Category Archives: Politics

It’s Time for Red States and Red Counties to Exit

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The House of Representatives will vote Tuesday on whether to make Washington, D.C., a State.” [Breitbart]

Sure. Bring in D.C. and Puerto Rico. That means 4 more Communists in the U.S. Senate–FOREVER. We’re already getting 4 new Communists on the Supreme Court. Why not go all the way?

My question for red states and red COUNTIES throughout the former USA republic: What reason do you have to stay in this regime? It’s a permanent one-party, far-left cabal where power and policies ARE NEVER GOING TO CHANGE HANDS.

I believe that Texas, South Carolina, Wyoming, Montana, West Virginia, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and other red states should LEAVE this mess. And I believe that red counties in blue states, including New York and California, should also exit. Divide and exit sure beats submission and tyranny.

Let’s start a new free country WITHOUT the left. This new free country will absolutely uphold individual rights, property rights, gun rights, and freedom of speech. Taxes will be minimal and government will only protect us from thugs and criminals–including the rulers of the remaining blue states and counties.

Sound too crazy and radical? Then I guess this means you’re willing to live under a permanent, one-party radical left-wing regime with no hope of ever enjoying any freedom again. I am ready for the EXIT. If you value the liberty and freedom you no longer have, you had better seriously consider it.

Let’s just get it over with. It’s going to happen anyway, unless 70 million Americans roll over and decide to give in to the greatest totalitarian dictatorship the world has ever known.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

American Cities are in Trouble

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Recent decades have not been kind to American cities. Manufacturing cities were adversely impacted by the offshoring of manufacturing jobs. Cities that are destinations for the floods of third world immigrants are experiencing deteriorating budgets and infrastructure and population replacement. In 1960 native born white American citizens comprised 90% of California’s population. Today white Americans comprise 30% of the state’s population. The 90% white population in 1960 did not require the support services that the 70% non-white population requires today, and there were no homeless people camping on the streets. Cities with black populations, Democrat regimes, and defunded police experience mob looting and burning of business districts. Covid lockdowns have taught white collar businesses that employees can work at home and the expense of collecting large numbers of people in office buildings can be avoided.

Covid lockdowns also taught people to shop online, and online penetration of retail sales has risen sharply. Estimates are that over the next 5 years the US will lose 81,000 to 150,000 retail stores and the jobs that go with them, with clothing, consumer electronics, home furnishings, sporting goods, and office supplies taking the largest hits. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-05/even-after-pandemic-retailers-seen-closing-thousands-of-stores

Think what this means for shopping centers and for cities.

Cities are not just becoming less pleasant and more dangerous places to live. Cities are losing their purpose and functions. Cities provide work forces for factories and offices. They provide stores where work forces provision themselves. They are transportation centers for people and goods. All of the changes noted above are eating into these purposes and functions of cities.

With so much of American manufacturing moved abroad, with the ability of white collar work and shopping to be done from home, and with the increase in dangers from city life and taxes for immigrant support, professional classes are likely to abandon cities for like-minded enclaves protected with gates and their own police.

Cities rise and fall like empires and civilizations. In my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, published eight years ago, I noted that the population of Detroit, Michigan, once America’s 4th largest city and a powerhouse of American manufacturing, experienced a 25% decline in population in the first decade of the 21st century. Gary, Indiana lost 22% of its population. St Louis, Missouri lost 20% with 19% of its housing units standing vacant. Flint, Michigan lost 18%. Cleveland, Ohio lost 17%. These loses were largely loses of middle class income people.

Authors who chronicle the decline of ancient civilizations could just as well turn their attention to the United States today. In 1950 life in America was safer, more enjoyable, more civilized, and more promising than in America today. Today life in America is barbaric, and it is on its way to worse.

Paul Craig Roberts, UNZ Review

People Not Getting Vaccinated will Become Regime’s Scapegoat

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So I’m hearing, more and more, that people who got the vaccine a month or more ago are still coming down with COVID. Most aren’t dying, of course, because the virus is usually not deadly. But they’re still getting it — despite the vaccine. I know for a fact this has happened in cases people have told me about; and even MSNBC had a headline on this story yesterday, claiming there are thousands of such documented cases. While I don’t believe anything MSNBC says, it’s noteworthy they have included this in their propaganda; they plan to make use of it.

If this trend is real and continues, here’s my prediction about how it will play out. The federal and most state governments will impose lockdowns again — worse than before, and for much longer. Think the U.K., who may never, ever be out of lockdown mode. They will blame the people who failed to get vaccines for the problem. It will be just like the mask issue: “People who don’t wear masks are responsible for the COVID numbers going up.” Of course, the vast majority of people who get COVID wear masks, because the vast majority of people wear masks. But that’s not part of “science” in today’s framework.

It will be the same with any perceived or actual failure of the vaccine. I don’t think the response will be limited to shaming. They’ll use this as an excuse to impose the “vaccine passports”, which they’re already going to do through the compliant Communist “private” sector, at least the large corporations getting all the government subsidies. But I predict they’ll go even further. If the media decides the ineffectiveness of the vaccine is severe enough, and that it’s all the fault of the 20 or 30 percent of the population who won’t get the vaccine, that’s when you’ll see the rounding up begin. I’m talking Nazi Germany. Brace yourselves. These tyrants in power are capable of ANYTHING and they’re not going to lose power, since they’ve rigged most of the elections. Not with 13 on the Supreme Court and all the other things they’re planning and executing, so far quite successfully.

My advice? Ignore and disobey the government as much as you can. Deceit, while a vice in voluntary relationships, is a VIRTUE when dealing with evil. In the words of Ayn Rand, morality ends where a gun begins. Refuse, in your minds, to acknowledge the moral legitimacy of any dictatorship. This is not your granddaddy’s American government — dysfunctional, but more or less freedom-loving. These people are evil and rotten to the core. I’m referring to the Bidens, the Pelosis, the whole pack — as well as most of your neighbors, friends and family who support them. Don’t let them off the hook. Ignorance can be stretched as an excuse, but only so far.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Ayn Rand on Immanuel Kant: Part III

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A “straw man” is an odd metaphor to apply to such an enormous, cumbersome, ponderous construction as Kant’s system of epistemology. Nevertheless, a straw man is what it was—and the doubts, the uncertainty, the skepticism that followed, skepticism about man’s ability ever to know anything, were not, in fact, applicable to human consciousness, because it was not a human consciousness that Kant’s robot represented. But philosophers accepted it as such. And while they cried that reason had been invalidated, they did not notice that reason had been pushed off the philosophical scene altogether and that the faculty they were arguing about was not reason.

No, Kant did not destroy reason; he merely did as thorough a job of undercutting as anyone could ever do.

If you trace the roots of all our current philosophies—such as pragmatism, logical positivism, and all the rest of the neo-mystics who announce happily that you cannot prove that you exist—you will find that they all grew out of Kant.

It’s True: Democrats Have Court-Packing on the Menu

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News broke on Wednesday that Democrats have prepared bills for both the House and the Senate aimed at increasing the Supreme Court from the current nine justices to thirteen. Were this to pass and new justices to be added, the Supreme Court would cease to be a body that reflects the back and forth of elections, with presidents of one party or another getting the opportunity to add new justices as old ones leave. Instead, it would simply become an unelected quasi-legislative body that pretends every item on the leftist wish list is encompassed in a “living” Constitution.

The Intercept reports that, in the House, the legislators behind the bill are Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), and Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.). Just to give a sense of the IQ behind this trio, Johnson thinks islands, if their population becomes too great, can tip over. (And no, his retrofitted excuse did not remove the stain of that idiotic statement.) Nadler is the shriveled gnome who insisted that Antifa violence in Portland is a myth. (The myth just burned a federal building.) Jones is the generic new Democrat: Stanford and Harvard Law grad, black, gay, demanding Sen. Josh Hawley’s expulsion, refusing to work with Republicans, etc. (And no, his “elite” credentials do not impress me since the odor of affirmative action hangs heavily around him. He’s also graduated so recently that both of those institutions were focused more on indoctrination than education.)

In the Senate, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) supported the bill. Markey is to the left of left. In addition to sponsoring the Green New Deal that morphed into Biden’s fake “stimulus” plan, here are just some of the things he’s said: Thanksgiving is about “atrocities” against Native Americans; we should take all “weapons of war” from police; and Trump’s nominating Amy Coney Barrett, which was consistent with the Constitution and historic precedent, was “illegitimate.”

Court-packing is nothing but a raw power play. Currently, the Court commands a certain level of respect. The justices represent the kind of ideologically mixed bag one gets when alternating Republican and Democrat presidents have the opportunity to appoint new justices. Because the balance of power goes back and forth, the justices must have a working relationship. Famously, Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were genuinely good friends.

This will all change if the Democrats do away with the filibuster and pack the Court. The four new justices will not have any hint of moderation about them. They will be hardcore leftists who may not even pretend to any respect for the Constitution. Currently, the activist justices consider the Constitution a “living” document that can be bent and stretched to meet their ends. With a packed Court, the justices could easily announce that it’s a dead document and conclude, ironically as a constitutional matter, that it’s no longer applicable to modern issues.

If the Democrats can pack the Court, they’ll also add Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. as new states, which will create a permanent Democrat majority in Congress. Once that happens, this is how things will play out:

Democrats will pass wish-list bills. These might include formally and completely socializing medicine, granting amnesty and citizenship to all illegal aliens, and declaring the Republican Party an insurrectionist organization, with all current and past members subject to immediate arrest. Or perhaps the administration will announce that it will seize all privately held guns or that, in the future, China will have a place at the Joint Chiefs of Staff table.

Horrified citizens will sue. However, no matter how the lower courts decide the case, once they get to the Supreme Court, the packed Court will rubber-stamp all congressional and legislative acts. In other words, despite the fact that the justices are appointed, not elected, they will be a super-legislature. At first, these decisions will come dressed in constitutional garb. Soon, though, the justices will abandon that pretense.

At that point, America, as a constitutional democratic republic, will cease to exist. It’s that simple. We won’t even be a soft democratic socialist country like many in Europe. We will, instead, be a fascist dictatorship, led by a cabal of corporations and politicians.

And here’s the really scary thing: currently, the only thing stopping this from happening is the promise that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) made to refuse to go along with their fellow Democrats’ demand to do away with the filibuster. That’s because, even if the bill passes the House (and it presumably will), the filibuster means that it will take 60 senators to vote yes on court-packing, and that’s not going to happen. Without the filibuster, only 50 Senators, plus Kamala Harris, are required to destroy America.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. And for goodness’s sake, contact your representatives and politely but firmly tell them that the Court is perfectly constituted with nine members.

Andrea Widburg, American Thinker

America’s Government is Now the Enemy

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Someone asked a good question: What does the Biden regime have in store for us, given its open intent to stack the Supreme Court with a left-wing majority, permanently?

It’s not hard to imagine. We’re not living in anything like the United States of America any longer. Living today is like living after World War II — had the Japanese and Nazis won. There would have been some going through the motions at first, on the pretense we still lived in a free society, as the way was cleared for a total dictatorship.

You have to stop referring to “the Biden administration” or “President Biden.” These people are dictators. It’s a regime. The people capable of the things they’re openly doing now are capable of far worse horrors — concentration camps, gulags, or whatever suits their whim for power. They are getting away with EVERYTHING with nobody other than hapless Republicans — most of them paid off traitors — to stop them.

I’m not trying to be negative. I’m simply giving you the truth. Find one shred of evidence to the contrary. EVERYTHING these dictators are seeking to do, they are doing. They are doing it unblinkingly and, so far, with no real opposition. Republicans talk about a “red wave” in the Congressional elections of November 2022. Like that will matter? If these Communists/fascists achieve even one-tenth of what they’re proposing — and right now they’re achieving 100 percent of it, with far worse to come — then no election will matter by that time. Let’s be real. If elections still mattered, Donald Trump would still be sitting in the White House. We know that — and, more importantly, our enemies know that. They also know what they’re getting away with, which gives them unlimited arrogance and makes them incredibly dangerous.

It’s every man and woman for him- or herself here. The government is officially the enemy. For 200-plus years, Americans relied on their government to protect them from enemies — British royal tyrants, National Socialists, Communists. Today, OUR own government is now the enemy. And, you will discover, this regime is at least as bad as any enemy Americans faced in past generations. And if you think Joe Biden is bad … just wait for Kamala.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Global Taxation–Global Stagnation

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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has proposed that governments around the world require payment of at least a uniform “global minimum corporate tax.” A motivation for Yellen’s push for a global minimum corporate tax is fear that the Biden administration’s proposed increase in the US corporate tax will cause some American corporations to flee the US for countries with lower corporate taxes.

President Biden wants to increase corporate taxes to help pay for his so-called infrastructure plan. The plan actually spends more on “progressive” priorities, including a down payment on the Green New Deal, than on infrastructure.

Much of the spending will benefit state-favored businesses. For example, the plan provides money to promote manufacturing and electric vehicles. So, the idea is to raise taxes on all corporations and then use some of the received tax payments to subsidize government-favored businesses and industries.

The only way to know the highest valued use of resources is by seeing what goods and services consumers voluntary choose to spend their money on. A system where the allocation of resources is based on the preferences of politicians and bureaucrats — who use force to get their way — will be less efficient than a system where consumers control the allocation of resources.

Thus, the greater role government plays in the economy the less prosperous the people will be — with the possible exception of the governing class and those who make their living currying favor with the rulers.

Yellen’s global corporate tax proposal will no doubt be supported by governments of many European Union (EU) countries, as well as the globalist bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). For years, these governments and their power-hungry OECD allies have sought to create a global tax cartel.

The goal of those supporting global minimum taxes enforced by a global tax agency is to prevent countries from lowering their taxes. Lowering corporate and other taxes is one way countries are able to attract new businesses and grow their economies. For example, after Ireland lowered its corporate taxes, it moved from being one of the poorest countries in the EU to having one of the EU’s strongest economies. Also, American workers and investors benefited from the 2017 tax reform’s reduction of corporate taxes from 35 percent to 21 percent.

Yellen and her pro-global tax counterparts deride tax competition between countries as a “race to the bottom.” In fact, tax competition is a race to the top for the countries whose economies benefit from new investments, and for the workers and consumers who benefit from new job opportunities and new products. In contrast, a global minimum corporate tax will raise prices and lower wages, while incentivizing politicians to further increase the minimum.

A global minimum corporate tax will also set a precedent for imposition of other global minimum taxes on individuals. This scheme may even advance the old Keynesian dream of a global currency. The Biden administration is already taking steps toward a global currency by asking the International Monetary Fund to issue more special drawing rights (SDRs).

Global tax and fiat currency systems will only benefit the world’s political and financial elites. In contrast, regular people across the world benefit from limited government, free markets, sound money, and reduced or eliminated taxes.

Ron Paul, UNZ Review

Ayn Rand on Immanuel Kant: Part II

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The motive of all the attacks on man’s rational faculty—from any quarter, in any of the endless variations, under the verbal dust of all the murky volumes—is a single, hidden premise: the desire to exempt consciousness from the law of identity. The hallmark of a mystic is the savagely stubborn refusal to accept the fact that consciousness, like any other existent, possesses identity, that it is a faculty of a specific nature, functioning through specific means. While the advance of civilization has been eliminating one area of magic after another, the last stand of the believers in the miraculous consists of their frantic attempts to regard identity as the disqualifying element of consciousness.

The implicit, but unadmitted premise of the neo-mystics of modern philosophy, is the notion that only an ineffable consciousness can acquire a valid knowledge of reality, that “true” knowledge has to be causeless, i.e., acquired without any means of cognition.

The entire apparatus of Kant’s system, like a hippopotamus engaged in belly-dancing, goes through its gyrations while resting on a single point: that man’s knowledge is not valid because his consciousness possesses identity. . . .

This is a negation, not only of man’s consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such, whether man’s, insect’s or God’s. (If one supposed the existence of God, the negation would still apply: either God perceives through no means whatever, in which case he possesses no identity—or he perceives by some divine means and no others, in which case his perception is not valid.) As Berkeley negated existence by claiming that “to be, is to be perceived,” so Kant negates consciousness by implying that to be perceived, is not to be. . . .

From primordial mysticism to this, its climax, the attack on man’s consciousness and particularly on his conceptual faculty has rested on the unchallenged premise that any knowledge acquired by a process of consciousness is necessarily subjective and cannot correspond to the facts of reality, since it is “processed knowledge.”

Make no mistake about the actual meaning of that premise: it is a revolt, not only against being conscious, but against being alive—since in fact, in reality, on earth, every aspect of being alive involves a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. (This is an example of the fact that the revolt against identity is a revolt against existence. “The desire not to be anything, is the desire not to be.” Atlas Shrugged.)

All knowledge is processed knowledge—whether on the sensory, perceptual or conceptual level. An “unprocessed” knowledge would be a knowledge acquired without means of cognition. Consciousness . . . is not a passive state, but an active process. And more: the satisfaction of every need of a living organism requires an act of processing by that organism, be it the need of air, of food or of knowledge.