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Into The Void | The Z Blog

Posted by M. C. on November 4, 2020

This is a useful thing to keep in mind as the current ruling class of America counts the votes in the presidential election. Every election is pitched as momentous, but that is mostly nonsense. The choices put in front of the voters are always vetted by the ruling elite, so the results are known in advance. The exception, of course, was Trump in 2016, which is why we have been subjected to close to five years of shrieking by the ruling class about how Trump is a threat to their system.

As Stalin said, it is not the votes that count, but who counts the votes and it is the people counting the votes who are the issue on the ballot. If Biden wins, most sensible people will assume shenanigans.

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=21702

The Great War not only devastated the physical structure of Europe, it destroyed the legitimacy of the political infrastructure as well. Once the legitimacy of the ruling class was gone, their authority was gone with it. After all, the war was not a natural disaster beyond the control of the ruling class. It was a disaster created by a ruling class that could not explain why the war was necessary. When they tried, no one could believe them, because they had lied the world into war.

The people, looking around at the devastation, wanted to understand why this terrible thing happened to them. The trouble was the people they would naturally look to for answers no longer had the trust of the people. They had squandered their legitimacy waging a pointless war. Into the void of authority came the liberal democrats, the communists and the fascists, offering their own narrative to explain the past and define a future better than the present. The rest is history.

This is a useful thing to keep in mind as the current ruling class of America counts the votes in the presidential election. Every election is pitched as momentous, but that is mostly nonsense. The choices put in front of the voters are always vetted by the ruling elite, so the results are known in advance. The exception, of course, was Trump in 2016, which is why we have been subjected to close to five years of shrieking by the ruling class about how Trump is a threat to their system.

This election could very well turn out to be devastatingly important. For starters, this is a rare case where both sides are sure they will win. Usually, both sides know what’s coming long before the vote. The eventual losing side may have some false hope, but when they lose they are not surprised. This time, both sides are not only sure they will win; they think they will win big. This is despite an unprecedented media barrage offering no possible way for Trump to win on Tuesday.

Both sides come at this from wildly different perspectives. The ruling class radicals backing the Biden campaign are sure they are the product of a meritocracy that has earned the right to rule. It is so obvious that no sane voter would choose any other system, but the one that puts them at the top. It’s why they remain convinced that Trump won in 2016 by appealing to the dark forces. There’s simply no way that a legitimate democratic system could have picked Trump.

This time they have used every weapon of the system to make sure those dark forces don’t prevail. They have bullied the pollsters that serve the political industrial complex into giving them useful polling data. They have used their media to flood the zone with fear, uncertainty and doubt. The same tools they use in their color revolutions abroad have been deployed here. If Trump wins, then it means the system, at least the rule-based system, is no longer of any use to them.

Ironically, if Trump wins, the people supporting Trump will conclude that the people in charge are no longer legitimate authorities. The polls, the media, the analysis, will all be viewed as an orchestrated lie campaign. After all, the best and the brightest of the system said Biden was a metaphysical lock. The result of a Trump win will be that both sides agree that the system is rotten to the core. The Left will seek to destroy it while the Right will stand aside and let them do it.

As Stalin said, it is not the votes that count, but who counts the votes and it is the people counting the votes who are the issue on the ballot. If Biden wins, most sensible people will assume shenanigans. Joe Biden has spent the final weeks of the campaign mumbling to empty parking lots, while Trump is speaking to stadium sized rallies in the key states. The same observations that lead people to think the polls are a lie will lead them to think a Biden victory is a lie.

It is heritage America that is the engine of the Trump campaign. These are people who get misty when they hear God Bless America. They believe that they are fighting to maintain the greatest system in the world for the greatest country in the World. All they have to do is vote harder and the bad guys will be driven from the field and the America they love will come back to herself. If their monumental efforts fail, then it means the system has failed. Their America is lost.

The irony of the Left making war on these people is that without these people there can be no Left, as there is no establishment to support the Left. Those huge crowds coming out to cheer for Trump are what makes liberal democracy possible. If they are finally cut off from having a say in how things are run, then the system begins to falter. Many of those people coming out for Trump will simply drop out, but many will look around for an alternative to the corrupt system they now distrust.

One of John F. Kennedy’s script writers said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” This is the subtext to this election, as both sides go all in on this election. For the Left, a Trump win means they are free to make total war on the system and the people who support it. A Biden win and the veil of ignorance drops for millions of heritage Americans. One side will decide that peaceful revolution, even peaceful reform, is no longer possible.

The truth of democracy is it makes everything political. Even the smallest act becomes a moral signifier, indicating which side you are on. This is because politics forces everyone to be a partisan. In order for democracy to work, everyone must participate, which means everyone picks a side. Partisanship turns everyone into the enemy of someone, often people they do not know. A country full of enemies is not a country, but a forest full of dry underbrush waiting for a match.

This is an election where one side will ultimately conclude that the system itself is no longer worth respecting or defending. The Biden camp is much closer to that point, maybe even resolved to it, but still pretending. The Trump side is not there yet, but inching closer. There is no result that can leave both sides satisfied that the system worked as intended. Like the period after the Great War, we are entering a crisis of legitimacy, which begins with the election results.

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Trump Rallies or Struggle Sessions – A Lesson for Libertarians

Posted by M. C. on November 4, 2020

If it’s the latter then realize the opportunity is here to direct that energy towards what comes next. What comes after the election will require leadership and skill. It will require patience, temperance and most importantly, courage.

It will require people willing to step up, be better and lead. And if you don’t like Trump’s leadership, fine. What will you do to counter it…. and posting memes on Twitter isn’t an answer.

t means stating without irony that the State is truly immoral but you voted anyway. Not because you love Trump, though he’s hilarious, but because you are willing to find common ground with people who you disagree with but who also stand athwart the tide of authoritarian control.

The people you are trying to persuade will respect you for that. The ideas you have will get a better audience.

I used to be that guy. I know what that looks like. Guess what? It looks an awful lot like despair.

And if that’s the best we libertarians have to offer, then this fight for the individual’s spirit, regardless of what happens in this election, is already over.

https://tomluongo.me/2020/11/02/lesson-for-libertarians-trump-rallies-struggle-sessions/

This election season hasn’t been about Trump versus Biden. It hasn’t been about capitalism versus socialism.

It’s not even about liberty versus authority.

As I said in my last article this election is about a simple choice, facing a chaotic future with courage or fear.

Regardless of who wins, my many libertarian friends and colleagues are correct that the ship of state cannot and will not be turned at this point in any meaningful way.

There are forces at work which will unleash hell on earth if Trump wins, which he should.

If the past four years have taught us anything it should have taught us that.

What’s on the ballot tomorrow is something much larger, however, because hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. and Europe are facing an existential choice on both sides of the power dynamic.

The People sense the closing off of escape routes by an oligarch class that rightly sees their institutional power waning in the face of rapid decentralization of information.

Because of this, an inevitable power struggle has ensued. This election has taken on a quality that transcends the practical nature of elections — who will run the consensual hallucination that is the State.

The Davos Crowd is in full control at the moment in Europe and attempting The Black Revolution here in the U.S. They will enact as much of their Great Reset as they can and play every card in their hand and dirty trick in their bag to achieve it.

This election is a nexus, a singularity, that has become an opportunity for an inflection point in history, one where ideas that were forced into the fringe of the political discourse during the last cycle have the opportunity for a real audience in the next one.

And the question I have for libertarians is, “Are you ready to lead or are you going to sit aloof, arms folded, and miss your chance?”

From what I’ve seen so far it’s not promising.

Donald Trump is no Ron Paul, but, honestly, libertarian commentators were moaning about Ron in 2008 and 2012. He didn’t pass the purity test they said and he was encouraging people into the vortex of politics.

That was the wrong read then and it’s the wrong read now.

As Trump holds rally after rally around the country, bringing literally millions of people together a statement has been made.

Courage trumps fear.

Even Obama couldn’t pull crowds like Trump has. This is unprecedented in American politics.

I contend the symbolism of this election far outweighs all other considerations. There’s a spirit animating this election unlike any other I’ve witnessed because not of who Trump is but what he represents.

Earlier in the year, post-George Floyd, the picture was very different. It was much darker. BLM and Antifa, thanks to corporate sponsorship and billions in oligarch money, ran wild in the streets.

Dressed in black bloc, chanting slogans, throwing rocks, sucker-punching suburbanites and burning cities they took over the streets in a crude attempt to force change onto people already scared over a virus.

Videos of white people washing the feet of their new black masters were all over social media. Struggle sessions were brought to diners forced to eat outside thanks to stupid COVID-19 social distancing rules.

With government assistance (because communists can’t build anything of value on their own) they set up the CHAZ in Seattle and failed miserably in places like Atlanta.

All of these projects, however, lost their momentum the moment it became obvious Americans weren’t buying any of it.

They bought guns instead.

They may have bought guns out of fear, but they bought them anyway.

Marxism has been the dominant political philosophy of this past cycle, pushing the nascent ideas of extreme individualism to the fringe.

And it is reaching for the gold ring of ultimate power. The orgy of violence its adherents call for is here. There’s no avoiding it but it doesn’t have to become an all-consuming jihad against the human spirit like it has been in the past – think Cambodia, Vietnam, the U.S.S.R and, of course, Germany.

Millions of Americans saw this future and recoiled from it. Right into the arms of Donald Trump who preached faith in them.

That’s where these mind-blowing rallies, flotillas, caravans and spontaneous uprisings supporting Trump are coming from. Improperly harnessed, that energy can be turned into something truly ugly.

This should be the signal for libertarians to come down off their mountains and declare themselves ready to lead the restitution of culture and civilized behavior.

Marxism can’t bring anything except a few thousand paid agitators to politically-sympathetic jurisdictions to loot, steal and bully people.

The mere threat of liberty brings out millions to sing ‘God Bless America.”

Because the Trump movement is a celebration of that which should unite us — family, faith, community, dignity. After decades of the Marxists dividing us into ever smaller echo chambers we were supposed to be demoralized and beaten.

And judging from what I see from great thinkers like Robert Higgs I can only conclude they are just that, encouraging Ancaps to think this is a winning strategy.

⬇️

This response is a defense mechanism of people without the capacity to lead.

Bob is right there are problems with Trump but where he sees dismay I see hope.

Why? Again, because this election isn’t about Trump or the State. It’s not about the nation. It’s about the assault on our communities, faith, family and sense of self.

It is an assault on the value of a human life.

And the question we are facing, imperfectly, is, “Are we the Last Man clinging to life like a barnacle in a violent sea or something greater; something with vitality, possessed with the spark of the creative, or even the divine?”

The people at those Trump rallies are anything but barnacles. And Twitter is full of supposed libertarians cynically reminding us that voting doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t, until it does.

For all his faults, Trump did what so many libertarians refuse to do, come off the mountain and lead. He could do this because Ron Paul motivated the people to declare they wanted some of what libertarians are selling.

In marketing terms these are ‘hot leads.’

And we don’t listen to them.

We talk at them, if not down to them.

We treat them exactly as Antifa and BLM treat those that don’t agree with them, as beneath them. People wonder why I hate the term, “sheeple.” Shouldn’t it be obvious? Because you don’t denigrate the people you’re trying to convince to buy what you’re selling.

So, my next question is, “Do you want to be right or do you want to help make a better world?”

If it’s the latter then realize the opportunity is here to direct that energy towards what comes next. What comes after the election will require leadership and skill. It will require patience, temperance and most importantly, courage.

It will require people willing to step up, be better and lead. And if you don’t like Trump’s leadership, fine. What will you do to counter it…. and posting memes on Twitter isn’t an answer.

Because even if we have the right ideas, we won’t be given that opportunity if we don’t first do the smallest thing we can do, stand next to them. Be a part of something not perpetually outside of it.

If that means voting, then vote. The symbolism should be clear enough.

It means stating without irony that the State is truly immoral but you voted anyway. Not because you love Trump, though he’s hilarious, but because you are willing to find common ground with people who you disagree with but who also stand athwart the tide of authoritarian control.

The people you are trying to persuade will respect you for that. The ideas you have will get a better audience.

I used to be that guy. I know what that looks like. Guess what? It looks an awful lot like despair.

And if that’s the best we libertarians have to offer, then this fight for the individual’s spirit, regardless of what happens in this election, is already over.

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How DHS and FBI officials spun a dubious Russian election threat days before voting | The Grayzone

Posted by M. C. on November 4, 2020

The new narrative was not consistent with information previously published by the the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), however. It was so incoherent, in fact, that it suggested a state of panic on the part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials worried about a possible transition to a Joe Biden administration.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/11/02/how-panicked-dhs-and-fbi-officials-spun-a-dubious-russian-election-threat-days-before-voting/

Gareth Porter

A Department of Homeland Security election alert spawning new Russia fears was so incoherent and inconsistent with previous findings, it suggested a state of political panic inside the agency.

Just days before the 2020 election the bureaucratic forces behind the original claim of Russian hacking of state election-related websites in 2016 launched a new drive to spawn fears of Moscow-made political chaos in the wake of the voting.

The new narrative was not consistent with information previously published by the the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), however. It was so incoherent, in fact, that it suggested a state of panic on the part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials worried about a possible transition to a Joe Biden administration.

On October 20, Christopher Krebs, the head of CISA, issued a video statement expressing confidence that “it would be incredibly difficult for them to change the outcome of an election at the national level.”  Then he abruptly changed his tone, adding, “But that doesn’t mean various actors won’t try to introduce chaos in our elections and make sensational claims that overstate their capabilities. In fact, the days and weeks just before and after Election Day is the perfect time for our adversaries to launch efforts intended to undermine your confidence in the integrity of the electoral process.”

Krebs’ warning of a possible Russian announcement that hackers had succeeded in disrupting the result of the U.S. election was so removed from reality that it suggested internal panic DHS over the failure of Russian hackers to do anything that could be cited as interfering the election.

Two days after Krebs’ dubious warning, the FBI and the DHS’s new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an “alert” reporting that “a Russian state-sponsored APT [Advanced Persistent Threat] actor” known as “Berserk Bear” had “conducted a campaign against a wide variety of U.S. targets.”

Since “at least September,” according to the DHS alert, the DHS warning claimed that it had targeted “dozens” of “U.S. state, local, territorial and tribal government networks.”  It even claimed that the supposed Russian campaign had compromised the network infrastructure of several official organizations and “exfiltrated data from at least two victims servers”. At the same time, it acknowledged there was “no indication” that any government operations had been “intentionally disrupted.”

The report went on to suggest, “[T]here may be some risk to elections information housed on SLTT [state, local territorial and tribal] government networks.” And then it abruptly shifted tone and level of analysis to offer the speculation that the Russian government “may be seeking access to obtain future disruption options, to influence U.S. policies or actions”, or to “delegitimize” the “government entities”.

On October 28, Krebs elaborated on the latter theme in an interview with the PBS NewsHour.  Referring inaccurately to government warnings about “Russian interference, some of which targeted voter registration,” which the FBI-CISA alert had never mentioned, PBS interviewer William Brangham asked, “Do you worry at all that there might be infiltration that we are not aware of?”

Instead of correcting Brangham’s inaccurate suggestion, Krebs responded that “infiltration” into voter registration files was “certainly possible,” but that “[W]e have improved the ability to detect compromises or anomalous activity.”

Krebs then homed in on a scenario he obviously wanted the public to focus on: “[Y]ou might see various actors, foreign powers, claim that they were able to accomplish something, [that] they were able to hack a database or hack the vote count. And it’s simply not true.”

Although the October 22 alert did not assert any deliberate Russian government hack of election-related sites, Krebs sought to keep speculation about both Russian capabilities and intent alive.

The buried alert that undermined the frightening official assessment

Eleven daysbefore Krebs debuted his speculation about Russia claiming to have hacked U.S. elections, the FBI and CISA issued a separate alert that seriously undercut his questionable claims.

The earlier document was clearly referring to the very same efforts by hackers to break into various websites addressed in the October 22 alert.  It not only referred to the same state and local government networks and to the wider range of targets affected but also mentioned precisely the same technical vulnerabilities that were targeted in the series of hacks.

The alert further stated that, “[I]t does not appear these targets are being selected because of their proximity to elections information….” In other words, the two US agencies conceded they had no basis for attributing the hacks in question to any election interference plot.

The most striking difference between the two alerts, however, was that the October 9 alert did not refer to any “Russian state-sponsored APT actor” as the October 22 one did. Instead, it simply pointed to “APT actors” in the plural, indicating that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence indicating a single actor was at work, let alone one that was “Russian-state sponsored.” 

Contrary to the impression that U.S. officials may have conveyed in referencing an “Advance Persistent Threat,” or APT, it is now widely understood by cybersecurity specialists that this term no longer refers to a state-sponsored actor. That is because the sophisticated tools and techniques once associated with state-sponsored hacking have now become available to a much wider range of cyber actors. Indeed, the codes for such high-end tools have been identified in the Shadow Brokers and Vault 7 leaks, and the tools have been marketed widely at affordable prices on the dark web.

The October 9 alert firmly established the dearth of evidence on the part of CISA and FBI about a Russian state-sponsored hacking team planning elections-related operations in the U.S. The sudden pivot days later to an unqualified claim that a single state-sponsored APT had been responsible for the same very large range of operations should have been accompanied by claims of substantial new intelligence, or at least a reference to the evidence underlying the dramatic new reversal. But no such proof ever arrived.

Scott McConnell, the spokesman for CISA, promised the Grazyzone on October 29 that he would provide someone to answer questions about the October 22 alert by the close of business Friday. In the end, however, no one from CISA responded, and there was no answer on McConnell’s line.

The peculiar reversal by the DHS and CISA on the hacking claims raise questions about the institutional considerations taken by these agencies. Did indications that President Donald Trump’s campaign was faltering inform their decision to issue a more stridently anti-Russian assessment in hopes of surviving a political transition?

The US officials who drew up the initial pre-election alert seemed keenly aware that despite that drumbeat of over the past two years, no state-sponsored Russian hacking of election institutions was underway.  But as the Trump campaign sputtered, they had their own careers to consider. Days later, DHS and CISA declared the wily Russians guilty of yet another malign operations — one that would not require them to have slightest evidence to support, and that would be impossible for them to explain.

Gareth Porter

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012.  His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.

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Business Owners Boarding Up In Case Party Of Love And Tolerance Loses

Posted by M. C. on November 4, 2020

“We just want to make sure our businesses will be safe from the sudden outpouring of peace, love, and tolerance,”

https://babylonbee.com/news/business-owners-boarding-up-in-preparation-for-onslaught-of-peaceful-protests

U.S.—Business owners in Democrat-controlled cities are boarding up in preparation for an onslaught of mostly peaceful demonstrations should Trump win the election Tuesday.

The real concern is that the party of love and tolerance loses the election.

“We just want to make sure our businesses will be safe from the sudden outpouring of peace, love, and tolerance,” said one frightened business owner in Los Angeles as he frantically boarded up his hookah lounge. “You know, too much peace can sometimes intensify and end up destroying millions of dollars of property. You know, from all the peace.”

“Can’t be too careful when there’s roaming bands of people spreading peace.”

Many business owners are even arming themselves with firearms to protect themselves from all the peace.

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Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem Exposes a Big Problem with Democracy | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on November 4, 2020

Specifically, if we ask “Does ‘society’ think Trump is better than Biden?,” the answer is yes, because Bob and Charlie think Trump is better than Biden—they outvote Alice on that narrow question. Using majority rule, we can also conclude that “society” thinks Biden is better than Jorgensen, because Alice and Charlie outvote Bob. So since “society” thinks Trump beats Biden and Biden beats Jorgensen, for the group to be rational we would also expect “society” to think Trump beats Jorgensen. And yet, as the table indicates, on that narrow question the voters would say the opposite: Alice and Bob would vote for Jo Jo over the Donald.

https://mises.org/wire/arrows-impossibility-theorem-exposes-big-problem-democracy?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=b6b76242be-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-b6b76242be-228343965

Robert P. Murphy

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

There is arguably nothing more sacrosanct to today’s elites than “democracy”—by which they mean “a political outcome we endorse.” And yet ironically, one of the most surprising and powerful results in social choice theory, namely Kenneth Arrow’s so-called impossibility theorem, shows that even in principle there is no coherent way to aggregate individual preferences into a collective will.

In a sense, Arrow did to democracy what Kurt Gödel did to the attempts to place mathematics on an axiomatic foundation. Yet while everyone from philosophers to cognitive scientists to computer programmers cites Gödel—even when they don’t really understand what he demonstrated—hardly anyone discusses Arrow when it comes to politics. My simple and cynical explanation is that his result is so devastating that it’s hard to say anything at all in its wake. (Note that free market economists also might suffer from this problem, if we speak too glibly about the “optimality” of a market outcome.)

Why Majority Rule Doesn’t Work

Before explaining Arrow’s shocking result, let me set the table with a demonstration of why simple majority rule isn’t a viable rule for making group decisions. Suppose Alice, Bob, and Charlie have the following subjective rankings of three candidates:

murphchart.png

murph

Specifically, if we ask “Does ‘society’ think Trump is better than Biden?,” the answer is yes, because Bob and Charlie think Trump is better than Biden—they outvote Alice on that narrow question. Using majority rule, we can also conclude that “society” thinks Biden is better than Jorgensen, because Alice and Charlie outvote Bob. So since “society” thinks Trump beats Biden and Biden beats Jorgensen, for the group to be rational we would also expect “society” to think Trump beats Jorgensen. And yet, as the table indicates, on that narrow question the voters would say the opposite: Alice and Bob would vote for Jo Jo over the Donald. Now with only three voters and three possible candidates, it should be relatively simple to determine what “the group” thinks about the best candidate, right? Yet if we happen to have the political preferences shown in the table above, then simple majority rule leads to intransitivity in the social ranking.

And so we see, even with a very simple example, that there is a fundamental problem with using simple majority rule as the mechanism for aggregating individual preference rankings into a single ‘social’ ranking. To repeat, there is no guarantee that the resulting ‘social’ rankings will obey transitivity.

Besides being worrisome conceptually, intransitive rankings also suffer from the practical problem that the overall winner is dependent on the order of pairwise contests. In our example above, if the group first pitted Biden versus Trump and then had the winner face Jo Jo, then Jo Jo would win. But if instead the elites wanted Biden, they would have the voters first decide between Trump and Jo Jo, then have that winner go head to head against Sleepy Joe.

Because a robust social choice rule shouldn’t be vulnerable to such manipulation, political thinkers have known since Condorcet that majority rule isn’t the answer.

Arrow’s Approach

I don’t know if this backstory is apocryphal, but I was taught that Kenneth Arrow set out in grad school in the late 1940s/early 1950s to get rigorous in social choice theory. Economists and other formal social scientists had known there were many types of undesirable social choice procedures (or rules). Arrow, so the story goes, originally wasn’t trying to find the best one, but instead he was merely trying to weed out the obviously bad rules in order to focus attention on the pool of surviving candidate procedures.

Arrow’s framework was a generalization of our table above. Specifically, Arrow assumed there were a finite number of citizens who each had subjective rankings of the possible “states of the world,” and he further assumed that each citizen’s preferences were complete (meaning the citizen had a definite opinion on any pairwise comparison, including the possibility of being indifferent between two outcomes) and transitive.

Taking this list of citizens’ complete and transitive preference rankings, Arrow wanted a procedure that would generate a complete and transitive “social” preference ranking of the various possible “states of the world.” In order to rule out what seemed self-evidently undesirable procedures, Arrow insisted that the eligible procedures also obey the following principles:

  • Nondictatorship: there shouldn’t exist one person in society such that, no matter what everyone else says, the procedure always makes the “social” ranking identical to the one person’s preferences. To be clear, it’s fine if in any particular example of everybody’s rankings the rule just so happens to make the “social” ranking the same as Jim’s ranking. But if, no matter what Jim and everybody else preferred, the rule always made “society” agree with Jim’s personal views, then he would be a dictator in Arrow’s sense.
  • Weak Pareto optimality: if every citizen thinks outcome A is preferable to outcome B, then it better be the case that the procedure spits out the result that “society” prefers A to B.
  • Independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA): this is the least intuitive of the axioms, but when you understand it, it also sounds reasonable. This criterion says that the “social” ranking of outcome A versus B should only depend on how the citizens compare A to B.

To get a sense of what Arrow is after with IIA, suppose a child is ordering ice cream at a restaurant. The waiter says, “We have vanilla or chocolate.” The child chooses vanilla. Then the waiter comes back a minute later and explains, “Sorry, I just realized we still have some strawberry ice cream as well. Would you like to change your order?” The child responds, “Yes! I’ll order chocolate instead.”

I hope the reader can see why our hypothetical child would here be exhibiting unusual choices. This is in the spirit of what the IIA criterion is prohibiting.

Arrow’s Shocking Result

To continue the story, apparently Arrow set about to prune away the possible procedures that violated any of the above criteria and ended up with…the empty set. In other words, Arrow realized that there did not exist a procedure for generating “social” preference rankings that obeyed his list of seemingly innocuous requirements.

What’s really fun is that any interested reader can see an actual proof of Arrow’s result that doesn’t rely on prior mathematical knowledge. See, for example, this version that Amartya Sen formulated. I heartily encourage the curious to give it a shot. You’ll see that it’s not based on a trick; Arrow really did demonstrate something with devastating relevance to the notion of political sovereignty.

Conclusion

As the media elites urge Americans to vote and celebrate the wonders of “democracy,” both at home and foisted by firepower around the world, always keep in mind the elephant in the room: Kenneth Arrow showed in 1951 that the entire project of social choice theory rested on quicksand. Author:

Contact Robert P. Murphy

Robert P. Murphy is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute. He is the author of many books. His latest is Contra Krugman: Smashing the Errors of America’s Most Famous Keynesian. His other works include Chaos Theory, Lessons for the Young Economist, and Choice: Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action (Independent Institute, 2015) which is a modern distillation of the essentials of Mises’s thought for the layperson. Murphy is cohost, with Tom Woods, of the popular podcast Contra Krugman, which is a weekly refutation of Paul Krugman’s New York Times column. He is also host of The Bob Murphy Show.

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The Rutherford Institute :: America After the Election: A Few Hard Truths About the Things That Won’t Change | By John W. Whitehead |

Posted by M. C. on November 3, 2020

Whomever wins…good luck.

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/america_after_the_election_a_few_hard_truths_about_the_things_that_wont_change

By John W. Whitehead

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”—George Orwell

The American people remain eager to be persuaded that a new president in the White House can solve the problems that plague us.

Yet no matter who wins this presidential election, you can rest assured that the new boss will be the same as the old boss, and we—the permanent underclass in America—will continue to be forced to march in lockstep with the police state in all matters, public and private.

Indeed, it really doesn’t matter what you call them—the Deep State, the 1%, the elite, the controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that no matter which party occupies the White House in 2021, the unelected bureaucracy that actually calls the shots will continue to do so.

In the interest of liberty and truth, here are a few hard truths about life in the American police state that will persist no matter who wins the 2020 presidential election. Indeed, these issues persisted—and in many cases flourished—under both Republican and Democratic administrations in recent years.

Police militarization will continue. Thanks to federal grant programs allowing the Pentagon to transfer surplus military supplies and weapons to local law enforcement agencies without charge, police forces will continue to be transformed from peace officers to heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. “Today, 17,000 local police forces are equipped with such military equipment as Blackhawk helicopters, machine guns, grenade launchers, battering rams, explosives, chemical sprays, body armor, night vision, rappelling gear and armored vehicles,” stated Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. “Some have tanks.”

Overcriminalization will continue. In the face of a government bureaucracy consumed with churning out laws, statutes, codes and regulations that reinforce its powers and value systems and those of the police state and its corporate allies, we will all continue to be viewed as petty criminals, guilty of violating some minor law. Thanks to an overabundance of 4,500-plus federal crimes and 400,000-plus rules and regulations, it is estimated that the average American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it. In fact, according to law professor John Baker, “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime.” Consequently, we now find ourselves operating in a strange new world where small farmers who dare to make unpasteurized goat cheese and share it with members of their community are finding their farms raided, while home gardeners face jail time for daring to cultivate their own varieties of orchids without having completed sufficient paperwork. This frightening state of affairs—where a person can actually be arrested and incarcerated for the most innocent and inane activities, including feeding a whale and collecting rainwater on their own property—is due to what law scholars refer to as overcriminalization.

Jailing Americans for profit will continue...

Poverty will continue...

Endless wars that enrich the military industrial complex will continue.

Police shootings of unarmed Americans will continue...

SWAT team raids will continue...

The government’s war on the American people will continue. ..

Government corruption will continue...

The rise of the surveillance state will continue...

The erection of a suspect society will continue...

Government tyranny under the reign of an Imperial President will continue...

The government’s manipulation of national crises in order to expand its powers will continue...

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : No Vaccine for Tyranny

Posted by M. C. on November 3, 2020

Instead of admitting that the lockdowns were a mistake, many in the political class, which includes a disturbing number of medical professionals whose positions and prestige depend on government, claim that we cannot return to normalcy until a coronavirus vaccine is in wide use. This suggests that people among the majority of Americans who do not wish to be vaccinated will remain under lockdown or be forced to be vaccinated against their will.

http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/november/02/no-vaccine-for-tyranny/

Written by Ron Paul

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently admitted that lockdowns cause more harm than good. Following this announcement, one would have expected American politicians to immediately end the lockdowns. After all, the WHO ‘s pronouncements are considered infallible, so much so that social media sites silence anyone who dares challenge the great and powerful WHO. Yet, governors, mayors, and other government officials across the country are ignoring the WHO’s anti-lockdown position.

Instead of admitting that the lockdowns were a mistake, many in the political class, which includes a disturbing number of medical professionals whose positions and prestige depend on government, claim that we cannot return to normalcy until a coronavirus vaccine is in wide use. This suggests that people among the majority of Americans who do not wish to be vaccinated will remain under lockdown or be forced to be vaccinated against their will.

The assault on our liberty will not end with deployment and use of a vaccine. Moncef Slaoui, the chief adviser of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, a “public-private partnership” in charge of producing and delivering a coronavirus vaccine, has said that those who receive a vaccine will be monitored by “incredibly precise … tracking systems.” Slaoui has also indicated that tech giants Google and Oracle will help the government keep tabs on the vaccinated individuals. So, the vaccine program will lead to an increase in government surveillance!

Slaoui is just the latest “expert” to endorse forcing the American people to relinquish their few remaining scraps of privacy to stop coronavirus. Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have urged development of a digital certificate for those vaccinated for coronavirus. People without the certificate would find their liberty severely restricted.

Those who think that the new surveillance system will be limited to coronavirus should remember that Social Security numbers were only supposed to be used to administer the Social Security program. They should also consider that the PATRIOT Act’s expansion of warrantless wiretapping was supposed to be limited to stopping terrorists. However, these powers have been used for a wide variety of purposes. Whenever government is given power to abuse our rights for one reason it will inevitably use that power to abuse our rights for other reasons as well.

Fauci and Gates’ digital certificate could, and likely will, be expanded to include proof individuals have received a variety of other vaccines and medical treatments. The digital certificate could even extend to monitoring a person’s lifestyle choices on the grounds that unhealthy habits make one more susceptible to diseases.

The digital certificate could also be tied to the REAL ID program to deny individuals who have not been vaccinated the right to travel. It could also be combined with a future mandatory E-Verify system to deny unvaccinated individuals the right to hold a job. Those who consider this “paranoia” should consider Britain is already developing a covid passport.

Liberty lost in the “war on covid” will not be voluntarily returned when the coronavirus threat ends — assuming the government ever stop moving the goal posts and declares the coronavirus threat is over. Instead, the people must be prepared to take back their liberty from the politicians. Fortunately, we still have the ability to do so by the peaceful means of educating our fellow citizens and pressuring our elected officials to reverse course. We must all do what we can to use these peaceful tools before we are in a “dark winter” of authoritarianism.


Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.


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The Modern Mayflower? – EPautos – Libertarian Car Talk

Posted by M. C. on November 2, 2020

And yet, the cloth is worn – suggesting the horrible possibility that the wearers want to wear their holy Face Diapers. Which suggests they will not object when the wearing of them is required by law – and actively enforced. More, that they will become the willing helpers of enforcement. And not just of the wearing of the Holy Diaper. They will be the “hands and fingers” that push the meds.

If that happens, which is almost certain to if the Orange Man loses – because the Hair Plugged Man has promised it will happen – then dissenters will be targets. Fixed targets, as they will be at home and their homes don’t move.

https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2020/10/28/the-modern-mayflower/

By eric

Living in a van down by the river has become a cultural catchphrase – it was part of a hilarious Chris Farley Saturday Night Live skit back in the ’90s about a depressed and broke motivational speaker.

But maybe it’s not such a bad idea.

In about a week, Americans could face the prospect of a federal mandate requiring them not only to join the Sickness Cult by adopting its uniform – the loathsome “mask” – but also extend their arms for the injection the government will likely attempt to mandate as well.

For some of us, these things are non-negotiable No’s.

The problem then becomes one of mobility – and visibility.  How to get away from the Diaper Police? Who may go door-to-door to make sure you take your medicine – and who will starve you out if you don’t, by keeping you “locked down” for the greater good if you don’t.

If you’re tied to your home, you are tied down. They know where you live. You literally have all your eggs – including your kids – in that one basket.

It may be time to consider getting mobile. Especially if you live among the Diapered – the actually ill ones ones who not only wear their religious garment willingly but are champing at the bit – if you could see them champing at the bit – to make you wear it, too. If the election goes the wrong way, they may soon have the power to do that.

Do you want to be home for that?

I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. I love my place in The Woods of rural SW Virginia. It’s a beautiful area, with a reasonable climate and a relatively low cost of living. I moved here about 17 years ago to get away from Northern Virginia, the canker sore part of the state that’s adjacent to the federal capital, with all of its pathologies.

The problem is that Northern Virginia is increasingly all of Virginia, attitudinally and so politically. The sickness has leached across the state. If the election goes the wrong way, it may no longer be safe to stay. The governor/gesundheitsfuhrer has already let slip – via trail balloon – that he intends to force every person in the state to take his medicine.

Or rather, Bill Gates’ medicine.

He has already made it plain that he wants no one to show their faces anywhere outside their homes and it is not beyond the realm of the possible within their homes.

Anything to “stop the spread” – of dissent.

The showing of your face being a show of disrespect for the holy doctrines of the Sickness Cult. It cannot be tolerated for the same reason that Winston Smith, the hero of Orwell’s 1984, could not be allowed to cling to the axiom that 2+2=4 because if that – i.e., objective reality – is granted then the regime has conceded there is something outside their power and superior it, which is immensely threatening to its power.

Winston – and all of us – must come to love Big Brother. It is not enough merely to obey him, out of fear of being punished if we do not. We must embrace the Diaper. We must accept the Needle.

Those of us whose brains aren’t mottled by the weaponized hypochondria of the Sickness Cult may face having to pick one of two options. The third option – wearing the holy cloth and partaking of the communion via the medicine – being off the table.https://www.youtube.com/embed/rJz77y4d_JA

The first is to stay and hope  – and be prepared to fight, if it comes to that.

I have been leaning this way for most of the duration of this plague – of psychosis. I have been hoping it would pass, like an epilectic fit. That enough people would, after a brief spell of being shellshocked by the manufactured fear campaign,  come to their senses as it became evident that the only people who need to wear a respirator (as opposed to a “mask”) are people who have age-or-sickness weakened bodies, as has always been the case with regard to the catching of colds.

That the science – i.e., objective reality – would de-alarm people in no real danger of dying from this cold, for the same reason that most people continue to get in their cars every day even though there is a very small chance that they might die in an accident. The chance of them dying from the WuFlu being even smaller, I figured they’d come to their senses sooner rather than later.

And perhaps they still will.

But it does not look good. Literally. Even here, which is almost as far from Northern Virginia as it is possible to get without actually leaving Virginia, the wearing of the Holy Cloth has become almost universal, even though the requirements – decrees, actually – aren’t being actively enforced almost anywhere

And yet, the cloth is worn – suggesting the horrible possibility that the wearers want to wear their holy Face Diapers. Which suggests they will not object when the wearing of them is required by law – and actively enforced. More, that they will become the willing helpers of enforcement. And not just of the wearing of the Holy Diaper. They will be the “hands and fingers” that push the meds.

If that happens, which is almost certain to if the Orange Man loses – because the Hair Plugged Man has promised it will happen – then dissenters will be targets. Fixed targets, as they will be at home and their homes don’t move.

They could, of course, fight – if the cultists refuse to leave them alone. This is morally justifiable and even noble, but it may also be as pointless as fighting the tide.

But you can avoid getting soaked by the tide by moving out of its reach. This brings up the final solution, so to speak. It is in a way the same solution chosen by the people who fled Europe to come to this continent hundreds of years ago when Europe became intolerable. They moved to get out of the reach of the governments of Europe. Of the various politically empowered psychopaths who would not leave them be.

Rather than stand their ground, they found new ground.

An RV – or even just a van – could be a kind of modern Mayflower that way. If things get hairy, you can split. They can’t Diaper – or Needle – what they can’t get their hands on. And you can get a pretty nice RV – one with  a full-size bed, a full kitchen and a full bathroom with a shower – for fraction of the cost of a home. If you own your home or have decent equity in it you could sell it to buy the RV – and use the remainder of the cash to finance your move as well as your stay – wherever you end up going.

It’s still a big country and there are places free of this psychosis or at least, where you can hide from it, once you find one.

It beats hell out of a three-month sea passage in a leaky wooden ship without hot or cold running water.

And it beats hell out of being force to don the Holy Cloth – and accept the Holy Needle.

Be seeing you

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We Are Pawns In A Bigger Game Than We Realize | Peak Prosperity

Posted by M. C. on November 2, 2020

https://www.peakprosperity.com/we-are-pawns-in-a-bigger-game-than-we-realize/

by Chris Martenson

“I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference invariably suggests others…. Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.”

 ~ Sherlock Holmes – The Adventures of Silver Blaze

Is it possible to make sense out of nonsense?

So much these days is an incoherent mess.  It’s complete nonsense.

Page 1 excitedly beams about a glorious rebound in GDP.  Yay economic growth!

Page 2 worryingly notes the near complete failure of Siberian arctic ice to reform during October and that hurricane Zeta (so many storms this year we’re now into the Greek alphabet!) has made punishing landfall.

Each is a narrative. Each has its own inner logic.

But they simply do not have any external coherence to each other. It’s nonsensical to be excited about rising economic growth while also concerned that each new unit of growth takes the planet further past a critical red line.

These narratives are incompatible. So which one should we pick?

Well, in the end, reality always has the final say. As Guy McPherson states: Nature bats last.

So better we choose to follow the narrative that hews closest to what reality actually is, vs what we desperately want it to be.

‘They’ Don’t Care About Us

While issues like climate change and economic growth may be difficult to fully grasp and unravel, direct threats to our lives &/or livelihoods are much more concrete and something we can react to and resist.

Such immediate and direct threats are now fully in play and, once again, they’re accompanied by narratives that are completely at odds with each other.  I’m speaking of Covid and the ways in which our national and global managers are choosing to respond (or not).

It’s a truly incoherent mess about which both social media and the increasingly irrelevant media are working quite hard to misinform us.

The mainstream narrative about Covid-19, in the West, is this:

  • It’s a quite deadly and novel disease
  • There are no effective treatments
  • Sadly, no double-blind placebo controlled trials exist to support some of the wild claims out there about various off-patent, cheap and widely available supplements and drugs
  • Health authorities care about saving lives
  • They care so much, in fact, that along with politicians they’ve decided to entirely shut down economies
  • There’s a huge second wave rampaging across the US and Europe and there’s nothing we can do to limit it except shut down businesses and people’s ability to travel and gather
  • You need to fear this virus and its associated disease
  • All we can do is wait for a vaccine

The alternative narrative, one that I’ve uncovered after 9 months of almost daily research and reporting, is this:

  • It’s not an especially dangerous disease and it’s certainly not novel
  • There is a huge assortment of very effective, cheap and widely-available preventatives and treatments including (but not limited to)
    • Vitamin D
    • Ivermectin
    • Hydroxychloroquine
    • Zinc
    • Selenium
    • Famotidine (Pepcid)
    • Melatonin
  • Use of a combination of these mostly OTC supplements could reasonably be expected to drop the severity of illness and the already low mortality rate by 90% or (probably) more
  • Western health authorities have shown either zero interest in the results of studies mainly conducted in poorer nations on these combination therapies or…
  • They have actively run studies designed to fail so that these cheap, effective therapies could be dismissed or…
  • Set up proper studies but which started late, have immensely long study periods and most likely won’t be done before a vaccine is hastily rushed through development.

By the way – every single one of my assertions and claims is backed by links and supporting documentation from scientific and clinical trials and studies.  I am not conjecturing here; I am recounting the summary of ten months’ worth of inquiry.

The conclusion I draw from my narrative (vs. theirs) is that we can no longer assume that the public health or saving lives has anything to do with explaining or understanding the actions of these health “managers” (I cannot bring myself to use the word authorities).

After we eliminate the impossible – which is that somehow these massive, well-funded bodies have missed month after month of accumulating evidence in support of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D, NAC, zinc, selenium and doxycycline/azithromycin – what remains must be the truth.

As improbable as it seems, the only conclusion we’re left with is that the machinery of politics, money and corporate psychopathy is suppressing life saving treatments because these managers have other priorities besides public health and saving lives.

This is a terribly difficult conclusion, because it means suspending so much that we hold dear.  Things like the notion that people are basically good. The idea that the government generally means well. The thought that somehow when the chips are down and a crisis is afoot, good will emerge and triumph over evil.

I’m sorry to say, the exact opposite of all of that has emerged as true.

Medical doctors in the UK NHS system purposely used toxic doses of hydroxychloroquine far too late in the disease cycle to be of any help simply to ‘make a point’ about hydroxychloroquine.  They rather desperately wanted that drug to fail, so they made it fail.

After deliberately setting their trial up for failure, they concluded: “Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t help, and it even makes things worse.”

Note that in order to be able to make this claim, they had to be willing to cause harm — even to let people die.  What kind of health official does that?

Not one who actually has compassion, a heart, or functioning level of sympathy.  It’s an awful conclusion but it’s what remains after we eliminate the impossible.

Getting Past The Emotional Toll

Science has proven that cheap, safe and significantly protective compounds exist to limit both Covid-related death and disease severity.

Yet all of the main so-called health authorities in the major western countries are nearly completely ignoring, if not outright banning, these safe, cheap and effective compounds.

This is crazy-making for independent observers like me (and you) because the data is so clear. It’s irrefutable at this point.  These medicines and treatments not only work, but work really, really well.

However most people will be unable to absorb the data, let alone move beyond it to wrestle with the implications.  Why? Because such data is belief-shattering.  Absorbing this information is not an intellectual process; it’s an emotional one.

I don’t know why human nature decided to invest so much in developing a tight wall around the belief systems that control our actions and thoughts. But it has.

I’m sure there was some powerful evolutionary advantage. One that’s now being hijacked daily by social media AI programs to nudge us in desired directions. One that’s being leveraged by shabby politicians, hucksters, fake gurus, and con men to steer advantage away from the populace and towards themselves.

The neural wiring of beliefs is what it is. We have to recognize that and move on.

Some people will be much faster in their adjustment process than others.  (Notably, the Peak Prosperity tribe is populated with many fast-adjusters, which is unsurprising given the topics we cover…tough topics tend to attract fast adjusters and repel the rest)

To move past the deeply troubling information laid out before us requires us to be willing to endure a bit of turbulence.  It’s the only way.

For you to navigate these troubling times safely and successfully, you’ll need to see as clearly as possible the true nature of the game actually being played.  To see what the rules really are – not what you’ve been told they are, or what you wish or hope they are.

The Manipulation Underway

The data above strongly supports the conclusion that our national health managers don’t actually care about public health generally or your health specifically.

If indeed true, then the beliefs preventing most people from accepting this likely include:

  • Wanting to believe that people are good (a biggie for most people)
  • Trust and faith in the medical system (really big)
  • Faith in authority (ginormous)

There are many other operative belief systems I could also list. But this is sufficient to get the ball rolling.

Picking just one, how hard would it be for someone to let go of, say, trust in the medical system?

That would be pretty hard in most cases.

First not trusting the medical system might mean having to wonder if a loved one might have died unnecessarily while being treated.  Or realizing that you’re now going to have to research the living daylights out of every medical decision before agreeing to it.  Or worrying that your medications might be more harmful to you over the long haul than helpful (which is true in many more cases than most appreciate).  It might mean having your personal heroes dinged by suspicion — perhaps even your father or mother who worked in the medical profession.  It would definitely require a complete reorientation away from being able to trust anything you read in a newspaper, or see on TV, about new pharmaceutical “breakthroughs”.

Trust, which is safe and warm and comforting, then turns into skepticism; which is lonelier and insists upon active mental involvement.

But, as always, hard work comes with benefits — with a healthy level of skepticism and involvement, the families of those recruited into the deadly UK RECOVERY trial could have looked at the proposed doses of HCQ (2,400 mg on day one! Toxic!) and said, “Not now, not ever!” and maybe have saved the life of their loved one.

Look at that tangled mess of undesirables that comes with unpacking that one belief: regret, uncertainty, shame, doubt, fallen idols, and vastly more additional effort. Are all up for grabs when we decide to look carefully at the actions of our national health managers during Covid.

Which is why most people simply choose not to look.  It’s too hard.

I get it. I have a lot of compassion for why people choose not to go down that path.  It can get unpleasant in a hurry.

But, just like choosing to ignore a nagging chest pain, turning away in denial has its own consequences.

The Coming ‘Great Reset’

My coverage of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) and Covid-19 (the associated disease) has led me to uncover some things that have made me deeply uncomfortable about our global and national ‘managers’.  Shameful things, really.  Scary things in their implications for what we might reasonably expect (or not expect, more accurately) from the future.

Once we get past the shock of seeing just how patently corrupt they’ve been, we have to ask both What’s next? and What should I do?

After all, you live in a system whose managers either are too dumb to understand the Vitamin D data (very unlikely) or have decided that they’d rather not promote it to the general populace for some reason.  It’s a ridiculously safe vitamin with almost zero downside and virtually unlimited upside.

Either they’re colossally dumb, or this is a calculated decision.  They’re not dumb.  So we have to ask: What’s the calculation being performed here?  It’s not public safety. It’s not your personal health. So… What is it?

This is our line of questioning and observation. It’s like the short story by Arthur Conan Doyle in Silver Blaze that many of us informally know as “the case of the dog that didn’t bark”.  As the story goes, because of a missing clue – a dog who remained silent as a murder was committed – this conclusion could be drawn: the dog was already familiar with the killer!

The silence around Vitamin D alone is extremely telling. It is the pharmacological dog that did not bark.

One true inference suggests others.  Here, too, we can deduce from the near total silence around Vitamin D that the health managers would prefer not to talk about it. They don’t want people to know. That much is painfully clear.

Such lack of promotion (let alone appropriate study) of safe, effective treatments is a thread that, if tugged, can unravel the whole rug.  The silence tells us everything we need to know.

Do they want people to suffer and die?  I don’t know. My belief systems certainly hope not. Perhaps the death and suffering are merely collateral damage as they pursue a different goal — money, power, politics?  Simply the depressing result of a contentious election year?  More than that?

We’ve now reached the jumping off point where we may well find out just how far down the rabbit hole goes.

A massive grab for tighter control over the global populace is now being fast-tracked at the highest levels. Have you heard of the Great Reset yet?

If not, you soon will.

In Part 2: The Coming ‘Great Reset’ we lay out everything we know so far about the multinational proposal to transform nearly every aspect of global industry, commerce, trade, and social structure.

If you read on, be ready and willing to let go of cherished beliefs and to suspend what you know to be true. Because none of us has that in hand.  It’s going to be a wild ride from here.

Something very big is afoot and I suspect that Covid-19 is merely an excuse providing cover for a much bigger power grab over the world’s wealth and peoples.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access).

Be seeing you

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Welcome to the Socialist States of Amerika – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on November 2, 2020

BLM is merely the militant wing of America’s Marxist movement, which is the primal originator of the present strife.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/11/vasko-kohlmayer/utopia-envisioned-welcome-to-the-socialist-states-of-amerika/

By Vasko Kohlmayer

Previously we suggested that the unfolding disarray we are witnessing in America is in reality an attempted neo-Marxist revolution. We have also spoken at some length about the important role that Black Lives Matter is playing in this process.

To obtain a realistic assessment of our predicament, however, we must be careful not to overstate the long-term significance of BLM. BLM is not the ultimate cause of our crisis. The groundwork for it had been laid long before BLM came into existence. It had been prepared in decades prior by leftists who kept systematically undermining the foundations of our society under the auspices of the Marx-inspired philosophies and ideologies we listed in this piece.

BLM is neither the mastermind nor the originator of America’s plight. BLM is merely the militant wing of America’s Marxist movement, which is the primal originator of the present strife. Violent groups such as BLM and Antifa emerge into prominence when problems and contradictions in a society reach a critical point and the overthrow of the existing system becomes a realistic possibility. It is at this stage that the militants come to the fore and try to foment the maximum disarray possible. If they succeed in creating enough havoc, Marxist politicians who have infiltrated the government attempt a coup. If the system is sufficiently discomposed, the coup has a good chance of succeeding.

Although BLM is now spearheading the advancing revolution, its mission is only temporary. Should the revolution succeed, BLM’s violent ways will no longer be needed. Once the Marxists seize power, there will be no more need for internal destabilization. When this comes to pass, order will be restored and BLM disbanded. Some of its more militant leaders will be cancelled (by the firing squad) and some of those who survive will be absorbed into the new ruling structures. The foot soldiers – the looters, the hooligans, the gross woke – will be sent home and told to become good socialist citizens. They will be put under discipline of hard work in order to contribute to the well-being of their new society. Their factory shifts will begin at 8:00 AM and run until 6:00 PM. They will be required to dress and behave decently, just like their counterparts in North Korea. There will be no welfare payments, pornography, drugs or rap music for them. Insolence, shouting and protesting of any kind shall not be tolerated under any circumstances. Those who refuse to submit to the new socialist rules will be quickly dealt with by the internal police. Once in their hands, the former looters and misfits will tearfully recall the old times when they were coddled by good old American cops in whose tender care they enjoyed all kinds of rights. No such privileges under the new American Stasi regime! If there is a silver lining, America’s Marxist revolution will put an end to sixty years of the Left’s systematic destruction of the black family by misguided welfare programs. The destruction was, of course, by design because it was needed at that stage to further the Marxist agenda of subversion of American society.

Ending the moral dissolution

The new socialist regime will move quickly to enforce morality. Up until now the Marxists have used sexual dissolution as a means of unravelling America’s moral fabric. They truly have done an excellent job. But it will have to stop at once when they are in charge. It is our prediction that a new government agency will be set up to deal with this matter. It will be called something along the lines of “The Department for Elimination of Sexual Degeneracy from the Socialist States of Amerika.” If the history of other socialist regimes is any guide, transexuals will be packed off into labor camps and open homosexuals will be given the option of changing their ways or be subjected to surgical removal of their reproductive organs.

Public displays of moral degeneracy will be strictly banned in socialist Amerika

As far as racial minorities are concerned, their equality and special privileges will be quickly eliminated. No more reverse discrimination in the Socialist States of the former USA. Here is a well-known secret: socialists and leftists are inveterate racists. They have always been – they despise dark-skinned people. This attitude goes back all the way to Karl Marx who himself was a hardened and cynical racist. Marx, for example, claimed that French ethnologist Pierre Tremaux had scientifically proven that “the common Negro type is the degenerate form of a much higher one.”

Below is an account by Paul Kengor of the contemptible way in which Karl Marx treated his own son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, who was Cuban by birth:

“Paul came from Cuba, born in Santiago, and Marx thus viewed him as marred by ‘Negro’ blood and denigrated him as ‘Negrillo’ or ‘the Gorilla.’ Karl never let up his ridicule of poor Paul. In November 1882, still 14 years after Lafargue and Laura [Marx’s daughter] married, Marx complained to Engels that ‘Lafargue has the blemish customarily found in the negro tribe — no sense of shame, by which I mean shame about making a fool of oneself.’”

Founder of communism: Karl Marx was an inveterate racist who despised black people

One wonders what the founders of BLM, who are self-confessed Marxists, think of Marx’s ugly racism. Why have they not cancelled Marx given that they have cancelled others for far less egregious statements? They have, in fact, accused people of racism and subsequently done away with them for making no racist comments at all. Karl, however, gets a pass. Why is this so?

No more Black Privilege in socialist Amerika

Up to the point of their victory, American Marxists will use black people as pawns to foment racial strife and division in American society. Once they take over, blacks will lose their usefulness and the new socialist rulers will show their true colors. Black people will be scorned and treated with contempt. Now they will see and feel what real racism is. The black revolutionaries will rue their stupidity and regret bitterly that they have let themselves be duped this way. They will yearn for a return of the present America where black people enjoyed unprecedented rights and opportunities. Never in history has any minority had it as good as blacks have it in America today: they are not only completely equal but enjoy special advantages unavailable to the rest of the population. Rather than being discriminated against, as is often falsely claimed, African Americans enjoy what amounts to Black Privilege. So efficacious is this privilege that a black person can become President of the United States even though their accomplishments are quite miniscule. Just ask Barrack Obama, a former community organizer. Had Mr. Obama been white, he would have never gotten anywhere close to the Oval Office. Given his lack of experience and attainments, a white Obama would have been laughed out the moment he announced his candidacy. There can be no question that Obama was elected largely because of the color of his skin. If Joe Biden wins tomorrow, there is a great likelihood – given Biden’s enfeebled state – that within two years Kamala Harris will succeed him as president. If this should happen, it would mean that America would have two black presidents within six years. Both would be affirmative action presidents, since Kamala Harris was also chosen to be Biden’s running mate primarily because she is black (the second reason was that she is a woman). Harris was certainly not selected because she is particularly competent or distinguished. In fact, her main talent seems to be bestowing sexual favors upon her political benefactors. But such is the great power of Black Privilege that black men and women can be propelled into the Oval Office despite their dearth of credentials.

There will be no more Black Privilege under the American Stasi regime, to be sure. I fully expect that not long after their victory, American Marxists will start dealing with what they will call the “Negro Question.” If the history of socialist states is any guide, gulag type establishments will be set up for black people. It will not be good or pretty, but at least the duped black revolutionaries will not be able to say that they had not been forewarned. Here is the warning: Don’t play Marxists, because you shall be devoured by the beast.

The rich will pay for their cowardice in the socialist utopia

The rich will be another demographic to be put on the chopping block. It is truly astonishing to watch so many of them trying to play along. They think that their donations and odious virtue signaling will win them the good graces of the barbarians. An incident involving Apple shows just how spineless and pathetic some of them are. A couple of months ago, a photo appeared of an empty Apple store in one of the riot-beset cities. Knowing that the looters would likely break in, the staff had cleared out the shelves of the store. But before they evacuated, they placed a big BLM sign on the vacant table where Apple devices used to be displayed. In other words, they publicly pledged support for those who were coming to loot them and vandalize their property. Instead of taking a stand against this evil of lawlessness, theft and wanton destruction, they kiss up to the worst criminal elements in our society. Apple, Nike and others like them should do what is right and oppose this kind of behavior, as should every decent person and organization in America. They should demand that the police stop this criminal outrage. If the police are not able to do so, they should hire their own security to beat back the looters.

The cowardice and stupidity of the rich who run and own these woke corporations is something to behold. They believe that their pandering they will get them off the hook, but in this they are badly mistaken. The rich are among the first to go after a successful leftist coup d’état. They are the obvious target because they have what everyone wants: wealth. In liberal democracies their property is protected by law and a web of institutions. In socialist regimes, on the other hand, there is no reliable system of property rights or protections. Wealth is freely taken from those who have it by those in power. The only way you can keep wealth in a socialist paradise is to be highly positioned in the party apparatus. (And even then your situation is precarious, since you never know when the next purge may come.) Business people are never part of hard-core socialist governments, because those that rise to the top in such enterprises are usually murderers, criminals or riffraff agitators such as Stalin, Castro and Chavez. These are the wealthy ones under socialism. These types are naturally suspicious of practical businessfolk and harbor an instinctive dislike of them. This is why in Marxist utopias the wealthy are mercilessly cancelled (by the noose), or expropriated and exiled (the lucky ones). Despite their naïve hopes to the contrary, the same fate will befall the American rich should the unfolding revolution succeed.

Cleaning up the woke

The woke will likewise have to be dealt with promptly once the revolutionary stage ends and their usefulness is exhausted. The socialists will not want to have any clowns or oafs littering their society. Like in North Korea, all their laptops and screens shall be confiscated, and they will be duly dispatched to work. Their hair will be restored to their natural color, the rings from their noses, tongues and other body parts will be ripped away and they will be issued groovy brown uniforms in which to pass their diligent days. The screen-addicted, junk-food weaklings will be put under a vigorous exercise regime to strengthen their enfeebled bodies and minds. Under socialism we used to have massive sport events called the Spartakiads. It was a compulsory program whereby we were forced to rehearse collective athletic routines and then perform them in stadiums so that the system could show off its healthy glorious communist youth. The woke will greatly benefit from this kind of strict regime and their bodies and minds will be much edified in the process. After their intense sports sessions, they will have no energy or inclination to discuss their eighteen gender identities.

Woksters the beautiful: The woke will have to clean up and be well-behaved in the Socialist States of Amerika

The socialists in charge will put a quick end to all the woke nonsense, since no society – socialist or otherwise – can survive if this kind of thinking infects the minds of the population. It is truly tragic that we have not recognized this and have allowed the hard left push all kinds of perversions and inanities into the minds of our young people. A society that allows such things inevitably ends up confused and soft and becomes an easy target for a takeover. The Marxists now feel that their chance has come. The question is whether we are still capable of enough clarity and moral resolve to stop them.

The Best of Vasko Kohlmayer Vasko Kohlmayer [send him mail] is a naturalized citizen.

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