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Anthony Fauci sets stage for mandatory — lucrative! — vaccine

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2020

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/8/anthony-fauci-sets-stage-mandatory-vaccine/

By Cheryl K. Chumley

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Anthony Fauci, America’s most-listened-to medical professional on the coronavirus, and apparently on all the political, economic, cultural and social precautions every man, woman and child in the nation should take on the coronavirus, has just warned what cooler-head coronavirus watchers have suspected all along: that this country may never, no never, go back to normal.

Never, that is, Fauci suggested, until a vaccine is developed. And by logical extension, that’s to say — never, until a vaccine is developed that must then be included on the required list of shots for all children to attend school.

What great news for Big Pharma.

What great news for Bill Gates who just announced his foundation is going to spend billions of dollars to help build factories for seven possible coronavirus vaccine makers. “Spend” is probably the wrong word here. Invest is more like it.

After all, Gates, first and foremost, is a businessman. A billionaire businessman who made his billions in Microsoft and who just left his billion-dollar Microsoft enterprise to pursue other matters — specifically, to “serve humanity,” is how the Economic Times put it, in a March headline.

For a taste of how he’s already served humanity, one need only look to the disastrous Common Core one-size-fits-all, top-down education plan that his foundation bankrolled.

From education to vaccinations — the service to humanity never ends.

But this is what Fauci just warned, at a White House briefing with reporters: “When we get back to normal, we will go back to the point where we can function as a society. But … [i]f you want to get back to pre-coronavirus, that might not ever happen in the sense that the threat is there. But I believe that with the therapies that will be coming online, and the fact that I feel confident that over a period of time we will get a good vaccine, that we will never have to get back to where we are right now.”

He also said this: “If back to normal means acting like there never was a coronavirus problem, I don’t think that’s going to happen until we do have a situation where you can completely protect the population. This — as the dire, dark, deathly numbers that sent America into coronavirus panic in the first place were just revised downward. “America’s most influential coronavirus model just revised its estimates downward,” The Washington Post reported.

This — as Gates, the guy who has been the face of warning about the “nightmare scenario” of the coronavirus outbreak, just said the predicted death toll may not be as high as, well, predicted. Yes, viruses are, after all, seasonal.

This — as deaths due to the coronavirus are wildly open to interpretation, wildly speculative, wildly unscientific.

“The lack of widespread, systematic testing in most countries is the main source of discrepancies in death rates internationally,” BBC reported.

What do doctors consider a coronavirus death?

In the United Kingdom, health officials give daily counts of deaths of those who tested positive for the coronavirus, but who might have actually died from other medical conditions. In the United States, doctor discretion reigns.

“In the US,” BBC reported, “doctors … are asked to record whether the patient dies ‘as a result of this illness’ when reporting Covid-19 deaths to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

So some patients may have underlying conditions that lead to death; others may not. Some hospitals may have policies that mandate the U.K. model — to chalk up any patient who died with the coronavirus to be reported to the CDC as a coronavirus fatality; other hospitals may let the doctor determine. It’s a toss-up, hardly fact-based.

And for all this, America may never see a return to pre-coronavirus normalcy?

We’re focused on fear.

We should be focused on this: the money trail.

The money and power trail.

The Global Vaccine Action Plan, for instance.

“The World Health Organization, UNICEF, the National institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have announced a collaboration to increase coordination across the international vaccine community and create a Global Vaccine Action Plan,” the Gates Foundation reported in a press release. “The collaboration follows the January 2010 call by Bill ad Melinda Gates for the next ten years to be the Decade of Vaccines.”

The “Decade of Vaccines?”

It’s a structured campaign. It includes a Leadership Council, a Steering Committee, an International Advisory Committee — and other bureaucratic so forths and so ons. But here’s an interesting link.

The Leadership Council “is comprised of … Dr. Anthony S. Fauci,” the Gates Foundation reported.

Fauci, the same guy who just set the stage for the dire need for a protective coronavirus vaccine, has a vested interest in seeing this vaccine come to fruition — come to widely administered fruition.

“Vaccines are miracles,” said Pedro Alonso, the director for the Institute for Global Health of Barcelona, and another stakeholder in the “Decade of Vaccines” program.

Yes.

And for certain folk, certain insider folk, vaccines are also great economic and political investments. Especially when they come as saving grace solutions to wildly spread fears — especially when they come as required, mandated protections for global populations.

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New Federal Vaccine Mandate Proposed | The Liberty Beacon

 

 

 

 

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National Security State Left US Defenseless Against Coronavirus – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2020

For decades, the military-industrial-congressional complex has force-fed the American public a warped conception of US national security focused entirely around perpetuating warfare. The cynical conflation of national security with waging war on designated enemies around the globe effectively stifled public awareness of the clear and present danger posed to its survival by global pandemic.

…the HHS made no serious effort to replenish the country’s diminished stockpiles of masks, ventilators, and other critical supplies. And even if it had, it would have had to have competed with a much more powerful military-industrial complex for funding…

Big government is the problem, not the solution.

https://original.antiwar.com/porter/2020/04/07/national-security-state-left-us-defenseless-against-coronavirus/

Responsibility for pandemic preparation was privatized under the Obama and Trump administrations. It·s time to face down the national security state that wasted trillions on imperial wars and abandoned Americans to fight coronavirus alone.

by

Donald Trump’s failure to act decisively to control the coronavirus pandemic has likely made the Covid-19 pandemic far more lethal than it should have been. But the reasons behind failure to get protective and life-saving equipment like masks and ventilators into the hands of health workers and hospitals run deeper than Trump’s self-centered recklessness.

Both the Obama and Trump administrations quietly delegated state and local authorities with the essential national security responsibility for obtaining and distributing these vital items. The failure of leadership was compounded the lack of any federal power center that embraced the idea that guarding for a pandemic was at least as important to national security as preparing for war.

For decades, the military-industrial-congressional complex has force-fed the American public a warped conception of US national security focused entirely around perpetuating warfare. The cynical conflation of national security with waging war on designated enemies around the globe effectively stifled public awareness of the clear and present danger posed to its survival by global pandemic. As a result, Congress was simply not called upon to fund the vitally important equipment that doctors and nurses needed for the Covid-19 crisis.

At the heart of the growing coronavirus crisis in the US is a severe shortage of N95 respirators and ventilators. Those items should have been available in sufficient numbers through the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), which holds the nation’s largest supplies necessary for national emergencies. But the stocks of crucial medical have not been maintained for years, largely because Congress has not provided the necessary funding.

Congress has been willing to dole out load of cash after pandemics hit the US. When the H1N1 flu crisis hit the United States in 2009, and close to 300,000 Americans were hospitalized, Congress appropriated $7.7 billion in special funding, including support for building up the SNS. That allowed the stockpile to provide 85 million respirators and millions of ventilators to hospitals around the country, especially during the second half of the yearlong crisis.

But since that 2009-10 crisis ended, the stockpile of such vital equipment has never been replenished. In 2020 the stockpile holds only 12 million N95 respirators – as little as 1 percent of what is now needed by health workers – and just 16,000 ventilators, compared with the estimated 750,000 people at minimum who will need a ventilator because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

These numbers are so scandalously low in relation to what is needed that senior officials Department of Health and Human Services have refused to reveal publicly how many they have in stock.

The failure to maintain those items in the stockpile was not the result of any lack of warning about the serious risk of a global pandemic that could be worse than any since the 1918 Spanish flu. It has been obvious that the frequency and ferocity of such rapidly spreading flu pandemics has been steadily rising throughout the 21st century.

The parade of recent pandemics began with SARS in 2002-3, continued with the much more serious H1N1 pandemic in 2009, and escalated with the spread of MERS IN 2012. Each one involved influenza viruses.

The H1N1 pandemic infected nearly 61 million Americans and hospitalized 274,000, causing 12,500 deaths. Another epidemic of the Ebola virus spread across much of Africa in 2014-16 but made only a slight appearance in the United States.

George Poste, a former director of Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute with close ties to the US military-intelligence apparatus, warned in 2018 that even though the horror of the 1918 flu epidemic had not been repeated, it was “inevitable that a pandemic strain of equal virulence will emerge.”

The awareness of the threat of a pandemic even reached into the National Security Council. In 2015, once the Ebola crisis had passed, the Obama administration’s departing Ebola coordinator convinced the White House to create an National Security Council (NSC) office for the threat from pandemics.

Then, a week before Trump’s inauguration, Obama’s outgoing homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, organized a simulation based on how the administration would respond to what she called a “nightmare scenario”: a flu pandemic that forces a halt to international travel and causes a stock market crash and for which there is no effective vaccine.

In May 2018, Luciana Borio, the director for medical and biodefense preparedness on the NSC staff, declared publicly that a flu pandemic that we “know cannot be stopped at the border” was the leading health security threat, and that the United States was not prepared for it.

But neither the NSC office nor the NSC itself produced a major initiative to focus political attention on the pandemic threat. The office’s role, as described by Beth Cameron, who oversaw it, was limited to closely monitoring global health threats to provide early warning of any potential pandemic.

So when arch-militarist John Bolton promptly downgraded the office after becoming Trump’s national security adviser, it made little difference.

Responsibility for domestic preparedness for a pandemic has always belonged not to NSC but to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). HHS organized a month-long simulation in 2019 involving a number of federal offices that ultimately demonstrated how seriously unprepared the government was to cope with a pandemic. Following such an exercise, it should have been obvious that a new stockpile of necessary medical gear was urgently needed.

However, the HHS made no serious effort to replenish the country’s diminished stockpiles of masks, ventilators, and other critical supplies. And even if it had, it would have had to have competed with a much more powerful military-industrial complex for funding, and almost certainly would have failed.

Deeply entrenched bureaucracies and defense contractors dominate the federal government. Thanks to hefty campaign contributions and other benefits to members of Congress who control budgetary decisions, the national security state is easily able to secure its demands. In contrast, no such lobbying complex exists to ensure the country is adequately prepared for a pandemic.

In fact, as Greg Burel, the director of the US strategic stockpile from 2009 to 2021, explained, HHS and the Strategic National Stockpile lost all responsibility for sending N-95 masks and ventilators to state and local health services and hospitals in a national health emergency. Hospitals and state and local health departments must therefore compete with one another to obtain limited commercially available suppliers after they are already knee-deep in a pandemic.

Responsibility for the preparation for the most significant threat to US security – a pandemic that would upend the economy and society as a whole – was thus privatized under both the Obama and Trump administrations.

At the same time, a bipartisan consensus emerged around shoveling $15 trillion in taxpayer money into wars that had little to do with national security in any true sense, and focused instead on the perpetuation of American empire.

The catastrophic human consequences of the failure to provide these essentials for a minimally adequate response should become the basis of nationwide political movement that takes on the national security state and its deadly grip on Congress.

Multi-billion-dollar weapons systems may have provided lucrative kickbacks to members of Congress and spacious Northern Virginia McMansions to arms industry lobbyists, but they have not provided an iota of security from coronavirus.

Such a movement would have seemed impossible only a few weeks ago. But after decades of preemption of resources for the parochial interests of a self-serving national security bureaucracy and its elite political allies, it is clear that most Americans have been abandoned before a pandemic their leaders dismissed and ignored.

A simple insistence that the actual security interests of the American people be served, rather than those of militarists who have hijacked the concept of national security for their own self-interest, is paramount.

A movement demanding this radical shift could be driven by very reasonable expectation that untold hundreds of thousands could die during a series of viral outbreaks throughout the next decade. As Dr. Peter Daszek, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance and a leading expert in predicting their impact of pandemics, recently told the Wall Street Journal, “We’re going to be hit with a much bigger one sometime in the next 10 years.”

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Government IS the Problem | PA Pundits - International

 

 

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Anti-China Hysteria Is Ultimately Not About Covid-19, Racism Or Communism, But Power – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2020

“Those who aren’t in power, such as rightwing journalists, realize their neoliberal ideology is unequipped to deal with the pandemic, and therefore is under attack,” Mastracci writes. “They won’t abandon their views, so they have to shift blame to an outside country with an ideology that is different in the right way. Attacking China clearly serves this purpose,…

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/04/08/anti-china-hysteria-is-ultimately-not-about-covid-19-racism-or-communism-but-power/

author: Caitlin Johnstone

In a recent article falsely titled “The U.S.-China propaganda war is on hold, but not for long“, The Washington Post‘s Josh Rogin made a very interesting admission.

“The United States is now in dire need of medical supplies, many of which are coming from China,” Rogin said. “If China’s leaders are willing to stop telling lies about us, we can pause pointing out the most embarrassing truths about them.”

Wait, sorry, “us”? “We”?

Rogin wasn’t quoting any US officials. He was referring, in the first person plural, to the US government, because he apparently sees himself as a part of it. He sees himself and others like him as an extension of the US government’s narrative control campaign, the branch that is responsible for distributing “truths” in America’s propaganda war to counter China’s “lies”. He sees himself as a state propagandist.

Which, of course, he is. The devoutly neoconservative Rogin consistently advances hawkish narratives against nations which have resisted absorption into the blob of the US-centralized empire, and he is showing no hesitation in running point on the new escalations in the narrative control campaign against China. This is because the USA and China have been on a collision course toward aggressive confrontation for a long time now, and the narrative managers need to manufacture consent for that horrific eventuality.

Passage‘s David Mastracci has a very worthwhile new article out titled “Don’t Blame China For Your Government’s COVID-19 Failures“, exposing what Rogin calls “embarrassing truths” about China’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic for the distorted spin jobs that they are and highlighting the fact that the difficulties Americans are currently facing is due to their own governments failures, not China’s.

“Those who aren’t in power, such as rightwing journalists, realize their neoliberal ideology is unequipped to deal with the pandemic, and therefore is under attack,” Mastracci writes. “They won’t abandon their views, so they have to shift blame to an outside country with an ideology that is different in the right way. Attacking China clearly serves this purpose, and offers a chance for anti-communism, which, as Parenti notes, people have been primed to hate for more than a century.”

This is much closer to the truth than anything you’ll read in any mass media publication. This virus is brutally highlighting all the insanity of the neoliberal status quo upon which the US empire is built, and that status quo is indeed premised upon shutting down all leftward political movement which could potentially inconvenience plutocrats and war profiteers. Much of what we’re hearing from leading Republican and Democratic Party pundits these days can be accurately translated as a wailing temper tantrum about their entire worldview crashing to an embarrassing faceplant in front of the whole world.

But even that doesn’t really cover it.

If you ask a leftist what the west’s sudden uptick in anti-China hysteria is about, they might say racism, xenophobia, and/or anti-communism. If you ask a rightist, they might tell you it’s because China lied about the virus, or because of communism, or because of China’s economic relationship with the US, or because it’s a backwards culture of people who eat different animals from us. If you ask someone who occupies the mainstream so-called “center”, they might tell you that it’s because of humanitarian concerns about China’s oppressive government, along with racism or some mixture of the aforementioned claims.

Ultimately though, it’s not about any of those things. While racism, xenophobia, anti-communism, free trade deals, authoritarianism and the virus are all real concerns which play a real role in the propaganda campaign, it’s not ultimately about any of them. Ultimately, like so much else, this is about power.

There can only be one top dog in a unipolar world. After the fall of the Soviet Union the prevailing philosophy slowly coalesced among US policymakers that the world’s only remaining superpower needed to remain that way at any cost in order to preserve the so-called liberal world order. This philosophy rose to dominance when the neoconservatives took over the Executive Branch during the George W Bush administration, and from there their ideas simply became the mainstream orthodoxy. Now the “unipolarity at any cost” ideology of neoconservatism is so pervasive that when you see someone like Tulsi Gabbard basically just advocating for pre-9/11 US foreign policy, you see them demonized as though they supported child cannibalism.

Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will shake the world.” Preventing the rise of China (and its loose network of other unabsorbed allies like Russia) has been a lasting agenda of the western world for generations, and the continuation of this agenda has set the world on a trajectory toward aggressive confrontation. The US has been surrounding China with military bases, many of them nuclear-armed, in preparation for a confrontation that it sees as ultimately inevitable, since China has no interest in being absorbed into the US power alliance and the US has no interest in allowing China to surpass it as a superpower.

What this means for us ordinary people is that we have found ourselves smashed between steadily increasing escalations between two nuclear-armed nations and their nuclear-armed allies hurtling toward a confrontation which benefits none of us in the slightest, while propagandists spoon feed us narratives about why this is something we should eventually support.

It doesn’t have to be this way. China doesn’t have to be the “sleeping giant” that we all fear. We don’t have to live in a world where nuclear-armed governments duel for planetary domination without our consent or permission and roll the dice on nuclear armageddon with greater and greater frequency each passing day. We don’t have to live in a world where the emergence of a new disease which kills human beings is seen as a tool to be exploited in a propaganda war instead of a problem to be solved together. We could all just get along and work together to create a better world for each other and for our ecosystem.

People will say this is unrealistic and unreasonable, but unrealistic and unreasonable as opposed to what? A few idiots waving armageddon weapons at each other because the other guys are standing on the wrong segment of dirt? A bunch of sociopaths pushing for the advancement of an omnicidal, ecocidal paradigm in service of an imaginary monetary system? Sounds like they’re the unreasonable and unrealistic ones to me.

Napoleon Bonaparte said China is a sleeping giant, but I know a bigger one. It’s all of us ordinary people who are sick of being crushed, exploited and imperiled by a few psychos who only care about power. All of us around the world, regardless of what dirt we stand on or what color our skin is or what political party they tell us we belong to. When we awaken, baby, that’s when the earth will shake.

____________________________________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics onTwitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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Prepare To Have Your Worldview Obliterated – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2020

Right now that’s the primary piece of advice I have to offer: stay skeptical, stay intellectually honest, and keep your perspectives malleable. If we are more interested in the truth than we are in being proven right or in feeling smug, then we are likely on a collision course with future revelations that will change our ideas about how the world is functioning in some pretty significant ways.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/04/07/prepare-to-have-your-worldview-obliterated/

author: Caitlin Johnstone

The first draft of the civil rights-eroding USA PATRIOT Act was magically introduced one week after the 9/11 attacks. Legislators later admitted that they hadn’t even had time to read through the hundreds of pages of the history-shaping bill before passing it the next month, yet somehow its authors were able to gather all the necessary information and write the whole entire thing in a week.

This was because most of the work had already been done. CNET reported the following back in 2008:

“Months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, [then-Senator Joe] Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of ‘terrorism’ that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detention of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for National Security Studies said the bill would erode ‘constitutional and statutory due process protections’ and would ‘authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.’

Biden’s bill was never put to a vote, but after 9/11 then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly credited his bill with the foundations of the USA PATRIOT Act.

“Civil libertarians were opposed to it,” Biden said in 2002 of his bill. “Right after 1994, and you can ask the attorney general this, because I got a call when he introduced the Patriot Act. He said, ‘Joe, I’m introducing the act basically as you wrote it in 1994.’”

I point this out because it is now more important than ever to be aware that power structures (and their goons like Biden) can and will seize on opportunities to roll out pre-existing authoritarian agendas. We know it happened after 9/11, and we may be absolutely certain that it is happening now.

Commentator and satirist CJ Hopkins has a long, long, long, long ongoing thread on Twitter right now compiling dozens and dozens of creepy Orwellian steps that have been taken by governments around the world and by Silicon Valley tech giants in response to the virus over the last three weeks. I emphasize how long the thread is because if you think you’ve finished scrolling through it you probably haven’t; make sure you keep clicking “more replies” until you get to the current entries.

I strongly encourage everyone to scroll through the thread when you get a chance to get a sense of the scale and scope of the drastic measures that are being implemented around the world, and maybe bookmark it and keep checking back now and then for updates. The entire thread is comprised of mainstream media articles with excerpts; some entries are more jarring than others, but taken as a whole it becomes clear that we’re looking at a whole lot of power being handed over to the kinds of institutions which historically don’t do good things when given a lot more power.

And these are just the steps we know about.

To what extent are these drastic, intrusive, authoritarian measures justified? The answer, in my estimation, isn’t clear yet. There are too many unknowns about the virus, too many unknowns about the responses to it, and too many unknowns about exactly what is going on behind the veil of secrecy in opaque government agencies around the world. There’s an argument expert epidemiologists are making that there’s no time to get perfectly certain of these things before dealing with a pandemic, that speed is of the essence and hesitating due to fear of maybe getting something wrong can cost millions of lives. Maybe that’s true; I’m not an epidemiologist and I do not know.

What I do know is that enormous changes are happening, and that powerful people are definitely conspiring to advance their own interests as this unfolds. There are many theories about who specifically is conspiring with whom and the specific manner in which they are doing so, and they’re being dismissed by establishment loyalists as “conspiracy theories” as though that in and of itself constitutes some sort of argument. That conspiracies are happening is actually just a fact that is obvious to any adult with a mature understanding of the world, and it can be useful to come up with theories about how that might be occurring; calling theories about conspiracies the thing that they are in a disparaging tone does not actually invalidate them.

There are a ton of theories about what’s going on behind the scenes with this pandemic and the policies that are being put in place to respond to it. Some are smart and relatively well-founded, some are stupid and rooted in generalized paranoia or partisan idiocy, many contradict each other, and many could potentially fit together in some way. I personally haven’t seen enough evidence for any one theory to throw my weight behind it, but I am watching carefully, and I am glad that the hive mind is chewing on this riddle.

One thing I will put my weight behind right now is the prediction that those of us who are dedicated to truth are going to have to drastically revise our worldviews in the coming months. There are such large-scale shifts happening in such an unclear information environment that the only thing we should expect is the unexpected; this virus is shaking things up (and being used to shake things up) in ways we don’t really understand yet, and even before the virus the world’s dominant power structures were acting very weird. This means our ideas about what’s going on in the world will likely have to undergo some revising in the relatively near future; the bigger the revelations, the more revision will be necessary.

Right now that’s the primary piece of advice I have to offer: stay skeptical, stay intellectually honest, and keep your perspectives malleable. If we are more interested in the truth than we are in being proven right or in feeling smug, then we are likely on a collision course with future revelations that will change our ideas about how the world is functioning in some pretty significant ways. If this doesn’t sound possible to you, it’s only because you currently lack the humility, intellectual honesty and cognitive flexibility to understand that you may not be seeing the full picture yet.

Things are shifting; all we can do is keep our minds agile enough to shift with them. Prepare to have your worldview obliterated.

_________________________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics onTwitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

 

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The Unholy Trinity and the Total State – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2020

Thus, we must remember that ideas can have powerful consequences and that liberty must be defended with vigilance.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/04/derek-dobalian/the-unholy-trinity-and-the-total-state/

By

The seeds of the Total State were planted by three men in the 19th century. These three men had delusions of grandeur and believed they had the answers to all of mankind’s troubles and questions. They placed themselves above God. The seeds they planted quickly grew roots and sprouted into the Total States of the 20th century. These three men were Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Abraham Lincoln. The ideologies and actions of these men complimented each other and ultimately led to a level of death and destruction the world had never seen before.

Charles Darwin and Karl Marx

In 1859, Darwin released “On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection, of the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,” in which he invented the theory of natural selection. A decade prior to this Karl Marx published “The Communist Manifesto,” which advocated for an authoritarian collectivist society that would abolish individual liberty. This manifesto was so influential that almost every major society put some form of it in place in the 20th century, whether it was a watered-down form of socialism or full-on communism. But this influence was only made possible because of Darwin and his theories. Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection discarded God and consequently the idea of objective morality and the inherent worth of every individual. It was Marx himself who said “Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle.” By destroying the idea that God created us all and granted us natural rights, Darwin gave Marx’s theory a much-needed foundation. This allowed for Marx’s theory to spread, as people began to accept that individuals did not have rights and therefore, that “society” had the right to enforce its will on individuals. After all, if Darwin’s theory is true, then there is no purpose in life and we are all here by chance. And if this is true, then there is no such thing as right and wrong. This thinking, combined with Marx’s idea of a collectivist society centered around an all-powerful state allowed for the creation of the Total State in the next century. Hitler, who was an avowed socialist, stated that “the earth has been acquired on the basis of the right of the stronger.” The German dictator, along with the other leaders of the 20th century Total States, adopted Marx’s theories and Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” concept, thus leading to an all-powerful state deciding who the most “fit” were and who could and should be sacrificed and destroyed.

Abraham Lincoln

If Darwin and Marx were the originators of the Total State throughout the world, Abraham Lincoln fulfilled that role more specifically in the United States and, more importantly, was the initiator of the horrific Total Warfare tactics they would eventually use. In regards to being a forerunner of the Total State, Lincoln not only wrote about it but actually put it into place. Lincoln argued that states had no right to secede and therefore that the national government had the authority to quash any such attempt with the use of overwhelming force. The results of this were obvious: the consolidation of power into one solitary group, the defining feature of the Total States of the 20th century. This centralization of power by Lincoln was later praised by Hitler in “Mein Kampf.” Hitler later would echo Lincoln, promising Germany that he “would totally eliminate states’ rights altogether.” Thus, we see that Lincoln’s vision laid the groundwork for the Total State. But that is not all. He also created the precedent for the Total War tactics that the vicious states of the 20th century would later employ. President Lincoln waged “total war” on the South, laying waste to its land and killing civilians, including children. As Murray Rothbard stated, he “broke the 19th-century rules of war by specifically plundering and slaughtering civilians, by destroying civilian life and institutions.” In fact, Rothbard declares, “by targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln…paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous 20th century.” The Total States’ later use of these tactics, which were unprecedented in Lincoln’s time, would make the 20th century the bloodiest one in history.

Conclusion

The terror of the 20th century did not occur by chance. It was largely the result of the horrific ideologies and actions of three men who lived in the previous century. Thus, we must remember that ideas can have powerful consequences and that liberty must be defended with vigilance.

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All Roads Lead to Dark Winter – TheAltWorld

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2020

More recently, this past July, the same Fort Detrick lab would be shut down by the CDC, after it was found that researchers “did not maintain an accurate or current inventory” for toxins and “failed to safeguard against unauthorized access to select agents.” The closure of the lab for its numerous breaches of biosafety protocols would be hidden from Congress and the facility would controversially be partially reopened last November before all of the identified biosafety issues were resolved.

http://thealtworld.com/whitney_webb/all-roads-lead-to-dark-winter

The leaders of two controversial pandemic simulations that took place just months before the Coronavirus crisis – Event 201 and Crimson Contagion – share a common history, the 2001 biowarfare simulation Dark Winter. Dark Winter not only predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks, but some of its participants had clear foreknowledge of those attacks.

During the presidency of George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s, something disturbing unfolded at the U.S.’ top biological warfare research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Specimens of highly contagious and deadly pathogens – anthrax and ebola among them – had disappeared from the lab, at a time when lab workers and rival scientists had been accused of targeted sexual and ethnic harassment and several disgruntled researchers had left as a result.

In addition to missing samples of anthrax, ebola, hanta virus and a variant of AIDS, two of the missing specimens had been labeled “unknown” – “an Army euphemism for classified research whose subject was secret,” according to reports. The vast majority of the specimens lost were never found and an Army spokesperson would later claim that it was “likely some were simply thrown out with the trash.”

An internal Army inquiry in 1992 would reveal that one employee, Lt. Col. Philip Zack, had been caught on camera secretly entering the lab to conduct “unauthorized research, apparently involving anthrax,” the Hartford Courant would later report. Despite this, Zack would continue to do infectious disease research for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and would collaborate with the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) throughout the 1990s.

The Courant had also noted that: “A numerical counter on a piece of lab equipment had been rolled back to hide work done by the mystery researcher [later revealed to be Zack], who left the misspelled label ‘antrax’ in the machine’s electronic memory.” The Courant’s report further detailed the extremely lax security controls and chaotic disorganization that then characterized the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) lab in Fort Detrick.

This same lab would, a decade later, be officially labeled as the source of the anthrax spores responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks, attacks which are also officially said to have been the work of a “deranged” USAMRIID researcher, despite initially having been blamed on Saddam Hussein and Iraq by top government officials and mainstream media. Those attacks killed 5 Americans and sickened 17.

Yet, as the investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks unfolded, accusations from major U.S. newspapers soon emerged that the FBI was deliberately sabotaging the probe to protect the Anthrax attacker and that the CIA and U.S. military intelligence had refused to cooperate with the investigation. The FBI did not officially close their investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks, nicknamed “Amerithrax,” until 2010 and aspects of that investigation still remain classified.

More recently, this past July, the same Fort Detrick lab would be shut down by the CDC, after it was found that researchers “did not maintain an accurate or current inventory” for toxins and “failed to safeguard against unauthorized access to select agents.” The closure of the lab for its numerous breaches of biosafety protocols would be hidden from Congress and the facility would controversially be partially reopened last November before all of the identified biosafety issues were resolved.

The same day that the lab was controversially allowed to partially reopen, which was the result of heavy lobbying from the Pentagon, local news outlets reported that the lab had suffered “two breaches of containment” last year, though the nature of those breaches and the pathogens involved were redacted in the inspection findings report obtained by the Frederick News Post. Notably, USAMRIID has, since the 1980s, worked closely with virologists and virology labs in Wuhan, China, where the first epicenter of the current novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) cases emerged. The Chinese government has since alleged that the virus had been brought to China by members of the U.S. military, members of which attended the World Military Games in the country last October.

Such similarities among these Fort Detrick lab breaches, from the early 1990s to 2001 to the present, may be nothing more than unfortunate coincidences that are the result of a stubborn federal government and military that have repeatedly refused to enforce the necessary stringent safety precautions on the nation’s top biological warfare laboratory.

Yet, upon examining not only these biosafety incidents at Fort Detrick, but the 2001 Anthrax attacks and the current Covid-19 outbreak, another odd commonality stands out — high-level war games exercise took place in June 2001 that eerily predicted not only the Anthrax attacks, but also the initial government narrative of those attacks and much, much more.

That June 2001 exercise, known as “Dark Winter,” also predicted many aspects of government pandemic response that would later re-emerge in last October’s simulation “Event 201,” which predicted a global pandemic caused by a novel Coronavirus just months before the Covid-19 outbreak. In addition, the U.S. government would lead its own multi-part series of pandemic simulations, called “Crimson Contagion,” that would also predict aspects of the Covid-19 outbreak and government response.

Upon further investigation, key leaders of both Event 201 and Crimson Contagion, not only have deep and longstanding ties to U.S. Intelligence and the U.S. Department of Defense, they were all previously involved in that same June 2001 exercise, Dark Winter. Some of these same individuals would also play a role in the FBI’s “sabotaged” investigation into the subsequent Anthrax attacks and are now handling major aspects of the U.S. government’s response to the Covid-19 crisis. One of those individuals, Robert Kadlec, was recently put in charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) entire Covid-19 response efforts, despite the fact that he was recently and directly responsible for actions that needlessly infected Americans with Covid-19. Read the rest of this entry »

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Manipulation Through Racial Hoaxes – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2020

Riley mentions the work of Dr. Wilfred Reilly who is a professor of political science at Kentucky State University and author of a new book, “Hate Crime Hoax,” that states “a huge percentage of the horrific hate crimes cited as evidence of contemporary bigotry are fakes.”

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/04/walter-e-williams/manipulation-through-racial-hoaxes/

By

We black people are so convenient and useful to America’s leftists. Whenever there’s a bit of silencing to be done, just accuse a detractor or critic of racism. A recent, particularly stupid, example is CNN’s Brandon Tensley’s complaint that the “Coronavirus task force is another example of Trump administration’s lack of diversity.” Tensley said the virus experts are “largely the same sorts of white men (and a couple women on the sidelines) who’ve dominated the Trump administration from the very beginning.” I’d like for Tensley to tell us just what racial or sex diversity contribute to finding a cure or treatment for the coronavirus.

Jesse Watters was criticized as a racist for claiming that the coronavirus outbreak was caused by Chinese people “eating raw bats and snakes.” He added that “They are a very hungry people. The Chinese communist government cannot feed the people, and they are desperate. This food is uncooked, it is unsafe and that is why scientists believe that’s where it originated from.” Watter’s statement can be settled by a bit of empiricism. Just find out whether Chinese people eat bats and snakes and whether that has anything to do with the spread of the coronavirus.

It may be perplexing to some, but I believe that our nation has made great progress in matters of race, so much so that imaginary racism and racial hoaxes must be found. Left-wingers on college campuses and elsewhere have a difficult time finding the racism that they say permeates everything. So they’re brazenly inventing it.

Jussie Smollett charged that two masked Trump supporters, wearing MAGA hats, using racial and homophobic insults attacked him. The anti-Trump media gobbled up Smollett’s story hook, line and sinker, but it turned out to be a hoax.

A large percentage of hate-crime hoaxes occur on college campuses. Andy Ngo writes about this in his City Journal article “Inventing Victimhood: Universities too often serve as ‘hate-crime hoax’ mills.” St. Olaf College in Minnesota was roiled in mass “anti-racism” protests that caused classes to be canceled. It turned out that a black student activist was found to be responsible for a racist threat she left on her own car. Five black students at the U.S. Air Force Academy Preparatory School found racial slurs written on their doors. An investigation later found that one of the students targeted was responsible for the vandalism.

Andy Ngo writes that there are dozens of other examples. They all point to a sickness in American society, with our institutions of higher education too often doubling as “hate-hoax mills,” encouraged by a bloated grievance industry in the form of diversity administrators. These are diversity-crazed administrators, along with professors of race and gender studies, who nationwide spend billions of dollars on diversity and a multiculturalist agenda. Racial discord and other kinds of strife are their meal tickets to greater influence and bigger budgets.

There’s another set of beneficiaries to racial hoaxes and racial strife. These alleged incidents are invariably seized upon by politicians and activists looking to feed a sacrosanct belief among liberals that discrimination and oppression are the main drivers of inequality. Jason Riley, writing in The Wall Street Journal says “In the mainstream media we hear almost constant talk about scary new forms of racism: ‘white privilege,’ ‘cultural appropriation,’ and ‘subtle bigotry.’” Riley mentions the work of Dr. Wilfred Reilly who is a professor of political science at Kentucky State University and author of a new book, “Hate Crime Hoax,” that states “a huge percentage of the horrific hate crimes cited as evidence of contemporary bigotry are fakes.” Reilly put together a data set of more than 400 confirmed cases of fake allegations that were reported to authorities between 2010 and 2017. He says that the exact number of false reports is probably unknowable, but what can be said “with absolute confidence is that the actual number of hate crime hoaxes is indisputably large. “We are not speaking here of just a few bad apples.” But Reilly has a larger point to make, writing, “The Smollett case isn’t an outlier. Increasingly, it’s the norm. And the media’s relative lack of interest in exposing hoaxes that don’t involve famous figures is a big part of the problem.”

Be seeing you

 

 

 

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The Remnant Newspaper – CORONAGATE: The Truth Emerges

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2020

America’s almost instantaneous transformation into a police state is based on “models” that “predicted” upwards of 2 million deaths from the Wuhan virus without “mitigation” in the form of a preposterous attempt to quarantine 330 million people. And the people have obsequiously bowed to every ridiculous command.

https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/fetzen-fliegen/item/4841-coronagate-the-truth-emerges

Written by 

“And I predict that even stranger things have happened.” – The Amazing Kreskin

In what has become a continuing series on the Great Coronavirus Panic of 2020, I would like to begin this much shorter article by thanking Remnant readers for their prayers for my father, Joseph, who is still locked down in a nursing facility in which the Wuhan virus is present. So far, he is doing well and shows no signs of the virus.

To sum up where we stand today, April 6: Based on the pretext that we must “limit the spread” of the Wuhan virus, the American economic boom of the past three years has been reversed in a matter of days, millions have lost their jobs, tens of thousands of small businesses have been shuttered and will probably never reopen, and three-quarters of the American population has been subjected to some form of house arrest by state, county and city governments.

 

All over the country people are being fined or arrested and jailed for violating suddenly imposed restrictions on their every movement and gathering, often with the aid of their neighbors, who turn them in to the police, following instructions on how to be a snitch.  Attendance at religious services has been forbidden altogether or limited to ten people, even in vast cathedrals, while “permission” is granted to crowd supermarkets and convenience stores, buy booze, purchase cannabis and have pets groomed.

This is permitted: chris 1

But this is forbidden: chris 2

This is permitted: chris 3

But this is forbidden: chris 4

In New York State, the Bill Gates-subsidized Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IMHE) “model” predicting doom in that state has been exposed as little short of a hoax, as its dire predictions are continually being slashed to match actual numbers and are still wildly off the mark. Yet, in New York City, hovering drones bark out commands to observe “social distancing” of “at least six feet” in a message that ends on a chillingly Orwellian note: “We are all in this together!”

America’s almost instantaneous transformation into a police state is based on “models” that “predicted” upwards of 2 million deaths from the Wuhan virus without “mitigation” in the form of a preposterous attempt to quarantine 330 million people. And the people have obsequiously bowed to every ridiculous command.

It is becoming clearer with each passing day that the death toll from the Wuhan virus is not rising exponentially as the “experts” predicted but only modestly in some places while levelling off or even declining almost everywhere else in the country—as well as the world.  The incidence of infection borders on nil in the hot and humid countries, where the number of deaths remains in the double or very low triple digits four months after the virus emerged from the Wuhan province of China.

Common sense alone indicates that the number of deaths will ultimately be nowhere near the 2 million without “mitigation” or a best case 100,000 to 240,000 with “mitigation” as predicted by “Tony and Deborah” at the White House press briefings that have fueled nationwide panic.  Tony and Deb have since revised their “models” downward to predict 40,000 to 178,000 deaths. And that prediction has already been lowered again as the IMHE model Tony and Deb have been touting during the briefings now “predicts” 81,766 deaths by August 4. That prediction would require some 18,000 people to die every month between now and then, even though at 10,000 deaths since February 29—a number consistent with a heavy flu season—we appear to have reached the peak and a decline is already evident.

At some point, Tony and Deb will be “predicting” precisely what has already happened, as we saw with the “models” that first predicted Hillary Clinton was certain to win the Presidency.  And when the final death toll fails even to approach what they first predicted in order to panic the whole country into a nationwide lockdown never before seen in human history, they will make the unprovable, non-falsifiable,  junk science  claim that “mitigation worked.”

But it is becoming increasingly clear that “mitigation” has done nothing but cause a pointless, catastrophic disruption of social and economic life. This seems to delight the lying media and their Democrat partners, who are striving to keep fear alive, avoid or minimize any good news about the numbers, overstate the burden on local hospitals (without any unedited video or other reliable evidence), argue against curative treatment by hydroxychloroquine or otherwise, get everybody into masks after months of  “expert” advice that masks are ineffective, and generally prolong the economic damage and loss of civil liberties for months to come.

As the actual numbers belie the pseudo-scientific prophecies of doom, however, the lockdown of America that began with Democrat governors and mayors now exhibits a curious and hardly coincidental fissure along party lines.  As of today, nine states, all headed by Republican governors, refuse to join the lockdown regime and now provide embarrassing counterfactuals demonstrating that officially mandated lockdowns were never necessary and have probably made the situation worse by preventing the development of “herd immunity” to this virus, like all the others, from the normal interaction of large populations.

The following are the nine states that have refused to impose lockdowns.  All of them have minimal death tolls from the Wuhan virus, including the populous South Carolina, and five of them have not enacted even local lockdowns:

Read the rest of this entry »

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Demonic Viruses & Imago Dei Immunity – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2020

So one should not look to Trump (a serial polygamist and sexual libertine to put  it mildly) for wisdom or moral leadership. One should look rather to oneself; to one’s loved ones; to the wise among one’s friends; to one’s God. But that is, if, and only if, one has a rightly informed conscience; if one has true love; if one has such friends; if one has so much as God. And that is indeed a big “if.”

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/04/gc-dilsaver/demonic-viruses-imago-dei-immunity/

By

SoulDeepScience

Trump played footsies for the very first time with his arch-gnat nemesis Acosta during the coronovirus briefing of March 31st. The previous day’s briefing was, as typical, contentious between the two, but this one was almost a one-on-one sit-down between them. Acosta was plopped-down right in front of the podium and was allowed to ask an inordinate amount of questions, being treated more like the teacher’s pet than a belligerent brat. But the point is, right after that briefing Acosta gentle informed his fellow CNNite Anderson of his newly found affection for the president, accurately describing a new spirit that had now infected Trump himself:

“Anderson, I have to convey to you sitting in that place that near to him, I’ve never ever observed President Trump like this ….he is scared right now….This was a different Donald Trump tonight, I think he gets it.”

Trump got it alright, he got the virus; that is, infected by the panic. Yes, Trump even mentioned the shocks he received that week when an overweight elderly friend of his got the virus and reportedly went rapidly down hill and that he had seen a video (psyops much?) of his boyhood neighborhood where refrigerator semi-trailers were lined up outside the community hospital to deal with the expected overflow of corpses. Trump has experienced as well a constant brainwashing barrage of stultifying statistics by the CDC apparatchiks/doctors Fauci & Birk, et.al. Of course, we keep hope alive and pray that Trump will recover quickly for the sake of the economy and liberty (inter alia, this author recommends the highly effective, but both initially outlawed, combined remedies of hydroxychloroquine and psychomoralitics).

And there is indeed a glimmer of hope, for Trump is not your average politician or government bureaucrat;  he lived a life of not mere hype but one that required him to “get ‘er done!’ Skyscrapers do not rise, much less stand, due to hyperbole alone. Your average politician or government bureaucrat, on the other hand, exists in a world of smoke and mirrors; of words but no truth; of laws but no justice; of lawyers and judges but no jurisprudence. These State minions are so full of pure pride and self-love, so caught up in an all engrossing egoistic power curve, that they live in an alternative reality, out of touch with even the law of gravity; a law the egoistic but realistic Trump had to take into consideration when building an empire of hotels and high-rises. But though Trump is in touch with certain material realities he is only in touch with material realities. Trump, like any good red-blooded American, is a materialist, and a lustful hedonist to boot. Yes, as per Acosta, Trump is very afraid, for all that he values is of the egoistic coins of wealth and pleasure, and in this he is just as much an egoist as all the denizens of the deep state.

Though Trump has, I believe, an outstanding understanding of what is good economically for the USA in the superficial short term (and any resurgence of the USA is but a short term death rally), this understanding says nothing about his depth, morality, or wisdom. (In contrast, when you read the Austrians you note something even more important than their economic theory: a larger and deeper wisdom. And because economics is at times a crap shoot and at other times a swindle it doesn’t abide by the ideal, though the Austrian ideal still needs to be upheld so as to be able to recognize and reckon with the financial malfeasance.) Trump, notwithstanding his genius and truly great accomplishments, is devoid of deep morality, much less spirituality. While he does indeed have a most magnificent brass ego, it is a brass plating and thus superficial.

So one should not look to Trump (a serial polygamist and sexual libertine to put  it mildly) for wisdom or moral leadership. One should look rather to oneself; to one’s loved ones; to the wise among one’s friends; to one’s God. But that is, if, and only if, one has a rightly informed conscience; if one has true love; if one has such friends; if one has so much as God. And that is indeed a big “if.” For today’s Western population is itself superficial, immature, and egoistic. In this Trump is truly a populist phenomenon. And the population such as it is, like Trump himself, is easily manipulated and enslaved, which has been readily attested to in the pandemic panic.

But still make no mistake, there is a deadly, relentless, and unstoppable virus among us, and sooner or later this virus ends in death. Look to your left, look to your right, look all around, then look in the mirror and realize that everyone you’ve gazed upon is infected with and will succumb to this virus. Of course, I speak of the virus of mortality, and yes, the population of the West and those within its universal realm of influence are in denial. This is why there is pan[ic]demic, for when death or its threat becomes real the third millennium population is found to be wanting in maturity, wanting in accepting reality, wanting in wisdom, wanting in courage. Today’s hopelessly immature, unrealistic, foolish, and cowardly Westerner, et al., could be paleontologically dubbed “technarcistic man;” for the person of the third millennium has a recalcitrant pride inured in a myriad of technological ways from the humiliation of existence.

Maturity is the ability to say yes to reality whether or not one likes that reality; that is, to accept the fact that I am not the center of the universe; that stuff happens; that “God’s ways are not man’s ways.” (IS 55:8) Maturity then most poignantly means accepting one’s mortality. And it is the wise and fully alive man who muses on and embraces this mortality and thus muses on and embraces the fullness of reality and existence in both its sorrows and its joys. But because technarcistic man lacks maturity and wisdom, he lacks the courage to so muse upon and embrace the fullness of human existence, living instead a cramped and paltry life of egoistic apprehension.

Because a technarcistic population has no baseline maturity, no basic acceptance of reality, not an inkling of wisdom, it is most susceptible to cowardly panic. Yes, a person and society should respond to immediate threats, but to do so in a prudent and effective manner requires a grounded point of reference. In the case of responding prudently to a pandemic, or any physical trauma or threat, this grounding is the acceptance of the baseline reality of one’s inherent physical vulnerability and mortality. From this grounding then comes the maturity, wisdom, and courage to take responsibility for one’s existence, to take responsibility for one’s loved ones, to take responsibility for the drama of life as it unfolds in the sacrament of the moment.

But the unrealistic, immature, foolish, and cowardly technarcistic masses take no responsibility for their existence. Rather, when a crisis strikes, they look to the State to take responsibility, to save and comfort them. They look to the first responders: the police, paramedics, or even coroners (for they know not even how to mourn without the State!). They look to the State and its elected, appointed, or careerists governmental officials to inform them and order them. But such an abdication of responsibility leads inexorably to slavery, for when one looks to a godless entity to save you, you will find one that will surely enslave you.

It is the fear that stems from an egoistic pride and self-love that keeps one from looking at and accepting the humiliation of reality. It is this egoistic fear that keeps one from humbly taking responsibility and maturing. It is egoistic fear that leads to prideful foolhardiness. It is egoistic fear that creates the cringing coward. Indeed, egoistic fear is dehumanizing, for it debilities the spiritual ability of the soul to assent to truth and choose the good. Yes, it is the egoistic fear, like the imago Dei itself, that is of the spiritual realm. It is the egoistic fear that emanates often in an irrational way from the pride and self love. It is an egoistic fear that reacts by either flight or fight, and thus in panic binds the intellect and will (as St Thomas Aquinas says) with irrational passions of self-love and pride. Yes, it is an egoistic fear deeper than that experienced by brute animals, for it is deeper than mere physical fear, for even physical fear finds it deepest anguish in the humiliation of the ego and sorrow of the soul.

The image of God is inherent in all human person’s regardless of creed or lack thereof. It is of nature, and not of grace, that the human person is made in God’s image. The human soul, unlike brute animals, has with God an akin spiritual and natural ability to reason and choose; that is, to assent to truth and love the good. This ability is what it means to be made in God’s image. This ability to assent to truth and love the good is the most awesome of creaturely abilities and thus its righteous exercise is the most awesome of responsibilities.

Indeed, this imago Dei ability to reason and choose is what it specifically means to be human. For this human ability to reason and choose is nothing less than what it means to be a moral being. Indeed, it is what it means to have freewill, and thus its preservation and promotion is essential for the preservation and promotion of freedom itself. Enslavement does not begin first in the mind, much less the flesh; but in the soul, where the ego reacts fearful and to some degree irrationally to the threat of humiliation.

But “be not afraid.” (MT 14:27) That is, succumb not to your fears, and you will not be susceptible to manipulation: be that manipulation by the State, the flesh, or the devil himself. It is only by restoring the image of God (which is the goal of the clinical discipline of psychomoralitics) where one maturely receives the real, wisely assents to truth, and courageously chooses the good, that will both defeat the manipulation and enslavement of evil and ensure the freedom and exaltation of the authentic human spirit; which is indeed the freedom and exaltation of that very image of God.

Be seeing you

 

 

 

 

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Four things only libertarians can see about COVID-19

Posted by M. C. on April 7, 2020

What is unseen are the variety of harms that occur because people have been denied freedom of association and movement.

Second, don’t overlook the harm caused by government actors.

No matter the doomsday scenario, it’s hard to imagine a single governor (or president) outsmarting millions of people.

The Principle of Human Respect is a natural, cause-and-effect relationship. If I rob you at gunpoint, your happiness decreases. Social harmony and prosperity are diminished too.

https://www.theadvocates.org/2020/03/four-things-only-libertarians-can-see-about-covid-19/

Jim Babka

A new form of political correctness has spread, like a virus, across the fruited plain. Libertarians are taking heat – getting angry responses for criticizing governors who have used the spread of COVID-19 to issue edicts that shutter businesses and impose martial law-like schemes.

coronavirus covid-19 libertarians politics

Still, libertarians find they cannot keep quiet. Their philosophy of self-government is forged in an understanding of consequences. Libertarians are the only members of society who can see – even foresee – the following four things about the State’s edicts and regulations…

The seen and the unseen

First, libertarians can visualize the Unseen.

What is seen is that which is obvious to us. In the present case, it’s easy for us to see the way the virus is spreading and how the healthcare system is overrun in Italy.

What is unseen are the variety of harms that occur because people have been denied freedom of association and movement. Politicians are using wartime powers and preening before TV cameras. There will be short-term and long-term effects stemming from their actions. Nearly everyone, especially the regime media, is overlooking these costs.

The proper way to analyze this situation is to take all of the effects into account.

Libertarians are just like you; they’re sheltering and practicing physical distance. But let’s be clear, not everyone has that luxury. There’s no way that a governor could anticipate, let alone solve all of these sticky issues. Edicts are “one size fits all.” Each person understands their unique situation better than a politician in a distant capitol could. There are many scenarios to consider. Here’s a sampling…

  • Right now, families are trapped in a home with an abuser. Perhaps the abuser’s workday was a time of relief, or the victim’s school or work was an escape path to safety.
  • Suicides will increase during the crisis.
  • Addiction will worsen because the sense of purpose or even mere interruption that occupational work provides has been stolen away.
  • Businesses that were operating on a thin margin will fold, crushing dreams, resulting in unemployment, and even reducing supply. Supply reductions will fuel price increases for all of us.

Notice State failures

Second, don’t overlook the harm caused by government actors. For example, Donald Trump’s aides were afraid to give their reelection-minded boss any bad news until it was too late. And the sudden, jarring, gubernatorial edicts have caused fear, uncertainty, and doubt – provoking shortages.

In a libertarian world, reliable tests would already be for sale! And if the tests were universally available, the crisis would’ve been far smaller and Americans would be back to work.

There are two reasons tests are not already on the market.

  1. Political suppression of information. If they had gotten the signal earlier, then entrepreneurs, inventors, and existing businesses would’ve started delivering tests by now. We know there was sufficient time because a handful of U.S. Senators were briefed in January. After seeing the impending crisis, they sold off their stocks.
  2. Ironically, regulations are supposed to make us safer. What they do instead is create barriers which increase delays and costs. Frequently, the innovator realizes that no action is profitable, choosing not to invent (another unseen effect). The FDA has been in the way of tests getting to market.

Wisdom of the crowd

Third, self-government is the best solution to the Knowledge Problem. No matter the doomsday scenario, it’s hard to imagine a single governor (or president) outsmarting millions of people.

No matter how brilliant the governor and his or her advisors are, he or she lacks the capacity to win a problem-solving contest against tens of millions of people.

Worse, political acts are prone to cause injuries (which tend to be unseen and unreported). The miracle of “stuff” arriving on our store shelves involves millions of micro-decisions. Sudden edicts have replaced that. Shortages result because the governor deploys unanticipated force. Consider…

Restaurants who planned menus suddenly have too much food. Grocery stores, who thought people would be at restaurants, find that they have new customers instead. The restaurant owner takes a bath.

Even with nearly-empty shelves, stores need to make sure they don’t over-order in response. Grocers know these effects are temporary, but they don’t know when they will end. They don’t want to end up like the restaurants, stuck with too much stock on hand. Uncertainty prevails. Shortages will remain a problem until governors back out of the equation.

Human respect

Fourth and most important of all, is the matter of Human Respect. The libertarian uniquely recognizes that everyone seeks happiness and that no one person can make everyone happy.

The Principle of Human Respect is a natural, cause-and-effect relationship. If I rob you at gunpoint, your happiness decreases. Social harmony and prosperity are diminished too.

Since this is a principle, even governors cannot violate it. Bans and edicts are ultimately enforced by armed men and women. These are not acts of persuasion; they are threats to achieve a desired result. When anyone, be they a criminal or your governor, coerces another human being, they never increase happiness. And in the present situation, the bans have obviously decreased social peace and material prosperity.

The damage to prosperity is already so obvious that no one is contesting it.

And before the governors started acting, we had peaceful cooperation. Most people were already practicing physical distancing. We also witnessed allegedly greedy corporations voluntarily sacrificing many millions of dollars. To prevent the spread of COVID-19 the NCAA closed events to the public. Then, the NBA suspended its season and Disney closed its parks. Like falling dominoes, tons of businesses followed.

AFTER that, governors forced the holdouts to close. Libertarians began raising important questions like the four you’ve just reviewed. They’re getting accused of wanting to clog hospitals and increase the death toll. Therefore, consider the role politicians are playing. Are their acts increasing harmony or did they introduce new divisions into our society?

Be seeing you

 

 

 

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