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Posts Tagged ‘Orwellian’

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The Freedom To Pursue Happiness – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on May 28, 2020

Please don’t misunderstand me. I recognize the scientific value of personal efforts to control contagion. But under the Constitution, these social-distancing, wear-your-mask, shut-your-business, stay-at-home edicts constitute mere recommendations that should induce rational voluntary compliance, because the government in America is without lawful power to compel compliance.

The governors complain about resistance. They need to know that Americans will resist efforts to interfere in behavior that remains as moral, natural, lawful and constitutional as it was 60 days ago.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/05/andrew-p-napolitano/the-freedom-to-pursue-happiness/

By

The governors of all 50 states, and the mayors of many large cities, have assumed unto themselves the powers to restrict private personal choices and lawful public behavior in an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19.

They have done so not by enforcing previously existing legislation but by crafting their own executive orders, styling those orders as if they were laws, using state and local police to enforce those so-called laws and — presumably when life returns to normal and the courts reopen — prosecuting the alleged offenders in court.

It is hard to believe that any judge in America would permit a criminal trial of any person for violating a standard of behavior that has not been enacted into law by a legislature. We know this because under our system of representative government, separated powers and guaranteed liberties, only the legislative branch can craft laws and assign punishments for noncompliance. This is Constitutional Law 101. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has written that the executive branch cannot enforce a law that it has written. If it does, we will have approached tyranny.

Have we approached tyranny already?

During the past eight weeks, governors and mayors have closed most businesses, public venues and houses of worship, prohibited public assembly and restricted travel — all of which they have unilaterally decreed to be nonessential.

In his terrifying novel “1984” — which posits a future of total control of all persons by the government and total control of the government by one political party — George Orwell argued that he who controls the meaning of words controls the laws as well.

That Orwellian truism has been manifested like never before here in America, where executive branch officeholders have used state and local police to restrain people from engaging in private and public behavior which they concede was lawful two months ago because today it is not deemed “essential.”

Frankly, I am surprised at the ferocity of police enforcement and the lameness of police compliance. The police have taken the same oaths to uphold the same Bill of Rights — it’s not the Bill of Safety; it’s the Bill of Rights — as have all other officeholders. The police also know that it is unlawful for them to obey an unlawful order, particularly when they use force.

The lockdown orders are all unlawful because none of them — none — has been enacted by a legislature, and all of them — all — interfere with fundamental liberties, each of which is guaranteed — guaranteed — by the Constitution.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I recognize the scientific value of personal efforts to control contagion. But under the Constitution, these social-distancing, wear-your-mask, shut-your-business, stay-at-home edicts constitute mere recommendations that should induce rational voluntary compliance, because the government in America is without lawful power to compel compliance.

The governors complain about resistance. They need to know that Americans will resist efforts to interfere in behavior that remains as moral, natural, lawful and constitutional as it was 60 days ago.

Last week, President Donald Trump, sounding fed up with gubernatorial lockdown orders, declared that religious worship is essential — meaning, in his opinion, all houses of worship should be opened — and he offered that he was prepared to “override” any governors who disagreed with him.

When he realized that he lacked any authority to override even unlawful gubernatorial decrees, he dispatched the Department of Justice to begin filing challenges to governors in federal courts and to argue that constitutional freedoms are being impaired by the states.

I applaud this, but it is too little, too late. Where was the DOJ when Catholic priests were threatened with arrest for saying Mass or distributing palms and when Jewish rabbis were put in COVID-19-infested jails for holding funerals? At all these religious events, folks freely chose to exercise their freedom to worship; and to take their chances.

These DOJ interventions provoked the question: Who should decide what goods, services or venues are essential — the states or the federal government? The question is Orwellian, as the answer is: neither of them. The government in America — state or federal — has no power and no right to determine what goods, services and venues are essential.

Those determinations have been for individuals to make since 1776, and those individual choices have been constitutionally protected from the feds since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791 and from the states since the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.

What is essential to the laborer or student or housewife may not be essential to the former Goldman Sachs partner who was elected governor of New Jersey, and who decreed last week, “It shall be the duty of every person or entity in this State… to cooperate fully” with his orders, or essential to the ideologue who is mayor of the Big Apple and who, for all his professed liberality, threatened to close permanently — permanently — businesses and houses of worship that flaunt his guidelines.

A duty is undertaken voluntarily or by nature, not by executive command, Governor Murphy. And the government cannot take property away from its owners except for a legitimate public use and only for just compensation, Mayor de Blasio.

Governors and mayors can make all the dictatorial pronouncements and threats that they wish. But they cannot use public assets to enforce them. And when they seek to use force, those from whom they seek it should decline the offer.

In America, we decide for ourselves what produces happiness. We have never delegated to the government — ever — the power to make personal choices for us.

And some of us are willing to take chances and even do “nonessential” things. The essence of the freedoms for which we have fought since 1776 is the liberty to be ourselves.

Be seeing you

 

 

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“Don’t Trace Me, Bro” – Just Say No to Contact Tracing – Gold Goats ‘n Guns

Posted by M. C. on April 30, 2020

Unfortunately, we live in a world today where the fearful are empowered by the powerful to mob the non-compliant. COVID-19 isn’t the plague folks. If you think it’s the crisis you should be fearful of I urge you to seek therapy not the false security of a government tracking app.

Matthew Gould also disclosed plans to log the location of whenever two or more people are in close proximity for minutes at a time.

That will disturb privacy campaigners. Very Stalin-esque

https://tomluongo.me/2020/04/28/dont-trace-me-bro-just-say-no-contact-tracing/

Author: Tom Luongo

Contact Tracing? Really? That’s the next big government program to push for total surveillance over our lives. Now the real fallout from the Coronapocalypse comes to light.

The very people who created a fake pandemic out of faulty statistics, media fear-pimping and the rankest of propaganda are now pushing the total surveillance state to protect us (them?) from the next crisis.

James Corbett from the Corbett Report just published an excellent video discussing ‘contact tracing’ as promulgated by (who else?) the Clinton Global Initiative to create an army of new Brown Shirts to assist our wise and benevolent leaders in managing us like livestock.

James is urging us not to use their Orwellian term, and I agree with him. But the best way to do that is to make fun of it and them.

I propose just looking at them and saying, “Don’t Trace Me, Bro.”

As always when they want to herd us towards a terrible idea they first have to come up with a harmless sounding euphemism for it. Either that or just call it a war that we’re going to fight and win together, you know, for kids!

But this was always the plan with this virus. We can speculate as to why this has been done, why it was directed from the commanding heights of our society but, in the end, that speculation is irrelevant.

This is happening, it’s here and they are now working to square the circle. The goal is to finish off the last vestiges of anonymity and individuality started with the destruction of financial privacy during the Clinton Adminstration, which was wrapped in the classic government phrases “Know Your Customer” and “Anti-Money Laundering”

Now those sets of rules which got ramped up after 9/11 dominate the global financial landscape.

But, let’s look at what’s happened with COVID-19 step-by-step.

First, a virus shows up in China which people in the highest levels of our government were briefed about as early as November, if Pepe Escobar’s research is to be believed.

The gold standard remains the ABC News report according to which intel collected in November 2019 by the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), a subsidiary of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was already warning about a new virulent contagion getting out of hand in Wuhan, based on “detailed analysis of intercepted communications and satellite imagery”.

An unnamed source told ABC, “analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event”, adding the intel was “briefed multiple times” to the DIA, the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even the White House.

Next China, the gold standard for the Orwellian Panopticon, proceeds to use that Panopticon to prove to the world how effective government can be in containing a deadly plague.

That model, which runs fundamentally counter to billions of years of evolution and basid immunology, is then propagated around the Western world to combat COVID-19, a disease which has a mortality rate similar to the annual flu, to shut down those economies exacerbating a financial crisis already fully underway.

This destroys the lives of hundreds of millions of people. It creates economic dislocations that make the Great Depression look like a mild recession.

In places like Italy, France and Spain where youth unemployment has been in double digits for more than a decade, the lock down was used as a way to tamp down social unrest, as they were hot beds for opposition to inept and increasingly fascistic governments.

In the U.S., a country ruled by old, ideologically-possessed and corrupt Boomers who have been in a heightened state of fear since Donald Trump was elected saw the opportunity to create the worst possible outcome in places like New York and California.

Governors in blue states seized power they didn’t legally have and cried for help they didn’t need.

And the confusion and disinformation about the virus created so much fear people willingly huddled in their homes hoping the angel of death passed them by with nothing more to do than be glued to the death counter in a desperate bid to stay informed about the science.

But there weren’t two million dead in the U.S. There’s around 50,000 and those death statistics are very speicous since the people reporting them have motive, means and opportunity to inflate them to get Federal aid, advance their political agendas now on full display and cover their asses.

So, now ‘contact tracing’ which is just a euphemism for total surveillance. But they are admitting that they can’t do it themselves. They need help. In totalitarian governments like the U.K., they’ll have an app in a couple of weeks.

Matthew Gould also disclosed plans to log the location of whenever two or more people are in close proximity for minutes at a time.

That will disturb privacy campaigners.

Ya think?

Mr Gould told the Science and Technology Committee the app would be “technically ready” for deployment in “two to three weeks” – but made it clear it was only one part of the strategy to emerge from lockdown and would involve a none-too-subtle marketing campaign.

“If you want to protect the NHS and stop it being overwhelmed and, at the same time, want to get the economy moving, then the app is going to be part of an essential part of a strategy for doing that,” he said.

China already has this. All across the enlightened West countries will now recruit tens of thousands of ‘contact tracers’ to go out and build their network for them, just like Gavin Newsome and Andrew Cuomo discussed with Bill Clinton in the video linked above.

And since there are now tens of millions of people out of work desperate for a job of any sort finding recruits will be easy.

See how this works?

First you destroy people’s lives, then you print trillions in funny money to bail out the inept and continue paying the enforcers, ensuring they are fed. And then when desperation reaches its peak you create a new government program and turn people into snitches to ensure compliance.

We’re going to empower the worst busybodies who are already insane with fear to run around collecting data for the government.

All in the name of getting the economy back up and running!

I’m pretty sure when I read The Scarlet Letter in high school we didn’t consider Hester Prynne to be the bad guy. Because the person who is COVID-19 positive will now have a big red “CV” on them which will limit their ability to partake in society.

The next stage will be to force them to lock themselves down in isolation or face the depredations of the State. And even if we begin to ignore such insanity the next step will be to look the other way when the contact tracers become belligerent.

This is all about keeping everyone in a heightened state of fear at all times. The Karens will bee worried about a stupid germ and everyone else will be worried about what the Karens will do.

Because what good is this app if it doesn’t report you to the authorities who know where you are.

So the solution to a virus and the incompetence of our governments is to turn busy bodies into brown shirts and COVID positives into social pariahs.

Do you realize what happens when you don’t pay a parking ticket now? Eventually your licence gets suspended, then your car insurance gets canceled. If you don’t turn your tag in for not having insurance then you are risking jail time when you get stopped by the police. They arrest you for driving on a suspended licence, impound your car, and the entire ordeal becomes a bureaucratic nightmare.

The moral of the story? Pay your parking ticket, obviously.

But not because you were a bad person or committed a heinous crime. But because you broke the rules. If you don’t follow the State’s rules, no matter how petty, no matter how asinine you will be punished to the full extent of the law.

Do you really think this ‘contact tracing’ system won’t end up in the same kind of hell?

Now you’re a documented threat to other people’s lives! You’re an evil spreader, man! Think of the children!

The State is only good at two things. Killing people and creating perverse incentives. And if this isn’t a classic case of creating the perverse incentive of destroying civilization in order to save it I don’t know what is?

This is the real danger of 5G technology. It isn’t China having a backdoor embedded by Huawei, it is the State having the ability to blanket the world in high bandwidth snooping devices everywhere that people congregate.

Their system is failing before our eyes. It’s a system born of corrupt money begetting ever greater institutional corruption. They wouldn’t be pushing for this total surveillance if they weren’t uniquely paranoid about our readiness to throw them overboard.

They want us snitching on each other and suspect of each other. This is the most pernicious form of social control ever devised, to distrust basic human contact and interaction because there are germs in the world.

It’s time to end the mass hallucination that we’ve never dealt with something like this before. The mass branding of this COVID-19 as the plague is laughable and the push for global surveillance is pathetic.

Unfortunately, we live in a world today where the fearful are empowered by the powerful to mob the non-compliant. COVID-19 isn’t the plague folks. If you think it’s the crisis you should be fearful of I urge you to seek therapy not the false security of a government tracking app.

Be seeing you

 

 

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Prepare To Have Your Worldview Obliterated – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2020

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

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

author: Caitlin Johnstone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And these are just the steps we know about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

_________________________________

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

 

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Sin Taxes & Other Orwellian Methods of Compliance That Feed the Government’s Greed

Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2019

Everything you own can be seized by the government under one pretext or another (civil asset forfeiture, unpaid taxes, eminent domain, so-called public interest, etc.).

“When we raise taxes on the poor, it’s good because then the poor will live longer because they can’t afford as many things that kill them,” stated Bloomberg.

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/sin_taxes_other_orwellian_methods_of_compliance_that_feed_the_governments_greed

By John W. Whitehead

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”—C.S. Lewis

“Taxman,” the only song written by George Harrison to open one of the Beatles’ albums (it featured on the band’s 1966 Revolver album), is a snarling, biting, angry commentary on government greed and how little control “we the taxpayers” have over our lives and our money.

If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street,

If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.

If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat,

If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.

Don’t ask me what I want it for

If you don’t want to pay some more

‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman.

When the Beatles finally started earning enough money from their music to place them in the top tax bracket, they found the British government only-too-eager to levy a supertax on them of more than 90%.

Here in America, things aren’t much better.

More than two centuries after our ancestors went to war over their abused property rights, we’re once again being subjected to taxation without any real representation, all the while the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little concern for the plight of its citizens.

Because the government’s voracious appetite for money, power and domination has grown out of control, its agents have devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees, and taxes disguised as tolls, speeding tickets and penalties.

With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.

Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we’re getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, and no real property rights, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn.

Think about it.

Everything you own can be seized by the government under one pretext or another (civil asset forfeiture, unpaid taxes, eminent domain, so-called public interest, etc.). Read the rest of this entry »

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Uncle Sam’s Latest Plan to Spy on Air Travelers | The Nestmann Group

Posted by M. C. on May 29, 2019

These days, you can wind up on a watchlist for merely complaining to a TSA agent. Getting on a watchlist doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be able to board your flight, but it will result in delays at the airport.

https://www.nestmann.com/uncle-sams-latest-plan-to-spy-on-air-travelers

By Mark Nestmann

When you arrive at the airport to board a flight, do you have any legitimate “expectation of privacy?” Uncle Sam and the Orwellian Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) would like you to think you don’t.

I beg to differ.

It’s not enough to be poked, prodded, and groped by bored TSA agents as we pass through airport checkpoints. The agency is now telling us – falsely – that we need TSA-compliant identification documents to board our flights.

To make sure those documents properly identify us, the TSA is rolling out face recognition systems at major airports. The goal is to use biometric technology to identify 100% of passengers boarding international flights by 2021.

The airlines are only too happy to cooperate. Delta, JetBlue, British Airways, Lufthansa, and American Airlines are integrating face recognition into their check-in process. Naturally, it’s pitched as a matter of “security” along with “passenger convenience.” In some cases, you needn’t even show your passport or boarding pass to board your flight. You just stare into a camera.

This practice became much better known a couple months ago when a JetBlue passenger who went through this process tweeted: Did I consent to this?…

The inconvenience and privacy invasion we suffer when we fly might be more palatable if there were any evidence that it’s effective. But there isn’t any. In 2015, the TSA sent undercover agents to dozens of America’s largest airports to test security protocols. Shockingly, the agents were able to smuggle explosives or weapons through security checkpoints 95% of the time. The TSA failed in 67 out of 70 tests.

Two years later, screeners again failed to detect 95% of explosives and drugs in an undercover test at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Indeed, evidence suggests that the TSA has never intercepted anyone intending to hijack a plane at an airport checkpoint.

This is the system you finance with $7 billion of your tax dollars each year. It’s worse than you ever imagined. It is, in the words of security expert Bruce Schneier, “security theater” at its finest…

For domestic flights, no law or regulation prohibits you from traveling anonymously. When privacy activists filed a Freedom of Information request for the TSA’s records of travelers who show up at an airport checkpoint without ID, they learned that more than 98% of them were able to board their flights. That means the TSA is lying when it posts signs like this one warning passengers that if they want to board a flight after October 1, 2020, using a driver’s license as identification, it must be compliant with the Real ID Act…

You can get on a plane without ID only if you print your boarding pass at home and proceed directly to the gate without checked luggage. Once you’re at the gate on a domestic flight, you won’t need to show ID to board the plane – just your boarding pass. If you have checked luggage, though, it’s unlikely that a ticket agent will accept it without ID…

These days, you can wind up on a watchlist for merely complaining to a TSA agent. Getting on a watchlist doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be able to board your flight, but it will result in delays at the airport…

Be seeing you

Tag

 

 

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What the McCain Eulogies Tell Us About the Media and the Regime | Tom Woods

Posted by M. C. on August 27, 2018

https://tomwoods.com/what-the-mccain-eulogies-tell-us-about-the-media-and-the-regime/

John McCain is dead.

People tell me I should not criticize him right now.

I do think some people are behaving in bad taste. But I do not think I am prohibited from making sober remarks at a moment when so many Americans, and the opinion molders who tell them what to think, are getting ludicrously carried away.

The phenomenon we are witnessing is so Orwellian that I can’t resist exploring it. I am less concerned with criticizing McCain — there will be ample time for that — than I am with trying to understand the regime under which we live, and the media lackeys that glorify it.

The tributes to McCain from the major newspapers are so over the top that there’s something more going on here than the perfunctory respect the media shows for most deceased politicians.

They will not be speaking this way about Pat Buchanan — a real maverick, who was the first conservative I ever saw who broke with both parties (that’s what a maverick does) to point out that the sanctions on Iraq were creating a humanitarian catastrophe that no moral person could support (that’s what an actual conservative says). Read the rest of this entry »

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The No Fly License – EPautos – Libertarian Car Talk

Posted by M. C. on August 23, 2018

The REAL ID is an upgraded internal passport, as well as an ear-tagging for the populace. The Soviet Union under Stalin used to issue internal passports; you could not travel from Moscow to another city, for example, without the passport.

https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2018/08/21/the-no-fly-license/

The Orwellian spin cycle is picking up speed.

From “parking services” – i.e., the government worker who puts parking tickets under your car’s windshield wiper – to the “shared responsibility payments” being extorted by the IRS on behalf of the health insurance mafia as punishment for declining to be mulcted by the insurance mafia – to the “upgraded” driver’s licenses being pushed on people, without which you’ll be degraded by not only being  denied permission to leave the country, you’ll be denied permission to travel (by air) within the country.

You’ll also be denied permission to enter “secure” federal buildings – though that one’s not so onerous because who wants to enter federal buildings. Most of us enter them because we have to – so there is one upside to thee “upgraded” licenses.

Which are only incidentally driver’s licenses.

They are really national ID cards. Read the rest of this entry »

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