictions to which we can resort, would be to establish a really free commerce, which would enlist the merchants of all nations to evade and counteract them.”
Taylor’s warnings went unheeded. In 1828, Congress passed the “Tariff of Abominations” — a crushing, heavy tariff that explicitly sacrificed one part of the country to another part — and set the South on fire. Northern manufacturers got almost all the benefits of protection, while Southern farmers were forced to pay higher prices for comparatively inferior American products and lost their cotton export markets because of foreign retaliation against the United States.
In 1832, Congress upped the tariff still higher. South Carolina declared the new tariff unconstitutional and thereby null, sparking a national crisis. In early 1861, after seven southern states seceded (in part to preserve the odious institution of slavery), congressional Republicans rushed to enact a prohibitive tariff bill even before Lincoln took office. A New York Times editorial on February 14, 1861, warned that boosting the tariffs as high as 216 percent could drive the border states out of the Union: “One of the strongest arguments the [seceded states] could address to [border states] would be furnished by a highly protective tariff on the part of our Government, toward which they cherish the deepest aversion.” The Times condemned the bill as a “disastrous measure” that “alienates extensive sections of the country we seek to retain” and will “deal a deadly blow … at the measures now
in progress to heal our political differences.” But Republicans were determined to effectively blockade American ports to foreign goods, and more states seceded after the onerous tariff law was passed.
See the rest here
This post was written by: James Bovard
James Bovard is a policy adviser to The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is a USA Today columnist and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, Playboy, American Spectator, Investors Business Daily, and many other publications. He is the author of Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty (2017, published by FFF); Public Policy Hooligan (2012); Attention Deficit Democracy (2006); The Bush Betrayal (2004); Terrorism and Tyranny (2003); Feeling Your Pain (2000); Freedom in Chains (1999); Shakedown (1995); Lost Rights (1994); The Fair Trade Fraud (1991); and The Farm Fiasco (1989). He was the 1995 co-recipient of the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the recipient of the 1996 Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. His book Lost Rights received the Mencken Award as Book of the Year from the Free Press Association. His Terrorism and Tyranny won Laissez Faire Book’s Lysander Spooner award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. Read his blog. Send him email.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Committee on Manufactures, John Taylor gatto, protectionists, Tyranny Unmasked | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on April 7, 2021
Government takes a hike and things get better. Whodathunkit.
by Tyler Durden
More than a month has passed since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott shocked the Faucis of the world by scrapping COVID-inspired restrictions on businesses and individuals, including removing the mask mandate. The decisions prompted Dr. Anthony Fauci and legions of public health “experts” to warn about the devastating consequences – thousands of unnecessary deaths would result, they said – however, as the data show, practically every metric has shown that the Lone Star State’s outbreak has continued to recede, even as blue states like Michigan are seeing a new surge in infections (believed to be driven by “mutant” strains).
As epidemiologists everywhere have struggled to come up with an explanation, it’s worth noting that Texans are dining out more, according to Opentable seatings, which have become a closely watched proxy for post-quarantine economic activity.
As experts have struggled to come up with a satisfying answer, Dr. Fauci was asked about the phenomenon during an interview on MSNBC Tuesday morning as the senior advisor to President Biden made the rounds. As MSNBC noted, “if you go to Texas…it looks like 2019… the restaurants are full…the ballparks are full…” and yet, cases have continued to tick downward.
#Drfauci on #Texas #covid cases dropping despite ignoring his advice on masks social distancing. #Fauci I think we’re as sick of you as we are of the #pandemic #maskthis pic.twitter.com/knziX9fjfd — Sn00pster (@sn00pdad) April 6, 2021
Dr. Fauci seemed dumbfounded. He first suggested that the surge in cases simply hadn’t manifested yet because of a “lag”. That might have made sense if the trend had only been in place for a week or two. But a month has passed, and Texas’ positivity rate – the share of new tests that yield positive results, seen as a more accurate representation of community spread – has continued to fall.
“It can be confusing because you may see a lag or a delay, because often you have to wait a few weeks…there’s a lot of things that go into that,” Dr. Fauci said.
“I’m not really sure, it could be because they’re doing things outdoors, you know it’s very difficult to just one-on-one compare that…I hope they continue to tick down, if they do that would be great. But there’s always the concern that when you pull back on methods, particularly things like indoor dining, or bars that are crowded…you could see a delay, then all of a sudden cases tick back up.”
“We’ve been fooled before with places opening up, then nothing happens, but all of a sudden a few weeks later cases explode on you.”
He concluded by saying “we’ve got to be careful we don’t prematurely judge” the situation in Texas.
For those who haven’t been closely following the situation in Texas, 26 days have passed since the state “reopened 100%” with no mask mandate, and 34 days have passed since Gov. Abbott announced the reopening. The number of new cases, deaths, hospitalizations ICU occupancy and positivity rate have all fallen.
Source: NYT
The doctor then speculated that last night’s packed Texas Rangers game might be a “super-spreader event” (like Sturgis? … or The Super Bowl party in Miami?).
Dr. Fauci has already rejected the CDC Director Walensky’s “impending doom” rhetoric, and on Tuesday, he told CNBC that “as long as we keep vaccinating people efficiently and effectively, I don’t think [a fourth wave] is gonna happen.”
However, “that doesn’t mean we’re not going to still see an increase in cases.”
Meanwhile, the White House announced Tuesday that it’s moving up its target date for all American adults to be eligible to receive a vaccine to April 19, two weeks earlier than its prior stated goal. Already, the government has doled out nearly 150M doses.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Dr. Fauci, Greg Abbott, Reopening, Texas Covid | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on April 7, 2021
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/state-legislators-are-working-to-reign-in-the-empire/
Fed up after years of relentless National Guard deployments in undeclared wars, state lawmakers across the country are pushing legislation that would prohibit the use of Guard units in combat zones without a formal declaration of war by Congress.
The bills are being promoted by BringOurTroopsHome.US, a self-described organization of “right-of-center” veterans working to end American involvement in “endless wars” and restore congressional authority over war-making. The libertarian 10th Amendment Center is also backing the cause.
The proposed laws would require governors to determine the constitutionality of orders that place Guard units on federal active duty; where they’re deemed unconstitutional, the governor is required to take action to prevent the unit from being surrendered to federal control and sent into harm’s way.
The first “Defend the Guard” bill was conceived and introduced by Air Force veteran and West Virginia state legislator Pat McGeehan. While no state has enacted the law yet, interest is spreading widely, with legislators now pushing the measure in 31 states.
BringOurTroopsHome.US is led by Dan McKnight, a 13-year veteran of the Marine Corps Reserve, active duty Army and Idaho Army National Guard whose military service ended after he was injured in Afghanistan.
McKnight and many other veterans leading the drive against the War on Terror are from the right side of the political spectrum. That’s a sharp contrast to the typical antiwar veteran of the Vietnam era, but McKnight says vets from both wars share a common experience.
Today’s veterans “are coming home and saying the same thing (Vietnam vets did): ‘What was the point of that? What was our mission? We have no mission, we have no definition of success, we have no clear path to victory, we have no idea what victory means and we’re there without a constitutional authority to send us there’,” he says.
“Every one of us raised our hands and swore an oath to the Constitution…and when it says Congress shall be the only body to declare war, we take that to heart. And when Congress doesn’t do it, we understand bad things can happen: long, endless foreign misadventures,” says McKnight.
In a 2019 Pew Research poll, 64% of veterans said the war in Iraq wasn’t worth fighting; 58% said the same of Afghanistan. A January Concerned Veterans for America/YouGov poll found two-thirds or more of veterans support full withdrawals from both countries.
“The right-of-center veterans are now echoing the message of left-of-center veterans, and it’s hard to ignore when veterans from the entire political spectrum are saying the same thing: Enough already—if you want us to go and bleed and die and spend our lives and your treasure in a foreign land, then Congress should put their name on the line before we put our boots on the ground,” McKnight says.
That’s what the Constitution demands. In an impassioned speech at the West Virginia legislature last month, McGeehan quoted James Madison: “The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it. It has accordingly, with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature.”
The National Guard has played a major role in America’s post-9/11 militarism: As recently as December, more than 57,000 Guard members were deployed around the world.
The federal government’s reliance on the National Guard makes state legislatures an intriguing second front in the drive to curtail the War on Terror. “Defend the Guard” laws also give state lawmakers a rare chance to influence foreign policy—and to impose consequences for the executive branch’s usurpation of war powers.
The heavy reliance on the Guard takes a toll on soldiers, families, neighborhoods and states. The intense pace of National Guard deployments was underscored at a recent Defend the Guard hearing in South Dakota: While opposing “Defend the Guard,” the state adjutant general acknowledged that, during the entire Global War on Terrorism to date, the state has had all its troops home for just 42 days.
McKnight has friends who’ve done a staggering 12 or 13 overseas National Guard deployments. Beyond the risk to life and limb, and the hardships imposed on individuals, families and marriages, he says communities also pay a price.
Guard members “are police officers, tradesmen, mechanics, schoolteachers, attorneys. (When) they have to leave that job behind, it puts a burden on the community,” says McKnight. Upon their return, Guard members are generally guaranteed the option to reclaim their jobs—but that sometimes means displacing those who filled their positions while they were away, compounding the disruptive effect.
Deployments also prevent National Guard units from responding to crises at home—their primary reason for existing. For example:
When Defend the Guard measures are introduced in state legislatures, the national security establishment and its allies emerge to defend the status quo—by hook or by crook.
In South Dakota, McKnight says, “the military-industrial complex…sent a two-star general to testify…and made all kinds of threats, and insinuated the state would lose their National Guard if they passed this bill, which is simply not true.”
Weeks ago, Republican Idaho Representative Joe Palmer, who chairs the state’s Transportation & Defense Committee, seemed to resort to underhanded tactics to kill a Defend the Guard bill.
He put the measure to an initial procedural vote in the committee, and declared it to have failed by voice vote. Video of the proceedings, however, shows the result of the voice vote to be unclear at best, and McKnight says his group’s post-vote polling of members suggests the measure would have advanced had Palmer taken a recorded vote.
If Palmer didn’t already know he should play fair with veterans who are trying to prevent fellow citizen-soldiers from dying in unconstitutional wars, he may be learning that lesson now: McKnight says his group facilitated an emergency meeting of the GOP committee in Palmer’s home town, which is now considering a resolution censuring Palmer for his conduct.
“If you want to play parliamentary tricks and the price of your tricks is the blood of my brothers and sisters who (deploy) over and over again, then we’re going to take some blood of our own, and we’re going to do that the way politicians understand, and that’s with voters in the primary and the general election,” says McKnight.
Sometimes, the establishment’s machinations are done away from cameras. In a 2015 interview, West Virginia’s McGeehan said he was summoned to a meeting in the Speaker’s office with the commander of the state National Guard. The general said he’d received a call from the Pentagon, threatening that, if Defend the Guard became law, West Virginia bases would find their way onto the list of installations targeted for closure.
McKnight says “the most offensive opposition that we’ve faced” came from U.S. Congresswoman Liz Cheney, daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney.
“When we pushed the Defend the Guard bill in Wyoming last year, she or her staff contacted members of the Wyoming legislature and said, ‘If this passes in Wyoming, I will personally see to it that two C-130 aircraft are stripped from Wyoming and sent to Texas’,” says McKnight, who was in Cheyenne to support the bill, along with U.S. Senator Rand Paul.
Bethany Baldes, Wyoming state director of BringOurTroopsHome.US, was also on hand. She too says lawmakers told her they received calls from Cheney’s office that included threats to send new C-130 cargo planes to Texas. (Cheney’s communications director has not replied to an invitation to comment on this story.)
The measure failed, 35-22. A statement signed by a group of Wyoming senators opposing the measure seemed to turn logic on its head by claiming the bill “calls into question Wyoming’s support for our soldiers and airmen in the National Guard.”
That episode was McKnight’s second jarring encounter with Cheney, whom he describes as a “warmonger heiress of a military-industrial fortune.” Months before, he and other veterans met with Cheney in Washington to urge her to support the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.
“We went into Liz Cheney’s office and we asked her, ‘What conditions must be met on the ground for you to support ending the war in Afghanistan and bringing our troops home?’ And she said, ‘I don’t think I could ever support that position’.”
Pressing the issue, the veterans asked Cheney how long troops should remain. “She looked us stone-faced in the eye and said, ‘Forever. American troops will be in Afghanistan forever’,” says McKnight. “That’s when we decided it was time to step away from the swamp and work in the states, and force the states to force Congress’s hand.”
This article was originally featured at Stark Realities
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: BringOurTroopsHome.US, Constitution, Empire, Liz Cheney, National Guard deployments | 1 Comment »
Posted by M. C. on April 7, 2021
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/04/patrick-j-buchanan/for-what-should-we-fight-russia-or-china/
Last Monday, in a single six-hour period, NATO launched 10 air intercepts to shadow six separate groups of Russian bombers and fighters over the Arctic, North Atlantic, North Sea, Black Sea and Baltic Sea.
Last week also brought reports that Moscow is increasing its troop presence in Crimea and along its borders with Ukraine.
Joe Biden responded. In his first conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Biden assured him of our “unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression in the Donbass and Crimea.”
Though Ukraine is not a member of NATO, and we have no treaty obligation to fight in its defense, this comes close to a war guarantee. Biden seems to be saying that if it comes to a shooting war between Moscow and Kiev, we will be there on the side of Kiev.
Last week, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov answered that if the U.S. sends troops to Ukraine, Russia will respond.
Again, is Biden saying that in the event of a military clash between Ukrainians and Russians in Crimea, Donetsk or Luhansk, the U.S. will intervene militarily on the side of Ukraine?
Such a pledge could put us at war with a nuclear-armed Russia in a region where we have never had vital interests, and without the approval of the only institution authorized to declare war — Congress.
Meanwhile, off Whitsun Reef in the South China Sea, which Beijing occupies but Manila claims, China has amassed 220 maritime militia ships.
This huge Chinese flotilla arrived after Secretary of State Anthony Blinken put Beijing on notice that any attack on Philippine planes or ships challenging Beijing’s claim to rocks and reefs of the South China Sea that are in Manila’s exclusive economic zone will be backed by the U.S.
Our 70-year-old mutual security treaty with Manila covers these islets and reefs, said Blinken, though some are already occupied and fortified by China.
Apparently, if Manila uses force to assert its claims and expel the Chinese, then we will fight beside our Philippine allies. This amounts to a war guarantee of the kind that forced the British to declare war on Germany in 1939 over the invasion of Poland.
Two weeks ago, 20 Chinese military aircraft entered Taiwan’s air defense identification zone in the largest incursion yet by Beijing over the waters between Taiwan and Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands. As national security correspondent Bill Gertz writes in today’s Washington Times:
”China is stepping up provocative activities targeting regional American allies in Asia … with an escalating number of military flights around Taiwan and the massing of more than 200 fishing ships near a disputed Philippines reef.
“China also raised tensions with Japan, announcing last week that Tokyo must drop all claims to the disputed Senkaku Islands, an uninhabited island chain that Japan has administered for decades but that Beijing recently claimed as its territory.
“The most serious provocation took place March 29. An exercise by the People’s Liberation Army air force that included 10 warplanes flew into Taiwan’s air defense zone is what analysts say appeared to be a simulated attack on the island. It came just three days after an earlier mass warplane incursion.”
While China appears clear about its aims and claims to virtually all of the islands in the South China Sea and East China Sea as well as Taiwan — it is less clear about its intentions as to when to validate those claims.
As for the U.S., does the present foggy ambiguity as to what we may or may not do as China goes about asserting its claims serve our vital interests in avoiding war with the greatest power on the largest continent on earth?
If red lines are to be laid down, they ought to be laid down by the one constitutional body with the authority to authorize or declare war — Congress. And questions need to be answered to avoid the kinds of miscalculations that led to horrific world wars in the 20th century.
Are the reefs and rocks the Philippines claim in the South China Sea, claims contradicted by China, covered by the U.S. mutual security treaty of 1951? Are we honor-bound to fight China on behalf of the Philippines, if Manila attempts to reclaim islets China occupies?
What is our obligation if China moves to take the Senkakus? Would the United States join Japan in military action to hold or retrieve them?
What, exactly, is our commitment to Taiwan if China attempts to blockade, invade or seize Taiwan’s offshore islands?
John F. Kennedy in the second debate with Richard Nixon in 1960 wrote off Quemoy and Matsu in the Taiwan Strait as indefensible and not worth war with Mao’s China.
With its warnings and threats, China is forcing America to address questions we have been avoiding for about as long as we can.
China is saying that it is not bluffing: These islands are ours!
Time to show our cards.
Patrick J. Buchanan is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever See his website.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Anthony Blinken, China, Crimea, Donbass, NATO, Russia, Ukraine | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on April 7, 2021
The USGS admits there is no direct relationship between climate and wildfires. However the evidence clearly shows a direct relationship with more humans causing more wildfire ignitions while additionally making landscapes more fire prone. Fires need kindling like dead grass and twigs to start, and human disturbance has increased the supply invasive grasses. Dead grasses and twigs become highly flammable within just hours of warm dry temperatures that are common every summer regardless of climate change.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/04/06/dangerously-stupid-science-solar-geoengineering/
By Jim Steele
A new report from the National Academies of Sciences recommended the United States pursue a robust research program into solar geoengineering, to reflect sunlight and forestall some of the worst effects of global warming. Seeking $200 million over 5 years for research from the Biden administration, those scientists push a climate crisis narrative, arguing greenhouse gas emissions are not falling quickly enough and, “Without decisive action and rapid stabilization of global temperature, risks from a changing climate will increase in the future, with potentially catastrophic consequences” This should alarm everyone. Not because a climate crisis is real, but because solar geoengineering is the height of stupidity and truly endangers humanity. Still solar blocking experiments were planned for June 2021 in Sweden. Fortunately objections from other scientists, environmentalists, and Indigenous groups just cancelled those plans … for now.
In contrast to many failed “climate crisis” predictions, there’s an abundance of research detailing the truly detrimental effects of decreased solar heating. Human suffering during the cooler Little Ice Age (LIA), spanning 1300 to 1850 AD, has been well documented. Scientists agree LIA cooling is linked to volcanic activity and several periods of reduced solar output associated with low sunspots, such as the Maunder Minimum that lasted from 1645 to 1715 AD. Satellites have verified that less solar energy is emitted when sunspots decline. During increased volcanic activity, volcanic aerosols are spewed into the atmosphere reflecting sunlight away from the earth. Likewise climate scientists seek to inject aerosols into the atmosphere to cool the earth. It’s mind-boggling that fear‑ridden scientists would want to return our climate to the cooler temperatures like Little Ice Age. So please examine what a similar LIA cooling of 1°C (1.8°F) could do.
Tropical rainfall patterns control the subsistence lifestyle of more than one billion people. Reconstructions of precipitation during the cooler 14th and 15th centuries reveal a series of monsoon mega‑droughts in central India, north-central China, and southern Vietnam, each lasting several years to decades. Although the Maunder Minimum increased rainfall in Africa’s Sahel, it also resulted in a megadrought in subtropical West Africa. Could cooling the earth be construed as racist?
Tropical rainfall and the Asian and Australian monsoons are largely controlled by the region where moisture carrying trade winds from the north and south converge. The earth’s greatest rainfall happens there and is called the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). It is easily recognized in satellite images as a band of heavy clouds.
As the sun moves northward during the northern hemisphere’s summer, the ITCZ likewise shifts northward, and a rainy season follows. During the winter as the ITCZ shifts southward the rainy season moves southward while the more northern region then experiences a dry season. Regions south of the ITCZ experience a dry season when northern tropics experience more rain and vice versa. Scientists have shown variations in solar strength alter the ITCZ and the accompanying rainfall. However the ITCZ does not strictly follow the sun. Its location is also affected by the temperature of the oceans and continents. During the LIA, cooler northern hemisphere temperatures pushed the average position of the ITCZ southward, resulting in the monsoonal megadroughts and famines that devastated India, and southeast Asia.
The LIA cooling of 1°C disrupted ocean and atmospheric circulation around the world, so that alternating good and bad weather whiplashed a struggling humanity. Indeed climate scientist Michel Mann wrote, “the Little Ice Age may have been more significant in terms of increased variability of the climate”. Bouts of extreme inclement weather from about 1550 to I700 AD brought famine and the age of great mortality to Europe. Ten percent of the population of northern France died in 1693-1694. In northern China, rapid cooling and increasing extreme disasters in the late 16th and 18th centuries resulted in severe social consequences characterized by more famine and popular unrest. The year 1816 was known as the Year Without a Summer, and prompted historians to write about The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World.
In contrast, with minimal increases in land use, our so-called warming crisis paired with the industrial world’s technological innovations to steadily increase global food production and feed a burgeoning global population that had increased from 600 million in 1700 to 7.7+ billion today.
In the polar Urals where trees had previously existed further northward, the colder 15‑19th century temperatures replaced forests with treeless tundra, as new tree growth was totally inhibited. On the other hand, twentieth century warming has now allowed tree line to recover its pre-LIA habitat. Satellite data reveals a global greening and multiple global ecosystem models suggest CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of that observed greening trend. Long appreciating such CO2 fertilization, commercial growers around the world pump an extra 1000 ppm CO2 into their greenhouses to increase plant growth.
By the 1700s a new killer began to dominate the LIA – accidental hypothermia. When indoor temperatures fall below 48°F for prolonged periods, the human body struggles to keep warm, setting off a series of reactions that causes stress and heart attacks. During the intense cold season of I739/40, indoor temperature readings fell below the freezing point throughout Western Europe. Frozen rivers disrupted transportation, creating a shortage of coal and wood for home heating in urban locations causing numerous deaths from accidental hypothermia. The cold and dry weather also caused shortages of grass and fodder resulting in widespread death to livestock. Though not as devastating as the LIA thanks to modern heating, Americans from the Great Plains as far south as Texas were killed by cold weather with over 100 humans dying during the February 2021 cold snap.
The weaker LIA sun also cooled the upper 600 meters of the oceans, and reduced upwelling. Based on marine sediments off Peru, oceanographers uncovered very low marine productivity during the cooler LIA. But warming that began in 1850 soon brought rapid expansion of upwelled nutrient-rich waters, resulting in the present-day higher biological productivity from plankton to pelagic fish throughout the marine food web.
Its most disturbing that the varied crises predicted for a warmer 21st century were worse during the cooler LIA. For example global warming is predicted to spread tropical disease. However from 1564 to the 1730s – the coldest period of the Little Ice Age – malaria was an important cause of illness and death in several parts of England. Malaria outbreaks expanded into the Arctic. Transmission began to decline only in the 19th century, when the present warming trend was well under way. Similarly the first mosquito-borne yellow fever outbreaks in the United States occurred in late 1690s. Nearly 100 years later, in the late summer of 1793, refugees from a yellow fever epidemic in the Caribbean fled to Philadelphia. By the middle of October, 100 people were dying from the virus every day. Those outbreaks encouraged the US to move its capital from Philadelphia to Washington DC.
See the rest here
Jim Steele is director emeritus of the Sierra Nevada Field Campus, SFSU, authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism, and proud member of the CO2 Coalition
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Global warming, solar blocking, Solar Geoengineering | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on April 7, 2021
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/04/laurence-m-vance/the-politicians-we-need/
Fair Haven, Vermont, chartered in 1779, is a town of less than 3,000 people noted for its late nineteenth-century architecture. But this is not what makes the town unique.
Fair Haven operates under a council–manager government with a town manager and a five-member board to supervise the local government. There is no mayor. Instead, an animal is chosen as mayor every year in a ceremonial mayoral election. In 2020, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Murfee was elected as mayor. Last month, in a race that contained nineteen candidates—including dogs, cats, horses, chickens, and birds—the incumbent dog mayor was reelected to a second term.
This is just the kind of politicians we need.
With politicians like this, the government—
Won’t start wars.
Won’t order the bombing of other countries.
Won’t punish people for engaging in entirely peaceful, voluntary, and consensual actions that do not aggress against the person or property of others.
Won’t violate the non-aggression principle.
Won’t subsidize anything.
Won’t regulate business or industry.
Won’t ban substances.
Won’t take people’s resources against their will, by force if necessary, and transfer or redistribute them to other citizens or foreigners.
Won’t violate property rights.
Won’t require vaccine passports.
Won’t control prices.
Won’t lock people in cages for possessing too much of a plant.
Won’t impose protective tariffs.
Won’t require occupational licensing.
Won’t force some Americans to pay for the health care of other Americans.
Won’t require people to wear masks.
Won’t be involved in television or radio broadcasting.
Won’t support the arts.
Won’t explore space.
Won’t require anyone to be vaccinated.
Won’t tell people not to travel.
Won’t require social distancing.
Won’t outlaw price gouging.
Won’t force “unessential” businesses to close.
Won’t issue nutritional guidelines.
Won’t tell people not to sing in church.
Won’t close parks and playgrounds.
Won’t force women’s restrooms to allow entrance to men dressed as women.
See the rest here
Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from central Florida. He is the author of The War on Drugs Is a War on Freedom; War, Christianity, and the State: Essays on the Follies of Christian Militarism; War, Empire, and the Military: Essays on the Follies of War and U.S. Foreign Policy; King James, His Bible, and Its Translators, and many other books. His newest books are Free Trade or Protectionism? and The Free Society.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Cavalier King Charles, Fair Haven, Vermont | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on April 7, 2021
Now, you shouldn’t be blamed for thinking that incompetence would easily be outed and vanquished in an age of black boxes, videotapes, and other gotcha devices. Unfortunately, the responsible are not always fingered, and mostly they are coddled and protected by the same bureaucrats who appointed them to the positions they can’t handle. An illustration follows:
I have a friend who is fearful of commercial airlines.
At the gate, before boarding, he asks the agent the following question: “What is the captain’s name?” If the answer indicates the pilot is female, he will not board that flight. Any criticism of my friend’s lack of confidence in any qualified aviatrix is answered along these lines: “She can’t drive a stick shift. I should trust her with a Jumbo Jet?”
My friend is right to be cautious about flying, but for different reasons. Like most air travelers, he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
After a career of being closely associated with the air traffic control system, I can confidently opine that female pilots should be near the bottom on anyone’s list of safety concerns. Closer to the top of that list? Affirmative action.
Affirmative action has eroded the efficacy of the air traffic control system to an alarming degree. The air traffic controllers’ strike in the summer of 1981 was a crisis that the social engineers did not let go to waste. They replaced the PATCO workforce with many of the liberal left’s favorites. Let’s just say their favorites do not include straight, white, competent, experienced males. However, some level of competence still must be added to the mix; the nature of air traffic control demands it. When flying tubes of flesh and jet fuel are hurtling hither and yon at breakneck speeds, someone has to break the ties. We can’t have controllers doing a “bang-up” job.
Now, you shouldn’t be blamed for thinking that incompetence would easily be outed and vanquished in an age of black boxes, videotapes, and other gotcha devices. Unfortunately, the responsible are not always fingered, and mostly they are coddled and protected by the same bureaucrats who appointed them to the positions they can’t handle. An illustration follows:
January 25, 1990. Avianca 052, a Boeing 707 en route from Columbia to JFK Airport in Queens, N.Y. After two missed approaches in bad weather, the pilot told the approach controller that he was “running out of fuel” and that he “needed priority.” The flight received neither sympathy nor priority. All four engines flamed out, and the 707 crash-landed in a wooded area of Long Island. Seventy-five dead. The FAA pointed to poor communication by the pilot and a language barrier. At the time, when asked about this by a New York–area journalist, I informed the scribe that the ATC tapes were transcribed fully in English and that no foreign language was heard on the tapes.
As hard as it may be to believe, the controller(s) apparently did not know that running out of fuel is a serious event when it happens to an aircraft in flight. The rulebook mandates that a controller, if in doubt as to the existence of an emergency, should treat such an event as if it is in fact an emergency.
The FAA and the NTSB lied about the cause of a multi-fatal aviation disaster. I believe that the reputation of the FAA Air Traffic Division in general, and the controllers involved in particular, is more important to FAA bureaucrats than maintaining a safe system.
Affirmative action rewards incompetence and degrades safety. That government agents would cover up the sad outcomes of the bad policy they foisted upon us should have been predictable.
I recommend avoiding the friendly skies altogether. This way, the sex of the pilot is not a consideration.
Willie Shields is a talk radio host, and the author of Exit 13A – A Control Tower Diary. A former U.S. Marine and an FAA air traffic controller, Mr. Shields resides in Wilmington, Delaware. Email: WSHIELDS1775@VERIZON.NET; Twitter: @WILLIEONRADIO.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Air Traffic Division, CFAA, NTSB | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on April 7, 2021
” We are getting a lot of vaccine into people’s arms,”
“Jail”, the “vaccinated” must wear masks, shouldn’t travel. Makes you wonder just how much is known about what you are letting government pump in your body. Don’t be surprised when you are told you must get a “booster”.
Control, Obey
https://erietimes-pa-app.newsmemory.com/?publink=21839ad20
David Bruce Erie Times-News USA TODAY NETWORK
Charlotte Berringer, R.N director of community health for the Erie County Department of Health The 51,216 Erie County residents who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 might feel like they are now invincible against the virus.
That’s not exactly true, said Charlotte Berringer, R.N., director of community health for the Erie County Department of Health.
‘The impression I get is that many of these folks feel like the vaccine is a get-out-of-jail-free card and that they can get back to doing anything they did before,’ Berringer said.
Berringer said people who have full immunity are safe for activities such as gathering without face masks in small groups with other fully vaccinated people.
They can also gather with unvaccinated people from a single household under similar conditions, as long as the unvaccinated individuals are at low risk for severe illness if infected, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.
But Berringer said vaccinated people must continue to take precautions in other circumstances. It’s because the current vaccines, while very effective, do not provide 100% protection and it is not yet known if they prevent people from spreading the virus.
‘If you are fully vaccinated and want to go out in public where there are unvaccinated people, you still need to wear a face mask and practice social distancing,’ Berringer said.
Erie County reported 56 new cases of COVID-19 and one additional death on Tuesday.
The county’s number of new cases has increased 19% in the past week, though COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to decline. Hospitalization trends tend to lag behind new case trends by a couple of weeks.
Berringer declined to predict whether COVID-19 hospitalizations will increase in the county but said she is pleased with the county’s rise in vaccinations.
‘We are getting a lot of vaccine into people’s arms,’ Berringer said. ‘About 33% of the county’s eligible population, people 16 and older, have at least one dose of vaccine. Another 7,000 doses are expected to be given this week.’
The county has 18,926 total cases of COVID-19, 453 deaths and 66,309 negative tests since the pandemic started.
Eleven county residents with COVID-19 were hospitalized Monday evening, including three in intensive care units and one who needed a ventilator, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
A total of 964 county residents have active cases of COVID-19 and 17,509 have recovered, according to state health department estimates.
Contact David Bruce at
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: COVID Vaccine | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on April 7, 2021
The Biden administration is reportedly considering restarting construction of former President Donald Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexico border as the administration struggles to maintain control of the worsening border crisis.
Biden Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said during a conversation with ICE employees last week that the administration was considering finishing “gaps in the wall.”
“It’s not a single answer to a single question. There are different projects that the chief of the Border Patrol has presented and the acting commissioner of CBP presented to me,” Mayorkas said, according to notes of the ICE session reviewed by The Washington Times. “The president has communicated quite clearly his decision that the emergency that triggered the devotion of DOD funds to the construction of the border wall is ended. But that leaves room to make decisions as the administration, as part of the administration, in particular areas of the wall that need renovation, particular projects that need to be finished.”
The Times said that Mayorkas specifically mentioned those “particular projects” included “gaps,” “gates,” and areas “where the wall has been completed but the technology has not been implemented.”
The report noted that the new completed section of border wall is more than just a wall as it includes technology that allows authorities to detect incursions and features “high-speed roads” that allows for rapid response. The report also highlighted recent polling that showed that the majority of Americans, 53% overall, support construction of the border wall.
Politico reported last month that Biden was under investigation by the Government Accountability Office for halting billions of dollars in payments that were scheduled to go out to companies that had been contracted to finish building the wall.
“Now the Government Accountability Office is launching a review to determine whether the new president broke the law by freezing the money in violation of budget rules designed to keep Congress in control of the cash flow,” Politico reported. “The probe highlights the challenge presidents have historically faced in fulfilling campaign promises that require money to be spent — or suspended — at odds with Congress’ intent.”
The report comes as Biden’s border crisis has overwhelmed the U.S.-Mexico border, promoting backlash against Biden from Republicans, Democrats, and even the president of Mexico.
Forty Senate Republicans said in a letter to the Government Accountability Office that in “the weeks that followed” Biden suspending construction of the border wall that “operational control of our southern border was comprised and a humanitarian and national security crisis has ensued.”
The letter added:
The President’s actions directly contributed to this unfortunate, yet entirely avoidable, scenario. They are also a blatant violation of federal law and infringe on Congress’s constitutional power of the purse. We write regarding these actions. We believe they violated the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), as interpreted by your office, and we request your legal opinion on the matter. Prompt action to end these violations is required to restore order at the border.
A new poll released this week showed that the majority of Americans do not approve of the job that Biden is doing on the border.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Alejandro Mayorkas, Border Crisis, border walls, Gaps | Leave a Comment »
