Let’s think about this for a minute. If these 5 additional Covid test kits for which my Medicare account has been billed actually arrive, and each contains the 8 test kits of the previous three, I will have at Medicare’s expense 64 expired Covid test kits.
“Paid for by Government” means paid for by Medicare. I now have 24 expired Covid tests for which Medicare has paid.
Since reporting this a few days ago I have now received Medicare notices that FIVE more labs have sent me AT MEDICARE’S EXPENSE Covid test kits. These kits have not year arrived, but the bill to Medicare has.
One is from Chicago Care Lab Services, W. Pratt Blvd, Chicago, IL, claim number 10-23136-413-830
One is from Cipher Global LLC, Pagosa Springs Dr, Auror, IL, claim number: 09-23097-395-630
One is from Az Labs Limited, W. Peterson Ave, Chicago, IL, claim number: 09-23117-216-810
One is from Lone Star Medlab, W. Spring Creek Pkwy, Plano TX, claim number: 39-23129-711-040
One is from Sval, S. Stonebridge Dr, McKinney, TX, claim number: 22-23153-708-850
China has already installed locked gates in some city neighborhoods where you can only leave if you keep your score up (anyone who has heard of 15-minute cities knows organizations like the World Economic Forum has plans to implement this globally).
You can opt-out of this system by cutting off the flow of information that you allow them to collect about you.
Instead, services from Proton Mail, for example, allow you to use email aliases so none of your accounts have your real contact information. This is one way to “compartmentalize” so that your Netflix, bank accounts, government accounts, credit card accounts, and social media aren’t all linked back to the same nexus.
We’ve all been talking about a product, place, or celebrity, only to see eerily similar ads pop up on our phones and computer screens.
Is big tech listening through your phone’s microphone or other smart devices? That’s possible, and a legitimate concern.
But perhaps even creepier is that with data mining, big tech might know what you’re thinking about without even having to listen.
If you don’t take steps to browse privately, purchase anonymously, or shield your communications from prying eyes, you are providing big tech and governments a detailed web of your life.
Log onto your friend’s Wifi network, and they may assume you share some similar interests.
Have your location logged near the coast, and you might have seafood or visiting an aquarium on the mind.
During Covid lockdowns, I swore I spontaneously decided to start making homemade sourdough bread… only to realize I was part of a huge trend. I was being served content based on the homesteading and survivalist videos I watched.
This is bad enough when it is mostly used by marketers. But what happens when the government starts using it against you?
I’m sure you’ve heard of China’s social credit system. It’s like a credit score, but for everything you do. Bought too much red meat at the store? Points off. Consumed Communist Party propaganda? Points on.
It’s all tracked, crunched, and spat out as a score that can seriously affect your life. Good score? Life’s a breeze. Bad score? Say goodbye to traveling on planes or trains, fast internet, and even decent jobs.
China has already installed locked gates in some city neighborhoods where you can only leave if you keep your score up (anyone who has heard of 15-minute cities knows organizations like the World Economic Forum has plans to implement this globally).
Too many who lean left today claim that the Enlightenment was the ideology of colonialism. Some academics, for instance, have claimed that it was a racist, colonial endeavour from the outset. That the Enlightenment needs to be ‘decolonised’. One piece in Harvard Magazine is even entitled ‘How the Enlightenment led to colonialism’.
Do those who make this claim imagine there was no colonialism before the Enlightenment? Presumably not, but it’s important to understand how something so false could come to seem true. (Raise a glass to the virtue of trying to understand those you disagree with.)
Let’s start with the fact that empires were not invented by the modern European nations whose advanced ships and guns were more effective in maintaining them than forced marches and pikes. Stronger nations have colonised weaker ones since the beginning of recorded history; indeed, before there were nations in our modern sense at all. Greeks and Romans built empires, as did the Chinese, the Assyrians, the Aztecs, the Malians, the Khmer and the Mughals. Those empires operated with varying degrees of brutality and repression, but all of them were based on an equation of might and right, which amounts to no concept of right at all. All of them used their power to compel weaker groups to surrender resources, submit tribute, press soldiers into service for further imperial wars, and accept commands that overrode local custom and law. As far as we know, there was one thing they lacked: a guilty conscience.
Emperors who were particularly cruel might be criticised, though brutal practices in colonised lands were rarely attacked by those in the home states. Objections to Nero or Caesar usually focussed on their crimes against Romans. The 16th-century Dominican friar, Bartolomeo de las Casas, was an early exception. His Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies denounced the atrocities that the Spanish conquest visited on indigenous peoples. But Las Casas argued for a kinder, gentler form of colonisation, which included substituting African for South American slave labour. He never questioned the imperial project as a whole.
The Enlightenment did, however. Here is Kant’s stinging attack on colonialism:
‘Compare the inhospitable actions of the civilised and especially of the commercial states of our part of the world. The injustice they show to lands and peoples they visit (which is equivalent to conquering them) is carried by them to terrifying lengths. America, the lands inhabited by the Negro, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc, were at the time of their discovery considered by these civilised intruders as lands without owners, for they counted the inhabitants as nothing… [they] oppress the natives, excite widespread wars among the various states, spread famine, rebellion, perfidy, and the whole litany of evils which afflict mankind. China and Japan, who have had experience with such guests, have wisely refused them entry.’ (1)
Though he was hardly a graceful writer, Kant was usually careful with words. He rarely used the word ‘evil’. Yet here, he is crystal clear: colonialism creates every kind of evil that affects humankind. And while he praises the wisdom of China and Japan in closing their doors to European invaders, his critique of colonialism is not confined to the conquest of ancient, sophisticated cultures. At a time when nascent colonial powers justified their seizure of indigenous territories in Africa and the Americas by claiming those lands were unoccupied, or their peoples uncivilised, Kant decried the injustice that ‘counted the inhabitants as nothing’.
Diderot went even further, arguing that indigenous peoples threatened by European colonisers would have reason, justice and humanity on their side if they simply killed the invaders like the wild beasts those intruders resembled. The Hottentots, he urged, should not be fooled by the false promises of the Dutch East Indian Company which had recently founded Cape Town.
‘Fly, Hottentots, fly!… Take up your axes, bend your bows, and send a shower of poisoned darts against these strangers. May there not be one of them remaining to convey to his country the news of their disaster.’ (2)
Update the weaponry and you would be forgiven for thinking you’d come upon a quote from Frantz Fanon. Nor is this passage unusual: Diderot, the 18th-century philosopher, called for anti-colonialist violence at least as often, and often more dramatically, than Fanon, the 20th-century psychiatrist.
Enlightenment critics of empire didn’t simply point out its cruelty. They also deconstructed the theories that sought to justify the theft of indigenous lands and resources. The most important of those theories was John Locke’s labour theory of property, which was used to argue that nomadic peoples had no claim to the lands on which they hunted and gathered. According to Locke, people only acquire property through agriculture, mixing their labour with the land they work and thereby obtaining ownership. Kant disagreed:
‘If those people are shepherds or hunters (like the Hottentots, the Tungusi, or most of the American Indian nations) who depend for their sustenance on vast open stretches of land, (foreign) settlement may not take place by force but only by contract, and indeed by contract that does not take advantage of the ignorance of those inhabitants with respect to ceding their lands.’ (3)
Here Kant not only undercut Locke’s theory of property, but also called out the shameless exploitation of peoples who, having no concept of private property in land, might cede the island of Manhattan for a handful of beads. Later critics dismissed this argument against settler colonialism as proof that Kant was unable to judge cultural or historical matters, since ‘primitive peoples’ lacked concepts of rights and were thus incapable of entering into treaties.
If the best of Enlightenment thinkers denounced the vast theft of lands that made up European empires, what did they make of the vast theft of peoples? Most were unequivocal in condemning slavery. Kant’s categorical imperative, which expresses the basic moral law, states that people should never be treated as means. This rules out slavery and other forms of oppression. These thinkers also lambasted European complicity in maintaining slavery, even by those who were not themselves slaveholders.
It all has to do with elitism, the kind practiced by ghastly lefties who write lies for The New York Times and spread nonsense when reporting the news on television.
Let’s put it another way. When was the last time you saw a movie where the hero spoke well, like an aristocrat? If you watch TCM, you hear William Powell, Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, Grace Kelly, Herbert Marshall, Bette Davis, Ronald Colman, and others like them articulate and pronounce their words beautifully. In today’s films, a proper accent usually means the person is up to no good, a phony and a crook. And today’s actors mumble on cue. When was the last time you heard and understood every word pronounced in a recently made movie?
I am writing this dispatch from the birthplace of “oracy,” the art of public speaking first perfected by the Athenian Demosthenes, a speaker so eloquent and influential he managed to force the great Aristotle to move back to Macedonia, his birthplace. Demosthenes did not like nor trust northern Greeks like Aristotle and his pupil, one Alexander the Great, the same distrust that many American Southerners felt for the interfering Northerners circa 1861.
Oracy, needless to say, is a skill equal to numeracy and literacy, one mastered at school in my day but, judging by today’s public speakers, no longer taught at any level. Only last week, sitting in a London café, I took out my notebook while three attractive American young women babbled away nonstop. I felt a bit like Henry Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion taking down Eliza Doolittle’s cockney outbursts. One of the three women noticed what I was doing and asked me rather coldly why. “I’m counting the times you’re using the word ‘like,’” I answered her. I did not dare tell her I was a linguist—which I am not—because they might have called the fuzz thinking that a linguist is some kind of sexual pervert. Never mind. Let’s get back to oracy and the beauty of eloquent speech.
The great Tom Wolfe once wrote, while reviewing a collection of my writings, that Americans cannot compete with the Brits in public speaking because the latter are examined orally in class, whereas the Yankees write it down. It made sense. Educated Englishmen are above anything else very good speakers. Americans can be, like, like, you know, like…you know, and so on.
When I look back at my youth and my education at an American private school for boys, public speaking was a popular subject taken even by “jocks” like myself anxious to avoid science, math, and other difficult majors. In class we had to read aloud poems or passages of literature, and at times we had to read a speech written by our own little old selves. Captains of sports had to review the year and their individual sport at the end of each term in front of the whole school, and public speaking came in handy then because “jocks” on scholarships were notoriously inarticulate, as they remain to this day.
Needless to say, the debating society was crawling with wimps who preferred to jaw rather than fight, but looking back, my sore soccer knees and numerously operated-on wrestling shoulders convince me that the wimps were smart and we, the jocks, were the dumb ones. In today’s climate, good speech is a negative, especially if the f-word is left unsaid. It is also dangerous for teachers to teach things pupils might not relate to. Worst of all, of course, is the invention of trigger warnings, a system that allows students to remain as dumb or even dumber by doing away with all difficult subjects—like Shakespeare, for example. Ditto safe spaces, another invention by the woke mob for a student to remain uneducated and stupider than when he or she arrived at school.
It all has to do with elitism, the kind practiced by ghastly lefties who write lies for The New York Times and spread nonsense when reporting the news on television. This warped and degenerate elitism wants the scope of teaching to be narrowed, for high standards of word use, elocution, and presentation to be done away with and replaced by “ordinary” speech—in other words, dumbed down to the level of the uneducated.
A US “windfall” in Ukraine comes at an unfathomable cost.
enthusiastic proxy warriors, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham, could candidly admit that US support ensured that Ukraine would “fight to the last person.”
Nearly one month into Russia’s invasion, the New York Times quietly abandoned any pretense that the US aim was to defend Ukraine and bring the war to a quick end. The White House, the Times reported, “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential paths to de-escalation.”
Eighteen months later, the desired quagmire has been achieved.
Nearly one month into Russia’s invasion, the New York Times quietly abandoned any pretense that the US aim was to defend Ukraine and bring the war to a quick end. The White House, the Times reported, “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential paths to de-escalation.”
Eighteen months later, the desired quagmire has been achieved. This is due not only to a massive influx of NATO weaponry, but a Western blockade of every tangible path to de-escalation, most notably the April 2022 Ukraine-Russia peace deal that Boris Johnson nixed.
With a Russian quagmire the overriding goal, the US and its partners have adopted an attendant disregard for the tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives sacrificed for the task.
In the war’s early stages, only the most outwardly enthusiastic proxy warriors, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham, could candidly admit that US support ensured that Ukraine would “fight to the last person.” With Ukraine now struggling to mount a widely hyped counteroffensive, the prevailing indifference to its human toll is more widely acknowledged.
“When Ukraine launched its big counteroffensive this spring, Western military officials knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian forces. But they hoped Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day. They haven’t.”
It is unclear how Western officials could have “hoped” that Ukrainian “resourcefulness” would make up for the training and weapons that they did not provide. A war zone, after all, is not an episode of MacGyver or the A-Team, and Ukraine’s adversary happens to be one of the world’s most powerful militaries. The operative Western definition of “Ukrainian courage”, however, is not hard to discern: a willingness to use Ukrainian soldiers as cannon fodder.
Caplan asks, “How much time and mental energy does the average politician pour into moral due diligence? A few hours a year seems like a high estimate.” He gives them too much credit. Do they even know what due diligence is? “They don’t just fall a tad short of their moral obligations,” Caplan continues. “They’re too busy passing laws and giving orders to face the possibility that they’re wielding power illegitimately.”
The best-selling social scientist and, it so happens, libertarian Bryan Caplan thinks politicians are immoral. Sounds promising. He’s discussed this online and in one of his published blog-post collections, How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery. What are we to make of his contention?
Caplan isn’t using the libertarian nonaggression standard here. Even people who never heard of that standard or who oppose it ought to be at least open to his case. He’s really talking about basic decency: the need to avoid gross negligence. Moreover, he thinks it’s irrelevant that politicians may believe they are doing the right thing. That’s not good enough; it doesn’t get them off Caplan’s hook.
He starts by talking about everyone and not just politicians. It won’t do, he writes, for people merely to go along with what everyone else expects them to do — not if they want to be virtuous.
[V]irtuous people can’t just conform to the expectations of their society. Everyone has at least a modest moral obligation to perform “due diligence” – to investigate whether their society’s expectations are immoral. And whenever their society fails to measure up, virtuous people spurn social expectations and do the morally right thing.
Caplan doesn’t say here what he means by virtuous (from other writings we know he’s a moral intuitionist), but that statement surely makes sense. Think of Socrates. No one should suspend their moral judgment or rest content with an unexamined life even in the face of social opposition. Taking into consideration the predominant opinion among most people or the most reputable people is a good starting point (as Aristotle acknowledged), but it is no substitute for thinking for oneself. One should be on the lookout for good reasons for questioning and even rejecting conventional wisdom.
Then Caplan moves on to politicians, who face an even tougher standard for obvious reasons.
Any thinking person (a sub-species of Homo sapiens that’s in decline but not yet endangered) would agree that the notion that an animal that’s existed in harmony with nature for over two million years could destroy the earth within fourteen years if they’re not exterminated is truly absurd.
The issues are absurdly extreme for a reason. The objective is not the achievement of the issues themselves. It is the alteration of the psyche of the populace.
We’ve all heard nonsense about cows presenting a danger to the continuance of life on earth – that methane gas from cow flatulence will bring on climate change faster than John Kerry’s jet.
Any thinking person (a sub-species of Homo sapiens that’s in decline but not yet endangered) would agree that the notion that an animal that’s existed in harmony with nature for over two million years could destroy the earth within fourteen years if they’re not exterminated is truly absurd.
And yet those whose ability to reason is on the decline are inclined to believe the claim. Presumably, these individuals are the same ones beginning to believe that men can have babies and that an individual can become something he or she is not simply by “identifying” as such.
But those of us who see the absurdity in such clearly nonsensical beliefs are disinclined to laugh as we observe that these concepts are being disseminated by globalist governments through a compliant media… and, worse, are being accepted by more than a few people.
As a case in point, recently, a publication – Natural News – did a piece entitled, “13 Nations agree to engineer global FAMINE by destroying agriculture, saying that producing food is BAD for the planet.”
In that article, they describe a conference led by US Climate Czar John Kerry, in which representatives from thirteen countries are stated to have committed to a diminished cow population worldwide to combat climate change.
Well, that conference did take place, and a topic of discussion was methane produced by cows, and thirteen attendees did agree that measures of some sort were needed.
But it is not the case that thirteen countries have enacted legislation to eliminate cows.
We might take a step back here and examine what actually occurred. In so doing, we may not only learn whether or not red meat will soon be eliminated globally; we might also gain some insight into how globalist governments seek to achieve their ends.
In most countries, the role of Minister for the Environment is a lowly ministerial position, given to a loyal party member as a token. Most Ministers of the Environment pontificate a fair bit but rarely implement significant change. So, let’s follow the thread of what has taken place.
John Kerry contacts the Environmental Ministers in a host of “lesser” countries around the world on the vague premise of “making a difference.” They’re pleased to take part, as Kerry gives them higher visibility and legitimizes their otherwise rather pointless jobs.
A conference is held at a four-star hotel somewhere for a few days. Everybody listens to the speakers wringing their hands over the dangers of climate change, and each minister tries to get their photos taken with John Kerry.
There’s very little in the text of the keynote presentation by Kerry – mostly vague comments about the dangers of methane and the need for each country to commit to making a difference.
At the end of the conference, the attendees are proud to sign a document that’s devoid of detail but says that they’re all in agreement in hoping to make a difference.
A press release is issued, showing all the ministers together, stating that methane is dangerous and that all the countries are in agreement regarding the concept of a worldwide methane control policy.
The message received by the public is that all the experts agree on whatever they’re saying, although what they’re saying is still quite unclear.
A publication such as Natural News publishes an article with a suitably alarming title.
The perceived overstatement by Natural News is regarded as a provocation by controlled information sources such as Wikipedia to alert the public. Interestingly, whenever a publication, group, or individual is discredited by Wikipedia, they always do so in the very first line of their description, i.e.,
Natural News is a far-right, anti-vaccination conspiracy theory and fake news website known for promoting alternative medicine, pseudoscience, disinformation, and far-right extremism.
That’s essentially the process that’s now consistently being utilized by globalists.
Quota systems like this, however, have always smacked of central planning and anti-capitalism. They engage in wholesale prohibition and regulation of entire classes of immigrants, regardless of the wants or needs of native employers, families, and charitable groups who might be interested in hosting these immigrants.
A wholesale ban on immigrants from Country X is about as compatible with a free economy as is a ban on imports from Country Y. It’s nothing more than a case of politicians deciding arbitrarily what sorts of economic activity Americans will be allowed to engage in.
It’s become common now to read arguments claiming that immigrants — broadly speaking — are good for the economy, or good for “America” in some other fashion.
“Migrants and refugees are good for economies,” Nature magazine claims. “Open Immigration Is Good for the Health of People and the Economy,” another writer claims. “1,500 economists to Trump: Immigrants are good for the U.S. economy,” CNN insists.
Now, I’m not one to argue against freedom of contract and exchange between US citizens and foreign nationals. In other words, if a private employer wishes to offer a job to a foreign national, that foreign national should be free to accept. Similarly, if an American landlord wants to enter into a lease agreement with a foreigner, that ought to be the landlord’s prerogative.
Note that in these cases, however, the private parties involved are specific individuals. The landlord and the employer have not entered into agreements with some vague concept of “immigrants.” They’re doing business with certain individuals who happen to be immigrants.
At the heart of this reality is a very important fact: immigrants are not homogeneous. Each person has different skills, different needs, and different luck. Moreover, immigrants aren’t even homogeneous within certain national groups. An English-speaking middle-class non-felon from Mexico clearly has little in common with a gangland assassin from the same country.
Thus, we cannot say that immigrants in general are good for the economy or good for anything else. Some are. Some aren’t.
For this reason, it would of course also be factually incorrect to say “migrants and refugees are bad for economies,”or “immigrants cause crime” or “immigrants are a burden on the public purse.” No doubt this is true about some immigrants.But it’s certainly not true of all of them. Thus, every time I see a headline that blares “Immigrants are good for America,” I wonder: “Do they mean all of them?”
But which ones are delightful neighbors and customers, and which ones are future drains on the taxpayer?
This has always been the central problem of immigration policy.
A Different Approach
Contrary to myths about the United States having totally open borders in the nineteenth century, many US states did, in fact, employ a variety of legal schemes to prevent entry to certain immigrants who were thought to be paupers who would be a drain on the public purse. (States did this because most people at the time agreed the federal government was not granted power of immigration matters.) New York and Massachusetts were especially notable for efforts to refuse entry to certain immigrants thought to be unemployable.
So why do these “experts” blame large corporations for something—price inflation—they do not cause? Because the objective is to increase government control of the economy and destroy private business that are large enough to be economically independent. They do not care about small businesses because those are already asphyxiated by taxes and small and medium enterprises are easily forced to depend on the government.
MCViewPoint 