MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Time To Pull the Troops From NATO: What Good Is an Alliance Full of Cheap-Riders? – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2020

In doing so the Pentagon has turned itself into a welfare agency, underwriting the defense of prosperous, populous states which could protect themselves. Some of these are military nonentities, such as Montenegro and North Macedonia, modern versions of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, made famous by The Mouse That Roared. Worst of all, the US increasingly allies, sometimes formally, sometimes informally, with countries that bring more military liabilities than assets. Georgia, Ukraine, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia are the most obvious cases today. All four could drag America into conflicts, the first three with nuclear-armed powers.

https://original.antiwar.com/doug-bandow/2020/06/07/time-to-pull-the-troops-from-nato-what-good-is-an-alliance-full-of-cheap-riders/

by

President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to remove 9,500 U.S troops from Germany by September. He also set a firm cap of 25,000, instead of allowing the number to swell to 52,000 as units rotate through or deploy for training.

It is a good start. But why did it take him more than three years to act on his criticism of allied cheap-riding on America? And what about the other 25,000 American military personnel in Germany?

Even after the US economy shut down and federal finances cratered, Washington’s foreign policy elite were seeking to add new international duties for Uncle Sam. America and China are teetering on a new cold war, which could turn hot in the Taiwan Strait or elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific. Thus, it is said, Washington must bolster its military alliances, security guarantees, and naval deployments.

Members of the Blob, as Washington’s foreign policy establishment has been called, continue to ferociously oppose the slightest withdrawal from the Middle East. America must fix Syria by confronting the Assad government, ISIS, other Islamist radicals, Turkey, Russia, and Iran. The US certainly cannot leave Iraq, irrespective of the wish of Iraqis. And America’s 18-year war in Afghanistan, in the heart of Central Asia surrounded by Iran, India, Pakistan, Russia, and China, should be accepted as the start of a beautiful permanent commitment. As the Eagles declared in their famous song Hotel California, Washington can never leave-from anywhere.

Finally, the US must increase troop deployments, naval dispositions, and financial assistance not only to NATO members, but alliance wannabe joiners Georgia and Ukraine. Forget the supposedly frontline states of the Baltics and Poland. America must bolster the southern front lest Russia solidify its dominance in the Black Sea and add a base in Syria and another in Libya, analysts warned at a recent forum organized by the Center for European Policy Analysis. Just another step or two and the Mediterranean Sea could become Moscow’s Mare Nostrum, like for the old Roman Empire. Russia then might seek control the Atlantic and perhaps even invade Washington, D.C., following in Britain’s footsteps a couple centuries ago. Or something like that.

The attempt to constantly ensnare America in other nations’ conflicts is foolish, even reckless. First, the US has never been more secure. Its geographic position remains unassailable: large oceans east and west, pacific neighbors north and south. No power threatens to breach that perimeter. America’s navy deploys 11 carrier groups, compared to two carriers by China and one by Russia. The US air force easily secures American airspace, or at least would do so if much of it wasn’t deployed overseas. Only nuclear-tipped missiles pose a serious threat, but America’s arsenal vastly outranges that of every country other than Russia, and the latter would be annihilated in return if it struck the US

Terrorism remains an ugly threat, but mostly against Americans overseas. And it is largely self-inflicted, the consequence of Washington’s promiscuous foreign intervention: bombing, invading, and occupying other states, such as Iraq; taking sides in bitter conflicts of no concern to the US, such as Lebanon’s civil war; supporting brutal dictatorships as in Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia; and backing nations which occupy and oppress minority populations, most notably Israel. Alas, Washington continues to unnecessarily create additional enemies every day.

Americans should not be surprised if some day angry Yemenis use terrorist methods to strike back against the US, which sold and serviced aircraft used by Saudi Arabia to wreck Yemeni cities, provided munitions dropped by Saudi warplanes on Yemeni weddings, funerals, apartments, and hospitals, refueled planes on their missions to slaughter Yemeni civilians, and offered intelligence to aid Riyadh’s air force in selecting targets. Put bluntly, the Obama and Trump administrations invited retaliation against the American people by aiding true terrorists against the Yemeni people.

Second, Washington has turned a means, alliances, into an end. Instead of using such relationships as a mechanism to improve US security, policymakers routinely sacrifice Americans’ safety and prosperity to continually expand security guarantees, leaving tripwires for war around the globe.

In doing so the Pentagon has turned itself into a welfare agency, underwriting the defense of prosperous, populous states which could protect themselves. Some of these are military nonentities, such as Montenegro and North Macedonia, modern versions of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, made famous by The Mouse That Roared. Worst of all, the US increasingly allies, sometimes formally, sometimes informally, with countries that bring more military liabilities than assets. Georgia, Ukraine, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia are the most obvious cases today. All four could drag America into conflicts, the first three with nuclear-armed powers.

Third, Washington engages in never-ending social engineering that rarely succeeds and would be of little value to Americans even if it did work. Three successive administration have spent almost 18 years trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal Western-style democracy. Worse was blowing up Iraq in expectation that contending ethnic, religious, and political groups would join together singing Kumbaya as they helped America battle Iran. President Barack Obama, a paladin of modern liberalism, ensured Libya’s destruction in the belief that something good would happen. He also imagined that Washington’s ivory tower warriors could fix Syria-simultaneously oust Bashar al-Assad, vanquish the Islamic State, empower “moderate” insurgents, pacify Turkey, oust Iran and Russia, protect Syrian Kurds, and foster democracy. Trump added the theft of Syrian oil as an American objective. Rarely have international plans been more chimerical, complicated, and costly.

The US is constantly expanding its defense obligations even as its financial health worsens. The federal government currently is borrowing record amounts-likely more than $4 trillion this year and $2 trillion next year-yet continues to subsidize the defense of populous, prosperous industrialized nation, rebuild failed states, bind together fake countries, hunt down other nations’ enemies, and sacrifice American lives and wealth to play international social engineer. The waste and hubris are bipartisan. Despite marginal differences among liberals and conservatives and Democrats and Republicans, the vast majority of Blob members work assiduously to ensure that the US spends as much as possible, devotes as many resources as possible, deploys as many soldiers as possible, and fights as many wars as possible, all in the name of protecting America despite almost always having the opposite effect.

Washington needs to start scaling back its outlandish ambitions, rediscovering humility and prudence. A good starting point, as the president apparently believes, is Europe.

Foreign policy determines military requirements and force structure. All should change along with circumstances. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization made sense as a temporary shield behind which Europe could revive economically and reconstruct politically. While it doesn’t appear that the Soviet Union ever seriously contemplated launching the Red Army on a march to the Atlantic Ocean, it would have been foolish to take the risk.

However, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the alliance’s supreme commander before becoming president, warned against permanent US deployments lest the continent become dependent on America. And he was right. Europe soon rebuilt and sped past the Soviet Empire, as even East German cities still sported evidence of World War II decades after the bombs stopped falling. Nevertheless, at the height of the Cold War the rising West Europeans continued to pass the bill for their defense to Washington. Their governments routinely promised to spend more and then reneged on their commitments. But the US still paid. The lesson was well-learned by Europe…

And so on

Be seeing you

 

 

 

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

America’s Forever Wars Have Come Home – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2020

But let me be clear: my dad knew how to put out fires, but once a house was “fully involved,” he used to tell me, there’s little you can do but stand back and watch it burn while keeping the fire from spreading.

America’s forever wars in distant lands have now come home big time. Our house is lit up and on fire. Alarms are being sounded over and over again. If we fail to come together to fight the fire until our house is fully involved, we will find ourselves – and what’s left of our democracy – burning with it.

https://original.antiwar.com/William_Astore/2020/06/07/americas-forever-wars-have-come-home/

by and

Originally posted at TomDispatch.

Here’s a little portrait of the United States in June 2020, a passage from a New York Times report on the National Guard’s treatment of a recent protest march of people chanting “We can’t breathe!” in Washington, D.C.:

“A Black Hawk helicopter, followed by a smaller medical evacuation helicopter, dropped to rooftop level with its searchlights aimed at the crowd. Tree limbs snapped, nearly hitting several people. Signs were torn from the sides of buildings. Some protesters looked up, while others ran into doorways. The downward force of air from the rotors was deafening. The helicopters were performing a ‘show of force’ – a standard tactic used by military aircraft in combat zones to scatter insurgents.”

Talk about America’s wars coming home! George Floyd’s recent killing is both a long way, and yet not far at all, from the police shooting of the unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Many Americans felt shocked then on seeing that city’s police force respond to the ensuing protests togged out in Pentagon-supplied gear of every sort, including sniper rifles and Humvees, often directly off the battlefields of this country’s ongoing wars. As Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver put it then, referring to an Iraqi city largely destroyed by the U.S. military in 2004, “Ferguson resembles Fallujah.”

The question is: What does the US resemble six years later? You know, I’m talking about the place that Secretary of Defense Mark Esper recently referred to as a “battle space” (as in “dominate the battle space”) in a contentious discussion he and President Trump had with the nation’s governors. I’m talking about the country where that same president has been threatening to call out the troops as police forces. (When retired military brass screamed bloody murder, Esper began backing down.) I’m talking about the land into which Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton has the urge to send the 101st Airborne Division, or Screaming Eagles, whose assault troops have previously seen action in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. (“If local politicians will not do their most basic job to protect our citizens, let’s see how these anarchists respond when the 101st Airborne is on the other side of the street.”)

Could you ever doubt that America’s wars would sooner or later come home in a big way? I suspect retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore didn’t. After all, he’s been writing for years at TomDispatch about how our former citizens’ military has, in those very wars, become the equivalent of a foreign legion. Fully militarizing the police and bringing the legionnaires home, a subject he explores today, seems like just the next obvious step in this country’s precipitous decline. ~ Tom

‘Light ’em Up’: Warrior-Cops Are the Law – and Above the Law – As Violence Grips America

By William J. Astore

From their front porches, regular citizens watched a cordon of cops sweep down their peaceful street in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Rankled at being filmed, the cops exceeded their authority and demanded that people go inside their houses. When some of them didn’t obey quickly enough, the order – one heard so many times in the streets of Iraqi cities and in the villages of Afghanistan – was issued: “Light ’em up.” And so “disobedient” Americans found themselves on the receiving end of non-lethal rounds for the “crime” of watching the police from those porches.

It’s taken years from Ferguson to this moment, but America’s cops have now officially joined the military as “professional” warriors. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder on May 25th, those warrior-cops have taken to the streets across the country wearing combat gear and with attitudes to match. They see protesters, as well as the reporters covering them, as the enemy and themselves as the “thin blue line” of law and order.

The police take to bashing heads and thrashing bodies, using weaponry so generously funded by the American taxpayer: rubber bullets, pepper spray (as Congresswoman Joyce Beatty of Ohio experienced at a protest), tear gas (as Episcopal clergy experienced at a demonstration in Washington, DC), paint canisters, and similar “non-lethal” munitions, together with flash-bang grenades, standard-issue batons, and Tasers, even as they drive military-surplus equipment like Humvees and MRAPs. (Note that such munitions blinded an eye of one photo-journalist.) A Predator drone even hovered over at least one protest.

Who needs a military parade, President Trump? Americans are witnessing militarized “parades” across the U.S.A. Their theme: violent force. The result: plenty of wounded and otherwise damaged Americans left in their wake. The detritus of America’s foreign wars has finally well and truly found its place on Main Street, USA

Cops are to blame for much of this mayhem. Video clips show them wildly out of control, inciting violence and inflicting it, instead of defusing and preventing it. Far too often, “to serve and protect” has become “to shoot and smack down.” It suggests the character of Eric Cartman from the cartoon South Park, a boy inflamed by a badge and a chance to inflict physical violence without accountability. “Respect my authoritah!” cries Cartman as he beats an innocent man for no reason….

And so on

Be seeing you

 

 

 

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

Social Distancing for Animals? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2020

The reason the bossy humans don’t try to control animals is because
controlling a virus or a bacteria or a parasite was never their intent
or never something they thought was a practical goal in the first place.
Their intent was always only to dominate those of their own species.
Human tyrants want to control other humans to serve their own interests.
It doesn’t serve their purposes to go to endless lengths to keep rats
at least 6 feet apart from each other. Why even start that discussion
if it can’t result in control over humans?

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/06/no_author/social-distancing-for-animals/

By Karen Hathaway

We have been told for decades that many viral, bacterial, and parasite-based infections in humans originate with animals. They have mentioned bats, birds, swine, sheep, cattle, rabbits, ticks, mosquitoes, and other creatures as being sources of harmful microorganisms that jump to humans and endanger us all.  We are often told that there will be mass deaths amongst humans from such things as swine flu, bird flu, bat viruses, blah, blah, blah if the government doesn’t take action. Basically, the sky is falling and we are all going to die unless we give up lots of money and freedom. It has been the same narrative my whole life.  But, my question is this: Why isn’t anyone putting tape on the forest floors or defining corridors in the sky to direct these inconsiderate or ignorant animals into more appropriate social behavior? Not just for the benefit of the humans, but for the benefit of the poor animals. Won’t anyone think about their plight?

Speaking of human infections; even if people were able to isolate themselves in a way that would prevent a disease from passing from one human to another, does that keep the disease from spreading between the animals that were the supposed source of the disease? Won’t the diseases that allegedly originate with animals continue to be passed from one animal to another in nature until natural immunities develop within that species? But, since natural immunities aren’t good enough for the powers that be, shouldn’t they propose doing something about this ever-present menace?

If social distancing between animals isn’t achievable (certainly they can try), then here’s an idea that should only cost about 30 trillion dollars: Maybe a pharmaceutical company could grow massive amounts of a targeted virus (enough to infect the whole world) and then undergo the standard vaccine preparation protocol by weakening it with radiation and then mixing it with powdered aluminum agitants and chemical immunosuppressants and then spray millions of gallons of it over all the forests of the world to give immunity to all the animals; picture Agent Orange. We could call this aerosol animal vaccine Agent Prophylactis. We could even mix in some antibiotics to deal with animal-borne bacterial diseases like Lyme Disease and pesticides to deal with animal-borne parasites that cause things like malaria in an attempt to get the perfect cocktail, something short of a mix that would kill every living creature. There would certainly be experts that would rubber stamp the need for, and the efficacy of, such a project if paid enough.

Social distancing or mass viral vaccinations for animals would be quite a chore, but certainly the all-powerful fear mongers would want to address this crucial animal issue; wouldn’t they? Although a daunting task, those public health heroes of the same political ilk as the global climate controllers would no doubt think themselves up to the task. If we can strive to control the world’s climate with money and political decrees, then we can certainly deal with all the animals of the world; if not their social behavior, then, at least, their vaccinations. Why don’t human authoritarians desire to even discuss the animal “socializing” threat since critters have been a key part of the never-ending panic narrative that has continued for decades?  Even if the mundanes (head nod to Will Grigg for that term) can’t understand it, why don’t the elite politicians and their subservient court intellectuals even want to discuss the notion of keeping birds and bats from touching each other or from crossing borders from one area to another and passing on cooties? We should at least attempt to control their socialization for the short term until the heroic pharmaceutical companies can produce Agent Prophylactis, shouldn’t we?

The need is clear, isn’t it? Even if a viral or bacterial infection “runs itself out” amongst infected humans during a “lockdown period,” wouldn’t the never-infected humans then be susceptible to infection from the pesky source animals once humans return to their normal lifestyles? The reason the bossy humans don’t try to control animals is because controlling a virus or a bacteria or a parasite was never their intent or never something they thought was a practical goal in the first place. Their intent was always only to dominate those of their own species. Human tyrants want to control other humans to serve their own interests. It doesn’t serve their purposes to go to endless lengths to keep rats at least 6 feet apart from each other.  Why even start that discussion if it can’t result in control over humans? The reason they don’t take scary snapshots of birds sitting together on telephone lines and then talk about “contact tracing” between the fowls of the world is because the engineered panic needs to relate to money and power in the human world. Estimating the distance between buzzards on a dead carcass or ticks on a deer doesn’t appeal to the libido dominandi.  Who cares about the buzzards when you are a human on a power trip. Getting another taxpayer on the hook or under your thumb is another subject entirely.

Maybe Agent Prophylactis is a different story. Maybe they would try that since it would be another way to rob the humans. Maybe I should keep my mouth shut.

 

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

Coronavirus and the Gates Foundation

Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2020

http://www.williamengdahl.com/englishNEO18Mar2020.php

By F. William Engdahl

Arguably, no one has been more active in promoting and funding research on vaccines aimed at dealing with coronavirus than Bill Gates and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. From sponsoring a simulation of a coronavirus global pandemic, just weeks before the Wuhan outbreak was announced, to funding numerous corporate efforts to come up with a novel vaccine for the apparently novel virus, the Gates presence is there. What does it actually entail ?

We must admit that at the very least Bill Gates is prophetic. He has claimed for years that a global killer pandemic will come and that we are not prepared for it. On March 18, 2015 Gates gave a TED talk on epidemics in Vancouver. That day he wrote on his blog, “I just gave a brief talk on a subject that I’ve been learning a lot about lately—epidemics. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is a tragedy—as I write this, more than 10,000 people have died.” Gates then added, “As awful as this epidemic has been, the next one could be much worse. The world is simply not prepared to deal with a disease—an especially virulent flu, for example—that infects large numbers of people very quickly. Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic.”

That same year, 2015, Bill Gates wrote an article for the New England Journal of Medicine titled, “The Next Epidemic: Lessons from Ebola.” There he spoke of a special class of drugs that “involves giving patients a set of particular RNA-based constructs that enables them to produce specific proteins(including antibodies).Although this is a very new area, it is promising because it is possible that a safe therapy could be designed and put into large-scale manufacture fairly rapidly. More basic research as well as the progress of companies like Moderna and CureVac could eventually make this approach a key tool for stopping epidemics.” Moderna and CureVac both today receive funds from the Gates Foundation and are leading the race to develop an approved COVID-19 vaccine based on mRNA.

2017 and Founding of CEPI

A global flu-like pandemic in fact is something that Gates and his well-endowed foundation have spent years preparing for. In 2017 during the Davos World Economic Forum, Gates initiated something called CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, together with the governments of Norway, India, Japan, and Germany, along with the Wellcome Trust of the UK. Its stated purpose is to “accelerate the development of vaccines we’ll need to contain outbreaks” of future epidemics. He noted at the time that “One promising area of vaccine development research is using advances in genomics to map the DNA and RNA of pathogens and make vaccines.” We will return to that.

Event 201

By 2019 Bill Gates and the foundation were going full-tilt boogie with their pandemic scenarios. He made a Netflix video which made an eerie imaginary scenario. The video, part of the “Explained” series, imagined a wet market in China where live and dead animals are stacked and a highly deadly virus erupts that spreads globally. Gates appears as an expert in the video to warn, “If you think of anything that could come along that would kill millions of people, a pandemic is our greatest risk.” He said if nothing was done to better prepare for pandemics, the time would come when the world would look back and wish it had invested more into potential vaccines. That was weeks before the world heard about bats and a live wet market in Wuhan China.

In October, 2019 the Gates Foundation teamed up with the World Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to enact what they called a “fictional” scenario simulation involving some of the world’s leading figures in public health. It was titled Event 201.

As their website describes it, Event 201 simulated an “outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.”

In the Event 201 scenario the disease originates at a pig farm in Brazil, spreading through low-income regions and ultimately explodes into an epidemic. The disease is carried by air travel to Portugal, the USA and China and beyond to the point no country can control it. The scenario posits no possible vaccine being available in the first year. “Since the whole human population is susceptible, during the initial months of the pandemic, the cumulative number of cases increases exponentially, doubling every week.”

The scenario then ends after 18 months when the fictional coronavirus has caused 65 million deaths. “The pandemic is beginning to slow due to the decreasing number of susceptible people. The pandemic will continue at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80-90 % of the global population has been exposed.”

Event 201 Players

As interesting as the prescient Gates-Johns Hopkins Event 201 fictional scenario of October, 2019 may be, the list of panelists who were invited to participate in the imaginary global response is equally interesting.

Among the selected “players” as they were called, was George Fu Gao. Notably, Prof. Gao is director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention since 2017. His specialization includes research on “influenza virus interspecies transmission (host jump)… He is also interested in virus ecology, especially the relationship between influenza virus and migratory birds or live poultry markets and the bat-derived virus ecology and molecular biology.” Bat-derived virus ecology…

Prof. Gao was joined among others at the panel by the former Deputy Director of the CIA during the Obama term, Avril Haines. She also served as Obama’s Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy National Security Advisor. Another of the players at the Gates event was Rear Admiral Stephen C. Redd, Director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The same CDC is at the center of a huge scandal for not having adequate functioning tests available for testing cases of COVID-19 in the USA. Their preparedness was anything but laudable.

Rounding out the group was Adrian Thomas, the Vice President of scandal-ridden Johnson & Johnson, the giant medical and pharmaceutical company. Thomas is responsible for pandemic preparedness at J&J including developing vaccines for Ebola, Dengue Fever, HIV. And there was Martin Knuchel, Head of Crisis, Emergency & Business Continuity Management, for Lufthansa Group Airlines. Lufthansa has been one of the major airlines dramatically cutting flights during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.

All this shows that Bill Gates has had a remarkable preoccupation with the possibility of a global pandemic outbreak he said could be even larger than the alleged deaths from the mysterious 1918 Spanish Flu, and has been warning for at least the past five years or more. What the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also has been involved in is funding development of new vaccines using bleeding-edge CRISPR gene-editing and other technologies.

The Coronavirus Vaccines

Gates Foundation money is backing vaccine development on every front. Inovio Pharmaceuticals of Pennsylvania received $9 million from the Gates-backed CEPI, Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, to develop a vaccine, INO-4800, which is about to test on humans in April, a suspiciously rapid time frame. In addition Gates Foundation just gave the company an added $5 million to develop a proprietary smart device for intradermal delivery of the new vaccine.

In addition Gates Foundation monies via CEPI are financing development of a radical new vaccine method known as messengerRNA or mRNA.

They are co-funding the Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech company, Moderna Inc., to develop a vaccine against the Wuhan novel coronavirus, now called SARS-CoV-2. Moderna’s other partner is the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Head of NIAID is Dr Anthony Fauci, the person at the center of the Trump Administration virus emergency response. Notable about the Fauci-Gates Moderna coronavirus vaccine, mRNA-1273, is that it has been rolled out in a matter of weeks, not years, and on February 24 went directly to Fauci’s NIH for tests on human guinea pigs, not on mice as normal. Moderna’s chief medical adviser, Tal Zaks, argued, “I don’t think proving this in an animal model is on the critical path to getting this to a clinical trial.”

Another notable admission by Moderna on its website is the legal disclaimer, “Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: …These risks, uncertainties, and other factors include, among others: … the fact that there has never been a commercial product utilizing mRNA technology approved for use.” In other words, completely unproven for human health and safety.

Another biotech company working with unproven mRNA technology to develop a vaccine for the COVID-19 is a German company, CureVac. Since 2015 CureVac has received money from the Gates Foundation to develop its own mRNA technology. In January the Gates-backed CEPI granted more than $8 million to develop a mRNA vaccine for the novel coronavirus.

Add to this the fact that the Gates Foundation and related entities such as CEPI constitute the largest funders of the public-private entity known as WHO, and that its current director, Tedros Adhanom, the first WHO director in history not a medical doctor, worked for years on HIV with the Gates Foundation when Tedros was a government minister in Ethiopia, and we see that there is practically no area of the current coronavirus pandemic where the footprints of the omnipresent Gates are not to be found. If that is to the good of mankind or grounds to be worried, time will tell.

Be seeing you

 

 

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

Ideas Have Consequences – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2020

I should have said, “the external cost of American police training is very high.”  US police are trained in Israeli practices that view protesters as enemies justifying very aggressive restraint techniques. The training produces such a high level of police anxiety that police feel compelled to handcuff 5-year olds before putting them in a squad car.

The New York Times’ 1619 Project is spreading this genocide of white history to all of North America.  Northern cities are in flames, and Canada won’t escape.  Nor will Europe. The idiot Northern liberals who think they can use black anger against the despised American South are going to find themselves flayed with the same whip.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/06/07/ideas-have-consequences/

Paul Craig Roberts

The Saker writes that “the systemic collapse of the US Society has begun.”  Actually, US societal collapse has been underway for a long time.  What The Saker means is that now it is obvious.

Organized violence and looting in many American cities with pre-deliveries of bricks as weapons of destruction.  Police and government officials kneeling in submission to the rioters, thus encouraging the rioters in their actions. The police unsupported and standing down. Destroyed businesses. Looters emptying even the big box stores. Enormous economic loss.  As I wrote, “the external cost of one Minnesota cop is very high.”

I should have said, “the external cost of American police training is very high.”  US police are trained in Israeli practices that view protesters as enemies justifying very aggressive restraint techniques. The training produces such a high level of police anxiety that police feel compelled to handcuff 5-year olds before putting them in a squad car. I doubt the Minneapolis police officer meant to kill George Floyd by employing a restraint technique that is taught to the police.  The Minneapolis cop was  a catalyst, not the cause of consequences set in motion with the second round of Reconstruction imposed on the South.

The first Reconstruction had to be closed down because its excesses were giving rise to a guerrilla movement in the invaded and occupied South.  The second Reconstruction was the  integration of neighborhood schools by force rather than by persuasion.  Force required denunciation, and the white liberals enjoyed their self-righteousness as they sowed the seeds of racial hatred. In the South I grew up in there was no hate. People don’t employ people they hate to look after their children, cook their meals, run their households, and people who hate don’t perform these tasks for those they hate.

As Richard Weaver said, “ideas have consequences.”  We are now experiencing the consequences of decades of teaching black Americans to hate white Americans and of teaching white Americans to accept guilt for the black slave trade that originated in the black Kingdom of Dahomey in 1600.  A black labor force was inherited by the United States and by the Confederate States of America. It was the gift of history.  But in the history that is mistaught, the inherited institution of slavery was imposed on black people by white supremacy.

These lies that have been institutionalized in American education are inconsistent with a diverse multicultural society and are now visibly at work unraveling it.

The Saker thinks that there is no going back from George Floyd. Blacks have gotten away with massive looting. Antifa is not being held accountable for massive violence and property damage. The Democrat and media establishments are using the events against President Trump and all other public officials who tried to protect private property. Leftists have gone beyond justifying violence to glorifying in it.

The Camp of the Saints is playing out before our eyes.  We are living the novel. It is impermissible to put down violent protests of “stigmatized and marginalized” black Americans.  But who is more stigmatized than white people, written off as “Trump deplorables” and “racist white supremacists”?  It is white people, not blacks who have to be careful in their language, to be careful about what parts of what cities they can safely enter. It is white people who are fired, sanctioned, evicted from social media for offending a black person, not the other way around. A white player for the professional soccer team, Los Angeles Galaxy, was let go not because of anything he did, but because his wife posted an Instagram of a black looter holding a shoebox with the caption, “Black Nikes Matter.”

It is perfectly acceptable to offend white people.  All is permissible. The governor of Virginia has ordered the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from Richmond, the Virginia capital that Robert E. Lee honorably defended for three years from being looted and burned by Union invaders. Thanks to Lee, Richmond escaped Atlanta’s fate, but Lee’s statue is being taken down. It was racist of Lee to defend his state and the property and lives of those in Virginia. The truth of the matter is that it is not blacks that have been genocided, it is Southern people and their history.

The New York Times’ 1619 Project is spreading this genocide of white history to all of North America.  Northern cities are in flames, and Canada won’t escape.  Nor will Europe. The idiot Northern liberals who think they can use black anger against the despised American South are going to find themselves flayed with the same whip.

Be seeing you

 

 

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

The Insolent American Population Has Become a Pathetic Mass of Irrelevancy, and Ripe for Takeover – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2020

The asinine, non-productive, and violent destruction of people and
property that is going on every day in this country through rioting and
looting, is not revolution, it is criminal insanity stoked by the very
entities responsible for all the destruction since February of this
year. This planned chaos that is being perpetrated by these non-thinking
and brainless individuals is only feeding the fire of tyranny, and
helping to solidify the new order sought by the controllers at the top.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/06/gary-d-barnett/the-insolent-american-population-has-become-a-pathetic-mass-of-irrelevancy-and-ripe-for-takeover/

By

“It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world
 if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years.
 But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a
 world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite
 and world bankers is surely preferable to the national
 auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”

~ David Rockefeller– “The Powers That Be: America’s Dirtiest Secrets”/Book by William Caniano, 2007.

The fact that self-proclaimed intellectual elites believe they are above all others, and are the only sovereigns, is tantamount to a belief that they are exalted overlords without check by the people. What has happened in the past few months has been staggering, and has exposed agendas not thought about by most of the people in this country in the past. The state has always been tyrannical, as that is the nature of government, but the escalation of fascist totalitarianism recently has surpassed all imagination. What this means is that the elite rulers and their political comrades have decided to make this the end game instead of relying on the long-term incremental devastation of individual liberty that they have practiced for decades.

Apparently, this all-in approach is being advanced now due to a belief that the masses in this country are ripe for takeover, and will not resist in any legitimate manner necessary to stop the onslaught of agendas meant to achieve a new world order; one that requires control of all people and systems. In addition, the monetary system is on the verge of collapse, as massive printing and debt have reached unsustainable levels, leaving the ruling elites in a temporary position of necessity to accelerate the takeover of society. The huge wealth transfers of late have been successful, so in order to gain total dominance, the monetary system must be restructured in their favor in order to allow central control over all financial transactions. This new system will be a digital structure on a global scale. While this current push is extensive and very inclusive, many aspects of individual control measures will continue to be implemented over time. Some measures are still too radical to advance in the open, but as more government authoritative supervision becomes evident over individuals, more drastic changes that allow direct control will be forthcoming.

The medical system monopoly will play a major role in this takeover of humanity, and if even more draconian measures than have happened so far this year are allowed to continue, population-wide changes in the human genetic makeup will be attempted through medical mandates. This will help the controlling powers to gain more command of what will be considered the lower classes; meaning all but the top tier of elites and their pawns in government. What I am speaking about here is future “vaccination” (injection) procedures that can alter human DNA structure. There are also very advanced technologies that will allow for any number of injections of tracking software, mind control, nanoparticle hydro gels, and smart nanoparticle injections that can be controlled remotely for alterations and time-controlled release of invasive biotechnological agents and updates.

This is no longer science fiction, and is the most dangerous part of the agenda being sought by the controlling elites. It is not only being considered but also purposely planned. Most have never looked into this type of eerie and invasive technology, but it does exist, and is being plotted for the future. The medical system in this country has become almost entirely an allopathic system based on treatment instead of prevention, and steeped in pharmaceutical prescription drug delivery instead of non-invasive homeopathic medical techniques. The idea of drugs, toxic vaccines, and surgery have been made normal nationwide, and most all are accustomed to this type of system, so it is no stretch to imagine a mass acceptance by the bulk of the population of drugs and injection of chemicals and technological agents as a way to survive and stay safe. It is accepted after all as the easy way out, and that is the natural course that people in this country seek.

Consider that the ruling element of society in order to achieve total control over the physical and psychological makeup of the human species, desires to literally computerize the biological working mechanisms of mankind. Do not dismiss this out of hand, or consider it some sort of “conspiracy theory,” as the implementation of this type of technology is not only in the works, but is extremely advanced at this stage. If billions of people accept the new untested vaccinations coming due to the illegitimate coronavirus “pandemic,” then this process will have already begun in earnest.

Considering the general population, this type of scenario is unfathomable for most, and from a common intellectual point of view borders on the impossible. This thinking is a mistake in judgment. The American herd has been programmed to believe over generations that they are in control, and that the ruling class is there to represent and protect them, but that is a lie. The future has already arrived considering the intent of those seeking total control. Nothing is off the table at this time, and all current systems are under threat.

The new system will be one of credit, where all current monetary procedures will no longer exist, and any new system will be based on management and control through computerized digital methods. Biometric identification and continuous data collection from all will be evident, even more so than today, especially once implanted chips or monitoring devices become universal. Property claims on humans may not be active today, but will be very soon given the technological advances in the works, including new digital money systems, tracking and tracing apps, and any forced medical applications that are administered with DNA altering technology.

The monopolization of all real food is in the works as well, and the false “pandemic” has caused many farmers to go under, harming food stocks, and causing destruction of crops and the killing of livestock. This has led to food shortages nationwide that is leading to a forced demand for GMO food production, food production that is chemically based and poisonous. Again, this purposeful destruction of agriculture will lead to dependence on corporate food supplies that can be used as another method to control all of us.

The asinine, non-productive, and violent destruction of people and property that is going on every day in this country through rioting and looting, is not revolution, it is criminal insanity stoked by the very entities responsible for all the destruction since February of this year. This planned chaos that is being perpetrated by these non-thinking and brainless individuals is only feeding the fire of tyranny, and helping to solidify the new order sought by the controllers at the top. Little that happens is organic, as everything that has happened so far has led to the advancement of the final agendas necessary to achieve total control.

What is coming will be the end of freedom and the enslavement of all but the few. The billionaires are running the world now, and at this point, there is little chance of them being stopped unless a mass awakening takes place. Some think that 5% or 10% of the population rebelling against the state is necessary for this to be stopped, but are there 15 million to 30 million Americans willing to risk all to regain freedom? If not, our future is doomed. This will not end of its own accord, it will not blow over, nothing will return to normal without legitimate revolt, as the destruction of life as any have ever known it is upon us.

Sources: Here, here, here, and here.

 

 

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

Those Pesky Statistics – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2020

https://www.takimag.com/article/those-pesky-statistics/

Theodore Dalrymple

I once gave a talk in New Zealand in which I said that, thanks to the inefficiency of the police and the leniency of the courts in Britain, a burglar spent on average three days in prison; in which case the question was not why there were so many burglars, but why there were so few.

To this question a clever lawyer in the audience immediately said, “They’re not very good at arithmetic.”

Neither, I suppose, are the rioters in the United States. It is true, of course, that the death of George Floyd at the hands, or rather the knee, of the policeman called Chauvin was horrible, and perhaps even worse (for it implied something more than mere individual psychopathy) was the fact that three of Chauvin’s colleagues were watching. The picture of the policeman with his knee on the victim’s neck, his hand in his pocket and the look of a triumphant big-game hunter on his face, is not easily forgotten. Chauvin’s defense attorney, I imagine, will not find it easy to say much in extenuation.

But proportion is necessary in all things, especially in anger and outrage. It is easy to indulge in these emotions for their own sake, because they are pleasurable and soon cease to be sincere.

To the citizens of most Western countries, the numbers of people killed by the American police are rather surprising, to say the least, but so are the numbers of police killed.

“I do not think that the rioters are much interested in philosophical subtleties.”

Roughly speaking, a policeman in the United States is about fifty times more likely to be killed than to kill, and this is without taking into consideration that the majority of the killings by the police are at least prima facie justified by self-defense or the interruption or prevention of a serious crime. Let us exclude only half of those killings on these grounds (probably a gross underestimate): This means that a policeman is 100 times more likely to be killed than to kill.

Let us also suppose that the police are killed by black and white in the same proportion as blacks and whites commit homicide in general (again, a generous, that is to say a conservative, assumption). This means that a policeman is about fifteen times more likely to be killed by a black man than to kill a black man, and again this is not to take into account the fact that many of the police killings would be at least prima facie justified.

A black man is about thirty times more likely to be killed by another black man than to be killed by a policeman (and some of the police are themselves black, of course). A white man is only fifteen times more likely to be killed by someone of any race than to be killed by a policeman. Are the police biased against whites?

These figures should not be taken as being accurate to the seventeenth decimal point. They are worked out from official figures but taken from somewhat different dates, varying by a year or two; but this would not alter their rough or fundamental accuracy.

Of course, most people do not bother to look up the statistics, but in some inchoate way they know them to be true. This is shown by the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s famous (or infamous) but honest remark, which he may now regret having made, that when walking down a dark street at night he felt relief that the man walking behind him was white and not black.

None of this alters the individual responsibility of the policeman who must surely have caused the death of George Floyd. (Would the latter have died anyway, even if not under arrest and treated in the way he was treated?) Nor does it alter the responsibility of the accessories before the fact. But it does cast a strange light on the rioters, and even on the peaceful demonstrators, most of whom seem to have expressed little concern, much less moral outrage, at the much more frequent murder of blacks by other blacks, or at the comparatively high rate of the murder of policemen. (The general homicide rate in the U.S. is about five per 100,000, that of policemen fifteen per 100,000.)

Now, it might be argued that an unjustified killing by an agent of the state is far worse than any other kind of killing, so raw statistics do not apply. I can see that this argument has a certain force. On the other hand, the killing of an agent of law and order also has a special seriousness, for it undermines law and order itself. And egalitarians who uphold the sanctity of (or at least the inalienable right to) human life are ill-placed to claim that one killing is worse than another.

I do not think that the rioters were or are much interested in philosophical subtleties, however. But, for the sake of argument, let us exclude those who riot for pleasure and profit, those who merely like the tinkling sound of smashed plate glass and the cheery crackling of flames in department stores while also indulging in a little light looting.

Let us, rather, take those who demonstrated peacefully within the law; surely they were acting in bad faith while preening themselves on their own moral grandeur? They demand “justice” but pronounce guilt before it has been established by a court of law. They have over and over again proved themselves indifferent to killings by the thousands, simply because they were of no political value to them. Their indifference to facts that they must know, at least in outline, is a symptom, I would suggest, of a guilty conscience. They want at all costs to preserve their Manichaean world outlook—we good, they bad—rather than face ambiguous, disconcerting, and intractable reality. Of course, we all have this desire or tendency, but it is one that we should seek to control rather than indulge.

I could not help but recall the famous words written by Alphonse Karr in 1849, Abolissons la peine de mort, mais que messieurs les assassins commencent—“Let us abolish the death penalty, but let Messrs. the murderers begin”—that is to say to go, and kill no more.

Be seeing you

 

 

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

Dumbing Us Down Quotes by John Taylor Gatto

Posted by M. C. on June 7, 2020

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/516764-dumbing-us-down-the-hidden-curriculum-of-compulsory-schooling

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto

“I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic — it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
tags: education-system, public-education
149 likes
Like
“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”
― John Taylor Gattoo, Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
54 likes
Like
“What’s gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
tags: education-system
48 likes
Like
“Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
tags: education
42 likes
Like
“Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships — the one-day variety or longer — these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of “school” to include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents — and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 — we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
35 likes
Like
“The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last month the education press reported the amazing news that, in their ability to think, children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
29 likes
Like
“This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
26 likes
Like
“School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
23 likes
Like
“The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
22 likes
Like
“Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for “basic skills” practice is a smoke screen”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
Be seeing you

 

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

Native American Boys: Forgotten Victims | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on June 6, 2020

Men and boys are nowhere. Nor does the media seemingly note even the possibility of male victims. A Lincoln Journal Star article that anticipated LB 154 was entitled “Senators want to step up investigations of missing or abused Native women.”

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/native-american-boys-forgotten-victims/

 

A recent study by the Nebraska State Patrol and the Commission on Indian Affairs should change how the media and lawmakers view violence against Native Americans. They should look carefully at male victims, but it is far from clear that they will.

The Omaha World-Herald offers a surprising statistic, “The greatest percentage of Native American missing Native American persons are boys age 17 or younger, accounting for 73.3% of all Native American missing persons in Nebraska.” In fact, they account for 59.6% of missing people in the state. The data is even the more remarkable because it resulted from LB 154, a state bill to “require a report on missing Native American women in Nebraska.” The 21-line bill that authorizes the study mentions “Native American women” six times; men and boys are not mentioned at all.

At long last, male victims of violence may receive the same attention as female ones. Or will they?

Some telling comments conclude the study. Under “Important Related Information,” it states, “During the period of this investigation…there have been several tragic events involving young Native women in Nebraska: the cases of Ashlea Aldrich and Esther Wolfe. These alleged crimes against Native women make plain” why the study and “its ongoing follow through are vitally important.” State Senator Tom Brewer, who co-sponsored LB 154, is quoted: “We need all law enforcement to communicate and work together to address the exploitation and victimization of Native women.” The concluding words of Judi M. Gaiashkibos, Executive Director, Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs, speaks only of “women and children” and laments “actions and policies” that “have displaced women from their traditional roles in communities and governance and diminished their status…leaving them vulnerable to violence.”

Men and boys are nowhere. Nor does the media seemingly note even the possibility of male victims. A Lincoln Journal Star article that anticipated LB 154 was entitled “Senators want to step up investigations of missing or abused Native women.” And a word commonly applied to violence against Native American women is “epidemic.” These women deserve every bit of attention and compassion they receive, but so do males.

Lawmakers also ignore male victims. The latest Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which awaits reauthorization, is an example. It sets the national standard on how sexual abuse is handled, including “Standardized protocols for…missing and murdered Indians.” (Sec. 904) Native American women is one of the Act’s core issues with TITLE IX—Safety for Indian Women addressing the problem. Title IX opens, “More than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women, or 84.3 percent, have experienced violence in their lifetime”—a statistic drawn from a National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey entitled “Violence Against American Indian and Alaska Native Women and Men.”

The statistic is appalling, but VAWA makes a curious omission in quoting it. Immediately after the 84.3 percent figure, the Survey cited reads, “More than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native men (81.6 percent) have experienced violence in their lifetime.” In other words, Native American men experience only 2.7 percent less violence than women. A few lines later, the  Survey states “55.5 percent” of women and “43.2 percent” of men “have experienced physical violence by an intimate partner,” figures that differ by 12.3 percent. And, yet, this data does not make it into VAWA.

It is difficult to avoid concluding that VAWA slants important evidence in order to champion female victims and dismiss male ones. In theory, the programs VAWA administers are available to both sexes even though the language is gendered for females. In practice, VAWA is widely accused of making only a tiny portion of its considerable resources available to men.

The plight of male victims must be well known to lawmakers who appear to be passionate about issues like domestic violence (DV). A 2019 article in Indian Country Today, “Breaking the silence on violence against Native American men” cites “a recent study by the National Institute of Justice”; it reported that “more than 1.4 million American Indian and Alaska Native men have experienced violence in their lifetime.” The total may be an understatement. Males victims of DV ”are often reluctant to seek help or tell friends or family out of embarrassment and/or fear of not being believed. They may worry that they—and not their partner—will be blamed for the abuse.”

The blind eye to male victims is not limited to Native Americans, however, but pervades most discussions of DV. Consider the VAWA provision that allows battered immigrants to petition for legal status. In 2016, Attorney Gerald Nowotny called out the provision’s unfairness to men. Nowotny wrote, “The irony is that when it comes to the perception of domestic abuse, the focus is almost exclusively on men as the perpetrators of violence and abuse. The statistical reality is that more men than women are victims of intimate partner physical violence and psychological aggression.” Nowotny’s assessment derived from a 2010 national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and U.S. Department of Justice that found more men than women experienced physical violence from an intimate partner and over 40% of severe physical violence.

But the assumption of mainstream media and lawmakers seems unshakable: men commit violence against women; men are not victims. What if this gender bias were a racial one? What if VAWA was the Violence Against Whites Act? There would be and there should be outrage. The same people should be as outraged as by the suffering of men who too often remain silent for fear of being ridiculed or not believed. In this regard, male victims today resemble female ones from decades ago; they are revictimized by a system that does want to hear their voices.

 

Be seeing you

 

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

The State’s Priority Is Protecting Itself, Not You | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on June 6, 2020

When the greater risk is of injury to the officer, and I had five injured last night – a building? A window? A door? The property that was in it can easily be replaced. But for a person who has had officers shot. And more recently than not, I will not put an officer in harm’s way to protect the property inside of a building. Because insurance is most likely going to cover that as well but that officer’s safety is of the utmost importance.

Got that? The officer’s safety is the primary concern, not the property of citizens. Agents of the state whose sole job is supposedly to protect the people and their property instead refuse to do their job at the first hint of danger.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-states-priority-is-protecting-itself-not-you/

Murray Rothbard pointed out in his book Anatomy of the State how the state is far more punitive against those that threaten the comfort and authority of government institutions and workers than they are against crimes against citizens.

This, according to Rothbard, exposed as a myth the notion that the state exists to protect its citizens.

“We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely—those against private citizens or those against itself?” Rothbard wrote.

“The gravest crimes in the State’s lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax.”

Boy how recent events have proven Rothbard right.

For weeks, we saw police aggressively pursuing and punishing peaceful people merely violating arbitrary lockdown orders to go surfing, cut hair, or host a child’s play date.

But in the first nights of the George Floyd protests, police allowed rioters to run amok destroying property, with political leaders dismissing the damage as unimportant.

This stark contrast in police responses dramatically underscores Rothbard’s point.

Take the first nights of rioting in Minneapolis. As reported by the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, the source of the “police stand-down order that allowed his own city to burn,” merely “shrugged off responsibility and minimized the damage.” Moreover, according to the report, “Frey kept repeating that the destruction was ‘just brick and mortar.’”

And consider the example of Raleigh, North Carolina Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown, who said:

When the greater risk is of injury to the officer, and I had five injured last night – a building? A window? A door? The property that was in it can easily be replaced. But for a person who has had officers shot. And more recently than not, I will not put an officer in harm’s way to protect the property inside of a building. Because insurance is most likely going to cover that as well but that officer’s safety is of the utmost importance.

Got that? The officer’s safety is the primary concern, not the property of citizens. Agents of the state whose sole job is supposedly to protect the people and their property instead refuse to do their job at the first hint of danger.

Worse still, as Ryan McMaken pointed out in a recent article at Mises.org, “A failure to protect taxpaying citizens from violence and crime in a wide variety of situations is standard operating procedure for police departments that are under no legal obligation to protect anyone, and where ‘officer safety’ is the number one priority.”

McMaken further notes that it is “now a well-established legal principle in the United States that police officers and police departments are not legally responsible for refusing to intervene in cases where private citizens are in imminent danger or even in the process of being victimized.”

Police absence during riots is nothing new. As McMaken wrote: “During the 2014 riots that followed the police killing of Michael Brown, for example, shopkeepers were forced to hire private security, and many had to rely on armed volunteers for protection from looters. ‘There’s no police,’ one Ferguson shopkeeper told Fox News at the time. ‘We trusted the police to keep it peaceful; they didn’t do their job.”’

As the violence of the riots intensified, mayors instructed police forces in cities across the nation to step up their presence.

But their initial reactions are the most telling.

The contrast between police actions against peaceful lockdown “violators” and the rioters is striking. The instincts of the political class was to haul mothers in parks and hair stylists away in handcuffs, while standing down and allowing private property owned by citizens to burn.

The former involved disobeying a government order, an act which would threaten the perceived authority, no matter how arbitrary, of the state. The latter involved violation and destruction of citizens’ property.

As Rothbard would have predicted, the state was far more interested in preserving the illusion of its authority than the property of its citizens.

Putting a tragic, but fine, point to Rothbard’s point: George Floyd was choked to death by a police officer sent to detain him for the “crime” of using a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes.

The state is not us. It does not exist to protect our person or property. It exists first and foremost for its own benefit and to exert power and control over its subjects.

Events of the past several weeks should make this crystal clear.

Be seeing you

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

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »