Credit Report Repair NewsUnited States Credit Report Repair News. Top Stories to help consumers fix bad credit, gain higher credit score, remove bankruptcy, free annual Equifax, TransUnion, Experian credit report. Free Credit Repair Counseling | (888) 502-1260
|
Table of Contents
|
We Won! Trader Joe’s was the First Crack in the ArmorMonday 17 May 2021 01:23 AM UTC-05
For more than a year, Trader Joe’s has been a particularly troubling store for some readers of these pages.
Trader Joe’s has some excellent quality products at a consumer friendly price with a quirky corporate style. What’s not to like about such a place?
When corona communism was implemented after the Ides of March 2020, we saw exactly what was not to like about such a place.
Trader Joe’s became one of many private companies that enforced the terrible one-sized-fits-all health mandates, including the CDC’s April 3, 2020, face mask order, the single most powerful tool of 2020.
The very concept of private property is further perverted when such behavior takes place as private companies enforce illegitimate government edict.
It didn’t stop there. Through participation in trade organizations, the executives of Trader Joe’s and other companies, called for even more stringent across-the-board policies from government. They didn’t just enable, they didn’t just enforce, they didn’t just encourage, they demanded even more tyranny!
To the credit of Trader Joe’s, their corporate policy always left room for individual exemptions among customers. However, in practice, this was very difficult to invoke. The Trader Joe’s horror stories are legion, and some of the worst of the past year.
In some locations, a customer practically had to have a law degree to get their face mask exemption policy honored.
The easy breezy decentralized corporate style of Trader Joe’s quickly devolved to utter tyrrany as managers were more likely to follow the directives of the CNN chyron than the actual corporate policy.
That once friendly “crew member” who always gave you an extra big smile at checkout was suddenly a mask Nazi of the tallest order.
I mean it when I say “Nazi.” A defining characteristic of nazism was the fusion of state and corporate power. Nazis needed corporate cooperation for their efforts to take hold, just as the corona communists of the Ides of March 2020 did.
Executives at Trader Joe’s overwhelmingly looked the other way as stores enacted the most preposterous policies.
Example: an employee polling other customers on whether a medically exempt customer looked like someone who should be medically exempt from a mask and then inciting customers to corner and angrily confront the unmasked shopper about that.
This kind of sick behavior was happening to grandmothers! Who could possibly justify an employee cornering a shopper in the spices section and gathering together an angry mob of customers?
Regional Vice Presidents encouraged the tyranny further, giving full support to such behavior and being so full of hubris as to actually put such support in writing. That level of hubris speaks volumes about an organization in a way little else can. There was utter disconnect from reality and total contempt for anyone who disagreed. As is so often true, pride precedes a fall.
On April 29, 2020, I sent a strongly worded letter on this topic of their rampant abuse of costumers to Trader Joe’s CEO Daniel Bane.
Just to make sure the letter was not ignored, my team and I followed up that letter with a press release further pointing to Trader Joe’s illegal and unethical discrimination.
It is the job of corporate communications departments to take note of the chatter about their company in the media and online. In such an environment, press releases can be a helpful exclamation point on a sentence that needs to be spoken with emphasis: Don’t tread on us.
If done right, both the CEOs office and the communications team end up going frantically through the company figuring out how to address those concerns.
This particular press release was picked up and reprinted by at least 109 media sources that day. The Trader Joe’s communications team probably noticed.
Beginning the very next day, the toughest Trader Joe’s stores in the country stopped their ridiculous level of radical enforcement. More than a year’s worth of the most unceasing awful behavior toward customers literally stopped overnight.
It was so rampant that I used to receive several complaints about Trader Joe’s some weeks. As of April 30, more than two weeks ago, I have not received a single new complaint. This was not only what I was observing through correspondences, but my team and I also have folks patrolling the world as health freedom inspectors keeping an eye on tyrannical corporate enforcement of illegitimate government policy. These health freedom inspectors reported similar results. Additionally, I myself am constantly out testing techniques and probing for cracks in the system. I firsthand observed an absolute night and day shift on April 30, repeatedly confirmed in the days thereafter.
I think we had their attention.
In the days ahead, I encouraged people to reach out to the Trader Joe’s CEO at his personal email address as follow up to the letter.
Hundreds of readers of these pages did that. This activity peaked with some 300 emails being sent to the CEO on a single day, Thursday, May 13, 2021.
I was CC’d or BCC’d on about a hundred of them that day.
This wasn’t sent to info@traderjoes.com. This was sent to the CEO. 300 emails to a single inbox can be hard to ignore.
What I wouldn’t give to have been a fly on the wall.
The next morning, on Friday, May 14, 2021, Trader Joe’s publicly altered their policy.
They dropped all face mask mandates for customers.
To save face, they cited a CDC guidance from the previous day about vaccines and face masks. They claimed that they would only allow entrance to unmasked customers who had been vaccinated, a detail that they publicly have stated they will not be checking for.
They crumbled.
I knew they were weak, these tyrants, I knew these orders were getting ready to crumble, but I didn’t realize exactly how weak they were. They are very weak and the proper response to weakness from an enemy of freedom is to fight all the harder, until they look back at 2020 and say “I’m never gonna try that again.”
Despite the corporate spin and gobbledygook, the truth of the matter is this:
On May 14, 2021, you and I, who have long been fighting this in ways both big and small, won a decisive victory, as we took down the Trader Joe’s face mask order. We left Trader Joe’s with no other alternative. We made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Dozens of companies immediately followed.
This is a huge victory, and it cannot stop here.
Trader Joe’s plans to leave their employees masked. They also plan to keep their “only the vaccinated can be unmasked policy” in place on paper. If allowed to remain in place, it will be only a matter of time before it returns with a vengeance. The next time it is enforced, we shouldn’t expect it to be as generous and easy to defeat as it was this time.
Therefore, we must stop the forced masking of Trader Joe’s employees and we must remove all mention of any government-advised health mandate as a condition of entering a business.
It is not the place of government to place health mandates on us, and it is certainly not the right of corporations to enforce such illegitimate abuses of government power on us. It is illegitimate abuse of government power no matter who enforces it: your neighbor, your grocer, your child’s school, your mailman, or your own mother.
We must truly redouble our efforts.
Time is of the essence. We have a very short window of opportunity to defeat these one-size-fits-all health mandates.
The annual flu season will begin in late-September. Respiratory virus related illnesses and deaths will increase and the fear campaign will intensify. Standard deaths that take place every year from respiratory viruses will be blamed on something scary. “Vaccine” deaths will be blamed on something scary and will certainly not be blamed on vaccines. We will have quite a fight on our hands.
If these one-size-fits-all approaches are still with us and normalized in September 2021, there will be no stopping them. They will be with us a very long time and we really will have entered the new normal. We must return society to normal by the end of this summer, or we risk losing society as we once knew it.
We must roll society back far before 2019, to regain freedoms we were once certain were gone forever, and we must let no vestige of 2020 remain.
That is the work that is ahead of us. That is the work we need accomplished immediately and by September 2021 at the latest, for if we do not, we will go into a far more pernicious battle for our civilization and will be doing so with the forces of freedom so grossly unprepared. That is something we cannot let happen.
I need you to do one thing right now to help me accomplish that, I need you to sign up at RealStevo.com, and I will enlist you in helping me take down these orders. In signing up, you will be joining an army of activists. The army of activists who read my work, who were so responsive, and who hit Trader Joe’s hard and repeatedly made such a difference in shifting this policy. We have much more work ahead of us.
Then I need you to share this article.
With literally 20 minutes of work a day from a dedicated minority, taking targeted action, we can take down these orders.
If you need pointers on how not to wear a mask every again read my bestselling “Face Masks in One Lesson.” If you would like similar witting free of charge, check out my LewRockwell.com writing on the topic, but really what it comes down to is insisting in your own life that you will live life by a higher standard: that is what saying “No!” to the mask amounts to.
We can do this.
We are winning.
They are desperate.
Victory is at hand.
And now we must close on our victory.
If you’re a closer I need you.
Who is with me? The post We Won! Trader Joe’s was the First Crack in the Armor appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Big Government and Big InflationMonday 17 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
April’s 4.2 percent past year increase in the Consumer Price Index is not likely to dissuade the Federal Reserve from continuing its policy of near-zero interest rates. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell believes the rising prices are just a temporary phenomenon caused by the ending of lockdowns releasing pent-up consumer demand. Powell may be right that the ending of lockdowns would inevitably be accompanied by a rise in prices. However, this is just the latest reason the Fed has given for putting off increasing interest rates. Powell does not want to admit that the real reason the Fed will continue to keep rates low is that increasing rates will cause the federal government’s interest payments to rise to unsustainable levels. One way the Fed increases the money supply — and thus lowers interest rates — is by purchasing US Treasury securities. These purchases increase demand for US government debt, keeping government’s borrowing costs low. An expansionary monetary policy thus enables increased federal spending and deficits. Since the lockdowns, the Fed has worked overtime to monetize federal debt, doubling its holdings of Treasury securities. A Truth in Accounting report from April concluded the real federal debt is 123 trillion dollars — over four times larger than the 28 trillion dollars “official” debt. The higher debt calculation includes the federal government’s unfunded liabilities. The biggest unfunded liabilities are the 55 trillion dollars in promised but unfunded Medicare benefits and the 41 trillion dollars in promised but unfunded Social Security benefits. Congress could transition away from entitlement and welfare programs without harming current or soon-to-be beneficiaries by cutting spending on militarism and corporate welfare. Part of the savings from these cuts could be used to pay down the debt, and part could be used to provide payments for current and soon-to-be beneficiaries of government programs while we transition to a free market. Unfortunately, there is not much appetite in Congress for spending cuts. The main Democratic criticisms of President Biden’s 1.52 trillion dollars budget, which increases spending by 8.4 percent, are that Biden is not proposing bigger increases in spending and debt, or in taxes on “the rich.” Biden’s budget increases are in addition to the trillions in other spending Biden is pursuing, including related to Covid, infrastructure, and his “American Families Plan.”
Some conservatives have even embraced the madness of Modern Monetary Theory. These conservatives are urging people to stop worrying about spending and debt and instead figure out how to use Fed-financed government spending to advance conservative ends. The refusal of Congress to cut spending means the Fed will keep increasing its balance sheet in an effort to monetize skyrocketing debt. Eventually, the increasing debt and inflation will lead to a major economic meltdown. The meltdown will likely include a rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status. The only way to avoid the crash is to spread the truth among enough people to force Congress to reverse course. Early steps in reversing course are blocking Biden’s big spending plans and passing Audit the Fed so the American people can finally know the truth about the Federal Reserve’s actions. The post Big Government and Big Inflation appeared first on LewRockwell. |
The Perfidious Dr. FauciMonday 17 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Rarely do one of our overlords ever get raked over in Congress. Even then, it’s mostly for political theatre. The front man for the entire infectious disease industry who has conspired with vaccine makers to usher in the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic is being pilloried in the court of public opinion these days. What took so long? When is somebody going to fire Anthony Fauci? Maybe, like the banks, he is too big to fail. There is strong talk on the floor of Congress that the National Institutes Of Infectious Disease, and its director Dr. Anthony Fauci in particular, indirectly underwrote “gain of function” tests in Wuhan, China, that resulted in the COVID-19 coronavirus mutation that allegedly escaped laboratory confinement in late 2019 to engulf the world in a viral pandemic of unprecedented proportion. The initial research was conducted by Dr. Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina that was halted in a moratorium over safety concerns. That same lab received many NIH grants. Congressman Rand Paul rakes Lord Fauci over these “gain of function” tests. You can listen to the denials and doublespeak by Dr. Fauci, including “It was not done,” and “Let me explain why it was done.” Whether the virus originated from bat caves in China or not, it is an unequivocal fact a US grant indirectly funded coronavirus experiments in China. The Eco Health Alliance investigator assigned to check on the above allegation was in partnership with the lab in Wuhan, which, as Congressman Rand Paul asserts, looks like a coverup. Even scientists from Stanford and MIT have signed a letter that the idea COVID-19 escaped out of a laboratory in Wuhan, China, cannot be dismissed and should be investigated. The seeds for COVID-19 began were planted long before the pandemic But this COVID-19 saga goes back to 2017 when Dr. Fauci made a statement that was not even a veiled claim, it was an overt threat. In January of 2017 Dr. Fauci, concerned his institute wasn’t going to get funding he demanded, literally threatened the President of the United States that a surprise infectious disease would erupt during his Presidency if the money didn’t materialize. USA TODAY fact- checked this statement and found it to be true. In 2018 Dr. Fauci doubled-down on his threat, that an infection called Disease X, would kill 200 million. Dr. Fauci demanded $7.5 billion to prevent it. Dr. Fauci was quoted to say X meant “unexpected.” Fauci mum on co-infection Then when COVID-19 began to sweep across the globe, Dr. Fauci seemed to forget his prior claim that it wasn’t a virus alone that has caused the 1918 Spanish flu, but a virus combined with a bacterial infection (tuberculosis and/or staphylococcus) that killed millions, a fact he hasn’t re-uttered since the COVID-19 pandemic was announced in early 2020. Maybe that is why so many deaths go unexplained even after vaccination for COVID-19. Other pathogens are involved. Vaccines narrowly targeted to kill of virally infected cells may not adequately immunize against the infectious pandemic now encircling the globe. Who will protect Americans from Dr. Fauci? But all this political and scientific theatre isn’t helping Americans cope with the high anxiety associated with this pandemic. In 2003 Antony Fauci wrote in the journal NATURE: “The overriding objective of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is to support biodefence research in order to provide people with countermeasures in the form of diagnostics, therapies and vaccines.” But who will protect the public from Dr. Fauci and the NIH? Past history points to the US, not China Lest we forget the anthrax attack on the United States was genetically tracked back to a US Army Lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland. What are Americans left to think after learning that China is the scapegoat for “gain of function” studies that started in the USA? Contradictive instruction Why has the nation’s leading infectious disease scientist changed course three times when it comes to wearing face masks during the pandemic? In separate videotaped announcements Fauci said Americans didn’t need to wear face masks, then would benefit from wearing face masks, then maybe they ought to wear two faces masks. Fauci and social distancing Fauci advised there was “no significant difference” between 3-foot and 6-foot distancing for school children when, according to CDC data, only 131.4 per 100,000 (1.3 cases per 1000) children age 5-10 were reported to have COVID-19 using a flawed PCR nasal swab test (35 doublings) that produces 97% false positives. Then among that questionable 131 in 100,000 who may or may not have had COVID-19, only 2.5% of these infected children (age 0-24) were hospitalized, or only 3.27 per 100,000; and almost zero died out of 100,000. Whole school districts would have to be screened to find 1 grade school child that succumbed to COVID-19. This data was for the week of January 22, 2021. But frankly this data largely pertains to children who were staying home and not attending school, where masks were not likely worn or social distancing practiced, who would have come in close contact with any family member who developed COVID-19 symptoms! So, just how much could social distancing of any measure in schools reduce the risk for infection, hospitalization or death in any meaningful way? This is classic Fauci, who is supposed to know this kind of data on the back of his hand. Kids are being forced to wear masks and fear their classmates and teachers over a remote possibility of getting infected and an infinitesimal risk of dying from COVID-19! And there’s more…. Dr. Fauci then encouraged Americans to wear a face mask after they’re vaccinated! Anybody who masterminded this claptrap public health policy should be asked to resign. More misdirection: get vaccinated to stop more mutations In February of 2021 Lord Fauci stated (CNN Report): “Americans need to get vaccinated to stop more mutations from emerging… Vaccines cannot mutate if they don’t replicate.” But independent researchers report replication of COVID-19 appears to be dependent upon diet – – arginine-rich foods (cocoa, chocolate, nuts) encourage viral replication while lysine-rich foods like cheese inhibit viral replication. Lysine itself as a dietary supplement produced a rapid and profound “cure” in the Dominican Republic where COVID-19 was even striking doctors very harshly. No word about lysine from Dr. Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has ignored the use of lysine for herpes infections for nearly 5 decades. Lysine can’t be “approved” because the existence of any “available alternatives” would eliminate approval of emergency-use vaccines. More to the point regarding viral mutations, the trace mineral selenium has been shown to inhibit viral mutations that induce new strains of COVID-19. Low soil levels of selenium have been linked to 10-fold greater COVID-19 infection. Is Dr. Fauci following the science? Or is he a shill for vaccine makers? What goes unsaid Another sin of emission is vitamin therapy. Fauci concedes he takes vitamin supplements to keep his immune system healthy, but says nothing about others taking them, particularly when vaccines were not available. The bogus PCR test, known to cause pseudo-epidemics Regarding the bogus PCR test that was intentionally set to be oversensitive for detection of COVID-19 coronavirus, Fauci finally had to say: “If you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more, that the chances of it being replication confident is miniscule… It’s just dead nucleotides, period.” So, all the numbers CDC were issuing, spreading fear and anxiety, that the pandemic was out of control (120,000 new cases in one day), were based on an untrustworthy test, a test that had caused pseudo-epidemics in the past. Dr. Fauci talks about numerators and denominators. The COVID-19 death rate is determined by the number of deaths divided by the number of diagnosed cases. A fatality rate of 2-3%. But the case numbers are slanted. Yes, there were deaths, but maybe not COVID-related deaths. The 97% false positive PCR test is being hidden from view on the internet. That is why the President of the United States said at the time, stop testing and the pandemic will disappear. The news media ridiculed the idea. That was in June of 2020, before the PCR test sensitivity began to be questioned. The President eventually called Fauci “a disaster.” But Fauci is impeachable. In an interview in THE ATLANTIC Dr. Fauci was quoted to say: “What was really the topper was when the White House sent out that list to everybody of the things that Dr. Fauci was wrong on, which was complete crap, because I wasn’t wrong on any of them!” [Laughs.] Scientists concluded: “If someone is tested by PCR as positive when a threshold of 35 cycles or higher is used (as is the case in most laboratories in Europe & the US), the probability that said person is actually infected is less than 3%, the probability that said result is a false positive is 97%.” Since viruses are very small particles, the PCR test doubles the quantity of viral particles in cycles. At some point the PCR test can be set so sensitive (more doubling cycles) that it will just detect dead viral particles. The whole world was being kept in lockdown with great financial harm, permanent loss of businesses, suicides, all over a test that was bogus. All the while, Dr. Fauci was enjoying the limelight. When a man is telling the Pope what to do at a May 6, 2021 Vatican conference, you can bet his ego is getting bigger. After all, God was asking him for advice. Fauci has also been chief advisor to six US Presidents. The world was to wait till Lord Fauci waved his magic wand and free it from a test that was intentionally oversensitive. It took till March of 2021 for the Centers for Disease Control to dial down the PCR test sensitivity to 28 to avoid false positive tests. None dared call it fraud. Dr. Antony Fauci should be nominated for the Nobel Fleece Prize. Vaccination: a road to nowhere I hear from friends and acquaintances that were vaccinated and say nothing adverse happened. Yes, but the entire vaccination campaign is a fraud! That doesn’t seem to bother some people. “But vaccination doesn’t even offer peace of mind!,” I say. Who is going to stop the vaccine train that is on a road to nowhere now that new variant strains leave the vaccinated vulnerable to reinfection? Vaccine passports then become meaningless. Requirements to vaccinate before entry to schools or jobs or businesses also are exercises in futility. Vaccine licensure: a bar too low The bar for licensure of COVID-19 vaccines is so low that pharmaceutical companies only have to reduce symptoms by 50%. If a vaccine does not vaccinate, that is, produce immunity against an infectious disease, is it really a vaccine? Everybody can quell symptoms with vitamins and zinc. Why hasn’t this dawned on most Americans? Groupthink We are learning many Americans don’t make personal health decisions, they let others make them for them. This is more of a group decision. Call this herd pseudo immunity. Or “you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” But it appears risk for serious side effects is greater than any proposed benefit from vaccination. With 192,954 adverse events, 4,057 deaths and 17,190 serious injuries from Dec. 14, 2020 to May 7, 2021, any other vaccine with that track record would have been recalled. The “first do no harm” principle is violated. These kinds of revelations should bring the multi-billion -dollar COVID-19 vaccine industry to a halt, if not an industry-wide recall. But the paid-off news media, the public arbiter, will have none of this. There is more to come, 162 more COVID-19 vaccines are said to be under development. The vaccine industry is going to proceed because it is removed from liability, and it is guaranteed a profit by government, but does it get a pass when the entire vaccination scheme is bogus? The last straw Dr. Fauci says he is frustrated to find many Americans are hesitant about received a COVID-19 vaccine. Here’s the guy who may have lit the match to the COVID-19 forest fire, then poured gasoline on the flames, confused everybody as to which way to run from the flames, and now is puzzled why people are hesitant to believe him. And what was Dr. Fauci doing while people were supposedly dying left and right from COVID-19? He was throwing out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals 2020 season. It was a wild pitch! The post The Perfidious Dr. Fauci appeared first on LewRockwell. |
The Key Covid Question To PonderMonday 17 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy As you know, back on March 12, 2020, I said in a lengthy podcast on Catholics Against Militarism that this Convid19 pandemic was “a grand deceit” aimed at altering economic and political reality on a a planetary scale in favor of a high-tech, dystopian dictatorial surveillance and control atmosphere that would make life better for the few but worse for the many. Everything that has happened since validates my original perception and analysis, with one exception. I no longer name what is happening “a grand deceit.” I now call it “a grand murderous deceit.” Murder is the intentional unjust desruction of a human being. Murder does not become anything less that murder because it is mass murder by intentioanal and unjustly destroying 100,00 human beings. Of course long ago the Noviolent Jesus revealed the connection between murder and deceit: “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (Jn 8:44). Here is an interview with Peter McCoullough, MD. His superlative medical credentials, which authorize him to speak with authority on the subject he is here addressing, will be stated during the interview but can also be found on Google. I would not suggest viewing this video if It was not morally important to do so. (30 minutes) P.S. When you enter this URL you will first see a printed text. Do not bother reading it since all that is in it, and much more, is in the video interview of Dr. McCoullough, which starts about a fourth of the way down the page. Scroll to it directly and start. The post The Key Covid Question To Ponder appeared first on LewRockwell. |
The Attack on Marco BassaniMonday 17 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
You may remember a meme circulating widely after the U.S. presidential election last November with a picture of Kamala Harris and the following comment: “She will be an inspiration to young girls by showing that if you sleep with the right powerfully connected men then you too can play second fiddle to a man with dementia. It’s basically a Cinderella story.” The political theorist and historian Marco Bassani, Professor of History of Political Theory at the Università Statale di Milano, was one of many who reposted the meme on a personal social media page. When this was brought to the attention of his university, the administration initiated disciplinary proceedings that finally reached a conclusion this past week after over six months. The verdict, reported in the Italian news, was that Prof. Bassani was found guilty of sharing “sexist and highly offensive content, not only toward the directly interested party but toward the entire female gender.” As punishment, his university teaching and salary were suspended for one month. Yet the penalty was apparently not simply for reposting the meme in question but for the nature of his social media posts more generally, since the press relates that he was also told “what happened does not constitute an isolated episode, since it is your custom to publicly express strong opinions on social networks, sometimes with extreme content.” Prof. Bassani reacted to the sentence with the following statement as reported in the press: “This clearly shows that I have been punished because I am not aligned with the banalities of the contemporary post-left. Furthermore, the verdict had already been written even before the commission was created. In the end, it is good that it happened to me since I am over 50 years old and a full professor. Had it happened to a young scholar at the beginning of their career, they would have been shredded to pieces. But I want to turn this madness into a battle in defense of the values of freedom, because this new Inquisition is really dangerous.” Prof. Bassani’s Italian colleagues are in the process of writing an open letter that they will circulate widely and ask supporters to sign in a gesture of solidarity. They have also set up a venue to collect donations to help offset the legal fees required to fight against this measure. Below I share the English version of an open letter that I have sent to an Italian publication. Open Letter to the President of the State University of Milan, Professor Elio Franzini Although I have never had the privilege of meeting Professor Marco Bassani in person, I’m an admirer of his scholarly work, in particular Liberty, State, & Union: The Political Theory of Thomas Jefferson, and, most recently, Chaining Down Leviathan: The American Dream of Self-Government 1776-1865. In addition, we are friends on Facebook where I value his wit and perceptiveness in posting comments, news, and memes on hotly debated topics of contemporary relevance. When I heard the commotion last fall simply because Prof. Bassani had reposted a meme on his personal Facebook page, I considered it an attempt to intimidate him for having expressed his opinion publicly but I honestly did not expect the fuss to amount to anything concrete. Now, however, that disciplinary proceedings at the Università Statale di Milano have resulted in an actual punishment in the form of a month’s suspension of his teaching and salary, I feel the moral obligation to register my shock and disagreement and to urge a repeal of the sentence against him. According to the press, you deemed that the meme in question contained “sexist and highly offensive content, not only toward the directly interested party but toward the entire female gender.” I cannot speak for others, but frankly I find the charge that the meme was “detrimental to the dignity of women” to be absurd. As a woman, and in particular as an American woman, I can assure you that the post was not in the least “detrimental to my dignity.” Indeed, I would call the content not at all sexist but rather feminist. In any case, putting all the focus on the question of gender diverts attention away from the issues of political corruption and conflict of interest that the meme raises. In fact, and I say this as a scholar of language and literature, if an entire group were implicitly the target, it would not be the female gender but instead the political class. But I’m writing not to defend the meme per se, but rather to defend Prof. Bassani’s fundamental right to repost it on his personal Facebook page without fear of a reprisal of any kind from his employer today or in the future. I cannot believe that such a fundamental right to expression could be denied to a professor at an Italian university. A meme often functions as a shorthand way to bring to mind and comment upon serious issues that are of public knowledge or have otherwise been treated at greater length in previous venues. And in fact, the widely circulated meme that Prof. Bassani reposted on his page drew attention to Vice President Kamala Harris’s rise to power that had been examined in detail and criticized in earlier publications. The meme did so using sarcasm which, like satirical humor more generally, has had a venerable role in speaking truth to power throughout the ages—including and especially in the history of Italian culture and literature. Today, however, this freedom is increasingly threatened if one’s opinions do not coincide with those that dominate in political institutions, the press, and even academia. This right of expression must therefore be safeguarded and defended with even greater tenacity. If not reversed, this sanction will endanger the freedom of speech of us all (already abolished in a large part of the world, where academics in particular are often prohibited from expressing their opinions freely). It could also lead that much faster to a world in which those who hold the monopoly on legalized violence can act with impunity—also thanks to the cover of those who should protect independent thinking!—without having their actions scrutinized or censured. In the grand scheme of things, it is certainly a much graver injustice that today whistleblowers and courageous investigative journalists who expose criminal acts are imprisoned or forced to live in exile while the corrupt powerbrokers who carry out misdeeds of all kinds are not held accountable and are instead shielded from the consequences of their wrongdoing. All the same, I really wonder how we’ve arrived at a situation in which—in a country that considers itself free—someone can be sanctioned simply for having reposted a meme on their personal Facebook page! In the Italian press I read that the commission’s assault on free speech was justified by the University’s rule that one must “avoid damage to the image and reputation of the University.” For me, it’s clear that the reputation of the University of Milan was not at all damaged by the reposting of a meme on the part of Prof. Bassani, who has a right to express himself freely. On the contrary, what gravely harmed the reputation of the University was the infliction of an unjustifiable punishment that made their disciplinary proceedings seem more like the persecution of his political ideas. The post The Attack on Marco Bassani appeared first on LewRockwell. |
The False GodMonday 17 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Beneath all the psychotic babble that sore besets the collective national hive-mind over a pandemic that comes and goes in waves, and phantoms of contrived identity animus, looms an economy that would collapse without gigantic IV infusions of “money” from the false god that our government has become. The collapse is working its way out in strange ways as we create ever stranger work-arounds for avoiding it — such as the unanswered “help wanted” signs while legions of unemployed adults cash government support checks. Of course, a lot of those unanswered signs are for what used to be called shit-jobs, flipping burgers, bagging groceries, and such. For a lot of Americans, those are the only jobs. We can argue about whether the government ushered better-paying low-skill factory jobs offshore or whether other nations would have developed industries in the natural course of things (or a combo of both). But the end result is a country full of people who can barely support themselves, let alone a family, and the consequent loss of all the psychological infrastructure for a society that can respect itself. With the spring zephyrs blowing, the great expectation rises for a return to “normal,” which seems to mainly consist of bustling restaurants, brisk car sales, and the construction of suburban houses. It’s not that these are the only things we can do in life, but they’re what the dynamics of the moment allow. Those dynamics include incentives, laws, regulations, habits, and customs. The zoning laws and building codes allow only certain types of habitations, generally ones too expensive for people seeking to establish households, not to mention the social costs of building even more unsustainable suburbia based on the selling of ever more unaffordable cars. The work-around for that is official manipulation of the debt markets, artificially-low interest rates, and discarding the framework of creditworthiness. The unintended consequences include the inflation of house prices and exposure of house-buyers to greater fragility (risk) in foreclosure. Ultimately, backstopping the banks that hold the mortgages and their derivative securities keeps the whole dishonest shootin’ match going… until it stops. One thing that will stop all of that will be the slow death of money, inflation, which is just now transforming from a distant specter on the horizon to a condition in the here-and-now. You will have plenty of money and that money will become increasingly worthless. The authorities probably think that’s better politically than the people having no money at all, but it’s really the same thing dragged out over time to fool everybody. Governments like it because it reduces the nominal cost of debt — except now the government debt-load is so supernaturally gigantic, really nothing will avail to fix that, and meanwhile they’re very busy making the debt situation worse by giving away as much newly borrowed money as the situation requires to maintain the illusion of a functioning economy. Anyway, as the time-frame for inflation compresses, the people notice that their money won’t buy what they need, and they get restless, perhaps dangerously so. In the process, the government begins to look incompetent, on top of the usual perception that it is corrupt, and before you know it, legitimacy slips through the widening cracks of the floor. Until now, the authorities have been successful in pitting citizens against each other, and the ill-will unleashed has been spectacular. But the memes of “white supremacy” are so obviously dishonest that they’ve only succeeded in hugely pissing off the substantial demographic of white people who struggle desperately to remain employed, housed, mobile, and capable of raising children who are not being driven crazy. The coronavirus situation is not so reassuring. We are one more serious up-wave of illness from tanking whatever remains of this vaporific economy. An emerging pattern suggests that higher vaccination rates might generate new-and-improved iterations of the disease more efficiently — just as the government tries more aggressively to sell vaccination to the public. The public is also noticing the alarming statistics, and many remain unconvinced that the vaccines are even vaccines in the usual sense, but rather insufficiently tested exotic experiments desperately employed against something that looks more and more like a bio-weapon that the government itself was complicit in creating. My state of New York is supposedly “reopening” today. Who’s not longing to get back to “normal?” But who’s not a little anxious that mixing normally with other people won’t start the whole cycle all over again? And, anyway, who doesn’t wonder whether normal is really a thing of the past now, disappearing in the rear-view mirror? Just as the hopeful meme floats over the Internet that the storm is over, we fail to see that there’s a larger storm of history whirling around us that we’re only in the eye of. Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com. The post The False God appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Limitations of the Hatred CoalitionMonday 17 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Reading Michael Anton’s rejoinder to my response to an article that appeared in Chronicles, I noticed that he and I agreed categorically on certain points: Whatever madness is afflicting this country and the rest of the West can in no way be blamed on the founders of the American republic. The rot set in later, despite the political achievement of those who won American independence and framed the Constitution. Further, the woke enthusiasm and anarcho-tyranny now besetting us may have to burn out on their own, seeing that we’ve had exceedingly limited success as a country controlling these disorders. Assuming that we are lucky and this combination of cultural radicalism and political totalitarianism does collapse, how exactly would that happen? According to ancient philosophers, political societies undergo deterioration (phthora) owing to both internal and external causes. They lose the ability to deal with internal disorder, while they are increasingly threatened by foreign enemies. Adversaries jump in for the kill when aberrant political leadership acts consistently against the common good. The foreign challenges that the Biden Administration is now facing, from the hacking of fuel supplies to the war that Hamas has unleashed against Israelis, to the recent expressions of Chinese and Russian adventurism, are intended to take advantage of an administration that has turned inward toward bizarre diversions such as battling white “systemic racism,” to carrying out a “green revolution” while simultaneously paying off Democratic constituencies with increasingly devalued money. The present administration, which represents both the woke Left and partisan Democratic interests, refuses to pay attention to a hemorrhaging Southern border. Allowing illegals to overrun a largely unprotected border to fill the country, starting with Texas, with future Democratic voters, is the transparent reason for Biden’s inaction in the face of this stampede. Federalizing elections, while removing controls against fraud, and then awarding statehood to the District of Columbia and possibly Puerto Rico would allow the Left to create a permanent electoral majority, certainly at the federal level. Packing the Supreme Court with Democratic partisans, another project of the Biden Administration, will prevent these actions from being judicially overturned. An American government that is preoccupied with such vagaries will not likely be inclined to meet foreign challenges boldly. Making sure that our military is taught critical race theory, that the CIA recruits plenty of lesbians, gays, and transsexuals, that American embassies fly the Rainbow Pride flag next to the Stars and Stripes, and that our president cheerleads an international crusade against global warming defines our supposed national interests. If readers of this website notice the dottiness of these priorities, so do foreign foes, who will take advantage of our nutty government. Why shouldn’t they? I certainly would do so if I noticed that the American federal administration was becoming a lunatic asylum. Our new foreign policy priorities have been accompanied by the emergence of internal problems that are likely to get worse—for example, increasing energy shortages and soaring crime rates in cities. Spiraling inflation is also underway. The post Limitations of the Hatred Coalition appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Help Unskilled Workers: Abolish the Minimum WageMonday 17 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
The minimum wage law does not require that a single solitary employee receive a boost in salary. Rather, it mandates that if such a person is hired, he or she must be paid at the level stipulated by law. A minimum wage of $15 per hour, which the United States is considering, need not lift anyone’s wage to that level. A person with productivity of $10 per hour, say, might not be hired at all, since employing people who lose you $5 per hour is an invitation to bankruptcy. The minimum wage is not an employment law; it’s an unemployment law. It decrees who will not be hired — namely, anyone whose productivity is below the designated wage. It doesn’t create a floor, raising wages. It’s a hurdle that potential employees must clear in order to get a job. And the higher it is, the harder it is to clear. According to a study conducted by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, 1.4 million jobs would be lost were the minimum wage to be raised to the $15 demanded by all politically correct folk. But no jobs — none at all, zero — will be lost one minute after this boost is enacted. Every day thereafter, of course, more and more unskilled workers would become unemployed. Presumably, at some point, the number of disemployed will reach exactly 1.4 million people. But, eventually, every employee with hourly productivity less than the new employment hurdle of $15 would either become unemployed or exit the labour force (contributing to the “discouraged worker effect”). The CBO estimate doesn’t specify a time frame, so is not that useful as a prediction. But it should force many minimum wage advocates to sit up and take notice. If the minimum wage law preys upon the poor, the unskilled, the “last, least and lost” amongst us, why do we have it at all? One reason may be the economic illiteracy of large parts of the electorate. Another is that the law has influential beneficiaries: in particular, organized labour, which is always in competition with the less skilled. When a union demands a wage increase from $30 to $40 per hour, the first thought of the employer is to substitute away from this newly more expensive factor of production into a cheaper one: the unskilled. How to nip this in the bud? Make the unskilled unemployable by pricing them out of the labour market. And how do you do that? One guess: yes, the minimum wage law. Reprinted with the author’s permission. The post Help Unskilled Workers: Abolish the Minimum Wage appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Neurotic America: Masks Today, Masks Tomorrow, Masks ForeverMonday 17 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Anumber of retail chains announced last week they are not requiring fully vaccinated customers to wears masks in their stores. Not everyone was happy to hear the liberating news, though. Our country, once a bulwark of the strong and daring, is becoming a land of the fainthearted. Minutes after The Hill tweeted Friday that Trader Joe’s was no longer demanding that its customers self-suffocate, at least those who’ve been fully vaccinated, the scolds and skittish school marms took their shots before running to hide under their beds. “Not good,” said one, without explaining why it’s not good. Other responses included: “I’ve only been there once and it looks like it will be my only time for a while,” and “I will not be going to #TraderJoes 4 a long time.” Many concurred: They’ll also avoid Trader Joe’s. One commenter said he doesn’t know if he’ll ever go back again. All that was missing was Joe Biden calling Trader Joe’s executives Neanderthals and Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank claiming the stores are “America’s No. 1 Death Destination.” Certainly everyone is free to express their opinions about masks, and everyone is also free to decide to shop elsewhere if they don’t like the Trader Joe’s policy. Yet the response concerns us. Will enough Nervous Nancies and Timorous Toms boycott Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Costco and others that have liberalized their mask policies to force the companies to backtrack on their decisions (which will help restore the humanity dignity that was ripped away by mask rules)? Will they actively picket in front of stores in an effort to bully executives into yielding to their neuroses, fixations, and superstitions? More than that, though, we are troubled by what this tells about America has become. The coronavirus pandemic revealed in stark terms a truth about this country that many of us have long suspected. We’ve grown soft, fearful, perpetually nagging and paralyzed by safetyism. Our prosperity has allowed many of us to feed our eccentricities and disorders, taking us down dark alleys and through doors that lead to grand halls of odd behavior. (For example, one late pop star’s wealth enabled him to create a fantasy world around his life and to change his appearance in bizarre ways. Had his life been an exercise in basic subsistence, he would not have been able to afford to accommodate the quirks of his personality.) To see just how deep this nation has plunged into a rancid broth of fear, take a look at this STAT-Harris poll taken after last fall’s election. It found that 75% of the public supported the idea of Joe Biden mandating mask-wearing, while two-thirds of Americans thought he “should ban gatherings involving more than 10 people.” The post Neurotic America: Masks Today, Masks Tomorrow, Masks Forever appeared first on LewRockwell. |
If No Election Fraud, Why Are Dems Desperate To Block Maricopa County, Arizona Audit?Monday 17 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Arizona Democrats have refused to comply with court orders and have declared an audit “racist.” The criminal gang that masquerades as the US Dept of Justice has declared the election audit “voter intimidation” as the DOJ attempts to intimidate Republicans to cease the audit. Obviously, there was massive electoral fraud. If not, why the extraordinary effort to block the audit? If there was no election fraud, the Democrats would welcome an audit to prove their case. What will Republicans, assuming the DOJ doesn’t scare them off, do with the evidence of election theft? Chances are high they will cover it up. Why? Here are several reasons: Republicans are largely from the business and corporate community. They don’t know how to fight. They learned that you get to the top by not making waves. Republicans are patriotic and are concerned to protect America’s reputation. Many will argue that to reveal the fraud will undermine America’s reputation and democracy and that the Chinese and Russians will use the fraud for propaganda against America. Suppressing the evidence of fraud is necessary to protect America’s influence. Revealing the fraud will undermine the Biden administration and cause a political crisis. It will be clear that America has suffered a coup. To overturn the coup would split the country. The Biden military might intervene in Biden’s behalf, thus legitimizing the coup and ending the authority of law and the Constitution.
Establishment Republicans will like this outcome because they are opposed to Trump and oppose anything that would vindicate him. No doubt the evidence of a stolen election would be leaked, but the presstitutes would never report it and no one would ever know. In view of the fact that very little is likely to result from conclusive evidence of election theft, the fierce opposition of Democrats and presstitutes to the audit is conclusive proof in itself that the election was stolen. The post If No Election Fraud, Why Are Dems Desperate To Block Maricopa County, Arizona Audit? appeared first on LewRockwell. |
The Real Estate Boom in Vegas Is More Frenzied Than EverMonday 17 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Summerlin, the suburb of west Las Vegas creeping ever closer to the mountains, looks to be crowded with fully paved streets, streetlights, block walls, and blue top lots. With lumber, labor, and other materials in short supply, home construction can’t keep up. However, Ali Wolf, chief economist with Zonda, quoted by CNBC, claims, “The lot supply shortage is real, and it is causing prices to rise and builders to move further into the suburbs.” Diana Olick writes, “The surge in lumber prices in the past year has added $35,872 to the price of an average new single-family home and $12,966 to the market value of an average new multi family home, according to the NAHB.” Las Vegas in the early to mid-2000s enjoyed an epic housing boom. This one is crazier. I popped awake at 1:00 a.m., anxiety my alarm clock. A half hour later, I feared someone was already on their way to be first in line for a prized lot, overlooking the city, one of only four being released by a large publicly held homebuilder for that subdivision. My wife pleaded with me not to go that early. Surely, I’d lost my mind. I drove into the subdivision and breathed a sigh of relief. I had told the saleswoman I would be there waiting for her, blocking the entrance to the sales office. It would open eight hours later. With coffee and Kindle to keep me company, I enjoyed the cool breeze and dark silence. What I had forgotten was a seat cushion. At four, I thought maybe I was nuts. But only six hours to go. Surely, at my age, lining up as if hoping to score front-row seats to a Rolling Stones concert was silly. With the sun finally up, a white Volvo station wagon wheeled into the project, stopping abruptly in front of the sales office. “What lot are you here for?” asked the gentleman. “Thirteen,” I answered. “Oh, shoot. My client will have to settle for 12.” “What time did you get here?” “I’m embarrassed to say.” “What time?” I held up two fingers. “Dude, you’re awesome,” he replied. Once a realtor in California, I learned over the next four and half hours that he’s been in town since 2003 selling real estate. The market is hotter than he’s ever seen. He made wonderful company. Just before six, another buyer arrived. He too, wanted lot 13 or lot 12. He’d now have to settle for across the street. Just before seven, a personal assistant arrived for another buyer. Soon after, a woman pulled up, rolled down her window, and shouted, “What lot are you here for?” “We’re all here for 13,” my new friend said. “But this guy has it,” pointing at me. She was ready to drive away in a huff, but the enterprising realtor talked her into driving to one of his listings nearby. Finally, the sales team arrived. The magic hour of 10:00 a.m. was near. The raging housing market made the front page of the Las Vegas Review-Journal three days last week, with headlines like: “‘Now a full-price offer is a weak offer’: Las Vegas Housing a Seller’s Market.” Homes listed for sale numbered only 1,772 in March, down 69 percent from a year ago. Jordan Rodriguez purchased “a southwest valley home from a builder in 2016 for nearly $293,000—and, he says, is now selling it for $560,000, $10,000 over the asking price,” Eli Segall reports. At the other end of the price spectrum, “Frank Napoli of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Nevada Properties, recently put a $7 million home on the market and received a full-price offer within three hours.” Napoli told Segall, “It is an extreme seller’s market.” No kidding. Incredibly, buyers are closing on homes and letting sellers live rent free until the seller’s new homes are ready. Segall writes, “[B]roker Shane Nguyen, owner of 1st Priority Realty, said he can’t recall seeing rent-free leasebacks in his 24 years of selling homes in Las Vegas until now.” “It’s never been free,” Nguyen said. “Lumber prices are skyrocketing for various reasons beyond just high demand from homebuilders and remodelers,” CNBC’s Olick writes. “Lumber tariffs had prices already rising a year ago, but then when the pandemic hit, production shut down. The expectation was that housing demand would dry up for a long time. But instead, after a brief pause, it came roaring back. Homebuilders were caught off guard, as were lumber producers.” “Clearly, increasing the cost of imports via tariffs does not help the situation,” said Robert Dietz, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders. While Treasury secretary Janet Yellen claims there is no inflation, land, lumber, gypsum, copper, and virtually everything else required to build a house are skyrocketing in price. The Federal Reserve’s money creation is at the root of all this. Affordable housing is a joke, bank analyst Chris Whalen said on Real Vision. “The appetite for yield is there, they just can’t find the assets,” he told Jack Farley. “It’s like people want to buy a house. The scarcity that you see in one to four family homes, and the scarcity you see in the bond market is the same thing. When Chair Powell gets up there and tells us the quantitative easing is not affecting home prices, that tells me he does not understand what he’s doing.” At 10 a.m. I was ushered into the sales office. The door was locked behind me. The paperwork was simple. As I provided the required check, I told the sales staff, “If you want an anecdote for the home office, I was here at two this morning. Also, the gentleman in the third chair is offering the buyer after me $20,000 to trade places.” I turned down a $30,000 offer for my spot. When I emerged from the office, the waiting buyers and realtors cheered, as if I had just won an award. One carried my chair to the car. In my thesis “Early Speculative Bubbles and Increases in the Supply of Money,” written under Murray Rothbard’s direction thirty years ago, I closed with this: “What can be predicted with absolute accuracy is that fiat money, fractional-reserve banking, central banks, Keynesian monetary policies, and self-serving politicians will combine to ensure that there will be many more booms and speculative bubbles for future economists and historians to chronicle.” I could not have imagined how many “many more” would be. Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute. The post The Real Estate Boom in Vegas Is More Frenzied Than Ever appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Covid Vaccine Adverse Effects, Huge NumbersMonday 17 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
A long-standing private organization, the National Vaccine Information Center, has analyzed the US government’s database, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). As of May 7, 2021, VAERS lists 192,954 adverse-event reports associated with COVID vaccines. [1] These events cover the spectrum from mild transient effects to death. VAERS has always has multiple problems. One: Doctors aren’t required by law to report adverse effects. Many of them wouldn’t risk blowback by doing so. Two: There is no comprehensive effort to determine whether an adverse effect is actually caused by a vaccine. Three: Patients can make adverse-effect reports—but are often hesitant to do so. Four: By far the biggest problem is: most Americans aren’t even aware that VAERS exists. Therefore, on balance, UNDER-REPORTING adverse effects is the primary defect of VAERS. Many efforts have been made to estimate the degree of under-reporting. These estimates state the VAERS numbers should be multiplied by 10, all the way to 100, to obtain an accurate picture of adverse effects. Ten times the current number of COVID vaccine adverse effects would equal 1,929,540. A hundred times the current number=19,295,400. Either way, the number is staggering. The death reports are escalating by the day. As of May 7—4,057. Here are other very troubling categories of VAERS adverse effects, as of May 7. Permanent Disability=2,475. Doctor’s Office Visit=32,801. Emergency Doctor/Room=25,566. Hospitalized=11,538. Birth Defect=112. Life-Threatening=3,548.
Yet, public officials and news outlets continue to repeat the mantra, “safe and effective,” and urge everyone to take the shot. Every person who receives the vaccine is supposed to be informed of the risks beforehand. I assure you NO ONE is being given these adverse effect numbers, plus the advice to multiply the numbers by 10 or 100. Lack of informed consent runs contrary to every medical code. I can also assure you the FDA, which is considering whether to give full approval to the current COVID vaccines, isn’t multiplying the adverse-effect numbers by 10 or 100. Here is something else to consider. Even multiplying the VAERS numbers by 100 may not be sufficient, because the RNA COVID shots are employing a new technology which a) has never been used on the public before and b) isn’t a vaccine at all; it’s a genetic treatment. As I’ve shown in recent articles, the entire field of genetic research is riddled with lies, pretense, and unpredictable ripple-effect consequences. The notion of inserting a single genetic change into a person and limiting its effects to an announced goal is a fiction. Unexpected changes occur. And their negative disruptive effects, long-term, are unknown. Those effects will never be listed in any database. SOURCE: [1] https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?TABLE=ON&GROUP1=CAT&EVENTS=ON&VAX=COVID19 Reprinted with permission from Jon Rappoport’s blog. The post Covid Vaccine Adverse Effects, Huge Numbers appeared first on LewRockwell. |
A Primer for the Propagandized: Fear Is the Mind-KillerMonday 17 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
The noose is dangling gently around our necks. Every day, they cinch it tighter. By the time we realize it’s strangling us, it will be too late. Those who – gradually and gleefully – sacrifice their freedoms, their autonomy, their individuality, their livelihoods, and their relationships on the altar of the “common good” have forgotten this is the pattern followed by every totalitarian regime in history. Everyone wonders how ordinary Germans could have been manipulated to participate or stand dumbstruck while their government was transformed into a genocidal juggernaut. This is how. Read Sebastian Haffner‘s Defying Hitler memoir to see how this can happen anywhere—including here. Everyone wonders how Russians could have permitted and even zealously reported fellow citizens for imprisonment and execution under Article 58, the penal code invented to incarcerate anyone who dared express the slightest whisper of noncompliance under Stalin’s homicidal state. This is how. Read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn‘s meticulously documented The Gulag Archipelago to witness this progression of authoritarian lunacy. Everyone wonders how Hutus could have suddenly started axing their Tutsi neighbors to death after being inundated with waves of anti-Tutsi propaganda from Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines. Read Philip Gourevitch‘s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. The list goes on. And on. And on. From Machiavelli‘s The Prince to Étienne de la Boetie‘s The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude to Edward Herman‘s and Noam Chomsky‘s Manufacturing Consent (and accompanying documentary) to BBC’s The Century of the Self, mechanisms of mass control have been chronicled for millennia. George Orwell wrote,
Can you imagine what master propagandist Edward Bernays would have done with access to today’s mainstream media conglomerate combined with the global surveillance infrastructure of Big Tech? And you really think that’s not happening now—with another century of psychological, neurological, and technological research under their belts? The present ability to curate reality and coerce obedience is unprecedented, far beyond what Orwell envisioned in 1984, Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451, Huxley in Brave New World, and Burgess in A Clockwork Orange. A textbook example of Problem Reaction Solution, the current tsunami of worldwide hysteria is the latest and potentially most threatening example of mass control in history. The recipe is simple. Take a naturally occurring phenomenon, say a seasonal virus, and exaggerate its threat far beyond every imagining—despite exhaustive evidence to the contrary. Suppress, silence, ostracize, and demonize every individual who dares present facts that expose the false mono-narrative. Whip up a witches’ brew of anger, envy, and, most importantly, fear, escalating emotions to a boil so as to short-circuit our faculties of reason and logic. The post A Primer for the Propagandized: Fear Is the Mind-Killer appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Republicans are making obligatory attacks on Biden’s spending, while also attacking Biden for increasing military spending to “only” 753 billion dollars. Republican complaints about Biden’s big spending ring hollow given their support for Presidents Donald Trump and George W. Bush’s spending increases and Republicans’ proposals to spend billions on infrastructure.
Many Republicans will argue that it is best to make a deal with the Democrats.
from https://youtu.be/V0EQNQssk6U
May 18, 2021
from https://youtu.be/UuC5mCL9HC8
May 18, 2021 at 02:29AM
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.