MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Watch “Biden Begs Taliban: Let Us Stay Six More Months” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on March 31, 2021

The Biden Administration seems intent on breaking the agreement signed under the Trump Administration for US troops to finally leave Afghanistan, the longest and perhaps most pointless war in US history. Rather than follow through with the withdrawal, the White House is attempting to negotiate with the Taliban for six more months. How many more Americans (and Afghanis) will have to die for this failed policy? Also today, Biden ratchets up war tensions in Ukraine, shipping more than 300 tons of new weapons. War drums getting louder.

https://youtu.be/28ZBOXIvHjA

Be seeing you

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

Can Las Vegas Recover from Covid? | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on March 31, 2021

https://mises.org/wire/can-las-vegas-recover-covid

Doug French

The Clark County Commissioners voted recently to rename McCarran Airport to Harry Reid International Airport. The vote was unanimous among those who rule the Las Vegas Strip. The public doesn’t understand why Las Vegas International Airport wouldn’t do if McCarran’s past is so perturbing. Not everyone is so wild about Harry.

There was a time when 40 million plus visitors passed through McCarran, during the boom years. But January 2021 saw visitor traffic fall 64 percent from a year ago. This sort of traffic has The Motley Fool wondering, “Are There Too Many Casinos in Las Vegas?” After all, convention traffic is nil, and “[a] concrete industry convention this summer is seen as the first real test of whether Las Vegas can come back soon,” writes Rich Dumprey. 

These days the convention center is housing covid vaccinations. The creator of the Las Vegas convention industry, Sheldon Adelson (SGA), just passed away, and had lined up a sale of all Las Vegas Sands properties before his death. LVS is all about Macau, Singapore and … Texas? That’s right, Sands money flooded into Austin in hopes of moving the legalized gaming needle, and convention business, in LVS’s direction. 

fre

What did SGA see that the rest of the town didn’t and doesn’t? As the Fool explains, “There are around 30 casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, about two dozen more nearby (such as on Fremont Street), and dozens more elsewhere. Yet with so many gambling halls available and so few people to fill them, casino operators could delay their recovery by continuing to operate them all. Perhaps the new normal for Vegas should be fewer casinos.”

As for convection space, in a piece for mises.org, I wrote, “Las Vegas convention attendance first topped 6 million in the boom year of 2005. Since then, the number of yearly convention visitors has bounced between just short of 4.5 million in 2009 and again in 2010 … ” In 2019, 6.6 million conventioneers hit town, while in 2020 let’s just say very few arrived.

Meanwhile, the Las Vegas Convention Authority has added “1.4 million square feet to its facility, including six hundred thousand square feet of new leasable exhibit space,” supposedly because, as LVCVA chief Steve Hill said in 2019, “It’s pretty remarkable what’s going on in Las Vegas right now, but it’s in response to demand.”

Elon Musk finished an underground people mover at the LVCVA site and has been signed on to dig more tunnels.

So, SGA saw thousands of rooms to compete with and the government (LVCVA) continuing to compete with subsidized rates for conventions. You see, hotels pay the LVCVA fees to bring business to Las Vegas and with those fees are able to offer lower convention space rates. Texas doesn’t sound so crazy after all.

As for Harry’s airport, one wonders when folks will want to fill the friendly skies again. The New York Times’s Farhad Manjoo writes, “Face-to-face interactions were said to justify the $1.4 trillion spent globally on business travel in 2019. In 2020, business travel was slashed in half, our faces were stuck in screens, and yet many of the companies used to spending boatloads on travel are doing just fine.”

Manjoo gives plenty of space to the carbon footprint of the average business traveler, but, more importantly, he interviewed Darren Marble, an entrepreneur based in Los Angeles, who learned face-to-face is not all it’s cracked up to be. “Rapport is overrated,” Marble told Manjoo.

And while I may think having a carbon-neutral footprint is overrated, younger folks put it much higher on their preference scales. The Global Business Travel Association predicts business travel will return to 2019 levels by 2025.

For Las Vegas and Reid International, 2025 won’t be soon enough.

Author:

Doug French

Douglas French is former president of the Mises Institute, author of Early Speculative Bubbles & Increases in the Money Supply, and author of Walk Away: The Rise and Fall of the Home-Ownership Myth. He received his master’s degree in economics from UNLV, studying under both Professor Murray Rothbard and Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Be seeing you

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

Joe Scarborough Slams “Idiots” Who Oppose Vaccine Passports: “They’re Living In Ignorance And Stupidity” | ZeroHedge

Posted by M. C. on March 31, 2021

Republicans and civil liberties advocates have criticized vaccine passports as s step toward “totalitarian communism”, and even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has vowed not to let them become a requirement in the state of Florida.

Scarborough’s rant continues, blasting Americans skeptical of vaccine passports as opposing the teachings of Jesus: https://t.co/7A5c27ifZM — Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 30, 2021

But that apparently didn’t occur to Scarborough as he chided Americans for “following conspiracy theories” and for living in “ignorance and stupidity.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/joe-scarborough-slams-idiots-who-oppose-vaccine-passports-theyre-living-ignorance-and?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter

Tyler Durden's Photoby Tyler Durden

As we have reported numerous times, at this point, the reality that vaccine passports will essentially become an individual’s ‘passport to life’ seems like a foregone conclusion. The EU is already working on rolling out a digital system to allow residents to prove their vaccination status in a desperate attempt to save the summer tourism season, which faced devastation last year because of the pandemic.

As the Biden Administration works with the private sector to develop a standardized way for Americans to prove their status (an effort that’s being led by airlines and their consultants), MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, a frequent and early GOP critic of President Trump, wants Americans to know that if they don’t support vaccine passports, then they’re “an idiot” and a “moron” who should probably “crawl back to your cave.”

We imagine Scarborough’s corporate sponsors, who are depending on the scheme to entice people to get out and consume,

Republicans and civil liberties advocates have criticized vaccine passports as s step toward “totalitarian communism”, and even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has vowed not to let them become a requirement in the state of Florida.

Scarborough’s rant continues, blasting Americans skeptical of vaccine passports as opposing the teachings of Jesus: https://t.co/7A5c27ifZM — Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 30, 2021

But that apparently didn’t occur to Scarborough as he chided Americans for “following conspiracy theories” and for living in “ignorance and stupidity.”

“They’re being stupid, they’re following conspiracy theories…they don’t understand because maybe they’re such morons,” he thundered. “If they don’t want to take the vaccine and they want to die, that’s their right as Americans. They can live in ignorance and stupidity.”

“Our government, our sports teams, our concert promoters damned well better put together something where you can show your vaccine receipt,” he said.

“This anti-science idiocy, you know, let them do that under a rock or in their caves,” he added, concluding that “the time to try to reason with these people has long passed.”

Scarborough was instantly blasted online for his rant, which some called out as “totally unhinged.”

To put it another way: “Our government damned well better systematically violate individuals’ right to informed consent.”

Like in The Matrix, there are those who will fight for their own enslavement. https://t.co/LPzYvNNIFH — Jeremy R. Hammond (@jeremyrhammond) March 30, 2021

WTF! This dude is totally unhinged!@JoeScarborough https://t.co/rcLiR41Ex7 — Laura (@llsch1) March 30, 2021

With enough enthusiasm from the private sector, the US government may only step in to ensure standardization. Speaking to reporters on Monday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that “we want to drive the market toward meeting public interest goals.” The government “is not viewing its role as the place to create a passport, nor a place to hold the data of citizens,” Andy Slavitt, a White House Covid-19 adviser, added during Psaki’s briefing.

Of course, views on vaccines are much different in Europe, where Germany on Tuesday is reportedly planning to bar the AstraZeneca jab, limiting to only patients under the age of 60. The effort follows publication of new research purporting to link the AstraZeneca jab with rare, but deadly, blood clots that have occurred in a small number of patients. The EMA and WHO haven’t denied a connection, but continue to insist that benefits of the jab far outweigh the costs.

Be seeing you

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

Republicans Want To Take Your Guns – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on March 31, 2021

Now, some would argue that felons shouldn’t be allowed to own guns. What qualifies a felon? Well, according to the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, if you’ve loaded this web page and are reading this right now, you’ve committed a felony. Specifically, you’ve obtained information and are engaging in interstate or foreign communication. According to the CFAA, those are felonies

The Democrats want to take our guns, but the Republicans will swindle us out of them. Having depression or PTSD or opening your mother’s mail for her could result in a gun ban under Republican legislation. Republicans are not the gun advocate saints they claim to be. Their ideas are far more harmful than they claim to be. The Democrats will tell you that they’ll take your guns. The Republicans will tell you everything’s fine while robbing you blind.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/03/dakota-hensley/republicans-want-to-take-your-guns/

By Dakota Hensley

Republicans like to portray themselves as the most ardent and dedicated protectors of gun rights and the Second Amendment. Those like Ted Cruz claim that it’s Democrats that want to take away “guns from law-abiding citizens because that’s their political objective.” Republicans claim that if you put them in the driver’s seat, your guns will be protected. Is that true? No. It hasn’t been true for a long, long time.

Which is worse: being robbed or being swindled? If someone robs you, you’ll know they’re robbing you. You can stop it from happening again. If someone swindles you, you may not know about it for days or weeks or more. Democrats will rob you of your guns. Republicans will swindle you out of your guns and you’ll be none the wiser.

Ted Cruz claims Democrats want to take your guns. Republicans would never do that. Is that why he co-sponsored the Protecting Communities and Preserving the Second Amendment Act  of 2019, a bill that bans the mentally ill and felons from owning guns? That sure seems like gun control to me. Cruz was endorsed by GOA, the no compromise gun lobby. I guess they’re ok with compromise as long as it “preserves communities.”

Now, some would argue that felons shouldn’t be allowed to own guns. What qualifies a felon? Well, according to the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, if you’ve loaded this web page and are reading this right now, you’ve committed a felony. Specifically, you’ve obtained information and are engaging in interstate or foreign communication. According to the CFAA, those are felonies. Ted Cruz and Chuck Grassley, the bill’s original sponsor, think you should now be banned from owning a gun. Possessing marijuana can also be a felony. So is posting fraudulent information on someone’s social media account, egging a mailbox, opening mail not addressed to you, downloading music without paying for it, giving a friend viagra, and failing to report your tips. Under the Grassley-Cruz bill, if you’ve done any of this, you’ll be banned from owning a gun.

There’s also the deal with mental illness. Mental illness is not as rare as politicians claim it to be. 1 in 5 people have depression and 1 in 5 have anxiety. 1 in 100 have schizophrenia. Almost 8% have PTSD, including 30% of veterans. Should all these people lose their guns? Should almost a third of veterans lose to their Second Amendment rights? Some say mass shooters justify this idea yet only 25% of them have a mental illness. Over 51 million people have a mental illness. Who’s going to take all those guns?

Modern Republicans like Cruz and Grassley aren’t the only ones who endorse gun control without really saying it. Ronald Reagan, as Governor of California, signed into law the Mulford Act, banning open carry. The bill was introduced because of the horror of black people walking around carrying guns. The Act was even endorsed by the NRA. Reagan also endorsed the Brady Bill in a 1991 op-ed. In 1989, he said, “…I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed in defense of a home” and should be banned with other “assault weapons.” In 1983, however, he told the NRA in a speech that, with gun control, “…police would be so busy arresting handgun owners that they would be unable to protect the people against criminals. It’s a nasty truth that those who seek to inflict harm are not phased by gun control laws. I happen to know this from personal experience.” Republicans like Reagan and Cruz say one thing in public yet do another in private. It’s rather swamp-like behavior. Conservatives deserve better.

According to the Daily Caller, this swamp-like behavior continues. Mitch McConnell and Pat Toomey are open to compromising on gun control. Cruz and Grassley are even discussing resurrecting the PCPSA act I mentioned earlier. Reading these words could get your guns taken away. Excessive? Maybe, but we all know that the government always deals in excess.

The Democrats want to take our guns, but the Republicans will swindle us out of them. Having depression or PTSD or opening your mother’s mail for her could result in a gun ban under Republican legislation. Republicans are not the gun advocate saints they claim to be. Their ideas are far more harmful than they claim to be. The Democrats will tell you that they’ll take your guns. The Republicans will tell you everything’s fine while robbing you blind.

Dakota Hensley [send him mail] is from Harlan County, Kentucky. He’s a writer and an individualist anarchist. You can find him on Twitter at @DakotaAHensley

Be seeing you

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

The Post-Marxist Left’s Race Problem | Chronicles

Posted by M. C. on March 31, 2021

One of these results is the growing suspicion among leftists that Marxism is a species of white supremacy, precisely because it devotes more attention to class than to race.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/the-post-marxist-left-s-race-problem/

By Grant Havers

A recurrent theme in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) is how the prospect of a coalition between poor blacks and poor whites has often struck fear in the hearts of the wealthy classes in American history. Not surprisingly, Zinn longed for the emergence of an interracial coalition that, in his view, would bring about a more humane and just America for all. As a traditional Marxist, he equated injustice with class oppression and justice with socialism.

0321-ANTIMARXISM-2Such an interracial coalition had emerged for a short time in conjunction with the populist movement of the late 19th century. Today, we may be witnessing the emergence of another such alliance—ironically, perhaps, on the populist right—in part because the left has largely abandoned Marxist concerns with class struggle.

In a chapter on the prevalence of racism in pre-revolutionary America, Zinn writes:

Only one fear was greater than the fear of black rebellion in the new American colonies. That was the fear that discontented whites would join black slaves to overthrow the existing order. In the early years of slavery, especially before racism as a way of thinking was firmly ingrained, while white indentured servants were often treated as badly as black slaves, there was a possibility of cooperation.

Zinn adds that plutocratic interests had a stake in pitting these poor groups against each other by encouraging “the temptation of superior status for whites,” as well as enshrining “legal and social punishment of black and white collaboration.” Despite these measures, the primal fear of an alliance only intensified in the antebellum South. “It was the potential combination of poor whites and blacks that caused the most fear among the wealthy white planters,” he wrote.

0321-ANTIMARXISM-1Although the Civil War ended slavery, it did not end the oppression of blacks in the South, nor did Zinn believe it improved the lives of northern whites who “were not economically favored” any more than those of most Southern whites who “were poor farmers, not decisionmakers.” According to Zinn, the Civil War was a clash between “elites”—Northern industrialists versus Southern planters—not “of peoples.” He believed that various divide-and-conquer strategies in postbellum America have worked to distract poor blacks and whites from uniting against a common enemy that exploits both groups to this day.

The first edition of A People’s History appeared at a time when leftists often still desired the unification of all poor Americans against the class system. In the decades since, many prominent leftists have rejected this traditional vision of an interracial class-based alliance as the wrong kind of unity to build. Instead, they insist that the focus on class obscured the need to zero in on white supremacy as the real dragon to be slain. This shift from class to race has led to some curious results that should interest observers on the left and the right.

One of these results is the growing suspicion among leftists that Marxism is a species of white supremacy, precisely because it devotes more attention to class than to race. To be sure, Marx did privilege the importance of class oppression over racism, even going so far as to compare the hostility between exploited English and Irish workers in England with the hatred that poor whites and emancipated slaves felt towards each other in America. Although this analogy does not sound like an endorsement of white racial superiority, the Caribbean professor of philosophy Charles W. Mills, in his work From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (2003), urges readers of Marx and Engels to read racial prejudice between the lines:

…[A]t best there was no perception on their part that the peculiar situation of people of color required any conceptual modifications of their theory. And if we are less charitable, we must ask whether their contemptuous attitude toward people of color does not raise the question whether they too, like the leading liberal theorists cited above, should not be indicted for racism…

Mills coined the term “White Marxism” in order to highlight what he took to be the racist blind spot of subordinating racial injustice to the “white” preoccupation with class. Nor is he the only leftist to equate a focus on class injustice with white racism. George Ciccariello-Maher, in his book Decolonizing Dialectics (2017) also attacks the Marxian version of “dialectics” for exhibiting Eurocentric tendencies that, at best, ignore colonial oppression of nonwhite races and, at worst, condone them.

Ciccariello-Maher is not exactly famous for sympathizing with the plight of the white working class. He is, however, infamous for tweeting “All I want for Christmas is white genocide” on Christmas Eve 2016. In a subsequent tweet, Ciccariello-Maher attributed the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas to both “Trumpism” and the entitled mentality of whites. “White people and men are told that they are entitled to everything,” he wrote. “This is what happens when they don’t get what they want.” These tweets and others led to his resignation as a professor of political science at Drexel University, which condemned his tweets. Ciccariello-Maher said he resigned because he no longer felt it was “safe” for him to work there, due to alleged death threats.

0321-ANTIMARXISM-3The most famous example of the leftist shift from class to race in recent years is, of course, Robin DiAngelo’s bestseller White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (2018). This work has inspired politicians, celebrities, and other wealthy individuals to take up the cause of fighting “systemic racism” wherever it lurks, so long as it doesn’t affect their pocketbooks. Like Mills and Ciccariello-Maher, DiAngelo shows little interest in understanding or appreciating the impact of class-based injustices on white people. In a 2011 essay on white fragility that became the template for her book, she consigns the issue of class to this footnote:

Although white racial insulation is somewhat mediated by social class (with poor and working-class urban whites being generally less racially insulated than suburban or rural whites), the larger social environment insulates and protects whites as a group through institutions, cultural representations, media, school textbooks, movies, advertising, and dominant discourses.

Contained within this wordy example of academic prose is this message: Poor whites, despite their lesser degree of “insulation,” are complicit in maintaining an order that legitimizes white supremacy. Additionally, they benefit from this regime. (The fact that DiAngelo has become very wealthy as a result of her work on white fragility may explain why she is reluctant to treat social class inequalities as a serious subject.)

Is it any surprise, then, that some leftists were horrified when some nonwhite Americans joined with working class whites in voting for Donald Trump? The fact that the ex-president won a significant number of votes from black and Hispanic Americans in the 2020 election has set off alarm bells. Some pundits on the left reacted by warning of “multiracial whiteness.” This is the deplorable condition of embracing “white” ideas that tolerate the oppression of nonwhites. As Chronicles Editor Paul Gottfried explains in his article, “‘Multiracial Whiteness’ is the Latest Leftist Branding Iron” (American Greatness, Jan. 26, 2021), the solution to this false consciousness afflicting minority groups is clear: “[T]he disease of ‘whiteness’ has befallen nonwhites as well as biological whites, and we would do well to reeducate these bigoted nonwhites, particularly the ones who wore MAGA hats and voted for Trump.”

Needless to say, the kind of interracial unity Zinn hoped for is not the one that led minority voters to vote for the plutocrat Trump. Yet it is also unlikely that he would have welcomed the subordination of class to race that is so widespread on the left today; more plausibly, he would have regarded this strategy as an example of leftists acting as “useful idiots” in another divide-and-conquer strategy cooked up by capitalist elites.

From a right-wing perspective, the left’s division over race is all very good news. As long as the post-Marxist left ignores the reality of class discrimination, its parties will continue to bleed working class voters to the right.

Grant Havers

Grant Havers is an associate editor of VoegelinView and Philosophy Department Chair at Trinity Western University in Canada. 

Be seeing you

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

Gannett (Erie) Times E-Edition Article-Erie County GOP censures Toomey

Posted by M. C. on March 31, 2021

12 Years too late

There are the democrats-the party of bad plans and republicans-the party of no plans. Both of these are under the direction of War Party, of which Toomey is an official water carrier.

Obedient votes in favor of bloated defense budgets and re-authorizations of the AUMF make Toomey’s allegiances quite clear. Trump made (empty) threats to end the endless wars and bring troops home. That is what caused Republicrats like Toomey to campaign against and censure Trump. Social issues are back of the bus compared to keeping the money flowing to the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Bankster-Complex.

This should be apparent to anyone with their eyes open. I see this censure as an attempt by the party that lost Erie County to appear relevant.

https://erietimes-pa-app.newsmemory.com/?publink=1ba3e6dd4

Staff report Erie Times-News The Erie County Republican Party voted last week to censure Sen. Pat Toomey for voting to convict former President Donald Trump on an article of impeachment.

Toomey, who has announced he will not seek reelection in 2022, was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump for incitement of insurrection following the Jan. 6 riot in which Trump supporters breached the U.S. Capitol in protest of the Congress’ certification of the Electoral College results.

Verel Salmon, chairman of the Erie County Republican Party, said a majority of the local party’s committee members sought to censure Toomey for splitting with Trump, following other county GOP parties across the state.

‘It was a clear majority vote,’ Salmon said. ‘People were so upset by it.’

The Pennsylvania Republican Party in February stopped short of formally censuring Toomey.

Toomey also voted in favor of certifying the election results, including the results from his home state, which helped President Joe Biden surpass the 270-vote mark needed to win the Electoral College. In voting to convict Trump, Toomey said Democrats had clearly sought to remove Trump from office ‘from the moment he won the 2016 election.’

‘However, these facts do not make President Trump’s conduct in response to losing the 2020 election acceptable,’ Toomey said in a statement following his Feb. 13 vote. ‘He began with dishonest, systematic attempts to convince supporters that he had won. His lawful, but unsuccessful, legal challenges failed due to lack of evidence. Then, he applied intense pressure on state and local officials to reverse the election outcomes in their states.

‘When these efforts failed, President Trump summoned thousands to Washington, D.C., and inflamed their passions by repeating disproven allegations about widespread fraud,’ he continued. ‘He urged the mob to march on the Capitol for the explicit purpose of preventing Congress and the vice president from formally certifying the results of the presidential election. All of this to hold on to power despite having legitimately lost.’

Salmon indicated that he still has respect for Toomey, saying that he watched him Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press.

‘He didn’t talk about Trump, but his answers were just masterful. It was absolutely excellent,’ he said, noting that Toomey sided with Trump on most policy issues. ‘That’s the way it goes in the world of politics.’

Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., departs Capitol Hill in Washington on Feb. 13 after the Senate acquitted former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial in the Senate. lex Brandon, AP

Be seeing you

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

CDC Director Meltdown: ‘Please Hold On A Little While Longer!’

Posted by M. C. on March 30, 2021

She “drops the script” while reading the script.

Biden Administration CDC Director Rochelle Walensky appeared to break down into tears yesterday, pleading with Americans to avoid the urge to begin living normally again as the virus continues to fade. She warns of “impending doom” if Americans begin going back to “normal.” But what about Texas and Florida? What about numbers? Science? Also today, Tyranny in the UK.

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

RFK, Jr. to Rutgers President: COVID Vaccine Mandate Violates Federal Law • Children’s Health Defense

Posted by M. C. on March 30, 2021

The announcement last week by Rutgers University that it would require all students to get the COVID vaccine prompted CHD Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to remind university officials that federal law prohibits mandating Emergency Use Authorization vaccines.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/rfk-jr-rutgers-covid-vaccine-mandates-violate-federal-law/

By  Children’s Health Defense Team

Rutgers University last week announced it will require all students enrolled for the 2021 fall semester to be vaccinated for COVID-19.

The announcement prompted Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to remind university officials that federal law prohibits mandating products approved under the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).

In a letter to Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway, Kennedy, who also serves as chief legal counsel for CHD, wrote:

“Federal law 21 U.S.C. § 360bbb-3(e)(1)(A)(ii)(III) requires that the person to whom an EUA vaccine is administered be advised, ‘of the option to accept or refuse administration of the product, of the consequences, if any, of refusing administration of the product, and of the alternatives to the product that are available and of their benefits and risks.’”

The reason for the right of refusal stems from the fact that EUA products are by definition experimental, Kennedy wrote. “Under the Nuremberg Code, no one may be coerced to participate in a medical experiment. Consent of the individual is ‘absolutely essential,’” Kennedy wrote.

Kennedy said forced participation in a medical experiment could result in injury.

Dr. Hooman Noorchashm, who also spoke out against Rutgers’ policy, agreed. Specifically, he said, students should be pre-screened for COVID infection before vaccination.

In an open letter to Rutgers, Noorchashm, a surgeon and patient safety advocate, wrote:

“While I fully agree with your policy of maximal immunity for all students and faculty attending in-person on the Rutgers campuses, you must also remain 100% cognizant of a potential danger of indiscriminate vaccination to some of your students. This potential danger is not only a safety risk, it would also pose a risk of liability to your university.”

Noorchashm has been an outspoken critic of indiscriminate mass vaccination because he believes people already or currently infected with COVID are at risk of severe injury, including death.

As he told The Defender last week, viral antigens persist in the tissues of the naturally infected for months. According to Noorchashm, when the vaccine is used too early after a natural infection, or worse during an active infection, the vaccine force activates a powerful immune response that attacks the tissues where the natural viral antigens are persisting.

“This, I suggest, is the cause of the high level of adverse events and, likely deaths, we are seeing in the recently infected following vaccination,” Noorchashm said.

Holloway last week told The New York Times the vaccine mandate will apply to Rutgers’ three main campuses and that students will have to show “proof of vaccination” before moving into a dorm or attending in-person classes. Students will be able to file for medical or religious exemptions, and those attending online or off-campus programs will also be exempt.

NBC News last week reached out to several universities and colleges, which said they would encourage students to get the vaccine, but hadn’t yet decided on mandates.

Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, told NBC:

“I’m just starting to hear discussion about mandating vaccines, and everyone I’ve talked to has said that they are leaning in the direction of mandating vaccines not just with the students, but with faculty and staff, as well.”

According to CHD President Mary Holland, federal law prohibits employers from mandating EUA vaccines.

In December 2020, CHD published “Vaccine Mandates: An Erosion of Civil Rights?” The downloadable e-book examines the history and consequences of vaccine mandates, and what you can do to protect yourself and your family members as public officials ramp up the pressure for COVID vaccines.

Be seeing you

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

The “Unvaccinated” Question – OffGuardian

Posted by M. C. on March 30, 2021

https://off-guardian.org/2021/03/29/the-unvaccinated-question/

CJ Hopkins

So, the New Normals are discussing the Unvaccinated Question. What is to be done with us? No, not those who haven’t been “vaccinated” yet. Us. The “Covidiots.” The “Covid deniers.” The “science deniers.” The “reality deniers.” Those who refuse to get “vaccinated,” ever.

There is no place for us in New Normal society. The New Normals know this and so do we. To them, we are a suspicious, alien tribe of people. We do not share their ideological beliefs. We do not perform their loyalty rituals, or we do so only grudgingly, because they force us to do so.

We traffic in arcane “conspiracy theories,” like “pre-March-2020 science,” “natural herd immunity,” “population-adjusted death rates,” “Sweden,” “Florida,” and other heresies.

They do not trust us. We are strangers among them. They suspect we feel superior to them. They believe we are conspiring against them, that we want to deceive them, confuse them, cheat them, pervert their culture, abuse their children, contaminate their precious bodily fluids, and perpetrate God knows what other horrors.

So they are discussing the need to segregate us, how to segregate us, when to segregate us, in order to protect society from us. In their eyes, we are no more than criminals, or, worse, a plague, an infestation.

In the words of someone (I can’t quite recall who), “getting rid of the Unvaccinated is not a question of ideology. It is a question of cleanliness,” or something like that. (I’ll have to hunt down and fact-check that quote. I might have taken it out of context.)

In Israel, Estonia, Denmark, Germany, the USA, and other New Normal countries, they have already begun the segregation process.

In the UK, it’s just a matter of time. The WEF, WHO, EU, and other transnational entities are helping to streamline the new segregation system, which, according to the WEF,

will need to be harmonized by a normative body, such as the WHO, to ensure that is ethical.”

Here in Germany, the government is considering banning us from working outside our homes. We are already banned from flying on commercial airlines. (We can still use the trains, if we dress up like New Normals.)

In the village of Potsdam, just down the road from Wannsee (which name you might recall from your 20th-Century history lessons), we are banned from entering shops and restaurants. (I’m not sure whether we can still use the sidewalks, or whether we have to walk in the gutters.)

In Saxony, we are forbidden from attending schools. At the Berliner Ensemble (the theater founded by Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, lifelong opponents of totalitarianism and fascism), we are banned from attending New Normal performances.

In the USA, we are being banned by universities. Our children are being banned from public schools.

In New York, the new “Excelsior Pass” will allow New Normals to attend cultural and sports events (and patronize bars and restaurants, eventually) secure in the knowledge that the Unvaccinated have been prevented from entering or segregated in an “Unvaccinated Only” section.

The pass system, designed by IBM, which, if history is any guide, is pretty good at designing such systems (OK, technically, it was Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft, IBM’s Nazi-Germany subsidiary), was launched this past weekend to considerable fanfare.

And this is only the very beginning.

Israel’s “Green Pass” is the model for the future, which makes sense, in a sick, fascistic kind of way. When you’re already an apartheid state, what’s a little more apartheid? Here’s a peek at what that looks like…

OK, I know what the New Normals are thinking. They’re thinking I’m “misleading” people again. That I’m exaggerating. That this isn’t really segregation, and certainly nothing like “medical apartheid.”

After all (as the New Normals will sternly remind me), no one is forcing us to get “vaccinated.” If we choose not to, or can’t for medical reasons, all we have to do is submit to a “test” — you know, the one where they ram that 9-inch swab up into your sinus cavities — within 24 hours before we want to go out to dinner, or attend the theater or a sports event, or visit a museum, or attend a university, or take our children to school or a playground, and our test results will serve as our “vaccine passports!”

We just present them to the appropriate Covid Compliance Officer, and (assuming the results are negative, of course) we will be allowed to take part in New Normal society just as if we’d been “vaccinated.”

Either way, “vaccine” or “test,” the New Normal officials will be satisfied, because the tests and passes are really just stage props. The point is the display of mindless obedience.

Even if you take the New Normals at their word, if you are under 65 and in relatively good health, getting “vaccinated” is more or less pointless, except as a public display of compliance and belief in the official Covid-19 narrative (the foundation stone of the New Normal ideology).

Even the high priests of their “Science” confess that it doesn’t prevent you spreading the “plague.” And the PCR tests are virtually meaningless, as even the WHO finally admitted. (You can positive-PCR-test a pawpaw fruit…but you might want to be careful who you tell if you do that.)

In contrast to the “vaccine” and the “test” themselves, the forced choice between them is not at all meaningless. It is no accident that both alternatives involve the violation of our bodies, literally the penetration of our bodies. It doesn’t really matter what is in the “vaccines” or what “results” the “tests” produce. The ritual is a demonstration of power, the power of the New Normals (i.e., global capitalism’s new face) to control our bodies, to dominate them, to violate them, psychologically and physically.

Now, don’t get all excited, my “conspiracy theorist” friends. I haven’t gone full QAnon just yet. Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab are not sitting around together, sipping adrenochrome on George Soros’ yacht, dreaming up ways to rape people’s noses. This stuff is built into the structure of the system. It is a standard feature of totalitarian societies, cults, churches, self-help groups, and…well, human society, generally.

Being forced to repeat a physical action which only makes sense within a specific ideology reifies that ideology within us. There is nothing inherently diabolical about this. It is a basic socialization technology. It is how we socialize our children. It is why we conduct weddings, baptisms, and bar mitzvahs. It is how we turn young men and women into soldiers. It is how actors learn their blocking and their lines. It is why the Nazis held all those rallies. It is why our “democracies” hold elections.

It is also basic ceremonial magic…but that’s a topic for a different column.

The issue, at the moment, is the Unvaccinated Question, and the public rituals that are being performed to make the New Normal ideology “reality,” and what to do about those of us who refuse to participate in those rituals, who refuse to forswear “old normal” reality and convert to New Normalism so that we can function in society without being segregated, criminalized, or “diagnosed” as “sociopathic” or otherwise psychiatrically disordered.

For us “conspiracy-theorizing reality deniers,” there is no getting around this dilemma. This isn’t Europe in the 1930s. There isn’t anywhere to emigrate to … OK, there is, temporarily, in some of the US states that have been staging rebellions, and other such “old normal” oases, but how long do you think that will last?

They’re already rolling out the “mutant variants,” and God only knows what will happen when the long-term effects of the “vaccines” kick in.

No, for most of us denizens of the global capitalist empire, it looks like the New Normal is here to stay. So, unless we are prepared to become New Normals, we are going to have to stand and fight. It is going to get rather ugly, and personal, but there isn’t any way to avoid that.

Given that many New Normals are our friends and colleagues, or even members of our families, it is tempting to believe that they will “come to their senses,” that “this is all just a hysterical overreaction,” and that “everything will go back to normal soon.”

This would be a monumental error on our parts…very possibly a fatal error.

Totalitarian movements, when they reach this stage, do not simply stop on their own. They continue to advance toward their full expressions, ultimately transforming entire societies into monstrous mirror-images of themselves, unless they are opposed by serious resistance. There is a window at the beginning when such resistance has a chance. That window is still open, but it is closing, fast.

I can’t tell you how best to resist, but I can tell you it starts with seeing things clearly, and calling things, and people, exactly what they are.

Let’s not make the same mistake that other minorities have made throughout history when confronted with a new totalitarian ideology. See the New Normals for what they are, maybe not deep down in their hearts, but what they have collectively become a part of, because it is the movement that is in control now, not the rational individuals they used to be.

Above all, recognize where this is headed, where totalitarian movements are always headed. (See. e.g., Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45.)

No, the Unvaccinated are not the Jews and the New Normals are not flying big Swastika flags, but totalitarianism is totalitarianism, regardless of which Goebbelsian Big Lies, and ideology, and official enemies it is selling. The historical context and costumes change, but its ruthless trajectory remains the same.

Today, the New Normals are presenting us with a “choice,” (a) conform to their New Normal ideology or (b) social segregation. What do you imagine they have planned for us tomorrow?

CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.

Be seeing you

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

Do You Believe in Magic? | Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on March 30, 2021

A command economy means that government increasingly attempts to takes over economic enterprise, to replace x-million individual economic choices of freely-acting people in a society with bureaucratic central planning. (Have you already said ha-ha-ha, knowing how that has worked out through history?)

UBI is the primary feature of that because, in a command economy, production is mostly pretend, so you just have to give people money (for nothing). Remember the old basic operating system of the Soviet Union, stated succinctly as: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. Got that?

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/do-you-believe-in-magic/

James Howard Kunstler

The people pretending to run the world’s financial affairs do. The more layers of abstract game-playing they add to the existing armatures of unreality they’ve already constructed, the more certain it becomes that they will blow up all the support systems of a sunsetting hyper-tech economy that now has no safe lane to continue running in.

Virtually all the big nations are doing this now in desperation because they don’t understand that the hyper-tech economy is hostage to the deteriorating economics of energy, basically fossil fuels, and oil especially. The macro mega-system can’t grow anymore. We’re now in the de-growth phase of a dynamic that pulsates through history, as everything in the universe pulsates. We attempted to compensate for de-growth with debt, borrowing from the future.

But debt only works in the youthful growth phases of economic pulsation, when the prospect of being paid back is statistically favorable. Now in the elder de-growth phase, the prospect of paying back debts, or even servicing the interest, is statistically dismal. The amount of racked-up debt worldwide has entered the realm of the laughable. So, the roughly twenty-year experiment in Central Bank credit magic, as a replacement for true capital formation, has come to its grievous end.

Hence, America under the pretend leadership of Joe Biden ventures into the final act of this melodrama, which will end badly and probably pretty quickly. They are about to call in the financial four horsemen of apocalypse: 1) Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), 2) a command economy, 3) Universal Basic Income (UBI, “helicopter” money for the people), and 4) the “Build Back Better” infrastructure scheme.

MMT is the idea that a nation which claims a monopoly on issuing money can “create” new money ad infinitum with no negative consequences. That is, we can “lend” ourselves money (borrow it into existence) without having to worry about paying it back. The theory caught on only because that’s what we’ve done for two decades and, so far, it hasn’t destroyed the banking system — though debt turned exponential, which is to say ruinous, only recently — so we won’t have to stand by long to see how this experiment works out. Note this: MMT completes the divorce between productive activity and capital formation, that is, prosperity without wealth.

A command economy means that government increasingly attempts to take over economic enterprise, to replace x-million individual economic choices of freely-acting people in a society with bureaucratic central planning. (Have you already said ha-ha-ha, knowing how that has worked out through history?)

UBI is the primary feature of that because, in a command economy, production is mostly pretend, so you just have to give people money (for nothing). Remember the old basic operating system of the Soviet Union, stated succinctly as: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. Got that?

The idea behind “Build Back Better” is to renovate the infrastructure of a hyper-tech economy that actually no longer exists because we are in the contraction phase of an historic pulsation or cycle, leaving us with lots of tech and less production, tending toward zero. Nobody flogging this slogan actually knows what it ought to mean under the circumstances, which is to go with the flow of the reality of this contraction: to downsize, downscale, and re-localize all our activities to bring them back into sync with actual productivity — that is, raising food, making real stuff, and trading it. Again, it’s the energy dynamic, stupid.

To get to that point, we’re going to shed the massive over-burden of financial game-playing that has pretended to represent our economy. That means stock valuations and bond prices will vaporize along with the derivative activities concocted for trading gainfully in these now-phantom representations of capital. If that happens sooner rather than later, we won’t even be able to pretend to Build Back Better the interstate highways, the electric grid, airports, and all the other stuff in the “infrastructure” folder.

Indeed, a lot of that would be malinvestment folly now because we’re nearing the end of mass motoring and commercial aviation as we’ve known them. If we even have electricity twenty-five years from now, it will come from much-reduced grids on a much more regional basis. The bottom line for all this is that pretty soon every corner of the country will be on its own amid quite a bit of social disorder and financial wreckage. So, whatever energy you actually can marshal to Build Back Better, save it for your town or your local community. And remember, all of the attempts by a national government to control these events, and coerce its citizens in the service of that, will only lead to a more ineffectual and impotent national government that nobody has faith in, confirming the fact that you are on your own.

Be seeing you

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