Hillary Clinton is emerging from the shadows and pimping censorship as the solution to the Democrats’ ills.All this is taking place just as talk builds of Kamala Harris’s disastrous performance as veep and the Democrats’ terrible presidential electoral prospects in 2024. Hillary’s never conceded the 2016 election, and the lust for power she’s exhibited in the past appears unabated. Something is going on that brings her back to the public spotlight.
She appeared with Rachel Maddow the past week and managed to compliment Joe Biden and push for censorship.In the following four-and-a-half-minute segment, she even turned a complaint from Maddow about YouTube censoring videos in Russia at the behest of the political authorities there into a what sounds like a plea for such censorship here, in the guise of fighting “disinformation” that has prevented Joe Biden from getting all the credit he deserves. Seriously: she actually said that.
It’s no secret that Doctor Who has been oddly tactful of late, with the thrills of time and space travel often seemingly taking a back seat to climate-change finger-wagging and lectures about historical racism / sexism. So I was a bit surprised to find myself irrevocably ‘triggered’ by something I saw in episode two of the new series: the Doctor, confronting an enemy whose features are entirely obscured by a battle helmet, yells, ‘Take your hat off, mate!’ – but when the enemy complies, revealing the hideous face of a Sontaran, she sneers, ‘Urgh – on second thoughts, put it back on!’.
Harmless? Perhaps. But only if there isn’t a single child anywhere in this country who looks even a little bit like a Sontaran – and, frankly, we all know that there are plenty. So why does the BBC feel it’s okay to show something that could lead to those kids getting bullied in the playground, when it is clearly so pathologically cautious about anything that could endanger any of the others? The answer, I’m sorry to say, is that ugly people have become the last under-represented minority on British television.
I personally have no problem with the steep upswing in diversity we’ve seen in TV shows and adverts over the past two or three years. It’s pandering and patronising, but it’s also given work to a lot of good people who would always have been unfairly sidelined otherwise. I just want to know why, at a time when there’s bags of diversity on screen, there are still no bags of spanners.
There is something “mysterious” going on in Africa that is puzzling scientists, said Wafaa El-Sadr, chair of global health at Columbia University. “Africa doesn’t have the vaccines and the resources to fight COVID-19 that they have in Europe and the U.S., but somehow they seem to be doing better,” she said.
The Covid “Vaccine” Makes You More Susceptible to Falling Ill with Covid and All Other Viruses and Diseases, because the “Vaccine” Destroys the Innate Immune System.
In Germany the states with the highest vaccination rate have the most excess deaths.
Dr. Ute Bergner, a physicist who is a member of the Thuringian state parliament in Germany, commissioned statisticians to investigate the relationship between vaccination and excess mortality in the 16 German federal states.
The statisticians found that the states with the lowest percentage of the population vaccinated had the lowest excess mortality. In contrast the state with the highest vaccination rate (66%) had the highest rate of excess deaths.
“The correlation coefficient is +0.31. In the eyes of the two data scientists this is ‘astonishingly high.’ Especially since the believers in the vaccine are claiming the opposite but provide no proof for their notion of ‘protection’. One should at the least expect a different relationship: the more vaccinations, the lower the mortality. After all, the intention was to protect people.”
“The excess mortality increases with the increase in the vaccination rate. This requires urgent clarification,” demanded the two statisticians. Furthermore, in view of “the pending political measures aimed at containing the virus this figure is worrying and requires explanation if further political measures are to be taken with the aim of increasing the vaccination rate.”
The Associated Press reported mid-November 2021 that in spite of low vaccination rates, Africa has few Covid cases
There is something “mysterious” going on in Africa that is puzzling scientists, said Wafaa El-Sadr, chair of global health at Columbia University. “Africa doesn’t have the vaccines and the resources to fight COVID-19 that they have in Europe and the U.S., but somehow they seem to be doing better,” she said.
Fewer than 6% of people in Africa are vaccinated. For months, the World Health Organization in its weekly pandemic reports has described Africa as “one of the least affected regions in the world.”
The most salient feature of totalitarianism is control of movement,
For the state, the whole point of tracking is to reward or punish, mostly the latter. In the past, you’d be invited to the police station, or just dragged off the street. Now, punishment can be much tidier, and instant, even for the tiniest sin. That’s where the vaccine, green, access or health passport comes in.
Though the left is supposedly most sensitive to animal rights, they just shrug at Fauci having puppies, with their vocal cords cut, eaten alive by ants.
The most salient feature of totalitarianism is control of movement, which entails tracking each citizen. Before the internet era, this could only be achieved roughly.
The state knew John Smith lived on Lumumba Street and worked on Stalin Avenue. If Smith wanted to spend a night at a woman’s apartment, she had to register him at the neighborhood police station. Big Brother entered the bedroom, but not totally, for he couldn’t hear all the sibilants, exhalations and squishes. Daytime movement was generally unmonitored, but the state always knew where you were at night.
Smith’s ID card also prevented him from moving to the next city, much less getting a better job there, so he was stuck in Bidenstadt, his hometown.
Smith was free, though, to walk into any state store to browse, for as long as he wanted, its empty shelves.
Now, the state knows where Smith is all the time. At 5:51:15PM, this scowling man is again at Blather Bar, next to Red Levine, who, despite his name, also has alternative right tendencies. Vein-popping fans of Steve Sailer, each has left hundreds of fist-pumping comments, under “sigofnig” and “xxxxrabbi.”
Billions of dollars printed and sent to states to reward “essential” “heros”. Only big government and it’s unelected bureaucrats forgot to figure out who are essential heroes.
No probs, it’s only a couple hundred billion. Pocket change for foggy bottom. A plethora of commissions, committees and thousands of pages of rules, regs, enforcement and applicable penalties will undoubtedly clear it all up.
What about those of us who don’t make the cut. Non-essential, non-heroes, inconsequential chaff.
Expand this “forgot to figure out” scenario to multi trillion dollar build back better size.
HARTFORD, Conn. – When the U.S. government allowed so-called hero pay for front-line workers as a possible use of pandemic relief money, it suggested occupations that could be eligible from farm workers and child care staff to janitors and truck drivers.
State and local governments have struggled to determine who among the many workers who braved the raging coronavirus pandemic before vaccines became available should qualify: Only government workers, or private employees, too? Should it go to a small pool of essential workers like nurses or be spread around to others, including grocery store workers?
“It’s a bad position for us to be in because you have your local government trying to pick winners and losers … or recipients and nonrecipients. And hence by default, you’re saying importance versus not important,” said Jason Levesque, the Republican mayor of Auburn, Maine, where officials have not decided who will receive hazard pay from the city’s American Rescue Plan funds.
A year and a half into the pandemic, such decisions have taken on political implications for some leaders as unions lobby for expanded eligibility, with workers who end up being left out feeling embittered.
“It sounds like it’s about the money, but this is a token of appreciation,” said Ginny Ligi, a correctional officer who contracted COVID-19 last year in Connecticut, where the bonus checks have yet to be cut amid negotiations with unions. “It’s so hard to put into words the actual feeling of what it was like to walk into that place every day, day in, day out. It scarred us. It really did.”
Interim federal rules published six months ago allow state and local COVID- 19 recovery funds to be spent on premium pay for essential workers of
See HAZARD PAY, Page 4A
Members of a health care union rally in Hartford, Conn., in 2020 to demand better protections for caregivers. The state still has not shared its federally provided “hero pay.” JESSICA HILL/AP FILE
Continued from Page 1A
up to $13 per hour, in addition to their regular wages. The amount cannot exceed $25,000 per employee.
The rules also allow grants to go to third-party employers with eligible workers, defined as those who have had “regular in-person interactions or regular physical handling of items that were also handled by others” or a heightened risk of exposure to COVID-19.
The rules encourage state and local governments to “prioritize providing retrospective premium pay where possible, recognizing that many essential workers have not yet received additional compensation for work conducted over the course of many months,” while also prioritizing lower-income eligible workers.
As of July, about a third of U.S. states had used federal COVID-19 relief aid to reward workers considered essential with bonuses, although who qualified and how much they received varied widely, according to an Associated Press review.
A list of hazard and premium pay state allocations as of Nov. 18, provided by the National Conference of State Legislatures, shows funds have typically been set aside for government workers, such as state troopers and correctional officers.
In Minnesota, lawmakers still have $250 million in aid set aside for hero pay, but they’ve been been struggling with how to distribute it. A special committee was unable to come up with a compromise plan, instead sending two competing recommendations to the full legislature for consideration.
“I think every time we take another week, we’re just delaying the whole process, and I think the fastest way is to get them over to the Legislature,” said Republican state Sen. Mary Kiffmeyer, a member of the committee, during a meeting last month.
Minnesota Senate Republicans want to offer a tax-free bonus of $1,200 to about 200,000 workers who they say took on the greatest risk, such as nurses, long-term care workers, prison staff and first responders.
But House Democrats want to spread the money more widely, providing roughly $375 to about 670,000 essential workers, including low-wage food service and grocery store employees, security guards, janitors and others.
Connecticut has yet to pay out any of the $20 million in federal money set aside by state lawmakers in June for essential state employees and members of the Connecticut National Guard.
As negotiations continue with union leaders, the Connecticut AFL-CIO labor organization has stepped up pressure on Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont, who is up for reelection in 2022, to provide $1 an hour in hazard pay to all public- and private-sector essential workers who worked during the pandemic before vaccinations became available.
“The governor needs to reevaluate his priorities and show that these workers who put themselves and their lives at risk are a top priority,” said Ed Hawthorne, president of the Connecticut AFL-CIO.
Max Reiss, Lamont’s spokesperson, said the figures cited by organized labor are “just not feasible.”
He saud the administration is in negotiations with state employee unions, classifying the work state employees did during the pandemic and determining whether they may have shifted to other responsibilities that were more or less risky, which could also affect whether they receive more or less money.
“We want to recognize the workers who kept going into work every day because they had to and there was not a choice. And those range from people working in state-run health care facilities to people who needed to plow our roads during severe weather and work in-person jobs,” he said.
“The next piece is that you have to come up with the determination as to who all those people were. And there’s a verification process to that,” Reiss said.
In some states like California, cities are in the process of determining how to fairly distribute some of their federal funds to to help essential private sector workers who may not have received extra pay from their employers.
Rachel Torres, deputy of the political and civil rights department at United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Local 770, said her union is urging cities to follow the lead of Oxnard and Calabasas, which voted this year to provide grocery and drugstore workers with payments of as much as $1,000.
“It really should not be a competition among essential workforces. There should be moneys available for many workers,” Torres said.
Connecticut health care workers, like these in Hartford, are still waiting for “hero pay” from federal funds set aside in the state budget. MARK LENNIHAN/AP FILE
The Biden administration is seeking to radically narrow the boundaries of respectable American political thought. The administration has repeatedly issued statements and reports that could automatically castigate citizens who distrust the federal government. We may eventually learn that the new Biden guidelines spurred a vast increase in federal surveillance and other abuses against Americans who were guilty of nothing more than vigorous skepticism.
Biden is Nixon on steroids
The Biden team is expanding the federal Enemies List perhaps faster than any time since the Nixon administration. In June, the Biden administration asserted that guys who are unable to score with women may be terrorist threats due to “involuntary celibate–violent extremism.” That revelation was included in the administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, which identified legions of new potential “domestic terrorists” that the feds can castigate and investigate.The White House claims its new war on terrorism and extremism is “carefully tailored to address violence and reduce the factors that …infringe on the free expression of ideas.” But the prerogative to define extremism includes the power to revile disapproved beliefs. The report warns that “narratives of fraud in the recent general election … will almost certainly spur some [domestic violent extremists] to try to engage in violence this year.” If accusations of 2020 electoral shenanigans are formally labeled as extremist threats, that could result in far more repression (aided by Facebook and Twitter) of dissenting voices. How will this work out any better than the concerted campaign by the media and Big Tech last fall to suppress all information about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the election? And how can Biden be trusted to be the judge after he effectively accused Facebook of mass murder for refusing to totally censor anyone who raised doubts about the COVID-19 vaccine?
When social distrust is sown among groups, particularly on the basis of spurious identity considerations, a great deal of what we value but take for granted is put at risk. This doesn’t mean that America’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, and less formal forms of racism can’t be taught and discussed frankly. They must be.
Be they “left” or “right,” those who agitate for racial polarization seem to have no sense of the harm they could do to everyone in our society. As the wise Glenn Loury would say, they are playing with fire. By polarization, of any kind, I mean more than merely a vigorous disagreement over issues or even basic principles. That’s fine. Rather, I mean something dogmatic, obsessive, and fanatical, in which virtually everything in the world is seen through a single lens and everyone is expected to act and speak in a certain way, with stern consequences for the noncompliant.
It can happen in politics, but it is becoming especially common with race, where some would have us interpret virtually everything through a racial prism. This is more than simply unfortunate; it threatens what the ancient Greek philosophers and later philosophers such as Spinoza — whose 389th birthday (Nov. 24, 1632) we marked this week — held to be the good life for human beings; it’s the conception of life in which being virtuous is seen as constitutive of happiness, or better: eudaimonia, and not separate from happiness or merely means to it.
Racial polarization threatens this not just in the obvious way, namely, with the potential holds for violence. I’m thinking of the more subtle way: through the narrowing and undermining of all sorts of social cooperation.
Formulators of the original (classical) liberalism, which has been refined into the libertarian political philosophy, took to heart what the Greeks and their intellectual descendants emphasized, namely, that we human beings are inherently social animals. Some went even further to note that, as reason- and language-bearing creatures, we thrive best when surrounded by people who exhibit their rationality in the fullest sense, not only as a tool to judge means but ends as well. Only in such a milieu can we live in ways most proper to rational animals, that is, with reason always in the driver’s seat. This entails, among other things, dealing with people through argument, persuasion, and consent rather than command, manipulation, and force.
A key way that social existence promotes individual flourishing is cooperation, which augments our otherwise weak individual capacities. While no collective brain exists, liberal society creates something analogous to it. As a result, we each gain access to an incredible volume of knowledge — moral and otherwise — any morsel of which we might never have thought up or encountered while living alone or in small groups during our limited lifespans. The marketplace of ideas is an example of this process that benefits us all beyond measure. In this day when free speech and free inquiry are increasingly under assault from reckless elements left and right, this would be good to remember.
The benefits of the broadest possible social cooperation are also abundant in the material realm. The early liberal political-economic thought demonstrated that living in isolation was to live in abject poverty. No one was better at pointing this out than Frédéric Bastiat, the 19th-century French liberal. In the opening chapter of his unfinished magnum opus, Economic Harmonies, he wrote:
It is impossible not to be struck by the disproportion, truly incommensurable, that exists between the satisfactions [any] man derives from society and the satisfactions that he could provide for himself if he were reduced to his own resources. I make bold to say that in one day he consumes more things than he could produce himself in ten centuries.
What makes the phenomenon stranger still is that the same thing holds true for all other men. Every one of the members of society has consumed a million times more than he could have produced; yet no one has robbed anyone else….
We should be shutting our eyes to the facts if we refused to recognize that society cannot present such complicated combinations in which civil and criminal law play so little part without being subject to a prodigiously ingenious mechanism. This mechanism is the object of study of political economy.
If this was true in 1850, what would Bastiat say about our time? Think of all the things we have access to in the developed world, even those of modest means. (The people of the developing world want the same, which shows the cruelty of so-called climate policy, which would raise the price and reliability of energy.) The point which shouts from Bastiat’s passages is that we have much to lose if social cooperation were to break down or even narrowed. Society is exchange, as the liberals hammered home on many occasions. “Society is concerted action, cooperation,” Ludwig von Mises wrote in his grand treatise, Human Action, which he was tempted to call Social Cooperation, another name for specialization through the division of labor and knowledge.
Need more be said about the threat from racial and other deep polarization? To invoke another original liberal, Adam Smith famously wrote that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. The fewer the people with whom to cooperate, the more primitive the division of labor. And the more primitive the division of labor, the poorer we are. That should require no elaboration.
When social distrust is sown among groups, particularly on the basis of spurious identity considerations, a great deal of what we value but take for granted is put at risk. This doesn’t mean that America’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, and less formal forms of racism can’t be taught and discussed frankly. They must be. But the cost will be unspeakably severe if frank conversation about the past and even aspects of the present transmogrify into polarization, hatred, and distrust.
Good people everywhere should speak out against polarization. Think about what we all have to lose. And once it’s lost, there may be no getting it back.
by Tyler Durden
She appeared with Rachel Maddow the past week and managed to compliment Joe Biden and push for censorship.In the following four-and-a-half-minute segment, she even turned a complaint from Maddow about YouTube censoring videos in Russia at the behest of the political authorities there into a what sounds like a plea for such censorship here, in the guise of fighting “disinformation” that has prevented Joe Biden from getting all the credit he deserves. Seriously: she actually said that.
