As former Foundation for Economic Education president Richard Ebeling has so profoundly described government: “There has been no greater threat to life, liberty, and property throughout the ages than government. Even the most violent and brutal private individuals have been able to inflict only a mere fraction of the harm and destruction that have been caused by the use of power by political authorities.” And as Judge Andrew Napolitano puts it: “Government is the negation of liberty.” The U.S. government is no exception, but compared to twenty-first century America, or other countries now or at that time, America between the Civil War and World War I was about as close to a libertarian society as can be imagined.
This means that if the pediatrician fails to vaccinate 63% of his eligible patients, he or she gets nothing. So, the pediatrician has a VERY high incentive to get as many toddlers fully vaccinated as possible, so as not to miss that target. It’s not just $400 that is at stake when parents decline one or more shots. Tens of thousands of dollars could be on the line. As noted by Dr. Bob Sears:9
To get childhood vaccination rates back on track, Chelsea Clinton is now making the rounds promoting a new vaccine initiative called “The Big Catch-Up.”
Partners in this effort include the World Health Organization, UNICEF, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Immunization Agenda 2030, and several other “global and national health partners.”
In April 2023, I reported how primary care providers across the U.S. were bribed with incentive programs to coerce patients into getting the toxic COVID shot. Since there was no medical malpractice liability, doctors profited while patients risked their lives as participants in an unprecedented medical experiment, all while being lied to about the safety and effectiveness of these injections.
Even more egregiously, once the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the COVID shot for children, similar vaccination incentives were extended to pediatricians as well. As detailed in an Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield Medicaid provider bulletin1 dated July 2022, doctors received $50 for each Medicaid patient aged 6 months and older, who got the experimental jab.
Pediatricians Are Financially Incentivized to Vaccinate
As it turns out, doctors have been financially incentivized to vaccinate children for a long time. According to a 1999 JAMA Pediatrics article,2 the average patient load of American pediatricians is 1,546, although the number of patients was “significantly higher in less populated areas and solo practices.”
Of these, 8.3% were younger than 1 year, 9.5% were 1 year old and 8.6% were 2 years old.3 That means approximately 26.4% of the average pediatrician’s patients were 2 years old and younger. More recent data,4 published in 2021, show 75% of pediatricians have between 1,000 and 1,800 patients and 21% have around 1,200 patients; most practices, 65%, are in the 1,000 to 1,500 range.
As shown in the 2016 provider incentive program document from Blue Cross Blue Shield below,5,6 pediatricians were getting $400 for each pediatric patient that completed all the 10 vaccinations listed — 25 doses in all7 — before their second birthday. (Keep in mind that incentives can vary by state. The example provided is part of Michigan’s Blue Cross Blue Shield Performance Recognition Program.)8
How Much Money Is at Stake?
The math from there is pretty straight-forward (although keep in mind that we’re dealing with presumed averages and aged statistics here). Just multiply the number of patients under age 2 times $400. Using the average statistics from 1999, if a pediatrician has 1,000 patients, 264 can be expected to be 2 years old or younger. If all are fully vaccinated, the pediatrician would be eligible for a $105,600 year-end bonus.
While $400 per fully vaccinated child might seem incentivizing enough, there’s an added pressure here, because Blue Cross Blue Shield also has (or at least had, in 2016) a “target” level of 63%.
This means that if the pediatrician fails to vaccinate 63% of his eligible patients, he or she gets nothing. So, the pediatrician has a VERY high incentive to get as many toddlers fully vaccinated as possible, so as not to miss that target. It’s not just $400 that is at stake when parents decline one or more shots. Tens of thousands of dollars could be on the line. As noted by Dr. Bob Sears:9
“Such incentives … end up forcing a doctor to consider the financial implications of accepting patients who even just want to opt out of one vaccine … Maybe a few such families wouldn’t make them fail the chart reviews, but if they have too many, there goes their year-end bonus.”
Why Pediatricians Become Adversaries
Anytime financial incentives are part of the equation, one can reasonably assume that the lure of self-enrichment will win. With tens of thousands of dollars at stake, pediatricians can easily be lulled into complacency when it comes to digging deeper into the science.
The FBI also routinely conducted warrantless searches on “individuals listed in police homicide reports, including victims, next-of-kin, witnesses, and suspects.”
Even the Justice Department complained those searches were improper.
Like the casino gambling scene in “Casablanca,” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court is “shocked, shocked” that the Federal Bureau of Investigation continues to ravage the privacy of vast numbers of Americans.
For each American the FISA court permitted the FBI to target, the bureau illicitly surveilled almost 1,000 additional Americans.
The court’s just-revealed ruling signals the FBI presumed any American suspected of supporting the Jan. 6, 2021, protests forfeited their constitutional rights.
FISA was enacted in 1978 to curb the rampant illegal political spying exposed during the Nixon administration.
After the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration decided the president was entitled to order the National Security Agency to vacuum up Americans’ and foreigners’ emails and other data without a warrant.
Federal judges disagreed, and the result was a 2008 FISA reform that authorized the feds to continue commandeering vast amounts of data.
But under Section 702 of that law, the FBI was permitted to conduct warrantless searches of that stash for Americans’ data only to seek foreign intelligence information or evidence of crime.
The FBI had conducted 278,000 improper searches of Americans in 2020 and early 2021.
The heavily redacted 2022 opinion finally released Friday revealed the FBI conducted 278,000 improper searches of Americans in 2020 and early 2021.
Incredibly, the bureau conducted roughly 3.4 million warrantless searches of Americans in 2021 via Section 702.
The day before, Thursday, an FBI whistleblower revealed in congressional testimony that FBI headquarters pressured agents to treat anyone who attended the Jan. 6 protests as a criminal suspect.
The FISA court opinion reveals the FBI wrongfully cast a far broader net.
Roughly 2,000 protesters supporting President Donald Trump (including an unknown number of undercover agents and informants) entered the Capitol that day.
But an FBI analyst exploited FISA to unjustifiably conduct searches on 23,132 Americans citizens “to find evidence of possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence,” according to FISA Chief Judge Rudolph Contreras.
I responded to my friend that failure is a perception because Britain did none of the things to make Brexit work.
Consider UK policy after Brexit: No tax cuts, no trade deal with the US or China, No dismantling of inept EU rules and regulations, no progress on things like artificial intelligence or energy.
This is not a failure of Brexit, it is a failure to take advantage of things possible without being tied to the EU.
Sunrise
A few days after I emailed my friend, Eurointelligence, admitted in an article called “Sunrise” that my view is the correct one.
It was always nonsensical to replace the entire volume of some 4000 EU regulations on a single day. The majority are unproblematic. The intellectual and operational difficulty with Brexit is to select specific areas where regulatory divergence makes sense. We all know about the costs of Brexit are transparent, but the opportunities are hidden, and dependent on how well this divergence is managed.
As Joël Reland from the UK in a Changing Europe think tank explains, there are still 600 EU regulations that will be changed. What will also change is the end of the supremacy of EU law by the end of the year. UK courts will then be able to override EU law. We expect this alone to lead to significant divergence down the road. The government has also given itself fast-track authority on future changes.
But the most important aspect is that this reform is now going hand-in-hand with another initiative that is running in parallel: the pro-innovation regulation of technologies review, led by Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s former chief scientific adviser. The review is finally doing what we had urged the UK government to do right after Brexit, which is spot high-tech opportunities the EU is missing. Artificial intelligence is an obvious one, as is medical research and many other tech developments held back by the EU’s antediluvian data protection regulation. On high-tech industries, the EU has entered a regulatory death spiral, focused entirely on consumers since the EU companies no longer have skin in the game.
The EU’s problems with these industries has been building up over the last 20 years. Innovation and entrepreneurship have fallen down the ladder of political priorities. We also have doubts about the efficacy of Horizon EU, the EU’s research programme. It is large in volume, and a bureaucratic nightmare, according to this survey. But apart from the cumbersome application process, one has to question why it is that the race for several cutting-edge 21st century technologies is nowadays mainly between the US and China.
We don’t see the UK so much as a threat to the EU in the way Emmanuel Macron and Michel Barnier had imagined, through low-wage sweatshops. The UK will simply exploit areas the EU has left to others.
We expect the UK’s shift in technology focus and regulations to persist under a Labour government. Labour will reap the benefits from what now appears the start of a post-Brexit strategy. Once you have spotted opportunities for investment and drawn in investors, you are not going to reverse to a status-quo ante.
Some See Failure, Others See Sunrise
The headless Atlantic misses the inevitable opportunities that will come into play sooner or later simply because the EU is so inept.
If you have to make up imaginary communist threats to give your ideology meaning and purpose, you have a dumb ideology. Making an identity out of being anti-communist in the west is like making an identity out of being anti-dinosaur. Stop being ridiculous and do something real.
No normal person is asking for digital IDs or central bank digital currencies. They’re being supplied without any demand, for the benefit of the power structures supplying them.
Many people turn to conservatism and religion because they perceive — correctly — that mainstream culture is a fraudulent sham bereft of meaning and authentic values. Their solutions are misguided, but their reasons arise from a perception of a very real problem.
It isn’t actually necessary to turn to religion or conservatism to find depth, meaning and groundedness; depth, meaning and groundedness are always abundantly accessible. But nothing about western culture makes this obvious, especially in the mainstream.
Turning to religion and conservatism as a solution to the degradation of mainstream culture is just replacing the modern systems of mass-scale thought control with the old ones. It’s a completely maladaptive solution to the problem, but you can’t ask people to just keep participating in a worldview that feels like it’s sucking your soul out of your body 24/7. You need to offer them something nourishing and authentic. Nothing in mainstream liberal culture offers this; it’s self-evidently phony, soulless and vapid.
This isn’t something the left can just dismiss. There needs to be something on offer which meets these needs better than both mainstream culture and the regressive belief systems which caused so much suffering in the past.
It’s incredible how much money the Americans can afford to blow just on exploding stuff overseas. Their healthcare system and infrastructure must be phenomenal.
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Communism is such a non-thing in the west that western rightists have to make up imaginary communist threats to be afraid of, pretending devoutly anti-communist institutions like the Democratic Party and the World Economic Forum are communist, or that “woke” stuff is communism.
If you have to make up imaginary communist threats to give your ideology meaning and purpose, you have a dumb ideology. Making an identity out of being anti-communist in the west is like making an identity out of being anti-dinosaur. Stop being ridiculous and do something real.
That’s what an official ideology is. It’s more than just a set of beliefs. Anyone can have any beliefs they want. Your personal beliefs do not constitute ‘reality.’ In order to make your beliefs ‘reality,’ you need to have the power to impose them on society. You need the power of the police, the military, the media, scientific ‘experts,’ academia, the culture industry, the entire ideology-manufacturing machine. There is nothing subtle about this process. Decommissioning one ‘reality’ and replacing it with another is a brutal business.
Reality isn’t what it used to be. It never really was, but that’s another story. This one isn’t about reality per se. It’s about the War on Reality, the one we’re in the middle of, the war that started when the War on Terror was cancelled in the Summer of 2016. It’s actually an extension and an evolution of the War on Terror, and the War on Populism, and the rollout of the New Normal in 2020 … but that is also another story. I want to focus on the war that is raging currently, on the Internet, in people’s workplaces, homes, among friends and families, and in people’s heads. I’m pretty sure you know the war I’m talking about, regardless of which “side” you feel you are on.
The War on Reality is a civil war, but it is much more than just a civil war. It is an asymmetrical, polymorphous, metastatic, multiplicitous war. An ontological free-for-all. It has no conventions or rules of engagement. There are no battle lines. The battle is everywhere. Alliances shift from day to day. It is chaos, unrelenting, inescapable chaos. An omnipresent, immaterial, omnipotent organism attacking itself. It is continual, and completely unwinnable. It is unwinnable because it has already been won. It ended in victory the moment it began, and now we’re doomed to go on fighting it forever, or until some less ethereal leviathan is born, or reborn, out of its ashes.
Unfortunately, that’s rather likely, the less ethereal leviathan scenario. It may not come about in my lifetime — and, selfishly, I’m hoping it doesn’t — but this state of affairs cannot continue indefinitely. As I wrote in an essay in June of 2021 …
All old news, long buried, reaching out from the memory hole
A 2018 study found that wind power can impact the climate by altering the atmospheric boundary layer. “We find that generating today’s US electricity demand with wind power would warm Continental US surface temperatures by 0.24 degrees Celsius,” it said.
Warming effect was found to be strongest at night, with the nighttime warming effect observed at 28 operational US wind farms.
Claims of wind power being pro-environment often do not consider the damaging effects these projects can have on wildlife and ecosystems, thus hiding the “true cost” of such initiatives.
Wind power projects can threaten birds that fly within their vicinity and trigger a decline in their population; it can harm marine life due to noise pollution, and affect the growth of plants in the region where it is located. Driven by subsidies granted by the federal government, the growth of wind projects has triggered concerns about the cumulative impacts they have on the environment.
There have been growing protests against wind power projects across the world. In the United States, people have opposed setting up wind turbines in Lake Erie due to concerns about the environmental impact of the project.
In New Jersey, protestors have asked to pause the development of an offshore wind farm which they claim has led to dolphins and whales washing ashore.
In Norway, climate activist Greta Thunberg has protested against a proposal to build two wind farms on the Sami reindeer grazing grounds. The Sami are the only indigenous people recognized within the EU and say that their tradition of herding reindeer will be put in danger due to the wind farms.
Danger to Birds and Whales
The blades of wind turbines can be fatal to birds. When the first commercial wind power plants were established in the United States, they had not considered the impact the project would have on birds and other flying creatures like bats. Not only are birds harmed by colliding with the wind blades but flying bats can be affected by changes in the air pressure resulting from blade rotations.
The proliferation of wind turbines is believed to pose a significant danger to the population of golden eagles which are already said to be in decline in certain regions.
An Associated Press analysis found that a significant number of eagles were dying while fewer criminal cases were being pursued—suggesting an intentional “trade-off” between bird deaths and implementing of clean power generation.
“They are rolling over backwards for wind companies,” said Mike Lockhart, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, according to the outlet. “I think they are killing a hell of a lot more eagles than they ever anticipated.”
Dozens of permits for wind projects that are either approved or pending are estimated to result in around 6,000 eagles getting killed off over multiple decades.
A 2013 paper estimated the mean bird annual deaths in the United States due to collision at wind facilities to be 234,000. With roughly 50,000 megawatts of installed capacity in the country, this comes to around 4.68 bird deaths per megawatt.
The Biden administration has set a target of deploying 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030. At 4.68 bird deaths per megawatt, this could result in 140,000 additional birds dying annually.
The installation of wind turbines as well as the noise created by their operation can have a harmful effect on whales.
Last year, an official from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) warned against setting up wind projects off the coast of New England because it would threaten the population of right whales in the region.
In 2011, there were around 478 of these creatures, a number that came down to 350 in 2022. In January, Rep Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) demanded an end to offshore wind activity in New Jersey after an “unprecedented” number of whales washed ashore in the region.
Climatic and Environmental Changes
Wind projects alter the habitats where they are located, changing the vegetation and other landscape features of the region. Setting up a wind farm necessitates the creation of open spaces. Vast open spaces tend to raise the speed of wind. Such minute changes can result in an uptick in temperatures and a reduction in humidity levels.
Higher temperatures at night can cause plants to release more CO2 than usual. This carbon dioxide is essential for the growth of the plants. By releasing the CO2, plant growth can thus get affected. In farming areas where wind turbines are established, this could mean lower crop yields.
A 2018 study found that wind power can impact the climate by altering the atmospheric boundary layer. “We find that generating today’s US electricity demand with wind power would warm Continental US surface temperatures by 0.24 degrees Celsius,” it said.
Warming effect was found to be strongest at night, with the nighttime warming effect observed at 28 operational US wind farms.
A study from 2010 discovered that “impacts from wind turbines on surface meteorological conditions are likely to affect agricultural practices as well as communities living in residential area around the farms,” it said.
Lotifi Hassan Misto was going about his business herding sheep in Syria’s Idlib province May 18 when a US drone strike blew him to smithereens.
Pentagon officials immediately announced we killed an al-Qaeda leader bent on terrorizing the homeland. That could well have been a recorded response that has been played hundreds, maybe thousands of times since the War of Terror began 22 years ago this September.
But the Pentagon fable quickly fell apart when family members came forward to defend Misto and grieve for his 10 kids now without a dad. They were backed up by terrorism experts who told the Washington Post Misto was likely not affiliated with al-Qaeda.
A Pentagon official offered an “oops” stating “We are no longer confident we killed a senior AQ official.”
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