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Convergence of Quandaries – Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on September 17, 2020

Afterward, BLM “protesters” showed up at the hospital where the deputies were undergoing surgery, shouting “I hope they die.” I can’t wait to hear Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell try to explain that to their faithful fans on MSNBC.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/convergence-of-quandaries/

James Howard Kunstler

And so, America has a new manufactured crisis, ElectionGate, as if all the other troubles piling up like tropical depressions marching across the September seas were not enough. Let me remind you what else is going on. The Wuhan pandemic is still on the scene, the economy is collapsing, a domestic race-war is escalating, the whole west coast is burning, and US oil production is crashing. Oh… and slow-moving tropical storm Sally is forecast to come ashore as a hurricane on the Gulf Coast today, dumping up to two feet of rain.

America needs a constitutional crisis like a hole in the head, and that’s exactly what’s being engineered for the holiday season by the clever folks in the Democratic Party’s Lawfare auxiliary. Here’s how it works: the complicit newspapers and cable news channels publish polls showing Joe Biden leading in several swing states, even if it’s not true. Facebook and Twitter amplify expectations of a Biden victory. This sets the stage for a furor when it turns out that he loses on election night. On cue, Antifa and BLM commence to riot all around the country. Meanwhile, a mighty harvest of mail-in votes pours into election districts utterly unequipped to validate them.

Lawfare cadres agitate in the contested states’ legislatures to send rogue elector slates to the electoral college. The dispute ends up in congress, which awaits a seating of newly-elected representatives on January 4, hopefully for Lawfare, mostly Democrats. Whoops…!  Turns out the Dems lost their majority there too. Fighting in the streets ramps up and overwhelms hamstrung police forces in Democratic-run cities. January 20 — Inauguration Day — rolls around and the Dems ask the military to drag Trump out of the White House “with great dispatch!” as Mr. Biden himself put it so nicely back in the summer. The US military breaks into two factions. Voilà: Civil War Two.

You didn’t read that here first, of course. It’s been all over the web for weeks, since the Democratic Party-sponsored Transition Integrity Project (cough cough) ran their summer “war game,” intending to demonstrate that any Trump election victory would be evidence of treason and require correction by any means necessary, including sedition, which they’d already tried a few times in an organized way since 2016 (and botched). The Democrats are crazy enough now to want this. They have driven themselves crazy for years with the death-wish of eradicating western civ (and themselves with it). There are many exegeses of this phenomenon, mostly derived from Marxist theories of revolution, but my own explanation departs from that.

The orgy of political hysteria, insane thinking, and violence is a psychotic reaction to the collapsing techno-industrial economy — a feature of it, actually. When all familiar social and economic arrangements are threatened, people go nuts. Interestingly, the craziness actually started in the colleges and universities where ideas (the products of thinking) are supposed to be the stock-in-trade. The more pressing the practical matters of daily life became, the less intellectuals wanted to face them. So, they desperately generated a force-field of crazy counter-ideas to repel the threat, a curriculum of wishful thinking, childish utopian nostrums, and exercises in boundary-smashing. As all this moved out of the campuses (the graduation function), it infected every other corner of American endeavor, institutions, business, news media, sports, Hollywood, etc. The country is now out of its mind… echoes of France, 1793… a rhyme, not a reprise.

The US economy began a slow and insidious collapse because its petroleum energy base became unaffordable. The reality of that was obscured by paradoxical appearances: the shale oil miracle goosed up US oil production from under five million barrels-a-day in 2007 to thirteen million barrels-a-day in 2019. Pretty awesome. Seemed like we were awash in oil. The problem was the companies producing shale oil couldn’t make money at it, and the loans that went into staging the shale oil “miracle” went bad… and then the companies couldn’t get new loans… and went bankrupt. So, the crash of US oil production is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that is sure to continue and will make things worse. Now, less than a year after reaching that majestic 13 million barrels-a-day, production has fallen to around 10 million a day — quite an impressive drop. Further obscuring the actual dynamic in play, gasoline prices at the pump are quite low — under $2.50-a-gallon where I live, compared with $4-plus a couple of years ago — and most citizens consider the price of gasoline their sole index of how things are going in the oil industry.

The Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated and accelerated the damage from that by shutting down much of small business across America since March. The businesses and people who owned them have suffered terribly. That and the public lockdowns have greatly depressed the demand for oil products, driving the price-per-barrel down and reducing the cash flow of the oil companies. That also aggravated worsening relations with our principal trading partner, China, the net effect of which threatens the supply chain for all sorts of critical parts and products needed to keep our complex systems running.

Whether Mr. Trump or anybody can respond intelligently to this long emergency is a matter of considerable moment. As far as election politics are concerned, Mr. Trump is only marginally better positioned because he is not in favor of destroying the existing institutions of the republic as his opponents are. There’s less reason to believe he’s capable of coping with the nuts-and-bolts of the economic collapse that awaits after the election dramaturgy plays out. For Mr. Trump, much depends on the illusory performance of the implausible financial markets. This is the season for market crashes, as it is the season for Atlantic cyclones, and those markets have been acting as toppy as a moon-shot lately.

Meanwhile, the BLM mayhem continues overnight, this time in stodgy little old Lancaster, PA, where a knife-wielding Hispanic man was shot by the cops. Crazy how unjustified that seems. The incident and the reaction to it (riot… fires) followed the assassination attempt of two LA County sheriff’s deputies in their car Saturday night by what appears to have been a black child or a dwarf. Afterward, BLM “protesters” showed up at the hospital where the deputies were undergoing surgery, shouting “I hope they die.” I can’t wait to hear Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell try to explain that to their faithful fans on MSNBC.

Note: I am posting on Parler now as jhkunstler.

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Nearly two decades after 9/11, the parallels between the post-terrorist attack ‘New Normal’ & that of Covid-19 can’t be ignored — RT Op-ed

Posted by M. C. on September 16, 2020

How? Peer pressure – or rather, the illusion of it. Those who oppose even the slightest element of the New Normal are denounced “objectively pro-Covid”. Just as then-President George W. Bush warned Americans who opposed his draconian post-9/11 crackdown and war in the Middle East that “you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists” and anti-war bands such as the Dixie Chicks got death threats, those who’ve embraced the Covid-19 regime are encouraged to wish sickness and death on their neighbors who won’t “mask up.”

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/500677-covid-september-11-parallels/

Helen Buyniski

is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23

Both the 9/11 attacks and the Covid-19 pandemic have dramatically shaped Western society. But the changes they wrought were devastating and unnecessary, pushed through by control-hungry governments who saw opportunity in crisis.

While both the worst terror attack in US history and the deadliest pandemic in a generation were immediately hyped as the defining elements of the era, the uncomfortable reality is that neither terrorism nor the novel coronavirus pose any risk more severe than taking a bath.

Also on rt.com The future is ‘CLEAR’ and it’s Dystopian: Virus hype ushers in a Covid 19-84 nightmare of restricted access

However, the media hype – fueled by think tanks and governments drooling over the possibility of adopting controls that would normally spark popular revolt – has created the same climate of fear that allowed the imposition of the post-9/11 police state, paving the way for a post-Covid regime that will make the Patriot Act look cuddly.

The shocking changes to the American “way of life” that have followed both events were in no way required, or even logical, responses to the crises in question. It took an unlikely series of what the government described as “intelligence failures” for the events of 9/11 to fall into place, and the Trump administration scrapped completely adequate pandemic response plans to adopt a regime of lockdowns and economic shutdowns that will likely end up doing more harm than the virus itself. Had governments followed their own procedures, neither catastrophe likely would have happened.

Read more
US states rush-recruiting Covid-19 contact tracers are overcompensating for their incompetence with authoritarianism US states rush-recruiting Covid-19 contact tracers are overcompensating for their incompetence with authoritarianism

But the ‘government incompetence’ narrative doesn’t sell the intrusive surveillance regulations that were yanked off the shelf in both cases to be railroaded through while any potential opposition was paralyzed with fear. Both the Patriot Act and the worst of the coronavirus control regulations in the US and elsewhere were written long before 9/11 and the pandemic, wheeled out at the appointed hour, and sometimes trialed in the private sector under the reasoning that one must not let a crisis go to waste. To further destabilize society, Americans were encouraged in both cases to rat out their fellow citizens to the authorities for perceived offenses as minor as checking the wrong books out from the library (2001) or failing to social-distance (2020). 

Even the crises themselves have an awful lot in common. Osama bin Laden was fingered definitively as the culprit for 9/11 even as the towers were still smoldering – long before an investigation could have been conducted – echoing the immediately ubiquitous media declaration that an infected bat at a Wuhan wet market had spawned coronavirus. After it was found the market didn’t actually sell bats, establishment scientists had to scramble to pin the responsibility for human transmission on an intermediate species – even as studies revealed the earliest cases of Covid-19 had had no contact with the market at all. Yet just as bin Laden and 19 hijackers (some of whom were later found to be inconveniently alive) remain the only ‘official’ culprits for 9/11, China is still blamed for the pandemic.

For those Americans too dense or stubborn to ‘get’ the similarities between Covid-19 and 9/11, a flood of articles accompanied the arrival of the virus on US shores. From “Not even 9/11 could shut down AA meetings. Coronavirus is different” (as if there’d been no society-disrupting disasters in the intervening 18 years capable of disrupting a 12-step meeting!) to “Imagining a 9/11-like response to coronavirus”, the heavy-handed programming has hammered home the “New Normal” supposedly facing the world on the other side of the pandemic. Just as Americans were led to fear endless terror attacks if they did not give up their rights, the entire world is being told we face a pandemic-laden future if we don’t mask up, sit down, shut up, and roll up our sleeves for an experimental vaccine (or two or three…).

But there’s no objective reason life should not, in fact, go back to “normal.” Humanity has lived through much deadlier pandemics, especially as each new revelation reveals that the horrific US Covid-19 statistics have been hugely overinflated. Yet while Wuhan, the virus’s apparent origin point, has returned to holding summertime pool parties as its case count cratered, parallel declines in fatalities in the US and UK have actually resulted in increased controls.

Also on rt.com Lockdown supporters are using psychology pseudoscience to label anti-maskers as irrational, stupid sociopaths

How? Peer pressure – or rather, the illusion of it. Those who oppose even the slightest element of the New Normal are denounced “objectively pro-Covid”. Just as then-President George W. Bush warned Americans who opposed his draconian post-9/11 crackdown and war in the Middle East that “you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists” and anti-war bands such as the Dixie Chicks got death threats, those who’ve embraced the Covid-19 regime are encouraged to wish sickness and death on their neighbors who won’t “mask up.”

Unfortunately, just as 9/11 was weaponized to launch wars against Afghanistan and Iraq (and, later, most of the Middle East), the Trump administration seems determined to wrangle a war with China out of Covid-19. Even if this doesn’t come to pass, the relationship between the two countries has deteriorated markedly, and a second Cold War seems inevitable. Meanwhile, the devastation wrought by the suicidal New Normal carries on at home, laying waste to what was left of Americans’ rights after the Patriot Act was through with them (and threatening to do the same . Can we stop repeating history for once?

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EconomicPolicyJournal.com: There is No Price Inflation (As Long as You Don’t Eat)

Posted by M. C. on September 12, 2020

https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2020/09/there-is-no-price-inflation-as-long-as.html

As can be seen in the chart above, the 12-month annualized price inflation rate dived after the COVID-19 lockdowns started and only started to climb after the May bottom.

Now, the annualized Consumer Price Index through the end of August stand at “only” 1.3%.

But breaking things down a bit, things look much different.

Food prices are soaring. Meats are up 7.1%, dairy and related products are up 5.7%, non-alcoholic beverages are up 5.1%, limited service meals and snacks are up 4.8%, tobacco and smoking products are 5.0% and medical care is up 5.3%.

What is driving the general index down is declines in goods we are not using anymore, or are using a lot less. Airline fares are down 23.2% and energy is down 9.0%

But the goods people are actually buying are way up.

It should be remembered that President Nixon in 1971 imposed wage and price controls when the CPI was only 4.0%. Most food prices are climbing at a faster rate than this now.

I fully expect the general CPI number to continue to climb as the prices that are declining start to bottom out and the climbing prices will have more of an impact on the overall CPI number.

Sometime next year, I expect price controls to become a very real possibility regardless of whether Trump or Biden is president.

–RW

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Is Kamala Harris a 21st-Century Woodrow Wilson? | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 6, 2020

To pander to the socialists, Harris supports the profligate Green New Deal and a universal basic income, funded by new taxes that will “only” be levied on the wealthy. Harris exerts enormous influence over the extremely malleable (and increasingly senile) Biden, jubilantly telling Trevor Noah on The Daily Show that “as soon as we get him in the White House, and even before with these task forces that we had, we were able to significantly push Joe Biden to do things that he hadn’t signed on to before.”

Clearly, Harris plans to run the show.

https://mises.org/wire/kamala-harris-21st-century-woodrow-wilson?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=078d03d63e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_09_04_06_24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-078d03d63e-228343965

Although the draconian lockdowns punished the economy, a partial recovery occurred after governments allowed businesses to reopen. However, continued economic growth depends on the outcome of the presidential election. The crisis opened the door for a surge in regulations, subsidies, and other special interest privileges under the guise of promoting the “public health.”

This progressivism—a code word for cronyism—presents a serious threat to America.

As Murray Rothbard explains, the original Progressive Era witnessed corporate and safety regulations, environmental laws, welfare and labor compensation, and new taxes that benefited favored corporations, bureaucrats, academics, and labor activists at the expense of the taxpayer. If trends continue, modern politicians will pass similar policies to benefit themselves and favored supporters, crippling economic activity. To properly understand this progressivist threat, one must recognize the motives, background, and ideological orientation of the original progressives. They were mostly Yankees, the descendants of the Puritans who stayed in New England or emigrated to New York and the Midwest. They grew up in evangelical households that urged a remaking of society by coercively stamping out sin, particularly alcohol consumption. After earning PhDs in Germany, progressives preached their interventionism under the secularized guise of science and the public welfare. Furthermore, these social engineers supported eugenics, the science of controlling the labor supply to improve its overall quality. Lastly, progressives strove to revolutionize the world through foreign policy adventures.

In their struggle for economic privileges, progressives split into two groups. The corporatists championed protecting trusts and cartels from the vicissitudes of the free market. These big business advocates wanted to create trade commissions and other regulatory agencies to cripple competition and impose onerous compliance costs on small businesses. On the other hand, the socialists desired an overhaul of the capitalist system, blaring the trumpets for stringent antitrust regulation, radical labor laws, and redistributive taxes. President Woodrow Wilson embodied both strands, working with the two groups to enact the income tax, the Federal Reserve System, and the Federal Trade Commission.

In many ways, modern progressives are carbon copies. They congregate in New England and live in coastal New York City, Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. While eschewing traditional religion, modern progressives are zealots for egalitarianism and social justice. They attended the Ivy League and other elite American universities, empowering them with government-funded research. Although modern progressives disregard eugenics, they still advocate social engineering, championing egalitarianism for everybody except themselves while dictating what is morally acceptable. Finally, they are thoroughgoing foreign interventionists. Neoconservatism is actually a variant of progressivism, for as Angelo Codevilla explains, George W. Bush’s wars were “but an extrapolation of the sentiments of America’s progressive class, first articulated by people such as Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson.”

The progressive movement still splits along corporatist and socialist lines. The former support a cozy relationship with Wall Street and “Big Tech,” welcoming various internet and safety regulations that would hurt smaller businesses without the appropriate ecommerce infrastructure. The latter advocate radically anticapitalist measures, particularly the dismantling of Big Tech, the Green New Deal, a universal basic income, and wealth taxes. With the exception of hostile antitrust lawsuits, big business corporatists are not against these measures per se, provided they can acquire environmental subsidies and offload the cost of new entitlements and taxes onto the less wealthy (accomplished with the progressivist income tax and Social Security).

If Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden embody the corporatist mindset and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren the socialist mentality, then surely Kamala Harris is the modern Wilsonian.

Big Tech has funded Harris in various California elections in exchange for favorable regulatory oversight. Many former personnel now work for the large companies: a senior counsel left in 2018 to lobby on behalf of Amazon, Harris’s first campaign manager works for Google, and her brother-in-law is the chief legal officer for Uber.

To pander to the socialists, Harris supports the profligate Green New Deal and a universal basic income, funded by new taxes that will “only” be levied on the wealthy. Harris exerts enormous influence over the extremely malleable (and increasingly senile) Biden, jubilantly telling Trevor Noah on The Daily Show that “as soon as we get him in the White House, and even before with these task forces that we had, we were able to significantly push Joe Biden to do things that he hadn’t signed on to before.”

Clearly, Harris plans to run the show.

Similar to the legislation of one hundred years ago, the new progressive juggernaut presents an incredible threat to the United States. Its policies will impoverish the public to enrich elite businesses, politicians, intellectuals, and unions. This future looks bleak, and it must be stopped.

[Adapted from “America 2021: The Threat of Progressivism,” a talk delivered on August 29 in Orlando, FL.]

Author:

Contact Patrick Newman

Patrick is Assistant Professor of Economics at Florida Southern College. He completed his PhD in the Department of Economics at George Mason University. He is a 2018 Mises Institute Research Fellow.

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EconomicPolicyJournal.com: Why Price Inflation Indexes Are More Fake Than Ever

Posted by M. C. on August 29, 2020

There are restaurants that don’t have outside dining just takeout. I pass them by.

The Jos. A. Bank clothing store in downtown San Francisco has closed. There is a sign in the window of the closed store suggesting I visit their nearest store—in Sacramento, a 2 hour drive.

It goes on and on. The unmeasured decline in goods and services that Cowen references because of the lockdowns is major and certainly not measured by the government indexes. Our standard of living is crashing.

https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2020/08/why-price-inflation-indexes-are-more.html

Tyler Cowen makes some interesting points in his Bloomberg column:

The most obvious effect of the pandemic is often better understood by the public than by professional economists: It has been an inflationary time, but not in the traditional manner.

The measured numbers indicate deflationary pressures, but that is misleading. In times of crisis, any measured inflation rate becomes much less meaningful as an economic indicator.

Let’s take education, which many American students have been doing online or not receiving much of at all. Whether for K-12 or at the university level, the cost of getting a quality education this year has risen drastically (think private tutors) — and for many individuals it may be impossible altogether. We are seeing deteriorating quality, and thus much higher real prices, yet this does not show up as either a quality adjustment or a price increase in standard calculations.
Or consider health care. For months, Americans were afraid to visit hospital facilities, for fear of contracting Covid-19. The perceived cost of the hospital visit was thus much higher, in terms of anxiety and medical risk, even if the sticker price or reimbursement rate for heart surgery hasn’t budged.
In many parts of the country, the lines at the motor vehicle offices are much longer, or it is much more time-consuming to get your car inspected for state approval. That is mostly due to pent-up demand from the worst months of the pandemic…
Education, health care and government are pretty big parts of our economy. If you add on the lower quality of restaurant visits, reduced sports performances (your ESPN cable package is worth less), and an inability to take preferred vacations and trips, you have many more negative quality adjustments that don’t show up in measured rates of inflation.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Fed and other institutions have declined to make formal adjustments for these changes in the real standard of living…
Inflation measures work best when the consumption bundle is roughly stable over short periods of time, and that just hasn’t been the case this year…
Perhaps most important, price rules and other forms of inflation rules don’t really work in times of pandemic. The very measurement of price inflation becomes arbitrary, and dependent on inertial measurement conventions from normal times, so the numbers don’t have enough actual economic meaning to guide policy.

Cowen makes these points in a wider essay discussing Fed decisions based on traditional price index measures, which I am less inclined to agree with, but his point here on how the quality of goods and services have declined during the lockdown is a very important observation.

Off the top of my head, I can think of instances where it applies to me.

The local Whole Foods maintains a count of the number of customers in its store and makes others wait outside until customers leave to keep the occupancy limited. I really don’t have time for this nonsense (a cost for me) and so I rarely visit anymore.

There are restaurants that don’t have outside dining just takeout. I pass them by.

The Jos. A. Bank clothing store in downtown San Francisco has closed. There is a sign in the window of the closed store suggesting I visit their nearest store—in Sacramento, a 2 hour drive.

It goes on and on. The unmeasured decline in goods and services that Cowen references because of the lockdowns is major and certainly not measured by the government indexes. Our standard of living is crashing.

–RW

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‘The greatest assault on civil liberties in our time…’ – RPI August 22nd Update

Posted by M. C. on August 22, 2020

The “experts” are literally destroying the next generation, and because of fear Americans are going along. The young son of a friend has recently taken his own life, incapable of managing the despair of the hell created for him by the monsters who have grabbed power in a manner that would even make Hitler blush. 

And they aren’t even making the older people safer with these asinine policies! In fact, thugs like Andrew Cuomo in New York purposely pursued a policy guaranteed to kill a maximum of older Americans – putting very sick people into nursing homes!

https://mailchi.mp/ronpaulinstitute/libertyassault?e=4e0de347c8

Dear Friends of the Ron Paul Institute:

First allow me to sincerely apologize for the scarcity of these updates of late. Since the Covid madness has taken over our country, spreading the real virus of authoritarianism to every corner of our republic, we have been barely able to come up for air. Literally every waking hour we spend preparing the next day’s episode of the Liberty Report, focusing on disproving the lies and correcting the misperceptions created by a mainstream media and politically-motivated actors to turn the country into a gulag. As you can imagine, refuting the lies of the mainstream media and politicized health “specialists” is beyond a full time job. They have all the resources at their fingertips, we are extremely limited so we have to work harder. And we have been so doing. 

The reaction to the virus outbreak has been the greatest assault on civil liberties in our time and the approach of those in authority will go down as perhaps the greatest disaster in US history. Even the Director of the CDC admits that more Americans are dying from lockdowns than from coronavirus. Meanwhile the virus is behaving as have all viruses in history: as it moves through society it infects, leaving healthier victims with immunity who in turn act as a wall to prevent infection of the vulnerable. Politicized medicine got in the way of this normal process, which cruelly led to a much longer period of potential exposure of the virus to the unhealthy and aged, its prime victims.

Young people, despite the media pile-on, are as Trump said nearly immune to this virus. According to CDC data, less than 300 Americans under the age of 24 have died from Covid-19. There is literally a better chance of being struck by lightening than dying of Covid if you are under 24. In fact by far the majority of deaths have occurred in those over 80 with other serious existing health problems. Yet these young people are being tortured by stay-at-home orders and masks and cancellation of school and destruction of their economic futures and cancellation of their very lives. No wonder three in four young persons has reported anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts over the coronavirus lockdowns.

The “experts” are literally destroying the next generation, and because of fear Americans are going along. The young son of a friend has recently taken his own life, incapable of managing the despair of the hell created for him by the monsters who have grabbed power in a manner that would even make Hitler blush. 

And they aren’t even making the older people safer with these asinine policies! In fact, thugs like Andrew Cuomo in New York purposely pursued a policy guaranteed to kill a maximum of older Americans – putting very sick people into nursing homes! Even the policies of lockdown and house arrest of the healthy have put the old and vulnerable at risk: the “second wave” is just a delayed first wave and the longer the virus hangs around without hitting the wall of herd immunity the more time the susceptible people can catch it and die.

Fear is the tool used throughout history to manipulate populations and to introduce totalitarian rule. A terrified population cannot make rational decisions, instead they desperately rush to hand their decisions off to a willing dictator to make for them. We know this movie and it does not end well. 

Yesterday the unelected state health commissioner of Virginia, Norman Oliver, announced that residents of the state would have no choice in the matter: the coronavirus vaccine would be mandatory. No exceptions. Your body, the state’s choice. 

From Germany to Ireland to beyond, citizens are rising up to protest the authoritarianism imposed by their governments in the name of a virus. Thus far in the US we have seen little of that. Unless Americans are willing to fight for their freedom there will soon be no freedom to fight for…

Sincerely yours,

Daniel McAdams
Executive Director
Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

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Lockdowns Kill, Exhibit Z – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 22, 2020

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/08/thomas-woods/lockdowns-kill-exhibit-z/

By

From the Tom Woods Letter:

The side effects of the lockdowns keep getting harder to ignore.

Dr. Brian Stauffer is head of cardiology at Denver Health. He and his colleagues wanted to figure out why the number of people arriving at the hospital suffering from cardiac arrest had plummeted in recent months.

Surely, dear reader, you know where this is going.

According to the Colorado Sun:

Looking at data on ambulance calls in Denver, they found that, while overall calls for service went down during the stay-at-home period, the number of people dying from cardiac arrests at home shot up.

Stauffer’s team found that cardiac arrests at home in Denver more than doubled in the two weeks after the statewide stay-at-home order was issued compared with historical averages. Even compared with more recent data, the weekly average of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests jumped to 46 during those two weeks, versus 26 or 27 in the three months prior.

Stauffer and his colleagues found that the number of people in Denver who died of cardiac arrests at home in the two weeks following the statewide stay-at-home order was greater than the total number of people who died of COVID-19 in the city during that time.

Oh, but “listen to the science,” everybody!

According to the “listen to the science” crowd, “science” demands lockdowns. Apart from the zero connection between lockdowns and health outcomes, the bigger issue is this: “science” doesn’t tell you how you should decide between pouring all resources into COVID-19 while leaving horrific wreckage — including massive loss of life — everywhere else.

It is rank superstition to think “the science” could possibly — or is even intended to — answer a question like this.

Science can inform our decision-making, naturally, but it obviously can’t tell us what we should value or how we should prioritize our various goals.

Not to mention: these days “the science” seems to be all about pretending there are no trade-offs, no competing goals.

Yesterday I wrote to you about the schools, and the day before that about the massive spike in suicidal ideation among the youth.

The wreckage keeps piling up, and our leaders obviously have no idea what the endgame is.

What else can we do after all this fact-free nonsense except live, and ignore these people as much as we can?

If that sounds good to you, join me in my community of normal people, for learning and camaraderie:

http://www.SupportingListeners.com

Tom Woods [send him mail; visit his website] is the New York Times bestselling author of 12 books and host of the Tom Woods Show, which libertarians listen to every weekday. Get a free copy of Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About the Lockdown: A Non-Hysteric’s Guide to COVID-19.

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The Case For Lockdowns, Masks, School Closures, ‘Distancing’ Has Just Collapsed

Posted by M. C. on August 21, 2020

The whole narrative is falling apart. New studies every day are proving beyond a doubt that the measures taken worldwide – with a few exceptions – to “fight” what they claimed was a “new” coronavirus have not only failed to slow or stop the disease, they have been counterproductive. It turns out that people develop lasting T-cell immunities, that patients have been successfully treated with T-cells from asymptomatic test-positive cases, and that the virus rarely spreads outside the family setting. What are the authoritarians going to do when it is no longer possible to keep this information hidden? How will they keep people shut down. Plus today: Utah shows a way out of corona-tyranny, big party in Wuhan, they are still cooking the books, and…enemy of the week!

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‘Pandemic’ Equality: All But the Ruling Class Will Be Equal Slaves – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 15, 2020

Yes, equality is coming to America. There will be two classes of people, the ruling oligarchs at the top, and all others at the bottom. Equal masters and equal slaves living in the new world order paradigm that I call technocratic communism.

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.”

Thomas Jefferson, Jean M. Yarbrough (1963). “The Essential Jefferson”, p.130, Hackett Publishing

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/08/gary-d-barnett/pandemic-equality-all-but-the-ruling-class-will-be-equal-slaves/

By

“There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.”

~ Democracy in America”. Book by Alexis de Tocqueville. Chapter III, Part I, 1835.

The big public push, or more accurately warning, by government and media has now been ramped up to a very high-level propaganda campaign. The announced second ‘virus’ stage that has not happened yet, is being telegraphed in order to prepare the sheep for even more tyranny and police state tactics. This is meant to condition the minds of the public that a health disaster is coming, and that extreme measures will be necessary in order to protect the lowly and ignorant Americans. This is not a prediction mind you, but an absolute certainty according to the powers that control this false narrative.

The previous six months of lockdowns, isolation, quarantine, mandated mask-wearing, job loss, and economic destruction were purposely manufactured so that a planned second phase could be released on the public just as the normal flu season begins. These past six months were nothing more than a set up as a plan to weaken most of the population in this country, allowing for more sickness than normal once cold weather arrives. Those in control did this to knowingly weaken the immune systems of most all in this country, which will lead to a much higher level of sickness and disease just when the ruling class and government need it to advance their agenda of total control. Fear mongering will increase exponentially, and as the flu season advances, so will the totalitarian response by the claimed authorities, and all enforcement will become much more brutal and oppressive. One look around the world will alert any paying attention as to what is soon coming the U.S.

In Australia, police brutality and dictatorial state measures are now out of control, and that type of authoritarian madness will soon consume the U.S. Curfews in Melbourne go from 8pm to 5am, as if this fake virus just comes out at night. Cyclists are forced to have papers, park visits require permits, sniffer dogs are patrolling in public locations, and forced vaccinations are a few of the things going on today. But it gets much worse. Police have been given state authority to enter homes without permission or warrant. Unlawful stops and testing of citizens for alcohol is normal, strip-searching is becoming common in New South Wales, there is horrendous and brutal treatment, including throw downs for any not wearing a mask, and breaking out car windows and removing occupants by force are common practice. This list barely scratches the surface of what is happening and what is to come.

Travel bans are becoming universal, and Americans are getting ever closer to being fully locked inside the walls of this country. An American passport is virtually worthless now, and that was certainly one of the agenda items sought by these cretins perpetrating this fraud. The U.S. Department of ‘Homeland Security’ has extended a ban on travel with Canada and Mexico until late September, virtually shutting off North American travel.

It is important to understand that this insanity in my opinion is staged, and is not what it is claimed to be. While total deaths were similar or less in 2019 and so far in 2020, than in 2017 and 2018, the lies continue about Covid. False death certificates, hospital bribery for claiming more Covid patients, faulty testing, closings of many hospitals when claims of hospital shortages were reported, building of special medical facilities that were never used, wild exaggeration of the predicted deaths, and false causes of death attributed to people dying have been evident. Other than the lies coming from the government and the mainstream media, is there any factual evidence available that would indicate that any pandemic really exists? I have seen no convincing evidence whatsoever that would support the state narrative.

I do firmly believe that what has happened to date concerning this fraudulent crisis will pale in comparison to what is coming in the next few months. The stage is set for a much higher rate of death this winter and spring than we have seen. This has been planned, and all the measures put into place since March have dramatically weakened the health and immune systems of most all Americans. This will guarantee a more devastating flu season, and with continued isolation practices, mask wearing, quarantine, job loss, poverty, and much increased suicide, these higher death numbers will be falsely blamed on coronavirus, and used to bring about a dictatorial police state. And even in this chaotic time coming, the claimed rich elite and their pawns will continue to gain wealth, while the rest of us lose everything. The great wealth transfer will continue while the world suffers under the thumb of tyranny.

In the midst of all this, there will be a very major distraction that will turn this country upside down, and cause much more civil unrest, looting, property destruction, and extreme violence. That distraction is another worthless presidential election that may or may not ever get settled. Regardless of the outcome, the division and hatred among us will only escalate; causing more fear, panic, and savage behavior that could lead to outright martial law. This is what the future holds if this planned virus coup is allowed to continue.

The next round of this planned pandemic will bring with it much more aggressive enforcement by the state goons. There will be many more arrests, increasing fines for any behavioral missteps, much more police brutality, and very controlled lockdowns. Concentration-like centers will be used to isolate those that test positive for Covid that are subject to quarantine, families will be separated, forced isolation will dramatically increase, and this will lead to the release of a poisonous vaccination claimed as the way out. This untested vaccine will be deadly, could have any of several unknown agents inserted, tracking capability, or invasive nano-particle materials designed for gene-altering or more extensive population control. Regardless of any side effects or harm caused by a toxic vaccine, those companies developing, designing, and delivering this concoction will be ‘legally’ exempt from prosecution or monetary liability.

Yes, equality is coming to America. There will be two classes of people, the ruling oligarchs at the top, and all others at the bottom. Equal masters and equal slaves living in the new world order paradigm that I call technocratic communism.

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.”

Thomas Jefferson, Jean M. Yarbrough (1963). “The Essential Jefferson”, p.130, Hackett Publishing

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Bad medicine: Fauci’s HCQ Waterloo – American Thinker

Posted by M. C. on August 8, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/bad_medicine_on_hcq_faucis_waterloo.html

By Monica Showalter

Dr. Anthony Fauci has been hailed in the press as the nation’s top infectious disease expert.  He’s been feted with presidential honors and high praise for his medical acumen.  His policy disagreements with President Trump, supposedly as the voice of “science,” have made him a hero on the left.  Such laurels and the implied power conveyed have led to some weird side-effects — such as his image featured on ladies’ underwear and declarations that he’s the sexiest man alive.

He’s still being posterized on the left with calls to “Thank Dr. Fauci.”  Here’s one:


Screenshot, banner ad.

But it’s about time this idol topples, based on this summary about Fauci’s startlingly bad medicine and bad medical policy on COVID, which has in fact cost thousands of lives.  And yes, he is very specifically to blame.

Virologist Steven Hatfill, writing in RealClearPolitics, summed up just how disastrous Fauci has been for America’s COVID response, based on Fauci’s suppression of evidence about hydroxychloroquine, the safest and most effective treatment for COVID based on all reputable studies, and the political power he’s used to halt its treatment even as the rest of the world got well from the inexpensive medication’s use.

The “Fauci Strategy” was to keep early infected patients quarantined at home without treatment until they developed a shortness of breath and had to be admitted to a hospital. Then they would they [sic] be given hydroxychloroquine. The Food and Drug Administration cluelessly agreed to this doctrine and it stated in its hydroxychloroquine Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that “hospitalized patients were likely to have a greater prospect of benefit (compared to ambulatory patients with mild illness).”

In reality just the opposite was true. This was a tragic mistake by Fauci and FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn and it was a mistake that would cost the lives of thousands of Americans in the days to come.

Other countries got well from COVID.  But America didn’t.  America today is still floundering around on lockdowns, re-lockdowns, its schools shut, its election growing dubious.  And the persistence of the pandemic can directly be traced to the incompetent, bad medical decisions of Dr. Anthony Fauci, which have left America a COVID wasteland while the rest of the world got well.

America’s death rate from COVID in fact is shockingly high, hitting 150,000 as of July 29, while other countries, which have also been hit by the pandemic, such as Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Turkey, Morocco, Malaysia, and Costa Rica, plus European countries such as Switzerland, have got the matter well under control, with no comparable death counts.  The difference is in their use of HCQ, or hydroxychloroquine.  And those are mostly well developed or high-middle-income countries.  What’s really shocking is that third-world hellholes are doing better, too, if they can get their hands on and use HCQ.  The U.S., under Fauci, has been left in the dust.

Here in our country, Fauci continued to ignore the ever accumulating and remarkable early-use data on hydroxychloroquine and he became focused on a new antiviral compound named remdesivir. This was an experimental drug that had to be given intravenously every day for five days. It was never suitable for major widespread outpatient or at-home use as part of a national pandemic plan. We now know now that remdesivir has no effect on overall COVID patient mortality and it costs thousands of dollars per patient.

Hydroxychloroquine, by contrast, costs 60 cents a tablet, it can be taken at home, it fits in with the national pandemic plan for respiratory viruses, and a course of therapy simply requires swallowing three tablets in the first 24 hours followed by one tablet every 12 hours for five days.

There are now 53 studies that show positive results of hydroxychloroquine in COVID infections. There are 14 global studies that show neutral or negative results — and 10 of them were of patients in very late stages of COVID-19, where no antiviral drug can be expected to have much effect. Of the remaining four studies, two come from the same University of Minnesota author. The other two are from the faulty Brazil paper, which should be retracted, and the fake Lancet paper, which was.

Hatfill points out that media malfeasance, badmouthing the use of HCQ, is an important aspect of why Fauci has gotten away with such shockingly bad medicine.  The press loves Fauci, and Fauci knows how to use the press.  Against all evidence and study after study, the press continues to report HCQ as “dangerous” and patients are going without and dying as a result.  Hatfill writes:

This is ground-shaking news. Why is it not being widely reported? Why is the American media trying to run the U.S. pandemic response with its own misinformation?

The ultimate culprit here is Fauci.  Everyone else worldwide gets well, while here in the States, under his policy recommendations and touting of bad medicine, we continue to wallow in the pandemic, the bodies piling up.  Why isn’t this ground-shaking news, too?  This isn’t making America great again; this is New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo seeding the nursing homes with COVID patients cubed, tremendously bad policy that is literally costing Americans their lives, and all for political purposes.

It’s probably going to be hard for President Trump to find a way to fire this guy, but the picture emerging is extremely disturbing.  Fauci’s suppression of hydroxychloroquine studies, his odd devotion to the new and profitable drug Remdesivir (which we have noted many NIH officials hold monetary stakes in), and Fauci’s earlier papers from years back touting the importance of hydroxychloroquine on other kinds of COVID viruses paint a damning picture of what is going on, a horrible confluence of financial interests and a desire to extend the pandemic to Get Trump at a huge cost of lives.  It’s time to start thinking about how to get him out of there, fire him, bring in someone serious about using the widely known global knowledge about HCQ who’s willing to move on it.  This much incompetence is doing tremendous damage to President Trump and American people, both lives and economy.  Get him out of there, he now stands exposed as a complete incompetent and has got to go.  If Harry Truman could fire the vaunted Douglas MacArthur, Trump can fire Fauci, too.

 

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