Demented Thinking About Biden

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The president has dementia.

I’m a cartoonist and a writer, and I am most assuredly not a gerontologist. I did not go to medical school. If I am not an expert in aging and cognitive decline, how do I know President Biden has dementia? The same way you and I and everyone else know things to be true despite our lack of credentials: experience and pattern recognition.

I don’t need to be an ornithologist in order to identify a blue jay.

I’m not a doctor, yet I was right and my doctor was wrong when I told her I had a hernia and she said I didn’t; I’d had one on my left side in 1999, and this felt like that but on my right. Knowing your own body sometimes counts for more than formal education.

I didn’t go to New York University film school. Despite my lack of official accreditation in cinema, I know, as do you, that Meryl Streep is a better actor than Brendan Fraser. We know this to be true because we have seen a lot of movies.

When my car’s wheel well issues a rubbing sound that gets faster when I accelerate, I know it’s probably an issue involving brake pads, ball bearings (if the car has significant mileage) or wheel alignment. I’m not a mechanic. But I’m 57; I’ve driven since I was 15 and had enough rubbing sounds to have learned what it probably means.

When I watched Biden’s first presidential press conference last week, I didn’t have to be an M.D. or a Ph.D appended to my name to recognize the clear, painfully obvious signs of dementia. My mother died of Alzheimer’s a little over a year ago. The president looked and acted like my mom about two years before she died: valiantly struggling to hold it together, moments of lucidity and occasional brilliance alternating with terrifying brain freezes, random rambling in search of connection and reaction, and cringy rhetorical crashes when the fremdschamen-o-meter shot to 11.

It took five reporters a question and four follow-ups to make Biden understand that he was being asked whether he favored the elimination of the filibuster, a question at the top of political news since he came into office. Here’s what the commander in chief finally came up with: “If we could end it with 51, we would have no problem. You’re going to have to — the existing rule — it’s going to be hard to get a parliamentary ruling that allows 50 votes to end the filibuster, the existence of a filibuster” (my emphasis added).

Abdicating journalism, corporate media outlets dutifully transcribed Biden’s response despite its glaring wrongness. Whether or not the filibuster as we know it survives has nothing, nada, zip to do with a Senate parliamentarian ruling. Paradoxically, a simple 51-vote majority could kill the filibuster.

Biden’s answer was — had to be (there’s no other possible explanation) — the product of dementia. Before, after all, Biden was as intimately knowledgeable about Senate rules and procedure as any human being on Earth. He served 36 years as a senator and eight years as vice president/president of the Senate — a total of 42 years. There was no world in which Biden would have said anything so totally, crazily, amazingly incorrect. Not drunk, not asleep, not at all.

Dementia frustrates. As its victim’s inner life becomes harder to articulate to others, the victim occasionally lashes out in disproportionate anger. We’ve seen this more and more with Biden, watching a famously affable guy with a patented aw-shucks grin deteriorate into nervous hardness and even rage.

And dementia befuddles. It mixes your knowledge and memories and opinions into a blender; though you often sound OK, what spews out of your mouth increasingly approaches randomness. That’s what happened to Biden during his presser. He obviously conflated two bits of news: the parliamentarian’s ruling that a proposed minimum wage increase be stripped from the coronavirus relief bill, which grabbed news attention, with the question about the filibuster. Vice President Biden would never have done that. Sen. Biden wouldn’t have either. He knew/knows this stuff too well.

Everyone forgets stuff. It happens more with age. What’s happening to Biden isn’t the occasional senior moment, nor is it stuttering — as Biden himself has said. Biden crashing and burning on a question about Senate procedure would be like me messing up questions about Photoshop or Central Asia, two things that have been central to most of my life. If I start mixing up RGB and CMYK and Ashgabat and Astana, topics I know forward and backward and about which I am obsessed, that will point not to “whatever; no biggie” but to worrisome cognitive decline.

Biden supporters who deny the visible signs of Biden’s mental deterioration are acting no more rationally than the Trumpies who made excuses for the former president’s crazy behavior. You can feel relief that Trump is gone and believe Biden to be an improvement while conceding that Biden isn’t up to the job and should step down in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris. This is the U.S. presidency. Good enough is anything but.

The fact that “Biden has dementia” is a Republican National Committee/Fox News talking point does not make it incorrect. Denying obvious truths — Trump is a racist jerk; climate change is real and caused by mankind; masks help fight COVID; Biden has dementia — makes you look stupid and silly, and no one should listen to you.

Trump’s war against truth was toxic. His supporters and enablers undermined decency and logical rhetoric, essential foundations of civil discourse. Democrats who refuse to watch Biden’s dismal, unscripted public appearances, who fail to question the president’s unwillingness to face the press at the same rate as his predecessors and who omit mention of his frequent mental breakdowns are no better than Trump and the Republicans.

Ted Rall, UNZ Review

 Why the COVID Vaccine Isn’t Alleviating Much Fear

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There’s a way to tell if your fear is rational, or indicative of disorder.

If your fear is rational, and you take steps to alleviate the fear, and the fear diminishes — that’s a good sign.

If you take steps to alleviate the fear and your fear remains — or even intensifies — that’s an unhealthy sign.

Throughout the last year, I have watched people go through this pandemic syndrome. This time last year: “I am scared to death. I certainly can’t leave my house, unless I have to.”

What will it take to encourage you to leave the house? “A vaccine,” was the most common answer, in spring 2020.

Now we have a vaccine, in spring 2021. Confidence in the vaccine is so strong that everybody feels compelled to get it, without question — and to have a guarantee that everyone else get one too. The same people who think it’s perfectly fine for the FDA to take 20 years to approve a life-saving drug now suddenly are just fine with bypassing all kinds of approval for the vaccine. Why so trusting?

A year ago, all that mattered was the vaccine. “Once I can get a vaccine, I can mostly go back to normal.”

So what happened? Millions are getting the vaccine. But many, I find, are still staying home. Or leave home, but only fearfully. They project this fear onto the blaming of others. “Well, if everyone would wear five masks, like we’re told to do, and if everyone would get the vaccine, then I wouldn’t have to be so scared.” It’s other people’s fault you’re scared.

But the anger at others is just a mask for the remaining, totally unaddressed fear. And even if it were somehow possible to guarantee that every single person on the planet will get the vaccine, and every single person on the planet can be forced to wear 5 masks, the fear would still not diminish. In fact, it would probably grow.

Self-refuting logic is a sign of irrational fear. If you really believed the COVID vaccine made you safer, you would not feel tempted to stay home; and you would not feel greater fear because some didn’t take the vaccine.

What makes fear of coronavirus so irrational is not the perfectly legitimate desire to avoid a virus, even a virus that is usually non-life-threatening. What makes the fear of coronavirus irrational is the faulty premise we don’t apply to ANY other ailment: a ZERO tolerance of risk.

When you strive to do the impossible, which is what “irrational” means, you end up doing things that only make the fear worse. The quest for ZERO risk, with regard to viruses, is untenable at this point in time. The more people look for that elusive zero risk, the worse the fear will become.

Imagine if an edict were written as follows: “Until we have a 100 percent guarantee that there will be ABSOLUTELY NO TRAFFIC FATALITIES, EVER AGAIN, then all driving must cease.” When, exactly, do you think people would be able to start driving again?

Irrational fear is self-reinforcing. The more steps you take to alleviate the irrational fear, the worse the fear becomes. Each ridiculous and self-refuting step — designed to bring about ZERO risk — leads to an intensification of the fear. The remedies for addressing the fear become more and more irrational, untenable and even unjust.

If you were an evil dictator and wanted to compel a society to bring itself down, turning citizen against citizen, then instilling such irrational fears would be a brilliant, though evil, way of going about it.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Vaccination Passports: The Cornerstone of a Totalitarian State

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Vaccination passports, like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want everyone to be forced to carry, are profoundly un-American.

This data-driven authoritarianism, if it comes to pass, will wash away what remains of the rule of law and the Constitution, and annihilate the American way of life.

First, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) inflicted their possibly lab-designed Wuhan Virus on America, and now we get their Social Credit System, their totalitarian digital architecture for society as well.

America’s placeholder president, the Communist Chinese ventriloquist’s dummy who fantasizes about becoming the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wants these vaccination passports badly.

POTUS 46* signed Executive Order 13998 on January 21 directing government agencies to “assess the feasibility of linking COVID-19 vaccination to International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP) and producing electronic versions of ICVPs.”

The Biden-Harris administration is now working on a “vaccine passport” for Americans to carry to prove they have received a vaccination against the novel coronavirus, according to the Washington Post.

“The passports are expected to be free and available through applications for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an airline boarding pass,” the Jeff Bezos mouthpiece reports. “Americans without smartphone access should be able to print out the passports, developers have said.”

Five administration sources supposedly told the “Democracy dies in darkness” fabulists that COVID Czar Jeff Zients is working with unidentified private entities to institute the program. A reported 30 international airlines are said to be demanding vaccine passports.

New York State is already moving forward with a “excelsior pass,” which is expected to be required in order to access “arts, entertainment, and event venues.” Individuals will be forced to display a QR code on their smartphones to partake in cultural enrichment.

“This is going to hit all parts of society, and so naturally, the government is involved,” Andy Slavitt, acting director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said during a White House briefing on the ongoing pandemic.

Most Americans have no idea what a social credit system is.

“China’s social credit system is about power and conformity,” U.S. Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) explains in a Fox News op-ed. “It’s an attempt to shape citizens into the CCP’s ideal subject: don’t ask questions, disobey or think for yourself.”

It also resembles the Left’s “cancel culture” in the United States in that they both share the goal of “ensuring conformity to one ideology.”

Under the CCP’s social credit system, “‘bad’ behavior lowers a person’s score and can make it difficult for them to buy, sell, travel, get loans or send their children to college. ‘Very bad’ behavior, such as political dissent, can get someone and their family members blacklisted, making it difficult for them to function in society,” Green writes.

To enforce their national blacklist, the Chinese Communists have created a unified record system to allow the government to track individuals and businesses and assess their trustworthiness. It is not at all like the U.S. credit reporting agencies Experian, Trans Union, and Equifax, which don’t have the iron fist of a totalitarian government backing them.

The Chinese system punishes those who engage in religious worship, play loud music, eat on public transportation, violate traffic rules such as jaywalking, fail to show up for restaurant or hotel reservations, fail to correctly sort waste, and smoke tobacco. Conversely, the system rewards those who donate blood, donate to charity, perform volunteer work, and use social media to praise the government. Those with favorable scores are rewarded with reduced waiting time at hospitals and government agencies, discounts at hotels and on energy bills, job offers, and better interest rates at banks.

Punishments include denial of high-speed rail tickets, denial of admission to private schools, slow Internet connections, and exclusion from prestigious work. Derogatory information about individuals deemed untrustworthy is publicly available and easy to locate. Debtors’ names and faces have been displayed before movies at movie theaters and on large screens on government buildings.

The system is related to China’s mass surveillance systems such as Skynet, which uses facial recognition and other technologies. Skynet, by the way, just so happens to be the name of the fictional all-encompassing artificial intelligence system from the Terminator movie franchise that becomes “self-aware” and attempts to eradicate humankind by nuclear attack.

“It’s easy to look at China’s repressive regime and think that it could never happen here,” Congressman Green continues, listing examples of social media censorship and social media companies’ successful efforts to prevent President Donald Trump from winning reelection.

“Yet after hearing demands from the far left to silence conservative voices, and after watching big tech and big business band together to deplatform conservatives, I’m beginning to think America could be like a frog boiling slowly in a pot,” he writes.

“What are the signs that the U.S. has its own social credit system? What else do you call it when a Democrat senator demands Republicans be put on a no-fly-list for how they voted, or when an editor is forced to resign for allowing a Republican to publish an opinion piece in the editorial section of his newspaper?”

But would a vaccination passport system morph into a Chinese-style Social Credit System here in America?

Liberal thinker Naomi Wolf says this kind of “biofascism” could easily happen.

Wolf told Steve Hilton on Fox News Channel that a mandatory vaccination passport would be “the end of human liberty.”

“How does [China] keep a billion people under the thumb of a totalitarian regime? The CCP can find any dissident in five minutes, and that can happen here literally within months.”

“I cannot say this forcefully enough: This is literally the end of human liberty in the West if this plan unfolds as planned,” she said.

“‘Vaccine passport’ sounds like a fine thing if you don’t understand what these platforms can do. I’m the CEO of a tech company, I understand what this platform does. It is not about the vaccine or the virus, it is about your data. What people need to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that platform with no problem at all.

“What that means is that it can be merged with your Paypal account, digital currency. Microsoft is talking about merging it with payment plans, your networks can be sucked up, it geolocates you wherever you go. All of your medical history can be included — this has already happened in Israel.

“And six months later, we’re hearing from activists that it is a two-tiered society and basically activists are ostracized and surveilled continually. It is the end of civil society and they are trying to roll it out around the world. It is absolutely so much more than a vaccine pass, it is — I cannot stress enough that it has the power to turn off your life, or to turn on your life, to let you engage in society or be marginalized.”

Illegal aliens may not need a real passport to get into America, but actual Americans may soon need a vaccination passport to travel inside America if they don’t take action.

America needs to get back to being America, not this nightmarish dystopia we are rapidly becoming.

Let Us Be Clear Once and For All: Socialism Is Not at Root About Economics!

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For the Conservatives, Capitalism is moral only to the extent that the capitalist lives to serve others. Self-interest can be smuggled silently in but not as a moral right or as a moral ideal. This means that “creeping socialism” always has the advantage and thus creeps unabated.

Over and over for decades, Conservatives have made the point that socialism does not “work,” that it does not create wealth but rather leads to poverty. This is true. Despite promising nirvana, “utopian” (socialist) communities and countries based on communism and socialism always failed economically.

Conservatives (including Wall Street Journal op-ed writers, right-wing think tanks, and pro-free enterprise economics departments) keep repeating the obvious and assert that people simply need better economic education to set them straight. Yet Conservatives keep losing every battle; the left repeatedly responds by ignoring their argument and rationalizing socialist failures.

The rationalizations run the gamut:

  • Previous socialist programs were not run correctly.
  • The moral ideal was right, but people are just too corrupt to practice it—there is a flaw in human nature.
  • The failure was caused by a plot by the U.S. (usually the CIA).
  • Socialism takes years to come to fruition and will triumph at some unspecified, future date….and so on.

What is striking is that no matter what the economic failures, true socialists rarely give it up. Why not. Because it has a moral base. Ayn Rand has made it clear that, “The power of morality is the strongest of all intellectual powers…men will not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally right.” (quoted in Binswanger, 1986, p. 315).

Morality trumps economic facts if there is a conflict. This is true even if one’s accepted code of morality is objectively wrong. Millions have died fighting for Communism and Nazism (national socialism), including murdering millions of victims and keeping millions of others in hopeless poverty.

What is the problem with Conservatives (for more details, see Binswanger, 1986, pp. 95-100)? The Conservative argument is based on a contradiction: Capitalism is practical because most people want to live better, but morally it is defended by altruism, the premise that one must live only for the sake of others. Thus, Capitalism is only permissible so long as one lives, or claims to live, for “the public good.” For the Conservatives, Capitalism is moral only to the extent that the capitalist lives to serve others. Self-interest can be smuggled silently in but not as a moral right or as a moral ideal. This means that “creeping socialism” always has the advantage and thus creeps unabated. The hapless Conservative defense is routinely: “Hey, let us not overdo it. Let us have some capitalism. The welfare state will work better if capitalists have permission to function.” Socialists face no such internal contradiction; sacrifice for and of others is the morally right thing to do even when everyone stays poor, cf. Cuba and Venezuela. (See Locke, 2020, for a detailed discussion of Venezuela).

The socialist’s indifference to poverty reveals that there is a deeper moral (objectively anti-moral) layer than altruism which means sacrifice for the benefit of others. Since others do not actually benefit, the deeper standard is the destruction of economic freedom as an end in itself. This is pure nihilism, destruction for the sake of destruction: better to have everyone grovel in poverty than to let one person make a profit. Socialism is based on hatred for human life. In socialist societies, the worst people, power lusters, rise to the top, but they only rise because socialism gives them a moral sanction.

What then would change a socialist’s mind? Convincing them that socialism is anti-life and that Capitalism, which is based on individual rights, is morally good, i.e., that every individual has a right to their own life, which includes the right to trade freely with others, based on self-interest, and profit from it (i.e., without fraud or coercion). This would mean that capitalists would be admired, both practically and morally, rather than reluctantly tolerated as a necessary evil or totally forbidden. Economic education will only be embraced by people who think that Capitalism is not just practical but morally good. Moral education is needed as the proper base for economic education.

Some might ask about the puzzling situation of a Communist dictatorship, China, openly fostering Capitalism (though with numerous controls). This is a historically unprecedented event. So, what explains it? It is not based on respect for individual rights since communists deny them. It is based purely on power lust. For centuries China was backwards in relation to the west. Now they have decided to be imperialists, and they saw that the only way they could get the needed power was to create wealth which would give them the ability to intimidate or dominate other countries by using economic and military force together, e.g., massive exports, cyber-crime, building a large, military including a nuclear arsenal, trying to forcibly take over international waters in the South China Sea, threatening and harming fishing vessels from other countries, seizing islands they do not own to build military bases, stealing copyrighted and military technology from foreign countries, bullying countries which displease them (Australia), invasion (Hong Kong, Tibet), continual military threats (Taiwan), loaning money to poor countries, who will not be able to repay them, as a means of gaining power over them, cooperating with other dictatorships such as North Korea and Iran which are also building nuclear weapons to attack the U.S., etc.

China recently acknowledged that their use of Capitalism was only a strategic move until full socialism could be established. China, right now, is the single biggest threat to world peace and freedom. The old-line Marxists said capitalists would buy or make the rope that will be used to hang them. China wants to make their own rope and hang us with it. It remains to be seen how all this will turn out. Our weapons are: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, our military might, Capitalism, and our commitment to freedom as a moral ideal–if we can keep them.

Edwin Locke, Capitalism Magazine

Help Wanted…Forever

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Business owners can’t find people to staff their businesses–hotels, restaurants, stores, offices. Why? Because fewer are working than ever before. What started as “COVID relief” is morphing into a guaranteed minimum income. TRANSLATION: Being paid NOT to work. Many find this appealing. Of course, it won’t be appealing if everyone stops working. Because once everyone stops working, and everyone opts for the ever-increasing guaranteed minimum income, there won’t be things to enjoy, because there will be no businesses. So those of you who think you have it made, living off the government, remember–we are not living under full Communism yet. We are presently in the transition to Communism. Once the full impact of zero production and zero capital accumulation takes effect, you’re not going to see anything like the prosperous world of 2019 and before. You’re going to wish people still had to work.

It won’t be so cool then, you lazy snowflakes.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Officer Chauvin’s Show Trial Will Bring the End of Law and Order

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The United States now has attributes of the 20th century totalitarian regimes that it opposed. The New York governor is implementing the hated Soviet internal passport that prevents freedom of movement, and the illegitimate Biden regime is working with private firms to create a nationwide internal passport.

American elections mean no more than Soviet ones. As Stalin said, it is who counts the votes that matters.

Washington’s foreign policy is more aggressive and bloody than the Third Reich’s.

Soviet show trials are now the new normal for American “justice.”

As an example, consider the highly orchestrated show trial of Officer Chauvin accused of George Floyd’s death currently underway. Yesterday, the second day of Officer Chauvin’s trial was “eye-witness day.” Eye-witness Donald Williams told the prosecutor, Steve Schleicher, that “I believe I witnessed a murder.” Eye-witness Alyssa Funari said, “I was upset because there was nothing that we could do as bystanders except watch them take this man’s life in front of our eyes.” Eye-witness Darnella Frazier said, “When I look at George Floyd I look at, look at my dad. I look at my brothers, cousins, uncles, because they are all Black. I have a Black father, I have a Black brother, I have Black friends. And I look at that and I look at how that could have been one of them.”

I believe these witnesses are describing what it seemed like to them. Donald Williams believes that he witnessed a murder. It certainly can look like that to everyone who does not have all the information. Thanks to the media, all the information is missing.

Among the missing information is the medical examiner’s report that finds three times the fatal dose of fentanyl in George Floyd’s blood. The medical examiner reports “No life-threatening injuries identified. No injuries of anterior muscles of neck or laryngeal structures.” The medical examiner reports extensive heart disease: Arteriosclerotic heart disease, multifocal, severe; Hypertensive heart disease.

Fentanyl causes breathing problems and death when overdosed.

As police audio/video show, Floyd complained to police of breathing problems prior to being restrained on the ground. He complained of breathing problems while sitting in the police car.

When Officer Chauvin arrived, he recognized a drug overdose problem and called for medics, an inexplicable decision if he intended murder.

Officer Chauvin restrained Floyd using a police-approved technique that has been used many times without killing anyone. Chauvin restrained Floyd in order to prevent Floyd from agitated behavior that would exhaust the little oxygen able to get into his system. The knee-hold does not prevent the flow of oxygen.

Practically alone among the print, TV, radio, and Internet media, I reported the facts of the situation. See:

In contrast, the visual “evidence” was constantly hyped all over the media. What people thought they saw was not the explanation.

The public was primed to misunderstand George Floyd’s death by previous instances of police brutality against blacks. The presstitutes only report police brutality against blacks, not the more numerous instances against whites, so the public sees it as a racist response to blacks. Officer Chauvin is partly a victim of the one-sided reported incidents against blacks.

As my readers know, I am a long-standing critic of police brutality against the public. I forecast that the police brutality together with the one-sided reporting was brewing racial problems by being misrepresented as racism. When I reported the medical examiner’s report, some readers wanted to know why I had changed from being a police critic to being a police apologist. I am not for or against the police. I am for truth and against lies and misrepresentation.

The truth is Officer Chauvin’s true defense, but it is unlikely to play a role. The presstitutes have presented the prosecutor with the case of his career. He is not going to let facts get in the way of Chauvin’s conviction. Neither does the judge want the vilification that a fair trial would bring. The jurors all understand that if they let Officer Chauvin off they will be outcasts and suffer violence to themselves and their property. The entire community knows that unless Chauvin is convicted, their city will again be looted and burned. Indeed, the many cities that experienced the George Floyd protests feel the same way. A person already convicted by the media cannot be let off even if innocent. What is the purpose of the eye-witnesses when all have already seen many times the scenario they describe and have their minds made up?

In former times when America had a justice system and a responsible media, media was careful not to convict a suspect or defendant prior to the jury doing so. To be convicted by the media was reason for dismissing the charges on the grounds that there was no prospect of an objective jury. But in America today, it is conviction that is the focus, not innocence or guilt.

Eye-witness Donald Williams feels that he witnessed a murder. No doubt every juror feels the same way prior to the trial. Evidence, even if presented, is unlikely to get anywhere with people already convinced by the constantly replayed video of Officer Chauvin with his knee-hold on George Floyd.

What I have noticed over the years, especially recent ones, is that facts have lost their importance. Facts have given way to emotional responses based on feelings. It is how Americans feel about whatever, not the facts, that determines the response.

It would take a heroic jury to find Chauvin innocent. His conviction will constitute another blow to law and order. White and Asian police officers will protect themselves by avoiding interaction with black criminals. I suspect that black officers will also. Otherwise, their kids will be beat up and their homes firebombed. The emboldened criminal population that is being created will be hard to contain.

Paul Craig Roberts, UNZ Review

Coronavirus in an Alternate, Rational Universe: What Might Have Been

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In a rational and free society, the reaction to coronavirus would not have been hysterical or tyrannical. People would have been left free to decide for themselves how to avoid getting this virus. All would have been fine — at least as fine as it has been, with none of the economic and social upheaval and decline. Of course, Donald Trump would likely still be President, and the country would not be under the stranglehold of an emerging one-party dictatorship, including the obliteration of the Bill of Rights itself.

So I guess it depends on what your definition of success is.

In such a free and rational society, any businesses or enterprises — large or small — would be free to have mask mandates or whatever they want. None of them would have done it, because it would have been bad for business and utterly unnecessary. If these things WERE necessary, no government mandates would be required, because it would be bad for business not to have masks and social distancing in stores and restaurants. There’s a reason why we never had lockdowns, mask lunacy, and multi-trillion dollar spending bills before, and why we survived flu or virus pandemics without them: They weren’t needed.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The One-Party State

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The left may or may not comprise a majority among professed supporters of the Democratic Party, though among elected officials in the federal government, the left is now in complete control. There are 50 Democratic Senators, almost all of whom at one time or another supported the filibuster in the US Senate. The Senate was established to be a deliberative body, one less subject to current passions, and purely majoritarian impulses in one party. The Electoral College was another feature of both the founders’ belief in federalism, the importance of states and a role for different geographic regions, and interests. Now, at most a handful of Democrats in the Senate (probably fewer), are willing to preserve the only remaining rule which provides a meaningful role for the minority party. Should America’s political future ride on the disposition of one West Virginia Senator? If Joe Manchin is turned, then we will have new states in the union, permanent Democratic majorities in the Senate, Supreme Court packing, and immediate passage of every bit of radical legislation in the left’s dream box including assaults on the principles of federalism, which provides for states to exercise power in various areas, such as voting rules. The recently passed stimulus bill prevents states from reducing taxes if they accept federal stimulus money. The assault has begun.

Those on the left are certainly a minority among all adult Americans. But the Democrats now control the presidency, and both Houses of Congress with very small majorities, and the left controls the elected Democrats and are pressing their advantage. In the meantime, the opposition party, the Republicans, seem unable to focus their effort on the great challenge ahead to slow down the express train of new policies, and spending and rules. These initiatives are designed to reward and enrich those who are part of the governing coalition, to make the minority party a permanent minority and to make published opposition to the new “progressive and anti-racist” vision, unavailable to readers, and socially unacceptable if not criminal.

Barack Obama’s decisive win in the 2008 Presidential race was believed by the left to be the signal that their day had come. Obama won the popular vote by 9.5 million and picked up more than two thirds of the Electoral College votes. Democrats won an 80-seat margin in the House, and 59 Senate seats, which soon became a filibuster proof 60 after Arlen Spector switched parties. Obama himself said his election would change America. The conventional political wisdom was that demographic changes in America would allow Democrats to build their majorities and continue to win going forward. Mostly non-white legal immigrants, and higher birth rates among non-white groups would drive down the white share of voters, the only group among whom Republicans were still a majority.

Things did not turn out that way. An unpopular health care bill led to big GOP gains in 2010, and control of the US House, plus big gains at the state level in governors and state legislators, leading to redistricting advantages. In 2014, Republicans won back the Senate. Then came Donald Trump’s stunning victory in 2016. Democrats were supposed to have a blue wall that virtually assured a win in Presidential contests in the Electoral College. Instead Trump broke through in states that had not gone Republican in nearly 30 years, attracting many former Democrats in rural areas, small towns, and once thriving industrial cities. Most Democrats (not just the left) seemed unable to process Trump’s victory and certainly did not accept it. No president in recent history has faced the kind of sustained attacks personally, and on his programs, that Trump did.

At the start of 2020, Trump seemed destined to win re-election. The economy was strong, job and wage growth had advanced broadly through the population, including among Blacks and Hispanics, and the President had reversed some of the perception of a country in decline with one sector of the population, the highly educated, doing very well, and many more struggling and falling back. The President had survived a Russia collusion hoax perpetrated by a hostile media and many Democrats in Congress, and a party line impeachment vote in the House, losing but one Republican Senator on one of two charges at his trial for an offense that had never been viewed as impeachment-worthy before. And then came the Wuhan virus.

Certainly, the Trump administration made serious mistakes, just as prior administrations had with other new health issues when they arose. But the coverage of Trump and his policies to address the virus were unremittingly negative. The left was convinced the virus could defeat Trump and it did. Make Americans miserable, and they will throw out the incumbent. Many states, most of them leaning or heavily Democratic, chose harsh lockdowns which threw people out of work, and closed schools, which led to increased isolation, alcoholism, drug abuse and mental illness, and untreated health issues since people feared going to hospitals or doctors’ offices. Democratic Governors and the current Vice President were among those who argued that vaccines would be unreliable if they were produced by the Trump administration. Of course, the vaccines would not come from Trump, but from drug companies doing miracle work in record time, encouraged by the Trump administration to take risks and by his agreement to pay for vaccines once they were available and received authorization.

Then came the late May death of George Floyd in police custody. Suddenly, America needed a racial reckoning and a toxic dose of it was received. Critical race theory and other anti-racism initiatives were implemented everywhere and quickly at great expense. Corporations made contributions in the billions to groups like BLM, which are anti- white, anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-nuclear family, and anti-Semitic. Otherwise, the group was pretty mainstream.

The infectious disease people who had told their state officials to keep people at home, now thought it important for tens of thousands of people to be out on the streets in close quarters to scream at and harass police, or to “break away from the largely peaceful demonstrations” to set buildings and shops on fire, loot stores, and attack police and others in their way. Practically every major professional organization, non-profit organization, corporation, social media platform, university and media company pledged to do their part to fight racism, since obviously what happened in Minneapolis was evidence of the country’s systemic racism. LeBron James offered his wisdom that Black men felt like they were being hunted by the police.

The reality of course was that about a dozen unarmed Blacks are killed by police in an average year. But nearly 10,000 Blacks were killed by other Blacks in 2020, a more than 25% increase over 2019, virtually all of the year-to-year increase occurring after George Floyd’s death. Heather MacDonald provided all the numbers and analysis one would need to look at crime rates, and police shootings but Google’s You Tube thought it too hot to handle, making it difficult to access her presentation. The attacks on police produced BLM demands to defund the police or eliminate the police, and led to a pullback from active policing in some cities. Gangs and other criminals had more freedom to operate, creating near state of nature conditions in some cities, such as Chicago.

The attempt to de-platform MacDonald, was just a prelude to the major social networking companies’ effort to prevent Trumps’ re-election. This included hiding the New York Post’s Hunter Biden/China connection story just before the November election. The Capitol riots of January 6th made it easy for Silicon Valley to try to destroy the Parler website, ban President Trump from Facebook and Twitter, take down posts which challenged the election results, and treat those who believed fraud had occurred, including US Senators and House members, as insurrectionists, expanding the universe of a few hundred people who behaved horribly on January 6th at the Capitol to include most of the 74 million-plus Trump voters.

The events since President Biden’s inauguration are more evidence of how the left is acting in concert to radically change the country before too many people wake up and notice. Send a stimulus check to people, and they will spend it and think better of the government and its policies. Meanwhile no one outside of a small number of conservative media voices will honestly convey the chaos created by the President’s reckless open borders policy, or the reality that the President may not be all there and others are pulling the strings and using Biden as the moderate, calming cover for a radical playbook.

The Enemy Within is the latest in Horowitz’s long string of books that provide a continuing theme on the attempts by the left to create a new America. What you see is what you get, and Horowitz remains committed to allowing us to see what is really going on, despite the censorship and cancel culture which are thriving. For if we see, we can also commit to engage in the struggle to preserve and build a different America than the one sought by the left.

David Horowitz

Good-Bye American Liberty

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Yesterday I pointed out that no facts known at this time support a Covid passport. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/03/29/new-yorks-covid-vaccine-passport-makes-no-sense/

The Establishment is not interested in facts and has no need of them. The Establishment has the presstitute lie machine. It creates whatever reality the Establishment wants us to live in.

Nevertheless, some facts are just overwhelming. Consider Florida. Long a retirement state, it is a state with a large proportion of elderly and overweight people. For the past year Florida has not been under lockdown or a mask mandate. The state is wide open. Consequently, one would think that Florida would have the hightest number of Covid deaths per 100,000 population.

But that is not the case. Florida’s 154 Covid deaths per 100,000 is in the middle of the 50 states ranking. New Jersey, a lockdown state, has a deaths per 100,000 almost twice Florida’s at 1.78 times. Lockdowned New York’s deaths are 1.66 times higher than Floridas. Lockdowned Massachusetts and Rhode Island Covid deaths are 1.60 times higher than Florida’s.

These numbers are from the official data. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/us-coronavirus-deaths-by-state-july-1.html The conclusion is that Florida, an open state with an elderly and overweight population without dockdown and mask mandates—conditions that according to the medical bureaucrats should have produced the leading high death rate—is in the middle of the pack.

We can safely conclude that lockdowns and mask mandates are pointless. And this conclusion does not take into account the many expert and suppressed opinions that the lockdowns and the masks do more harm than good.

Despite the facts, the corrupt Biden regime, a stolen presidency, is working with private companies who smell the profits to develop vaccine passport systems, which they allege is the only way to return to normalcy. In other words, if you want to get out of jail, you will have to give up your privacy.

Scared people are likely to fall for the propaganda that the passport is a public health measure that will liberate us from lockdowns. But Florida doesn’t have lockdowns or a vaccine passport. Naomi Wolf warns:

“I am not overstating this. I can’t say it forcefully enough. This is literally the end of human liberty in the west if this plan unfolds as planned. Vaccine passports sound like a fine thing if you don’t understand what these platforms can do …

ORDER IT NOW

“It’s not about the vaccine. It’s not about the virus. It’s about your data. And once this rolls out you don’t have a choice about being part of the system. What people have to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that platform with no problem at all. What that means is that it can be merged with your Paypal account, with your digital currency, Microsoft is already talking about merging it with payment plans. Your networks can be sucked up. It geolocates you wherever you go. Your credit history can be included. All of your medical history can be included.” https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/coming-soon-vaccine-passports/

To keep the fear level high the medical bureaucrat who heads the Centers for Disease Control, Rochelle Walensky, preditcted yesterday, based on her feelings, impending doom from a new Covid surge. https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/545375-cdc-director-warns-of-impending-doom-on-potential-new-covid-surge?userid=439965

Allegedly, the US has had 30 million Covid cases. Where does this number come from. It comes from financial incentives to hospitals to report every death as a Covid death—see https://www.globalresearch.ca/hospitals-getting-paid-more-label-cause-death-coronavirus/5709720 — and from running the PCR test at such high cycles that the test produces false positives. In other words, the figure is an orchestrated figure in service to an agenda.

Has the public noticed that this year there has been no flu season? The explanation is that the flu cases have been conflated with Covid cases in order to multiply the level of Covid infection.

A population that is so easily manipulated and scared has no possibility of holding on to liberty. Eighteenth century Americans valued liberty—“give me liberty or give me death.” Twenty-first century Americans evidently do not. Their acceptance of lockdowns proves their readiness for the Gulag.

Paul Craig Roberts, UNZ Review

‘It’s everywhere’: Parents Group Fights Left-wing Indoctrination in Schools

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A group of parents alarmed by what they see as left-wing indoctrination sweeping through K-12 schools on Tuesday announced a new online clearinghouse of information designed to help families navigate what’s happening in their children’s classrooms.

Nicole Neily, president of the group, Parents Defending Education, said parents are hungry for information to fight back against a curriculum that increasingly promotes racial and social justice ideology.

“There’s this feeling among some that this is just a New York and California thing, but it’s not; it’s everywhere,” she said. “It’s in private schools and parochial schools

Schools across the country have adopted classwork and instructional models based on critical race theory, which teaches that the U.S. legal and governance systems are inherently racist and retain economic and political power for Whites by oppressing people of color.

In some classes, students are divided into groups according to their status as “oppressors” and “victims,” “privileged” or “resistors,” based on immutable characteristics such as the color of their skin.

The lessons have sparked a series of legal challenges in state and federal courts by parents and students.

Supporters contend the curriculum is a necessary rejoinder to decades of White supremacist thinking that has permeated society. They say the goal must be “anti-racist” rather than not racist and that their approach will educate children about advantages they have been given or handicaps they have been burdened with by systemic racism.

Parents Defending Education describes itself on its website this way: “Parents Defending Education is a national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists imposing harmful agendas. Through network and coalition building, investigative reporting, litigation, and engagement on local, state, and national policies, we are fighting indoctrination in the classroom — and promoting the restoration of a healthy, non-political education for our kids.”

Ms. Neily said thousands of parents are unaware of what’s going on or are deeply disturbed by it but unsure how to fight back, leaving them feeling alone and helpless. She envisions DefendingEd.org as a network of concerned parents who can swap horror stories and seek political or legal solutions.

The website features an “IndoctriNation Map” map, where parents can look up scores of school districts and “learn about parents organizations, incidents and FOIAs.” As more information is gathered, new flags will be posted on the map, the group says.

The “Deep Dive” section of the site provides links to news accounts of lawsuits and other issues that arise in response to the critical race theory wave.

Much of the information targets public schools, Ms. Neily said, though critical race theory has spread far and wide.

Some of the tiniest schools in the U.S., from the Dalton School in New York City to Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles, where America’s richest families send their children, have made headlines recently for lumping their students into sinister or sympathetic groups based on their race.

“If you want to send your kid to Social Justice Country Day, you’re free to do so, but we must do what we can to not allow the imposition of these top-down solutions,” Ms. Neily said.

Asra Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who serves as Defending Education’s vice president of strategy and investigations, said she believes a tipping point is approaching in education.

“Our country is in a crisis today because of ideologues pumping divisive, polarizing ideas into our classrooms, teaching them to our children,” she said. “Educators have a moral duty to teach our kids how to read, write and think — not dictate what they must think,” she said. “As parents, we must stand together to defend education, challenge radicalization and inspire our children with positive values.”

Many parents feel at sea when they discover what is happening and need a tool to navigate waters that critical race theorists leave deliberately murky, said Christopher Rufo, a national advocate against critical race theory who advises Parents Defending Education.

“Parents across the country are mobilizing against critical race theory in schools,” he told The Washington Times. “All Americans should stand against the principles of race essentialism, collective guilt and neo-segregation.”

The group has filed motions to intervene in court cases, such as one in New York brought by Integrate NYC Inc., which advocates for more critical race theory. The lawsuit charges that New York City’s magnet schools and gifted programs are racist because they do not include enough Black and minority students.

It is one of several lawsuits in the courts pushing for more critical race theory or objecting to its implementation. Some state legislators are looking at laws that would ban education materials and practices based on critical race theory.

It is telling, Ms. Neily said, that critical race theory materials are often slipped into curricula with a minimum of discussion or parental involvement, which creates another reason for a kind of one-stop shopping site for opponents.

“Sunshine is the best disinfectant, and we need to encourage people to show up and demand answers to what in a lot of cases amounts to emotional abuse of children,” she said. “It’s actually a small group of people who want this, and we need to shine a light on what is happening.”

The Washington Times