MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Study: Short Break From Cosmetics Causes “Significant Drop of Hormone Disrupting Chemicals” – Collective Evolution

Posted by M. C. on January 12, 2021

https://www.collective-evolution.com/2021/01/10/study-short-break-from-cosmetics-causes-significant-drop-of-hormone-disrupting-chemicals/

Avatar

ByAlanna Ketler

In Brief

  • The Facts:A study led by researchers at UC Berkeley and Clinica de Salud del Valle de Salinas demonstrates how even a short break from certain kinds of makeup, shampoos and lotions leads to a large drop in levels of hormone-disrupting chemicals in the body.
  • Reflect On:Why is this industry so poorly regulated?

A study led by researchers at UC Berkeley and Clinica de Salud del Valle Salinas has demonstrated how taking even a short break from various cosmetics, shampoos, and other personal care products can lead to a substantial drop in the levels of hormone-disrupting chemicals present within the body. advertisement – learn more

The results from the study were published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Researchers gave 100 Latina teenagers various personal care products that were labeled to be free of common chemicals including phthalates, parabens, triclosan, and oxybenzone. These chemicals are used regularly in almost all conventional personal care products such as cosmetics, soap, sunscreen, shampoo, conditioner, and other hair products, and animal studies have shown that they directly interfere with the body’s endocrine system.

“Because women are the primary consumers of many personal care products, they may be disproportionately exposed to these chemicals,” said study lead author Kim Harley, associate director of the UC Berkeley Center for Environmental Research and Children’s Health. “Teen girls may be at particular risk since it’s a time of rapid reproductive development, and research has suggested that they use more personal care products per day than the average adult woman.”

Results

After just a three-day trial with the girls using only the lower-chemical products, urine samples showed a significant drop in the level of chemicals in the body. Methyl and propyl parabens, commonly used as preservatives in cosmetics, dropped 44% and 45%, respectively, metabolites of diethyl phthalate, used often in perfumes, dropped by 27%, and both triclosan and benzophenone-3 fell 36%. The authors of the study were surprised to see an increase in two lesser common parabens, but, being minor, could easily have been caused by accidental contamination or a substitute not listed on the labels.

Co-director of the study Kimberly Parra explains why having local youths participate in the study was of particular importance:

The results of the study are particularly interesting on a scientific level, but the fact that high school students led the study set a new path to engaging youth to learn about science and how it can be used to improve the health of their communities. After learning of the results, the youth took it upon themselves to educate friends and community members, and presented their cause to legislatures in Sacramento.

Included in the CHAMACOS Youth Council were 12 local high school students who helped design and implement the study. One of the teen researchers, Maritza Cárdenas, is now a UC Berkeley undergraduate majoring in molecular and cell biology.

“One of the goals of our study was to create awareness among the participants of the chemicals found in everyday products, to help make people more conscious about what they’re using,” said Cárdenas. “Seeing the drop in chemical levels after just three days shows that simple actions can be taken, such as choosing products with fewer chemicals, and make a difference.”

The researchers noted that cosmetics and personal care products are not well-regulated in this country, and that getting data about health effects from exposure, particularly long-term ones, is difficult. But they say there is growing evidence linking endocrine-disrupting chemicals to neurobehavioral problems, obesity and cancer cell growth.

What Can You Do?

Well, you can be sure to check the labels on any products you purchase. Most personal care products contain a list of ingredients, but unfortunately many cosmetics do not. If you use a particular brand that you really love you can try contacting the manufacturer directly and asking them for an ingredient list.

You can also opt for more natural and organic products, but be sure to keep in mind that in the industry of personal care products, the words “natural” and “organic” are often meaningless. A safe bet would be to buy these products from a health food store and be sure to read the ingredients or ask the sales clerk. Generally, when products do not contain specific chemicals, the manufacturers are happy to label them as such.

The less demand for these chemically-laden products there is, the less these chemicals will be used. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: VOTE WITH YOUR DOLLAR! We have the power to create the type of world we want. Be the change.

Check out The Story Of Cosmetics below!

Be seeing you

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

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : The ‘War On Terror’ Comes Home

Posted by M. C. on January 11, 2021

Those who continue to argue that the social media companies are purely private ventures acting independent of US government interests are ignoring reality. The corporatist merger of “private” US social media companies with US government foreign policy goals has a long history and is deeply steeped in the hyper-interventionism of the Obama/Biden era.

“Big Tech” long ago partnered with the Obama/Biden/Clinton State Department to lend their tools to US “soft power” goals overseas.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2021/january/11/the-war-on-terror-comes-home/?mc_cid=da4f0fca1c

Written by Ron Paul

Last week’s massive social media purges – starting with President Trump’s permanent ban from Twitter and other outlets – was shocking and chilling, particularly to those of us who value free expression and the free exchange of ideas. The justifications given for the silencing of wide swaths of public opinion made no sense and the process was anything but transparent. Nowhere in President Trump’s two “offending” Tweets, for example, was a call for violence expressed explicitly or implicitly. It was a classic example of sentence first, verdict later.

Many Americans viewed this assault on social media accounts as a liberal or Democrat attack on conservatives and Republicans, but they are missing the point. The narrowing of allowable opinion in the virtual public square is no conspiracy against conservatives. As progressives like Glenn Greenwald have pointed out, this is a wider assault on any opinion that veers from the acceptable parameters of the mainstream elite, which is made up of both Democrats and Republicans.

Yes, this is partly an attempt to erase the Trump movement from the pages of history, but it is also an attempt to silence any criticism of the emerging political consensus in the coming Biden era that may come from progressive or antiwar circles.

After all, a look at Biden’s incoming “experts” shows that they will be the same failed neoconservative interventionists who gave us weekly kill lists, endless drone attacks and coups overseas, and even US government killing of American citizens abroad. Progressives who complain about this “back to the future” foreign policy are also sure to find their voices silenced.

Those who continue to argue that the social media companies are purely private ventures acting independent of US government interests are ignoring reality. The corporatist merger of “private” US social media companies with US government foreign policy goals has a long history and is deeply steeped in the hyper-interventionism of the Obama/Biden era.

“Big Tech” long ago partnered with the Obama/Biden/Clinton State Department to lend their tools to US “soft power” goals overseas. Whether it was ongoing regime change attempts against Iran, the 2009 coup in Honduras, the disastrous US-led coup in Ukraine, “Arab Spring,” the destruction of Syria and Libya, and so many more, the big US tech firms were happy to partner up with the State Department and US intelligence to provide the tools to empower those the US wanted to seize power and to silence those out of favor.

In short, US government elites have been partnering with “Big Tech” overseas for years to decide who has the right to speak and who must be silenced. What has changed now is that this deployment of “soft power” in the service of Washington’s hard power has come home to roost.

So what is to be done? Even pro-free speech alternative social media outlets are under attack from the Big Tech/government Leviathan. There are no easy solutions. But we must think back to the dissidents in the era of Soviet tyranny. They had no Internet. They had no social media. They had no ability to communicate with thousands and millions of like-minded, freedom lovers. Yet they used incredible creativity in the face of incredible adversity to continue pushing their ideas. Because no army – not even Big Tech partnered with Big Government – can stop an idea whose time has come. And Liberty is that idea. We must move forward with creativity and confidence!

Copyright © 2021 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.

Be seeing you

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

Why Mainstream Economic Forecasts Are So Often Wrong | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on January 11, 2021

The final lesson for us as investors is simple: take with a pinch of salt those estimates that place too much positive impact on government and central bank stimuli. Remember that things that have never happened and multipliers that have never occurred are not going to happen, even less so with all-time-high levels of debt and widespread overcapacity.

https://mises.org/wire/why-mainstream-economic-forecasts-are-so-often-wrong

Daniel Lacalle

Every end of the year, by the end of the year, we receive numerous estimates of global GDP growth and inflation for the following year. Historically, almost in all cases, expectations of inflation and growth are too optimistic in December for the following year.

If we look at the track record of central banks, it is particularly poor in predicting inflation, while large supranational entities tend to err on the side of optimism in GDP estimates. The international Monetary Fund or the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, for example, have been particularly poor at estimating recessions, but mostly accurate at making long-term trend estimates. Contrary to popular belief, it seems that most forecasts are better at identifying long-term economic dynamics than short-term ones.

Forecasting is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Economic forecasting is exceedingly difficult because there are numerous factors that can drastically change the course of a global economy that is increasingly complex and subject to important uncertainties. However, macroeconomic forecasting is also essential to provide a frame of reference for investors and policymakers. It should not be considered the revealed truth nor entirely dismissed, just an important framework that allows us to at least identify the major points of discrepancy as well as the areas to look at for positive or negative surprises as the year unravels. Yes, macroeconomic forecasting is essential.

The first lesson is that independent forecasts are almost every year more accurate than those of supranational bodies and central banks. There is a logic behind it. Independent forecasters do not feel the political pressure to use a benign view of government policies in their estimates. This is one of the main reasons why investors increasingly use their own economic forecasting teams alongside truly independent firms. While it is always worth paying attention to investment banks and international bodies’ forecasts, most investors have learned to understand that the estimates of these large entities are often blurred by political correctness and a tendency to be overly diplomatic. Notice how even in countries where governments have destroyed the economy with wrong policies, one-year-ahead forecasts tend to be diplomatically optimistic.

The second lesson, particularly after years of financial repression, is that most forecasts tend to assume an optimistic and extraordinary multiplier effect from government spending and central bank stimulus plans. In most cases, when we look at the estimates of large central banks and international entities, the biggest mistakes in forecasting come from expecting a surprisingly large positive impact on consumption, growth, employment, and investment from demand-side policies. In my experience, the two largest divergences between forecast and reality tend to appear in capital expenditure (capex) and inflation. This is not a coincidence. When the forecaster places too much weight on demand-side policies while ignoring the accumulated debt, overcapacity, and poor track record of most of these measures, the mistakes in capex and inflation forecasts are almost inevitably going to be enormous and much larger than the mistakes on output and employment. Likewise, the tendency of large forecasting entities of ignoring or dismissing supply-side policies leads to forecast errors on the side of caution. This was particularly evident in the recovery of some eurozone countries in 2014 and in the estimates for jobs and growth of 2018–19 in the United States. One of the clearest examples is the almost annual slump in growth in the eurozone relative to early estimates.

The third lesson is that forecasts tend to be significantly more accurate when negative news is already consensus. Even when considering risks that may erode significantly the estimates for the next year, large entities tend to consider a lower probability of occurrence of those events in order to maintain a “positive” outlook. There are still too many politicians and economists who believe that the economy is a matter of sentiment and animal spirits and that, as such, one should maintain a healthily optimistic outlook to support the economy. This has obviously been debunked by reality. Being too optimistic has impacted the credibility of very valuable forecasts while doing nothing to lead economic agents to see a brighter prospect in a recession.

In the past nine years we have seen important improvements in economic forecasting. Some investment banks have stepped out of their historical role of painting rosy outlooks where next year is always a “this time is different” story, and we have seen a more realistic approach. Unfortunately, there is still an eyebrow-raising tendency to end global outlook reports with the same recommendations every year: carry trade your way into the next twelve months.

International bodies have also improved. We have are seeing a much more realistic approach to forecasting than ten years ago, but inflation and GDP estimates still err on the side of figures that governments will be happy with. However, the intense and rising pressure from governments that these bodies are receiving is actually a sign that forecasting is becoming more independent.

The final lesson for us as investors is simple: take with a pinch of salt those estimates that place too much positive impact on government and central bank stimuli. Remember that things that have never happened and multipliers that have never occurred are not going to happen, even less so with all-time-high levels of debt and widespread overcapacity.

Reading only mainstream macroeconomic reports, even if coming from different entities, can lead to a massive confirmation bias, and I learned many years ago that we may get dozens of different sources that ultimately just say the same thing: government spending is always good and central banks always get it right.

We must also remember that mainstream bodies are almost entirely populated by Keynesian economists, and there is a tendency to adopt the messages of pressure groups in the economic debate, as we are witnessing with things like the Great Reset, the whitewashing of MMT (modern monetary theory) and the adoption of concepts like inequality, stakeholder investment, and social spending in ways that are uncomfortably close to the political agendas of some interventionist parties. Mainstream bodies should have understood by now that adopting political mantras does not combat wrong economically radical agendas, it only undermines the entity’s credibility.

Independent research and forecasts have become increasingly important precisely because of the lack of pressure from governments or central banks to produce a predesigned estimate. And this rise of the independents has been absolutely critical to spur international bodies and investment banks to step up their game. That is why it is so important to use different sources of research.

The best way to use forecasts is to do what many of us learned to do, for example, with brokers’ equity and fixed-income research, forget the first page and read the data, the details and the deep content. The headlines and recommendations of brokers and international entities should be the last thing to read in outlook reports.

Forecasting is essential. Independence is key. Independent forecasting will be even more important in 2021 than it was in 2020. Author:

Daniel Lacalle

Daniel Lacalle, PhD, economist and fund manager, is the author of the bestselling books Freedom or Equality (2020),Escape from the Central Bank Trap (2017), The Energy World Is Flat (2015), and Life in the Financial Markets (2014).

He is a professor of global economy at IE Business School in Madrid.

Be seeing you

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

COVID Tests Gone Wild—An Epidemic of COVID Positive Tests

Posted by M. C. on January 11, 2021

Summary:

  1. We have an epidemic of COVID-positive tests that is substantially larger than the epidemic of identified Relevant Infectious COVID Disease. In contrast, people with actual, mild cases of COVID-disease aren’t all getting tested. So the data, on which lockdowns are supposedly justified, are lousy.
  2. The data on COVID hospitalizations and deaths in the US are exaggerated by a government subsidization scheme that incentivizes the improper use of tests in people without particular risk of the disease.
  3. Avoid getting tested for COVID unless you are symptomatic yourself, have had exposure to someone who was both symptomatic and tested positive for COVID, or have some other personal reason that makes sense.
  4. Know that getting tested before traveling abroad puts you at a modest risk of getting a false-positive test result, which will assuredly screw up your trip. It’s a new political risk of travel.
  5. There is a lot more to this viral testing game, and there are a lot of weird incentives. There are gray areas and room for debate.
  6. Yes, the COVID disease can kill people. But a positive test won’t kill anybody. Sadly, every COVID-positive test empowers those politicians and bureaucrats who have a natural bent to control people—the sociopaths and their ilk.

https://internationalman.com/articles/covid-tests-gone-wild-an-epidemic-of-covid-positive-tests/

by John Hunt, MD

Editor’s Note: In the setting of COVID-19, almost every country in the world closed its borders, locked down its citizens, and forced businesses to close. Today, most governments still restrict travel, economic activity, and social gatherings.

The justification for these unprecedented measures has been a growing number of COVID-19 cases. This has unleashed an epidemic of COVID testing—with PCR and rapid antigen tests as the means of identifying positive COVID cases. Our very own Dr. John Hunt examines the science behind COVID testing, whether the testing paradigms are effective, and the rationality behind government response to the virus.

—

What COVID tests mean and don’t mean

RT-PCR tests can be designed to be highly sensitive to the presence of the original viral RNA in a clinical sample. But a highly sensitive test risks poor specificity for actual infectious disease.

Rapid antigen tests are different. They measure viral protein. They do so by reacting a clinical sample with one or two lab-created antibodies that are labeled with a measurable marker. These antigen tests are often poorly specific, meaning they can show as positive in the absence of any actual viral protein or any COVID disease.

For a lab test, what does it mean to be sensitive? What does it mean to be specific?

I’ll use COVID to help explain these terms. In order to do this correctly, we need to avoid using the language of the media and government because those institutions tend to mislead us via language manipulation. For example, they’ve wrongly taught us that a COVID-positive test is synonymous with COVID- disease. It isn’t, as you will soon see.

So for this article, I will use the term “Relevant Infectious COVID Disease” to mean a condition, caused by COVID-19, in which a patient is sickened by the virus or has (in their airways) living replicating virus capable of being transmitted to others. This seems a fair definition of what we should be caring about in this disease. If the patient isn’t sick and isn’t capable of transmitting the disease, then any COVID RNA or protein that may appear in a test is not relevant, nor infectious, and therefore of little to no consequence.

You can think of a test’s sensitivity like this: In a group of 100 people who absolutely have Relevant Infectious COVID Disease, how many people does the test actually report as “positive?” For a test that is 95% sensitive, 95 of these 100 patients with the true disease will be reported by the test as COVID positive and 5 will be missed.

Specificity: In a group of 100 people who absolutely do not have Relevant Infectious COVID Disease, how many will be reported by the test as “negative?” For a test that is 95% specific, 95 of these healthy people will be reported as COVID-negative and 5 will be incorrectly reported as COVID-positive

Sensitivity and Specificity are inherent characteristics of a test, not of a patient, not of a disease, and not of a population. These terms are very different than Positive Predictive Value (PPV) and Negative Predictive Value (NPV). PPV and NPV are affected not only by the test’s sensitivity and specificity but also by the characteristics of the people chosen to be tested and, particularly, the patients’ underlying likelihood of actually having true Relevant Infectious COVID Disease. The Positive Predictive Value—the chance a positive test actually indicates a true disease—is greatly improved if you test people who are likely to have COVID, and, importantly, avoid testing people unlikely to have COVID.

If you do a COVID test with 95% sensitivity and 95% specificity in 1,000 patients who are feverish, have snot pouring out of their noses, are coughing profusely, and are short of breath, then you are using that test as a diagnostic test in people who currently have a reasonable up-front chance of having Relevant Infectious COVID Disease. Let’s say 500 of them do actually have Relevant Infectious COVID Disease, and the others have a common cold. This 95% sensitive test will correctly identify 475 of these people who are truly ill with COVID as being COVID-positive, and it will miss 25 of them. This same test is also 95% specific, which means it will falsely label 25 of the 500 non-COVID patients as COVID-positive. Although the test isn’t perfect it has a Positive Predictive Value of 95% in this group of people, and is a pretty good test overall.

But what if you run this very same COVID test on everyone in the population? Let’s guesstimate that the up-front chance of having Relevant Infectious COVID in the US at this moment is about 0.5% (suggesting that 5 out of 1000 people currently have the actual transmittable disease right now, which is a high estimate). How does this same 95% sensitive/95% specific test work in this screening setting? The good news is that this test will likely identify the 5 people out of every 1000 with Relevant Infectious COVID! Yay! The bad news is that, out of every 1000 people, it will also falsely label 50 people as COVID-positive who don’t have Relevant Infectious COVID. Out of 55 people with positive tests in each group of 1000 people, 5 actually have the disease. 50 of the tests are false positives. With a Positive Predictive Value of only 9%, one could say that’s a pretty lousy test. It’s far lousier if you test only people with no symptoms (such as screening a school, jobsite, or college), in whom the up-front likelihood of having Relevant Infectious COVID Disease is substantially lower.

The very same test that is pretty good when testing people who are actually ill or at risk is lousy when screening people who aren’t.

In the first scenario (with symptoms), the test is being used correctly for diagnosis. In the second scenario (no symptoms), the test is being used wrongly for screening.

A diagnostic test is used to diagnose a patient the doctor thinks has a reasonable chance of having the disease (having symptoms like fever, cough, a snotty nose, and shortness of breath during a viral season).

A screening test is used to check for the presence of a disease in a person without symptoms and no heightened risk of having the disease.

A screening test may be appropriate to use when it has very high specificity (99% or more), when the prevalence of the disease in the population is pretty high, and when there is something we can do about the disease if we identify it. However, if the prevalence of a disease is low (as is the case for Relevant Infectious COVID) and the test isn’t adequately specific (as is the case with PCR and rapid antigen tests for the COVID virus), then using such a test as a screening measure in healthy people is forcing the test to be lousy. The more it is used wrongly, the more misinformation ensues.

Our health authorities are recommending more testing of asymptomatic people. In other words, they are encouraging the wrong and lousy application of these tests. Our health officials are doing what a first-year medical student should know better than to do. It’s enough of a concerning error that it leaves two likely conclusions: 1) that our leading government health officials are truly incompetent and/or 2) that we, as a nation, are being intentionally gaslighted/manipulated. Or it could be both. (Another conclusion you should consider is that my analysis of these tests is incorrect. I’m open to a challenge.)

So what if you, as an individual, get a positive PCR test result (one that has 95% specificity) without having symptoms of COVID-19 or recent exposure to a true Relevant Infectious COVID Disease patient? What do you do? Well, with that positive test, your risk of having COVID has just increased from less than 5 in 1,000 (the general population risk) to about somewhere perhaps 5 in 55 (the risk of actual Relevant Infectious COVID Disease in asymptomatic people with a COVID-19-positive test). That’s an 18-fold increase in risk, amounting to a 9% risk of you having Relevant Infectious COVID Disease (or a 91% chance of you being totally healthy). That may be a relevant increase in risk in your mind, enough that you choose to avoid exposing your friends and family to your higher risk compared to the general population. But if the government spends resources to contact-trace you, then they are contact-tracing 91% of people uselessly. And they are deciding whether to lock us down based on the wrong notion that COVID-positive tests in healthy people are epidemiologically accurate when indeed they are mostly wrong.

For the 50 asymptomatic low-risk people falsely popping positive out of each group of 1,000, what makes them pop positive? For a rapid antigen test, it is because the test is never meant for use as a screening test in healthy asymptomatic people because it’s not specific enough. For a PCR test, positivity confidently means that there was COVID RNA in that sample, sure, but your nose or mouth very likely just filtered some dead bits of viral debris from the dust particles in the air as you walked through CVS to get the test before you learned you were supposed to use the drive-through. PCR can be way too sensitive.

A few strands of RNA are irrelevant. Even a few hundred fully intact viral particles are not likely to infect or cause disease. Humans aren’t that wimpy. But keep in mind that there is a very small chance that the test popped positive because you are about to get sick with COVID-19, and the test caught you, by pure luck, just before you are to become sick.

On top of this wrong use of diagnostic tests as screening tests, the government has been subsidizing hospitals for taking care of COVID-19-positive patients. Let’s say a hospital performs a COVID test 4 times during a hospital stay as a screening test in a patient who has no symptoms of COVID. If that test pops positive once and negative three times, the hospital will report that patient as having COVID-19, even though the one positive result is highly likely to have been a false positive. Why do hospitals do this testing so much? In part, because they’ll get $14,000 more from the government for each patient they declare has COVID-19.

When we see statistics of COVID-19 deaths, we should recognize that some substantial percentage of them should be called “Deaths with a COVID-19-positive test.” When we see reports of case numbers rising, we should know that they are defining “case” as anyone with a COVID-19-positive test, which, as you might now realize, is really a garbage number.

Summary:

  1. We have an epidemic of COVID-positive tests that is substantially larger than the epidemic of identified Relevant Infectious COVID Disease. In contrast, people with actual, mild cases of COVID-disease aren’t all getting tested. So the data, on which lockdowns are supposedly justified, are lousy.
  2. The data on COVID hospitalizations and deaths in the US are exaggerated by a government subsidization scheme that incentivizes the improper use of tests in people without particular risk of the disease.
  3. Avoid getting tested for COVID unless you are symptomatic yourself, have had exposure to someone who was both symptomatic and tested positive for COVID, or have some other personal reason that makes sense.
  4. Know that getting tested before traveling abroad puts you at a modest risk of getting a false-positive test result, which will assuredly screw up your trip. It’s a new political risk of travel.
  5. There is a lot more to this viral testing game, and there are a lot of weird incentives. There are gray areas and room for debate.
  6. Yes, the COVID disease can kill people. But a positive test won’t kill anybody. Sadly, every COVID-positive test empowers those politicians and bureaucrats who have a natural bent to control people—the sociopaths and their ilk.

John Hunt, MD is a pediatric pulmonologist/allergist/immunologist, a former tenured Associate Professor and academic medical researcher, who has extensive experience and publications involving PCR, antigen testing, and analysis of respiratory fluid. He is internationally recognized as an expert in aerosol/respiratory droplet collection and analysis. He’s also Doug Casey’s coauthor for the High Ground novels Speculator, Drug Lord, and the just-released Assassin, and he is a founding member of the LLC that owns International Man.

Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, most people have no idea what really happens when a government goes out of control, let alone how to prepare…

How will you protect yourself in the event of an economic crisis?

New York Times best-selling author Doug Casey and his team just released a guide that will show you exactly how. Click here to download the PDF now.

Be seeing you

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

The woke purge – spiked

Posted by M. C. on January 11, 2021

Twitter’s suspension of Donald Trump is a chilling sign of tyranny to come.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/09/the-woke-purge/

Cancel culture doesn’t exist, they say. And yet with the flick of a switch, billionaire capitalists voted for by precisely nobody have just silenced a man who is still the democratically elected president of the United States. With the push of a button in their vast temples to technology, the new capitalist oligarchs of Silicon Valley have prevented a man who won the second largest vote in the history of the American republic just two months ago — 74million votes — from engaging with his supporters (and critics) in the new public square of the internet age.

Not only does cancel culture exist — it is the means through which the powerful, unaccountable oligarchies of the internet era and their clueless cheerleaders in the liberal elites interfere in the democratic process and purge voices they disapprove of. That’s what Twitter’s permanent suspension of Donald Trump confirms.

The new capitalists’ cancellation of the democratically elected president of the United States is a very significant turning point in the politics and culture of the Western world. We underestimate the significance of this act of unilateral purging at our peril. It demonstrates that the greatest threat to freedom and democracy comes not from the oafs and hard-right clowns who stormed the Capitol this week, but from the technocratic elites who spy in the breaching of the Capitol an opportunity to consolidate their cultural power and their political dominance.

Twitter’s ban on Trump is extraordinary for many reasons. First, there’s the arrogance of it. Make no mistake: this is the bosses vs democracy; corporates vs the people; exceptionally wealthy and aloof elites determining which elected politicians may engage in online discussion, which is where most political and public debate takes place in the 21st century. Those who cannot see how concerning and sinister it is that a handful of Big Tech companies have secured a virtual monopoly over the social side of the internet, and are now exploiting their monopolistic power to dictate what political opinions it is acceptable to hold and express in these forums, urgently needs a wake-up call.

Secondly, there is Twitter’s deeply disturbing justification for why it suspended Trump. It says Trump’s account ran the ‘risk’ of ‘inciting violence’. And yet the two tweets of his that it cites do nothing of the sort. In one, Trump describes his voters as ‘great American patriots’ and insists they will have a ‘GIANT VOICE’ in the future. In the other he confirms that he will not be attending the inauguration of Joe Biden. That’s it. In what warped moral universe can such standard, boastful Trump-made statements be interpreted as calls for violence?

In the warped moral universe of pre-emptive, precautionary censorship being built by our tech overlords, that’s where. Strikingly, Twitter says its censorship of the president is based on how other people might read and interpret his words. It says its censorious motivation is ‘specifically’ the question of ‘how [Trump’s tweets] are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter’. Trump’s comments ‘must be read’ in the broader context of how certain statements ‘can be mobilised by different audiences’, Twitter decrees. So Trump’s words, strictly speaking, are not the problem; it’s the possibility, the risk, that someone, somewhere might interpret them in a particular way.

This sets a terrifying precedent for the internet age. It legitimises a new regime of online censorship which doesn’t only punish inflammatory speech — which would be bad enough — but which punishes normal, legitimate political speech on the grounds of how other, unnamed people or groups might respond to it.

There would be no end to what could be censored. Trans-sceptical feminists, already victims of Silicon Valley’s woke purges, would be completely wiped out on the basis that some idiot might interpret their intellectual, non-bigoted critiques of genderfluidity as an instruction to bash a trans person. Christians sceptical of gay marriage, pro-life campaigners furious about abortion, radical leftists who say ‘smash the system’ — all could potentially fall foul of this new diktat that says we are not only responsible for what we ourselves think and say, but also for the myriad interpretations that everyone else, from the man in the street to the weirdo incel, makes of what we think and say.

On this basis the White Album should be banned, given its songs ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Piggies’ were ‘mobilised by different audiences’ to terrible ends — the killings carried out by Charles Manson’s Family. Catcher in the Rye? Censor it. Don’t you remember how it ‘mobilised’ Mark David Chapman to kill John Lennon? As for the Bible, the Koran and any number of political texts and anthems — the risks of ‘mobilisation’ that they pose are clearly too great, so, to be on the safe side, let’s scrub those too.

It isn’t just Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg (zero votes) had already indefinitely suspended Trump (74million votes) from Facebook. Reddit has scrubbed its Donald Trump thread. All social-media accounts that promote the mad Qanon conspiracy theory are being suspended. Mike Flynn and Sidney Powell have been banished from Twitter. YouTube is now banning any video and account that says the American election was fraudulent. This shows how ideological Silicon Valley oligarchs have become. For four years leading members of the media and cultural elites in the US and the UK have said the American presidential election and the EU referendum of 2016 were frauds. That they were meddled with, illegitimate, should be overthrown. You’ll find tens of thousands of videos on YouTube featuring people saying the vote for Brexit was a fit-up by Ruskies or an ‘advisory’ vote fraudulently turned into an instructional one. They won’t be taken down. Because our tech overlords are engaged in acts of openly political censorship.

And then there’s Parler, the libertarian alternative to Twitter. Google this week removed the Parler app from its store on the basis that it doesn’t control its users’ inflammatory speech strictly enough. Apple is threatening to do likewise. All those who said ‘Just make your own social-media platform’ clearly underestimated the tyrannical determination of the woke elites to erase ‘offensive speech’ from every quarter of the internet. This is a full-on purge of any voice that significantly runs counter to the worldview of the anti-populist elites.

That the left is cheering this on is cretinism of the most remarkable kind. They are green-lighting the most thorough assault on freedom of speech that the capitalist elites have ever carried out. They are sanctioning the control of speech by billionaires. They are celebrating as corporate oligarchies interfere directly in the democratic process. They are making a fetish of private property rights, insisting that the corporate rights of virtual monopolies like Twitter and Facebook, in this case their right to throw people off their platforms, override the social, democratic good of free public debate.

I know this is unlikely anytime soon — given the entirely bullshit and pseudo ‘leftish’ posturing of the Silicon Valley elites — but imagine if at some point in the future the tech overlords decide that Bernie Sanders or some rabble-rousing organiser of protests outside Google’s HQ might ‘mobilise audiences’ to do something bad and decide to ban them? What will the left say? Nothing, presumably. Or nothing that should be taken seriously, given they will have helped to create this web of tyranny. They have forgotten the cry of the true radical Thomas Paine: ‘He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.’

There is danger in the current moment. It comes not from horn-helmeted idiots and racist scumbags who paraded through the Capitol Building for an hour, but from those who wish to turn that despicable incident into the founding myth of a new era of woke authoritarianism. The business and political elites, determined to crush the populist experiment of recent years, will busily launch wars on ‘domestic terrorism’, clamp down on inflammatory speech, purge from the internet and from workplaces anyone with ‘incorrect’ thoughts, and blacklist those who believe populism is preferable to technocracy. They’re already doing it. The Biden administration isn’t even in power yet and this is already happening. Imagine how emboldened the new oligarchies and their woke mobs will become once Biden and Co are ruling. Brace yourselves; the purge is only beginning.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy

Be seeing you

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

Prepare for the new “Domestic Terrorism Bill” – OffGuardian

Posted by M. C. on January 11, 2021

Joe Biden has claimed multiple times to be the author of the original Patriot Act, saying it was based entirely on a bill he proposed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.

Well now he has a chance to work on the reboot too, and they are always so much better when you can get the original creative team back together.

What will “Domestic Terrorism” mean in this law? The answer to that is pretty much always “whatever they want it to mean.”

https://off-guardian.org/2021/01/08/prepare-for-the-new-domestic-terrorism-bill/

Kit Knightly

It’s not been often, in the five years OffG has existed, that we’ve had to cop to missing something important within 24 hours of publishing an article – but this is one of those times.

In my article yesterday – “The Storming of the Capitol”: America’s Reichstag Fire? – I said this [my emphasis]:

Although there is not yet any talk of legislation [in response to the Capitol Hill riots], it’s certainly true there are whispers of purges and other measures to “protect the constitution”.

That quote did not age well, indeed it was wrong from the moment it went to print. Because, as it turns out, there has actually been “talk of legislation” for weeks – even months. Soon-to-be-President Joe Biden promised a new “domestic terrorism bill” back in November, according to the Wall Street Journal.

That is why you’re seeing so much usage of the phrase “domestic terrorism” in the last couple of days. It’s the meme-phrase. The primary talking point for this whole exercise. It was underlined in all the memos sent out to all the media outlets.

That’s why Joe Biden went to such lengths to distinguish “domestic terrorists” from “protesters” in his speech following the riots.

That’s why the Council on Foreign Relations had an interview with a “counter-terrorism and national security expert” published within 24 hours of the incident, in which he spends 4 paragraphs arguing that the people who “stormed the capitol” were domestic terrorists.

That’s why the Washington Post has got an article dedicated to “lawmakers and experts” arguing that the Capitol Hill protest was an act of “domestic terrorism”. And so have Vox. And Mother Jones.

That’s why ABC had an article about how “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” were a growing problem in America…a week before the riot took place.

And that’s why #TrumpisaDomesticTerrorist is trending on Twitter.

Georgetown University, a well-known spook college, published a paper in September 2020 titled the “The Need for a Specific Law Against Domestic Terrorism”, and op-ed pieces bemoaning the lack of such a law have been dotted through the press going back to last summer and even late 2019.

There was one published yesterday, in which a “senior FBI official” says “more could have been done” if there had been a “specific law outlawing” domestic terrorism.

“Domestic Terrorism” is clearly where it’s at in early 2021, so we can expect a brand new law regarding it…probably by March, at the latest.

What will “Domestic Terrorism” mean in this law? The answer to that is pretty much always “whatever they want it to mean.”

Certainly, it will include “incitement” and “hate speech”, I would expect “denialism” to make an appearance, and be downright shocked if “spreading misinformation” doesn’t get a mention. Don’t be surprised if “questioning elections” or “bringing democracy into disrepute” is made an outright crime.

It will probably be tied into the Covid “pandemic” in some way, too. After all, what is discouraging people from taking vaccines if not the very definition of “terrorism”, right? It’s possible that even climate change will get a mention as well. They like to slide that into every issue these days.

Joe Biden has claimed multiple times to be the author of the original Patriot Act, saying it was based entirely on a bill he proposed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.

Well now he has a chance to work on the reboot too, and they are always so much better when you can get the original creative team back together.

Be seeing you

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

What Anarchy Isn’t by Larken Rose

Posted by M. C. on January 11, 2021

https://libertarianinstitute.org/dont-tread-on-anyone/what-anarchy-isnt-by-larken-rose/

by Keith Knight

… I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual. Anarchists oppose the State because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.

Murry N. Rothbard

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 535

Be seeing you

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

The Killer Isn’t Covid-19. It’s C2H5OH – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 11, 2021

It’s not the mutation of a virus into a more virulent strain, and not necessarily impairment of the immune system, it is the lack of vitamin B1 that controls the entire nervous and immune system that is the origin of the present pandemic.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/01/no_author/the-killer-isnt-covid-19-it-is-c2h5oh/

By Bill Sardi

See the link.

Be seeing you

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

The Most Violent Demonstration Ever to Occur at the White House – Foundation for Economic Education

Posted by M. C. on January 11, 2021

The issue, believe it or not, was a bank.

https://fee.org/articles/the-most-violent-demonstration-to-ever-occur-at-the-white-house/

Lawrence W. Reed
Lawrence W. Reed

After months of violent demonstrations—especially in New York, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Portland—many Americans might not want to learn of yet another. This one, however, dates back long before any living person’s memory and ranks as the worst ever on the grounds of the White House in Washington. The issue, believe it or not, was a bank.

That’s right, a bank. Not racism. Not corruption. Not even an unpopular war. The mob that broke windows and nearly stormed the residence of the highest US official in August 1841 demanded a government-sponsored central bank from a president who refused to give them one. Here’s the story.

The 1840 election pitted incumbent Jacksonian Democrat Martin van Buren against Whig Party challenger and Battle of Tippecanoe hero William Henry Harrison. Four years earlier, Harrison had lost to Van Buren but this time he prevailed. His running mate was former Democrat John Tyler of Virginia, giving rise to the famous campaign slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!”

Harrison assumed the presidency on March 4, 1841 at the age of 68. He term-limited himself by dying just 31 days later. The Whigs expected Tyler to faithfully implement the big-government Whig program designed by Kentucky Senator Henry Clay but were quickly disappointed. Even as the party’s vice-presidential candidate, Tyler never disguised his skepticism for Clay’s schemes of a central bank, corporate welfare and high tariffs.

Clay ran the Senate and his fellow Whigs controlled the House, where Clay had previously served a decade as Speaker. While president Tyler cautioned against creating a new central bank (Andrew Jackson had killed the last one a few years before), Clay pressed forward with it in the summer of 1841. A bank bill passed both houses and went to Tyler’s desk, where it died by veto on August 16. The president regarded it as unconstitutional in part because it would force the states to accept branches of the central bank within their boundaries, in direct competition with state-chartered banks.

Tyler began his veto message by reminding Congress that his opposition to a federal bank was longstanding. For 25 years, he pointed out, he expressed this view as a state and federal legislator. He had just sworn an oath to preserve, protect and defend the very Constitution that Clay’s bank scheme would undermine. To turn his back now on both the Constitution and his own conscience, wrote Tyler, “would be to commit a crime which I would not willfully commit to gain any earthly reward, and which would justly subject me to the ridicule and scorn of all virtuous men.”

A central bank would enhance the power of the federal government at the expense of the states, bestow benefits on a financial elite, and undermine the cause of sound money. Tyler wisely wanted nothing to do with it.

The Whigs erupted in a fury of indignation. In his biography of Tyler, historian Gary May describes what happened next:

At 2:00 a.m. on the morning of August 18, a drunken mob gathered outside the White House portico. They blew horns, beat drums, threw rocks at the building, and fired guns into the night sky. Tyler and his family were awakened by the noise…Someone in the mansion’s upstairs quarters lit candles and the light scared the crowd off. Another group arrived a few hours later, dragging a scarecrow-like figure. They set it afire and John Tyler was burned in effigy. It was the most violent demonstration ever to occur at the White House complex.

Security at the executive mansion was minimal in those days. It was not uncommon, in fact, for visitors to walk right in unescorted. A drunken painter even threw rocks at President Tyler as he walked the south grounds. When an odd-looking package arrived by mail at the White House, Tyler feared a bomb, but it fortunately turned out to be a cake.

Clay urged the Senate to override the president’s veto but he failed to get the required two-thirds vote. A new central bank bill with minor adjustments then passed both houses. On September 9, Tyler vetoed that one too. The second veto prompted a stream of invective from Whig-friendly media that lasted for the rest of Tyler’s term. From May’s biography again:

“If a God-directed thunderbolt were to strike and annihilate the traitor,” the Lexington Intelligencer wrote, “all would say that ‘Heaven is just.’” Tyler was called “His Accidency”; the “Executive A**”; “base, selfish, and perfidious”; “a vast nightmare over the republic.” One writer claimed that the president was insane, the victim of “brain fever.” Another, borrowing from Shakespeare, called “for a whip in every honest hand, to lash the rascal naked through the world.” There were anti-Tyler rallies and demonstrations everywhere and numerous burnings in effigy, including in Richmond and at the Charles City County courthouse, where the young John Tyler had practiced law. Angry letters poured into the White House; many proffered threats on the president’s life. What happened next was also expected, but it was still shocking because it had never before happened in American history: the president’s entire cabinet, save [Secretary of State] Daniel Webster, resigned.

On Monday, September 13, angry congressional Whigs formally expelled President Tyler from their ranks. Henry Clay pronounced to his political comrades that Tyler was “a President without a party.” Unlike the opportunistic and ambitious Clay, Tyler was a man of steadfast principles—and those are things that too many politicians (then and now) neither possess themselves nor can abide in others.

Whig vitriol dogged Tyler for the remainder of his term. In the months after the bank vetoes, he also nixed Whig bills to hike tariffs. In response, his congressional opponents formed the first-ever committee to explore whether the president should be impeached and named former president John Quincy Adams as its chair. Its final report, released on August 16, 1842, concluded that Tyler had committed “offenses of the gravest character” and deserved to be impeached. Fearing a political backlash in the country, the committee’s majority stopped short of recommending it.

The report of the Adams committee was partisan political theater at its worst. Tyler had done utterly nothing impeachable. His “offenses of the gravest character” amounted to nothing more than failure to advance the flawed big government agenda of Henry Clay and the Whig Party.

A few years later when Clay realized his own life-long lust for the presidency would never materialize, he famously declared in a speech to the Senate, “I would rather be right than be President.” Time and again, he was neither.

So a firestorm in the Congress produced a riot at the White House. It was all about a bank which the country did not need and which the president rightly used his constitutional authority to thwart. By any measure, it was not our finest hour. But Tyler’s vetoes stand, in my view, as great moments in presidential courage.

One final note regarding President John Tyler: His two grandsons are still around today, at ages 96 and 92. It sounds incredible that two men are living right now whose grandfather was President of the United States almost 180 years ago. You can read the details here.

Be seeing you

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

“This Was A Coordinated Attack”: Parler CEO Speaks Out After Amazon Boots From AWS, Vows To Rebuild ‘From Scratch’ | ZeroHedge

Posted by M. C. on January 10, 2021

The media as anti-trump vaccine. Kill it before it mutates.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/amazon-employees-demand-company-drop-parler-aws-cloud-app-becomes-1-download

Tyler Durden's Photoby Tyler Durden

Update (2210 ET): Parler CEO John Matze has issued a statement (emphasis ours):

Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products.

We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies.

This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out.

#speakfreely

* * *

Update (2130 ET): And so the hammer has come down late on Saturday, when Amazon officially kicked Parler off its cloud Web hosting service, AWS according to Buzzfeed. The suspension means that once the ban takes effect on Sunday, the website – which as of this moment is still up – will be offline until it finds someone else to host it.

* * *

Update (2100 ET): As expected, Apple removed Parler permanently from its app store on Saturday. “[T]here is no place on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activity,” the iPhone maker said, according to CNN which adds that Apple notified Parler of its decision in a message that said it had violated the company’s app store terms.

“The processes Parler has put in place to moderate or prevent the spread of dangerous and illegal content have proved insufficient,” Apple told Parler. “Specifically, we have continued to find direct threats of violence and calls to incite lawless action in violation of Guideline 1.1 – Safety – Objectionable Content.”

Apple’s notice said Parler’s responses to an earlier warning were inadequate, including Parler’s defense that it had been taking violent rhetoric on its platform “very seriously for weeks” and that it had a moderation plan “for the time being,” according to Apple.

A search for the Parler app as of 8pm showed that the app was no longer there, with the search query returning recommended substitutes:

“Parler has not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of these threats to people’s safety,” Apple said in a statement to CNN Business. “We have suspended Parler from the App Store until they resolve these issues.”

Apple’s decision follows a similar move by Google to drop Parler from the Google Play Store, and after Amazon (AMZN) has come under pressure by its own employees to stop hosting Parler’s website on Amazon Web Services.

John Matze, Parler’s CEO, wrote in a message on his platform that Apple “will be banning Parler until we give up free speech, institute broad and invasive policies like Twitter and Facebook and we become a surveillance platform by pursuing guilt of those who use Parler before innocence.”

“They claim it is due to violence on the platform,” Matze wrote of Apple, whom he also accused of being a “software monopoly,” a particularly relevant attack right now given an ongoing antitrust suit against Apple from Fortnite maker Epic Games. “The community disagrees as we hit number 1 on their store today.”

Matze promised to share “more details about our next plans coming soon as we have many options.”

* * *

Earlier:

A coalition of Amazon corporate employees have demanded that the Seattle-based megacorp kick Parler off the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform unless ‘posts inciting violence’ are removed, which would force the Trump-friendly Twitter competitor to find another host.

According to CNBC, an employee advocacy group – Amazon Employees for Climate Justice – said in a Saturday tweet that AWS should “deny Parler services until it removes posts inciting violence, including at the Presidential inauguration.”

Enough is enough. Amazon hosts Parler on @awscloud.

As Amazon workers, we demand Amazon deny Parler services until it removes posts inciting violence, including at the Presidential inauguration.

We cannot be complicit in more bloodshed and violent attacks on our democracy. — Amazon Employees For Climate Justice (@AMZNforClimate) January 9, 2021

More via CNBC:

Pressure has been mounting for Amazon to stop hosting Parler on AWS after other tech giants took action against the social media app in the wake of the deadly U.S. Capitol riot earlier this week. Google on Friday removed Parler from its app store for Android users, Google Play Store. BuzzFeed News reported on Friday that Apple has threatened to pull Parler from its App Store.

Parler, which launched in 2018, has emerged as a popular platform for President Trump’s allies in the last year by billing itself as a free speech alternative to mainstream social media services like Twitter and Facebook. –CNBC

To justify censoring Parler, critics have pointed to posts calling for ‘firing squads’ – like one from attorney Lin Wood (who some sayhanded the Senate to the Democrats by openly calling for Georgians not to vote in the runoff election unless the GOP candidates backed Trump’s election fraud claims).

In 2019, Amazon pulled the plug on their AWS partnership with Twitter alternative GAB over user posts. CEO Andrew Torba essentially blamed the CIA – claiming that a “PSYOP campaign started back in early December” in which newly created accounts were “popping up out of nowhere and making threats of violence.”

Torba’s letter continues:

After this week, it’s clear why this PSYOP was started: to take down alt-tech platforms and frame them for the January 6th protests that ended with the police killing an unarmed woman.

Almost instantly after police allowed protestors into the Capitol the New York Times started a baseless narrative that this protest was organized on alt-tech sites, and in particular on Gab, without offering any proof, screenshots, usernames, or evidence to back these baseless claims. I’ve recorded a video highlighting how this all played out. I hope you’ll take some time to watch it to learn how the CIA Mockingbird Media complex operates. The way we fight back is with truth and by speaking truth to their power, which is quickly fading. 

Meanwhile, Parler has jumped to the #1 app in Apple’s app store.

Parler saw approximately 210,000 installs globally on Friday 1/8, up 281% from approximately 55,000 on 1/7, according to data from the analytics service Sensor Tower. “In the U.S., the app saw approximately 182,000 first-time downloads on 1/8, up 355% from about 40,000 installs on 1/7. Since Wednesday, the app has seen approximately 268,000 installs from across U.S. app stores,” a press rep from Sensor Tower wrote in an email. -TechCrunchAnd as conservatives scramble to download the app before it’s deplatformed at yet another social media giant, we now have to wonder if they’ll even be able to find a new home among a collusive constellation of big-tech – at least one of which used to value the phrase ‘think different.’

Be seeing you

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

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »